A Second Trump Term is the Beginning of the End and That's Not All Bad

 How could this happen? Again? On what planet, in what parallel universe does it make any logical sense for Donald J. Trump, the ghastliest beast to ever stalk the West Wing, to return to power in a veritable landslide victory? Didn't we learn our lesson the last time? It feels like it was just yesterday that they were carting that orange lunatic away in a bronzer soiled straitjacket, babbling rabidly about insane conspiracies against his precious bodily fluids while his flailing personality cult swarmed the Capitol like insulin starved insects in a parallel hissy fit.

I honestly believed that the imbeciles who vote in this country collected a few of their senses and swore on a stack of John Grisham novels that they would never try a crazy fad like Trumpism again. And on a normal planet, in a sane universe, that would be the end of it. Orange Nixon would be pardoned from the Arkham Asylum by some mild-mannered GOP yes man to play golf in the obscure wilds South Florida and America would collectively convalesce on a steady diet of quaaludes and Fleetwood Mac while the war machine ferried out their atrocities to some second-rate Suharto for a while.

But this is not a normal planet. This is not a sane universe. This is Babylon during the end times. Rome is burning, so Caligula gets a second term while Nero plays "Rhiannon" on the violin. The craziest thing is that Trump didn't even really win. The motherfucker actually got two-million fewer votes than he did in 2020 when he got his ass whooped by a Dixiecrat sarcophagus on life support. Kamala Harris just lost that badly, by five-million votes to be precise, and it's actually not really all that hard to see why if you just take the 3D glasses off. The woman had all the warmed-over charm of a Rust Belt ghost mall renovated into a cut-rate casino. She had virtually no ideology to speak of other than being just slightly more animated than the dead man from Delaware that the Democrats tried shove down our throats until July.

And it would be pretty easy to blame this on Joe Biden, God knows that career criminal deserves to die in shame. But the bitter truth is that the rot runs much deeper than that. The Democrats made the rise and return of Donald Trump inevitable the same way that every centrist bourgeoise liberal government has made fascism inevitable going back to Weimar Germany; by tainting anything to the left of Genghis Khan with their own clueless venality while transforming the nation state into a juggernaut. The Democrats have always been frauds, but their scam began to get sickeningly obvious under the reign of the Clintons when every crony capitalist atrocity from outsourcing the middle class to expanding NATO to the Kremlin gates got stamped "liberal."

Every state ends in fascism sooner or later. This tragic fate becomes inevitable the moment that you sanctify power by monopolizing the use force in the hands of the few and it usually plays out the same way. A plutocracy masquerading as a democracy becomes increasingly authoritarian as its veneer of legitimacy begins to disintegrate. Once this farce fails and words like 'left-wing' and 'liberal' lose all meaning in the mouths of elitist oligarchs, the masses flock to more brazenly authoritarian solutions because that is precisely what the state has groomed them to do. This didn't begin with Trump. It began with Lincoln's evisceration of habeas corpus to preserve an imperial union and continued with a thousand other revisions to this empire's trappings of civil liberties, from the dissolution of the War Powers Act to the rise of the surveillance state. 

So, yes, dearest motherfuckers, I must conclude with my more hysterical colleagues on the far left, this is indeed the end of the world as we know it. However, there is good news, and that good news is the very fact that this is indeed the end of the world as we know it. If you are a straight white liberal, this may be of little comfort to you, but for anyone outside of the margins of the mainstream this world has sucked pretty hard for a very long time. Just ask an Indian if you can find one. 

Fascism is the final stage in the state's life cycle after the orgy of imperialism, and the American Empire couldn't die soon enough. Even under the tutelage of the neoliberal insiders of the Biden-Harris Administration, we are currently tempting fate every day by playing nuclear football in both Ukraine and the Middle East while we melt the ice caps and hand the Button over to Skynet with AI.

This doesn't mean that Trump and whichever cabal of Christian-Zionists who actually manages to pull his strings for fifteen minutes shouldn't be opposed with every fiber in our beings, but we can't oppose fascism with the very state that birthed it. We must reject this system entirely and resist it with something totally untainted by its tentacles. Otherwise, we're just handing the Reichstag Death Star back to the Social Democrats until Hitler can make another comeback.

As ugly as this picture promises to get, true antifascists do have a few things working in our favor historically speaking, the best actually being the sheer size of the American Empire itself. Hitler wasn't done in by any one nation, he was done in by dozens of them because he tried to take them all too fast. Donald Trump will be tasked with controlling more territory than Hitler could ever dream of from day one, along with a massive Byzantinesque federal bureaucracy. 

This is what kept Orange Man Bad from blowing up the world during his first four years and a number of ambitious think tanks like the people behind Project 2025 are jockeying to fix that problem by offering to do the big picture work for Trump. Whether that man's massive ego will even offer these mincing Little Eichmann's with the opportunity to do this remains debatable but what doesn't is the fact that America's sheer size, even if you don't count our bankrupt phalanx of imperial quislings, makes successful German-style consolidation highly unlikely.

What we are far more likely to encounter is the kind of violent Balkanization encountered by the similarly monolithic Soviet Bloc as their power began to disintegrate. This will also very likely lead to a great deal of chaos and violence, but I believe that at least some of this turmoil can be circumvented if the various colonized peoples of America choose to embrace our tribal diversity rather than clinging desperately to dated government solutions. There are a lot of ways to achieve this, and we should probably try all of them.

We should try agorism by building extensive black market economic networks beyond the reach of the federal government and its corporate masters. We should try panarchism by creating totally stateless communities capable of governing themselves without outside interference. We should do what the Amish do and grow our own food, build our own schools, and create our own networks of social services that can coexist with the "English World" without having to rely on it. And we should do what Hezbollah does and build well-armed, well-trained, and well-organized civilian militias prepared to defend those communities when the collapsing Cthulhu of the fascist pig state catches on that they're losing control.

What we definitely shouldn't do is allow our communities to be preyed upon any longer by failed agents of a failing state like the Democratic Party. These are the Weimar nitwits that idiot-proofed a death machine for a fumbling manchild like Trump to commandeer and now they actually have the nerve to try to guilt trip us into investing even more of our time and energy into another billion-dollar swindle like Kamala Inc. 

They actually have the gall to blame trans kids, Muslims, and Black men for their failure to sell Fascism Lite as salvation with rainbow colored Oprah telethons. These are the same people who used to share teenage prostitutes with the current Orange Further elect back when he was still funding their campaigns. We are not going to slay this monster by getting back in bed with Doctor Frankenstein. Our best hope of surviving this failed state is by divorcing ourselves from it entirely and building a society that will never have to rely on its filthy favors again.

It's hard fucking work and it might fail but what other option do we have besides looking on the bright side of the apocalypse? This crisis can still become an opportunity for those of us brave enough to fight for it by every means necessary. So, what do you say, dearest motherfuckers, let's get creative and knock this motherfucker we call fascism on its orange ass once and for all.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  London Calling by the Clash

* Rhiannon by Fleetwood Mac

* The Mess Inside by the Mountain Goats

* Last Monkey by Buffalo Tom

* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

* Slow Dog by Belly

* It's the End of the World as We Know it (and I Feel Fine) by REM

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

* Suppose by Buffalo Tom

* California Uber Alles by Dead Kennedys

The Weird Turn Pro: A Revolutionary Call to Turn and Embrace the Strange

 In case you haven't noticed dearest motherfuckers, I'm pretty goddamn weird and I seem to be getting weirder by the hour. This isn't a flex; every time I think I've got my proverbial shit figured out I seem to add another asterisk to my colossal list of obnoxious eccentricities that makes me just a little bit more marginalized than I already am and it's beginning to get hard even for me to keep it all straight.

As if simply being genderqueer wasn't enough, it turns out that I'm really more of a butch lesbian trapped in a man's body which is virtually impossible to express without just looking like a fucking dude. And as if convincing Queer cis women to find Andrea Dworkin in Mikhail Bakunin wasn't enough of an uphill climb, it turns out that my childhood trauma makes it pretty much impossible for me to have a sexual relationship unless it's part of some kind of sadomasochistic roleplay where one of us performs the part of the innocent Catholic schoolgirl and the other becomes some mystic maternal figure saintly enough to restrain her without leaving a bruise. 

My ideology has taken a similarly labyrinthine path into esoteric absurdity. I started out as a better-red-than-dead Tankie-Guevarist then jumped ship to left-Rothbardian free market anarchism before coming to the conclusion that civilization itself is the fucking problem and rejecting the whole damn left-right paradigm for some kind of Queer, post-civ, heathen revivalism. All the while managing to maintain just enough Marxian solidarity with third world revolutionaries and resistance to any form of non-voluntary governance to isolate myself from pretty much everyone. People on the left think I'm a fascist, people on the right think I'm a Maoist, and my only response to both is that you people have no idea what those words even fucking mean anymore.

But it's probably my psych eval that really takes the cake. After decades of haunting support groups and out-patient psych rehabs as a perpetually broken, agoraphobic basket case, my gender transition tripwired a cascading avalanche of repressed memories that resulted in a year of spine rattling seizures and horrific flashbacks revealing that not only did I realize I was born in the wrong gender at an obscenely young age but I was also quite literally beaten and sodomized by Catholic priests into making that part of myself disappear. Now the only way that I can cope with this truth is by assuming multiple personalities, most of whom aren't old enough to feel safe leaving the house without having another one of us holding their invisible hand. Oh yeah, and then there's the chronic Lyme disease. 

So, it turns out that I'm a transbian mommy domme primitivist with three badly battered children that no one else can see but me unless one of them gets triggered enough to hijack my thirty-something body for a public hissy fit. Don't feel bad for feeling exhausted. Even I'm rolling my eyes at me, or at least my 14-year-old alter Max is. The most common responses that I receive to this circus that I now call life are "You're fucking crazy, dude" and "You just want attention." The first I agree with whole heartedly but the second is almost laughably absurd.

If I just wanted your fucking attention, I would buy an iguana and get a face tattoo like every other desperate white bro, and if my laundry list of increasingly severe social dysfunctions were just a ploy for attention, it would be a pretty fucking stupid one considering that the result has been having less and less people take me seriously while handing my rapidly multiplying collection of enemies more and more pointy things to throw in my general direction.

So, why do I do it then? Why do I bother putting my pathological eccentricities on display like this? Well, for one thing, when you spend your life keeping 90% of yourself a secret even from yourself the only way to heal is to find a voice and scream your guts out from the tallest rooftop. But the other thing, the really strange thing, is that the more marginalized I get, the more sense my life seems to make even while it baffles everyone around me. With a little help from a committed trauma therapist who isn't a slave to the DSM, I've actually found that being five pagan dykes in an estrogen dosed caveman's body feels strangely normal and that's probably because what passes for normal in this twisted civilized world has always felt dangerously strange to me.

What exactly would be the "normal" response to having every adult in my life ignore my rampant gender dysphoria before losing my virginity to a pair of clergymen in preschool? I suppose if I was normal, I might buy a big truck, join the Republican Party, and take my rage out on Haitian migrants and Palestinian toddlers. Or I could just do what those two priests did and find some old-time religion in a locked rectory closet. Sorry normies, not my style.

I may be an insane pervert defined by my jihad against the modern world, but I didn't start this fight. Normal fired first. Me and my girls just came back to church with a can of gasoline to get even and perhaps the strangest thing about our presence is that we are not alone. America and Western Civilization in general has become a veritable petri dish of abnormal behaviors. Rates of mental illness and neurodiversity are exploding from Bakersfield to Berlin, as are the growing list of brazenly bizarre subcultures and identities being used to cope with them. 

I spend a great deal of my time writing about these post-modern tribes right here. Asexuals, otherkin, antiworkers, Boogaloos, adult babies, drag queens, sovereign citizens, furies, race traitors, sex workers, Wiccans, larpers, tulpamancers, chaos magicians, radical traditionalists, Afrocentrics, forest defenders, psychonauts, urban explorers, nudists, vampires, stoners, weebs, neopagans, body modifiers, junkies, agorists, Russophiles, transhumanists, homesteaders, homeschoolers, doomers, Squatters, guerrilla gardeners, and ageplayers.

We are all different, but we all have at least one thing in common; society doesn't fucking fit, and we all want out. None of this is a coincidence. It is all connected, from my so-called mental illness to yours. The growing diversity of people choosing to live outside the increasingly stultifying boundaries of normal is spreading and it's about time. One of my favorite Marxists, Antoni Gramsci, referred to us as the Subaltern. Karl himself more derisively labeled us as the lumpenproletariat. Both essentially amount to an unorganized underclass amongst the post-colonial masses that exists on the margins- criminals, vagrants, migrants, convicts, drifters, loners, and lunatics, the homeless, the unemployed and the unemployable, an entire caste excluded from the socioeconomic institutions of society in order to deny the strange agency.

But when society itself has become a sickness, we on the outside become the cure. We are living on a dying planet managed by a superrich elite who are willing to drive the entirety of humanity and virtually every other living thing to extinction just to satiate their nihilistic thirst for more. This is the inevitable result of civilization itself, of man attempting to possess nature and monopolize it beneath a colossus of carcinogenic constructs like property, agriculture, corporatism, capitalism, and the state. All of this was achieved through a concerted campaign of homogeny and universalism, of sameness and assimilation, through the church and Walmart and NATO and Walt Disney.

Strange is the solution. Marx's Russian rival and my apparent cis-doppelganger Mikhail Bakunin knew this well. While his prissy German nemesis shit on the unpoliticized underclass and told us all to get a job at one of his blessed factories, Bakunin declared lumpenproles to be the natural leaders of any successful revolution specifically because we already existed outside of society. I hate to date my own craziness here, but Jesus Christ said the same thing too. He walked past the banks and temples and declared the whores and lepers to be the people of God because they had already divorced themselves from a vain and vapid world.

So, I've come here to boldly embrace every aspect of my identity that removes me from the status quo, and I encourage you in these trying times to do the same. Civilization has made western society too big to be anything but dangerous and we all need to get together to chop it up. So, flush your meds, fuck a stranger, start a gang or a cult, buy your pot from the Amish, encourage your kids to change their gender identity twice a week, go weird, go pro, tune in, drop out, turn and embrace the strange, because normal got us into this mess and lunatics like you and me and me and me are the only way out.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Wild Wild Life by Talking Heads

* Changes by David Bowie

* Floyd the Barber by Nirvana

* American Music by Violent Femmes

* Describe by Perfume Genius

* Lithium by the Polyphonic Spree

* Mr. Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan

* Ever by Flipper

* Levitate Me by the Pixies

* Turn it On by Flaming Lips

The Bipartisan Border War is Turning America into a Prison

I write this screed during the waning hours of an election season that has made me thirst for the taste of a blue steel shotgun barrel like a newborn craves mother's milk. I hate all of you people so fucking much and I will never forgive you for doing this to me every four years. But I digress...

Chances are that by the time you read this you will have done one of two hideous things which will likely end in the same tragic outcome. You will have voted for Donald Trump for some stupid fucking reason or another, which will give him the mandate to carry out the largest mass deportation since Josef Stalin, or you will have voted for Kamala Harris to stop him even though she has more or less promised to do the same goddamn thing in slow motion with a side of joy as displayed by her administration's recent attempts to slam the border shut like the jaws of life.

All of this is fucking insane and what makes it even crazier is that it is driven by tabloid stoked popular demand. Around the country, Republicans and Democrats alike are flipping out over the border. Why, most of my neighbors in rural Pennsyltucky have never even seen a Venezuelan and yet they still seem to believe that scores of them are coming scuttling down the chimney for their daughter's virginity with freshly sharpened knives in their teeth. 

All of this hysteria, what we now call the "border crisis", is built on the fundamental lie consistently embraced by both parties that more "border security" aka "police state" equals less immigrants and a more orderly border. This is total bullshit, and it is easily disproven with pretty basic statistics.

Tax funding for a wide range of border security experiments has pretty consistently increased in this country over the last several decades with funding for the Department of Homeland Security between 2001 and 2020 more than six times as high as the previous twenty years. 

This spending spree continued to increase under Biden and Kamala, with their 2024 budget for border and immigration enforcement breaking Trump's record at $30.2 billion dollars, which is nearly double what it was in 2012. In fact, the "open borders" administration has forked over $28.1 billion dollars in private contracts for border and immigration enforcement since 2021 which is $8.2 billion more than Donald Trump's $20.9 billion between 2017 and 2021.

Meanwhile, the border has only became increasingly ungovernable during this time. The undocumented population has more than doubled since the mid-nineties, growing from 5 million in 1996 to nearly 12 million in 2024. And this trend only continued during Trump's reign of terror. 

While that loud-mouthed terrorist sent children to concentration camps, illegal entry measured by apprehensions doubled between 2016 and 2019. In fact, the Cato Institute actually estimates that the number of immigrants who have gotten into this country without being caught increased during every year of Orange Man Bad's first term.

So, what does all this bewildering math mean? Well, for starters it means that border security, at least over an area as vast and unpopulated as the Rio Grande is a fucking flop. It doesn't work. It never worked. But we all keep shoving money into it anyway and the Democrats are far from a lesser evil on this scam. They fucking started it. 

Bill Clinton's Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act aka IIRIRA, unleashed with overwhelming bipartisan fanfare in the wake of his similarly fascistic Crime Bill, essentially created the modern-day deportation apparatus. Before IIRIRA deportations were actually pretty rare in this country. After it, they became a veritable cottage industry. Billions were pumped into migrant detection and removal with an army of heavily armed guards whose jurisdiction now includes any patch of dirt within 100 miles of either border.

As stated above, none of this worked. In fact, it had the opposite effect. Before 2014, your average border crosser was just some dude going back and forth across an invisible line for his day job. When the border became militarized, those dudes simply stayed where the work was and brought their families with them. In other words, IIRIRA only succeeded in making the border more chaotic and every administration that followed Clinton simply decided to double down and make it worse.

Despite the fact that every single one of the 9/11 hijackers was a green card holder who came through a legal port of entry, Bush used those attacks to move the flailing border Cthulhu from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security and juiced it up like Schwarzenegger with militaristic surveillance paraphernalia like drones and aerostats. And Barack Obama still holds the title belt for deporter in chief, building the concentration camps and turning ICE into the dick swinging gestapo that Trump used to raid kindergartens and children's hospitals to fill them.

Of course, everything got way more complicated in 2014 when Central American women and children seeking sanctuary began to outnumber Mexican men looking to make a paycheck. The root causes behind this migrant sea change are not particularly hard to figure out when you consider that most of those families were fleeing from the Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. 

All three of those poverty racked nations has been subjected to decades of American funded death squads and juntas, including the one that Obama put in charge of Honduras in a 2009 coup which pretty much openly colluded with local gangsters and Mexican cartels. However, by the end of Trump's first executive killing spree, this deluge became just one small piece of a massive international refugee crisis, exacerbated by the Pandemic but largely born from the wreckage of two other disastrous American experiments known as the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.

And this is actually how America's border crisis can probably be best understood. Just like the war machine and the prison state, the American border is a failure industrial complex. Nobody has ever been made safer by any of those rackets, but a very small group of corporations and federal bureaucracies have gotten very rich, and the sickest part of the con is that the worse the blowback from its fascist adventures gets, the more money the scumbags behind them get to clean up their own mess or fail trying.

Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans have taken this industry to new lows and they're still digging. Whether that dayglow corporate crybaby wins or not, his party is now defined by an insane conspiracy to use war powers to evict 3% of this country's population, and if Kamala has proven anything with her long miserable career as a glorified deadbeat cop it's that her only real ideology is 'just following orders' unburdened by what has been. Either way, the border police state wins and no one should feel safe.

The federal government detains and deports thousands of American citizens every year and federal policy permits the use of racial and ethnic profiling to enforce migration restrictions in so-called "border areas", which thanks to Bill Clinton and his Democrats now legally includes two-thirds of American territory. And for every honky sitting pretty on a porch swing saying, 'not my problem', let me remind you of the increasing diversity of the refugee crisis and the expanding battle lines of NATO's proxy apocalypse in Ukraine. In other words, what's going to stop the ATF from sending your pale ass back to the old country when Kamala comes to take your guns away, Jethro?

This is how borders work, especially when applied arbitrarily on a massive scale to govern nebulous colonial territories. They don't do jack shit to keep people out because they aren't designed to. They're designed to police and control the people trapped between them and when imperialist maniacs in decline are manning the guard towers that nation in question might as well be a prison. 

Happy Election Day, morons. Regardless of which asshole wins, we're already fucked.

Peace, Love, & Antipathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* No Children by the Mountain Goats

* Atmosphere by Joy Division

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

* White Minority by Black Flag

* Sea Swallow Me by Cocteau Twins

* Old College Try by the Mountain Goats

* Police Truck by Dead Kennedys

* I Bet on Losing Dogs by Mitski

* Dot Dash by Wire

* Danny Nedelko by Idles

Hey Parents, get a Grip and Make Halloween Dangerous Again

To say that my childhood was less than idyllic would probably be an understatement. Growing up stuck between genders in a dreary small-town Catholic school would have been harsh enough if the priests would only keep their fucking hands to themselves. After eleven years of being told I was fucked to eternal hellfire by the same people who took my virginity in preschool, I was already at the end of a very short rope. Then they accused me of plotting a school shooting because I shopped at Hot Topic and refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, and I began to come up with some pretty creative uses for that rope. 

So, what little childhood I had was pretty much eviscerated by a mean cabal of pedophile priests and the despotic teachers and meddlesome parents who loved them, but somehow by some strange heathen miracle, Halloween remained sacred. The one night of the year that the adults couldn't put their hands on. 

One night of gloriously unfettered chaos where kids ran the streets, set free from the various stultifying codes of conformity inflicted upon us and encouraged to be anonymous freaks, scattering between the streetlights like dead leaves in a stiff breeze, dressed in any kind of drag we could get our hands on, forming fifteen-minute gangs to plot out which houses to harass for junk food first and carrying out petty acts of revenge against those who failed to give up the goods with cartons of eggs that seemed to appear out of nowhere.

There were no teachers to tell us to keep it down, there were no uniforms to strip us of our individuality and what few parents who attempted to accompany us quickly found themselves outnumbered and gloriously marginalized. You could be any gender or species you wanted to be that night and instead of being punished, ridiculed, or berated, you would be rewarded with as much fun-size chocolate as you could carry in a pillowcase. 

In many ways, Halloween was my first taste of Queer anarchism, so, it should probably shock no one that I treat it like a pagan holiday and sadly it should probably shock even fewer people that it has increasingly found itself under attack over the years.

What was once one crazy night of unhinged juvenile delinquency has increasingly found itself stifled beneath a petty police state of constant supervision. Cop cars patrol the streets like buzzards and growing hordes of gossiping helicopter parents seem to be hauled up on every corner like watch-tapping pimps in white khakis. It's a fucking bummer and this is if you're lucky enough not to be corralled into some trunk-or-treat rodeo in an over lit church parking lot.

Much of this heavy-handed purse string bondage is the byproduct of breathless and baseless tall tales about razor blades in cupcakes and fentanyl laced Sweet Tarts that get parroted with reckless abandon by self-proclaimed journalists in the mainstream media and neckless cops looking for any excuse they can find to justify pillaging our tax dollars to facilitate their ego trips.

Just add this to Big Tech's increasingly pervasive monopoly on all forms of basic human interaction and adults have essentially reduced childhood to an agoraphobic experience defined by constant surveillance. The sickest thing is that many parents seem to grasp that their irrational clinginess is choking their kids on a leash but they themselves feel bullied and peer-pressured by some kind of absurd groupthink into policing their own offspring.

A recent study by the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital found that only 17% of parents actually believe that they live in unsafe neighborhoods but only 15% of this same group would even consider allowing their preteen children to play in the park, walk to a friend's house, or go trick or treating without some form of adult supervision. Most of them cited being blackballed as 'bad parents' for motivating their admitted irrationality and it's not like I'm entirely unsympathetic.

I realize that most of these parents are likely just victims of state facilitated fearmongering who are terrified of their children being violated the way that I was, but they need to turn off the evening news and recognize that kids don't get abused by freedom. In fact, statistically speaking, they tend to get abused by trusted adult authority figures. The overwhelming majority of victims of childhood sexual abuse are actually exploited by parents, teachers, law enforcement, and clergy.

My parents sent me to that Catholic school specifically because of its small class sizes and the involvement of priests and teachers in the church that they considered to be a trusted extension of our own family. The result wasn't safety, it was a world in which there was no escaping the grasp and influence of my abusers. At just five-years-old, I was convinced that not only were these trusted adult supervisors allowed full access to my increasingly confusing body but that what they chose to do with it was likely in accordance with my parents' wishes. 

I honestly believed that they had approved the molestation as punishment for my refusal to be a boy. It turned out that they were nearly as confused as I was, but the resulting terror of feeling surrounded by people attempting to police every aspect of my biology left me with little choice but to enter a state of deep disassociation that left me with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and multiple personalities.

The harsh truth here that most parents don't want to face is that their kids are actually probably much healthier, not to mention happier, being left less supervised because adults will always be capable of harming them far worse than they could ever harm themselves or each other. So, just back the fuck off a little bit and give your children a little room to fuck up and find out.

Let them stay out all night and get sick on candy. Let them work through their body issues by playing doctor with the kid next door. Let them get stoned and skinny dip at the abandoned quarry. Let them watch bad movies that give them nightmares. Let them get even with their gym teacher with six rolls of double-ply and a dozen rotten eggs. 

You know that they're going to do this shit anyway, so, forget being a "good parent" for five goddamn minutes and let your kids be kids with other fucking kids and trust them to come to you for help when they take it too far.

I know, it's a lot of faith to put into a cruel world, but freedom always is, and freedom is the only thing that can make this world a little less cruel. Believe it or not anarchy is actually a lot of hard work, so, maybe you could just start by letting your kids beg for candy with their friends while dressed like a serial killer for one night a year. You know, get a grip and make Halloween dangerous again.

Just a thought from a survivor of constant adult supervision.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post 

* Surrender by Cheap Trick

* Much Ado About Nothing by Waxahatchee

* Halloween by the Misfits

* Hummer by Smashing Pumpkins

* Pinhead by the Ramones

* Tear In Your Hand by Tori Amos

* Golden Hair by Slowdive

* Sweetness by Jimmy Eat World

* Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth

* Debaser by the Pixies

Horror Movies Against War

 I am a lifelong antiwar activist and a diehard horror movie buff. A lot of people seem to find those two facts to be a contradiction, and I guess on the surface I can comprehend their confusion. Showing up to a Free Gaza rally in a Blood Feast t-shirt does seem to send some mixed messages. However, at their finest, horror films must be understood as unflinching investigations into what terrifies society most and nothing should be more terrifying to society than war. 

This is why some of the most influential movies of the genre, some of the movies that form the very foundation of what every day Americans think of when they think scary movies, are actually the byproduct of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement.

Vietnam was a real-life horror movie, the first modern war that America lost badly played out on live television too quickly to be censored for public consumption. The empire was stripped bare every evening at six for the hideous, brutish thing that it was, and this spectacle irreversibly altered the DNA of American culture on a very fundamental level. In many ways, it temporarily radicalized pop culture as we knew it and horror movies were far from an exception.

One of the least understood consequences of this cultural Vietnam syndrome was the invention of the modern-day slasher film. The first and debatably most influential picture of that grotesque oeuvre was the 1974 grindhouse classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Most of the oft repeated tropes were in place; five teenagers stranded in the middle of nowhere being stalked by a psychopath in a mask. But anyone who has actually seen this film can tell you that there is something unsettlingly different about its delivery. The entire thing feels raw and almost intimate in its depiction of young tourists at the mercy of a hostile and alien environment. The sticks and weeds of the unforgiving Texas scrublands seem to conspire with the killers and there is a pervasive feeling that we shouldn't be watching this even as we can't look away.

That's because director Tobe Hooper shot the film specifically to look like the war footage that kept him up at night. This is also what convinced the young director to cast the monsters of this movie as a perverted portrait of the average American family, literally clamoring for blood at the supper table from their deranged young son, armed to the teeth with a power tool and concealing himself beneath the flesh of his own victims.

But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre wasn't the first bloodbath with roots that reach from the My Lai Massacre to Elm Street. One of horror cinema's most influential auteurs and the man behind Freddy Krueger, Wes Craven, got his start shooting shocking and grotesquely misunderstood exploitation films that attempted to make sense of the horrors of Vietnam much the way that Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre did.

Craven's 1972 directorial debut, The Last House on the Left, was also deeply influenced by the horrors on the evening news with a story loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's Virgin Spring. A pair of teenage girls are kidnapped and brutalized by a gang of fugitive psychopaths who then unwittingly seek shelter in the nearby house of one of their slain victims' parents. When the parents discover the crime and the criminals in their midst, they prove themselves to be every bit as capable of savagery in the service of revenge.

There are two messages to be learned by this ugly story. The first is that a society defined by violence has no right to be shocked when that violence shows up unannounced on their doorsteps. In the early seventies, Wes Craven was baffled by a nation that had found itself in the midst of a gruesome crimewave but didn't seem capable of making the connection that perhaps this was merely a reflection of the violence that their own government was committing on a daily basis in the jungles of Indochina. 

The second uneasy lesson from this deeply uneasy picture is that anyone can become the monster in their own horror movie once they begin defending violence as a means justified by its ends.

Craven explored this theme further in his 1977 follow up to Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes. This time a normal suburban family find themselves stranded in the barren Nevada desert where they are preyed upon by savage mutants. But once again, this films power comes in the form of two revelations which come far too late. The first revelation being that the mutants these milquetoast Nixonites encounter are in fact the desperate and deranged byproduct of nuclear testing committed by their own nation's military. 

The second is that these upstanding Americans find themselves as capable of the same kind of savagery when they too are tormented by forces that defy their comprehension. By the final scene the lines between the good guys and the bad guys become so severely blurred that the film can only end in still shots that fade to red.

Sadly, like much of the American counterculture of that era, the slasher film found itself a victim of commercial assimilation and so did Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven for that matter. But the greatest contribution that the antiwar movement made to horror cinema has to be the zombie movie and this subgenre continues to serve as a pliable tool for social criticism on a shoestring budget. We have the late, great George Romero to thank for this.

While this Rust Belt cult icon made scores of terrifying pictures over the decades, he is most notorious for the original trilogy of his Living Dead series. The truly fascinating thing about these movies is that they are all monster movies in which the actual monsters serve largely as a faceless backdrop for the evils of average human beings who find themselves embattled, isolated, and surrounded by an unstoppable force. 

This template was set by 1968's Night of the Living Dead, in which seven strangers hold up in a vacant farmhouse when they find themselves inexplicably surrounded by man-eating corpses who have risen from their graves to lurk and feast. But it doesn't take long for those strangers to find greater conflict between each other than their shared enemy.

This scenario was inspired not only by the Vietnam War but by the fact that in the midst of this holocaust, America found itself hopelessly at war with itself with the violence that erupted across the country after the failures of the Civil Rights Movement. It is particularly telling that the closest thing to a hero that this movie has is a Black man named Ben (brilliantly played by Duane Johnson) who manages to survive the onslaught of the living dead only to be shot dead by the posse of heavily armed white men allegedly there to rescue him. 

Romero expands upon this theme with the sequels, 1978's Dawn of the Dead and 1985's Day of the Dead, each with a new batch of stranded survivalists attempting to make sense of an increasingly senseless apocalyptic American landscape. 

In Dawn of the Dead, the unlucky survivors manage to isolate themselves in the luxury of an abandoned shopping mall only to find themselves crippled and despondent by depression, agoraphobia, and nihilism. Day of the Dead shows a spark of hope in the fact that the undead appear to be evolving into something more human only to have the movie's hardened warriors double down on their forever war on these creatures that has come to define their existence.

All of these gore fests are really movies about empire, about the horrible things that society can consign itself too in an endless state of constant warfare. The war always comes home, even in a bunker designed to survive nuclear winter, and the zombies always come home to roost. As Nietzsche famously observed, those who fight monsters frequently find themselves reflecting that which they fight.

Many movies have continued to mine this unique post-apocalyptic scenario for gruesome lessons about the banality and inhumanity of western consumer culture today. The best, in my opinion, are Danny Boyle's 2002 masterpiece 28 Days Later and it's 2007 sequel by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 28 Weeks Later. Both of these movies involve everyday people attempting to survive an apocalyptic, rage-inducing virus by putting their faith and safety into the hands of modern-day standing armies only to find these soldiers to be far more likely to kill the innocent in a crisis than to save them.

This is the horrific world that we now find ourselves in and it's not just a movie anymore. The western world has found itself held captive by a military industrial behemoth that creates monsters simply to justify its own increasingly nihilistic existence. Francois Truffaut once said that "every film about war ends up being pro-war." My response is that Francois should have spent less time at Hollywood matinees and more time at the grungy grindhouses of Times Square. 

Working class directors slumming it in exploitation cinema new all too well that the only accurate way to capture the horrors of modern warfare is with a monster movie.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs influenced by this post

* Hybrid Moments by the Misfits

* Mandatory Suicide by Slayer

* Release the Bats by the Birthday Party

* For Whom the Bell Tolls by Metallica

* TV Set by the Cramps

* Let's Have a War by Fear

* Peace Sells by Megadeth

* Rooster by Alice in Chains

* There Won't Be Many Coming Home by Roy Orbison

* Too Many Puppies by Primus

* American Nightmare by the Misfits

Hezbollah is Not Hamas

Victory comes quick to cowards with superior firepower, but that victory is almost always short lived. You would think that Israel, or any other proxy student of western colonialism, would have learned this lesson by now but here comes Bibi, landing on an American battleship in his shiny new F-16, mugging it up for the cameras beneath a big banner that reads 'Mission Accomplished.'

And there is no denying that this has been a pretty sweet Indian summer for Zionist terrorism in Southern Lebanon. After obliterating several international laws and several children with thousands of exploding handheld devices, Israel kicked off its new offensive against Hezbollah by assassinating the organization's mercurial Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, and about 300 other people including a senior commander for Iran's Revolutionary Guard with a massive 2,000-pound bomb with the American gift card still attached. According to western sources, these attacks and others like them have left the plucky Shia militia in shambles with a large portion of their leadership decapitated.

True or false, this is all a part of a much larger plan, as Benjamin Netanyahu established with the public relations choreography surrounding Nasrallah's murder. The bombing took place a day after Bibi had very publicly rejected the latest in a long line of half-assed, western-backed ceasefire proposals and only an hour after he berated the United Nations General Assembly on live television, calling the body a "swamp of antisemitic bile" for politely suggesting that maybe he should tone it down with all the genocide and then declaring a "seven-front war" that can only end in "total victory" over the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and of course Iran. Bibi then retired to a five-star hotel room and personally flipped the kill-switch on an entire neighborhood in Beirut.

But in all his brazen bravado, Netanyahu has actually exposed his cowardice and the delusional hubris which will inevitably damn his conspiracy to tame the Middle East with American ordinances to failure. While all the braindead talking heads in the English-speaking world ooh and awe over the Wagnerian theatrics of Israel's bombastic fireworks display, none of them really seem to grasp the big picture beneath the mushroom cloud.

Israel had to drop an American-made doomsday device the size of an elephant and reduce six apartment blocks to rubble just to kill one man. Had the IDF attempted to enter the suburban Hezbollah stronghold known as Haret Hreik on the ground they would still be attempting to bushwack their way to a retreat through a concrete jungle of hardened Shia guerrillas as we speak.

You see, dearest motherfuckers, Israel is terrified of Hezbollah, and they should be. They have never won a single ground campaign against the outfit even though they have consistently outgunned them, and the reason why should be painfully clear to any casual student of recent Middle Eastern history. To put it simply, Hezbollah is not Hamas. 

Hamas is a grubby, thuggish little Frankenstein that never would have even escaped the laboratory without Israel's support. Bibi and his bros in the Likud intelligentsia have openly bragged about this, their smug conspiracy to arm, fund, and support a two-bit Salafi charity affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood during the First Intifada in order to sabotage the Two-State Solution by confining the PLO's influence to the West Bank. It worked but it also led to October 7.

Hezbollah however is no Zionist Frankenstein monster. If anything, they are much more like an anti-colonialist Van Helsing, born in the fires of Israel's vampiric foreign policy and hardened by every new bomb they've thrown their way. Hezbollah was formed in 1985 by South Lebanese Shia clerics in order to fight off Israel's occupation of the region using the lessons of Iran's uniquely indigenous revolution as a blueprint. Hassan Nasrallah himself was only elected to lead the organization after its previous Secretary-General had been assassinated by Israel in 1992 and he would lead the organization from the ashes to fight Israel to a standstill during two separate military operations designed to eliminate them in 1993 and 1996.

Ultimately, it was Hezbollah, the scrappy Shia militia that should have died with its leader in 1992, that would finally rid Lebanon of its Zionist occupiers in 2000 before going on to become the world's most heavily armed non-state fighting force, with a paramilitary wing surpassing Lebanon's own army in strength. Hezbollah would best Israel once again in 2006 and then play a pivotal role in razing the Islamic State to the ground by building the Axis of Resistance with a legion of other Shiite militias formed in the craters of western munitions in places like Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

It was on those desert battlefields that the model for Bibi's seven-front strategy to Zionize the Middle East was born. America referred to it as 'Shock and Awe' but it really just amounts to a post-Cold War remake of Nazi Germany's Blitzkrieg in which overwhelming displays of industrial-grade terrorism are used to demoralize and paralyze an adversary. 

As we saw during both the Second World War and the War on Terrorism, this works like a charm at crushing states, but it also rapidly radicalizes civilian populations, creating a virulent breeding ground for partisan militias who end up overwhelming the victorious conquering armies and purging them violently from the host.

In the Middle East, a land totally alien to the Westphalian Nation State foisted upon its sands by generations of western colonialism, Shock and Awe resulted in the birth of a whole new generation of warfare, Fourth Generation Warfare, as it's been coined by paleoconservative cold warriors who became critics of empire during the neocon era. This theory essentially amounts to warfare's return to its decentralized tribal state in which the sainted nation state no longer commands a monopoly over the battlefield, but I personally think that it reaches much deeper than this.

Hezbollah didn't just replace the Lebanese Military in its region, it replaced the state itself with a successful network of welfare and infrastructure projects that have made that state virtually irrelevant and ingrained Hezbollah into the very fabric of South Lebanese society. Yemen's Houthi rebels and Iraq's Sadrists have similarly followed suit, and I believe that this is what Israel and its western sponsors are truly afraid of, a No-State Solution.

Israel only exists at the mercy of completely facetious borders that divide a Palestinian population that dwarfs their occupiers in size, four to one. If physical boundaries were abandoned entirely and Arabs returned to their previous state of stateless kinship societies, Israel would disintegrate, and the west would lose its imperial beachhead at the gates of the Eurasian Century.

This isn't just a theory either; it becomes a reality every time western forces attempt to confront the enemy on the ground in Lebanon. Within days of Israel's spectacular bombardment of Haret Hreik, its first ground operations in the region were met with the quick death of half a dozen commandos from Israel's supposedly elite Egoz Unit at the hands of Hezbollah militiamen literally fighting without a leader. The dead included the squad's decorated commander and was followed shortly by the destruction of three Israeli tanks in a separate ambush.

This is why cowards fight from the sky, raining down thousands of pounds of modern machinery upon civilian populations and starving children by manipulating globalist trade regulations. But as the Nazis learned the hard way at Stalingrad, modern technology alone cannot save an invader surrounded by a decentralized population. Hitler wasn't defeated by the United States or even the Soviet Union. He had his ass kicked by starving Jewish girls with bolt-action rifles built before he was born.

This same fate will fall upon Benjamin Netanyahu and his stormtroopers who seem to have learned nothing from the Holocaust other than how to exploit its memory in order to repeat its crimes. 

Had they paid better attention to the wisdom of their ancestors, they might know that Hell hath no fury like a stateless people scorned. But that's ok, I know a few fellow travelers in the local gentile community willing to remind them.

Peace, Love, and Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Blinded By the Light by Manfred Mann

* Golden Hair by Slowdive

* Kim's Watermelon Gun by Flaming Lips

* Frankenstein by New York Dolls

* Glory by the Airborne Toxic Event

* Divine Hammer by the Breeders

* Bright Lights by the Killers

* The House That Heaven Built by Japandroids

* Impressively Average by Brigitte Calls Me Baby

* Punching Bag by the Front Bottoms

Could Orange-Man-Stupid Be the Lesser Evil?

 I despised Donald Trump long before he became a lumpy soapbox for self-congratulating neoliberals to virtue signal on. In fact, I hated that miserable cunt back when he was still financing the campaigns of said self-congratulating neoliberals. 

Long before Donald Trump became billed as the perennial threat to liberal democracy, he was a race bating slumlord, gentrifying New York into a Disneyfied yuppie playground then parlaying the relationships he built with DNC swamp monsters at Jeffrey Eppstein's underage orgies into an even more lucrative career as a Chapter 11 flaunting corporate welfare queen, dismembering Atlantic City with eminent domain and grotesque casinos too big to fail. 

Far from being the antithesis of liberal democracy, this lecherous scum puddle packed into a suit is the byproduct of its pollution and I have a bit of a hard time listening to its scions bitching because he bit the hand that feeds. 

It's not that I don't recognize the threat that beast poses to anything remotely resembling individual liberty, it's just that I fail to see what makes his brand of blunt force fascism any more destructive than what his opponents wield behind a rainbow curtain. 

After all, last time I checked, Barack Obama deported more migrants, built more prisons, and shredded more pages of the Constitution than two Trumps sown together, and he did it all with a benevolent poker face that earned him a Nobel Peace Prize while he murdered brown babies with drone strikes in Pakistan. But, somehow, none of that was an existential threat to democracy.

That's because Democrats and neocons don't give a flying fuck about democracy. What they care about is empire or more specifically, dressing empire in the festive drag of democracy. And it is this carefully choreographed charade that Trump is a threat to because his pathological pomposity pushes him to lead this death star we call a republic like Caligula in bronzer. The only thing particularly exceptional about Trump's last four-year tirade in the White House was the messy ineptitude that defined it. This is the only reason why Washington insiders cringe at the possibility of a second term for Orange-Man-Stupid.

While the deep state uses its economic clout to quietly harass the European members of NATO into allowing tanks in the Louvre parking lot, Trump crashes into Brussels with his fly down and his filthy little hand out, barking "Where's the money, Frenchy!" 

While the deep state prefers to discreetly shuffle migrant children from one police state depot to another in the dead of night, Trump screams racist obscenities and turns Obama-built concentration camps into highly publicized human zoos. 

While the deep state uses the fine print on peace deals to carefully police the half-hearted nuclear ambitions of Israel's rivals, Trump unilaterally rips them up and offers up Jerusalem like a pudding while the rest of the neighborhood plots revenge.

This is the real reason why the Donald is so despised by his fellow swamp critters, he's a pathologically unhinged glutton who makes the most exceptional empire in the history of mankind look like a grubby crew cut from The Sopranos for wearing too many gold medallions over their blood-soaked tracksuits. This is also the reason why this Gambino clown show actually frightens me less than most of his rivals and I'm a goddamn genderqueer rape survivor living on the rural fringe of a fucking swing state. 

However, after four years of the Democratic Party's grand restoration of imperial order, I remain as endangered and marginalized as I did under Orange-Man-Stupid, and I'm supposed to vote for a tranny bashing cop like Kamala to save me from the knuckle-draggers at MAGA inc. Kiss my Queer ass.

And I know what you're going to say to scare the living vote out of me. "Project 2025 is coming! Project 2025 is coming!" Let me tell you something about Project 2025. The Big Bad Wolf in this admittedly nefarious plot by the Heritage Foundation to "institutionalize Trumpism" is Schedule F, an executive order that could hypothetically allow the president to fire as many as 50,000 members of the federal bureaucracy and replace them with Bible flinging zealots. But presidents already have the ability to make 4,000 political appointments and Donald Trump couldn't even do that in four years.

In fact, Orange-Man-Stupid couldn't seem to stop firing his own pea-brained flunkies for not licking his unwashed taint in the style he had become accustomed to. If this motherfucker ever actually got his shit together long enough to restaff the federal government, that racist colossus would become so clogged with pro-wrestlers and Proud Boys that it would cease to function, which means the FBI might miss its quota for framing Muslim kids online and demonizing sex workers as human traffickers. 

Oh, the humanity, someone please send me a savior! I'll vote for anything to save me from the threat of a government that hates me in chaos!

Of course, there are still plenty of good reasons to be terrified of Donald Trump. His plans to further militarize ICE and the Border Patrol to carry out the largest mass deportation since Josef Stalin is a massive injection of steroids to the police state's buttocks that could easily threaten all of us and God knows if Tom Cotton gets within arm's reach of the Button, we're all as good as vapor. 

However, in accordance with America's national sickness known as the lesser of two evils, Donald Trump, in all his grotesque glory, still looks like a lesser to me when compared to his prim and proper alternative. I made a similarly sacrilegious argument way back in 2016 when it was Donald V. Hillary with something that I like to call the Multiple Miggs Defense in reference to the horror classic, Silence of the Lambs. 

Upon her arrival to Dr. Frederick Chilton's insane asylum in Baltimore, Special Agent Clarice Starling found herself face to face with a bevy of monsters but two stood out from the rest. The first, Multiple Miggs, a semen flinging madman climbing the bars and belching crude expletives. The second, Hannibal Lecter, a neat, polite, and almost impossibly still gentleman with something terrifying sparkling just behind his glassy eyes.

If you were to ask Clarice upon her first encounter with these creatures, she would likely declare Hannibal to be the lesser evil, especially after he gently convinces Miggs to swallow his own tongue after becoming insulted by his lack of decorum towards their guest. But Clarice would be dead wrong. The question here isn't which candidate is less gross than the other, it's who you would rather have manning a fucking battleship, an unhinged rapist like Multiple Miggs or a formidable sociopath with elaborate elocution like Doctor Lecter. 

In 2012, Hillary felt like a clear stand-in for Lecter with her long record of manipulating rapacious imbeciles like her own husband into destabilizing the planet with massive war crimes. In 2024, Donald Trump is still very much Multiple Miggs, but Kamala Harris is much more like the snide and sinister Dr. Frederick Chilton, a vain and transparent civil servant with delusions of grandeur who has no lasting values and is completely unburdened by what has been.

Under these circumstances, who do you honestly think is more capable of navigating the Byzantinesque architecture of American power? Who do you think is more likely to allow themselves to be used as a glorified vessel by the fascist bureaucrats who actually know how to run this thing designed to compartmentalize a superstate built for genocide and slavery? 

I'm sorry, dearest motherfuckers, but everything that I have learned from Antonio Gramsci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Critical Race Theory tells me that Kamala is more dangerous to humanity than Trump.

I can just hear my progressive colleagues shouting from their peanut galleries with blood vessels bursting in their eyes, "She's mad! She's sick!" And I would readily concur with this conclusion if I actually bought into the Faustian cabaret that is the lesser of two evils. Only in a system this morally depraved would a semen slinging Nazi orangutan become a moral option for validation. 

Which is the other reason why I don't tremble in fear before the looming shadow of Orange-Man-Stupid. Because I tremble in fear before the looming shadow of the fraudulent democracy we are being compelled to protect from him.

Any system that could produce a creature as foul as Donald Trump and then allow just one lunatic the ability to abuse so many people for four years straight is not a democracy, and I refuse to vote for anyone who does not explicitly promise to dismantle such a machine.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon

* Up the Wolves by the Mountain Goats

* The Denial Twist by the White Stripes

* Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

* Mistress by Red House Painters

* Goodbye Horses by Lazarus Q

* I Wanna Be Your Dog by the Stooges

* Drain You by Nirvana

* Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Marilyn Manson

* Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon