Iran in Vain: Rooting for the "Bad Guy" is No Vice When Your Guy is Worse

 If you have no earthly idea what in the hot fuck is going on with the Iran War right now, then you are probably paying attention because the Trump Administration and the mainstream news appear to be equally clueless. In fact, their behavior seems downright bipolar from a proper distance. For weeks now, since Trump and the Mullahs kind-of-sort-of-not-really put their hostilities on hold with a temporary ceasefire, everything has been stuck in an endless loop of negotiation, escalation, negotiation, escalation...

Every Monday, Donald Trump announces an impending genocide of biblical proportions and every Tuesday he backs down at the last minute while reminding us that doomsday could still come at any given second but a big-beautiful peace deal is also really, really fucking close. 

The mainstream news mostly just seems to take all this diplomatic madness at face value while reminding us how impossibly complicated diplomacy is and that only their Washington trained experts can lead us through it. The only problem with that explanation is that all their think tank wonks seem to be chasing Donald from one flip-flop to the next like small-town weathermen covering big-town storms.

So, just what in the fuck is really going on here? My speculative populist analysis is that Donald Trump got blackmailed into a war that he was also fooled into believing he could just pull out of at the last minute like his last few war crimes and it was likely his cherished allies in Israel who set him up. 

Even if we are to simply ignore the recently aired Epstein Files confirming that the feds believed Trump to be "compromised by Israel" as early as 2016 and that Epstein himself was a Mossad agent, the Zionist sock puppets within Trump's own regime have essentially confirmed that Netanyahu put them up to this.

Both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson confirmed before retracting that Israel had brazenly informed the Trump Administration that they were attacking Iran with or without us which can only be seen as an act of geopolitical extortion when you consider the thousands of US troops stationed between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea like human shields.

America's last couple of drive-by military interventions probably served largely to convince an incompetent egomaniac like Donald Trump that he could pull another atrocity out of his orange ass at the drop of a hat without facing any major repercussions but that is precisely what those interventions were designed to do; give the impression that not every act of American imperial aggression has to lead to a forever war. 

This was particularly true in regard to the kidnapping of President Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela which wasn't even really an intervention as much as it was a carefully choregraphed strongman-swap made between the Trump junta and corrupt elements within the Maduro regime for the latter to hand over their fearless leader in exchange for being allowed to keep earning so long as they gave Trump a taste of the cut.

I had initially interpreted this weird regime change ballet as being designed to break America's Iraq War Syndrome just before the real onslaught in the Persian Gulf the same way George H.W. Bush had done when he swiftly flipped the dictatorship Reagan bought in Panama to break America's Vietnam War Syndrome leading up to the original Gulf War. However, I am now beginning to suspect that the Donald himself may have been the real target of this grift.

Trump has never been the isolationist he plays on TV every four years to turn the Rust Belt, but he isn't a complete and total imbecile either, at least not until his ego gets revved up and maybe that's just what a few good Zionist neocons in his administration did. They gave him an easy win in a fixed fight before helping their allies in Tel Aviv to lure him into an unwinnable Persian dumpster fire that only they could prosper from and even Bush Jr. was smart enough to avoid.

Either way, Trump's already faulty reputation as anything but an abject failure has been decimated by a war that is clearly totally outside of his control. The Mullahs have no interest in making a peace deal with some asshole who blew them up the last two times they came to the table. They quite literally have nothing of value left to lose but their pride. We killed half of their leaders, including most of the moderates, and their economy has been in the shitter since 1979 when we began sanctioning them for removing one of our favorite dictators in the region.

These people survived a solid decade of mustard gas and trench warfare during the 80s with their downright apocalyptic war with another Reagan rent-a-thug named Saddam Hussein. This shit is nothing to them and our own intelligence has confirmed that with reports that the Mullahs still maintain around 70% of their pre-war mobile missile stockpile. 

Meanwhile, both gas prices and Trump's approval ratings are following Iran straight into a hell that the Mullahs spent half a century booby trapping like the ninth circle of Straw Dogs.

The truth is that Trump's flip-flopping peace negotiations are largely a solo act. While Iran maintains their vengeful hardline and stays the course, the Donald desperately attempts to jumpstart the flailing economy with phony breakthroughs at an empty peace table and then threatens genocide when his dick starts shriveling before the cameras again. 

All the while, Israel goes out of their way to dig him in even deeper with strategically planned atrocities in Lebanon and public declarations of their commitment to drop bombs on Tehran forever regardless of diplomacy.

Those psychopaths don't give a flying fuck about American supremacy anymore. Not when they have every side of the fence to play in an increasingly multipolar game of thrones. Russia, China, India, and Turkey are all doing serious business with a hyper-Zionist regime that can play America's Caligula like a fiddle caught in bed with a fourteen-year-old girl. They'll just switch over to the Yuan while the Dollar burns and keep expanding their borders with no functioning UN bureaucracy left to slow them down.

At some point Trump will either have to pull out or keep bombing, but either way he's fucked and so is America's influence in the Middle East as anything but a Kosher busboy. Our reputation as a superpower will likely never recover from such a devastating humiliation and this is probably the one silver lining still visible from the other side of the mushroom clouds. That and this couldn't have happened to a nicer pedophile.

As much as it sickens me to admit it, this chapter in Donald Trump's meandering tragic comedy really fucking turns me on. After having my own childhood mulched by the white-collared sex fiends of the Catholic Church, I can't tell you how good it feels to see the most powerful rapist on earth pose like Tony Montana with fear in his eyes and shit in his pants.

Right-wing battle fetishists will point at me and scoff over the spectacle of a Queer anarchist rooting for the "bad guy", but why the fuck shouldn't I when America is so much worse? This is typically how empires end and thank God they do because the only other option is likely to end in a nuclear holocaust. Iran isn't going to conquer America. The Mullahs aren't coming to a liberal arts school near you. They are simply ensuring that America can't pretend that they won anything but high gas prices for attempting to unilaterally decapitate another sovereign nation's government.

God help me but that feels like a fairly worthy cause to pay the pump for. I've paid higher taxes for far worse. I just wish that Israel would pay the same price, but if they keep throwing their weight around like a rogue British colony, they will. I seriously recommend that every Zionist usurper pays very close attention while Donald Trump begs for peace and screams for war. He is their future. Sooner or later, every empire ends like this. Sooner or later every reign of terror ends in humiliation.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced This Post

*  Scarface (Push it to the Limit) by Paul Engemann

*  Train in Vain by the Clash

*  Rambozo the Clown by Dead Kennedys

*  Like a Rolling Stone by Drive-By Truckers

*  Falling Apart by Slow Pulp

*  Let's Have a War by Fear

*  Ladykillers by Lush

*  Crown on the Ground by Sleigh Bells

*  Volcano Girls by Veruca Salt

*  Pilot Can at the Queer God by the Flaming Lips

Mental Illness May be a Myth, but Trauma is a Societal Crisis

 "In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients."

-Thomas Szasz

In the beginning, there were shamans; wild eyed wiseman communing with the ancestors, drawing down the moon, and swapping genders like loin cloths. They were strange and mystical creatures born with a downright uncanny connection to forces beyond the veil of the seen world and every village had one. 

Then progress began and spiritual diversity got in the way of profit. Villages became cities, tribes became governments, and individuals became citizens. A handful of shamans were rebranded as prophets and messiahs, but they ultimately proved to be too unruly to be governed while they were still alive. So, a few dead messiahs were chosen and churches were built around their carefully edited texts while the rest of the shamanic class were simply deemed heretics and slaughtered.

As progress continued and the cities became states and the states became empires, even religion became inconvenient as anything but an anesthetic relic. The heretics were deemed lunatics and asylums were built, first to simply contain them and then to "treat" them. A new religion was established around such treatments. A secular temple preaching chemical subjugation and societal assimilation as its dogma. They called this church Psychiatry, the Clinic was its God, and its Devil was a mysterious affliction known as Mental Illness.

This is the history of people like me, the history of madness, and it is a history that the various organizations behind Mental Health Awareness Month would really prefer you weren't made aware of. That's because mental illness, at least as they define it, is a myth, and these same organizations are a part of a multibillion-dollar industry built to perpetuate this myth for prestige and profit.

Thankfully, a handful of disgruntled psychiatrists and academics broke away from this cult by making the radical decision to actually listen to their patients and blew the whistle on the entire madness industrial complex during the countercultural heyday of the 1960s.   

Chief among these whistleblowing therapeutic renegades was a psychiatrist and professor by the name of Thomas Szasz who continues to shake the establishment to its faulty foundations from the grave with his groundbreaking 1961 bestseller, "The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct" 

In this carefully researched manifesto, the good doctor largely exposes mental illness as a social construct designed to control those of us driven by unconscious forces to violate the social norms of conventional society. As Szasz shows, this conspiracy to domesticate civilization's neurological malcontents is achieved by declaring our numerous eccentricities to be medical ailments treatable by a variety of forms of therapeutic coercion, from the simple quick fix of pharmaceutical intervention to our involuntary internment at glorified prison camps deemed inpatient facilities.

Szasz didn't reject psychotherapy entirely, however. In fact, he encouraged its widespread use as a means for consenting adults to seek outside guidance in order to "learn more about themselves, others and life." In other words, Dr. Szasz advocated that therapists behave more like shamans than priests while deriding any notion of mental health being pathologized as a corrupt junk science that deprives the individual of autonomy and basic human dignity.

As someone who has spent a good portion of my life at the mercy of bad shrinks and overly simplistic diagnoses, I can vouch for the good shaman, Thomas Szazs, but that doesn't mean that I am well. Quite the contrary. I am indeed a deeply disturbed individual, but the source of my disturbance is not medical, it is societal.

I suffer every day from the trauma inflicted upon me from a young age by the systems that toxic constructs like mental illness built. I am a survivor of multiple forms of child abuse only made possible by institutional powers that left me defenseless and at the mercy of the sexual predators who have managed to carve out their own class amidst the midlevel echelons of bourgeoise society: priests, teachers, politicians, cops, doctors and indeed therapists; institutional authoritarians who prey upon the classes constructed beneath them quite simply because the system tells them they can. They're allowed.

This kind of abuse is rampant and takes many forms beyond simple sexual predation. It takes the form of racial profiling and police brutality. It takes the form of coercive compulsory schooling and downright systemic bullying. It takes the form of rigid gender norms and heteronormative grooming. It takes the form of post-colonial subjugation and cultural erasure. It takes the form of industrial warfare and a 24/7 news cycle. 

We live in a very deeply unwell society and the signs that surround us have grown downright dystopian, but our society is not sick, at least not in the medical sense of the word. Our society is traumatized and we are a society traumatized by Western Civilization itself. A civilization built on genocide, slavery, and apocalyptic Abrahamic cultural supremacy. A civilization that raises its young before the unblinking eyes of Silicon Valley's smartphone panopticon and then diagnosis them with brain diseases when they grow up to be broken and "unproductive" adults. 

And far from fixing the problem, the construct of mental illness only serves to acerbate it further, by treating trauma with trauma and then further marginalizing the results.

Studies collected by PubMed indicate that up to 66% of people experiencing their first episode of diagnosed psychosis develop PTSD from the inpatient treatment they are summarily subjected to. Treatment experiences which often include such totally legal indignities as forced medication, mandatory isolation, and physical restraint. Under such civilized circumstances it is really little wonder that 99% of incarcerated men report having experienced at least one traumatic event in their lifetime with an additional 87-97% experiencing further trauma while incarcerated.

And incarceration is really what all of this comes down to. We are all incarcerated in ways both big and colossal every single day; in schools, in churches, in hospitals, in wage slavery, under constant surveillance, in the fog of forever wars, beneath the state. In a civilization defined by global homogeny and ceaseless growth. 

We have become a post-traumatic society, and no pill is strong enough to cure our living affliction. We must end the abuse of progress, unplug ourselves from the global technofascist hivemind and return to an ecosystem built around community, mutual aid, local diversity, and environmental intimacy. 

In other words, we must return to the wisdom of the shamans deemed mad by a debased order. Then and only then can we break the chains of Western Civilization and begin to heal.

This, dearest motherfuckers, is what my madness means to me. so, if you must diagnose me with anything, diagnose me as pathologically allergic to the modern world and the blind men in grey flannel suits willing to follow its dictates into the abyss. 

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails

*  Ohm by Yo La Tengo

*  Roots Bloody Roots by Sepultura

*  Lost in My Bedroom by Sky Ferreira

*  (Nothing But) Flowers by Talking Heads

*  The World in My Eyes by Depeche Mode

*  Schizophrenia by Sonic Youth

*  Mother's Little Helper by the Rolling Stones

*  Nervous Breakdown by Black Flag

What Makes a Man Shoot Serial Killers: On Refusing to be Shocked by Political Violence

 So, another motherfucker took a shot at the president; another bored kid with a gun and an iPhone looking for immortality in all the wrong places. The desperate details are less important than the fact that this was the third attempt against our current and former president since his last presidential campaign less than two years ago. The man seems to attract bullets the way he does rape allegations and even some of his committed enemies are beginning to freak out. The general consensus among both Dempublicans and Republicrats alike is that everybody needs to tone down the dialogue. That, and "such acts of political violence have no place in civil society!"

I might be tempted to agree with them if we lived in something resembling a civil society and I'm not talking about the rhetoric. As bombastic as these gasbags in the political class have become in a desperate attempt to improve ratings on that failed reality show they call a government, young folks aren't popping off politicos because of what other politicos said. Even if that was how violence worked, that makes no sense considering that even the vilest rhetoric isn't enough to get this demographic out of bed to vote, let alone attempt murder. The reality is that we live in a violent country and we always have. For the political class to expect to be immune from this harsh reality is absurd, especially when you consider how goddamn violent they are.

Everybody seems to be really fixated on the dialogue but very few talking heads seem to be willing to point out that the one place where Washington isn't all talk is when it comes to murder. Donald Trump is a lot of awful things but the worst among his many evil deeds is probably the fact that the man is essentially a serial killer and this isn't just rhetoric. The fucker is quite proud of it. Every time he blows up another boat load of alleged drug pushers, he posts the footage online like a pervert with a crush video. The Donald has had at least 185 people whacked this way since last September and he shows little sign of slowing down anytime soon.

Our dear leader has also killed somewhere in the ballpark of three or four thousand people in Iran, more than half of them civilians, and he's publicly threatened to do far worse, trolling the Mullahs on social media like a sociopathic mean girl with the threat of genocide if they don't agree to a ceasefire that makes him look like a winner.

My question for the political class is what makes you so goddamn special? Why should you and those of your ilk be immune to the violence of a civilization in freefall when you work in an industry defined by it. Of course, many of the members of the Washington insect class will argue that Donald Trump is somehow exceptional in his barbarism and they're not totally wrong, but every American president from Washington on up has been complicit in acts of mass homicide and most of them got away with it. Even when the chickens come home to roost, the slain are given the martyr treatment regardless of their body count.

Abraham Lincoln was a great, great man who also suspended habeas corpus and presided over the mass hanging of 38 Dakota Indians found guilty of self-defense by kangaroo courts in five-minute trials. William McKinley was a fine, fine man who had over 200,000 civilians slaughtered during his savage conquest of the Philippines. And John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a goddamn saint who officially started the Vietnam War and had the President of South Vietnam killed along with his brother during the same year he was popped by a shady character named Lee Harvey Oswald who appears to have had connections to the violent underworld of international intelligence.

The only thing that sets Donald Trump apart from any of these heroic psycho killers is that Donald Trump is fucking gross for lack of a better word salad. The Donald is a ghastly and classless attention whore who holds up a mirror to all his fellow homicidal elites by committing all the same crimes that they do in the shadows out in the open for all his dwindling fan club to see.

Just days after the latest botched attempt on his life, Trump was back on Truth Social posting an AI image of himself stroking an AR-15 amidst the flaming ruins of Iran with the words "No More Mr. Nice Guy" emblazoned above. This bloated savage makes LBJ look like Frank fucking Sinatra and the smarter psychopaths on the Hill are beside themselves because they know that the long-term effects of his reign will probably attract more bullets to all their houses and likely already has.

Telling any of these cretins in the so-called political class to tone down the rhetoric is a bit like telling Jeffrey Dahmer to mind his table manners. The state is a machine defined by affording its chosen elites a monopoly on sociopathy. A polite killer isn't much less destructive than a bombastic one. I might even argue quite the contrary. At least Europe sees Donald Trump coming from a mile away with his poorly stapled together woman-suit and his flailing arsenal of gilded power tools. Barack Obama could slit the throat of your 16-year-old son with a boxcutter before you've even stopped laughing at his last joke.

Truth be told, I'm not particularly interested in the safety of known serial killers. I'd much rather focus on mixed-up kids like Lee Harvey Oswald and Cole Thomas Allen. This society is a shitshow and I commend you for seeing through the stained-glass windows and witnessing the crimes they conceal. You have every right to be pissed, and I don't blame you for being so desperate for attention. It sucks being ignored in a burning temple, especially when you feel like you're the only one who sees the flames.

I sympathize; I really do. But blowing the head off the king changes nothing. He will be replaced before they're even finished hosing his brains out of the backseat of his Lincoln and he will live on as a martyr while you will be forgotten by everyone but a few loose conspiracy cranks.

The only thing that you will achieve by killing a serial killer is becoming just a little more like one and that is a far greater tragedy than another dead president. I implore the lone nuts of this bleeding empire to use your rifles to defend your neighborhoods or just drop out and by a cabin by the lake. Let the politicians kill each other. It's what they're paid for after all.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

*  Violence by Grimes

*  See No Evil by Television

*  Burn by Nine Inch Nails

*  Life During Wartime by Talking Heads

*  California Girls by the Magnetic Fields

*  We Appreciate Power by Grimes

*  What's Fair by Blondshell

*  Getting Closer by Nitzer Ebb

*  Tell Em by Sleigh Bells

A Few Words on May Day from a Radical Welfare Queen

Well folks, it's that time of year again. The birds are a-chirping, the flowers are a-blooming, and Trotskyites and Stalinists alike are falling head-over-heals in love with the working man like it's the very first time. 

That's right dearest motherfuckers, it's May Day! That blessed of holidays when even the bougiest of leftists can be caught waxing philosophic about the glories of a carefully organized proletariat and as usual, just because they're a tad bit obnoxious doesn't mean that my comrades are wrong.

The few privileges that American workers have left in this miserable dystopia we call a country were paid for with the blood of wild, wild unions who literally went to war with entire armies of heavily armed Pinkertons and federal gestapo. I'm talking real-deal working-class arsonists who shot it up and got shot up in downright suicidal attempts to organize the poor into voluntary direct democracies capable of holding their own in what once vaguely resembled a free market in this nation.

Mainstream shitlib hagiographers will tell you that FDR delivered us from the Fritz Langian sweatshops of the Gilded Ages on a silver platter. Don't fucking believe it. The eight-hour workday and the five-day workweek are the bruised fruit of wildcatting anarchists and communists with guns, and the New Deal declawed them by federalizing the whole goddamn operation and turning thriving workplace democracies into corporate boards with labyrinthine bureaucracies and CEOs pulling down six figures without ever having to break a sweat.

I have the full respect for America's largely forgotten labor martyrs of a ferociously neurodivergent autodidact and I very strongly believe that words like 'Haymarket' and 'Ludlow' should be as synonymous with American history as genocide and apple pie. I just tend to feel a tad bit left out of all the proletarian festivities do to the fact that I am unemployed, never have been employed, and am in all likelihood largely unemployable. 

A Freudian alphabet of syndromes and disorders from PTSD to DID left me high and dry in the poorly paid purgatory of federal disability by my thirtieth birthday and my history of switching personalities every time I have to alter my schedule leads me to believe that I'll probably be here until the American Empire finally freezes over.

I have spent plenty of time beating myself up over these hard swallowed truths, partially because even what passes for the left in this country is still enslaved by the Protestant work ethic that weighs every individual's sense of self-worth by the volume of the sweat on their brow, but also because I am a committed anarchist who doesn't even believe in taxes, not even if those IRS pilfered dollars keep me off the streets. 

However, the hindsight of recent rounds of trauma therapy have brought me to a few startling conclusions that feel downright revolutionary and have led me to put down the flail and consider the very real possibility of a May Day free from guilt and self-flagellation.

The biggest revelation is that I am not rendered unemployable by chronic fatigue and social anxiety alone. My inability to live a nine-to-five existence comes from the fact that I am literally triggered by wage slavery. To put it in the simplest terms available, work in the modern context feels way too much like the child abuse I endured at the hands of the Catholic Church and to put it even more bluntly than that, I quite simply can't take orders from some adolescent despot in a stupid hat without feeling like I'm going to get raped all over again.

While this reaction may be extremely traumagenic, it also can't be discounted as totally irrational either when you consider the level of sexual abuse that transwomen like me experience on the job if we're even "lucky" enough to get employed in the first place. The only thing sicker than how quickly a mild-mannered, middle-management, drone delves into downright sadomasochistic behavior once afforded even the slightest amount of power is how willing we all are to put up with it for even the meagerest of paychecks.

My complex PTSD and dissociative identity disorder simply make me chemically incapable of putting up with being some superior wage slave's plaything and they should probably be grateful that I've given up on trying considering that Mona, my alter defined by my long-repressed rage, is a corpse paint drenched lesbian separatist who would gladly feed anything with a hard-on its own teeth like a buffet of blood-flavored Chicklets.

This isn't to say that I'm incapable of labor. That too has very recently been made bluntly apparent to me. I just can't cope with it being organized by anyone but myself. 

Since my found family's homestead burned to the ground this February, I have found myself hustling like a Time Square Mack possessed. Bouncing through personalities like a one-girl Bowie tribute band and practically crashing my shitty Ford Taurus through Friend's Meeting Houses to sell perma-guilty, white liberal, church ladies on saving our farm, one nickel at a time. 

I nearly ended up swallowing my tongue in the process and even my own people have politely asked me to shut the fuck up about it, but I also raked in more money in six weeks than most adolescent despots in stupid hats make in six months. All while still managing to publish one of these crazy gonzo tirades each week. So, where the fuck do I punch that card at?

We as a species have allowed a cheaply manufactured master class of managerial Nazis to dictate the very definition of what we consider to be work for way too long and tragically even large segments of the radical left have fallen hook line and sinker for this grift. Any form of mass labor should be organized democratically to ensure the market remains free for everyone who participates in it, but I can't help but to feel like we are all doing ourselves a great disservice by failing to even question the value of mass labor itself.

Mankind spent 99% of its existence in the so-called Stone Ages. During this time human beings existed in small tribal, nomadic, and largely matriarchal societies defined by the primitive grind of hunting and gathering. But historical studies have also shown us that these supposedly savage ancestors of ours spent less time working and more time relaxing largely due to the simple fact that they didn't define their interpretation of wealth by the sheer volume of the things that they possessed but by the amount of time they spent doing the things they loved with the people that mattered.

I'm not necessarily telling the world to go back to that. I'm not Tyler fucking Durden or even John Zerzan here. I fully accept the fact that you can't put the shit back in a donkey. But I also feel very strongly that human beings were not meant to spend eight hours a day or more in a fucking cubicle the size of a prison cell or putting together boxes of frivolous nonsense on an assembly line in some so-called fulfillment center. 

Maybe certain kinds of labor shouldn't even exist. Maybe we should start organizing consumers to render their existence irrelevant to our own. Maybe victims of systemic child abuse should unionize and demand reparations from tax-exempt churches and overzealous teachers' unions. Maybe we should all spend at least a few hours of every May Day discussing what the word labor even means to us and more importantly what it should mean.

Just a few thoughts from the hardest working welfare queen in show business. Catch you in the soup lines, working class heroes. That's where we're all heading.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Take This Job and Shove It by Dead Kennedys

*  Nobodies Heroes by the Menzingers

*  Don't Talk Back by Kasey Chambers

*  Daddy Was a Bank Robber by the Clash

*  Only Women Bleed by Tori Amos

*  Yesterdays Heroes by the 4 Skins

*  Breathe by the Prodigy

*  Clocked In by Black Flag

*  Working Class Hero by John Lennon

*  Trade It by Slow Pulp

Re-Radicalization in an Age of MAGA Remorse

 Something very strange is shifting in the darker corners of the internet. Something serpentine slick and black as ink. While Donald Trump moves farther and farther to the right and much of his cultish base mindlessly follows him into the abyss, the farthest of the far-right appear to be turning against Orange-Man-Fash with a vengeance. 

The brazenly Zionist massacre in Iran was certainly the last straw, but this subterranean sea change was a longtime coming. It first seemed to pick up momentum with Trump's ham-fisted attempts to bury his dirty secrets in the Epstein Files, but it actually began with a slew of executive orders granting broad sweeping powers to the federal police state with the less than subtle assistance MAGA's new tech bro overlords in Silicon Valley. The mainstream media barely even registered this spooky true story of unified federal data banks, but the Groypers and Proud Boys sure as fuck did. This was where the wedge was driven, Iran is where the lumber split.

The most blatant signs of this division in progress can be seen on the podcasts of loathsome far-right influencers like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones, and a great deal of it does seem to be tinged by an antisemitic revival that Israel practically willed into existence by insisting that you were either with them or Hitler, but upon closer inspection the situation is actually far more complex than that.

This was made fascinatingly clear to me when I witnessed a shocking amount of downright fascist followers of mine on social media come out in droves to support my fire breathing harangues against ICE during its murderous military occupation of Minneapolis. To be 100% clear here, I am talking about confirmed neo-Nazis showing unvarnished sympathy for Renee Good and openly denouncing mass raids on undocumented brown people.

This is huge, or at least it could be. Donald Trump in his second term is quite possibly the closest thing this country has ever come to being run by an openly fascist dictator and the actual fucking fascists are the right wingers suffering from the most vociferous bouts of MAGA buyer's remorse. To paraphrase Courtney Love, they got what they want, and they never want it again. All of this leaves us with a very action-oriented movement with little other option than to embrace the kind of antigovernment extremism that nearly provoked an armed march on Washington during the Clinton years.

A lot of people on the left are going to hate me, but I can work with that. Gore Vidal and Alex Cockburn tried to lead the anti-Clinton left in working with that with little success back in the nineties and I think we could have really used the backup during the Battle of Seattle. 

However, I'm not just talking about recently ancient history here. This brand of guerrilla diplomacy is what I do. You may have heard the rumors on antifa chatrooms and they aren't totally false. Nicky Reid is in fact the world's only genderqueer anarchist Nazi-whisperer. My reasons for performing such a bizarre and thankless public service are varied and complicated.

On a purely political level, I am a practitioner of the lost antifascist art of deradicalization, though I prefer to think of what I do as re-radicalization. Whereas deradicalization is the practice of encouraging people with extremist views to adapt to a more moderate stance, I have nothing but contempt for the so-called moderates of Western Civilization who frequently do a better job pushing white supremacy than the Klan with their endless expansions of the police-warfare state. What I do is try to encourage radicals with counterrevolutionary views to adopt legitimately revolutionary ones.

What inspires me to do this is where things get more personal. Some of it, I admit, is merely a hyperfocus. I have a downright neurodivergent fixation with the extremes of society that extends from cannibals and necrophiles to dictators and terrorists. I find Julius Evola to be as fascinating as I find him revolting and I can easily lose myself in a forty-minute conversation about sex magick and Esoteric Hitlerism. Which actually kind of leads me to another reason why I do this which hits even closer to home. 

I know a neurodivergent Queer person when I see one and the far-right is depressingly riddled with my people, poorly concealing their Queerness amidst a camouflage of radical theater less likely to get them lynched by their neighbors in flyover country than sodomy or HRT. 

And this leads me to my primary reason for weathering barrages of hate speech and risking further alienation from my leftwing allies. When I hear some self-loathing closet queen on the spectrum singing the praises of long-dead despots, I sometimes catch a brief glimpse of myself at a very painful age on that blue screen. 

You see, dearest motherfuckers, before Nicky Reid was the heathen genderfuck anarchist you all know and hate to love, she was a very pissed off and mixed up Marxist-Leninist with some tendencies that ran disturbingly close to what some might consider National Bolshevism.

I never bought into racism, sexism, or xenophobia but I was very much in love with the notion of a Eurasian world order powerful enough to pulverize the West into sand. I was always much fonder of Tito than Stalin, but I was also quite fond of the anti-western bromides of Russophilic Soviet revivalist Alexander Dugin and the Red Square street theater of Eduard Liminov.

I was angry at most of the right things, at watching the American hegemon thrash one third world culture after another in the name of liberalism so fat jerks in long ties could hock bombs and sell the orphans of the people they obliterated into slavery to Walmart sweatshops, but there was an ugly part of me that was also very angry at myself. 

Pissed off at the scared little girl in the boy's body who wasn't strong enough to keep the priests from forcing themselves on her until she vomited on the rectory floor. I wanted to make her disappear beneath that camouflage of Soviet kitsch and Slavic strongmen. This desperate need to disappear was coupled with an equally desperate hunger to belong and that need became insatiable enough for me to look the other way on all the gulags and pogroms and mass graves that lurked just behind all that dripping Eurasian ephemera.

It was actually a few Queer libertarian capitalist pigs on a couple of antiwar message boards that finally set me straight, not by jumping down my throat or forcing their own specific ideology upon me but by pushing me to be consistent with my own core beliefs and by pushing me to recognize that expecting powerful men to save me from other powerful men wasn't anything even resembling a solution to my pain. 

They also convinced me to forgive that little girl still bleeding under all that armor. I had to embrace her and recognize that there was nothing she could have done to prevent herself from being preyed upon by vile men with way too much goddamn power but there was plenty I could do to prevent that sick systemic debauchery from continuing.

So now, when I cross paths with other clearly subaltern people adopting views and positions that put them at odds with mainstream society, I have a hard time ignoring the pain behind the rage in their eyes. And when I see those same people realizing that they've been fleeced by another two-bit conman in designer jackboots, I see an opportunity to finally remove the wool from those eyes. 

With all that being said, and since sadly much of the left seems to have forgotten how to break bread with the enemy's battered children, I feel compelled to give a few pointers on re-radicalization during an age of festering MAGA remorse.

First off, know your species. Believe it or not there are a lot of different kinds of right-wing whack-jobs out there and even if you can't see a big difference between the Koch Brothers and the Strasser Brothers that doesn't mean that reactionary types don't. Second, keep a sense of humor and a sick one at that. You are going to be called some horrific things and being able to toss it right back with a devilish grin will carry you a long way. 

However, you don't score points with ideological weakness either. Stand your ground and the people who aren't totally beyond redemption will respect you for it. Call out bigotry when you see it and call it bigotry even if you're simply saying 'that's some hopped-up, Nazi bullshit' on your way to making a larger point. Call a spade a spade but always keep the lines of communication open. Agree to disagree but keep on disagreeing in a manner that confronts ideas without belittling the people struggling beneath them.

Most importantly, make them recognize who the real enemy is and make them recognize that it isn't you. When push comes to shove, nearly every fascist I confront will concede at some point that who they really despise is the motherfuckers in Washington and on Wall Street. Powerful, Atlantic elites, taxing them blind, sending their jobs overseas, and sending their kids off to die for the whole awful scam. These scions of cosmopolitanism aren't transgender teenagers or undocumented workers. Most of them aren't even Jews. They are old money, country club, secular Protestants like Donald Trump or their shameless, bellycrawling, new money toadies like JD Vance. 

They are a class that only exists because big business and big government got together and gave birth to a cartel called the state and they rule over a penniless majority by keeping the poor divided against each other based on a plethora of manufactured differences that include competing schools of despotism like fascism and communism.

This is indeed a scam, a new world order, an international conspiracy to destroy poor white people, but the real conspiracy is that poor white people destroy themselves when they destroy Black, brown, and Queer people. They waste their rage on other victims of the same system that enslaves them and become limp-wristed shock troops for city slicking pedophiles like Donald Trump in the process. We can agree to disagree on a good many things, from my alternative 'lifestyle' to your Biblical values, just so long as we agree that power is the problem and that any ideology that sanctifies it is the real enemy.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Cult of Personality by Living Colour

*  Holiday in Cambodia by Dead Kennedys

*  Eat the Rich by Motorhead

*  White Riot by the Clash

*  Asking for It by Hole

*  Losing My Religion by REM

*  I Spy by Ministry

*  Mandinka by Sinéad O'Connor

America is the Bad Guy in This Movie

 "We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal"

-Ingmar Bergman

 "I could have killed 'em all, I could kill you. In town you're the law, out here it's me. Don't push it. Don't push it or I'll give you a war you won't believe. Let it go. Let it go."

-John Rambo

I hate all the 'good guy/bad guy' talk belched out into the ether by law-and-order types, especially when it comes to the moral complexities of foreign policy. "We've gotta get in there to get the bad guys.", "The world needs American strength to take care of the bad guys.", "The bad guys don't care about human right so why should we?" "I beat my wife to death last night with a tire iron but in my defense, she cooked the roast like a bad guy."

It is all just one big, offensively over-simplistic, PR device designed to infantilize the American public around the complicated issues of life, death, and extrajudicial murder by erasing the mirror of moral ambiguity and replacing it with a black and white cartoon reality.

The end result of this specific macho genre of manufactured consent is Pete Hegseth, our swaggering Secretary of War Crimes, who seems to honestly believe that he is living in an eighties action movie. However, it isn't always clear weather he's trying out for the role of the hero or the villain, the good guy or the bad guy. When this flexing baboon isn't praying to White Jesus to inflict "overwhelming violence" on "those who deserve no mercy" at creepy Pentagon prayer breakfasts, he's bragging about America's superhuman prowess when it comes to raining down "death and destruction" on the deadly 5th grade schoolgirls of Iran in some hopped-up press junket.

The only thing marginally more sickening than that creep's Bratpack jock antics is the fact that a frightening percentage of Americans are somehow still falling for it even while the rest of the world cringes and clinches their collective sphincter.

I hate to sound like one of those harping church karens who blames all society's ills on the latest TikTok dick joke but the only reason that this seemingly obvious line of garbage works at all is because of Hollywood and its incestuous relationship with the Military Industrial Complex. 

For nearly a century, mainstream American cinema has regurgitated, devoured, and re-regurgitated the same foaming popcorn mythology in which it is presented as basic common sense that America is always the good guy and that every foreigner with a funny accent who stands in his way is a totally otherized human bowling pin who exists for the sole purpose of being obliterated again and again and again in a voluptuous bacchanalia of endless machine gun barrages and bottomless stacks of bloodless corpses.

Your average American is raised on a steady diet of this schlock with a side of paint-by-the-numbers public school history teachers who can turn any warzone into a beige labyrinth of names and dates to memorize for next week's ludoviko scantron test. I may be terminally jaded but I'm no exception to the rule. My own uniquely Queer neurodivergent otherness just left me with the odd habit of almost always rooting for the bad guys in the movies which in turn led me down a shockingly short road from Darth Vader to Molotov Remembers. That tripped me up for a second truth be told, but it also provided me with an extra pinch of perspective. 

The brutal and deeply unpleasant reality at play here is that when it comes to the state and the war that gives it meaning, there are very few good guys, just different kinds of bad guys. Some of them wear black and some of them wear white. They all use different excuses, but they all kill people for a living, and they are all just as defined by "the enemy's" continued existence as they are by their triumph over that other shade of bad guy which somehow never seems to last longer than fifteen minutes before the next one appears from the abyss.

With that being said, upon closer assessment of the undoctored historical statistics, it very quickly becomes hard to avoid the fact that the most brutal and deeply unpleasant reality at play here is that America has become the worst kind of bad guy. America has become the Dath Sidious of our era. The kind of Third Reich-grade big-bad that unites bad guys like Molotov and de Gaulle in existential climactic battle for the survival of the human race. This is far from a recent development, but it is definitely getting worse.

Since its inception as a republic largely defined by genocide and slavery, the United States has engaged in nearly 500 foreign military interventions with over half of them occurring after our victory in World War 2 and about 25% of them occurring after the demise of our only real rival on the world stage, the Soviet Union. In other words, the more America "wins", the more violent it gets. The weaker America's opponents become, the higher the body count reaches. 

Donald Trump's latest request for the annual military spending budget in 2027 breaks all previous records at $1.5 trillion dollars, which is not only more than ten times that of our supposed big-bad, China, it is more than the next dozen highest defense budgets combined. And all of this tax accumulated slush goes to maintaining a global network of around 800 overseas bases in 80 countries on every continent on earth. None of this is good guy behavior. It isn't even bad guy behavior. This is fucking Death Star behavior, and we should all be at least a little bit terrified right now.

With that being said, this can hardly be surprising for anyone who's history education didn't end with Rocky IV. This whole fucking horror show is merely the natural result of Manifest Destiny; the cult of the omnipotent good guy that has long governed the zeitgeist of Western Civilization. 

Super creeps like Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump are merely the first cracks in the facade big enough to frighten the neighbors. Our fellow NATOcrats have ridden Robin on every Batman drive-by the US has orchestrated over the last century. They cringe at MAGA not because of the grizzly nature of its recent quagmires in the Middle East but because America's current administration is blackening the international cache of the West's good guy/bad guy brand with open and unabashed displays of B-grade schlock-buster villainy.

And I Quote: "Our war fighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the President and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This war was never meant to be a fair fight and it's not a fair fight. We don't train to be merciful here. Mercy is for the weak. We are punching them while they're down. Which is exactly how it should be. If a nation confronts you, they are the enemy, an enemy deserves no mercy."

Now, most of that quote comes from Pete Hegseth's chest thumping announcement of the launch of his administration's bloodbath in Iran, but parts of it come directly from the dialogue of Cobra Kai Sensei John Kreese in the 1984 cheeseball classic, The Karate Kid. But I challenge any of you to tell me who said what without the assistance of C-Span or IMDB because it appears that Hegseth has modeled his entire public persona on a B-movie bully who beats up on high school kids to feel like a big shot.

Of course, Hegseth is far more grotesque, going to elementary school playgrounds with bunker busters to validate his fragile manhood. But this is precisely the kind of public display of 'good guy' villainy that makes Europe cringe, but this was also the inevitable result of the cult of humanitarian interventionism that all of the sainted First World has been baptized in.

We can't go back to Barack Obama. That character doesn't sell anymore. As delusional as the American people are about their place in the world, they recognize the tired sales pitch of the woke neoliberal as being a glass of bullshit too tall to swallow. Americans had two choices in the last election, a Sith Lord who offends what little intelligence any of them have left by behaving like a Jedi or a Sith Lord who talks like Java the Hut and promises to at least get them a good deal on the next war crime. America chose the more obvious bad guy because that was just slightly easier than doubling down on denial and way easier than actually taking responsibility for the violent world we created in the name of being a good guy.

If the rest of the fictional free world had any common sense, they would join China to confront this monstrosity by ripping up the dollar. If they had any moral sense, they would just hang themselves by their own capes and save their citizens the trouble. Call me a cynical critic, but I won't hold my breath for either finale. They just don't direct the Apocalypse like Ingmar Bergman anymore.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced This Post

* TV Eye by the Stooges

* The Only Heartbreaker by Mitski

* Tarmac by Blondshell

* Left of the Dial by the Replacements

* Mr. Moustache by Nirvana

* Rambozo the Clown by Dead Kennedys

* That White Cat by Mitski

* Danse Macabre by Celtic Frost

* Man Size by PJ Harvey

* Suffragette City by David Bowie

Lebanon, Iran, and the Forgotten Plight of the Shia "Infidel"

 As a badly battered Middle East hangs off the edge of a cliff by a string with a temporary ceasefire between the United States and Iran, peace or anything remotely resembling it looks even less likely for Southern Lebanon than it does for the rest of that treacherous map drawn by dead British arseholes. Even if Israel were the kind of creature who could be trusted to respect a ceasefire with anyone, much of the damage is already done.

Long before the latest peacetime artillery pogrom, the IDF had already spent the better part of a month attempting to empty out every square inch of the region south of the Litani River with the same kind of scorched earth campaign they used to cleanse Gaza before obliterating every bridge crossing said Litani River. 600,000 people have been herded north to join another 600,000 Lebanese citizens in being internally displaced by Zionist terrorism.

Israel has made their intentions for this slice of the Levant sickeningly clear. They have already publicly abandoned their mythic crusade to disarm Hezbollah in favor of focusing exclusively on the blatantly illegal goal of simply annexing another chunk of the Holy Land and declaring it a "buffer zone." They aren't the least bit shy about just what they are attempting to "buffer" either.

Israel has released official statements reassuring the regions Christian and Druze populations that they will be allowed to return home to Israeli occupied rubble but have also harshly warned these populations against so much as even sheltering any member of that regions Shiite majority who have very pointedly not been welcomed to return. 

There is a word for this, and it start with a 'G' but even the most progressive First World observers don't seem to want to use it. This seems particularly strange considering how many westerners have finally broken the taboo of accusing Israel of committing genocide in Palestine, but the word feels pretty damn appropriate here too. 

Israel has openly declared war on Lebanon's population of Shia Muslims, successfully removing many of them from the region of that nation that has long been their stronghold and instructing them in no uncertain terms never to come back, but still most westerners continue to avoid using the G-word here and I do believe that the reason why tells us a great deal about the violent current of First World depravity informing the larger regional war that has grown to engulf the entirety of the Middle East. 

In a word, it all comes down to Shiaphobia.

Shia Muslims have long found themselves the victims of rampant and frequently brutal discrimination across the Muslim world going all the way back to the death of the Prophet Muhammed. A minority among an already besieged faithful, Shiites provoked the wrath of the Umayyads with their critique of what they saw as the unjust power of the Caliphs and have never been forgiven for this rebellious trespass against theological conformity. 

All other theocratic differences aside, it appears to be this population's willingness to confront the corruption of the majority that has defined their plight above all else, a plight which has not only seen eleven of the twelve Shia Imams murdered at the hands of a variety of despotic autocrats, but has also led to the construction and proliferation of entire extremist Sunni sects like the Wahabi and the Salafi who are largely defined by their advocacy for genocide against all infidels, with the Shia serving the role of the original transgressors.

We have seen this play out in one horror show after another across the Muslim world, whether it be the systematic displacement of over 50% of Afghanistan and Pakistan's Shia Hazara community or the glorified Sunni apartheid state of Bahrain, that has long shackled that oil rich nation's slim Shia majority with the status of second-class citizens. 

More often than not it has been western imperialists fueling the bigotry too, targeting Shia communities for their inability to capitulate and conform to our pseudo-Islamic Wahhabi quislings and generally using them as convenient scapegoats to keep the Sunni majority distracted while we rob them blind too.

In many ways, for better or worse, Iran's consistently defiant Islamic Republic is the natural result of the systemic plight of the Shia. After centuries of being raped and pillaged by one corrupt caliphate after another, the Twelvers formed a caliphate of their own defined not only by their spiritual resistance to the west and its proxies but their willingness to put their money where their mouth is and support Shia and occasionally even Sunni resistance to colonial subjugation anywhere and everywhere it surfaces.

Sadly, this has also led Tehran to play the part of the foreign interloper, intervening even where they aren't wanted by a Shia community far too vast and diverse to ever be properly represented by any kind of centralized authority. On more than one occasion we have seen the Mullahs falling victim to that old Nietzschean trope and resembling the very same kind of corrupt caliphs they once defined themselves by disobeying.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has undoubtably become a corrupt and venal hierarchy of bloodthirsty fundamentalist imposters who have become totally disconnected from Islam's roots as a force for social justice that had originally put them to the left of their Abrahamic cousins, but they must not be confused with the merciless beasts that even liberal westerners have convinced themselves that they are and they certainly must not be tarred by the downright absurd farce that they are somehow "the greatest state sponsors of terrorism on the planet." 

This simple act of historical sanity seems to be an obnoxiously challenging feat for the west to even attempt to grasp but after having our asses handed to us on a tarnished brass platter by the Islamic Republic even after we assassinated the first two or three layers of their government, I feel like any form of peace is compulsory upon grasping it.

I guess, at the end of the day, you probably have to ask yourself a few hard questions before you can swallow the truth. 

First, who is Hezbollah? Hezbollah is a militia formed by Lebanese Shia clerics during Israel's brutal invasion of their already war-torn nation in the 1980s. They were trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guard but formed well before this to defend a marginalized community subjected to near-routine massacres and pogroms during the Lebanese Civil War. 

Now, who are the Houthi rebels? The Houthi rebels, otherwise known as Ansar Allah, were actually a relatively moderate theological movement advocating for the revival of the Zaydi school of Shia Islam endemic to the mountains of Northern Yemen until their criticism of an American backed dictator got their founder murdered and the Zaydi were forced to rely on the rifle to affect change. The Revolutionary Guard don't actually appear at all during their rise until well after the Houthi established themselves as a force to be reckoned with.

But just who exactly are the Revolutionary Guard anyway, aside from a branch of the Iranian military connected to the so-called terrorists above? Well, they are the force responsible for organizing the Shia militias who crippled Al-Qaeda in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of post-Saddam Iraq. They are also the force who united a vast and diverse coalition known as the Axis of Resistance, more responsible than any conventional army for breaking the back of the genocidally Shiaphobic Islamic State.

Contrary to western mythology, Iran's Islamic Republic has found themselves serving the role of the greatest state sponsor of grassroots antiterrorism on the planet. Now, with that being said, there is a very fine line between terrorism and antiterrorism, what with Nietzschean monsters being what they are, but let us at least get the score right and let us do so with a few more uncomfortable questions too.

First, who exactly are Al-Qaeda? Al-Qaeda is a loose network of Salafi-Wahhabist killers who spawned from the armies Jimmy Carter organized to kill communists in Afghanistan. And who are ISIS but the bastard sons of Al-Qaeda, not-so secretly funded by forces outside of the Levant for the purpose of destabilizing the pro-Russian Shia dictatorship of the Assad Dynasty in Syria. Their biggest donors being old Jimmy's friends in the Persian Gulf

And just who are these friends in the Gulf? A clique of Salafi-Wahhabist billionaires defined by a series of Faustian bargains made with the British Empire and Big Oil after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. They are also the source of nearly every dollar that has ever lined the pockets not just of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but Al-Shebab, Al-Nusra, Boko Haram, and nearly every other organization advocating for distinctly global aka imperial jihad. 

Now, for the million-dollar question. Who are the United States? The US is the empire that arms, funds, and defends those nefarious Gulf States along with the blatantly genocidal state of Israel with trillions of dollars in tax pilfered funds and millions of pounds of military hardware, much of which mysteriously and repeatedly finds its way into the ungrateful hands of Salafi-Wahhabist killers across the globe.

Ladies and gentlemen, the United States of America is the greatest state sponsor of terrorism on the planet and Iran is our number one target in the Middle East because they are the fucking monsters defined by destroying our fucking monsters.

The Russians have an old saying that the communists were wrong about everything but capitalism. I guess you could probably sum up this latest rant of mine by saying that the Mullahs were wrong about everything but the Great Satan. 

They oughta know, Satan always seems to go after the Shiites and the communists first and their ain't many communists left.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced This Post

*  If I Leave by Mitski

*  Overkill by Motorhead

*  White Riot by the Clash

*  Gouge Away by the Pixies

*  Hunter by Bjork

*  Lizzy by the Melvins

*  Ghost Town by Madness

*  Frankenstein by New York Dolls

*  I Bet on Losing Dogs by Mitski

*  Drown by Smashing Pumpkins