Martin's Dream Has Become Malcolm's Nightmare

 Dr. Martin Luther King had a dream, and it sounded pretty fucking sweet on the radio. Even a bitter post-everything anarchist like me gets a little choked up listening to the good doctor's Sermon on the Mount at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Martin had a dream about America living up to its word and redeeming itself after centuries of barbarism by opening its doors and letting everybody in. A dream in which his own children wouldn't be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character and all Americans would work together, play together, struggle together, go to jail together. A dream about inclusion that invited everyone to take part in the American Dream.

You could actually argue that America has kind of achieved this goal at least on the surface. In fact, America seems to have made Martin Luther King a major part of their whole sales pitch and the entire month of February is pretty much devoted to making this argument in the form of Black History Month. For 28 days a year, we are all reminded by a host of corporate sponsors that after just three civil rights acts and a few dead heroes America has become a place with Black celebrities, Black billionaires, Black CEOs, senators, generals and Supreme Court judges. We've even had a Black president. In what other indispensable empire could such things be possible?

If this all sounds a little too good to be true, then join the club and get ready to sit through a very short month of appalled guilt trips delivered by straight white dudes in dashikis. To be perfectly clear, I myself am what you might call a honky. In fact, I'm what many would likely refer to as a redneck. But I'm also a neurodivergent transwoman in the thick of Trump Country and I know when I'm being sold a bill of goods. The harsh reality that only a handful of politically incorrect people of color seem to even be willing to touch is that Martin's dream, at least the version sold at Walmart for 9.95, is tragically skin deep and quite nightmarish just beneath the surface.

In 1968, LBJ ordered a study to be done on racial disparity in America after Dr. King's assassination nearly triggered a nationwide revolution across the country's ghettos. The result was the Kerner Commission and what this commission found was a nation wracked by generations of institutional apartheid and a Black community in particular struggling to survive under third world conditions in the wealthiest nation on earth. The most tragic fact made clear by the Kerner Commission however didn't actually surface until half a century after it was published.

In 2025, some 57 years after LBJ passed this nation's last civil rights act while the ghettoes were still burning, study after study shows that racial inequality in this country is virtually unchanged from the one in the yellowed pages of the Kerner Commission and in some places, it has actually gotten worse. The earnings gap remains the same, the wealth gap remains the same, the disparity between Black and white homeownership remains the same, and four generations after desegregation, America's cities are more segregated than ever before.

"But how could this be...?" a frantic white woman cries out in the distance, "We killed Jim Crow!" Perhaps, but the War on Drugs brought him back by turning America's prison system into the most effective tool for white supremacy that the world has ever seen. In 1968, the American prison population was 188,000. Today, it stands at just over two million with another three million people living under some form of judicial supervision which renders convicted felons bereft of nearly every right guaranteed them by the civil rights acts of the 1960s, including the right to vote.

This population is made up overwhelmingly of people of color convicted of non-violent drug offenses and this isn't just some cruel coincidence. It was a deliberate conspiracy conjured up by failed segregationists like Senator Strom Thurmond who used the manufactured panic over America's poverty driven drug habits to turn the federal government they once opposed in the name of state's rights into the kind of white power behemoth that would make the Klan downright irrelevant.

But it wasn't cross-burning goons in white hoods who drove the final nail in this coffin, it was LBJ's Democrats. Men like former President Joe Biden, who Thurmond carefully groomed to take his place as hangman of the Senate Judiciary Committe, and former President Bill Clinton who together passed the largest crime bill in American history in 1994. A legal monstrosity that more than doubled the prison population within a decade with 60 new death penalties, 90 enhanced penalties, 100,000 new cops, and 125,000 new state prison cells. As late as 2007, then Senator Joe Biden described this bill as his proudest achievement. A year later he would serve as Vice President to America's first Black Commander in Chief.

Yes, a handful of the Black bourgeoisie like President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris have reached the pinnacle of American power, but they have only done so by taking part in the violence as token members of a police state still defined by white supremacy. 

So, now we have Dr. King's children not being judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their body count. We have Black prosecutors lynching Black children as adults, Black senators arming the Klan in blue with fucking battle tanks, Black generals reducing entire city blocks to cinders in Black countries like Somalia, Black Supreme Court justices giving it all the rubber stamp of "constitutionality", and Black billionaires taking their cut of the blood money.

This was always the inherent flaw in Martin Luther King's dream. America is an existentially imperial enterprise built on genocide, conquest, and slavery. There was never anything here worth redeeming and including Black people or any other minority into this conspiracy could only succeed in making them complicit at best. Malcolm X, the unofficial villain of Tyler Perry's Black History Month, tried to warn us that this dream could only end in a nightmare, and he did it from the cheap seats of the Lincoln Memorial.

Brother Malcolm took part in Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington, the one that ended with the speech that would make Dr. King immortal, but he would leave the Mall disparaging the entire inspirational happening as the "Farce on Washington." That's because Malcolm came to take part in what the March's organizers had originally intended to be a massive act of revolutionary civil disobedience, an occupation of the nation's capital that would cripple its ability to rule until its demands were met. 

However, after meeting with the Kennedy Administration, more moderate civil rights leaders like Dr. King made a deal with Camelot; they would carefully coordinate the march with the administration straight down to the signs caried and speeches given and even agree to a designated curfew if Kennedy agreed to pass a watered-down Civil Rights Act.

Malcolm X and many other fellow marchers were disgusted by this Faustian bargain. They accused King of selling out the Movement to the very people it was supposed to be fighting against, and they were right. JFK used the PR he milked from his photo-ops with the Civil Rights Movement to afford himself the moral cache that allowed him to drop napalm on the third world while still appearing to be a progressive.  

Malcolm and the Black Power Movement that formed by his gravesite saw the oppressed people of this nation as a part of a greater third world struggle for liberation against western imperialism that still rages to this day and while the official dogma of Black History Month struggles to paint this movement as the bitter fruit of Martin Luther King's rivals, the good doctor himself would come to admit that they were right.

In the years following the March on Washington and leading up to his untimely demise, Dr. King became increasingly radical in the face of an empire that he had come to realize had little intention of following through on its promises. King condemned America as the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet, declared his solidarity with the Vietcong struggling to liberate their own people by any means necessary in Vietnam, and condemned modern capitalism for being a morally bankrupt fetish totally incompatible with Christian values. 

In fact, during the time of MLK's assassination he was actually plotting another march on Washington known as the Poor People's Campaign that was intended to be more in line with the original's pre-modified goal of a revolutionary national occupation.

King's assassination, like Malcolm's, remains shrouded in the smoke of Cointelpro and J. Edgar Hoover's relentless jihad against civil rights but sadly it proved to be just as convenient for the American Empire as his rebirth as the patron saint of Black History Month did. America's cultural elites have chosen to empathize MLK's more assimilationist early teachings while essentially deleting the fact that he spent the last years of his life defying them with open contempt. The result of this whitewash isn't just the weird rise of the Black white supremacists that such touchy-feely liberals love, it is the rise of more flatulent hate mongers like Donald Trump who they love to hate.

Twenty percent of Black voters kicked up to the Donald in 2024. That's more Black votes than any Republican candidate has received in fifty years going to the most openly racist Republican candidate in fifty years and why not. Wasn't it you white liberals who convinced them that voting for a career white supremacist like Joe Biden was kosher in trying times? Don't get so pissed off just because they took your advice twice.

Nevertheless, with all that vitriol being left in the bucket, I still insist that Black history matters to a Queer hick like me for the same reason that Black Power matters to a Queer hick like me. Even with all the fanfare afforded to the whitewashed mythology of the Civil Rights Movement by the still very white establishment, these same condescending cunts remain more invested than ever in keeping the Black population of this country as incarcerated as humanly possible and that is because no population has ever proven more impossible to assimilate into the American nightmare than the Black population and this is a testament to a proud culture of resistance that leads all the way back to Africa.

A culture of slave revolts and rock n roll. A culture of Black Panthers and gangsta rap. A culture of prison riots, graffiti, lowrider cars and black-market Sour Diesel. A culture defined by being fundamentally ungovernable. In their own ways, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King both embodied this uniquely American outlaw culture, and it is a culture that inspired faggots like me to pick up a brick at Stonewall.

The dream is over. Time to wake up and let the revolution begin.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Cult of Personality by Living Colour

* Hip Hop by Dead Prez

* I Against I by Bad Brains

* List of Demands by Saul Williams

* Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry

* Express Yourself by NWA

* Rock N Roll N*ggar by Patti Smith

* Hey Joe by Jimmi Hendrix

* Who We Be by DMX

* It's a Mirror by Perfume Genius

A Girl Named Nicholas: How Individualist "Gender Ideology" Actually Keeps Kids Safe

 (TRIGGER WARNING: The following story includes detailed descriptions of childhood sexual abuse.)

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Nicholas, or at least that is what her parents named her. She wasn't exactly sure just what she was, but she knew from a very young age that she wasn't a boy. Her big brother was a boy and every time that her parents insisted that she be like him she became furious. The little girl didn't know how to tell her parents how wrong they were with words so she showed them in every other way that she could. Anytime her parents told her that "if you want to be like your big brother" you'll do this, she responded by doing the polar opposite.

Her big brother ate his fruits and vegetables, so the little girl refused to even touch another fruit or vegetable. Her big brother drank his juice from a sippy cup, so the little girl refused to drink anything but water even though juice was her favorite drink. Still, somehow, the little girl's parents were not getting the message, but when it came to potty training, things went too far fast. Suddenly, people were policing parts of the little girl's body that she found terrifying and confusing and then telling her to just behave like her big brother. Even worse, they demanded that she comply so they could send her away to the same Catholic school that was making her brother such a well behaved 'big boy.'

The little girl didn't know what to do so she did what she had always done and refused to comply, but her parents seemed to simply ignore her protests, cleaning up her messes and sending her away to that scary preschool anyway. This went on for nearly two years until the little girl's mother finally realized that her 'accidents' were deliberate and reacted to this discovery with violence for the first and only time in the little girl's childhood. Not long after this incident, the little girl's preschool teacher did the same but took it much further, dragging her by the arm to the bathroom that she refused to use, stripping her naked from her shoulders to her ankles and beating her with her bare hands.

Before the little girl could even figure out what had gone wrong, a Catholic priest visiting the church next door to the school observed her misbehavior and saw an opportunity. The young man in the white collar offered his expert guidance to the clearly frustrated preschool teacher. She was more than happy for the help and seemed to have no problem with this grown man taking a young child into the bathroom alone to show her exactly how a man is supposed to behave. What he did was molest the child. He put his hands and his mouth all over her body and made it do frightening things. The little girl was horrified but every other adult was allowed to put their hands on her body so why not this this man of God? How could she possibly say no?

Incredibly, things got worse. One day the visiting priest stopped by the preschool playground and with the approval of the little girl's teacher took her down the street to visit the rectory where he was staying. He fixed her a sandwich in the kitchen and then sent her upstairs to the bedroom. The moment the little girl entered that room she knew something was horribly wrong. Another man, a priest from her church was already in there naked. The visiting priest came into the room behind her, sat down on the bed in front of her, and removed his pants. The little girl knew right then and there exactly what these two men of God wanted her to do because one of them had already done it to her. She cried and begged the men not to make her do those things. She promised to be good. She promised to behave like her big brother.

The priests literally laughed in her face. The visiting clergyman joked to the other about how much the little girl had enjoyed what he did to her, about how big he manipulated the scary parts of her body into becoming. The little girl just kept sobbing and begging until the two priests lost their patience. One of them grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her mouth onto the other. She choked. She couldn't breathe. She thought that she was going to die. When the first priest had finally finished, he attempted to pass the gagging child to the other, but the little girl threw up before he could. The priests got mad. They looked at their soiled victim like a broken toy who had just ruined their good time. 

The visiting priest who had started it all leaned in close and told the little girl, "Look what a big mess you just made. Your parents and your teacher would be very angry if they knew what a big mess you just made." The little girl believed the man of God but all she could do was cry and beg to see her mommy until the priest told her that if she didn't calm down and clean herself up that they wouldn't let her go home, that she would never go home again. As scary as the little girl's parents had become, the things they did to her body out of frustration were far less horrifying than the things those men did to her body for fun. She finally decided to behave however she was told to behave.

After cleaning the child up a bit, the visiting priest returned her to her preschool and informed her teacher that she had made another mess in the rectory. The preschool teacher said nothing. She only looked at the petrified five-year-old as if she were some kind of diseased animal, perverting a house of God with her biology. She sent the little girl to the bathroom where she had been beaten and molested to continue to clean herself up before she could go home.

The little girl was terrified. She saw very little difference between what the priests had done and what her teacher and her mother had done. She didn't understand the difference between the ways those people touched her. She only knew that every single adult in her life was putting their hands on her frightening body in increasingly frightening ways. She believed that this was just what all adults did to children when they didn't behave, and all the adults seemed to want her to become a different species upon the threat of rape. The little girl couldn't handle the terrifying confusion of her reality. She looked into the bathroom mirror and didn't recognize the image staring back at her. She had no place left to hide. She had no choice but to make herself disappear.

I was that little girl, and I spent decades after being savagely abused by the church my parents held in such high regard in a fog. The first decade was spent at that same school surrounded by the people who broke me. I had no choice but to black it all out. I behaved like a boy, but I didn't feel it. I didn't feel much of anything. I would watch the other girls playing on the playground or chatting on their way to the girl's room where they seemed to feel so safe, and I desperately wanted to be a part of this but something deep inside told me that those feelings were dangerous, and the church seemed to validate these fears with its teachings on compulsory heterosexuality and proper gender behavior.

It wasn't until I finally rejected all this shit and began my ongoing gender transition that these horrific memories began to rush back to me in an avalanche of vivid flashbacks, violent seizures, and dissociative identities. I need people to know this horrific story and I need them to know every last gruesome detail of it because I wasn't just a victim of systemic childhood sexual abuse. I was a victim of spiritual abuse and the dangerous ignorance that it fosters. My parents had no idea that I was transgender because they had no idea what transgender even was. They just believed that I was a stubborn child who refused to obey. The only people who seemed to realize exactly how confused and terrified I was were those predatory priests and they used this terrifying confusion and the ignorance that afforded it to their full advantage.

Sadly, this isn't a rare case. It is a well-known fact that Queer children are far more likely to be victims of abuse because these are the children most likely to be too scared and ashamed of their own bodies to tell. It is also a well recorded fact that early childhood sexual education that includes just simply acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ people reduces the rate of this abuse exponentially and this is precisely what the Christian Right wants erased from the public square. This basic level of biological awareness that could save a child from the horrific trauma that I still struggle with every day is the "extreme gender ideology" that President Donald Trump condemns in his pompous executive orders. But he and his masters are the ones pushing an extremist gender ideology.

These people want to erase Queer children. They want to return to a world of make-believe where those kids don't exist, but they do and so did I. I had no idea what gender was, I didn't even know that 'transgender' was a thing. The only thing I knew was that I wasn't a boy and that I was terrified. If I had simply known that I wasn't the only person on the planet with these feelings, if my parents simply knew that early childhood gender dysphoria was a legitimate phenomenon, and if I had only been taught that my body was my body, and that no adult had the right to define it but me, I might have had the tools I needed to defend myself.

We need to provide our children with unfettered access to every kind of information and give them the critical thinking skills to assess this information for themselves. We need to get the government out of libraries and off the internet and we need to keep religion out of the government. We don't need curriculums or courses or helicopter parents trying to define what this or that pronoun means. We need to provide children with the resources they need to determine their own goddamn identities and then we need to shut the fuck up and listen when they tell us who they are. This isn't a gender ideology; it's an individual ideology and it is exactly as extreme as it needs to be to keep kids safe.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Candy Says by the Velvet Underground

* The Suburbs by Arcade Fire

* Life On Mars by David Bowie

* Shake It Out by Florence + the Machine

* Polly by Nirvana

* Bruised Violet by Babes in Toyland

* Sour Breath by Julien Baker

* Asking for It by Hole

* Tourniquet by Marilyn Manson

* Stellate by Samia

* Been a Son by Nirvana

* Something I Can Never Have by Nine Inch Nails

In the Age of Trump, All Queer People Should Be Anarchists

 Well, it's official dearest motherfuckers, according to the President of the United States I don't fucking exist and neither does anyone else who falls outside of that country club rapist's definition of male and female. I had my suspicions; people do seem to struggle to look me in the eye at the Cracker Barrel but thank God we have an Executive Office with the power to finally set the record straight.

I speak of course of Donald Trump's absurd executive order "Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the Federal Government" and as ludicrous as this document may be, quite literally defining something as biologically complicated as gender to be defined by what junk one doctor reports seeing on your birth certificate, it is still essentially a genocidal document designed to legally erase an entire population of people and it carries just enough authority to hurt the most vulnerable members of the already existentially vulnerable transgender community.

Aside from defining our very existence to be little more than a contrived conspiracy against the fabric of Western Civilization, President Trump's sweepingly vague executive decree also directs all federal prisons, jails, shelters, and juvenile facilities to be segregated based on some asshole's definition of sex. 

One in six transgender people find themselves a hostage of the prison industrial complex at some point during our lifetime, usually for engaging in the victimless crime of survival sex, and we are already 13 times more likely than cisgender prisoners to be sexually assaulted by fellow inmates or staff. This order doesn't so much change that harsh reality as it enshrines it into federal policy and emboldens the wardens of America's gulag archipelago to act with explicit malice.

Trump's executive order also promises to expand this institutional violence to the compulsory school system that so often serves as a pipeline to America's prisons by directing the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to take a break from kicking Muslims so they can bar transgender people from government funded single sex facilities that align with our gender identity.

This means that every school K-12 that excepts a dime of federal aid runs the risk of incurring the wrath of their landlord unless they carefully police the genitalia of the children in their charge and effectively deprive trans children of the basic human right of using the bathroom unless they are willing to run the risk of facing the same fate of Nex Bennedict or worse.

All of this comes at a time when transgender people like me are already finding ourselves under assault by quite literally every single branch of the American Government. 

Half the states in the country have laws banning transgender children from access to treatment that every major medical body on the planet agrees is virtually harmless and potentially lifesaving and, based on recent hearings, the Supreme Court looks primed to allow such draconian attempts to police the private medical decisions of families and individuals, in spite of the fact that they clearly violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

As if that weren't despotic enough, the House of Representatives has recently succeeded in passing a national law regulating gender in student sports that also conceals a far more heinous provision to amend federal law to define sex on similar grounds as Trump's pompous executive order. 

And I can just hear the queens at my local fag bar now, bitching me out over their cocktails, "This is why you should have voted bitch! This is why you should have voted!" I hate to break it to you girls but I'm still not taking a bite out of that poison apple. 

Who the fuck was I supposed to vote for? Kamala? That police state TERF in rainbow clothing. The same one who chucked transwomen into men's prisons as an attorney general and then deprived them of basic medical care. 

Was she the one who was going to save me? Well, then what stopped her and the rest her crooked administration from doing so over the last four years? What did any of those fucking Democrats do to prevent this? Quite the contrary, that party has long contributed to making these kinds of executive pogroms possible.

Executive orders are largely toothless proclamations made by presidents trying to appear less feckless amidst the deep state. Just look at all the meaningless crap Biden passed on student debt. The only thing that can give these glorified decrees fangs is the one thing the president does have direct authority over and that is the various departments of this country's police state, and nobody has done more to overfund and centralize that phalanx of bureaucratic fascisti than the Democratic Party.  

It was Kamala's rapidly disintegrating boss, Joe Biden, who helped then-President Bill Clinton pass his massive crime bill in 1994 that paved the way for the disproportionate mass incarceration of my people and turned the prison industry in this country into a multibillion-dollar corporate juggernaut. Within a decade of passing that atrocity, the incarcerated population of this country more than doubled and put China to shame as the largest human zoo on earth.

This ain't just ancient history either. In 2018, then-Senator Kamala Harris was one of the numerous Democratic sponsors of SESTA-FOSTA, a monstrously bloated bill that affectively criminalized any attempt by sex workers or their allies to organize online in a blatant bipartisan assault on internet freedom and the First Amendment that it depends on. 

And even more recently, it was the Biden-Harris Administration that fed the police state another $350 billion dollars as part of their massive covid slush fund which also pushed another $170 billion to the public school system without any strings attached, lining the pockets of some of the most blatantly transphobic school boards in the country.

I have seen the damage of this legislation firsthand in my own little corner of the rust belt. I volunteered at an AIDS resource center whose outreach programs providing contraceptives to at-risk sex workers were affectively crippled by SESTA-FOSTA and my local LGBTQ center was devastated by the covid lockdowns. 

None of us saw a single red cent from Biden's wallet, but the police force that shot a friend of mine dead for the crime of being neurodivergent while Black and the Catholic Church that literally tried to rape me straight in preschool both got their cut. Funny how that works out, don't you think?

When are Queer people going to get it, the government is not our fucking ally. The state has never recognized our existence as anything but mascots or cannon fodder, so why do we continue to recognize the legitimacy of the state? 

The people I love do it because they're scared. I'm not sure that I've ever met another transgender person who hasn't been horrifically traumatized, bullied, and humiliated, usually as children in the Democrats' sacred compulsory school system. So, when we hear bible thumping lunatics calling for us to be prosecuted like sex criminals, we get triggered, and when Democrats like Kamala and Biden put down the whip just long enough to pet us, it's hard not to be tempted by the devil we know.

This is a textbook abusive relationship, and we all know it. One arm of the state beats us while the other offers us shelter but they both serve the same industrial complexes. 

If the shockingly unthinkable resurrection of Donald Trump proves anything it's that the Democratic Party is about as worthless as the German Social Democrats who made the rise of Hitler inevitable by canoodling with the Freikorps while feigning tolerance for the weird people, and if that ugly chapter of democratic history should prove anything to Queer people it's that all of us should be anarchists right now.

But exactly what is a Queer Anarchist, you ask? I'll tell you but not before I tell you what the words 'Queer' and 'Anarchist' really mean. 

Queer is a counterculture of people biologically driven to live in resistance to Anglo-Saxon Puritan values and all of the secular forms of cultural conformity they inspired. While most of us are gender outlaws and sexual minorities, simply being LGBT does not make one Queer. It is resistance to mainstream assimilation that achieves that title.

An Anarchist is an individual or collective opposed to the state or any other authority defined by a monopoly on the use of force. Therefore, a Queer Anarchist is any Queer anti-assimilationist who puts tribe before authority and recognizes that the state is the authority that poses the biggest threat to this tribe. 

We as a tribe must resist Trump, and we must do it with every fiber of our collective being, but this resistance will prove just as pointless as our resistance to that man's last term if we fail once again to recognize that it is only the existence of the state itself that makes such a stupid and petty clown this dangerous. 

As long as the state exists no marginalized tribe of committed anti-conformists will ever be truly liberated. So, let's finish the job Stonewall started before it's too late.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Life On Mars by David Bowie

* Good Times by Twin Shadow

* Beginning to See the Light by the Velvet Underground

* Describe by Perfume Genius

* He Hit Me by Hole

* T & A by Blondshell

* Bruised Violet by Babes in Toyland

* Triptych by Samia 

* Y Control by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

* Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division

It's a Mad Max World for Us: Post Apocalyptic Daydreams in an Age of Dystopian Crisis

 This may or may not be the literal Armageddon but just peeking through the shades I can tell you that it's looking pretty goddamn apocalyptic to me. As I write this acidic screed, the only square mile of the continental United States that isn't frozen solid by a polar vortex the size of God's asshole is literally in flames. Deny the violence of science all you want but it doesn't take a charlatan like Al Gore to know which way the wind blows, and our rapidly mutating climate isn't even the most immediate threat posed to humanity at this apocalyptic moment.

In fact, there are almost too many Cthulhus to count. While greenhouse gasses bake the ice caps, NATO and Putin continue to play nuclear footsie in Ukraine as the Chinese Communist Party and the wizards of Wall Street race to put artificial intelligence in charge of it all even while they openly admit that this sick gambit runs the risk of provoking human extinction before the stock market crashes.

Fuck Armageddon, mankind will be lucky to make to next Tuesday while we split ourselves into equally hideous political parties to bicker over the remote. I'm honestly not sure if I can save these assholes and trying is making me want to throw myself into the fire. It's at times like these that I actually find myself begging for an apocalypse. It's at times like these that I can't seem help but to fantasize about living in a Mad Max America. In fact, I can almost smell the diesel fumes now....

Waking up whenever the daylight calls my name through the drapes of a bulletproof yurt, I'll hit the vacant desert plains of Central Pennsylvania in a heavily modified, rust-rod, El Camino technical with my leather clad horde of genderfuck lesbian barbarians to scavenge the radiated ruins of suburbia for coffee and gunpowder....

With a Buck knife in my teeth and a sawed-off M1 Carbine strapped to my thigh, I'll scale the facade of an abandoned football stadium strangled by vines and hunt white tailed buck with a crossbow between the charred rush hour carcasses on Interstate 80 from a defiled billboard....

I'll cook raw flesh on a bayonet over a flaming television set while the blistering riffs of an all-Stooges mixtape crackle over a ghetto blaster and my dreadlock laden coven of heathen sisters howl for Loki at a moon populated by the corpses of billionaires who failed to escape their demons on luxury rocket ships....

Maybe this all sounds a bit sick to you, and it probably is. I often have to remind myself to contain my glee over such notions of post-apocalyptic bliss in public. It only seems to feed the narrative popular amongst more industrial inclined leftists that post-civ anprim types like me are little more than recklessly misanthropic romantics turning the cinematic specters of George Miller's Max Rokitansky and Imperator Furiosa into something akin to Rousseau's noble savage. And I will own up to the fact that my lust for dieselpunk daydreams isn't exactly the most constructive response to an era of unprecedented societal collapse, but I won't apologize either.

These fantasies aren't merely the realm of radical minds anymore. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a growing multibillion dollar industry and I'm not just talking about the Mad Max franchise. Legions of otherwise vanilla office slaves binge themselves sick on countless hours of survivalist videogames and an endless procession of streaming zombie apocalypse spin-offs. Meanwhile, larping city slickers escape to the sticks just so they can haul up in luxury bunkers and take turns shooting each other up to a blister pocked bliss with high-powered paintball guns.

If this is a sickness, then it's a pandemic but it's a plague that makes perfect fucking sense when you consider the fact that we are already living amidst the kind of towering dystopian architecture that George Orwell and Aldous Huxley once shilled out as science fiction.

Your average American lives under a state of constant stimulation and constant surveillance. When they aren't struggling to pay off the debts of bourgeois degrees with borderline third world wages in the boiling kitchen dungeons of your neighborhood casual dining franchise, they are burning through their meager wages on clickbait smartphone crack like Candy Crush and being hounded to buy more shit that no one needs by fifteen adds at once. 

All while the Meta-NSA panopticon keeps careful tabs on every bowel movement that you feel compelled by unknown forces to report on social media and murders Somalian peasants with flying robots for choosing Allah over Pepsi-Cola.

THIS is your precious civilization. This is what 500 years of western enlightenment has brought us too. Morbidly obese voluntary enslavement at the barrel of a drone. And all it cost us was our tribes, our villages, our gods, our dignity, and our fucking ecosystem. But I'm the sicko because I'd rather shoot cannibals in the face at the end of the world than vote for backstabbing social democrats and unionizing my cell block at the nearest cubicle colony? Kiss my Unabomber reading faggot ass.

We need to face a few very harsh facts here. The first is that everyone is sick in our post-modern dystopia because we have all been raised on the toxic terrain of a deeply sick society. You smoke crack and I horde ammunition but we're all doing desperate shit to get by in a desperate situation. With that being said, the hardest fact that we need to face here is that, for better or worse, civilization as we know it is fucked, and the damage is likely irreversible.

 Even if by some miracle all the nation states of the world joined hands, buried their nuclear stockpiles, ended their various cold wars, and agreed to "go green" immediately, the sheer amount of infrastructure it would take to transform a colossal, fossil-fueled, global juggernaut like ours into one powered exclusively by renewable energy would require enough pollution and plunder to finish the job gasoline started in the process.

Society itself is the problem. Our entire civilization was designed for the sole purpose of endless expansion. You can pass all the Green New Deals you want, even the ones that aren't colossal scams will merely be shoveling shit against the tide.

This isn't to say that we should all just throw up our hands and go quietly into that good night. We should work like hell to do the only thing that can possibly curtail the damage of global capitalism and that's downsize; decentralize, secede, drop out, rebuild locally autonomous village communities divorced from the restraints of big business and big government. 

But we should also prepare for the worst because it's already here and there are worse teachers than Max Rokitansky to learn these lessons from.

The titular character of the first Mad Max film that began George Miller and Byron Kennedy's five-part apocalyptic opus in 1979 started out much like my critics, trying to work within the system to govern an increasingly ungovernable society on the verge of collapse. 

Max attempted to achieve this quixotic goal as a skull-cracking highway patrolman, but the more skulls he cracked, the less human he became until he found himself virtually indistinguishable from the highway savages he hunted. The resulting violence cost him his family and his humanity. So, Max left everything but the violence behind him and escaped in his battle-scarred Pursuit Special Cruiser to the desert abyss that stared back.

For the rest of the series Max essentially plays the role of the consummate egoist loner sketched out in the works of individualist anarchists like Max Stirner and Ernst Junger. His interactions with other survivors, often various kinds of tribal collectives, begin as solitary exchanges governed exclusively by self-interest, protection for petrol, but Max repeatedly discovers that even the strongest lone egoist cannot survive without forming longer lasting unions with those of seemingly divergent values and lifestyles based on the evolutionary principle of mutual aid.

These experiences don't exactly transform Max into a model communalist, but he learns to do as Stirner suggested in his 19th century masterwork, The Ego and Its Own, with his concept of the Union of Egoists. He builds temporary, voluntary, and non-systematic associations that exist only as long as all parties involved are willing to cooperate, and through this process Max, the other Max, rediscovers the humanity that fighting to keep a polluted society cohesive stripped him of.

However, this school of post-industrial egoism is far from the only approach to stateless survival presented in the franchise and speaking personally, as a genderqueer anarcho-feminist as well as a survivor of systemic sexual violence, the story of Imperator Furiosa told in the last two films of the series is one that resonates very deeply with me. 

After being robbed of a childhood amidst her matriarchal tribe by sadistic marauders who saw her gender as little more than currency in an apocalyptic landscape, Furiosa must conceal her gender and assimilate to a lifestyle of rape and pillage in order to survive. She only finds an opportunity for redemption when she attempts to help the marital sex slaves of her master, Immortan Joe, to escape to "the green place of many mothers" of her childhood.

However, when Furiosa discovers her utopia polluted beyond repair it is Max the masculine egoist who convinces her that salvation lies in her forming a union of many kinds of prisoners, including Joe's own conscripts, to retake the resources that their collective labor created back at the fortress from which they escaped.

The lesson here, as I see it, is that in an age of collapsing superstructures designed by disintegrating majorities, a tribal minority like mine can only survive unassimilated not only by binding ourselves together in a common subculture of resistance but by collaborating with other struggling subcultures of resistance and encouraging those still devoted to patriarchal master races to do the same.

I can't tell you how the next movie ends. I can only tell you that the odds of it ending harmoniously are not in our favor, but that doesn't mean that there is no hope. It simply means that our best hope rests in the survival of the small amidst the wreckage of the big. 

If Furiosa can do that with one arm chained to God's jawbone, then the very least I can do is die dreaming while civilization's useful idiots roll their eyes.

Devoted in loving memory to David Lynch (1946-2025) who left in a cloud of smoke with the flames still burning....

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs for an apocalyptic mixtape

* This Magic Moment by Lou Reed

* Search & Destroy by the Stooges

* We Will Fall by the Stooges

* Down on the Street by the Stooges

* Success by Iggy Pop

* Raw Power by the Stooges

* No Fun by the Stooges

* TV Eye by the Stooges

* The Passenger by Iggy Pop

* Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell by the Stooges

The Politics of Violence and the Violence of the Political

 Some sharp white dude with a nifty haircut once observed that those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable. Then some other white dude with a nifty haircut blew his brains all over Dealey Plaza with a cheap, Italian, mail-order rifle. In case you haven't guessed, the first quotable white dude was President John F. Kennedy, his far less quotable killer was an angry little man named Lee Harvey Oswald and regardless of what your pet theory on their last tango in Dallas may be, it's pretty hard to deny that it had something to do with the ultraviolence that defined Kennedy's first and only term in office. 

No matter how badly Oliver Stone may want JFK to be Mark Twain with a bigger dick that doesn't change the uncomfortable truth that between poetic soliloquys and boozy sexual escapades, the king of Camelot was little more than a garden variety terrorist, having elected officials whacked and firebombing rice paddies to the last day of his presidency. 

This was the man who followed up the fantastic and nearly apocalyptic failures of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis with Operation Mongoose, an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks on Cuba's civilian infrastructure by CIA trained fascist bandidos. oil refineries were bombed, railroads were sabotaged, and innocent people were slaughtered in cold blood.

So, even if you want to believe that there were Cuban exiles on the Grassy Knoll to deflower a generation of milquetoast liberal dreamers, who do you think loaded them up on ludes and Carcanos? Malcolm X called it best when he nonchalantly described Kennedy's demise as chickens coming home to roost. Then he got shot too.

Sixty some years later and America still hasn't learned a goddamn thing about the karmic political violence that decapitated Camelot. In fact, political violence is higher now than it's been since the Days of Rage that followed the JFK assassination, and the tide just keeps swelling higher and higher. 

We barely survived a frantically chaotic presidential election season which saw not one, but two serious attempts made on the front runner's life when he wasn't busy organizing lynch mobs to stock mythic Haitian cat eaters only to see the new year kicked off by not one, but two terrorist acts, both committed by men trained to kill like Oswald by the United States Government. 

At 3:15 AM on January 1rst, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 13-year veteran of the US Army welcomed in the New Year by crashing a pickup truck with an ISIS decal into the packed crowds of New Orlean's French Quarter, killing 14 and injuring 35 before he could be shot dead by police. Just six hours later, an active-duty Green Beret named Matthew Livelsberger parked a Tesla Cybertruck loaded with fireworks at the front entrance of Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas and shot himself while detonating his rented vehicle, injuring 7 in the process.

The media on both sides of the aisle seems to be utterly perplexed by this carnage even while they replay the footage in slow-motion to "Oh Yeah" by Yello. The gnashing heads of Snuff TV are quick as silver to blame it on the far-right, the far-left, and their rivals on social media but they've all conveniently forgotten the words of John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X. 

When powerful people make peaceful change impossible while spreading violent change across the world it is only a matter of time before those chickens come home to roost.

All of the violent acts listed above were inspired by a vast array of motives. The only conspiracy connecting them all is that they were all launched against perceived representatives of the most violent empire on the planet. For a nation actively stoking the flames of a full-blown holocaust in Gaza and a possible apocalypse in Ukraine to expect anything less than violence is really nothing short of absurd.

This is the same kind of almost mystical, dewy-eyed, double-standard that the Westphalian nation state tried to apply to the kings and emperors of Old Europe with the specter of monarchism and it worked for a while. Killers were kings and kings were gods until gods started getting killed by their own irate subjects. Empress Elisabeth in 1898, King Umberto in 1900, King Carlos I and Crown Prince Luis Filipe in 1908. It was all oh so very shocking but not nearly as shocking as the October Uprising that shattered Czarist Russia into a thousand shards in 1917. 

Violent change made inevitable.

What exactly is terrorism? What constitutes "political" violence? We're told that it is an act of violence perpetrated with an explicitly political motive. Well, then what about the tax resistor being thrown in prison for refusing to feed the war machine his pocket change? What about the Black man shot dead in cold blood for failing to genuflect to the kings in blue? 

549 Americans were killed in the United States between 9/11 and 2019 during designated terrorist attacks, all during an era in which we were commanded by outrage over political violence to fight a violent War in Terror. Those deaths were the tragic fallout of the state that this forever war grew. So, were the 1,164 civilians murdered during fatal police shootings in 2023 alone but where is their outrage? Where is their war on terror?

This level of downright dizzying injustice cannot be silenced and stifled by the legacy media anymore. Even while the Supreme Court shrugs at banning TikTok and pigfucking oligarchs like Elon Musk buy off Twitter, there are simply too many camera phones for them to govern. We have all become digital witnesses to police stranglings and hospital bombings, and the more the elites attempt to pretend that it's all just not happening or it simply doesn't matter, the less legitimacy they can afford to clothe their naked greed and hubris with.

In a "free world" like this, with a global corporate state apparatus that is this omnipresent and inescapable, the rage becomes like fumes and every act of violence becomes political. Smash and grabs become acts of revenge against the mass gentrification of box stores. Workplace shootings become one-man uprisings against cubicle despotism. And every spark threatens to ignite a Bolshevik size prairie fire amidst the busted ovens of a failed technostate.

We can't pretend that any of this is shocking anymore without being complicit and I refuse to join the gasping class in their breathless chorus of virtue signaling awe, but I won't advocate carnage either even if I do understand it. Not only is it gruesome and dehumanizing even for the perpetrator who has reduced themself to fighting like a state, but it isn't particularly affective either.

Firing three bullets into a CEO feels fantastic but so what? Then what? What changes when we simply remove a single cog from the machine? And what did the Bolsheviks really achieve with their bloodbath beyond merely replacing one massive death machine with another?

The state itself is the source of the mass violence of the political and it cannot be replaced; it must be disengaged. A real war on terror would be a grassroots movement of citizens who refuse to pay taxes, refuse to buy their goods from corporate thieves, refuse to invest in banks or elections. 

A growing collection of autonomous communities who only trade, share, and barter between others who refuse to validate any institution which benefits from the systematic monopolization of the use of force. A counterculture of counter governments rendering the violent authority of the state irrelevant once and for all.

And when the state comes to defend terrorism against the peaceful, and it will come, then and only then do we fire back while the whole world is watching. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins

* Digital Witness by St. Vincent

* Jesus Built My Hotrod by Ministry

* We Appreciate Power by Grimes

* A Drug Against War by KMFDM

* Behind the Wheel by Depeche Mode

* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails

* Karma Police by Radiohead

* Kerosene by Big Black

* Zombie by the Cranberries

A Depressed Anarchist's Guide to Not Blowing Your Brains Out This Winter

 In case you haven't noticed, dearest motherfuckers, my mental health is kind of a hot mess. OCD, ADHD, CPTSD, OSDID, all on top of LGBT and just a dash of BDSM for flavor. It seems like every year I add a few more letters to this dizzying alphabet soup, not to mention a few more prescriptions. I thought I was fucked up back when I was afraid to leave the house, then I escaped through the closet, switched genders, and stumbled headlong down a rabbit hole of repressed childhood trauma and began sprouting personalities like fucking mushrooms. 

So, yeah, I'm a little bit fucked up, in fact all five of me are. If anything, qualifying my mental state as a hot mess is kind of an understatement, especially in January when the freezing cold has the odd tendency to make that hot mess a lot hotter.

Don't get me wrong, the trials and tribulations of Stressmas can be quite the shit show in their own right, but at least there's fudge. Then January rears its frigid head and there is no more fudge; no more lights, no more tinsel, no more sugar cookies, no more chestnuts roasting over an open fire or shimmering candy-colored Christmas trees. Only death; cold, dark, muddy, death. 

Just one long slog through three more months of winter sludge without a goddamn thing to look forward to but a light so far at the end of the tunnel that it might as well be on another fucking planet. We don't even get snow anymore in Central Pennsylvania thanks to those climate raping parasites over at Exxon Mobil. Just dead trees with no leaves and the wind whistling Morrissey up my spine. I wouldn't exactly say that I'm suicidal but by February the barrel of a shotgun begins to look more appetizing than a chicken fried steak.

I survive because that's what I do; I suffer, bitch, and survive. But a lot of people don't, and I feel for them. As fucked up as I may be, I'm not alone and I'm not just talking about the alters in my internal family collective. Depression is booming in this country and for good goddamn reason. This country and much of the world it rapes sucks. In 2023, Statista reported that an estimated 17.8% of American adults report currently suffering from depression, which is a significant increase from the 10.5% in 2015.

Armchair normies stroke their beards at such numbers and call it a crisis. I look at those numbers and all I can think is that at least 17.8% of Americans are finally paying attention. Depression may suck but it isn't a fucking illness, it's a painful state of awareness. America is governed by dueling herds of white supremacists who are actively financing at least one full-fledged genocide in the Middle East and several uranium tipped cold wars pretty much everywhere else, including outer space where HAL 9000 will soon be deciding our collective fate with fucking laser beams.

You would be sick if you didn't want to die and as something of a civil libertarian absolutist, I actually support that right. However, if everyone with enough of a conscience to feel like shit about this world being shit blew their fucking brains out there would be nothing left but Republicrats and Dempublicans to talk to and I would have little choice but to join you on the balcony out of pure boredom alone. 

Such a fate would also let the dicks who currently run this world off way too goddamn easy, so this January I have decided to provide my unique services as a professional crazy person with a fifth-degree blackbelt in fending off the noose to anyone feeling tempted to eat their hardware in a Kurt Cobain club sandwich this winter. This is a brief guide from a depressed anarchist on how to be as fucked up as you have every right to be without blowing your brains out and these are a few things you might want to consider trying before pulling that trigger.

1.) Find Yourself an Advocate, not a Life Coach

As you can imagine, I have seen my share of shrinks and most of them deserved to be shot far more than I do. With that being said, contrary to what my screeds against the tyranny of the DSM may lead you to believe, I am not anti-psychiatry. I just happen to believe that like most authority figures, psychiatrists have way too much goddamn power in this country and that the burgeoning for-profit therapeutic state encourages downright tyrannical behavior from such professionals, but there are exceptions to this rule, and they can save your life if you let them.

My advice is to proceed with caution. A good therapist is a lot like a good whore. If they aren't willing to be upfront with you about their ethics, then no condom on earth is going to keep you safe. Seek out a therapist who behaves more like a collaborator than a doctor. The quickest way to do this is to tell any prospective therapist upfront that you don't view your pain as an illness and that you think that the DSM is the shittiest self-help rag since the Old Testament. If they respond by just taking notes and asking how that 'makes you feel', get the fuck out of their and find an actual human being to talk to. Therapy should be an informed conversation between consenting adults. Anything less is just abuse with a bill.

2.) Drop Out of Anything that Makes You Want to Die

We live in a society that ties up way too much self-worth into some strange sense of duty to do things that are soul crushing for a paycheck or a diploma. We all need to make a living but if you're spending nine to five wondering which AR-15 goes best with the color of your manager's empty chest cavity then you really aren't making a living, you're making a dying. Get the fuck out and try to find a way to get by that doesn't feel worse than cancer. Maybe that's flipping pancakes at a greasy spoon in Montana or selling whippets in the parking lot of a Phish concert. Shit, maybe that's begging for change and drinking fortified wine beneath a freeway overpass. 

Define your own goddamn happiness and to hell with everyone else. I'm a welfare queen myself and as much as I despise living on money stollen by the state from other taxpayers, I'd much rather see that money go to putting a downpayment on my first novel then see it go to more scatter bombs for Israel. Stop concerning yourself with pleasing an unwell society and focus on what kind of living you can actually live with instead.  One good way to start is by dropping out of society altogether.

3.) Find a Cause that You are Willing to Fail Trying to Achieve and Build a Community Around It

In my experience most people labeled as mentally ill like me just care way too much about all the right things in all the wrong ways. It's easy to get overwhelmed when you look at the crisis that our entire planet has put itself in since the Agricultural Revolution; AI, climate change, genocide, nuclear war, Nickelback... The stakes are high, and they just keep getting higher but putting all your focus on the whole damn world is only going to burn you out quicker than the sun.

In fact, this whole global universalist mindset is a big part of what has fucked the globe up so badly. No one person can save the world and trying to do so has an ugly tendency of resulting in attempts to rule it. Think smaller. Think locally. Think about the kind of community that you would like to live in right now if the rest of the world would just fuck off and start living it.

I'm an obnoxiously Queer anarchist who lives in the rusty outback of Central Pennsylvania tetanus country. The weight of the military-prison industrial complex crushed me into an agoraphobic mess for most of my twenties. Then I stopped plotting to overthrow the new world order and started to focus on creating a way for people like me to live rurally without having to rely on the vanilla technocracy of big government and big business. It's an endless work in progress. I volunteer at local shelters, take part in local support groups, and help out with my little found family's struggling homestead, but it is both work and progress.

I may never live to see my goal of a Queer hillbilly utopia that's equal parts Mad Max, John Waters, and Ziggy Stardust but I don't mind if I die trying and something tells me that if more people did the same while keeping their finances off the books and between friends instead of with the banks, maybe a lot of this evil global shit that makes so many of us want to die would simply fall apart.

Maybe I am pretty fucked up. Hell, I'll own that shit, all day, every day. But I am not ill, at least not from anything innately biological. I am simply too sensitive to coexist peacefully with a society that considers voting for war criminals and spending two thirds of your life in a cubicle to be normal. This society is the sickness, I'm just slightly more allergic to the pollution than most, but not for long. The rate of despair in the wealthiest nation on earth is booming because human beings simply weren't designed to live this way and we sure as shit weren't designed to die this way. 

If this makes you want to kill yourself then that's OK. You're not alone and you're not the one with the real fucking problem here because you're not the one hurting everyone around you like all those successful people do on their way to the office every morning. 

But killing yourself is quite simply letting those cunts off way too easy. Do yourself a favor, stick around for a while and embrace going nuts as way of life instead of a way of death. The sun is going to explode anyway, right? We might as well make things a little more interesting before it does.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now by the Smiths

* Supersad by Suki Waterhouse

* Today by Smashing Pumpkins

* Go Home by Julien Baker

* Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle by Nirvana

* Beautiful by Lana Del Rey

* Hurt by Nine Inch Nails

* Crazy by Willie Nelson

* Bullet with Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins

* Hand in My Pocket by Alannis Morrissette

* Until the Sun Explodes by Pains of Being Pure at Heart

* Lazy-Eye by Silversun Pickups

In 2025 We Must All Fight Like the Few People Who Didn't Suck in 2024

 I have been writing this annual post celebrating a handful of people who have achieved the impossible and miraculously failed to suck over the last twelve months for almost a decade now and I have little intention of ending this New Year's ritual any time soon. Even my shrink agrees that it's a healthy thing for a perpetually angry anarchist to do. 

However, my obsessive-compulsive disorder will not allow me to ignore the fact that for several years running I have begun this list by observing with some astonishment that somehow this past year was even more brutally soul crushing than the last and this looks to be yet another ritual unlikely to change in the near future.

Just think about it, dearest motherfuckers. We've gone from Donald Trump being elected president on a promise to ethnically cleanse your local Walmart to his replacement, Joe Biden, somehow sucking bad enough to get that orange asshole reelected in a landslide to do what he failed miserably to do the first time around and make this car wreck country great again. But wait there's more!

Just when you thought that the pandemic was the pinnacle of government facilitated catastrophe, Israel launches a genocidal war on everything brown that moves in the desert with the full financial and rhetorical support of both halves of our plutocratic duopoly.

...And just when you thought that bourgeoise America had finally tired of watching their police strangle one unarmed Black civilian after another on live television they decide that the pigs have become the real victims here and gave those swaggering welfare scroungers a raise.

...And just when you thought that the Wallstreet swamp flooding Wahington had provoked one crippling recession too many for middle American voters to stomach, MAGA populists put the richest man on earth in charge of reigning in government corruption.

Pardon my Esperanto, but what in the holy Jesus fuck is going on here? When did CNN go from being geopolitical Videodrome to an episode of The Twilight Zone with no end? I'm actually starting to miss ISIS. Maybe they'll run a candidate for 2028 that's just marginally more palatable than Kamala Harris. 

I'd kick the TV out the goddamn window again but it's the one thing distracting me from the fact that the only thing more heinous than the news right now is the raging volcano in the mirror. 

This year brought me closer the brink of total madness than I even thought possible when my gender transition ended up unlocking a Pandora's box of repressed childhood trauma that erupted into a raging circus fire of psychedelic flashbacks, epileptic-style seizures, and freshly raped multiple personalities, not to mention the near disintegration of my long struggling Queer rural found family.

I really don't mean to make this yet another story that is somehow all about me, but I can't ignore the harrowing parallels between my own descent into the ninth circle of hell and the Western world's journey into the merciless maelstrom of its own existential abyss. 

Even beyond my own weird genre of emo-gonzo journalism and the paranoid delusions of grandeur that fuel it, this all feels eerily connected and fuck your mother, why not? I have long posited the radical theory that so-called mentally ill people like me are merely emotional weathers vanes so sensitive to the greater trials and tribulations of society that our own neuroses flare up in concert with the flames Rome.

All the voices in my head seem to be singing "Gimme Shelter" in perfect harmony right now, with rape and murder just a kiss away and the screams between the chatter on the evening news filling in the chorus quite nicely. 

Could these really be the end times, the decline of the west, the second coming, the fourth turning, the kali yuga, the age of Ozymandias? Could the gloomy prophecies of the Book of Revelations and the Unabomber Manifesto finally be upon us? Or have I simply snapped beneath the weight of a world run wrong by cabals of pedophile priests and baby killing oligarchs? 

I honestly couldn't say for sure at this point but either way the only thing close to a constructive solution that I can come up with for such ills, be they societal or mental, is to fight and to fight like bloody fucking hell. We must fight like the few people who managed the small miracle of not sucking in this the Year of the Vacuum, 2024....

We must fight like the young pro-Palestine protestors who have hijacked campuses complicit in genocide across the country and across the world this year. Tens of thousands of debt besotted children have embraced the wrath of their Boomer parents by launching encampments and occupations at some of Babylon's most prestigious diploma mills. They have glued themselves to the streets, shutdown parades, hectored Christmas tree lightings, and haunted clueless oligarchs like Joe Biden on the campaign trail. 

They have taken post-adolescent petulance to epic heights not seen since the height of the Vietnam War and they have done so selflessly with the simple mission of not allowing their elders to forget that that isn't red wine staining their fingertips, it is the blood of children. For this unforgivable fit of empathy they have been evicted, suspended, fired, beaten, maced, imprisoned, universally vilified, and tarred with the vilest labels imaginable and they're still screaming the names of the innocent at the top of their lungs from the steps of a university near you.  

We must fight like the pissed-off Muslims and Arabs of this country who refused to turn off their conscience and fall in line behind the Democratic Party simply because they say nice things about Mohammed before bombing and starving his children across the globe. 

After forking over literal tons of deadly ordinances to an increasingly unhinged and openly genocidal regime in Israel, the Democrats essentially dared a nearly invisible minority in this country not to vote for them against an orange supremacist who spent his first term throwing anyone on a prayer rug without a Saudi permission slip out of the country. These people responded by running a hajj around the ballot box with their middle fingers in the air, giving Kamala Harris and her clueless handlers a humiliating defeat that they begged for on all fours.

And yes, at the risk of being added to another dozen government watch lists, I say we should fight like the Shia militias of the Middle East who form the only armies left willing to fight for their brothers and sisters in Palestine even if it costs them the lives of their own families. 

Ansar Allah, Hezbollah, and the Popular Mobilization Forces, all impoverished and poorly armed militias made up of men considered to be heretics by the kind of Sunni fundamentalists elected to govern the Gaza Strip. These bearded barbarians have brought down a driving rain of Soviet-grade artillery and homemade drones upon the combined forces of Pax Americana who built the Israeli Frankenstein out of body parts robbed from Holocaust graveyards in order to make their own declaration of 'never again.' No more Nakba's without a price.

We must all fight and we must fight with hands and fists and teeth and claws because pacifism does not provide a sufficient response to industrial slaughter. 

However, we must also fight like the great unknown American nonvoter, close to 90 million of whom chose simply to disengage the plutocratic theater of the American election circus by withholding any form of validation for a system that contains no more legitimacy than it has empathy.

We must fight like the millions of equally invisible undocumented Americans who have come to this country, crossing invisible lines drawn and redrawn by racist gringos in both parties, to build thriving economies that boom completely off the grid of state facilitated capital.

We must fight like the legions of underage gender outlaws in this country, some 300,000 and growing, teenage iconoclasts reinventing their world and building new identities from scratch that reflect the divinely eccentric contents of their souls even while the Supreme Court condemns them to medical apartheid and violent hate crimes in compulsory school bathrooms.

And we must fight like the screaming voices in my head. My dearly beloved alters, Max, Agnes, Ophelia, and Mona. These jagged pieces of me that an organized crime ring dressed like a church tried to banish to the darkest corners of my subconscious through years of systematic abuse only to have them return to me thirty years later as individuals every bit as sentient and autonomous as the one preaching to you right now. A church tried to destroy a girl in a boy's body, and they created five. 

As hellish and unspeakably violent as this year has been for my mental health, those girls, my girls, are the best thing that ever happened to me because they are me and they have afforded me the ability to be me authentically than I have ever been before. I am a collective that exists in eternal resistance to tyranny. Together I fight and so should you.

Not to win but to redefine ourselves as something that cannot be defined by authority. We must oppose the tyranny of our modern dystopian prison state on every front imaginable, in every way possible, including amidst the banality of our day to day lives. Sometimes that means doing something as bold as picking up a brick in a crowd of cowards and sometimes that means doing something as simple as telling our own demons, "Fuck you, I won't do what you told me..."

If this really is the end of the world as we know it, then we must go down swinging wild because that is the only way to build a new one. We must fight like we don't suck because we all deserve better.

See you fuckers in the Thunderdome. Drop the goddamn microphone.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Get Me Away from Here I'm Dying by Belle & Sebastian

* Darklands by the Jesus & Mary Chain

* As Soon as You Can by Twin Shadow

* Epic by Faith No More

* Sea Swallow Me by Cocteau Twins

* Lithium by the Polyphonic Spree

* Shove by L7

* Sing Me Spanish Techno by the New Pornographers

* Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine

* Changes by David Bowie