Rethinking Antifascism in an Age of Constitutional Despotism

 America is supposed to be the greatest democracy on earth, right? I know this because we have at least fifty goddamn holidays a year shouting it at us from the night sky in burning lights. Still, I feel compelled to ask, because it only took five unelected judges to declare our president to be infallible and his Executive Office to be above the law. 

I speak of course about the first attempted criminal prosecution of an American president for his actions in office, in which the Supreme Court largely sided with one Donald J. Trump along partisan lines by declaring that the President of these great United States of America enjoys near absolute immunity for any crime which he or she deems to be an "official act." 

In the dissent to this absurd ruling, liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor summed up the likely results of the decision quite succinctly. "When "the President" uses his official power in any way, under the majority's reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy's Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organize a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune."

The conservative justices balked like braying gulls at high tide over the supposed hyperbole of this dissent but if anything, it doesn't go far enough. While Trump V. United States certainly makes it frighteningly clear that the White House is essentially a despotic device, this can only be construed as a revelation to someone who spends two thirds of the year hibernating two miles up their own asshole. 

In fact, it was actually under Donald Trump's much-beloved predecessor, Barack Obama, that the Executive Office was first officially awarded the authority to murder American citizens by decree through a shadowy drone strike program which has already been used to kill thousands of innocent civilians across the globe.

And when this extrajudicial assembly line of despotic slaughter was finally brought before a federal judge in 2016 by the ACLU in a lawsuit on behalf of three slain Americans, one of them a 16-year-old boy, the judge openly admitted that Obama likely violated the due process of a child but threw out the case anyway, spouting off about the sanctity of national security and executive power.

This is an absurdly despicable opinion which Mrs. Sotomayor herself apparently shares as she chose to defend herself from charges of hyperbole by fellow lifetime members of her unelected judicial junta by protesting that Trump was not "doing it like President Obama... to protect the country from terrorism, he's doing it for personal gain." 

This sick moral logic actually cuts right to the dark heart of liberal Trump hysteria. People like Sonya Sotomayor and her fellow dissenting judges aren't really frightened at all by the gross power wielded by the Executive Office, a power they all know and acknowledge is a matter of life and death. They are simply offended that an oafish lout like Donald Trump doesn't bother to shield his despotism with lofty peons to national security and the greater good.

This is because America has long been a fascist state that uses a scalped constitution like Buffalo Bill's "woman suit" to conceal its nasty bits, and this ghastly practice is far from unusual. While America certainly tucks its despotism with all the poise and skill of a world class drag queen, it is far from the first fascist state to use liberal democracy to facilitate its rise to absolute power. It's actually a pretty standard procedure in this trade and you can look no further than Nazi Germany for the blueprint.

After the November Revolution brought down the German Empire during the waning hours of the First World War, its military elites in the Freikorps and their bourgeoise industrialist patrons made a deal with the supposed liberal progressives in the Social Democratic Party to form a constitutional democracy provided that these Social Democrats sold out their more radical comrades and allowed the same elites they raged against to retain their status and power behind a more politically correct facade.   

For a while it worked, with the so-called Weimar Republic enjoying what at least held all the trappings of a very socially tolerant secular society. But the seeds of the Third Reich were sown right into the Republic's constitution which afforded its own executive office with the right to override the Reichstag through emergency decree with its infamous Article 48. 

The nation's first president, a Social Democrat named Friedrich Ebert, made regular use of this democratic device for despotism to keep the rabble in line, as did his predecessors, including Paul Von Hindenburg, whose presidency the SPD backed in the name of national unity and who paved the road to the Holocaust with democratic pavement by appointing Adolf Hitler as his chancellor. And how did young Hitler justify his proceeding attempted takeover of Europe? With a call for national security of course after the Reichstag burned down during his own little January 6.

None of this is coincidental nor anomalous. Nearly every fascist state is midwifed by a liberal democracy because both are little more than the playthings of the same greedy elites attempting to hoodwink the powerless while they rob them stupid. 

The one thing that the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany all had in common was that they all shared the exact same nest of conniving oligarchs running the show behind the curtains. Monied creeps who simply shifted the excuses to maintain their grip on power with different parties and ideologies. In fact, many of these vermin even helped the United States to "rebuild" the Europe they blew to bits as part of the newly liberal government of West Germany.

All of this is part of a cyclical process of degenerative statism that often begins with some kind of divinely inspired monarchy, matures into a more secular republic, and then embraces an openly militant call to despotism as its public begins to catch on to the charade, often before simply repeating the cycle all over again. 

The communists often refer to the fascistic stage of this process as "late capitalism" and their analysis of its liberal roots remains right on the money, but these Marxist historians also typically fail to recognize that state communism is merely another part of the same cruel process. After all, didn't Czarist Russia become a social democracy before the Bolsheviks crashed in to preserve the order by declaring the Comintern to be the new aristocracy until it was time for Stalin to play Further?

This isn't to say that fascism isn't a problem. Fascism is an existential threat to basic human dignity, but it will never be stopped until we address the fact that it is merely the inevitable end result of the state itself, a system defined by giving a single sainted class a monopoly on the use of force. Once that precedent is set with standing armies and "national security," fascism essentially becomes a forgone conclusion. Therefore, the only way to truly confront the fascist menace is to confront the state itself, specifically the police state, and the only thing that committed antifascists really need to do to achieve this goal is to maintain their tactics while shifting their focus.

Targeting hooligans like the Proud Boys or even just one single wannabe Further like Donald Trump is little more than an act of treating the symptoms of a much larger disease and it often actually only tends to provide that disease with more opportunities to justify its own existence by offering its aid in fighting its own symptoms. This is how you get a career white supremacist like Joe Biden running to save us all from Satan's power while beefing up the same police state that Trump sicked on peaceful protestors, only this time in the name of preventing MAGA extremism.

Antifascists should be infiltrating, sabotaging, and doxing the police state itself along with its corporate sponsors and their role models should be post-modern cyber revolutionaries like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, who have risked their lives to expose the guts of the fascist machine, as well as hacktivist sets like Anonymous who have actively sabotaged it. This can even be taken a step further by taking a page from counter economic pioneers like Ross Albricht, who gave us a sample of a viable alternative to corporate state subsistence with the black markets of his new Silk Road.

Despotism at its most cerebral is a very creative beast that will require equally creative solutions to destroy it. Covert fascists like Justice Sotomayor are actually far smarter than their conservative counterparts to conceal their despotism behind a veneer of liberal democracy but the power will always belong to the people who are just creative enough to realize that they are only as powerless as they believe they are. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* People Have the Power by Patti Smith

* Power to the People by John Lennon

* Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols

* Big Wheel by Samia

* Funny You Should Ask by the Front Bottoms

* The Bends by Radiohead

* White Riot by The Clash

* The Crying Game by Boy George

* Where is My Mind by the Pixies

* Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth

A Message to "Libertarians" Backing a Baby Killer to Spite Trans Kids

 It all began with a brazen and reckless pre-dawn raid in the desert wilds of Yemen. Seal Team 6 hit the ground shooting on the dusty streets of Yakla after lighting the village up with Reaper drones. The peasants put up a fight, one Seal was killed and two were wounded, but it was little use. By the time the sun rose on Yakla that morning it was strewn with body parts and smoldering in ashes. Among the dead were some 30 civilians including 8 women and 7 children, with the youngest slain by American heroes at the lethal age of 3 years old. 

But one victim of this onslaught stood out among the others. An 8-year-old American citizen named Nora al-Awlaki was the third member of her immediate family killed on military orders issued from on high with White House executive authority. Nora's father was the notorious Islamic propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, and in 2011 both he and her 16-year-old half-brother had been extrajudicially assassinated by drone strike within a week of one another under the orders of then-President Barack Obama.

Little Nora's own execution came under the orders of one Donald J. Trump however, at the end of that man's first week in the Oval Office in early January of 2017. She bled to death in agony in her mother's arms over a period of two hours while that knuckle-dragging fiend-in-chief gorged himself on Big Macs and Diet Cokes. Her last words were, "Don't cry, mama, I'm fine." 

And just like that, after less than one week in office, Donald Trump graduated from a sleezy, rapacious, corporate welfare queen to a full-blown baby killer. But anyone foolish enough to be shocked didn't have to dig deep to find that this brazenly cruel war crime was merely another campaign promise fulfilled. "The other thing with terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families." He had boasted vainly on the campaign trail. Mission accomplished.

But President Trump wasn't done killing babies in Yemen. In fact, he was just getting started. As Gulf State lobbyists carefully messaged his son-in-law's prostate, the Donald accelerated his predecessor's already genocidal proxy war on the poorest nation in the Arab Peninsula. With a little help from Trump's golf buddies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, he and Obama slaughtered 377,000 people by the end of Donald's first term in office. 60% of these people died from starvation and disease made possible by a US facilitated blockade and more than half of the dead were children under the age of five. Now this orange baby killer is back and he's calling to take Genocide Joe's own proxy war on the children of Gaza to new levels of unapologetic cruelty. 

Biden has already aided and abetted the hyper-Zionist government of Bibi Netanyahu in committing what might just barely surpass the massacre in Yemen as the most heinous act of genocide of the 21rst century. The official death count stands at nearly 40,000 in just under a year, with 15,000 of those bodies belonging to children but the Lancet has recently projected those numbers to be closer to 186,000 dead, and this apparently isn't heinous enough for Donald Trump. In fact, he has actually accused Genocide Joe of being a "bad Palestinian" and has promised to help his old cronies in Israel to "finish the job."

And somehow, this is the man that many members of the leadership of the Libertarian Party, my party, are lining up to offer their support too. The only thing more bizarre than a bunch of so-called anarchists and minarchists backing a man who quadrupled the deficit to put undocumented children in concentration camps is that they actually have a solidly non-interventionist candidate on the ballot, a 38-year-old gay antiwar activist named Chase Oliver. 

But according to the Mises Caucus who now runs the party, Oliver is too "woke" for libertarian consumption. Some of this is just sour grapes. After allowing Donald Trump to turn their biennial Libertarian National Convention in DC into a MAGA circus by awarding him the keynote speaking slot, the Mises Caucus managed to secure the Party Chair for another term for Angela Mcardle but failed to get their candidate, Michael Rectenwald, the party's presidential nomination.

However, poor losers aside, I find it a bit hard to ignore the fact that most of the people publicly rejecting Oliver's candidacy, often in favor of tacitly backing Trump, list the man's support for respecting the rights of parents with transgender children to make their own medical decisions first and foremost among his unforgivably "woke" sins.

This includes both the Montana and Colorado state Libertarian Parties who have declared that they will not even put Oliver's name on the ballot. Idaho is contemplating doing the same and Chairwoman Mcardle appears to be right there with them. In a post-convention video address, the head of my party's national leadership appeared in a clown nose before a rainbow backdrop and proceeded to faun over a man who spent more tax dollars than nearly any other president in history like a lovesick fangirl. 

"Donald Trump says he's going to put a Libertarian in a cabinet position. He came out and spoke to us. He said he's a libertarian. He has basically endorsed us." Mcardle gushed shamelessly before making her loyalties crystal clear. "And so, in return, I endorse Chase Oliver as the best way to beat Joe Biden. Get in loser, we are stopping Biden. That's what I think this campaign is about."

Speaking as a genderqueer libertarian antiwar activist, I dearly wish that any of this trash was shocking to me, and it probably should be. The GOP has been on a big government jihad against trans kids for years now, violating every civil liberty imaginable to erase them from existence. But the Mises Caucus and their leadership in the Libertarian Party have made their feelings about my community very clear. 

After skuttling an attempt to add support for the civil liberties of trans people to the party's platform earlier this year, a leaked internal party memo labeled "transgenderism" as a Cultural Marxist conspiracy that needs to be thwarted and sadly this line of bullshit jibes perfectly with many of the Mises Caucus' ideological torch bearers like Rectenwald and Mcardle who spout baseless conspiracy theories about puberty blockers chemically castrating children.

Please allow me to rip the needle from the record right now. Puberty blockers have been used safely for decades to treat precocious puberty in cis children. The Mayo Clinic has found them to cause little to no permanent physical changes, but studies have consistently shown them to reduce suicidality in one of the most vulnerable populations of young people in this country by as much as 73% and I'm not even asking you fucking people to grow up and support a medical treatment proven to be effective in saving lives. I am merely asking that my party stand by its goddamn word and support the right for Queer kids and their families to exist without having the jackboot of the state stepping on our throats.

I am asking you to keep the government out of our schools where they are banning books and policing public bathrooms. I am asking you to keep the government out of our doctor's offices where some states are trying to interfere with the medical decisions of individuals well into their twenties. And I am asking you to keep the government off our streets where states like Florida and Tennessee want to use anti-drag laws to penalize any gender performance that they deem to be "male and female impersonation." But more than anything, I want you to put shutting down the war machine that mangles other people's children like little Nora al-Awlaki before your culture war bullshit and this is what the Mises Caucus itself was supposed to be all about. 

Formed in 2017 in revulsion to the Libertarian Party putting a known neocon warmonger named Bill Weld up for VP on the 2016 ticket, Mises was supposed to be a revival of the anti-imperialist values of anarchists like Murray Rothbard who founded this party. I have good friends and loyal allies in this caucus, fellow radicals who share my revulsion for compulsory schooling and my support for secession, both of which I view as indispensable tools for Queer liberation. 

But over the last few years I have seen this caucus polluted by the braindead talking points of Christian Zionist globalists and this is the other objective of the GOP's war on trans, to use cultural prejudices to hoodwink well-intentioned isolationist populists into supporting big government, baby killing scum like Donald Trump.

Sadly, it appears to have worked and this is why this post should not be misconstrued as an endorsement for Chase Oliver or any other candidate. A decade ago, I would have been happy to endorse this fatherfucker for the same reasons that I would have been happy to endorse Ron Paul or Eugene Debs for that matter. Because I would have wanted the most unapologetically antiwar candidate to have the loudest microphone that I could throw them. But in 2024, American presidential elections aren't even affective for protest votes. The process itself has become a device for dividing oppressed people of every stripe against each other.

Before the GOP's war on woke, I had no problem building alliances among even the most culturally conservative libertarians. Now, my own party treats me like a fucking pedophile because I want to keep other trans girls from getting molested in men's bathrooms like I was, and because I need to stop my government from killing any more children, whether their name is Nora al-Awlaki or Nex Bennedict.

If this is what democracy looks like, then I am done with fucking democracy and the morons it plays like one of Donald Trump's cheap casino games. 

You people can vote for whoever the fuck you want but don't you dare go calling your appeasement for genocide at home and abroad libertarian or I'll kick your fucking ass.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* (I'm) Screwed by Titus Andronicus

* See No Evil by Television

* All I Do by Bully

* Lexicon Devil by the Germs

* Someone Tell the Boys by Samia

* Blank Generation by Richard Hell & the Voivods

* Fatal Flaw by Titus Andronicus

* My War by Black Flag

* Bored by Waxahatchee

* The Mess Inside by the Mountain Goats

Every American War is Bullshit: Exposing the Myth of the 'Good War'

 America has a problem but don't worry, because we can stop anytime we want. I speak of course of America's bottomless appetite for warfare, the fact that we can't seem to go fifteen minutes without lighting up a third world country like a fucking spliff. But this doesn't make us addicts, we just like to fuck around and blow shit up once in a while to let off some steam after a long day. I mean, we quit Afghanistan after like twenty years and we kind of quit Iraq. We could totally go cold turkey and put America first if we wanted too. 

But let's just send a few more bombs to Ukraine first. And maybe just one more drone strike in Somalia, you know, for old times' sake. And then maybe just a quick invasion of Haiti and another freedom of navigation drill in the South China Sea and a few more sanctions on North Korea and a couple more NATO members and another base in Okinawa and a quick quagmire in Yemen and a few more child soldiers in Rojava and just one goddamn holocaust in the Holy Land, maybe two, or three, or five, or fuck it, give us World War Three!

OK, so maybe America has a tiny little addiction. Oh, let's just face it, we're fucking war junkies, Sid and Nancy grade shit, sucking off Raytheon behind the missile silo for just one last fix. But as long as we're having this moment of clarity here, why don't we just put it all on the table right now. We may be an empire of fiends who crave war crimes like a baby craves tits, but this is far from a new condition, and we are all infected. Even your average marching pacifist in this country seems to view America's appetite for destruction as little more than an aberration in an otherwise stoic national history and every so-called non-interventionist seems to carry room in their heart for at least one exception that proves the rule. That one good war, you know, the one where we played the good guys for real and saved the day for just one bright shining moment.

But this is all bullshit. Every single American war has been bullshit. They all come with different excuses and some of them are pretty goddamn convincing but every major conflict that this country has ever engaged in has been motivated by greed and power, and every single war we've fought has ended the exact same way, with piles of bodies, fewer civil rights, and a growing thirst for more.

Even our so-called Revolution, which so many otherwise peaceful libertarians hold in such high regard, was little more than another blood thirsty power grab. Let me be frank here, even I can get behind a good old-fashioned grass roots revolution as an act of societal self-defense, but the idea that you can have any kind of real revolution on illegally occupied territory is absurd. The American Revolution was really more of a colonial mutiny. A bunch of slave-trading Indian killers got tired of kicking up to the Crown and after catching wind that the British were making moves to curtail some of their slave trading and Indian killing, they went all Colonel Kurtz on their ass and declared their encampment to be a sovereign nation.

"But what about the Civil War?" I can hear some bright young social justice warrior call out from the back row. Surely, the fight to free the slaves is an exception, and maybe it would have been if that bloodbath was actually motivated by slavery. Don't get me wrong, the Confederacy was a racist cartel of genocidal scumbags who seceded specifically so they could keep buying, selling, raping, and killing human property. But the Union didn't give one solitary fuck about the slaves, and they pretty openly admitted as much on multiple occasions. 

Abraham Lincoln himself was an outspoken white supremacist and he and pretty much all of his Republicans whole heartedly endorsed the original 13th Amendment, passing it in both the Senate and the House, which explicitly prohibited the federal government from interfering with southern slavery and served as a much-touted justification by Dixie to secede on constitutional grounds. The South may have been motivated by slavery, but the North was motivated by consolidating their power and fortifying the Executive Office. The biggest results of that slaughterhouse, aside from millions of dead bodies, was the suspension of Habeas Corpus and the transplanting of Black bodies from the agrarian chattel slavery of the plantation to the industrial wage slavery of the factory. Frederick Douglass himself proclaimed in horror that he couldn't tell the difference, but the industrialists who lined Lincoln's pockets sure as fuck could.

And then of course we have our sainted World Wars, where America the indispensable saved humanity from fascism in the name of world peace and global democracy. Yeah, sorry progressives, but that's just more imperial bullshit. The First World War was a senseless imperial clusterfuck with a bunch of antiquated empires like France, Germany, Russia, and the UK clawing each other's eyes out over their dwindling spheres of influence. After about three years of this shit, everybody involved was pretty much ready to call it quits and negotiate a settlement. Then Woodrow Wilson jumped into the mosh pit to keep the bloodbath running so he could achieve his dream of establishing America as a progressive global superpower and use his massive new war powers to reorganize the economy beneath a cartel of massive corporations while simultaneously reorganizing the Constitution beneath an engorged police state.

That white devil also set the stage for the next World War by putting all the debt from the first one on Germany with the Treaty of Versailles. But wasn't America attacked at Pearl Harbor? Technically, yes, but FDR and his thugs went out of their way to make this attack inevitable, goading the Japanese with a crippling oil embargo, shaming their Diet when they visited Washington to negotiate, and placing the US Pacific Fleet on their doorstep by relocating it to the recently colonized territory of Hawaii. Germany never would have declared war on the US if it wasn't for Pearl Harbor. Hitler had already basically lost the war in Stalingrad and was actually pretty committed to avoiding stretching himself any thinner in the Atlantic.

But the US wanted to finish what Wilson started. So, once again, we jumped into another imperial bloodbath between dueling monsters at the last minute to cravenly poach the spoils of war and we did so with a campaign of shocking terrorist attacks designed to send a message to the world that we were the Nazis now. Entire cities were torched to the ground in massive napalm attacks. 100,000 people in Tokyo, another 600,000 in Hamburg, Dresden, and Cologne. By 1945, Japan was begging for a peace deal, but we dropped two nuclear bombs on them anyway just to make sure that Stalin got the message. 

Sound like a pretty good fucking war to you?

Over the decades, the battlefields and the boogeymen kept changing but the results were always the same. Another 4 million people burnt alive in Korea, another 5 million in Vietnam, dictators and death squads and mujahadeen armed to the teeth and trained in butchery, all in the name of fighting the evils of communism. But then communism falls, and we start more wars with those same dictators and death squads and mujahadeen. The so-called War on Terror creates another killing field for another 4.7 million bodies and America gets bigger, our corporations get richer, and our police state becomes more severe.

Enough! Enough bullshit wars already. America needs to end this demented addiction before it ends us all in a nuclear overdose. The first step isn't just admitting that we have a problem. The first step is ripping up the toxic mythology of the good war and admitting that we've always had a fucking problem, that war itself is the problem. The only good excuse for violence is self-defense and you can't defend yourself when you are constantly crashing someone else's property. It's time for a different kind of intervention. It's time for dope-sick Americans to join the rest of the world in defending ourselves from the disease of American imperialism. And it all starts with us finally admitting that every American war is bullshit.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Killing in the Name Of by Rage Against the Machine

* Just One Fix by Ministry

* Big Empty by Stone Temple Pilots

* I'm Waiting for the Man by the Velvet Underground

* Sick of Myself by Matthew Sweet

* Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth by the Dandy Warhols

* Head On by the Jesus and Mary Chain

* Faith Healer by Julien Baker

* Hit So Hard by Hole

* You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory by Johnny Thunders

Smash the Fourth and Make America Tribal Again

 If there is just one thing left that quite literally everyone in this country can agree on this Independence Day, it is the indisputable fact that there is something profoundly wrong with America and it's not hard to see why. 

America is a country where the economy can be a booming success while the middle class evaporates and the rest of us starve in the streets. America is a country with a colossal dystopian police state that continues to expand with the full support of both parties even while their own federal agents admit that crime is on the decline. America is a country that maintains a phalanx of nuclear armed bases on nearly every continent on earth while playing the role of the victim to second string despots like Vladimir Putin and the Ayatollah. And America is a country eagerly fueling increasingly gruesome proxy wars on those lesser bullies' doorsteps in places like Ukraine and Gaza just so a few oligarchs can sling missiles to duplicitous baby butchers like Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelensky.

But perhaps what's most disturbing of all is that America is also a country with a population who seems to be very well aware that their government is becoming dangerously dysfunctional and despotic but has resigned itself to the role of hapless observers, watching the fire crawl closer and closer to the city limits from their smart phones while resting their dwindling hopes on whichever presidential candidate seems less likely to rape their children this week. 

Yes indeed, dearest motherfuckers, there is certainly something quite profoundly wrong with America. I and the various radicals who I collude with have been saying this for some time now and while we all seem to agree that this nation needs something a bit stronger than anything our demented electoral duopoly has to offer, we all seem to have very divergent theories on how to save this country. 

Most of my fellow libertarians seem to be convinced that if we simply return to the vision that this nation's Founding Fathers painted in the Constitution, we could arrest the despotic powers of the federal government and return to a state defined by natural law. Meanwhile, my former comrades on the far left rest their hopes largely on turning America into a multicultural workers' paradise by transforming that same federal government into a bludgeon to be wielded by the proletariat against the rich.

While I personally find both of these theories to be rather charming in their own ways, I can't help but to feel like both of them miss the most fundamental problem at the heart of our downright apocalyptic age even though it's standing dressed in dripping blood and a goddamn hockey mask right in front of them. 

There is absolutely something profoundly wrong with America and that something is the basic existential fact that America itself is profoundly wrong and it always has been. There were no glory days of bread and roses for this country. There is no chapter where it all went wrong. The men who founded this country were despicable fiends and they found this country for the express purpose of doing despicably fiendish things. America is not an institution designed for liberty or social justice. Quite the contrary, it is a merciless murder machine designed for subjugation and annihilation.

Over 4 million Indians were slaughtered during the first two centuries of this nation's existence and they weren't systematically annihilated to build a playground for free markets or organized labor. This vast nation was hollowed out to make room for the greatest slave cartel in human history. More than 15 million men, women, and children were the direct victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade with as many as 60 million dying as a result of its putrid existence in both Africa and the New World. 

Two massive dueling holocausts define this nation's very existence and nearly every one of our precious Founding Fathers was complicit in one or both of these tragedies with the revolution that gave America its independence playing a major role in the conspiracy.

For all its own atrocities, the British Empire made a couple of desperate attempts in the late 18th century to reign in an increasingly rogue American colony that they feared might destabilize their international dominance. In 1763 they made a proclamation that colonists could push no further westward into Indian Territory and in 1772 the Empire declared slavery to be incompatible with English common law which resulted in the freedom of some 15,000 slaves living in England.

Both of these decisions threatened to cripple the ill-gotten wealth of fatted colonial oligarchs like Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, so they threw in their sordid lot with the Minutemen while corralling them beneath a single constitution that fettered their Declaration of Independence and explicitly guaranteed America's future as a land of rape and honey. 

And it was all a downhill sprint to the ninth circle of Ozymandias from there. America's grotesque police state which continues to define its leadership at home is a direct descendant of the law and order of chattel slavery while the gore fueled war machine that defines its reign of terror on the world stage is the direct progeny of Manifest Destiny. In other words, these aren't the aberrations of an otherwise benevolent republic. These founding sins are what defines this nation's very existence and they continue to inform that beast's slouching crawl toward inevitable imperial collapse.

So, how then do we save this perilous nation? Here's a truly radical notion, how about we don't. Let's stop wasting our time on bullshit elections and historical revisionism and just pull the plug on a machine that has never represented anything resembling moral decency and never will. We can achieve this goal by quite simply dropping out of the American nightmare. The left libertarian radical, Samuel Edward Konkin III, had the right idea with Agorism. American radicals of every stripe should build a grey market counter economy that can simultaneously starve this evil government of tax revenue while denying its corporate masters of their profits with a diverse network of homestead agriculture and bootleg swag.

As the American juggernaut grows weaker, we can take this strategy a step further by embracing a policy of pan-secession in which every conceivable polity can essentially become its own nation provided that any group of its citizens is free to follow their lead. In other words, the People's Republic of Pennsylvania is free to leave the Union so long as the Amish Dutchy of Lancaster is free to leave the People's Republic of Pennsylvania and so on and so on...

And the greatest thing about this solution is that it doesn't require a massive and diverse population of radicals to adhere to any one radical ideology. My fellow libertarians are free to write a constitution that actually reflects the values of natural law for any population who consents to be governed by it and my former comrades on the far left can build a totally voluntary worker's paradise right next door, while I'm free to tell them both to politely fuck off so I can build my own Queer little pirate utopia that embraces the best of both worlds in doublewide republic on their border.

If America has any legacy left worth preserving, it's that of a vast and ungovernable land where outlaws fled long before the white man to start over and try something weird in the wilderness. This dream has defined every wild tribe of fantastic savages from the Seminole Nation to the Mormon Deseret. My radical theory is that they were all right because no single ideology can possibly govern a truly free people. No single constitution can ever represent every generation. So, let's stop trying to preserve the unsustainably counterrevolutionary and embrace something that's both brand new and far older. Let's smash the state and make America tribal again.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Game Shows Change Our Lives by the Mountain Goats

* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

* Bleed American by Jimmy Eat World

* Fourth of July by X

* Rockin' in a Free World by Neil Young

* Young Americans by David Bowie

* All My Little Words by the Magnetic Fields

* Looking for America by Lana Del Rey

* A More Perfect Union by Titus Andronicus

From Stonewall to Blair Mountain: A Rant in Defense of Riots

 Once upon a time, in a village called Greenwich, there was a dingey little bar called Stonewall where several shades of queens and dykes used to hang out, get lit, and get their rocks off. It wasn't much to look at, just a punchy little hole in the wall run by the Genovese Crime Family on the Queer end of Manhattan. The truth is, there were actually a lot of Stonewalls. They came and went, popping up here and there only to be crushed by the cis-het state for this reason or that. 

However, in June of 1969, this Stonewall was a temporary autonomous zone, a shitty little pirate utopia for the most marginalized members of the Queer community; a dizzy hodgepodge of drag queens, bulldykes, trannies, twinks, hustlers, and street kids, most of them Black and brown, extras cut from a Lou Reed song for forgetting to shave their legs that mourning. But they were family and, for fifteen minutes, Stonewall was their home.

Then the pigs came. The pigs always came. Aggressive, sexually confused white men with no necks, limp dicks, and square haircuts. Nasty, role-crazy, civil servants hitting up any place misfits dared to call home for their "gayola," a dirty wad of cash the mob would pay these glorified welfare scroungers just to fuck off for a few weeks. 

And when the pigs didn't get what they wanted they took what they wanted. Throwing teenage runaways up against the wall and thrusting their grimy hands up their skirts. Beating us. Raping us. Locking us up for crossdressing and then beating and raping us some more. But something happened when the pigs came to Stonewall in late June 1969. The queens and dykes said enough.

You can call it a riot. You can call it an uprising. You can call it a rebellion. I call it an ass whooping and it was well deserved and a long time coming. After the Public Morals Squad of the NYPD attempted to trap about 200 Queers inside the Stonewall Inn, a small army of their comrades slowly swelled outside the bar. 

A stone cold butch bulldyke and Black buck drag king named Storme DeLarverie threw the first punch. In fact, she threw the first twenty, taking on multiple pigs at once for nearly ten minutes straight before being cracked wide open by a truncheon with her fists chained behind her back. Bloody but unbowed, Storme barked to her people, "Why don't you guys do something?" as she was being crammed into a police cruiser. So, we did something.

The crowd of irate Queers, which now outnumbered the pigs by several hundred, armed themselves with bricks from a nearby construction site and rained down hell on the invading army in blue. When those ham-fisted cowards barricaded themselves in the bar, our bar, with a bevy of handcuffed hostages in tow, this spontaneous Queer army tore out a parking meter, turned it into a battering ram, and burned that motherfucker down. 

More pigs came, tactical patrol forces with their helmets and tax-funded, "less than lethal" toys. The Queers met them with a kicking chorus line, and when the pigs failed to get the joke, when they failed to get that they were now the fucking joke, we kicked their pink asses black and blue, up and down Christopher Street, until they literally ran home screaming for their lives.

I wasn't there. I wasn't even born yet. But I say 'we' because a movement was born that night, a movement that literally saved my life and the lives of so many other strange, beautiful things raped and ravaged by a state designed by satanic cunts who call themselves Christians to confine the individual in a jar with no holes in the lid. I, like many others, would have suffocated there, broken and alone, if a few pissed-off queens and dykes hadn't said enough at Stonewall and detonated the closet. 

The assimilationist Homophile Movement had been begging breeders politely to abuse us a little more softly for decades and achieved nothing. It took a riot to wake this country and gather its broken toys into an army and I'm tired of pretending that this act of vengeance was anything but justly violent and absolutely fucking necessary.

I have been a part of the antiwar movement in this country for nearly as long as I've been Queer. I have opposed every imperial bloodbath that this country has ever partaken in, including literally every war since I was born screaming in the wrong gender almost 19 years to the day after the Stonewall uprising. 

From Panama to the Persian Gulf to the former Yugoslavia and back to the Gulf again, from Afghanistan to Libya to Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, and Gaza, I despise war like I despise my dick, but I am not a pacifist. I am a rare post-left student of the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle, which opposes all initiatory violence, including taxation and carceral confinement. But there was nothing initiatory about Stonewall and it wasn't the first or the last popular uprising necessary to defend the public from the oppression of the state in this country. 

Every single chickenshit privilege that we call a right in this nation was taken by force in uprisings frequently labeled as riots. There would have been no eight-hour workday or five-day workweek if it wasn't for the West Virginia Coal Wars that forced Washington to send in the National Guard to put down the largest uprising since the Civil War at Blair Mountain in 1921. And we might have held onto a few of those hours too if we had kept fighting instead of joining the federal government with FDR's duplicitous New Deal. 

Every single civil rights act pushed through by liberal progressives like the Kennedys and LBJ was a desperate attempt to extinguish the growing fires of the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s, with the patron saint of pacifism, MLK himself, often using the specter of looming Black Power to bring white power to the table and the riots inspired by his assassination spooking forward the last of these congressional pay offs.

The antiwar movement itself achieved its greatest victories, pausing the draft and ending the Vietnam War, with a rash of riotous behavior that spanned from the campuses of this nation's finest universities to the jungle bases where LBJ drafted Black ghetto rebels to kill for Uncle Sam. The Pentagon estimated that 3% of its officers killed in Vietnam between the years of 1961 and 1972 had been fragged by their own GIs with their acts of incendiary insubordination peaking between 1969 and 1971 with 730 known incidents. 

And this war against war was mirrored back home with at least 174 antiwar bombings occurring on campus during the school year of 1969-1970 alone. Long story short, the only reason why we aren't still killing babies in Indochina to this day is because the Pentagon believed it may have cost them the entire empire and it probably should have.

This isn't to say that violence is the only answer. Far from it. Every single one of these riots and insurrections was furthered by the tireless work of non-violent activists who provided the status quo with proof of a peaceful alternative to the violent lifestyle that their system made inevitable and many of those uprisings also include cases of good people taking direct action too far. 

What we need is a diverse and tempered movement open to all non-initiatory tactics available to affect change. But in an increasingly despotic nation engaged in dueling genocides directed at both trans kids and their siblings in Palestine, pacifism practiced as a dogmatic religion is complacent at best and complicit at worst.

The sad fact of the matter is that the only way poor people have ever been afforded any real and lasting peace in this country is with a brick in one hand and a flower in the other. This empire has smashed enough fag bars and refugee camps. It's time to make like my Queer elders and smash back.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

* All Born Screaming by St. Vincent

* Rise Above by Black Flag

* Rock & Roll by the Velvet Underground

* $20 by Boygenius

* Down Rodeo by Rage Against the Machine

* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones

* Fuck tha Police by NWA

* Police Truck by Dead Kennedys

* Riot Rhythm by Sleigh Bells

This post is dedicated in loving memory to Tom Plotts, a loyal friend, ferocious ally, benevolent dope fiend, and one of my favorite dearest motherfuckers in the history of dearest motherfuckerdom. This world is a shithole without you, brother. Catch you on the other side.

The Real Queer Conspiracy Against Western Civilization

 It may have taken me decades of careful introspection to find myself amidst the wreckage of decades of institutional trauma, but it seems like every other asshole on the right has my gender identity all figured out the moment they clock me in as trans. I was pretty fucking sure that this was an intensely intimate issue defined by the complex interactions between biology and culture but according to amateur genderologists like Matt Walsh and those fine young libertarians in the Mises Caucus, my entire existence and that of millions of others can be boiled down to a single ideology and that ideology is some kind of convoluted Marxist conspiracy to erode traditional American values and destroy the very fabric of Western Civilization itself.

While these paranoid fabulists clearly need to cut down a bit on their steady diet of rainwater and grain alcohol, they actually aren't totally off base. Those stuffy breeders in the Frankfurt School may not have known a tranny from a drag queen if one fucked them in the ass but Third World Marxist movements like Black Power and Aztlán had a profound and tragically under sung influence on the modern Queer Liberation Movement and this is nothing to be ashamed of. Movements to expand revolutionary consciousness frequently empower one another simply by expanding beyond each other's designated boundaries and blurring the lines that once superficially separated them.

When Stokely Carmicheal boldly reclaimed Blackness as a concept defined by empowered otherness and Chicano firebrands like Oscar Zeta Acosta followed suit, Black and brown Queer folk like Marsha P. Jonhson and Sylvia Rivera were paying attention. And when the streets got wild from Watts to Detroit, it was these gender outlaws of color who decided to bring that same fire to roast the pigs at Stonewall.

At their heart, the Third World consciousness movements of the sixties and seventies were defined by colonized people struggling to recover what was stolen from them by generations of annihilation and assimilation. It was about building new cultures informed by what shreds remained of the old and this is what today's straight white conservative culture war "experts" remain totally blind to. 

While Marxist concepts on class oppression may have strongly informed our approach, much like Afrocentricity and Aztlan, Queerness is a construct defined by a decidedly conservative yearning for traditional values, our traditional values. We are a people in search of a home and this home can still be found if you blow the dust from the right history books.

Long before there was any need for concepts like Queerness and Blackness, the planet was divided into a diverse array of tribal ecosystems, each with its own classes, genders, gods, and spoken histories. While defined by diversity, gender fluidity was rife throughout these primitive cultures. Across nearly every continent, archeologists have found evidence of third genders existing amongst thousands of tribal cultures for thousands of years, from the Iron Age grave markings of Persian antiquity to the Bronze Age figurative art of Ancient Greece.

Many of these traditions relied on unwritten oral histories but some of them still survive to this day and many of those who don't were recorded by the vicars and conquistadors who annihilated them to make room for their pseudo-Christian imperial new world order. Over 100 third genders were observed to have existed in North America alone during the age of first contact and they were far from the only ones. 

In Africa you had the Ashtami of the Maale in Ethiopia and the Oracles of Mukura of the Ankele in Uganda. In the South Pacific we still have the ancient Maha of Hawaii's Kanaka Mauli and the Fa'afafine of Samoa. The Incans had the Quariwarmi, the Ancient Sumerians had the gender bending servants of Inanna and Rome had the transgender priestesses known as the Galli.

This is my culture and not only is it older than Western Civilization, but Western Civilization is what razed it in the name of modernity and progress. Christianity may have been the weapon Rome used to cull us, but it was merely one of countless spiritual traditions of the ancient world that the Ceasars plucked from the Garden of Eden and stripped of its indigenous divinity in order to use it as a battering ram for the real enemy of traditional divinity, the state and its debauched mutant progeny, empire. This is what destroyed a thousand tribal identities and decimated their people to the point of requiring revolutionary recycling projects like Black Power and Queer Liberation.

And this is what women and gender outlaws have been attempting to revive through populist pagan reform movements like Wicca and Asatru for decades, a spiritual consciousness that reflects our own diverse and ignored personal experiences. Conservative pagans will often take such communities to task for failing their historical purity tests, but the point here isn't that any single tribal tradition is morally superior to Christianity or capitalism. The point is that many tribal traditions will always be morally superior to any single tribal tradition because humanity is far too diverse and complex to be homogenized in a single melting pot without that cooking implement becoming a genocidal charnel.

The transgender ideology, if any single one exists, is not a symptom of modern decadence. It is an act of resistance against it. So, you are goddamn right that we are at war with your precious civilization but that is only because what you call traditional American values remain an existential threat to any truly indigenous tribal society, new or old. In other words, it is not the Queer Liberation Movement that is modern and decadent, it is the vapid globalist monstrosity of the American Empire. A soulless monolithic corporate culture actively working to transform Queerness into just another brand like Marxism and Christianity.

But I still believe that it is in fact Queer people, and Black people and Chicano people, who must lead a new struggle against state sanctioned modernity with a revival of truly traditional values like communalism and diversity beneath the banner of a bold new primitivism, not just because it has always been the 'others' of the lumpenproletariat who have carried the fire of revolution, from Amistad to Stonewall, but because revival is the only way forward for all of us in a world where the past has been ravaged by imperial conquest.

It isn't just the traditionally marginalized who have been throttled into submission by imperial homogeny. It is the Irish and the Italians and the Polish and the Germans and all the other cultures erased by toxic modern concepts like race, gender, church, and state. Western Civilization has stripped us all of our traditions and movements like mine have found a way to revive them by embracing a culture of resistance through decentralized tribal diversity.

This is my transgender ideology, a form of Queer post-civ panarchism beyond left and right. But I'm not here to recruit you, I'm here to encourage you to rebuild your own tribe so that together we can build a thousand tribes, too diverse to be governed by any single power, civilization be dammed.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* All I Really Want by Alannis Morrissette

* Describe by Perfume Genius

* Ocean Size by Jane's Addiction

* We Oh We by the Hidden Cameras

* Territorial Pissings by Nirvana

* Satanist by Boygenius

* Teenage Riot by Sonic Youth

* Ziggy Stardust by Bauhaus

* What's the Frequency, Kenneth by REM

* Hot Topic by Le Tigre

Schooled Straight: Confronting the Cis Hetero Compulsory School System

 “Humankind is innocent, loving, and creative, you dig? It's the bureaucracies that create the evil, that make Honor and Community impossible, and it's the kids who really take it in the groin.”

-Paul Goodman

Well, it's another Pride Month and the so-called Christian Right's increasingly statist culture war against Queer folk just continues to rage on with the reckless abandon of a runaway bushfire. And why the fuck not? It keeps the faithful stupid and the coffers heavy with their money, so let the hate legislation burn! None of this shocks me. I'm a genderqueer lapsed Catholic in cousin-fucker country, I grew up being terrorized by these goons. But what does disgust me is the way these cretins have targeted children, specifically trans kids, and the way they use the compulsory school system to do it.

2024 will be the fourth consecutive year in a row in which the sheer volume of anti-Queer bills being pushed across the country will shatter the record books. Less than halfway into the year and there have already been 38 of these bills passed and another 579 being considered. Most of these bills will likely fail to do anything but terrorize one of the most statistically vulnerable demographics in the country, but too many of them have already given the public school system a new set of fangs.

Seven states have laws in place that affectively silence any classroom discussion that acknowledges that Queer people actually exist. Eleven states have laws denying trans kids access to bathrooms where they won't face the kind of mob violence that killed Nex Bennedict this year. And seven states have laws demanding that school officials violate the privacy of their students by outing them to their parents.

The strategy here, beyond the economics of crass political football, isn't hard to discern. It's a strategy pretty familiar to the American school system. Kill the Queer, save the child. These people see "transgenderism" as a contagion that should be eradicated, and they have been proven to be more than willing to use the strong arm of the state to strain it from impure children by any means necessary. This strategy can only be accurately described as a form of social genocide and with the suicide rate amongst its targeted demographic already through the roof, this slaughter is becoming increasingly literal.

Many mainstream LGBTQ people and their sundry liberal allies are attempting to push back with their own legislation seeking to make the public school system more inclusive. Washington has recently become the seventh state to enact legislation actually mandating that public schools incorporate some form of LGBTQ-inclusive curricula, and the Biden Administration is attempting to revise Title IX to protect Queer kids from sex discrimination. This all sounds wonderful on the surface, but I've received way too many false promises from straight white liberals with blood in their veneers to believe that the very system designed to crush us is suddenly going to become our salvation.

Title IX is actually the ultimate proof of this fickle duplicity. In this dwindling plutocratic empire, a law passed to be a civil rights act is just as easily transformed into a weapon of bigotry depending on whatever demographic the current breeder in the White House happens to be pandering too. Donald Trump used this same law to affect a nationwide bathroom apartheid system in order to protect the civil rights of cis parents who didn't want their kids' sharing bathrooms with designated perverts and he has promised the Bible thumpers back in cousin-fucker country that he'll do it again if they just vote to make Israel great again.

The cold hard reality is that systems designed for oppression cannot be reformed and the compulsory school system itself is one of the most heinous examples of this fact in recorded history. Despite what the liberal teachers' unions may tell you, public schools have never been bastions of inclusion and tolerance, they are in fact an invention of the original Christian Right, designed specifically for indoctrination and assimilation.

Compulsory schooling has its origins in the Protestant Reformation, with Martin Luther himself envisioning a system in which Christian education would be forced upon children in a fashion similar to the way that the draft forced war upon their fathers. The first public schools were established in Germany during the 14th century under heavy Lutheran influence and would become the seed for the militant compulsory school system of the Prussian Empire which would itself serve as the template for nearly all the public-school systems that followed across the west and beyond.

The Prussian school system was explicitly devised to create a compliant citizenry groomed from an early age into submitting their will to authority with a strict regimen of harshly enforced rules built around a centrally controlled curriculum. It worked. This system helped turn Prussia into an imperial military powerhouse by subjecting generations of children to the same kind of disciplinary indoctrination usually reserved for prisons and boot camps, and the line of morally blind nationalism that it fostered is commonly acknowledged to have created the foundation for the rise of national socialism. It also created the foundation for the American public school system.

The first American public schools were devised by the Puritans of New England as a means of perpetuating their own twisted blend of Calvinism and quite literally suppressing dissent in the cradle. Massachusetts enacted the first general school law in the country in 1789 but it was the Prussian school system that inspired these lunatics to take the system national in the 19th century as a means of enforcing homogeny upon the unruly and diverse masses of a rapidly expanding empire. 

This remains the goal at the heart of America's compulsory school system even in its current secular incarnation. Teachers and administrators across the country are encouraged to enforce a standardized curriculum not for the purpose of education but as a means of tracking and controlling large numbers of children with the ultimate goal of maintaining the order of an authoritarian status quo.

In these glorified prisons it is the individual that suffers the worst. This means any child unable or unwilling to conform to the manufactured will of the majority and among the disabled and the neurodivergent this has always meant Queer children who are defined by their inability to conform to a set pattern. 

This is the system that is literally killing our kids. 86% of Queer students in America report having been harassed or assaulted at school and 84% of trans kids do not feel safe in these environments specifically because of their gender. All of this statistically leads to lower GPAs, lower self-esteem, higher dropout rates, and higher rates of suicide, with Queer kids more than four times as likely to commit suicide than their straight peers. 

This is personal to me because I experienced the very worst of it firsthand in both parochial and public compulsory institutions. During my twelve-year sentence, I was beaten, molested, humiliated, bullied, demonized, and ostracized by both adult authority figures and the students who mimicked their cruelty. Nearly all of this abuse stemmed from a stubborn unwillingness on my part to conform to conventional gender norms followed by attempts to overcompensate by building a deliberately antisocial persona to protect myself from more abuse.

The result is Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The result is crippling agoraphobia. The result is violent flashbacks, seizures, and multiple personalities. But most importantly, the result is an unwillingness to cut deals with fucking child abusers in allies clothing.

The compulsory school system is a form of indentured servitude designed to break the individual in two. The notion that such a system can be reformed into anything worth salvaging is about as offensively absurd as believing that the prison system can ever be reformed into anything but a glorified plantation or that the police can ever truly serve the communities that they have been tasked with subduing. 

As I said before, systems designed for abuse will always be abusive. Even under the best-case scenario, a woke public school system will never amount to much more than a bunch of straight authority figures teaching Queer kids how to be Queer and this is the kind of shit that results in phenomena like detransitioners when non-binary kids are forced to pick a gender defined by cis heteronormativity.

What Queer kids really need are Queer schools or no schools at all. The ideal would be a form of communal unschooling, governed by Queer parents, elders, and found families, that make children a vital part of a multigenerational community and helps them to learn through natural life experiences. However, for the sake of Queer kids in straight households, free schools of the Sudbury model in which students make their own curriculum and exist in a direct democracy with equal rights for both staff and pupils is likely the best option.

But the worst way to combat the Christian Right's genocidal war on trans youth is to double down on saving the tools designed by authoritarian zealots just like them to destroy us. If we are ever going to protect our kids, then we must destroy these institutions. In other words, save the Queer, smash the school.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Oh! Sweet Nuthin' by the Velvet Underground

* Smells Like Teen Spirit by Tori Amos

* Rebel Rebel by David Bowie

* Sheila Take a Bow by the Smiths

* In Bloom by Nirvana

* School's Out by Alice Cooper

* Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton by the Mountain Goats

* Teenage Whore by Hole

* Thirteen by Big Star

* Rock & Roll by the Velvet Underground