The Donroe Doctrine is a Recipe for Two, Three... Many Iraqs

 It all went off without a hitch. Donald Trump's huge, beautiful, helicopter coup of 2026. After two years of bungling pretty much everything from tariffs to the Epstein cover-up, our dayglow Caesar rolled the dice in Venezuela, and he appears to have pulled off a high-octane putsch straight out of a cheesy 80s action flick. After cutting the power to Caracas, over 200 US troops launched a fast and furious assault, riding in on a fleet of more than 150 aircraft and bombing scores of Venezuelan military facilities and air defense positions before Delta Force unleashed a Scarface-style full frontal assault on President Nicholas Madura's compound, wiping out his entire security detail before whisking the strongman and his wife away in a Blackhawk in the blink of an eye.

By the time the smoke settled, Caracas was in ashes, at least 100 people lay dead, and the President of Venezuela was locked up in a steel cell in Brooklyn, awaiting prosecution on a laundry list of charges ranging from drug trafficking to esoteric early 20th century American firearms violations.

It all went off without a hitch alright. The perfect war crime. The problem however, aside from the fact that all of this is totally fucking illegal in every court of law on the planet, is that we've seen this blockbuster before and it doesn't end the way it begins. Afterall, the Second Iraq War went off without a hitch too, until it didn't and then it was too late.

George W. Bush's brazen crusade to rid the world of Saddam Hussein had more than a few things in common with Donald Trump's triumphant conquest of the Cartel of the Suns. Both were blatantly unconstitutional adventures that sought to effortlessly hijack embargo decimated oil industries using almost obviously fictional conspiracies to justify the heist. Just like Maduro has his shadowy international drug cartel, Saddam had his equally fabricated arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And just like Donald Trump had his hitch-less helicopter coup, Dubya had his camera-ready campaign of "shock and awe" that tore through Bagdad like a bullet through an oil drum.

In fact, just six weeks into his Babylonian adventure, George W. Bush was landing a fighter jet on the USS Abraham Lincoln and announcing that all "major combat operations in Iraq (had) ended" before a massive banner reading "Mission Accomplished!" It was a sparkling spectacle of high-powered American jingoism straight out of a Michael Bay movie. It was also a severely premature imperial victory lap that would become the casket that the entire Bush dynasty's reputation would be buried in.

The Iraq War would drag on for another 8 years with more than 4,500 US troops giving their lives for a campaign that would pave the Highway of Death for the rise of the Islamic State and the Axis of Resistance. All of which was part of a much larger but equally catastrophic scheme by neocon Sith lords like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to conquer the entire Middle East with America's still flailing War on Terror. The Results abroad would be the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War and somewhere between 4.5 and 4.7 million dead.

The results at home would be devastating in their own cruelly karmic way. The results at home would be the destruction of the neocon movement as anything but a universally despised bipartisan backroom cabal and the rise of Donald Trump, who ran multiple shockingly successful campaigns on being the solution to the neocon curse even while loading both of his cabinets with those same bloodied but unashamed scions of endless warfare.

Now, Trump has his own Iraq going in Venezuela and he isn't nearly as shy about his intentions to suck that milkshake dry of its oil reserves. While the Department of Justice is busy trying to manufacture a criminal case against the nation's rightful President, Donald Trump has openly announced that he has no intentions of even holding a sham election in the country before he gets his grubby little pussy grabbers on all that oil. After threatening a second wave of attacks if Venezuela's post-Maduro interim government resists his advances, Donald Trump announced a massive nation building project in Venezuela that would involve sending in US troops to secure the nation's natural resources and sticking US oil companies with the bill.

After meeting with a coterie of oil tycoons at the White House last week, Trump revealed his $100 billion-dollar 18-month plan to rebuild Venezuela into America's own private gas station, boasting that the captive nation would be "turning over" somewhere between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil to the United States and that "that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States."

Meanwhile, Generalissimo Trump's increasingly caudillo-like regime has made it blatantly clear that just like Iraq was part of a much larger imperial campaign in the Middle East, Venezuela will merely be the first domino to fall in a much larger campaign by the United States to reestablish its dominance over the Western Hemisphere. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spent the first Sunday after kidnapping another world leader on the cable news talk show circuit announcing that Cuba would be next as Trump simultaneously renewed his threats to annex Greenland from their current colonists in Copenhagen and refused to rule out the use of military force in doing so.

All of this is part of what has become known as the "Donroe Doctrine", a 21rst century plot to reignite 19th century style gunboat diplomacy and sell it to the isolationists of MAGA as a kind of Imperialism Lite, but in reality, this is all nothing more than neoconservativism in retreat. After failing miserably to remake the Middle East in Ronald Reagan's image, large sections of the American imperial elite have reluctantly thrown their weight behind bringing the troops back west to consolidate their holdings in the long-neglected Americas in preparation for the final showdown with their real target, China.

Trump wants to do this by removing China's biggest western allies in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. He wants to do this by using the War on Drugs to increase America's military presence in the newly gas-rich nation of Mexico. He wants to do this by retaking the Panama Canal and Greenland. And he wants to do this by turning the United States into a fully militarized and automated police state by joining the War on Drugs and the War on Terror in an unholy marriage of domestic drone strikes and offshore prison colonies.

That's the new American nightmare at least, but it all hinges upon Donald Trump maintaining a war weary base by selling the Donroe Doctrine as a kinder, gentler, neocon hand, and all of this hinges upon Venezuela. While removing Maduro from the picture may have been a snap, so was removing Saddam. The problem comes with the inevitable occupation and the longer a military occupation lasts, the bloodier it gets. Dubya's plans for Iraq weren't done in by any state but rather the forces loosed across the desert plains by the dissolution of a state, and his biggest obstacle wasn't the Baathists, but their longtime Shia rivals united under a Saddam-era opposition figure named Muqtada al-Sadr.

Venezuela could be a recipe for something far worse. This is a nation twice the size of Iraq with half of that terrain covered in dense jungle. A nation with a 1,378-mile border with Colombia defined by longstanding issues with smuggling, undocumented migration, and general ungovernableness. Even if Maduro's interim government folds like a deck of cards, Venezuela is still teeming with Colectivos, a loosely organized but heavily armed collection of motorcycle riding paramilitaries organized around barrio councils that predate Hugo Chavez and number as high as 8,000, operating in 16 of Venezuela's 23 states.

You also have Venezuela's 4.5 million strong Bolivarian Militias now activated by a deposed leader, not to mention somewhere in the ballpark of 20,000 armed guerillas just across that porous border with Colombia, most of them unemployed and impoverished since the 2016 peace deal Venezuela helped broker there. And all just a three-day train ride away from the Rio Grande.

This is the real reason why the Donald isn't so quick to shove a Washington snitch like Maria Machado into the presidential palace. He's gaming on making another one of his infamous scumfuck deals with the same military brass he calls a cartel in hopes that they can convince the lower ranks to put down their gats while he siphons off the gas supply. It's a big fucking gamble and he better pray it pays off because otherwise he has painted his ass into a corner with more than just Venezuelan crude. Latin America is one big Molotov cocktail that's been ready to blow since the Conquistadors lit it to fire the rise the First World with the fuel of the Third and I'm not the first lunatic to eyeball that flame with a flicker of rambunctious hope either.

Way back in 1967, Latin America's native guerrilla laureate, Che Guevara, penned an essay calling on revolutionary movements across the Global South to "create two, three... many Vietnams." as part of a recklessly passionate fever dream about swarming Pax Americana's outer colonies with Vietcong style guerrilla campaigns that would stretch the Empire's recourses across a vast theater of territory in order to precipitate the kind of global collapse that brought the Romans to their knees.

Che would launch his failed Bolivian Campaign later that year, a quixotic conspiracy to foment this revolution amidst the colliding borders of Latin America's heartland that would ultimately end in Che's death at the barrel of a CIA pistol. But Che's spirit never left that wild country. In fact, his ghost spread to every corner of Latin America, inspiring generations of disgruntled anti-imperialists from FARC and Hugo Chavez to the Zapatistas and Oscar Zeta Acosta.

Now, Donald Trump wants to bring the War on Terror home to this flaming bush of ghosts. What could possibly go wrong? 

Then again, she said with a devilish grin, what could go right? 

Cartels, Colectivos, street gangs, refugees, militias, pacifists with iPhones, white women in SUVs, Black boys on mopeds, transgender antifascists, mouthy Muslim women and anti-Zionist Jews, all lumped into the same category of "terrorist" by a modern-day Caligula on a bender... Maybe, just maybe, we should all just come together and change that category back to "freedom fighter" so we can turn this American nightmare into two, three... many Iraqs.

I know, I know, I'm a fucking whack job, I've heard. But at this point, what do we have to lose another ton of chains?

Dream the dangerous dream, dearest motherfuckers. Dream the dangerous dream.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Firestarter by the Prodigy

* Rockin' in the Free World by Neil Young

* Kerosene by Big Black

* Song for Zula by Phosphorescent

* The Money Will Roll Right In by Fang

* Cochise by Audioslave

* Anaconda by the Melvins

* Burning by Fugazi

* Floyd the Barber by Nirvana

* New Pollution by Beck

Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Epstein, and Moral Relativism in An Age of Lesser Evils

 Two events from my bleak rural Pennsylvania childhood have scarred my soul more than any others, fundamentally defining my entire outlook both psychologically and philosophically. The first event was very personal but became very political and the second was very political but became very personal. Over the decades the two have overlapped and intertwined in more ways than I can possibly count.

The first event was being violently sexually abused at the age of five by a pair of Catholic priests. These men weren't strangers with candy in a white panel van. They were divinely chosen representatives of the small-town diocese where I would spend the remainder of my childhood. I blacked out a lot of the trauma for most of my life just to survive it, but I spent the next decade after the abuse at a school and in a church that facilitated and covered up my abuse. I also spent what was left of my youth listening to literally every adult I knew from my teachers to my parents' making excuses for the kind of men who violated me.

While I suppressed and denied my trauma for decades, the same people who openly shamed me for being Queer and neurodivergent greeted the child sex abuse scandal that rocked their precious church to its foundation in the early 2000s with an endless campaign of excuses and obfuscation. According to these pillars of my community, it was just a few bad priests and what are a few measly broken childhoods in the context of centuries of charity and high moral piety. After all, the Church was the real victim here, singled out by an unjust world that only they could hold accountable.

As nauseating as all this high-handed moral hypocrisy was, especially coming from a legion of brazenly bigoted bullies who trafficked fervently in the biblical binary chicanery of 'good' and 'evil', it wasn't enough to break through the wall of dissociation I had built between myself and the outside world in the wake of my abuse. It would take a war to do that. 

Ten years after I was molested by holy sadists in white collars, the United States made the unilateral decision to invade Iraq a second time based on lies that seemed almost absurdly obvious to an emotionally numb 8th grade closet case but no one else. Every adult I knew at that church was totally on board with this imperial crusade for oil and they all seemed to despise me for finding myself disgusted by their willful hubris. I didn't know much about politics at the time. All I knew was that every time I turned on the news, I found myself making eye contact with another emotionally numb child being dragged from the rubble with a look of horror on their face that felt jarringly familiar. A look that screamed 'why' without a voice to scream it with.

I went looking for answers that I knew my textbooks wouldn't provide me with and I stumbled over the truth in the writings of a plain-spoken old MIT professor named Noam Chomsky. I read a number of his books at a very impressionable age, but none had a bigger impact on me than 'What Uncle Sam Really Wants.' With an excruciatingly detailed and exhaustingly well researched exploration into the vile sex crimes committed by American armed, funded, trained, and led death squads in Central America, I finally found an adult willing to cut the bullshit and tell me 'why.'

America, just like the Catholic Church, decimated and abused the innocent quite simply because they could. Every reason they supplied to the public was nothing more than another empty excuse for the perversion of naked power. 

The government, my government, didn't give a flying fuck about fighting communism. In fact, they supported it when it suited them in Cambodia just to destabilize Vietnam. And they didn't give a flying fuck about democracy either. Every state they propped up went a mile out of its way to evaporate basic civil liberties in a vat of CIA supplied acid. Uncle Sam, much like the Pope, only cared about power and cruelty was quite simply the most effective way to achieve this.

In other words, there was no excuse.

It was a harsh lesson to teach a pissed-off teenager, but it was also the only lesson that passed the smell test with her because I was already intimately familiar with the savagery that pious adults were capable of when they could convince themselves that they were armed with moral superiority. Lying and cheating and raping and killing could all be justified by the fact that they knew without a shadow of a doubt that they were on the right side, whether it be on the right side of 'democracy' or the right side of 'God.'

In many ways, Noam Chomsky taught me what I already knew by simply helping me to unlearn the excuses that power used to get away with it.

Needless to say, with all this considered, I was more than a little disgusted to discover Noam Chomsky in the Epstein Files. It wasn't exactly a secret that he had interactions with that billionaire sex fiend, but the depth and nature of those interactions were exposed by the House Oversight Committee to be far more intimate and disturbing than anything I had imagined. Years of what Chomsky himself is quoted as describing as a valued friendship, all occurring well after Epstein's crimes and his shocking ability to get away with them had become public knowledge.

The thing that sickened me the most about these revelations though were the excuses made by Chomsky's diehard supporters on the intellectual left because they largely mirrored the excuses that I have been hearing for my entire life in defense of the predator class.

"After all, what are a few pictures and a single friendship with a known rapist compared to Professor Chomsky's long career as an otherwise spotless crusader against unchecked power? Are you really going to throw that all away over a single scandal?"

And the answer is no. Noam Chomsky's writings on the dangers of state power remain indispensable, as does his service to the crusade to give voice to the voiceless, but none of this, not the professor's brilliance or his past, supplies him with an excuse for doing far more than just canoodling with a very powerful man who acquired his power through trafficking the voiceless to the powerful.

In 2018, Jeffrey Epstein's sweetheart deal with the Southern District of Florida that allowed him to evade a federal investigation into child sexual slavery in exchange for pleading guilty to state prostitution charges was finally given mainstream exposure by the Miami Herald. 

Jeffrey Epstein's response to this rapidly tightening noose, as revealed through his emails and text messages at the time, was to try to produce a documentary on himself that would present him in a more favorable light. One of those text messages stated simply, "Spoke to Chomsky. He's all in." Another message from Epstein claimed that he was flying to meet with Chomsky on May,12, 2019, less than two months before the new charges dropped.

2018 was also the year that Noam Chomsky received a transfer of $270,000 from Epstein linked accounts. According to Chomsky this was all very innocent. Jeffrey Epstein was simply helping the professor "rearrange" funds related to his late ex-wife's estate and none of this directly involved Epstein's money. The only problem here is the problem that faces every rich and powerful figure who has chosen to engage Jeffrey Epstein for supposedly innocent economic services.

Jeffrey Epstein is a convicted sex offender who isn't even licensed as a stockbroker or a financial advisor which makes him a pretty absurd choice for assistance with such supposedly routine but largescale financial transactions, especially for someone as brilliant and well-connected as Noam Chomsky.

I can't tell you why Noam Chomsky chose to engage with a creature like Jeffrey Epstein or how he could allow his good name to be used by such an obvious fiend in a desperate attempt to rehabilitate his public image and apparently Chomsky can't either. A stroke in 2023 has allegedly rendered him beyond reproach. What I can tell you is that a great deal of Chomsky's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein appeared to have to do with the access Epstein could provide to powerful people (and clients) like former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who could further the professor's research or possibly even some of his loftier political goals.

I can also tell you that Professor Chomsky has a long history of publicly justifying the lesser evilism of endorsing monsters like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton in the name of defending us all from supposedly more dangerous monsters like Donald Trump which I strongly believe is precisely the kind of short-sighted moral relativism that actually allowed an open fascist like Trump to access the White House in the first place, now that his "left wing" opponents are to the right of Richard Nixon.

One more history lesson.

In 1971, a young Noam Chomsky engaged in a now infamous debate with iconoclastic French post-modern philosopher Michel Foucault over the existence of moral relativism. Chomsky argued against the concept, claiming that fundamental moral principles rooted in human nature defined what conduct society perceives as good or evil. Foucault argued that it was in fact 'regimes of power' that defined a society's morality.

While I have found my own personal ideology drifting towards increasingly Foucaultian post-left waters in recent years, I would still argue that both were right. Human beings are indeed imbued with a natural sense of right and wrong, but structures of power erected since the Agricultural Revolution by misguided men in search of 'progress' have grown massive enough to distort this natural moral compass and even manufacture the consent of the masses against it.

These are the kind of power structures that allow good parents to defend pedophile priests over their own children in the name of God. The kind of power structures that allow good citizens to defend despotism in the name of democracy. And, tragically, these appear to be the kind of power structures that can convince even brilliant men that colluding with evil can serve some higher good in the name of lesser evils.

These power structures like power itself exist for the simple reason that they can, that it is easier for good people to forfeit critical thinking to such schemes because it is easier to accept the inevitability of progress than it is to accept that evil is something that even good people can do without trying. But we must try. We must all do the hard work of confronting evil every single day, everywhere that it exists, including in our own mirrors, because all it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to accept that a lesser version can save them from it.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* See No Evil by Television

* Cornflake Girl by Tori Amos

* Down by the Water by PJ Harvey

* Wardance by Killing Joke

* Triptych by Samia

* Melissa by Merciful Fate

* Human Cannonball by Butthole Surfers

* 100% by Sonic Youth

* Requiem by Killing Joke

* Atmosphere by Joy Division

Dreaming of a Queer Amish Hezbollah or: Revolution as Therapy in Apocalyptic Times

 

“Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!”

-Paul Goodman

It feels like I've been bringing in the New Year every year for several years running now with the shocked observation that somehow, by some sort of Satanic miracle, this last year has been even more bombastically fucked up than the last and I'm more than a little tempted to repeat the refrain again as I look back at the wreckage of 2025 from the brink of 2026. In fact, I'm pretty sure I can actually see all the way back to 2023 from here and I still can't believe I survived it all. 

That was right around the time I became a woman and the whole fucking world seemed to lose its proverbial shit simultaneously. Don't get me wrong, I have been losing my mind for about as long as America has been losing its soul, but that was the year when it all finally boiled over into one big hot mess of overlapping personal and political trauma.

At a time when an unexpectantly ascendant GOP was pushing transphobic legislation to new heights of downright genocidal malice and Israel's Christian Zionist facilitated atrocities in the Holy Land provoked the blood drenched blowback of October 7th, I began to remember way too much, way too soon as my long-awaited gender transition reached its hormonal peak.  

I began to remember all the atrocities that the Christian Zionists at my rural Catholic diocese committed against my young body while I first arrived at the baffling realization that somehow God had gotten my gender wrong. I remembered receiving a graphic lesson on how a "man conducts himself" in the boys' room from a traveling priest with my preschool teacher's complete approval. I remembered coming to the horrifying conclusion that all the devout adults around me were in on it. And I remembered literally blacking out in that preschool bathroom after realizing that I could no longer recognize my own face in the mirror. 

Emotional flashbacks became visual flashbacks, and visual flashbacks became painfully physical while every YouTube video that played in between was scarred by footage of the butchered infants Israel decided should suffer for its post-colonial sins.

By 2024, I had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, Donald Trump had been re-elected president and somehow it all just kept getting worse. Being five really pissed off lesbians in one skull actually made a hell of a lot of sense to me considering all the repressed trauma I had just tripped over on my way to Armageddon. What didn't make sense was the level of bigotry I faced from my own damn community because of my unexpected multiplicity. 

When Donald Trump took the GOP jihad on "gender ideology" to the Executive Office, suddenly all the white suburban trans moms and their Karen-cum-allies couldn't afford to risk losing their precious corporate sponsorships for the Pride parade by being associated with someone as terminally Queer as me. They very politely told me in fifty shades of microaggression to keep my diagnosis in the closet and just like that, all my woke "friends" turned Catholic while my country got fascist.

Somewhat needless to say, 2025 was another year on fire. Donald Trump declared the holocaust in Gaza to be peace once Hamas stopped shooting back and then declared "transgenderism" to be a violent terrorist ideology in a failed attempt to throw his own base off of the mounting stench of his Vatican-grade sex crimes. On top of all that carnage, I got gaslit out of the last LGBTQ non-profit I had been volunteering at for the apparently mortal sin of demanding to be heard while neurodivergent and found myself forced to rebuild all my supports from scratch. 

So, for the third year in a row I got burned pretty fucking bad. Shit, I got scorched. But I'm not writing this screed from the burn ward looking for sympathy. Quite the contrary, I wrote this post because the most shocking thing about this year is that the ashes of despair were not the strongest thing I tasted on my lips this New Year's Eve.

This gutter fucked carcass of an imperial dystopia definitely requires a goddamn revolution in this the year of our lord Charlie Kirk, twenty-hundred-and-twenty-six, yet looking back on the last twelve months, I actually feel a strange twinge of what I can only describe as hope for the next twelve months ahead. That's because, on the advice of my four alters and our tireless trauma therapist, I have finally stopped begging for revolution and begun living it.

After years of lusting after some distant mythic critical mass uniting the world in one colossal struggle against tyranny, I finally began to truly embrace the lessons I've been learning from more libertarian modes of resistance like agorism and panarchy, and shifted my focus towards building community resources focused on making my people less dependent on toxic institutions of power in the present.

I started small. I started a support group for rural Queer youth at a local non-profit bookstore just around the corner from the rectory where I was raped. As small as this step was, it actually felt like way too much until it didn't. After all, I am literally the most batshit Queer person I know, in fact I'm about five of them. How the hell could I run a goddamn youth group? 

But I did it and it made my existence worth clinging to this year. I provided a small space where neurodivergent Queer kids in a backwoods hick town could feel safe enough to shoot the shit and trash their parents and now, they're organizing and building resources of their own while I'm organizing a second support group, and I'm learning how to shoot, and I'm helping my found family build a homestead, and just like the trauma, it is all fucking connected.

I would still love nothing better than to overthrow the American government in a blazing ball of genderfuck fury but that isn't the only way to fight a revolution, and it probably isn't even the most effective way to do so in this day and age either. That's where free market guerrilla warfare kicks in.

Agorism is a political philosophy developed by a little-known libertarian burn-out named Samuel Edward Konkin III that advocates destroying the government by engaging in modes of counter-economics that essentially make every market a black market by replacing state facilitated capitalism with an unregulated ecosystem of barter, subsistence production and mutual aid which simultaneously make communities like mine more autonomous and virtually untaxable. 

Panarchy is a system of governance proposing an infinite constellation of diverse, co-existing, and largely non-territorial governments that individuals can chose to join or leave at will the same way they would a church or a cellphone provider, creating a network of overlapping tribal nations not unlike those once indigenous to the pre-Christian world. 

With those philosophies in mind, I have developed a loose long-term goal to liberate my people, the rural Queer subaltern betrayed by Pride inc., that builds on the baby steps I have begun taking this year.

It all starts by simply gathering my community and creating a level of local tribal consciousness. From there we build a tapestry of interconnected communities that foster increasing levels of self-sufficiency. Through my local organizing, I have recently discovered that my found family isn't the only brood of Queers homesteading in the rust covered foothills of Appalachia. We are part of a growing community of Queer farmers who have no interest in being herded into gay ghettos.

Individually, we are islands isolated in the storm of late capitalist collapse, but collectively we could become an archipelago of communal stability, pooling resources and sharing knowledge. Prepping ourselves the way right-wing survivalists do while organizing ourselves the way the Queer community always has in times of crisis, as a kind of extended underground family.

From here we drop out and withdraw our consent to be governed by outsiders. As the American Nightmare continues to implode beneath the weight of empire, we further delegitimize their waning grip on power by simply refusing to engage with their system at all. We stop voting in their elections and we stop paying their taxes and we organize armed civilians into democratically operated militias capable of replacing law enforcement and making it painful for the feds if they insist on taking our resources by force. We don't fire the first shot, but we stand our ground and hope that our defiant existence inspires others to do the same.

The ideal would be a sort of Queer Amish Hezbollah. A loose confederation of autonomous agrarian communes sustaining a network of small business', schools, farms, clinics and markets along with a stateless, parallel, horizontally organized government capable of providing welfare and security amidst economic upheaval. A counterculture with an army, co-existing with thousands of others. Maybe it sounds crazy and maybe it is, but I prefer to think of it as neurodivergent, and I've seen other nuts make it work too.

There are Amish farms in my county that literally go back centuries. Those people maintain a lifestyle straight out of Little House on the goddamn Prairie, but they continue to thrive both socially and economically because they have found a way to coexist with the "English World" while maintaining their own culture of autonomy and their own totally voluntary institutions.

Now, my tribe is probably a bit too ethnically diverse to be able to get away with that like pacifists but if we organize ourselves around a well-armed civilian paramilitary force, we will have the means to defend what's ours by simply making the cost of taking it too high. 

While their recent collapse makes it clear that they are far from a perfect model, Hezbollah began much like the Panthers did, as an organization devoted to defending Lebanon's marginalized Shia community, and ended up building grassroots financial institutions that remain more stable than Beirut's, even after years of bombardment and international sanctions. Hezbollah has been affectively decapitated but Israel continues to bomb their banks because a strong militia built an even stronger community.

Maybe this is all a bit of a jump, especially from a small-town youth group, but it's also a goal that I can work on right here and right now. A kind of revolutionary therapy that builds a sense of aspirational community during what continues to appear to be increasingly unstable times.

More importantly, it is something that I would quite literally die old doing even if it was dammed to fail because it is something I do for love, not just for my people but for the person I become when I fight for them and that is something far more sustainable than any kind of dogmatic ism or complex guerrilla praxis.

That's the struggle and that's how 2025 ended up being the best fucked up year of my life. So, bring on your goddamn apocalypse and I'll face it with my youth group. I've got a lot of work to do but I'm just getting started.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana

* Kind of Girl by MUNA

* Ever by Flipper

* Suffragette City by David Bowie

* Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill

* Sanctified by Nine Inch Nails

* Son of a Gun by the Vaselines

* Dicknail by Hole

* Man Size by PJ Harvey

* Hand in My Pocket by Alannis Morrissette

* The Future by Leonard Cohen

Celebrate the Holidays like Jesus and Flip Off Your Local Church

“No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.”

-Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity

I have plenty of reasons to be pissed off at Jesus this Christmas. Not that I didn't have plenty of reasons to be pissed at Jesus last Christmas but over the years I just seem to collect more and more wounds inflicted on me in the name of Christ. As if spending decades in the closet of a backwoods Catholic church weren't enough, I seem to just keep vomiting up repressed memories of the lewd things the priests did to my body in that blackhole between their lessons on all the reasons my gender identity was going to send me straight to hell.

In order to survive this level of trauma at such a young age, I had to segregate my consciousness into five distinct dissociative identities to keep the secrets I couldn't tell even to myself. Thus, most of my alters are still children and always will be, so when another powerful sexual predator like Donald Trump declares "gender ideology" to be a symptom of terrorism and commands the fine people who torched the children at Waco to stomp it out, I get to experience this resurrection of Christian nationalism from the perspective of a freshly raped five-year-old trans girl.

So yes, dearest motherfuckers, I do indeed have many reasons to be pissed off, and I am not above lashing out. I use Norwegian Black Metal songs like lullabies to put my youngest alters to bed and I cannot drive past a church of any denomination without holding one finger high above my head. But I'm not pissed at Jesus, I'm pissed at Christians, and something tells me that Jesus would be too.

Christ is an ancient figure steeped in mythology and lore. There are thousands of interpretations of the motherfucker and what he represented. I can't pretend that my interpretations are any more or less legit than the next bitch with an ax to grind but I can tell you that I spent 11 years being indoctrinated in a parochial school and I spent another twenty studying scripture and the often-esoteric history that informs and frequently censors it in an attempt to unlearn that abuse. 

I have studied the Gospels, including the Gnostic ones, and I have poured over what ancient Islamic and Judaic texts have to say about Christ as well, not to mention the debates of a host of secular historians, linguists and philosophers on the matter.

So, the following is my own mythology, constructed from many sources over many years, and I stand by it as absolute chaos magick. Make of that what you will.

Jesus Christ was a shaggy-haired anarchist troubadour, a traveling mystical heretic delivering muckraking rants against the rich and the pious. Far from what the revisionists in Rome would have you believe, Jesus was a disgruntled Jew who despised the Old Testament and the gangsters who spewed it. Christ was hostile to pretty much all authority; banks, kings, empires... But he despised no seat of power more than "Moses' seat" in the temples of ancient Roman Judea. 

He went from town to town, passing right by these so-called houses of God and the pompous bigots who frequented them and then headed straight for the local red-light districts to rally whores, lepers and eunuchs against them. Christ taught these people that God was a divine spark within them and that they didn't require holy men to access enlightenment.

Jesus also spent plenty of time trashing those holy men. Referring to them variously as snakes, hypocrites, blind guides and play-actors. Accusing them of slamming the door to the Kingdom of Heaven in people's faces and devouring widow's houses while they sat on Moses' seat counting their gold. The only time Christ even stepped foot in a church, he flipped the fuck out, turning over tables and chasing moneychangers into the streets as he condemned their temple as a den of robbers. 

It's hard to imagine the fury that the stadium churches of today's millionaire Zionist Evangelicals would inspire in this mystic wildcard, but I imagine it would likely put the teenage church burning Satanists of the Norwegian Black Metal scene to shame. This is the Jesus I know and, in this light, even the wholesome fable of the first Christmas takes on a far more rambunctious flicker.  

After getting knocked up by an angel, Mary and her terrestrial side-piece Joseph fled Galilee on the orders of a census that was set to increase their taxes to the Roman imperial rump state of Judea. When King Harrod, the quisling in charge of this glorified colony, learned that holy men were traveling to Bethlehem to visit a newborn who might someday challenge his monopoly on power, he sent his own Waco death squad out to kill every male under two in the metropolitan area. Luckily, the Family Christ managed to dodge the pigs and go underground in Egypt until Harrod finally kicked and the heat died down. Then Young Jesus started kicking kings for kicks and the shit got real again...

Is any of this shit true? Who fucking knows. What I do know is that the Gospels served as an inspiration for heretics, peasants and revolutionaries long before they were hijacked by the same tyrants who likely had Jesus killed with a little help from the Pharisees that he spent his short life flipping off. Believe it or not, as a battered, raped and tormented closet case, it was actually Christian revolutionaries that gave me the strength to defend myself against the church and they continue to inform my radical contrarian ideology to this day.

I owe everything to proud Christian heretics like Jaques Ellul, Dorothy Day, Ivan Illich, Peter Maurin and Nikolai Berdyaev, and in the darkest days of my life, I have increasingly turned to the more Gnostic side of Christian mysticism, finding the strength to be the woman the Christians continue to conspire against me becoming through the divine feminine spirit of Sophia and the holy women defined by it; Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Saint Brigitte and most of all, the Virgin Mary.

Faith isn't about what you can prove or what you can preach, it is about inner knowledge, gnosis, a personal kinship with the divine and how that inspires you to live or in my case survive. The church has declared war on me through another empire that uses a bad interpretation of the Bible to justify its conspiracy for global dominance and I have never felt closer to Christ in despising these cunts. In fact, I would argue that this current union of church and state is an excellent candidate for the Beast described in the Book of Revelations.

After all.... "The first beast comes up from the sea... it is given authority and power over every tribe, every people, every tongue, and every nation." Or as Jaques Ellul put it, "All who dwell on earth worship it."

How is this not the Christian nationalist church of Pax Americana during the age of artificial intelligence and Donald Trump? Wasn't it the American Empire that first came from the sea with its battleships and gunboat diplomacy? Isn't it the state-bastardized version of Christianity that first sought global hegemony over every pagan tribe, every people, every tongue, and every nation? Can you honestly think of a better candidate for Antichrist than JD Vance, a Silicon Valley technofascist masquerading as a homespun Christian populist bumpkin?

It all fits like a noose around my neck but I'm not afraid to go down swinging. After all, the power of Jesus Christ Heretic compels me.

So, during this holiday season, with Judea in ashes and the poor man's pedophile Constantine languishing in the White House, I invite you to celebrate the birth of Christ the way he lived his life, by flipping off every church you pass and spitting in the eye of the powerful.

Mery fucking Christmas, dearest motherfuckers, and a happy intifada.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* I Have Forgiven Jesus by Morrissey

* The Pagan Winter by Darkthrone

* God by Tori Amos

* Leave Me in Hell by Venom

* Jesus Don't Want Me for His Sunbeam by Nirvana

* I am the Black Wizards by Emperor

* Jennifer's Body by Hole

* Crucify by Tori Amos

* Mary by Big Thief

* Pure Fucking Armageddon by Mayhem

The Mainstream Left Will Never Represent the Lumpenproletariat

 I've gone through this scenario a million fucking times before and it always seems to play out the same way. I meet some vanilla white progressive ally who feels my pain. You know the type; the non-profit industrial complex is crawling with them. The granola bro in vegan Chucks with a Bernie bumper sticker on his Prius just below a sticker for the latest Dempublican to cheat him out of another primary. The squeaky-clean Karen with the porcelain smile, surgically attached to an NPR tote bag full of positive affirmations and gluten-free cookies. They always start out super understanding. They have a lot of friends like me. They use all the right pronouns without missing a beat. But the moment shit gets complicated, that mask of wokeness slips and they start politely suggesting that I should just shut the fuck up and let my so-called allies carry my burden for me.

When I call them out for this micro-aggressive bullshit, they gaslight the shit out of me and tell me I'm getting "emotional" and that they "respect my feelings" but I didn't hear what I know I heard and I should just calm down. This is around the time when it dawns on me; it is way more goddamn important for these people to look woke than to be woke and that includes never having to apologize to people like me. This is also around the time when I have to step outside just to keep myself from proving them right by losing my fucking shit while they remain permanently Xanax calm. Fucking white people, right?

Here's the thing, I am fucking white people, at least according to the current census data definition of that label. But I'm also a very out-genderqueer person with five-alarm neurodiversity (five personalities and counting!) in a rural white community that has never exactly welcomed my existence. I grew up with white people; kids who repeatedly reminded me that I would never be one of them and adults who seemed convinced that I was dangerous because from a very young age there was something distinctly 'other' about me. This treatment continues to this day and it's exhausting, feeling like you are constantly under the surveillance of hateful eyes, holding your breath every time you pass a police car, and then having straight white people offer you help just to turn on you when your otherness becomes inconvenient to their hobby of playing savior with tranny lunatics like me. 

I don't equate my experience with that of people of color, especially considering that Queer neurodivergent people of color are basically statistically born dead. However, I can't afford to ignore the fact that many of the straight Black and brown people I know are the only neurotypical straight people who seem to even understand what I'm talking about when I'm talking about shit like this. I've known Black people from Dixie who have literally moved back to the South because at least there the racists don't pretend to be your friend which is the same reason why I avoid organizing in the suburbs. So many of us are just sick and tired of the passive-aggressive culture of the mainstream left. That's because all of us are members of the lumpenproletariat and the leaders of the mainstream left in this country are not. 

The lumpenproletariat is the outsider class, spit on even by Marx who referred to us as "social scum" and the "refuse of all classes." The term literally means "rag proletariat" and it includes all the poor people outside of the more traditional working class, the beggars, cripples, criminals, prostitutes, ex-cons and mental patients. The unemployed and the unemployable. The downwardly mobile. A genderfuck basket case eking out a meager existence on disability while cycling in and out of non-profits just to keep the demons at bay. Marx and Engels shit on all of us for lacking "class consciousness" but in reality, we are just poor people they can't unionize and govern beneath their leadership.

This prejudice is baked into the mainstream left across the west. The Social Democratic Party of Germany that set the pace for many progressives and social democrats across the globe during the late 19th and early 20th century made wide use of the term lumpenproletariat as a slur designed to exclude the "non-respectable poor" from those deemed worthy of proletariat status and create a more "desirable" working class. As the 20th century marched on and the SPD found themselves leading post-Imperial Germany, they came to view the lumpen as a biological threat to the health of a truly progressive society and much of the west followed suit with their asylums, reform schools, clinics, and other devices of social hygiene, much of which would also set the table for the Nazis.

In post-colonial America, the lumpenproletariat has always been overwhelmingly Black, brown, and/or Queer, and this isn't a coincidence. Trauma is the number one side-effect of white supremacy and the neurotypical gender binary, and this trauma keeps the lights on at the offices of the numerous industrial complexes that have kept white power alive and well long after the fall of Jim Crow. The Clinton Democrats, under the tutelage of Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmon, saw to that.

The National Institute of Health has consistently shown that the Black community suffers from the highest rate of PTSD out of any other racial group in this country and most studies generally show that just short of half of all LGBTQ+ identifying people suffer from that same psychic injury which is frequently misdiagnosed as any number of "mental illnesses." All of this seems to pave a road straight to the penitentiary for people who can't afford to be subdued by pharmaceuticals. 

Roughly half of all inmates in this country have been found to be experiencing a "mental health condition" and pretty much all of them have experienced some form of childhood trauma. Uncoincidentally, Black Americans are more than 6 times as likely to be imprisoned than whites with Latinos twice as likely and Queer people right in between at 3 times as likely as straight people with 16% of all trans people having served time.

I've been fortunate enough to dodge prison in the sticks, but this relative privilege came with the constellation prize of being chewed up by a wide variety of for-profit mental health institutions that gave me dozens of diagnoses and God knows how many pills before I finally discovered that the primary source of my ailments was the trauma I suffered as a gender non-conforming child at a Catholic school that essentially served me up like a pudding to pedophile priests so those pillars of white heterosexuality could steer me in the right direction with their cocks.

The left did finally hear the cry of the lumpenproletariat, but it would take Queer thinkers like Michelle Foucault and thinkers of color like Frantz Fanon to articulate our pain in a language straight white people could understand. The latter, a psychiatrist by trade, would largely reinvent the word lumpenproletariat with his landmark manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, in which Fanon studied a number of asylums and discovered mental distress to largely be a symptom of capitalist and post-colonialist exploitation. Doctor Fanon also recognized that those suffering under such conditions were a lot less likely to suffer from colonial class indoctrination and were thus a lot more willing to revolt against the status quo.

This wasn't exactly news to barely closeted Queer anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin and Max Stirner who had long preached way back in the 19th century that those of us in the rag class already represented a kind of actually existing anarchism simply by daring to exist outside the confines of mainstream society. They knew what Frantz and Foucault found out, that we were just crazy enough to kick ass without a manifesto to tell us how to do it and we proved this in spades during the sixties and seventies.

The last time the left brought this country to the brink of revolution it was under the leadership of the Black Power Movement that ignited the imagination of the entire lumpenproletariat by simply passing around the goddamn microphone. No organization embodied this spirit of revolutionary dialogue better than the Black Panther Party who openly courted the urban lumpenproles for support with Huey Newton lionizing this cadre as "street brothers"; an organized paramilitary force of ex-cons and ex-gangbangers turning their arms on the systems of oppression that alienated them from society.  

Dozens of other armed revolutionaries from the gutters of Babylon followed suit, from the fags and dykes of the Gay Liberation Front to the streetwalking gender outlaws of STAR, from the reservation dog soldiers of AIM to the Latino lowriders of the Young Lords who even developed a "Lumpen Organization" within their ranks and captured the mood of the times when they boldly proclaimed "It's a law of revolution that the most oppressed group takes the leadership position."

The climax came when the Illinois chapter of the Panthers, led by a young visionary named Fred Hampton, tried to organize these tribes under a single Rainbow Coalition with the intention of not just confronting the state but replacing it with parallel institutions for community welfare that took the chronically unemployed off the government dole. The government couldn't have this, so they shot Fred Hampton. They shot Bunchy Carter, they shot Malcolm X, and they locked up Huey and Bobby Seale, and they framed Leonard Peltier and Geronimo Pratt, and they let an entire generation of Black Queer and Black and Queer revolutionaries die of AIDS.

Then the universities took over, and the big labor unions marched back in with the Democrats on speed dial along with a host of moneyed non-profits organized from the top down like corporations. All of these institutions, all of them, are overwhelmingly led by elderly straight white men and even their diversity programs are largely devices of gatekeeping and tokenization that only afford the most assimilated minorities, aka the least lumpen minorities, access to positions of power. And thus, I find myself getting gaslit and disenfranchised by cis-passing white transwomen who run DEI programs at fucking Raytheon (sadly, a true story.)

We the unwashed lumpenproletariat need to rediscover our voice. We need to get the fucking microphone back. Cointelpro stole it from us and I'm sick and tired of barrowing the DNC's in exchange for another slice of my pride.

The problem on the mainstream left today is almost identical to the problem on the right. They are both run by old white cis het men for old white cis het men. The only difference is that the right admits it while the left just uses minorities like human shields while they kill Muslims with drones and organize the global bourgeoisie beneath decaying relics of progressive internationalism like the EU and the UN. Well, no more. No more Weimar allies buttering us up with petty privileges while the Nazis gather their guns.

We need our own goddamn guns, our own clinics, our own schools, our own parties and organizations run from the bottom up by our own people. Paler Queer folk and neurodivergent trailer trash also need to abandon what's left of our white privilege and throw in our lot with our true comrades, with street brothers and reservation dog soldiers, in the name of lumpen power. The poor need to become a storm over the white pride parade of the two-party oligarchy. The lumpenproletariat must come together again like a rainbow fist and smash the pigfucker state once and for all.

Maybe then I can play nice with bougie vanilla leftists but I'm not making any promises.

Peace, Rage, & Solidarity- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Sunday Morning by the Velvet Underground

* I Against I by Bad Brains

* Down to Be Wrong by HAIM

* Rich Daddy by the Dicks

* Easier Said by Sunflower Bean

* Retard Girl by Hole

* Braille by Regina Spektor

* List of Demands by Saul Williams

* Wolf Like Me by TV On the Radio

* Drunk Walk Home by Mitski

You Can Put America First by Destroying MAGA: A Message for a Post-Trump Isolationist Movement

 "What transforms this world is... Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed."

Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavillion

As someone who lives in Trump Country but frequently moves in left-wing circles online, I have heard a lot of nasty things about Trump supporters and plenty of them are true. I didn't exactly have a great time growing up Queer in a town where boys are raised to believe that manhood is defined by torturing kids like me. Rural Pennsylvania can certainly be a cruel place to the strange little creatures. 

So yes, my neighbors can be pig-headed, short-sighted, close-minded, assholes who lash out at people they choose to know nothing about, but they're also a few other things that grab far fewer headlines. My neighbors are also hard-working, outsourced, war weary, poor folk, acutely aware of the fact that they have been getting played for generations by a system rigged against them by Wall Street and much of their petty prejudices are mirrored by some of their city slicking liberal critics who take about as much time to comprehend country people as country people do to understand trans kids and Somalian immigrants.

It's easy to be terrified of a boogeyman you've never met before, and Republicans aren't the only monster's adept at playing this game. For decades now Democrats have used the specter of the redneck deplorable to scare Queer folk and people of color into voting for slightly more passive aggressive white supremacists like Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, but their caricature of rural monstrosity is only a fraction of the story at best. What most MSDNC shitlibs leave out of their grotesque portraits of rust belt, white trash, MAGA folk is the fact that most of these people were actually motivated to vote for Donald Trump largely as a reckless act of vengeance against the two-party system.

In 2016, the GOP was pushing another Bush, the Democrats were pushing another Clinton, and both teams were equally horrified by the scatological antics of a foul-mouthed, dayglow ginger, rodeo clown who seemed more committed to the LOLs than he did to any coherent ideology. The people of my native Pennsyltucky had spent the worst part of the last twenty-something years losing everything to a Clinton or a Bush administration. They had their factories sold out from under them by shitty trade deals and their kids sent to die in wars that never seemed to end or add up. To put a long diatribe short, regardless of how I feel about the people I grew up with, they worked hard and paid their taxes to a couple of parties who fucked them until they couldn't walk straight in the name of globalism.

Trump was one of the few candidates to actually address this fact and he did so while horrifying the media that helped the Bush and Clinton dynasties to get away with it. Most of the people I knew who voted for Trump in 2016 did it to get even. That doesn't make voting for a race-baiting serial rapist acceptable, but it does make it somewhat understandable to a transgender feminist who has watched both of these parties take turns feeding my people one lie after another while feeding one abused sex worker after another to the prison industrial complex. Shit like that made me crazy enough to route for Putin as a badly closeted communist. So, I get how easily oppression can lead to temporary insanity.

The trouble with MAGA was that the insanity stuck. Trump's first four years in power should have shot the illusion that he was some kind of isolationist in bronze armor to shit. The bastard ripped up the JCPOA, sold Ukraine the offensive weaponry that convinced Putin to invade, gave Israel the green light to rape and pillage Jerusalem, and facilitated a Saudi genocide in Yemen. Not to mention that he stacked his cabinet to the gills with neocon vampires like Mike Pompeo, Eliot Abrams and John Bolton.

But the mainstream media didn't really cover any of this. They mostly just stuck to the narrative that Donald Trump was some kind of dangerous, Putin appeasing, NATO stomping, old right nationalist to which your average MAGA supporter responded by doubling down on their support for a man who could have easily been exposed as just another cold-blooded swamp monster if the news wasn't too busy defending cold-blooded swamp monsters to do so. 

Biden won in a coma in 2020 largely thanks to COVID and then graciously took the blame for Trump's blowback by doing nothing to stop it. The JCPOA remained in tatters, Russia invaded a nation Trump armed to the teeth, and Hamas went on a rampage that Trump's servitude to the Israel Lobby inspired. Then the Democrats made it worse when they ignored their base and ran Kamala as some kind of Zionist Oprah posing with the Cheney's while Trump scored points with all the young bros on the blogosphere.

The Democrats and the Republicans pretty much tripped over each other to make Trump's reanimation possible and in 2025, their mess has become a menace worth being hysterical over. Donald Trump has always been his own worst enemy. The man's pathological ego has always been the stuff that psycho killers and dictators are made of. However, his erratic mood swings and gawdy lack of anything resembling class have always kept him from acquiring the kind of establishment gravitas necessary to make him dangerous to anyone but migrants and Muslims. 

That all changed during the last election when Elon Musk and a host of other Silicon Valley billionaires decided to hedge their bets on a wild card in a gamble to put a man in the White House impulsive enough to let them replace the old military industrial complex with Artificial Intelligence. The bet paid off and now Trump finally has the corporate sponsorship to play Hitler for real this time.

Perhaps the only good news here is that it turns out that some of Trump's supporters really did want to put America first and are finally displaying a little buyer's remorse and it's about fucking time. No sane human being could possibly consider that psychopath to be an actual conservative while he micromanages the liquidation of the Gaza Strip and uses borders and cartels as an excuse to shred what's left of the Constitution and hand the Federal Government over to Palantir. The man being outed as a pedophile didn't exactly help either. I guess even neo-Nazis have a red line.

In recent weeks the fallout has become downright torrential with even Marjorie Taylor Greene turning on her beloved Übermensch over the Epstein files before cowering in a corner at the spectacle of her own unexpected chivalry. But it's Venezuela that looks primed to be the tipping point. 

With Little Marco whispering sweet nothings in his ear, Donald Trump has followed the neocon playbook every step of the way on this one. Making up phony threats to national security with totally fabricated cartels. Changing the dictionary to define America's addiction to hard drugs and cheap labor as a license for total war. Bypassing Congress, the Constitution and international law to unilaterally demand regime change at the barrel of a cannon. It's all there and America sees it. 70% of those polled across party lines in a recent CBS News poll oppose military action in Venezuela.

Republican Senator Rand Paul probably summed it up best when he said: "If he invades Venezuela or gives more money to Ukraine, his movement will dissolve." Such a fabulously catastrophic outcome should be approached as an opportunity to all those who truly seek to dissolve Donald Trump and the evil empire for which he stands in a vat of molten lava. MAGA has become an increasingly sick cult of braindead foot soldiers devoted to a Big Mac gagging Caligula, but the America First Movement that developed in the run-off of this panic factory has some legitimately descent values to stand by. 

My neighbors are right to disdain globalism, forever wars and the deep state. They are correct in observing that all of these imperial vices rob the homeland to rape the third world. But they are going to need to purge themselves of more than just Trump to forge a truly affective revolutionary movement.

While paleolibertarians likes Rand Paul and Thomas Massie are laying down the groundwork for a post-Trump America First Movement that could easily become the kind of gateway drug to anarchism that Rand's father's movement proved to be in the wake of Bush, opportunistic trolls like Tucker Carlson are taking things in a far darker direction, glorifying oligarchs like Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin while pushing uncut antisemitism and backing unrepentant neo-Nazi parasites like Nick Fuentes.

This is why anti-fascism needs to be injected into any form of Isolationism to keep it from mutating into national chauvinism. The brilliant Japanese isolationist Yukio Mishima correctly observed that the death of the Japanese nation came with the birth of the Japanese Empire, that foreign entanglements like initiatory war disintegrate the integrity of any truly benevolent culture. He should have taken it one step further and recognized that unchecked power itself is defined by the disintegration of everything that stands in its way, including the people it is supposed to put first.

It's not too late for my neighbors to learn this lesson but someone has to be willing to deliver it to them without burning them at the stake. That means weird people like me agreeing to drop our own prejudices and preconceived notions at the door as long as my neighbors are willing to meet me halfway by doing the same.

Color me a contrarian, but this is one genderfuck anarchist willing to give it a shot. How about you?

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* All the Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople

* Joiner by Blondshell

* Mamma Tried by Merle Haggard

* In Bloom by Nirvana

* Down to be Wrong by HAIM

* Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

* Liar by Rollins Band

* Goodbye Stranger by Supertramp

* Working Class Hero by John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band

* All My Life by Foo Fighters

It's Time to Make America Truly Tribal Again

 Way back in the 1700s there was this fucked up little place called Florida, or at least that's what the Spaniards called it. The original natives of the region had multiple different names for this untamable swampland but most of them were wiped out by slaughter and disease from the Conquistadors who declared the wild mess, Florida. They didn't last long though. In fact, those butchers only managed to build and populate a few colonialist missions before their glorious Catholic empire collapsed in the tall grass surrounding them and, in spite of such efforts, most of Florida remained a verdant wilderness teeming with all kinds of shit that freaked white people the fuck out- snakes, alligators, mosquitos, humidity... 

But there was one tribe of Indians just wild enough to call this no-man's-land home.

The colonialists called them the Seminole, which was believed to be derived from the Spanish word "cimerones", meaning "untamed" or "runaway." It had originally been used as a pejorative for Native Americans who rejected mission life and Roman Catholicism in order to flee and live "wild" in the snake infested forests. But this wasn't just any tribe. The Seminole were a nation of refugees, the product of ethnogenesis, a collection of different disparate ethnicities joining together to create a new one. 

Most of their original members were renegades and outcasts exiled from existing tribes, most significantly the Muscogee Creeks of what is now called Georgia and Alabama but also Choctaw, Yamasee, Yuchi and eventually free Africans, escaped slaves and even a few disenfranchised white colonialists. They all came together in the wilderness to live free, and they thrived where white men feared to tread, building an identity over the centuries defined by their collective refusal to be governed by any force but nature.

They organized themselves into autonomous, self-governing, villages called Italwa that cooperated for mutual defense and built a thriving trade network on the largely abandoned ruins of the Spanish Empire. It was their diversity that set them apart though and made them far more independent than the other local Creek based tribes. It was also this diversity that would eventually make them a target of another burgeoning empire known as the United States of America.

By the 19th Century, the Seminoles had accepted so many escaped slaves from nearby plantations that these darker skinned refugees formed their own distinct band dedicated to preserving their own unique culture under Seminole protection while also enjoying the right to bear arms. They called them Black Seminoles, and they quickly established an alliance between wild Indians and escaped slaves that threatened the monopoly on force held by white Southern planters with a growing network of underground railroads. 

In other words, the Seminole had to go and thus began the Seminole Wars.

Three conflicts were fought between the years of 1816 and 1858. The first was also America's first major military intervention on foreign soil lead by a sadistic General named Andrew Jackson for the express purpose of recovering escaped slaves, and it was Andrew Jackson who would lead America into the second and deadliest of those wars about a decade later when he was elected president. For nearly 7 years, less than 2,000 Seminole warriors schooled over 30,000 heavily armed American troops in swampland guerrilla warfare, picking them off like mosquitos in hit-and-run attacks and then disappearing back into the stags like ghosts.

It was the longest, deadliest and most expensive Indian War this empire has ever engaged in. As many as 2,000 American troops died in that filthy black water, a population of corpses that matched the size of the entirety of the Seminoles' armed forces. The Americans only won the war the way Americans have ever won a war, by targeting and starving their adversaries' families and subjecting civilians to genocide in order to force real warriors to surrender.  

However, while most of the Seminoles begrudgingly agreed to flee the land they made their own for the glorified concentration camps of Oklahoma, a few small bands never surrendered, choosing to retreat even deeper into that fucked up little place where they remain unconquered to this day in what has now become known as the Everglades. The Southern planters even attempted to reach out to these bloodied but unbowed renegades in a desperate hunt for allies during the Civil War. The Seminoles told them to fuck off. They remained neutral.

This is one of my favorite stories in the often-depressing pantheon of American history for a number of reasons. As a Queer person, any story about a band of outcasts forging a new identity in resistance to their oppressors is kind of like hyperfocus candy for my distinctly neurodivergent brain. But more than anything, the story of the Seminole Nation is a story that proves that ethnicity or tribal identity is mutable and that bioregionalism is far stronger than traditional Westphalian nationalism. It is historical proof that the American Empire is a mirage built on totally manufactured constructs like race and borders, and that these constructs can be destroyed.

The fatal flaw at the heart of both the left and the right in this country is the nightmare known as the American Dream. A contrived notion that any form of political universalism writ large over such a vast and diverse physical space can ever lead to anything but tyranny regardless of what label you put on it. Perhaps the most devastating label of all is the western concept of race as a biological construct with its deadliest byproduct being that godless religion known as whiteness.  The very notion of white people was invented for the express purpose of homogenizing the entirety of the European diaspora into a single globalized master race.

I guess it kind of worked, at least for a while. America is still the deadliest empire on earth and much of that empire is built upon the bedrock of white supremacy. But just like the Spanish Empire before them, America is rapidly collapsing into the abyss beneath the weight of its own sins, leaving a vast population of 'white people' without any form of ethnic identity other than conquest to cling to. And cling they do, to Proud Boys and Heritage Foundations and vile technofascist juntas. To a very polluted and historically color blind form of tribalism. But we shouldn't let this sickness pollute the word 'tribe' any more than we should let it pervert the word 'God.'

That would be truly tragic because the solution to this problem, of how to free people from being the willing hostages of a thrashing international leviathan as it drowns in its own blood, may actually be to turn to a sort of historical bioregionalism based on the kind of tribalism which has always been natural to this region of the world. This doesn't mean indulging in cultural chauvinism or cultural appropriation. It means doing what the Seminole did and building new nations in contradiction to these things. 

The indigenous people of these so-called Americas are still here and still fighting to define themselves but if any of us are going to live peacefully on this land with them after the inevitable collapse of the empire that failed to extinguish them, we should probably start looking to them for more influence than the host of dead white men still worshipped by both sides of academia.

As noted above, I believe that the best way to do this is by embracing bioregionalism, a philosophy of green localism that calls on societies to organize themselves small around the natural boundaries of bioregions and to actively engage with a process of becoming native to these environments by learning and embracing their ecological and cultural history. This is precisely what the Seminole did in the wilds of colonial Florida, and they did it in a way that didn't involve them forcing their will upon anyone. They built a vibrant new cultural identity by uniting the shards of the many ethnicities that joined beneath their flag and adapting them to the environment that offered them sanctuary. 

The Seminoles were not alone. Many indigenous nations existed in small, decentralized, non-hierarchical, societies long before some white dude declared this anarchism. The Iraquois Confederacy and the Navajo Dine developed complex societies that united many cultures in harmony with nature through cooperation and collective responsibility. Europeans once did too in places like Medieval Iceland and Gaelic Ireland. You can also detect streaks of this stateless spirit among the outliers of post-colonial Euro-American culture such as the Cajuns of the Bayou and the numerous sects of Anabaptists across America's badly scarred heartland.

This is what I seek to achieve with my own community of mostly pale-faced rural Queer folk on the ruins of the Appalachian rust belt. A borderless confederacy of autonomous and anti-colonialist tribal communities built around our shared traditions of multi-ethnic Queerness and anti-authoritarian neurodivergence, fostered by the agrarian traditions of the land we now call home. A series of farms, communes, co-ops and homesteads living off the land with our own network of schools, militias, small businesses and mutual aid societies to sustain us while still living in harmony with whatever other voluntary cultures surround us.

We can't replace the native people who once occupied these hollers, and we wouldn't dare to try. The Shawnee who once called my little corner of Pennsyltucky home suffered a similar fate as many of the Seminoles, being ethnically cleansed by that 19th century Donald Trump, Andrew Jackson, with his genocidal 1830 Indian Removal Act. 

But we can honor the last nations to live off this land sustainably and more importantly we can learn from them. We can do what the Seminole dared to do and forge a new stateless existence in the age of Orange Ozymandias by making America truly tribal again.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Even the Losers by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

* Tribe by Gruntruck

* The Flag by Royal Trux

* The Wrong Year by the Decemberists

* Heroes by David Bowie

* The King of Spain by the Tallest Man on Earth

* The Druid by Sleep

* Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes

* Anaconda by the Melvins

* Territorial Pissings by Nirvana