Harsh Lessons Christian Nationalists Could Learn from Folk Horror

 Christianity is back and it's more violent than ever. I speak of course of the late capitalist tent house revival of Christian Nationalism amongst the decaying ruins of Washington DC. Using the demonic, Caligula-esque Emperador Trump like a pedophilic battering ram, a bunch of millenarian lunatics with a barely literate interpretation of the Bible have found themselves in the highest echelons of political influence in this country and their vulgar reach can be felt throughout the decidedly big government and hyper-interventionist policies of MAGA 2.0, from the transgender genocide to the Zionist reinvention of the Middle East.

But there's a catch and it's one likely to catch up with the Evangelical set with a vengeance far sooner than later. The Christian Right may have succeeded in renting a pitiless, scum-fucking White House, ready and willing to make all their nightmares a reality for the right price but their numbers among the unwashed masses continue to dwindle as many churches are having to choose between rainbow welcome mats and shuttering their doors for good.  These are wealthy zealots with a powerful lobby, but they have a rapidly shrinking army in an age of imperial decline and ascendant national debt and that could very easily make their throne a downright dangerous place to languish on.

Meanwhile, the number of people identifying as Queer, feminist, and/or pagan like me is slowly on the rise and being very affectively radicalized by the excessively statist abuse of the totally out of touch Evangelical fascists who've managed to rig a failing system into giving them an absurdly outsized presence in every state, court and federal office in the country. The blowback of related political violence has been grotesquely overexaggerated by Trump and his handlers, but it isn't non-existent either and it will likely expand with their demonization deliberately amplifying its presence. I don't believe any of this to be a coincidence either. In fact, I don't even believe this to be all that shocking as I tend to view history like most things as being largely cyclical in nature.

While most mainstream American commentators seem to interpret the rise of "radical transgenderism" as some new pillar of progressive liberalism, I see it along with a persistent drive towards more overtly matriarchal institutions as being more of a return to the tribal diversity of the ancient heathen third gender mentality which I also honestly believe Oswald Spengler himself would have probably begrudgingly embraced on some level.

In other words, the Christian nationalists are playing a desperate and dangerous game, and they will have no one to blame but themselves when it continues to blow up in their face in increasingly violent ways. Believe it or not, as much anguish as I carry from a childhood of abuse suffered at the hands of these people, this is not a fait that I promote or relish in. I actually still consider myself to be something of a Folk Christian, blending a more Gnostic interpretation of the Gospels with Celtic strains of pantheistic Druidry. I am also no ally to the use of initiatory violence as a means of retribution. 

However, my own obsessive compulsive research on the topic of collapse has rendered me a well-read student in the social physics of karma, and I feel that I owe it to the Virgin Mary, mother goddess of the New Testament, to warn my wayward Christian cousins that the biblical violence they are currently reaping with their petty despotism is likely to come back to them in plagues if they don't confront the devil in their mirror.

I could recite you reems from the Norse Eddas, but I think it would be far more affective for me to speak in terms of the modern folklore of horror cinema, especially considering that I am delivering this sermon during the season of Samhain, and what better vehicle than the ascendant subgenre of folk horror to do this with. 

For those of you who are not familiar with the works of Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, folk horror is a medium tracing its roots back decades and its influences back centuries. It is a variant of horror cinema that uses pre-Christian folklore to tell stories of decadently modern Christians and secularists who find themselves at the mercy of the ancient, sacred, natural world which they foolishly attempt to govern into submission.

Many occult cinephiles interpret such movies as being somewhat exploitative towards heathen traditions do to their frequent portrayal of such cultures as being far more violent than actual recorded history would suggest, but if Queer theory has taught me anything it is that one person's grindhouse can very easily be transformed into another person's temple when viewed through the lens of radical cultural reclamation and I tend to see the better movies of the folk horror milieu as trenchantly anti-colonialist parables about the dangers of puritanical patriarchy and its discontents.

Take the genre's cornerstone and veritable Citizen Kane, Robyn Hardy's 1973 masterpiece, The Wicker Man. On the flimsy evidence of an anonymous letter, a chaste and devout Christian police officer named Sargeant Neil Howle travels to the remote Scottish Island of Summerisle to investigate the alleged disappearance of a young girl. Upon discovering to his horror that the inhabitants of this island had returned to their heathen roots, the Sargeant becomes convinced that the child has fallen prey to a human sacrifice. To spoil one of cinema's greatest twist endings, Sargeant Howle discovers the child to be alive and well, and that he is in fact the human sacrifice, meeting all the requirements as a man coming of his own free will while carrying the power of a king along with the purity of a virgin and the ignorance of a fool.

My interpretation of this climactic arch is that it does a remarkable job of displaying the willful blindness of the savior syndrome incurred when patriarchal authority lacks all respect for the human sheep they have taken upon themselves to shepherd into the light. The children of Summerisle were never in any danger and it took a bigot obsessed with governing their access to divinity to feed the flames of a human sacrifice symbolic of the Island's need to embrace the traditions of their ancestors in order to sustain a future for their children.

The dangers that puritans sow when they attempt to intervene with the necessary evolutionary milestones of childhood is explored even deeper and far darker in Robert Eggers' 2015 directorial debut, The Witch, in which an isolated puritan family banished from their New England settlement over a religious dispute finds themselves at the mercy of strange and evil forces coming from the surrounding woods only for them to make their own teenage daughter, Thomasin, the scapegoat for all their woes. 

In another of the great twists of modern horror cinema, Thomasin decides to embrace these dark forces and join them in the wicked forest in order to achieve the liberation and independence denied to her by patriarchal colonialist society. The lesson here is that the children of conquistadors are always their first victims, and they often require very little in the way of indoctrination in order to realize freedom awaits them just outside the communities that fail them.

Of course, the subjugation of children in patriarchal societies never ends for the permanently infantilized class created for women by such cultures and the results of this kind of multigenerational subjugation are taken to their most extreme conclusions in Lars Von Trier's deeply unsettling 2009 masterpiece, Antichrist. 

After experiencing the tragic death their young son, an unnamed psychotherapist takes it upon himself to fix his unnamed wife's crippling grief by absconding with her to an isolated cabin in the woods. Here he seeks to force her to confront her demons only to have this forest, where the woman had spent time alone with their son the year before while researching an unfinished thesis on the subject of femicide, confront the good doctor. Through increasingly sadomasochistic sessions in the dark and unforgiving woods it is revealed that the therapist's wife had deliberately let their son die after coming to the conclusion that all women were inherently evil.

Many critics struggled to comprehend this brutal piece of arthouse cinema but to me it spoke quite clearly. The patriarchy is right to view women as dangerous because what other alternative to subjugation have they given us? The system has alienated an entire gender to the point where any form of insurrection is at least as tempting as subordination and almost always far more rewarding. When you consistently cast a powerless class of people as the villain in all your fairy tales, you really have no right to be shocked when they rise to the occasion and greet you with fists. 

The therapist ultimately only succeeds in pacifying a wife driven to psychosexual nihilism by murdering her, but his only reward is to discover himself lost in a forest, surrounded by faceless women. This is the fate of any man seeking to conquer what he fails to comprehend. Valerie Solanas couldn't have put it better herself. Yet not all is lost to the staring contest with the abyss. 

Ari Aster's 2019 shocker Midsommar offers a slightly more hopeful outcome to this predicament. It begins like many horror films, with a group of young travelers at the mercy of backwoods savages, in this case a rural pagan commune in Sweden celebrating a 9-day midsummer festival which only occurs once in every 90 years, but as the three men in the quartet find themselves picked off and subjected to gruesome ritual sacrifices one by one, their only female companion, Dani, struggling with grief over a senseless murder-suicide that took her entire family and the turmoil of having her pain merely tolerated by her vain and self-centered boyfriend, finds herself experiencing a level of community and understanding among this supposedly backwards and wicked cult that civilization had deprived her of.

I believe that the key to understanding this film and the key to comprehending the existential question all of us find ourselves faced with in the bosom of a crumbling empire lies at the juxtaposition between the death of Dani's first family; cold, pointless and nihilistic, and the sacrifices performed by her second family which are equally horrific and are yet seen as more savage merely because they are performed with a sense of purpose. What awaits us after modern Christianity is no more utopian than what came before, but it is likely something far more meaningful because it was and will likely be the product of a society governed by community rather than industrial superstructures modeled after the church. It will also likely be influenced by a spirituality woven into the earth rather than shot into the sky.

This isn't a defense of human sacrifice. It's an argument that this unfortunate genre of ritual violence never actually left us, it simply lost all meaning beyond conquest under materialism and left us with a society in which life is cheap, and spirituality is governed by the rich. once again, I reject initiatory violence of any kind, but I also recognize as Marx once did that violence on any massive scale is the midwife of any society pregnant with a new one or perhaps in this case, an old one.

Either way, the Christian nation state has given us nothing left to lose but a ritual industrial complex that makes folk horror appear downright quaint by comparison. Perhaps we can simply embrace the folk and reject the horror. At the very least, it's worth a try and we might not have much other choice at this point.

Next year in Valhalla.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Playlist: Songs That Influenced This Post

* Birthday by the Sugarcubes

* Wrath of the Tyrant by Emperor

* Feed the Tree by Belly

* Gloria by Patti Smith

* Danse Macabre by Celtic Frost

* Plump by Hole

* The Cutter by Echo & the Bunnymen

* Down by the Water by PJ Harvey

* God by Tori Amos

* Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath

Beware of Queerintelpro: A Public Service Announcement from Your Friendly Neighborhood Gender Extremist

 My people are freaking the fuck out right now. I deal with it every day. Just being transgender in a conservative rural community alone can feel like a fulltime job. Being actively trans, organizing Queer resistance in a place with two fag-bashing churches for every honkytonk bar, can feel like a tour of duty without an exit strategy, especially in an age of epic collapse when every normie seems to be jonesing for a convenient scapegoat and every gangster in Washington needs a distraction from the latest bed he shit.

I cope with this along with my own palette load of trauma by organizing. I volunteer at non-profits, I facilitate youth groups, I help out at my found family's homestead, I weather death threats and carry three knives in my purse... I do whatever I can to keep busy between therapy sessions and blog posts, in part because the trans people I work with who don't get busy tend to get terrified and they're not being irrational.

The GOP has declared war against trans people in this country in nearly every manner conceivable. For five straight years these police state bulls have broken the last year's record for the sheer volume of bloated, big government, anti-trans legislation they've pushed forward. Sadly, 2025 is looking likely to break the record again with 998 bills proposed and 129 passed across 49 states in the first half of the year alone. These laws police every aspect of trans existence from school bathroom access to private healthcare decisions and the latest Trump administration is cranking up the heat with one executive order after another. 

The first, passed just days after that orange child molester crept back into the Oval Office, set the tone by proclaiming that transgender people simply do not exist and that the federal government officially rejects our existence by declaring there to be only two immutable gender identities defined exclusively by government documents taken at birth, a position flatly rejected by every major medical and scientific body on the planet.

This is what radical trans activists like me are talking about when we talk about transgender genocide; a concerted effort by various wings of the power elite to erase us from public life and force the youngest generation of gender outlaws back into the closet they escaped from no matter how many suicides that results in, all while empowering the strong arm of the state to dictate everyone's biological integrity in the process.

And this is why radical trans activism is absolutely existential to individual liberty, especially in rural areas where the GOP's influence over popular opinion is tragically damn near universal. However, with Trump's numbers slipping in nearly every poll available and that lecherous cretin's standing with his own base on extremely shaky ground over his desperate attempts to cover up his toxic bromance with Jeffrey Epstein, the President is attempting to shift focus by leveling every last federal rifle scope at his disposal on radical trans activists like me.

Trump is doing this with a national security directive known as National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 or NSPM-7 which identifies a disturbingly broad laundry list of rudimentary viewpoints as investigable indicators of "radical left violence." Such symptoms of terroristic ideation include "anti-Christianity", "extremism on gender" and "hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion or morality." The directive's solution to these threats is best explained in no uncertain terms by the document itself. 

"The United States requires a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts."

The key jargon here is the call to "disrupt" individuals or groups "that foment(s) political violence... before they result in violent political acts." What this newspeak essentially amounts to is the Executive Branch commanding the Federal Government to surveil and sabotage speech and ideas that they believe to be capable of influencing crimes before they even occur and using a strategy of disruption to do so and what this essentially amounts to is East Berlin-style Stalinism in a bright red ballcap. 

All this sickeningly Orwellian horseshit is only compounded further by the fact that all of it comes on the heels of the Department of Justice's open calls to consider stripping anyone diagnosed with gender dysphoria of their Second Amendment rights by including us in their 'Red Flag Laws' along with the all-powerful Heritage Foundation's memo to the FBI calling on the feds to essentially label all transgender activism as "Trans Ideology Inspired Violent Extremism."

As I said above, this is all shit well-worth freaking the fuck out about, but I also have a feeling that might be precisely the point. The Trump Administration tried like hell to turn the assassination of Charlie Kirk into some kind of 9/11 moment that would rally wayward deplorables around a MAGA brand increasingly tainted by the Donald's own historical sexual predations and his utterly shameless support for Benjamin Netanyahu's attempts to declare war on pretty much the entire Middle East.

The result was actually pretty fucking funny if you have a deranged enough sense of humor. So many Trumpers blamed Bibi himself for the assassination of one of his own lobbyists that the Israeli Prime Minister felt compelled to release a video in which he basically begged a bunch of social media trolls to believe him when he promised for two minutes straight that he wasn't on the Grassy Knoll. 

As crazy as all this sounds and is, it was only made possible by the fact that MAGA's attempts to connect the Charlie Kirk assassination to some bizarre cabal of transgender furies proved to be even more batshit than anything the Groypers could conjure up.

So, now Donald Trump is openly publishing what would typically be a classified national security directive announcing his intention to infiltrate and destroy a movement he can't seem to convince his already virulently transphobic base to crucify in the name of American greatness. This feels like a trap (pun welcomed but not intended) and it wouldn't be the first time in history that the feds tried to neutralize a radical political movement through provocation and trickery.

This was the entire basis for Cointelpro; J. Edgar Hoover's Cold War conspiracy to infiltrate, disrupt and discredit the "subversives" of the Civil Rights and Antiwar movements. The variety of tactics used to do so were vast but frequently violent and often involved sending snitches into these organizations to encourage and sometimes just outright commit acts of violence against political rivals or even their handlers' own foot soldiers.

A classic example of this septic skullduggery is the case of the Panther 21; a joint FBI/NYPD sting operation against the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party, charging 21 radicals of conspiring to launch a massive spree of terrorist attacks against local police infrastructure. The only problem was that the entire conspiracy was largely the invention of a network of police infiltrators and once this boondoggle was exposed, the case collapsed into a humiliating money pit that proved to be the most expensive criminal prosecution in Gotham history while only seeing a single solitary Panther do any real time.

This didn't end with Cointelpro either. During the War on Terror, guerrilla catfishing basically became a cottage industry that kept the lights on at Quantico and those fuckers honed the con job down to a science. First you find several heavy breathers talking shit on some dark web chatroom, then you egg them on to take things to the next level, provide them with the kind of logistics and firepower they could never possibly assemble on their own and nail them in some highly publicized law enforcement production before J. Edna's Heroes very publicly pat themselves on the back for being real-life action heroes and ask for another deficit tripling raise so they can spend even more of your tax dollars entrapping glorified jihad larpers on 4chan.

The feds do this all the time to pissed-off Muslim kids but they've also done it with militia types like those Boogaloo wannabes who needed a dozen informants just to put together a hairbrained scheme to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and now Trump wants to play this game with "Transtifa" because it's the only way to make us desperate enough to fire first and scare people off his trail of raped teenage girls and dead Arab babies. 

Call it Queerintelpro, put it on a bumper sticker and fix me another White Russian because I was born too old for this shit in the wrong goddamn gender.

My advice as a genderfuck anarchist with a serious hyperfocus on the nastier shards of American history is that Queer people need to stay vigilant, we need to prepare ourselves to defend our people by any means necessary, but we must not react. The strongest defense that we as a community against this kind of insidious government infiltration is actually our communities themselves; intimate, tightknit tribes designed to replace the families many of us have been thrown out of. We need to strengthen these bonds now more than ever because no fed can fake that kind of love.

Stay in touch, check in with your people, and keep an eye out for any loudmouth newbie trying to rile them up. If anyone offers to sell you a palette full of MP5s that mysteriously lost their serial numbers, forget their fucking phone number and tell everyone you know to watch out for them. Do everything you can above board and when you can't only let those closest to you in on it. Basically, don't be a fucking outlaw just to score points. It's not worth it.

Perhaps more than anything though, Queer people need to confront this threat as something far bigger than just a Queer issue. This needs to be addressed first and foremost as a police state issue and confronted wherever it rears its ugly head. 

This means trannies teaching undocumented workers about stealth, militia bros teaching Muslims about open carry, Panthers teaching Antifa how to spot a crowd exciter, and all of us calling out the feds for their fascism regardless of who they happen to be using it against this week because if they can use it against any of us they can use it against all of us. 

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Kool Thing by Sonic Youth

* Hood by Perfume Genius

* Y Control by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

* Hatebreeders by the Misfits

* Can't Do Much by Waxahatchee

* Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie by Black Flag

* Queen by Perfume Genius

* (I'm) Screwed by Titus Andronicus

* Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers

Washington is to Blame for Its Own Culture of Political Violence

 This isn't just Deja vu. We have quite literally been here before, in fact, we've been here so many times that you can practically set your watch to the proceeding order of events. We start with a tragedy, some pissed-off lonely kid puts down his smartphone and picks up a gun, somebody gets shot, sometimes a politician, sometimes some other species of media personality, but usually it ends up just being a room full of other lonely kids with smartphones. 

After a lot of frantic finger pointing by the media personalities left standing, it usually becomes clear that the shooter wasn't actually directly concerned with any of their silly partisan squabbles and this is when everyone with a camera and a microphone falls back on one of the default boogeymen they like to project on the blank canvas of young ghosts.

The left, or what passes for it these days at least, usually goes with a far from unfounded but woefully oversimplified take on guns and suggests that America is somehow just one police state provision away from controlling an ocean of semi-automatic firepower the size of the Atlantic Ocean. 

The right, or what passes for it these days at least, typically does one worse and trots out whatever monster-of-the-week they happen to be crucifying at the moment; border hoppers, crypto-gender benders, the overly or underly medicated neurodivergent... Some convenient category of 'other' to distract from the fact that the killers are usually basically their own sons, cis het white dudes unsatisfied with the privileges of their post-colonial caste ranking.

And then of course, the sainted centrist calls for calm, for all of these scapegoating players in America's increasingly unhinged political circus to just come together in Babylonian brotherhood and sing us all back to sleep with another harmonic chorus of bipartisan kumbaya. 

Somehow, the centrist always seems to piss me off the most.

While it is painfully obvious to anyone with half a brain still attached to a functioning conscience that both sides of this country's manufactured tribal divide are exploiting these tragedies just to score points and rile up their captive constituencies, the notion that the solution to American nihilism is bringing all these jackals together for another war-on-something is even worse. It's worse because Washington isn't the panacea painted so stoically by the centrist. Washington is the real fucking problem here and somebody needs to say it.

While Republicans and Democrats warble hysterically over a growing trend in overtly politically motivated acts of violence, the actual statistics present a slightly different portrait. The Cato Institute puts the number of people murdered in politically motivated terrorist attacks in the US at 3,597 since 1975 but only 79 of these killings have occurred since 2020. Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Institute puts the number of people killed in any form of mass public shooting at 1,723 since 1966. 

Yet strangely, both of those categories of headline dominating slaughter only include acts of violence committed by civilians. They do not include the inherently political violence committed by government operatives such as police officers who have murdered more than a thousand people every year since 2020 with a total of more than 6,000 bodies in just under five years. In fact, 2024 marks the deadliest year on record for police violence with at least 1,365 killed in twelve months.

The various institutes and think tanks of this nation's ivory tower class also consistently overlook the violence perpetrated by the very people preaching to us about the virtues of red flags and gun control from their premium podcasts and cable news pulpits. Charlie Kirk was shot in the throat amidst a highly publicized but rarely questioned murder spree launched by the man he routinely endorsed to play the role of America's Ceasar. Donald Trump washed his own moneychanger's blood from his pussy-grabbers and cursed the numerous demographics he blamed for the mess right in the middle of the launch of a series of snuff films taken by the US Military over undisclosed sections of the Caribbean Ocean.

Over a period of a few weeks, Donald Trump had at least 17 people murdered extrajudicially in three separate airstrikes on three separate civilian boats before proudly displaying the footage of his war crimes on social media like a teenage mosque shooter. The people killed are accused without evidence of trafficking narcotics, an offense that wouldn't even garner a life sentence in any court of law in the Western Hemisphere, let alone a death sentence. All of this slaughter is part of an open attempt to affect regime change in the nation of Venezuela, whose current president, Nicholas Maduro, has a $50 million dollar bounty placed on his head by an administration that expects us all to forfeit even more of our civil rights to prevent future assassinations of assholes who aren't on their hit list.

And the centrists want us to be calm... Well, let me just gently reassure the centrists that I am completely calm when I politely suggest that you go fuck yourself with the sharp end of your own goddamn hypocrisy.

Once again, your average active shooter is a pissed-off lonely kid who feels powerless and totally unseen in a dystopian house of digital mirrors. Who is more seen and who has more power than the President of the United States of America? And how does this man solve his problems? With drone strikes and tomahawk missiles and genocide and mass deportation... With murder. With 'political' violence. And where is the centrist amidst all this carnage? Why, he's voting for the latest billion-dollar defense bill and calling for calm from those who he hasn't personally sanctioned to be mass shooters.

In our current era of blood and debt, we don't need calm and we sure as shit don't need unity, at least not of the bipartisan variety. Anger is actually a perfectly appropriate response to being governed by dueling parties of thieves and killers, but we need to direct this anger where it belongs, against the state without preference to pointless partisan divisions, and we need to carefully temper this anger, so we are not merely feeding into the state's game of highly publicized tension and paranoia.

The truth is, our nation's centrists don't really care about political violence; they're just pissed off that private citizens want to home in on their action, and for once, I agree with them. We can do better. You are never going to smash the state by fighting it like a state. In the best-case scenario, you merely replace them and become precisely what you hate. The most common scenario however ends with a bunch of good radicals dead or in prison while the state scores points with the normies over the ashes of another Reichstag Fire.

The reality is that Washington and its corporate media apparatus are existentially toxic. Engaging these institutions in any way, including in combat, will simply result in the further spread of this toxicity. With that being said, we should all take heart in the fact that an empire built on a toxic waste dump is fundamentally unsustainable. The rot will inevitably spread to the brain. The leviathan will die from the cancer that defines its existence. The professionally politically violent will lash out against each other without anyone left but other goats to scape. The Donald Trumps and James Comeys of this toxic nation will take turns throwing each other in and out of prison and rent different genres of hooligan to storm their increasingly impoverished capitol until China comes to repossess it.

The radicals: the pissed and the lonely, the border hoppers and deplorables and unmedicated gender benders need to drop out, cease and desist, detox... Remove yourself from the toxic waste, find some other lonely misfits, and use your totally justified disgust with this deeply sick society to fuel yourselves into building something better that doesn't require its vulture-like attention to exist. Build a commune. Build a farm. Build a fire and dance around it naked. Stop voting. Stop watching the news. Turn off that funhouse mirror you keep in your pocket. And for Cthulhu's sake, stop killing other poor people. The state doesn't need your help with that chore so stop adding to their towering mound of bodies. 

In other words, own your anger and let the centrists starve without your attention. This world is too sacred to waste on something as empty as politics. Choose anarchy instead.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Someone to Die for by Belly

* Raining Blood by Tori Amos

* Afraid of Heights by Boygenius

* Shove by L7

* And the Same by Fugazi

* (I Blame) Society by Titus Andronicus

* Angel of Death by Slayer

* Lose You by Bully

* Cross Your Heart by Momma

* Black Boys on Mopeds by Sinead O'Connor 

Donald Trump is a Child Molesting Zionist Cuck and He Needs You to Fear Trans People

 Believe it or not, I didn't choose to be Queer, I've been raging against my prescribed gender identity since I was barely old enough to kick a priest in the shins, but I do choose to live in what has come to be known as Trump Country. I was born a gender rebel in the Appalachian foothills of bucolic Pennsyltucky and I got my ass mauled by the locals for failing to fit in, but thirty-some years later, I'm still here and I have zero intention of leaving in the next century. That's because, in spite of the bible-thumpers and the Walmart colonialism, I actually fucking love it here.

I love the endless twisting country roads that lead to my found family's homestead deep in the holler. I love the rolling farmlands separated by rusty car parts and the fly infested Amish markets with their barefooted cashiers and diabetic shock inducing baked goods. Shit, I even love the four wheelers, trailer parks and gun shows. This is my home, and I want other Queer people to feel at home here too, so we can grow our own food, defend our own land and deschool our own kids our way.

When it all comes down to it, I am not just a Queer anarchist. I am a Queer agrarian anarchist. I strongly believe that in times of epic societal collapse like these there is no better place for gender outlaws to be free than in the poorly governed backwoods of rural flyover country. In order to live this way however, to build this life for my people, I have had no choice but to work with people who define my existence as a sinful lifestyle choice while they vote for people who do far worse than that. In other words, whether the mainstream left likes it or not, I have had to work with the "enemy."

But who exactly is this enemy? Once you strip away the bullshit of electoral politics, your average deplorable is essentially just another pissed-off poor person who hates the fucking government as much as I do. These are people who would much rather sort things out themselves than call the police. These are people who feel much closer to God half-drunk and fishing than they do in church. These are people like me, who were born poor to this country but wouldn't leave if you paid them because it affords them a level of freedom from the bullshit of modern civilization that money can't buy. 

In other words, there really is no logical reason for us to hate each other so goddamn much and this is precisely why the state, and their globalist corporate benefactors have to invest so much time and money into driving us all fucking crazy.

Few politicians have invested more ill-gotten resources into riling up my neighbors against some mythic Queer agenda than Donald Trump has over the last four years. He has transformed his public persona from a populist potty mouth who would much rather troll John McCain's funeral than the Pride parade to an absurdly philanderous stadium church crowd exciter whooping up hysteria over bearded macho men playing ladybug soccer and mandatory sex change surgeries at a kindergarten near you. 

There is a reason for this. The first four years in the White House alone proved that Donald Trump is just another neocon-hiring missile merchant to anyone actually paying attention, so he has to invest more and more resources into making sure that you're way too pissed off at weird people like me for you to pay attention.

His problems have only been exacerbated ten-fold during his second term. The Donald has been outed by his own base as an Epstein client sheltering pedophile more beholden to Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley than he is to anybody's main street. This is why that two-timing despotic Ceasar has embraced the assassination of Christian-Zionist boy-toy Charlie Kirk like a gift from Satan. 

MAGA inc. was blaming transgender extremists for this pointless act of violence against an equally pointless social media personality before his body was even cold and now that the real killer appears to have possibly had some kind of connection to some kind of trans person, they are yodeling for Queer blood like head-chopping fedayeen assassins.

All around us, Trump's minions and apparatchiks are answering the call to hysteria. Vice President JD Vance pulled Peter Thiel's dick out of his mouth just long enough to host the first post-Charlie Kirk episode of the Charlie Kirk Show from the White House with MAGA Goebbels baby Stephen Miller at his side, howling for vengeance and calling for a vast crackdown against a broad mélange of left-wing opponents. Donald Trump Jr. was slightly less cryptic when he went off on a September 11th Rumble livestream, stating that it "seems like per capita- the radical transgender movement has to be the most violent movement anywhere in the world." Boko Haram was not available for comment.

Now, Kash Patel's Keystone Kops in the FBI are toying with the notion of using the purposely vague terrorist threat category of "Nihilistic Violent Extremist" to target transgender activists and his patrons in the Heritage Foundation are pushing it one step further with a memo calling on the feds to just label all of us as "Trans Ideology Inspired Violent Extremists" This dangerous cuckoo bird bullshit also comes on the heels of the Department of Justice's attempts to strip trans people of our Second Amendment rights by including gender dysphoria in their red flag laws.

Now, I could tell yawl that trans people make up less than 1% of all mass shooters and point out the numerous statistics showing that we are also far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators, but Donald Trump isn't concerned with facts, he is concerned with distraction, so, I am quite simply going to remind you all of exactly what he is trying to distract you from by asking you, my fellow hicks, the simple question of who do you really fucking hate here?

Are transwomen slaughtering Christian babies and leveling Catholic Churches in the Gaza Strip? Did we promise you peace in Ukraine only to turn around and hand Volodymyr Zelensky a Pat Sajak size check for missiles and a greenlight to send more kids to die in the Donbass? Was it an unhinged transgender extremist who buried the Epstein Files and sent Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum-security summer camp? Is the Queer agenda handing over your tax receipts to the AI auditors over at Palantir? Or have you all been bamboozled by a trash talking, child molesting, Clinton financing, Zionist cuck in populist clothing named Donald J. Trump?

Now, he wants you to embrace gun control, cancel culture and pink-scare McCarthyism just so he can shut down the threat posed by homesteading pagan weirdos with AR-15s? Are you seriously going to let this city-slicking pedophile play you like that? Or are you going to finally wake the fuck up and realize that freedom is just another word for smashing the state and working with other people who just want to be left the fuck alone to live free or die is a much better way to achieve this goal than cutting deals with fucking billionaires?

The only thing that keeps powerful people powerful is a carefully constructed illusion of omnipotence that rests largely upon the notion that poor people need their governments and their armies and their databases just to exist. In no place on earth is this lie more blatantly obvious than on the more rural sections of the map where it wouldn't be hard to forget that any of that shit even fucking existed if we weren't being taxed to pay for it. 

This is why the richest nation on earth spent twenty years dropping bombs on goat herders in Afghanistan and this is why the GOP spends billions trafficking every manner of bigotry imaginable to my next-door neighbors. We are all already living proof that these cowards are powerless and the moment we stop cutting each other's throats over petty cultural differences is the moment that their days of plenty have become numbered.

Take it from a pink trash anti-Zionist bitch like me. Turn that gauge around and fight the real enemy.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Inspired This Post

* Townies by Wednesday

* Our Town by Iris DeMent

* Me and Bobby McGee by Kris Kristofferson

* Mary Me by Drive-By Truckers

* Fourth of July by X

* American Music by Violent Femmes

* Elderberry Wine by Wednesday

* Hotel Yorba by The White Stripes

* War by Sinead O'Connor

* Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley 

The Project for a New Israeli Century: Outsourcing Neoconservatism in an Age of Imperial Decline

 In case you haven't noticed, Israel seems to be at war with pretty much fucking everybody right now and they show little sign of slowing down anytime in the near future. In fact, if anything, the Netanyahu regime seems to be accelerating the violence to downright dizzying heights of global sadism with every new corner of the map he bombs. 

What began in October of 2023 as a gruesome revenge kick in the Gaza Strip over a Hamas attack that the Nakba made a forgone conclusion has rapidly evolved into a twenty-month rampage against everyone and everything that got in Bibi's way to the maternity ward. Now, nearly 35,000 separate acts of IDF facilitated terrorism have scarred the face of seven separate sovereign nations and counting so far.

Israel currently occupies large portions of Southern Lebanon which the invaders back in Tel Aviv are pushing to forcibly depopulate and turn into a US Military controlled "Trump Zone" complete with a new phalanx of permanent Israeli bases. Meanwhile, just north in Syria, where an Al-Qaeda affiliated government now clings to power largely as a result of Israeli destabilization, IDF forces are pushing deeper and deeper into the long-embattled nation's territory while launching airstrikes on the capitol of Damascus and openly contemplating mandating the forced demilitarization of the entire country.

In Yemen, where the Houthi rebels have shown the region what real solidarity looks like by cutting off Israeli access to the Red Sea, Bibi has bombed power plants, oil refineries, neighborhoods and other forms of civilian infrastructure, assassinating the nation's prime minister Ahmed al-Rahawi and murdering 25 journalists from the nation's two most prominent newspapers in the process. In Doha, the capitol of the Kingdom of Qatar, Israeli airstrikes targeted a gathering of Hamas diplomats meeting to discuss the Trump regime's latest peace proposal. 

This was a remarkably similar set-up to the one that kicked off Israel and America's 12-Day War on Iran, when scores of senior Iranian military officials were lured into a false sense of security by Washington diplomacy only to be obliterated at the peace table. And as if bombing potential peacemakers weren't enough, Israel has even used its bloodthirsty military to target unarmed international activists, launching incendiary drone strikes on boats in the waters off the coast of Tunisia that are being used by the Global Sumud Flotilla to bring aid to starving Gazans.

Amazingly, none of this mayhem has done a thing to slow down Israel's final solution to the Palestinian question in Gaza where more than ten percent of the population is now either dead or dying nor in the West Bank where Israel's sinister Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has proposed a plan to annex 82% of the territory promised to Palestine by the United Nations who have only just recently recognized the Nakba as an actual fucking genocide.

All of this violence in all of these nations is downright dizzying for anyone to comprehend but it really can't be considered incredibly shocking considering that the Zionist state of Israel has always been an expansionist project by nature. 

Israel's own founding fathers announced their intentions for greater conquest all the way back during the United Kingdom's partition of Mandatory Palestine in 1937, with David Ben-Gurion stating "The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country" with Israel's future first president Chaim Weizmann chiming in with "We shall spread in the whole country in the course of time... this is only an arrangement for the next 25 to 30 years."

For those men as well as Netanyahu's, "the whole country" is a Greater Israel based on ancient religious folklore, a land that the ghastly Mr. Smotrich has recently suggested should include all of Jordan and parts of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq.

Nevertheless, there seems to be something else going on here, something far more global in nature. As noted above, the Trump Administration's involvement in this Abrahamic revanchist jihad has been consistently intimate in nature even by Washington standards, making all of these operations feel eerily familiar to anyone who survived the first decade of George W. Bush's War on Terror. In fact, if I didn't know better, I could swear a neoconservative was still in the Oval Office.

Bibi's rapidly unraveling plans for the Middle East match up pretty consistently with those advocated by the Bush administration and the various neocon think tanks like the Project for a New American Century that filled its ranks, and this is far from a coincidence. 

One of the foundational documents of the modern neoconservative movement, the so-called Clean Break Report of 1996, was put together by Reagan cabinet cancer and Bush Family Svengali Richard Perle at the behest of none other than also then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party. The document outlined a robust new approach to America's relationship with Israel and the Middle East as a whole that included the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the containment of Syria through a series of US sponsored proxy wars and the total rejection of any Palestinian state.

Many of these same neoconservatives would go on to use the attacks on 9/11 five years later in a disturbingly similar fashion to the way Bibi currently uses October 7th to expand this mission to include the mythical Axis of Evil which would grow to include every major rival to American hegemony in the region, beginning with Iraq and ending with Iran. All of this was part of a quite open strategy to build the Washington military-industrial leviathan into a new Rome on the ashes of the former Soviet Union so as to ensure that America would reign over the globe indefinitely as the planet's only remaining superpower.

It didn't exactly work out as planned. The first target, Iraq, rapidly turned into Babylonian quicksand with the Mullahs wisely using the ensuing chaos to empower their Shia allies in the region. Thus, the Bush administration ended up closing its ambitious 8-year-plan on a sour note of epic failure, leaving much of their own once trigger-happy constituency deeply disgruntled with interventionism itself in the process. In many ways the rise of MAGA has come to be seen as the antithesis of all things neocon, but is it really?

While the current Trump Administration is certainly shifting the weight of our own military forces back towards the Western Hemisphere, we have never seen a White House move in lockstep with Israeli foreign policy quite like this one. Donald Trump has played an obnoxiously outsized role in every single escalation Israel has made towards making Zion great again, from offering to take military control of depopulated chunks of Gaza and Lebanon to using its diplomatic channels to aid Israeli attacks in Tehran and Doha. 

The results speak for themselves. While Trump pretends to be the Antibush and a badly battered American war machine sets its sites on a new Monroe Doctrine to prep the West for a final showdown with China, Washington has essentially just outsourced the project for a New American Century to Israel with similar plans to turn Volodymyr Zelensky into a kind of European Netanyahu. In other words, neoconservatism is alive and well under Donald Trump, it's simply rebranding in trying times. 

 It is important to remember that these rats have always been craven survivalists with few partisan allegiances. After all, the neocon movement began in the Democratic Party under Scoop Jackson before converting to Christian revanchism under Ronald Reagan then transforming into a slightly more secular New World Order under HW Bush. 

The hustle continued even after Dubya sank the ship in 2008 with stow aways in the Obama regime like David Petraeus who briefly oversaw Afghanistan after igniting the proxy wars that would lead to the convenient rise of the Islamic State farther west and Victoria Nuland who would play a decisive hand in overthrowing democracy in Ukraine. They pretty much ran Trump's first administration with neocon dinosaurs like John Bolton and Elliot Abrams at the helm as well as newer true believers like Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley filling up most of the prime defense positions for MAGA's first cabinet.

And who do you think run's Trump's current war machine? Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US Ambassador to the UN Elise Stefanik and the newly rechristened Secretary of War Pete Hegseth; all unreformed and unapologetic supporters of the Iraq War and devoted students of the New American Century.

Benjamin Netanyahu himself can be seen as a lifelong neocon in his own right but those of you who want to put Israel at the top of this pyramid scheme are looking at the blueprint upside down. Israel is and has always been an Anglo-American colony, completely dependent on a $3.8 billion-dollar annual allowance to keep them in hellfire missiles. If this money disappeared overnight, so would the fascist fever dream of a Greater Israel, like a mirage in the desert. A fact highlighted in flames by the 60% of Israel's own citizens in the goddamn streets right now as we speak, calling for Bibi's head on a steak. Only MAGA stands between them.

Zionism is a European export. Part of the same Atlantist-Anglo supremacist contagion that cooked up neoconservatism as a new form of phony American nationalism beholden to the same multinational corporate elites who own Donald Trump's ass like an Epstein whore.

Please, dearest motherfuckers, do yourselves a big fucking favor; forget the brands and fight the war machine birthed by Westphalia under any flag, in every party. By any name, that same foul beast drags us all to Armageddon unless we forget about bullshit politics long enough to start dragging back. 

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Headache by Francis Black

* The Mess Inside by the Mountain Goats

* 100% by Sonic Youth

* Heavy Metal Drummer by Wilco

* Devil's Haircut by Beck

* Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes

* Cinder Block by Samia

* Dylan Thomas by Better Oblivion Community Center

* The Captain by Kacey Chambers

* Stuck Between Stations by the Hold Steady

Corrupt "Democracy" Makes Fascism Inevitable

 I've never been much of an optimist when it comes to America because quite frankly, there is really very little to be optimistic about. A cursory glance at this nation's history should be more than enough to prove that. The arch of history may or may not bend towards progress but there is no bending a colonial machine designed for slavery and genocide into anything worth redeeming. America, as a concept, is existentially fucked and we need to get over it.

Ironically, in the past, it has actually been this rosy outlook on the American nightmare that has led me to roll my eyes at notions made by comrades on the left that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. Not that I've ever held delusions about that foul orange beast being anything south of sociopathic. I just found it hard to believe that a man so bombastically flatulent with his sociopathy could ever pose a bigger threat than men like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama who could sell this same evil as progress to tree huggers at Lilith Fair.

I'm not too big to say that I stand corrected, at least partially. While the Donald's first term was largely a three-ring rodeo fire that did at least as much smoke damage to America's undeserved reputation as it did to its underprivileged people, his second term is clearly something far more satanic in nature and the analogies to the Third Reich feel grossly appropriate. Every day seems to bring another unprecedented breach of the Executive Office into every conceivable facet of American life and the courts that haven't been totally corrupted have been exposed as being completely powerless to stop it.

With that being confessed, I do feel that it is extremely important to point out that the people who made this possible aren't trailer park proud boys or even those mutant millionaires in the Christian Right. Donald Trump was transformed from a charismatically unconfident, soiled rodeo clown into a totally viable Hitler reenactor by the billionaires of Silicon Valley.

All roads lead back to Peter Thiel. The megarich founder of PayPal who invested his early fortune into companies like Palantir and SpaceX which promise to usurp the old gas-powered military industrial complex with something far more technologically dystopian may have very theatrically decided to take a knee during the last two presidential elections, but his influence is all over the second Trump administration. 

Elon Musk, who broke records by donating a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump's reelection campaign is one of Thiel's PayPal era dauphins, which is probably why Thiel essentially continues to run DOGE even after rocket boy abandoned ship to tend to the damage done to his fortune by associating openly with their Frankenstein monster. Other known Thiel acolytes now swimming in the MAGA swamp include AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks and Vice President JD Vance, and their investment is paying off hand over fist.

Every major push by the new and improved Trump junta into frighteningly fascist territory is powered by Silicon Valley, from its AI fueled mass deportation regime to its Golden Dome boondoggle. DOGE is scalping our antiquated federal bureaucracy to make room for a singular high-tech police state that only companies like Palantir can provide, and Trump has already passed executive orders requiring all federal agencies to share data on American citizens. This is how Palantir alone has already netted over $900 million dollars in federal government contracts, and these are the men who made MAGA a terrifying success, the members of America's new cyber oligarchy.

However, these are also the same men who had very recently financed the so-called "liberal order" that Trump was elected raging against which unironically is also the very same order that gifted Donald Trump an idiot-proof executive death star and blackened the name of democracy by using it to sling forever wars and globalist trade deals in the process. Elon Musk donated over $100,000 dollars to Barack Obama in 2012 alone and why the fuck not? Obama had already taken George W. Bush's post-9/11 police-warfare state and expanded it into a massive, all-seeing, NSA panopticon with a swarm of drones to defend it from brown children. Who do you think gave Palantir its first government contracts? The same liberal-progressive who built a gulag archipelago of detention camps that Donald Trump would use to cage toddlers.

This is why even though Donald Trump has become an unprecedented threat who needs to be stopped, his mainstream "resistance" funded by neocon Never Trumpers and the neoliberal DNC need to be thrown out with him for making his reign of terror possible by being only marginally less despotic than Orange-Man-Bad while daring to call their proto-fascistic shell game woke.

This has happened before. In fact, this is precisely how the original Hitler ended up in power. As the German Empire disintegrated in the face of massive popular revolts during the wee hours of the First World War, the German Amy's Quartermaster General, Wilhelm Greener, made a deal with the Empire's last Chancellor and head of the German Social Democratic Party, Friedrich Ebert. Provided that Ebert crush the radical leftists amidst his ranks and allow Germany's military strongmen to remain in power, these thugs would allow Ebert to establish a "social democracy" in the form of the Weimar Republic.

A stalwart patriot already notorious for crushing the antiwar elements within his own party, soon-to-be-President Friedrich Ebert snapped up the deal immediately and while Weimar Germany wore the drag of liberty and progress with a constitution and a parliament, the Republic's first president established a dictatorship in all but name only for the last six years of his life. Friedrich Ebert spent most of his reign ruling by decree with the new Weimar constitution's Article 48, which afforded the Reich President the ability to govern without the consent of the Reichstag so long as he did so in the name of national security.

By the time Ebert had finally dropped dead, an increasingly large segment of Germany's population had taken a hard turn back to the right, largely out of disgust for what had been allowed to pass for the left. Seeing at least some of the writing on the wall, the Social Democratic Party decided to endorse an Imperial German Army general named Paul Von Hindenburg to replace Ebert as president in 1932 in order to prevent a victory by an ascendant Adolf Hitler. 

Hindenburg wasted little time using the despotic executive powers created by the SPD to make the Third Reich a forgone conclusion. He approved the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties over an obvious false flag attack, he awarded the Weimar executive office even more power with the Enabling Act of 1933, and he appointed Adolf Hitler to the position of Chancellor of Germany from which the Further used the SPD's Article 48 to establish a military dictatorship by totally legal means.

My point here isn't that liberalism or social democracy are synonymous with fascism. My point is that fascism lurks behind every ideology that shelters an untouchable elite and that free people tend to embrace authoritarian solutions to their perceived problems when democracy is reduced to a shroud used to conceal the true source of those problems. If you send Middle American's children off to die in the Middle East in the name of democracy and gut main street in the name of the free market, you can't exactly be shocked when they reject both for any asshole promising to make their empty lives great again by any means necessary.

You also have little right to be shocked when liberal democracy's financiers approve of increasingly despotic measures when the old illusions fail to pacify the growing rage of the masses.

We cannot confront the threat posed by Donald Trump until we confront the fact that, just like Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump is the product of a morally bankrupt neoliberal plutocracy that dared to call itself a democracy, and we cannot confront the threat still posed by fascism until we confront the fact that time and time again, this phantom is merely the last stage of every state on the brink of collapse.

I've said it before, and I'll be shot saying it ten more times, anarchism is the only order that affords the full consent of the governed necessary for true democracy to thrive and any form of democracy not administered directly through popular consensus is just another lie for phantoms to hide behind.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* El President by Drugstore featuring Thom Yorke

* John Wayne was a Nazi by MDC

* Toy by Blondshell

* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins

* The Captain by Kasey Chambers

* Nazi Punks Fuck Off by Dead Kennedys

* Asshole by the Lumineers

* No Values by Black Flag

* Lexicon Devil by the Germs

* Lady Picture Show by Stone Temple Pilots

Nothing Fights Fascism Like Mutiny: A Call to Organize Troops Against Trump

 We've seen this same scenario play out on the international news a thousand times before. Some populist despot on a power binge locks down the capitol with heavily armed and uniformed soldiers on the street. Some kind of crisis is declared. Some kind of enemy is denounced. Both are usually conveniently vague and open to expansive interpretation. Everyone but a few brainwashed zealots know the score and what was once a barely functioning plutocracy is reduced to an armed encampment with soldiers serving as a newly christened dictator's jackbooted errand boys and a quire of armored vehicles singing his praises in a diesel fueled chorus.

Yep, we've seen this same scenario play out a thousand times before but this time it isn't playing out in some third world banana republic, it's unraveling as we speak on the streets of the capitol of the most powerful empire on earth and it's spreading like spilt milk under a refrigerator near you. In the sacred name of law and order, Donald Trump, the Batista of Mar-a-Lago, has federalized law enforcement in Wahington DC and sent in 800 National Guardsmen and another 450 federal law enforcement agents to lord over the national monuments with assault rifles and pose fearsomely for the cameras. One could be forgiven for being tempted to believe that this is just some reckless publicity stunt to throw people off the Epstein trail and I'm sure that played a part in the timing, but this is clearly part of a much larger campaign.

Trump already fed the Tenth Amendment to the tank treads with his brazenly unconstitutional military occupation of Los Angeles, and a series of leaks and executive orders have made it clear that it won't end in Chicago either. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been tasked with establishing a 600 Guardsman "Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force" that can be deployed within hours to cities across the country to quell whatever "civil disturbance" America's increasingly omnipotent Executive Office deems to be a national emergency with a dusty coupon booklet of antiquated war powers.

This isn't a dictatorship yet but this sure as shit is how they start. I know because I've been studying the one's the CIA sets up in third world countries for the better part of my miserable young life. This is also why, even though I am certainly very disturbed by what's transpiring, I am just slightly less than shocked. Our country's vaunted liberal peanut gallery can spend hours in front of the bathroom mirror perfecting their 50s monster movie shriek, but this country has been exporting fascism like Coca-Cola for centuries; did you Karens honestly believe that this poison product would never follow you home? And I'm not just talking ancient history here either. 

I'm talking about our overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 2004 for the high crime of trying to raise the minimum wage of Disney sweatshops in Port-au-Prince and I'm talking about our decision to replace Manuel Zelaya with a drug peddling junta in Honduras in 2009. None of you people blank twice when America erased these democracy's and now those chickens are coming home to roost.

The only thing separating Donald Trump from fellow executive arbiters of authoritarianism like George W. Bush and Barack Obama is the fact that he finally brought the war home. This may be sickening but it was also inevitable, especially when you consider the fact that all these men did their part to drastically expand the powers of the executive office while growing America's military to the size of a fucking death star. Now, the jig is finally up. The illusion of American democracy has been dashed to smithereens on the petulant whims of a reality television goon and what really rubs his mainstream critics raw is how tacky it makes us look.

With that being said, weapons grade hypocrisy doesn't erase the danger marching through our streets as we speak and the fact that the die was cast several administrations ago doesn't mean that we should all just sit around snarking while Uncle Sam tries on mirrored aviator shades. What it does mean is that we have to get a little more inventive than monkeying around with electoral politics in a Weimar republic and we need to get a little more radical than singing "Give Peace a Chance" in state designated protest kennels. My crazed neurodivergent suggestion is that we actually reach out to the storm troopers.

These aren't well-trained Freikorps'; they're working-class weekend warriors trying to pay off their credit card debt. Many of them are barely out of high school and most of them had no idea what they were signing up for. Signs of discontent among these ranks have already surfaced in Los Angeles after Trump sent 4,000 National Guards to confront the scourge of undocumented maids at the El Segundo Motel 6. In fact, reports of downright aggressive disgruntlement amidst the SoCal barracks have become quite widespread just behind the scenes. 

Multiple advocacy organizations representing military families, including the Sarah Stryder Initiative and the Chamberlain Network, have reported an influx of affected service members contacting them to express their disgust with Trump's mission in the City of Angels. At least 105 members of this deployment have also sought counseling from behavioral health offices and at least one company commander and one battalion commander have been reassigned after expressing their objections to Trump's orders.

This is fertile soil for mutiny which anti-fascists would be wise to sow. History is rife with examples of disgruntled soldiers leading open revolts that ultimately led to the downfall of the very regimes they were tasked with fortifying. A mutiny aboard the Battleship Potemkin launched by sailors unwilling to die for empire in the Russo-Japanese War ended in disaster but also ultimately sparked the Russian Revolution of 1905, which not only ended the war but set the stage for the October Revolution that would end the reign of the Tsar completely a decade later.

That same year, the Kiel Mutiny of 1918 was lit after a German crew refused to sail into certain death against the British Grand Fleet during the final days of the First World War and would inspire another revolution that would topple the Kaiser and put the final nail in the casket of a fading German Empire. In this case, the mutineers even set up democratic soldier's councils that rapidly spread across the country, erasing the corrupt governments in every city they occupied with little to no resistance before they made the tragic mistake of handing their decentralized direct democracies over to professional politicians who would sell them back to their officers for a Reich.

Perhaps the best example of gestapo in revolt however occurred within the ranks of our own military during the Vietnam War with the GI Movement, a radical antiwar insurgency that spread like napalm across every base from West Point to Danang, ultimately leading to nearly half of all enlisted American soldiers openly revolting against their superiors which nearly sank the whole damn empire before the Pentagon finally pulled the plug on their failed conquest of Indochina. 

Over half a million incidents of desertion were recorded between 1966 and 1973. Another 488 incidents of sabotage on naval vessels were also logged during that time frame including the largest single act of sabotage in naval history aboard the USS Forrestal aircraft carrier in 1972 when a massive fire caused over $7 million dollars in damage and delayed the ships deployment by over two months.

All of this was done with the full support and collaboration of anti-imperialists across the expanse of occupied Babylon, from the Black Panthers of California to the Beheiren movement of Japan. And I say it can be done again! Naysayers will point to America's all volunteer army, formed for the express purpose of avoiding another GI Movement. I will point to a stagnant economy and a shriveling middle class that forces many young men and women to fight for food only to find themselves stop-lossed into an endless loop of deployments to one bombed out wasteland after another. 

Now, these impoverished and deeply traumatized government mercenaries are being ordered to patrol their own streets for a senile billionaire child molester. Lynch me for my morbid optimism if you must but, Dearest motherfuckers, I think we can work with this! 

But first we would be wise to remember that the most important target of any mutiny should always be the fascist construct of the standing army itself. A national guard is really the only armed force any nation should ever require but it should be reserved exclusively for the self-defense of the communities they serve, and this mission should include the defense of communities against their own government. This can only be achieved with the kind of civilian militias advocated by this nation's wiser founding fathers to serve specifically as a bulwark against any attempt to monopolize the use of force with a professional standing army.

The popularity of the anti-interventionist Defend the Guard Act across the left-right spectrum shows an increased awareness among soldiers and civilians alike for the necessity of these kinds of populist limitations on military power and in times of great crisis there is great opportunity for radical acceleration. 

Empires are often at their most despotic before they collapse. Donald Trump just needs a little push, and I can think of a few good men who might just be willing to lend him a hand.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Mutiny, I Promise You by the New Pornographers

* Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix

* California Uber Alles by Dead Kennedys

* What's the Frequency Kenneth by REM

* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones

* Eat the Rich by Motorhead

* Rambozo the Clown by Dead Kennedys

* All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix

* We Gotta Get Out of This Place by Fear

* Doesn't Remind Me of Anything by Audioslave