12 People Who Don't Suck!

Every year since I started this blog I've written a Shitlist of all the cunts who drive me to near homicidal ideation. And every year since I started this blog I've countered that poison pen cocktail with a more altruistic list to bring in the new year, a list of people that miraculously don't suck (I know, right?). It's often a hard list to write because so few people deserve to be on it. I often have to struggle not to put the same damn people on it every year. This year I've decided to leave out my holy trinity of repeat offenders, the patron saint of the Fifth Estate, Julian Assange, and my online mentors, Angela Keaton and Thomas Knapp (consider this sentence an honorable mention), and try to put nothing but first timers on this list. I came up with twelve, and like my shitlist, not everybody is going to agree with my choices. But with me, someone is always going to have to go fuck themselves. Like it or loath it, these are the holy handful of dearest motherfuckers who have kept the proverbial pistol out of my mouth in 2018, and I feel duty bound to salute them.


Ahed Tamini-  In a time when things have never looked bleaker for Palestine, it took the fury of a child scorned to reignite a movement. At the tender age of 17, Ahed Tamini has seen everything taken from her little West Bank village of Nabi Salih, their land, their water, their dignity, and all to often their lives. She has seen her brothers arrested, beaten, and tortured. She has seen her uncle murdered in cold blood. And she has seen her families tiny property routinely violated by unwelcome intruders. But Tamini never learned how to lie down. She made a name for herself in her tight-knit community for violently confronting the heavily armed Israeli gestapo who police her young existence culminating with the bitch slap heard around the world when the then 16 year old Ahed physically assaulted a pair of cackling IDF storm troopers loitering on her families property after their comrades had put her cousin in a coma with a rubber bullet to the head. The fiery young red head earned the ire of the increasingly despotic Zionist regime when footage of the beat down went viral. But she also earned a heroes welcome at her village once she was released from the klink. Her act of righteous heroism gave her besieged village their pride back. Ahed stared down the barrel of her oppressors gun and she didn't flinch. And at 17, this Palestinian firecracker is just getting started.


Peter Van Buren-  Perhaps the first innocent victim of Twitter's third red scare, Peter, a Bush-era whistleblower with a gift for bitching out hypocrites, was banned permanently from the platform after crashing the latest pity party thrown by the press over our dick president's latest accurate description of their general grossness. Peter inconveniently brought up the wars these poseurs lied us into along with a few salty barbs about hypothetical MAGA zombies eating their face. The liberalazzi dimed him out to big brother and Peter's entire body of work on the site was erased in a techno-Stalinist purge. Seven long years of weapons grade snark down the drain with the click of a mouse for the unspeakable crime of "dehumanizing" gutless scum with politically incorrect humor. But somebody had to be the canary in the tweet-mine and Peter's sacrifice to the gods of free speech will not be forgotten. Like Lenny Bruce and Robert Mapplethorpe before him, history will absolve him and we here shall salute him. Great job taking the trash out, Peter. We'll drag the cans down to the curb for you.


Janna Jihad-  Peter isn't the only undersung social media warrior on this list and Ahed Tamini isn't the only girl crusader for Palestinian peace. Her cousin and bestie Janna is the worlds youngest journalist at 12 years old with over 270,000 followers on Facebook. The pint size muckraker began covering the Israeli conquest of her and Ahed's West Bank village with her mother's iPhone at 7 and in less than five years she's achieved more than grizzled gonzos like me have in thirty. The fucking whipper-snapper, she deserves it. America's blubbering journalists could learn something from this kid if they ever stop bitching about the scourge of free speech, oops! I mean 'Fake News'. Janna is a bad-ass riot grrrl with a camera and, along with her cousin, proof positive that the next generation of Palestinian women are gonna give Leila Khaled a run for her money. Buckle up, Bibi, the next intifada is coming.


Caitlin Johnstone-  To call Caitlin a kindred spirit is probably an understatement. She's more like a Siamese twin separated by generations and continents at birth. Do you know any other foul mouthed Yippie bitches willing to break bread with the radical right? Didn't think so. Lately Caitlin has become a sort of online Courtney Love, a loud mouth punching bag who gets degraded largely for being the smartest thing with a vagina in the room. Caitlin may be too classy to play that card but her tranny sister is shameless. Justin Raimondo and Joshua Frank are scared little boys afraid of the big bad bitch stepping on their fragile little pricks. A pox on both your houses! Caitlin is a legit underground journalist. Fuckers like you use to know what those words meant. We don't play by your stupid fucking rules. Solidarity!


Joe Pera-  To call Joe an acquired taste is also probably an understatement. Truth be told, no comedian since Andy Kaufman has managed to harness the surreal soft power of subtle awkwardness quite like Mr. Pera. The result is something so 'normal' it's downright unnerving. For those of you who aren't familiar with this endangered species of performance artist, he's kind of like an odd hybrid of Chance from Being There and Mr. Rogers on mescaline. And his late night Adult Swim series, Joe Pera Talks With You, might be the strangest and most wonderful new thing on TV in 2018. Playing a semi-fictional version of himself against the backdrop of a small town on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that has clearly grown bored with his supine antics, middle school quire teacher Joe Pera hosts a series of public access style introductions to such esoteric topics as Nineteenth Century Canadian pest control, the proper way to dispose of a jack-o-lantern, and becoming the last white man alive to discover the Who's Baba O'riley. Somewhere along the way the show morphs into a strange love story between the painfully single Pera and a closet survivalist band teacher. The result is the perfect anecdote to the often stagnant existence of small town life in a dying empire. It's sort of like a good Ambien trip. Once you get past the initial wave of unnatural calmness, the normal becomes strangely beautiful and the beautiful becomes downright ridiculous in the best kind of way.


Father John Misty-  Every generation requires at least one great bard of blunt sarcasm. A smirking cynic with a guitar who wraps his barbs in such fluffy layers of melodic pop that their audience doesn't even realize they're bleeding internally until it's too late. In the past we've had Dylan, Lennon, Waits, and Oberst, to name a few. Today we have Mister Father John Misty, who's smoochy soft rock ballads thinly veil some of the sharpest critiques of western society in years. The title of his latest masterpiece, God's Favorite Customer, says it all; 'I'm a rock star, look at me, who fucking cares.' Something tells me both Sartre and Kurt Cobain would approve. The only thing more refreshingly bitter than the good Father's lyrics are his hilariously flippant interviews with the press where he dismisses their tired pretensions like a drunken whore turning down the advances of a penniless john. There is no point denying that Mr. Misty is a fucking dick, but god do we need him, now more than ever.


Muqtada Al-Sadr-  Don't call it a comeback, Muqtada has been here for years...  You remember, the dude who looks like a jihad garden gnome and kicked America's monkey ass up and down post-Saddam Iraq with his crafty Shia Mahdi Army. I'm pretty sure he's responsible for at least half of Dick Cheney's sixteen heart attacks. Muqtada pulled a JD Salinger after the (partial) American withdrawal but he came back with a vengeance in 2018, reinventing himself as a kind of Islamic Ralph Nader. He took on all the major parties and the corruption of foreign influence from both the US and Iran in this years parliamentary elections and against all the odds he won, proving once again that the bullet and the ballot box is still a viable option for revolutionary change. I don't know Sadr's take on queer folks but this is one tranny who fucking loves him. Solidarity!


Mitski-  The only exception to my no repeats rule. I had to put Miss Mitski Miyawaki on this list again because, with Be the Cowboy, she once again recorded the best album of the year. Mitski has transcended from indie darling to a full blown phenomenon. With her songs about cultural isolation and sexual frustration, she has become a welcome voice for a whole generation of lost children who have awoken to a crippled adulthood in a hemorrhaging civilization where the American Dream has become a dystopian nightmare. We're broken hearted and we're all pretty fucking pissed too. Mitski continues to create the perfect soundtrack to this Faustian existence and I'm not the only one grateful for the sacrifice. I am part of a growing fan base of women, Asians, and Queers who find solace in her music. Together, we are not alone. Mitski is our champion.


Keith Preston-  When I first discovered that one of my posts had been published on a place called Attack the System, I asked a friend of mine who the hell Keith Preston is. His response; "He's the left-libertarian that left-libertarians love to hate." My response; "Sounds like my flavor of motherfucker." It was the perfect beginning to what has become a strange and wonderful friendship. I've never considered myself to be a national anarchist and I still don't. I mean, shit, I've been called a social justice warrior more times than I can count and I rarely deny the charge. But the core of my philosophy has always been a kind of 'come as you are' open mindedness that I've found strangely unwelcome on many leftist sites. But that really is what best sums up the philosophy of AtS as well. In spite of all the cat calls from the increasingly shrill antifa-left, Attack the System is the most open minded place in the radical blogosphere and that seems to be the main problem the supposed open minds on the left seem to have with it. Keith takes intersectionality to its natural conclusion. If we're all getting fucked by the same system then why are we wasting our time attacking each other? Freaks of the world unite and take over. I can't thank Keith enough for creating such a place or letting me be a part of it. In hindsight, I'm surprised it took me this long to get there.


Clare, Lily, & Chantal-  You don't know these girls but trust me when I tell you, you wish that you did. I came into this past year reeling from a nasty run-in with a quack shrink who tried to convince me that my gender is a perverted mental illness, something the Catholic Church had already burned into my frontal lobe in grade school. Once I decided that cunt wasn't worth the price of the hollow-points I would need to convert her face into a toilet bowl full of blood, I sought out help from my tiny Appalachian hamlet's single queer therapy group and I met the three sisters that god had denied me by blood. These girls, my girls, aren't just my friends, they're my family and they, more than anyone else, have taught me the importance of belonging to something bigger than yourself. Before them, I was half a girl without a tribe. Less than a year later, I'm a veritable force to be reckoned with. These connections are why I remain so committed to the struggle for liberty and voluntary collectivism. They're also the number one reason I get out of bed in the morning.


You see, dearest motherfuckers, at the end of the year, it doesn't matter how many cars run you over or how many tumors you find on your tits. It doesn't matter how many people the empire kills or how many ice caps they melt doing it. As long as we have each other to fight for, it's all worth it, it's worth every drop of blood. These are the people I bleed for and the people who bleed for us all. And they've collectively made one of the most fucked up years of my life one of the best. Stay tuned and keep the faith, dearest motherfuckers, we're just getting started.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtracks; theme songs for people who don't suck

* Ahed Tamini- Cherry Bomb by the Runaways
* Peter Van Buren- I Fought the Law by the Clash
* Janna Jihad- Modern Girl by Sleater-Kinney
* Caitlin Johnstone- Awful by Hole
* Joe Pera- Baba O'riley by the Who
* Father John Misty- Bored in the USA by Father John Misty
* Muqtada Al-Sadr- Mama Said Knock You Out by LL Cool J
* Mitski- Your Best American Girl by Mitski
* Keith Preston- Come As You Are by Nirvana
* Clare, Lily, & Chantal- My Girls by Panda Bear

Anarchism and the Mentally Ill

Like many of my posts, I'm writing this piece from the clerical unit of my local psych rehab. There are all kinds of people here around me; black, white, old, young. But the one thing we all have in common, the one thing that brings us all together here, is that, for lack of a better word, we're all fucking nuts. Schizophrenia, bipolar, a vast rainbow across the autism spectrum, I personally enjoy a zesty melange of depression, social anxiety, gender dysphoria, and agoraphobia that have plagued me for most of my life and my family for generations. We come here for a lot of reasons, for work, for recovery, but mostly we come here to belong. Because it's the one place where we can be who we are without fear of being censured by a society that has deemed us defective.

I am mentally ill, dearest motherfuckers. But what does that really mean in this day and age. In the modern world, a mentally ill person is essentially someone who is pathologically ill equipped to take part in society. But considering the state of society, is that really a disability? We live in a country that prizes mindless obedience to authority and no holds barred consumption to the point of ecological genocide. If you ask me, the people who aren't freaked out are the fucking sickos.

I can't hold down a steady job because I can't cope with having my life micromanaged by some pubescent grill Nazi or some role-crazy box-store despot. But I've come to the realization that not only can I not hack it in the straight world, I don't want to. Even if I could stand behind a counter at Best Buy for six hours straight without literally murdering somebody with a goddamn Xbox, I can't stand the thought of living my life that way. I devote my time instead to writing, therapy, and volunteering for causes that I actually give a fuck about. I'm not nuts about using peoples state-pilfered tax dollars to pay for my meds but I do get a sick kick out of the fact that the feds are quite literally paying me to advocate for their destruction.

You see, along with being certifiable, I'm also an outspoken anarchist. Many people consider these things to be synonymous and I happen to agree with them. Medicaid aside, the state has always been a consistent enemy to the mentally unruly. They beat us, drug us, lock us up, and drug us some more. Individuals who live outside the class system on the streets are routinely murdered and their killers are rarely held accountable. People deemed mentally ill also often have the foresight to see the system for the ridiculous sham that it is, which is what makes us pathological anarchists and natural born enemies of the state. This is where the stigma kicks in. The world doesn't have to heed the warnings of Ted Kaczynski because Ted Kaczynski is crazy. It took a dozen bombs for the sane world to even listen and even then his manifesto fell on deaf ears until his crazy predictions about automation and technological slavery became a reality. Mental illness didn't push Ted to terrorism, society did. Attacking civilians is never excusable but when the world treats you like a fucking dog on a chain, some people decide to bite to get heard.

Well, I choose to bite back too. This blog is my bomb. These words are my fangs. I embrace the individuality of my mental illness. If sanity means embracing conformity, wage slavery, and a total indifference to the suffering of the world then count my crazy tranny ass out. If wearing a gendered uniform from nine to five makes me dysphoric then I will embrace my discomfort. If the herd makes me nervous then I will embrace my anxiety. If the carnage of the war machine breaks my heart then I will embrace my depression. I will not allow mainstream society to make me ashamed of recognizing the human costs of its rational nihilism. I will not use pills and therapy to normalize my mind for enslavement, I will use them to develop the skills I need to organize my fellow freaks to fuck the system that's fucked us. The only fair stereotype about the mentally ill is that we are dangerous. You're goddamn right we are. We think free, we feel deep, we fight back, and we will not be bowed by your false gods. So fear me, society. This nut-job is gonna bring you down.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs to lose your shit to

* Bad Days by the Flaming Lips
* Something For Your M.I.N.D. by Superorganism
* Holes by Mercury Rev
* Whatever (I Had a Dream) by Butthole Surfers
* My War by Black Flag
* More Human than Human by White Zombie
* Planet of Sound by the Pixies
* Be My Head by the Flaming Lips
* Pretend We're Dead by L7
* Two Step by Throwing Muses

Godspeed William Blum

William Blum, a role model, a hero, and the author of my favorite book, Killing Hope, died this past week at 85 in Arlington, VA, from complications related to kidney failure. Blum pulled zero punches when it came to his acidic criticism of America's imperialist foreign policy or its shameless defenders in the mainstream media, like the loathsome New York Times, those fine folks who brought you the Iraq War, who penned a pissy little obituary about a real journalist titled, "William Blum, US Policy Critic Cited by Bin Laden, Dies at 85". I sincerely hope that I'm not alone when I wish those creeps blackouts, toothaches. and indigestion for Christmas. Morons like Mr. Sam Roberts aren't fit to dig Blum's grave, much less piss on it.

Yes, in a career spanning half a century, Blum was probably best known for the praise he received from one Osama Bin Laden for his antiwar cult classic deep state rip-and-run, Rogue State. He became downright infamous for refusing to denounce the bastard's good taste in agit-prop. Instead, while denouncing the attacks on September 11, he stood by his work and supported its use by anyone as a tool for historical illumination. As a raving queer leftist who has been published by everyone from libertarian capitalist pigs to right-wing tribalists, I can relate. William not only had the courage to stand up to his own countries foul foreign policy but he never bowed to the Mandarins of the Fourth Estate who scoffed at his brilliant prose.

Blum had an uncanny start for an anti-imperialist crusader. He was in his youth a devout anti-communist cold warrior who secured a job at the State Department with ambitions of becoming a globe-trotting defender of the "free world". This dream came crashing down when he witnessed the unspeakable carnage of the Vietnam War. He quit his promising career with the deep state and instead devoted his life to combating the tyranny he discovered that it truly represented. He helped found the Washington Free Press, which quickly became a cornerstone of the antiwar movement and the burgeoning Fifth Estate which sought to restore the soiled good name of American muckrakery. He stepped in the footsteps of America's finest bards of outrage; Thoreau, Twain, Mencken.

Blum reveled in his new-found calling as an anti-establishment provocateur. He worked closely with burn-listed rogue spooks like former CIA case officer Phillip Agee. He once faked a flat tire outside the gates of Langley in order to record the licence plates of CIA agents coming and going so he could later publish their names and addresses. Blum was the proto-Assange but it was his role as an underground historian that earned him infamy. In his raison d'etre, Killing Hope, Blum gave a carefully detailed, excruciatingly well sourced account of America's toxic history of endless conquest, in blow-by-blow chronological order, from our covert excursions into Maoist China at the end of the Second World War to the imperial train-wreck of the second invasion of Iraq. The work earned Blum resounding praise from academics, intelligence officers, Pulitzer Prize winners, and even a former New York Times bureau chief. But the lion share of the legacy media was beside themselves with vitriol over Blum's exposure of the war crimes of sacred cows like JFK and Bill Clinton, not to mention the long history of collusion between the self-proclaimed free press and the American intelligence community which included fomenting coups and perverting popular elections, almost always in favor of despotic military regimes.

It's little surprise that these corporate sock puppets would throw one last hissy-fit at the gravestone of a literary novice who so rudely showed them what a real journalist looks like, but the virtual radio silence from the alternative left media (with a few shinning acceptions) that William Blum helped create is what I find truly revolting. It took me almost a week to even learn that a man I loved had passed. The rapidly shrinking Russopobes at CounterPunch, a once fine organ that Blum helped put on the map, waited five days to give the self-proclaimed democratic socialist a lukewarm send-off, buried 29 stories down on their weekend edition. Blum was a devoted leftist but he was an anti-imperialist first and foremost and he didn't shy away from calling a spade a spade, even when it was politically incorrect to do so. He rightly spoke out against America's covert regime change operations in Ukraine and our nation's increasingly unhinged position towards Putin's Russia. In the end he got written off by many of the same fellow leftists who once sung his praises for the same reason he got written off by high-brow war-porn operations like the Times, he spoke the truth and the truth was inconvenient.

William Blum was a devoted antiwarrior to the very end. He was also one of the most underrated voices of his generation. I felt compelled to write this obituary to honor his legacy. His service to world peace should never be forgotten. Godspeed William Blum, this is one devoted malcontent who salutes you.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky Reid/CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

* The Whole of the Moon by the Waterboys
* Outsmarted by the Hives
* Whisper to a Scream by Icicle Works
* Glorious by Adorable
* Bring On the Dancing Horses by Echo & the Bunnymen
* Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival
* You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory by Johnny Thunders

HW: Death of a Dick

It seems like just last week we finally fucking buried John McCain's stinking corpse and it's already time for another 24/7, month long, imperial funeral marathon. Since the very second former president and well known war criminal George HW Bush finally dropped dead (What was he, like 900?), every channel from CNN to Nickelodeon has been surgically attached to his decomposing dick. "Oh, what a great man!" "What an American hero!" "His breath smelled like roses and his jizz tasted like mayonnaise!" Judging by the coverage, you would have thought the man cured fucking cancer rather than twiddling his thumbs while a whole generation of queer people died of a plague he refused to even address so he could keep cutting checks from those Millennarian fag-bashers in the Christian Right, OH WHAT A HERO!...

We're all told how humble our 41st president was, yet his obnoxiously opulent funeral put some of the African dictators he bankrolled to shame with all the subtlety of a goddamn Master P video. Pre-pubescent quires and blazing guns and fluttering doves and balling bitches. I'm surprised they didn't drag his gilded casket away behind a solid gold tank. I've seen North Korean missile parades with more modesty. The bastard even had some saccharine Josh Groban knock-off warbling philosophic about his Greek godlike achievements- "He swung his golden sword, and spilt blood for our lord, and when he unsheathed his dong, his interns swore it twas a gourd..." I would have burst out laughing if I didn't have to swallow a mouthful of vomit.

We're all told about HW's hallowed career as a death defying war hero. Few people mention however that our heroic flyboy strafed two life boats escaping the wreckage of his latest target in the South Pacific in clear violation of international law. If Tojo had managed to get the upper hand on our burgeoning American war machine, it would have been "war heroes" like old HW standing trial at Nuremberg. Greatest Generation my ass. The core philosophy of our much vaunted "Greatest Generation" was best summed up by those would-be-war-heroes in the Waffen-SS, "We were just following orders!...", yeah, now drink yourself stupid in suburban purgatory and cheer on the National Guard while they shoot your long-haired kids for refusing to do the same.

And of coarse, we're all told about George Bush, the great and humble statesman, who oversaw the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War. They swiftly glaze over his "victories" in Panama and Iraq without delving into the towering horrors those conflicts entailed. They can't really even be accurately described as wars. Wars require two sides. They were more like carefully staged massacres, choreographed bloodbaths, the thorough annihilation of two defenseless third world countries by the last superpower standing. All while the rest of the world watched in despair at what could easily become their fate if they dared to cross the only bully on the block.

After provoking the Panamanian National Guard into retaliation with months of Marine Corpse hooliganism along the border of the still illegally American Panama Canal Zone, our newly elected fearless leader unleashed all out hell on the tiny Central American nation, supposedly with the sole intention of taking out his former lackey, a coke smuggling rapist named Manuel Noriega. Apparently this task necessitated burning the nations poorest barrio, El Chorrillo, too the fucking ground, displacing some 20,000 people, and filling mass graves with nearly 3,000 civilian bodies. The country never recovered. When asked if all this carnage was really necessary just to nab a tin-pot money launderer who use to be on his CIA's payroll, that sweet gentle statesman responded that every human life was precious but not precious enough to give up the opportunity to prove he wasn't a wimp. Compared to Iraq, however, Panama got off easy.

The first Gulf War began much the way Panama did, with a formerly allied tyrant, Saddam Hussein, goaded into an attack over a highly disputed territory. Hussein only invaded Kuwait after receiving several green lights to do so by high-ranking members of Bush's staff. When HW called for blood atonement for the subsequent invasion, Saddam was utterly stupefied by his former chum's total about face and made several desperate attempts to reach out and make some kind of face-saving peace deal. But it was already too late, HW's geostrategic Grand Guignol show of post-Cold War power was already underway.

A fierce rain of bombs was unleashed upon the desert nation and its people, obliterating power plants, radio stations, nuclear reactors, oil refineries, factories producing toxic chemicals, bridges clogged with civilian traffic, and pretty much everything and anything else that fucking moved. A civilian bunker miles from anything of strategic importance was blown to smithereens, killing 408 cowering people inside, most of them women and children. Iraqi troops were slaughtered in cold blood after waving the white flag of defeat, tens of thousands more were roasted alive retreating on the infamous Highway of Death where 60 miles of fleeing soldiers were boxed in and then systematically annihilated by a swarm of American bombers so thick that it only cleared up after several near collisions. More Iraqi GI's were buried alive in their bunkers by US Army bulldozers and shot if they tried to escape.

The shear scale and variety of sadistic torments over the span of just a few months remains baffling. What's all the more baffling is that the majority of these acts of barbaric ultra-violence occurred after Iraq had already been roundly routed and defeated. 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were murdered in total. Over 3,000 civilians were killed by the initial bombing but within a couple years the near complete devastation of the nation's once modern infrastructure caused the untimely deaths of another couple hundred-thousand. By the end of the decade that number had creeped up into the millions as a result of the crippling sanctions started by our last true warrior president, all while his beloved colleagues in the American mass media covered and covered up the massacre with the Vaseline gloss of a Hollywood blockbuster.

The closest thing to a reason for this devastating carnage given by Bush was that it was necessary to usher in a new era of American dominance, a single polar world in which one country called the shots. Other nations could be built like the US dictatorships in Panama and Iraq, and they could just as easily be ground into dust. The lord giveth and the lord taketh away. The mammoth blood baths of HW marked the birth of the neoconservative era of American super-imperialism, or as Bush put it, "a new world order". In short, the man destroyed two entire nations in four years because he could. There was no more Soviet adversary to check his influence. He murdered all those people to send a message. A decade later on September 11, 2001, the Middle East gave its response in a manner cruel enough for even a simpleton like Bush's son to understand. That's the true legacy of the old bastard, or at least it should be. Osama Bin Laden didn't start the War on Terror, his fellow monster and former sponsor George HW Bush did. In a parallel universe, Bush's long life would have been ended by a shot in the dark from a Salafi Seal Team 6 and Bin Laden would have died in a palace, surrounded by loved ones. Strange the way things work out.

Beware of heroes, dearest motherfuckers. They have an uncanny tendency to be villains with better luck and sharper PR campaigns. HW was a dick. The fact that he's dead doesn't change that.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

* We Appreciate Power by Grimes
* Cult of Personality by Living Colour
* Leave Him Now by Cloud Nothings
* Family Man by Nitzer Ebb
* Danny Nedelko by IDLES
* N.W.O. by Ministry
* Ironic by Alanis Morissette
* What Do I Get? by Buzzcocks



Dedicated in loving memory to Pete Shelley, a man who only bombed our ears with beautiful noise, and who's death was overshadowed by the death of a dick. Godspeed my brother. The next pint's on Christ.

The Church of Jesus Christ Satanist

Maybe this is evil but I've always wanted to start a cult. It just seems like a fun thing to do. The robes, the guns, the girls, the mirrored aviator shades. Death squads, armed compounds, and fireside orgies. There is just something strangely romantic to me about taking over a ghost town in Wyoming, painting all the buildings blood red, and declaring war on the federal government and reality itself. The fact that it's also a tax exempt way to get laid and loaded doesn't exactly hurt either. Sure it usually ends badly but to go out in a blaze of glory set by the feds on live television while neck deep in barely legal pussy, oh sweet Jesus, what a way to go! So I figured, after 11 years in Catholic school and another 6 in hermetic self-isolation, why not try my hand at the game. I'm an off-puttingly charismatic and mentally ill gadfly. If Jim Jones, Osho, and Charlie Manson, then why not Comrade Hermit. It's high time we had ourselves a genderfuck messiah. The idea is very 2019, don't you think?

First off though, I feel obligated by my own syncretic spirituality to clarify that I don't believe in half of the bullshit bellow. Maybe publicly admitting that isn't the best way to start a new religious movement but it certainly feels like the most post-modern. Personally, I'm an agnostic. I like to keep an open mind, but I generally subscribe to an odd mix of Christian Gnosticism, Liberation Theology, and Celtic Pagan Pantheism, which basically amounts to a sort of Irish Folk Christianity, like Santeria for transgender Lapsed Catholics. But that's a touch too sincere for a cult. Sincerity is for spirituality. Cults and their mainstream cousins, organized religion, are about theater. So, spirituality aside, I've decided to use this blog to launch the Church of Jesus Christ Satanist. A cult for the Twenty-first Century!

The doctrine goes that after Jehovah wen't nuts and started turning motherfuckers into pillars of salt and flooding half the planet just for kicks, a righteous young renegade angel named Lucifer launched a failed celestial palace coup to overthrow a despotic god and liberate mankind and beyond by granting all beings the ability to evolve into their own gods. When the coup went south, god deposed Satan and cast him and his fellow renegade angels down to earth, which theologians often get mixed up with hell or purgatory when in reality they're just three different names for the same sub-celestial realm, from which Satan and his fellow fallen angels began to plot a grass-roots, Maoist-style, peasant revolution to bring down heaven once and for all.

Satan's angels took many forms across the planet; Odin, Set, Shiva, Loki, Kali, Quetzacoatl, all preaching a similar form of tribal earth worship. God fired back by sending Abraham to poop the pagan party and stir up shit across ancient Mesopotamia. He also got busy corrupting the heathens in Rome with material greed, causing them to pervert Satan's message into a justification for imperial conquest. Satan's solution was to fuck a human and spawn a son to spread the true word of Lucifer and confront god's quislings in Rome and Israel. That son was none other than Sir Jesus Christ, who, contrary to popular belief, was in fact the anti-messiah foretold in Abrahamic lore.

A chip off the old block of sulfur, Christ was a renegade in his father's image. A wine guzzling, polyamorous, faggot who rolled with twelve hunky, blue collar, boy-toys and a smart-mouthed, sex-working, fag-hag who he made his bride. Jesus roamed the deserts, hanging out with hookers, eunuchs, and lepers and railing against the tyranny of imperialism and organized religion. He performed Vaudeville-style magic tricks, vandalized temples, and taught peasants that the power of god was already within them. Naturally, Christ had to go. So god had his favorite dicks in the Roman Empire and the Pharisees team up to have the baddest faggot in Bethlehem gruesomely murdered on the cross.

But Christ rose from the dead for one last zombie pep rally with his boys and his bottom bitch that convinced them to keep the movement going in the shadows of Jehovah's tyrants. The first Christians were the only true Christian Satanists before our new church. They lived a proto-Kropotkinite existence, forgoing class and money, dwelling in caves, and performing psychedelic fueled fertility rituals. God only managed to keep this burgeoning underground happening under his thumb by using his old chums in the Roman Empire to appropriate Christianity and transform it into another ball crushing, despotic, Abrahamic, sky-god cult. The true teachings of Christ were manipulated and mutilated beyond recognition and the ultimate pagan outlaw was used to justify the destruction of heathen cultures across the globe by the same cunts who killed him.

This is where the Church of Jesus Christ Satanist comes in to revive the anti-messiah's bad name and re-declare war on the god he died rebelling against. We are a church that recognizes the validity of all pagan deities as reflections of the original heathen god, Satan. We dress in black and red robes and reject all forms of government and authority as well as the gender and sexual norms they perpetuate to separate our divine biological relationship with the Devil. We perform sacramental orgies and use the awesome power of hallucinogenic pharmaceuticals to realize our true evolutionary potential as gods in our own right. Our saints include spiritual iconoclasts like Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Peter Kropotkin, and naturally, yours truly as well as true Christian renegades like Jacques Ellul, Dorothy Day, Leo Tolstoy, and Ivan Illich. And, of coarse, the quickest way to the Devil's heart is my boudoir.

Like I said, it's all theater. But like all great theater, it comes with a grain of truth. The true goal of the Church of Jesus Christ Satanist, aside from getting me laid and spooking the squares, is to divorce the righteous teachings of Christ from the cruel and despotic teachings pushed in the Old Testament as well as by a few of the loonier Apostles. It also seeks to create a bridge between what I believe to be the anti-clerical and anti-authoritarian roots of early Christianity with it's influences in Mesopotamian Heathenry as well as the rituals it appropriated from European Paganism which have informed everything from the veneration of the Holy Mother archetype to the best parts of the Christmas tradition. I don't actually believe in Satan, at least not in the literal sense. But if god really was as callous as that dictator described in the Old Testament then it would only follow that his antagonist would be the real good guy. This is why so many good people remain attracted to the seemingly un-defendable premise of Satanism. Parts of the Bible have been used to successfully oppress so many people for so long that some of them are willing to praise a demonic serpent just to free themselves from its shackles. I can sympathize and I have the odd feeling that Christ would too.

So what do you say, dearest motherfuckers? Are you with me? Upon this blog I build our church. Praise Jesus and Hail Satan! Let the orgy begin.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

* Rite of Cleansure by Burzum
* If You're Feeling Sinister by Belle & Sebastian
* Spirit In the Sky by Norman Greenbaum
* Santeria by Sublime
* Sympathy For the Devil by the Rolling Stones
* Raining Blood by Slayer
* Beginning to See the Light by the Velvet Underground
* Levitate Me by the Pixies
* In Conspirasy with Satan by Bathory
* Number of the Beast by Zwan

The Trouble With White Guilt

White Guilt is a very serious affliction in this country. Its symptoms include cultural appropriation, political correctness, and obsessive NPR consumption. Fall is peak White Guilt season, wedged between our country's most cherished celebrations of genocide, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. A common misconception is that White Guilt is a mental illness. While it can cause delusions in more severe cases, White Guilt is actually a completely natural response to conspicuous consumption, particularly when this addiction to material garbage is built on an ancient Indian burial ground.

Lets face it people, like it or not, this country's grotesque surplus of wealth would be scientifically impossible without a veritable banquet of holocausts spanning three continents and the entire Western Hemisphere. Scores of tribes in North and South America and Africa were reduced to cinder to create a level of concentrated wealth in Western Europe and its bastard breakaway states that is downright unnatural and white people on both sides of the Atlantic continue to enjoy the luxuries that this legacy of brutality provides us. Luxuries like slowly murdering ourselves with trans fats while others starve and declaring it a holiday. So if you're white, you probably should feel a little bit guilty. Our ancestors did some dicked up shit, even mine. Though they may have came to this country as white niggers escaping their own holocaust on potato boats, my Irish Catholic kin still earned their right to whiteness by whooping on school buses full of black kids as good as any Catholic bashing WASP could.

So we've zeroed in on the cause of white guilt, now how about the cure if there even is one? The prescription currently preferred by most milquetoast, limp-wristed, liberal, sweater vest jockies is some form of charity. Whether this means cutting checks to the Southern Poverty Law Center or voting for extravagant welfare state packages, honkies seem convinced that they can buy their way out of rape like Kobe fucking Bryant. This doesn't work. However well intentioned, forking over fists full of cash to poor people does nothing but make them dependent on the same kind of hierarchy that imprisoned them in the first place. Africa doesn't need food, they need farms that aren't owned by Monsanto and more than anything they need the bloodsucking monkey of Western Imperialism off their fucking back. So unless you can give them debt forgiveness save your money.

Welfare strings people along and gives them just enough money to exist while keeping them reliant on and thus subservient to the state. I know this from personal experience. My agoraphobia makes me ill-equipped to function in conventional society, the fact that I'm permanently stuck between genders doesn't exactly help either. But rather than adjusting society to meet the needs of people like me and encouraging our strengths, the state prefers to give me a stiffened that affords me just enough money to cover my meds while preventing me from seeking the part time work that might be enough to get me started but not enough to cover my expenses. The result is being trapped in a kind of limbo of economic dependency. This snare serves a whole other purpose when we're talking about even more heavily marginalized communities. What sane black person living under the yoke of a police state wouldn't want to strap on a Ruger and hit the nearest Howard Johnson's? Well, one that needs that same racist state to feed their family. It's no coincidence that LBJ's Great Society came amidst some of the biggest black insurrections since the Restoration. It was payola in the form of high rise slave quarters called projects. The welfare state seeks to cripple not empower.

The more radical white leftist solution to White Guilt usually comes in the form of some kind of #pandering. You can keep your gentrified town house and hit up the ATM for your trust funds in your cherry new Tesla as long as you sip fair trade lattes and support Black Lives Matter and queer rights on Facebook. Not only is this brand of plush armchair activism offensively counterproductive but it's also downright counterrevolutionary. It's easy to support someone else's struggle from the comfort of the suburbs. And marching off to someone else's barrio thinking your going to save the peasants with your menthol E-cigs and your Che Guevara iPhone is just a petite bourgeois version of humanitarian imperialism. So congrats Sandernistas, you're Clintonians after all.

So what is the cure? Your probably begging your browser by now. The harsh reality is that there really isn't one. The damage has been done. Contrition is a lifelong sentence, not a solution. But that doesn't mean things can't be done to help equal the playing field and live a long fulfilling life with WG. How do we do that? I think founding Black Panther, Huey Newton came up with the best answer to that question when he was asked what white kids could do to support his cause. His response? Start a White Panther Party. There are poor white folks from the Ozarks to the Rust Belt that are just as thirsty for revolution as any person of color and for many of the same damn reasons. Sadly, too many of their kids have turned their backs on them and left their righteous fury to be poached by race baiting twats like Donald Trump. These kids go on and on about intersectionality without realizing that the best way to show their solidarity with oppressed minorities is to organize their own communities against the state that threatens them both. They could use a brief history lesson.

For the most part, Huey's sage advice fell on deaf ears but a few radical honkies got the message. John Sinclair's appropriately titled White Panther Party worked to unite Ann Arbor and Detroit's disenfranchised white youth around dope, sex, and Rock&Roll. He managed to galvanize the weapons grade angst of youth culture to create an authentic vanguard against Nixon's fascist state. They joined the Black Panther's revolution from their own neighborhoods, creating the terrifyingly unthinkable; the teenage suburban guerrilla, armed with a blunt and their daddies gauge and ready to fight the pigs that crashed their kegger knowing they were the same pigs that shot Mark Clark and Fred Hampton.

Perhaps even more fascinating was the Young Patriots Organization which later manifested itself into the sadly short lived Patriot Party. These were a loose knit collection of rural white radicals who realized that hillbillies, white trash, and rednecks were the new white niggers and that their hunting skills were put to better use taking aim at city hall than joining the Klan to fuck with other poor people. So they dressed in berets and denim jackets emblazoned with the Stars and Bars and joined Fred Hampton's militant Rainbow Coalition to take down the state. I think this cuts to the heart of the White Guilt conundrum and how to treat it by lending a hand to the people our ancestors fucked rather than belittling their cause with charity and empty calls for solidarity.

You see, dearest motherfuckers, the best thing we can do to make up for the crimes of the white race is to secede from it. The very concept of whiteness was invented to justify one small cartel of pale faced oligarch's theft of three entire continents. We should reject our membership to this jerry-rigged caste by recognizing that all poor people are their playthings and we're done with being played. We need to reinvest into our own maligned cultures and declare independence for our true tribes separate from the inherently classist monstrosity of White Supremacy, be we queers, headcases, delinquents, hillbillies, or trailer trash. Our act of contrition for getting high off the fumes of the white race should be to burn it down.

It's one of the reasons why I'm proud to be a part of a site like Attack the System. It celebrates true tribal diversity as well as the one thing that brings us all together, our thirst for liberty and our hatred of the state that deprives every shade of this radical rainbow its god given right to radical self-determination. It's like the Breakfast Club for renegades. Here we are all the nigger, the faggot, the redneck, the bandit, and the call-girl. So let them call me a token tranny or a NatBol. I share Huey's dream of an America of a thousand flags even if a few of them are emblazoned on the back of pick-up trucks. This is all of our fight. So swallow that guilt and pick up a torch, we've got mansions to burn together.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

* Everything That Happens Will Happen Today by David Byrne & Brian Eno
* Serve the People by Handsome Furs
* Great American Hoax by the MC5
* Common People by Pulp
* Sonic Reducer by Richard Hell & the Voidoids
* Rebels by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
* Across 110th Street by Bobby Womack
* Sit Down by James
* Don't You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds
* Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello

Support the Houthis

Growing up I was obsessed with the counterculture of the 60's and 70's, so much so that I now instinctively associate a lot of it with my own childhood even though I grew up in the 90's and 00's. Shaved Fish and Let It Bleed play like soundtracks to my teenage years. Some of my first crushes were on righteous babes in arms like Angela Davis and Leila Khaled. And I spent hours pouring over my parents vintage magazines, devouring articles on the Black Panther Party and the Symbionese Liberation Army. What can I say, I was a weird fucking kid. But my fixation with radical chic felt very appropriate during the Orwellian miasma of the Bush years and in some very sad ways, it feels even more appropriate today.

One of the big moments that had a permanent impact on my socio-political outlook were the riots of the '68 Chicago Democratic National Convention, when, unlike today, the radical left took on their own supposed party for refusing to get serious about ending their growing bloodbath in Vietnam. Irate kids filled the streets chanting expletives, the Yippies threatened to contaminate the city's water supply with LSD, and the MC5 crashed the caucus on a flatbed truck with an eight our marathon performance that helped give birth to the Yippies mutant offspring later known as punk rock. The moment that stuck with me most, however, was the one that sent the club swinging pigs in the Chicago PD into a skull cracking frenzy that even the state agreed was a police riot, the moment on night three of the Convention when ten thousand kids raided Grant Park and took down an American flag before replacing it with a red one in an act of solidarity with the Vietcong. To many meat and potatoes Americans, this was the step too far, when protesters went from simply opposing an illegal war to supporting the "enemy".

But from an anti-imperialist perspective, this was the only moral option. The Vietcong were peasants defending their country from an American invasion of genocidal proportions. They were the one force standing between the American war machine and a million My Lai's. To appose the war without supporting this resistance would be an act of absurd hypocrisy. It wasn't about politics. Though their were plenty of communists in the antiwar movement, they didn't make make up the majority any more than fascists made up the majority of the America First Committee. The leading figures in Grant Park included queer anarchist bard Allen Ginsberg, who was later thrown out of Cuba for calling Che Guevara "cute", and foul mouthed libertarian socialist prankster Abbie Hoffman, who owed at least as much to classic liberal populists like Thomas Paine and Henry George as he did the Frankfurt School. They didn't support "Charlie" because they were commies, they supported them because they were the real heroes fighting for their freedom.

Flash forward fifty years, an Arab coalition backed by US Dollars and armed to the fangs with American weapons has slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians and starved countless more in the tiny nation of Yemen, one of the poorest on earth. Their latest victim's crime? An old one, Supporting another rag-tag militia of rural freedom fighters known as the Houthis and, regardless of the latest UN ceasefire, with the last rebel held port of Hodeidah surrounded by a death squad of 30,000 mercenaries, our imperial superstate is a cunts hair away from shutting down the source of 70% of the already impoverished countries imports making the deaths of millions an inevitability. Chicken-hawks like Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary, James "Mad Dog" Mattis have called for a tentative peace deal sometime in December. But their grim track record speaks for itself. These were the same little Kissingers who sabotaged the last ceasefire in June. Meanwhile, the weapons just keep flowing to the front lines while the Saudis launch new fronts in the north west and the Trump administration openly toys with making such a peace deal null and void by declaring the embattled Houthis terrorists.

In other words, the fabled ceasefire is a rouse to calm down Europe while the Saudis prepare to land the death blow in Hodeidah. However, against all perceivable odds, the Houthis continue to make the bastards bleed for every last inch of their country while remaining open to peace. They stand alone against the greatest forces for tyranny the world has ever seen. Contrary to state appropriated myth, there are no Iranian sugar daddies supplying them with arms. The only guns in their hands are the ones they pried from the bodies of the tyrants we sent to subjugate them. These are not terrorists. They aren't even extremists. Though their humble beginnings rest in the Shia stronghold of their nations mountainous north, they are a non-sectarian, non-denominational militia that has earned the hard won support of their nations working-class majority.

But where are the Houthi flags flying here in the land of the free, the sacred belly of the beast? Where have all the Yippies gone? Where is our generations Grant Park moment? well I for one am willing to forgo political correctness to make that stand. So I am calling on you, my dearest motherfuckers, to take this November, National Veterans Month, to pledge your solidarity to the brave men who are truly dying for their freedom. Stand with the Houthis as they make what could very well be their final stand. Tear down the American flag and raise the one that calls for the death of this wretched empire. Support peace. Support justice. Support the Houthis.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5
* Power to the People by John Lennon
* Teenage Riot by Sonic Youth
* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones
* Wave of Mutilation by the Pixies
* Flowers in December by Mazzy Star

Has the Government Declared War on Trans People?

Has the government declared war on trans people? That's the million dollar question and its one I still don't have a clear answer to. As some of you may already know, several weeks ago a memo being circulated by the Department of Health and Human Services was leaked exposing a plan by the Trump administration in league with their supposed enemies in the Deep State to officially establish gender as being defined exclusively by ones genitalia at birth. This would essentially erase people like me and leave us at the mercy of a bevy of bureaucratic tyrants from the prison industrial complex to its child abusing cousins in the tenured snake pits of the public school system.

When I first heard about the memo, released by the New York Times, I was skeptical for a number of reasons, most of them having to do with the foul circus of the midterms. Was the memo leaked by Trump's frenemies in the Steady State in an attempt to use identity politics to shore up the youth vote for their allies in the Democratic Party? Or did Trump leak the memo himself to excite those fun-policing tranny-bashers, the Evangelicals, knowing they'd need the Spanish Fly of state sanctioned child abuse to get hard enough to vote for their local philandering whore-mongers in the GOP and, by proxy, our own philandering whore-monger in chief? Was this memo for real or was it just more hot air to fill Trump's leaky balloon?

Infuriated, I dug like Lazarus to get to the bottom of this fucking thing and I still haven't come any closer to the truth. The memo is out there, bouncing around from one grey-flannel federal bully pit to the next, but as to the question of "does it mean anything?", I still don't know, but I've come to the conclusion that ultimately that's beside the point. The point isn't whether or not the government will use their power to crush a maligned but growing minority. The point is that they can and they can use the federal machinery of 'human rights' to do it. Title IX, a law designed so the state could protect the rights of girls and young women, is now being considered as a possible weapon to define gender based on a horde of powerful mens' Victorian notions of a pink and blue binary universe.

The question here shouldn't be, Can gender be defined by the outward nature of our junk? The question should be, what gives the government the fucking right to make that decision? Regardless of your opinions on gender, do you really trust those pencil-pushing cubicle-Nazis in the Federal Government to tell you who you are? If gender then why not race or sexuality or religion? Where does it stop? The civil rights movement was supposed to be about empowerment, but once the government failed to squash it by force, they decided to co-opt it much the way they did the labor movement. The result hasn't been an increase of rights but a buffet of privileges delivered by the same state with the fire hoses and rabid dogs. When this state decides that it wants to control us, it threatens to take back the privileges and release the hounds. Somehow, I don't think this is what Harvey Milk got shot for.

The relationship between queer people and the state has always been an abusive one. By nature, being queer is an affront to the status quo that the state holds dear. They've tried to annihilate us, to make our love and our bodies illegal, to throw us away in padded cells and concrete tombs. When all that failed to correct us, suddenly Uncle Sam came around offering us a pocket full of candy. We were too desperate to realize this gift was poison. When the state can't eliminate a threat, it subjugates it. The state tried to subjugate trans children with segregated safe spaces and other trinkets of bureaucratic largess but our kids refused to be tamed. They refused to fit into those tight little boxes that say male and female and they inspired many lost adults like myself to join them. Together, we've rejected the tired western notion of gender entirely, creating our own identities to mach the complex nature of our spirits. Spirits that couldn't be contained by outdated science and social structures. Spirits called genderqueer, non-binary, genderfluid, genderflux, trigender, bigender, neutrois, genderless, and some without any name at all. This radical embrace of spiritual freedom and sexual diversity made it impossible for the state to control us. So now it looks like the poison candy may be replaced by the truncheons and bite wounds of yesteryear.

Well fuck them. They can't tell us who we are. They can't tell us what's in our souls. If the government wants to declare war on my people then I say lets return the fucking favor. It is the state that has no right to exist, not us, and all we have to do is refuse to acknowledge its authority. Dress outlandishly. Refuse to answer to any name that's not your own. Use multiple different gendered spaces in one day. Hold a shit-in and occupy the faculties own facilities. Drop out. Run away. Start your own damn families, your own damn schools, your own damn tribal institutions, and your own damn communities. We've already succeeded at rendering gender irrelevant, lets give the state the same treatment. Lets genderfuck Uncle Sam and give him a taste of his own poison candy.

Our movement was built around the wild flames of the counter-cultural bonfires of the Sixties and Seventies. We were wild, naked, and free. We rejected the false gods of the straight world. But somewhere between Reagan's plagues and Obama's platitudes we lost our way. The latest generation of our tribe has reignited the flame and reminded us who we are. The time is now, dearest motherfuckers. Come back to the fire. With any luck we can make it spread. Lets burn this motherfucker down.



Peace, Love, Anarchy, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

* Be a Body by Grimes
* Children of the Revolution by T. Rex
* Losing My Religion by REM
* Monkeywrench by Foo Fighters
* Wake Up by Arcade Fire
* Mississauga Goddamn by the Hidden Cameras
* Oh! You Pretty Things by David Bowie
* Keep Yourself Alive by Queen

Vote or Don't (the Brick and the Ballot Box)

Like any twilight empire, America has some strange and perverse rituals that are generally excepted as normal by our unblinking masses. There's the fascist war prayer of the National Anthem, which you can lose your livelihood for betraying with a knee. There's the Kidz Bop chant version known as the Pledge of Allegiance, my own childhood protest of which had my archdiocese contacting the nearest exorcist. Then of coarse there's the incessant soldier worship which mandates us all to repeatedly thank everyone who has ever served in our colossal armed services for preserving our "freedoms", regardless of whether they launched drone strikes from Las Vegas cubicles or shot Cuban gardeners on golf courses in Grenada. But all of that jingle brained jingoism pales in comparison to the peer-pressure-palooza that is the right to vote.

America's most prestigious imperial holiday comes every two to four years during the first week of November, the sacred ballot bacchanalia known as voting day, an absurd celebration of our mock democracy which everyone from grumpy porch-dwelling oldsters to bitch slapping gangsta rappers implores us to take part in upon the threat dismemberment. "Vote or die because, because... people died... for your right to vote... or die..." or some such nonsense. First off, no they didn't. None of the last centuries ghastly geostrategic boogeymen, be they the starving rice farmers of Indochina or the sheep shagging opium lords of the Hindu Kush gave half a flying fuck about our electoral process. They were much more concerned with that of their own nations and our nations strong arm influence over it. Hell, even those "bastard Japs" would have stuck to there end of the Pacific if it wasn't for FDR's goading oil embargo.

And, hypothetically, if our young men and women in green really did die for our right to vote, that would be twice as tragic because they would have died for a total abject mockery of the word democracy. There is absolutely nothing democratic about picking your favorite grabby one-percenter to run your fucking life for the next two to four years. There are S&M contracts that are more democratic, at least there's a fucking safety word. The only democracy that counts or is even deserving of the title is direct democracy, the original democracy. Personally, I'll take Delescluze and Pericles over Jefferson and Hamilton any day of the fucking week. Until we achieve this standard, the standard being fought for as we speak in Rojava and Chiapas, our elections will be about as meaningful as the ones on reality television.

Does this mean that Comrade Hermit is anti-voting? No, sweet baby, Comrade votes but Comrade votes to protest and Comrade loves to protest. But I also believe in a diversity of tactics, a philosophy I call, the Brick and the Ballot Box, a homage to my kin back in the bandit country of Armagh. I generally do the Rothbard thing and vote for whoever the most antiwar candidate is because without war the states legitimacy swiftly falls to shit. Even here though I have a few caveats. I will not vote for any candidate who doesn't call for a bare minimum of a 50% cut in military spending. If this bare minimum isn't met by any candidate then I protest the vote itself by writing in something like "none of the above" or "roll this ballot into a sharp spear and go fuck yourself with it." (Sadly, computers have largely rendered this last suggestion as symbolic as the vote itself.) What all this generally means is that when I do vote, I vote third party.

With that being said, voting may be a groovy way to tell the state to fornicate itself but real change has always been the product of direct action in the streets aka the Brick. It was the Brick that gave us the forty hour work week and the weekend (thank a fucking Wobbly for your freedom.) It was the Brick that gave us what little civil rights we have. And it will be the Brick that gets the fascist federal government's jackboot off our kid's throats for following the gender in their heart above the gender in their pants. The Ballot Box is fine but, contrary to popular belief, the Ballot Box is largely optional for real progress, the Brick is not. So if you're not gonna vote, I say right on. But lets not let our plutocracy off that easy. You don't have to meet me half-way at the Ballot Box, dearest motherfuckers, to meet me all the way in the streets. You bring the pessimism and I'll bring my brick. The safety word is revolution, dearest motherfuckers. Lets fucking bring it.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

* Waiting Room by Fugazi
* The National Anthem by Radiohead
* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails
* In the Streets by Big Star
* Testify by Rage Against the Machine
* See No Evil by Television
* Public Image by Public Image Ltd
* My Doorbell by the White Stripes
* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones

Make Halloween Dangerous Again!

Halloween is quite easily my favorite holiday. A heathen celebration the Christians failed to conquer, it's a time of joyful chaos and youth rebellion decorated by skeletons, scattered leaves, flickering jack-o-lanterns, and bonfire smoke. A holiday where serial killers are lionized and everyone dresses in drag, betraying conformity to expose their darkest desires to be whores and outlaws. It's the one time of year when a genderfuck malcontent like me can feel halfway normal without having to sell out. It's also arguably this stupid countries only truly anarchist holiday, or at least it was and it still should be.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Halloween meant one night a year when kids owned the streets, wandering unsupervised from house to house dressed in disguise like demons and monsters, appropriating candy from random strangers under the threat of vandalism like tiny unions of egoists. Trick or Treat began as a threat. You could hand over the good stuff (and it better be good) or you could get your house fucked up in a toilet paper draped act of propaganda of the deed, letting the whole neighborhood and any other passing horde of hoodlums know who fucked up and why. In certain parts of the country there was a completely separate holiday called Hell Night, when children engaged in mass acts of gleeful sabotage against the parents, teachers, clergy, and cops who made them feel powerless during the rest of the year. Windows were broken, tires were slashed, and a sense of justice was returned to the universe.

Halloween and Hell Night weren't like Christmas or Easter. The only gifts you got where the gifts you took, the gifts you earned. It was an empowering event that celebrated lawlessness and the collective power of us against them. So it should come as little surprise that the thems of this world have conspired to neuter this heathen celebration of unfettered youth power, by badge, bible, or checkbook. Over the last couple decades Halloween has been transformed into something truly monstrous, the worst kind of monster, a fascistically vanilla monster called "normal". A pejorative so hideously fowl that it could have only been created by an adult, dead from the heart up.

Clever costumes constructed from Goodwill dumpster dives and pilfered drug store make-up have been Disneyfied and replaced by cheap mass produced commercials for corny Hollywood schlock. Feral gangs of sugar-high seeking adolescent illegalists have been rangled into domesticated doorbell chain gangs governed by cartels of uptight helicopter parents. The best junk food has been banished for being unwrapped or unhealthy and replaced by flavorless healthy alternatives to a good time. The moonlit blacktop playgrounds of nocturnal suburbia have become infested by curfew crunching cops and drowned in floodlights seeking to keep kids under adult thumbs even on the only night of the year that was once there's for the taking.

Well I say enough. This is a call to the kids of this country, both young and old, to revolt. Take back the streets. Take back Halloween from the beige forces of adulthood. It was never there's to take to begin with. So break the rules. Sneak out without your parents supervision. Dress to terrify and offend your marks. Get sick on lethal amounts chocolate. Punish the dicks who hand out raisins with shaving cream and rotten eggs. Egg a fucking cop car while your at it. Blow up your neighbors mailbox. Toilet paper your vice principles house and soak the mess with his hose so he cant clean it up. Smash a jack-o-lantern. Get ripped on forties lifted from the local mini-mart. Get finger fucked by your best friend in your grandmas stolen Gremlin. Be a fucking kid. Break the rules. Fuck up. Do something random and stupid. Suburbia's a goddamn prison so start a fucking riot.

And to all the adults in the room, especially the parents, give your kids a fucking break for a change. They may be your responsibility but they're not your property. Turn a blind eye. Hand out the good candy and take it on the fucking chin when your car gets shit-canned if you fail to deliver. You were kids once. Anarchist or not, you can remember what it was like to be the powerless prisoner of your parents or the state. I'm an agoraphobic basket-case. I've grown scared as I've grown old, but I take comfort in the idea that there are still little Stirnerites out there to stir the shit and make the man sweat. They'll here me shout "Right on!" from my living room window with a raised fist after taking a bat to my mailbox. Embrace the chaos, even if that means just not snitching. Keep the anarchist spirit of this season alive. Make Halloween dangerous again.

Happy Samhain, dearest motherfuckers. Keep it wicked and give em holy hell. Somebodies got to.



Peace, Love, & Anarchy- CH



Soundtrack; songs to raise hell to

* Double Dare by Bauhaus
* Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground by the White Stripes
* 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins
* TV Set by the Cramps
* Suburbia by Arcade Fire
* Wild in the Streets by Circle Jerks
* The House that Heaven Built by Japandroids
* (Every Day Is) Halloween by Ministry
* Awful by Hole
* Rise Above by Black Flag

In Defense of National Anarchism

When I first learned that I had been published on Attack the System, a site notorious for being something of a safe space for national anarchists, I was both confused and intrigued. Intrigued because the national anarchists have a rather unsavory rep among their fellow anti-statists as being a kooky breed of quasi white supremacists. And confused because I happen to be an aggressively queer Marxian syndicalist. But also being a hard-luck, technologically challenged, writer who's shit is often too radical even for the fringe, I decided I could hardly look a gift horse in the mouth. So I said fuck it, why not?

Then something very strange happened. The national anarchists turned out to be human beings and they seemed to legitimately dig my shit. So I put them to the test. I sent them all of my posts, not just the ones I thought wouldn't offend their traditionalist sensibilities. I sent them candid posts about my own complex gender identity. I sent them posts referencing my past dalliances with communism and my continued admiration for the Black Panthers. I sent them posts in which I openly and gleefully derided the very notions of biological race and gender. I didn't write these posts with the national anarchists in mind, it just happened to be the kind of shit I write about and I made zero attempt to shield my new audience from it. To my surprise, not only did every single one of those posts get published, they were a hit. Attack the System even went so far as to make me an editor, which was particularly kind considering that I can barely edit my own work, let alone anyone else's.

What the fuck was going on? These were the big bad national anarchists that everyone is so goddamn afraid of? So I did some digging and I was shocked to find out how much common ground I had with these pariahs of the anarchist movement. First off, Attack the System is run by a guy named Keith Preston, an ex-Wobbly who looks more like an ex-Hell's Angel. The left anarchist blogosphere would have believe that Keith eats live babies and jerks off to Nazi propaganda films but, much like myself, he's actually a Lou Reed loving panarchist who had been an important player in the anarchist left before he decided to go rogue and welcome national anarchists into the fold as viable revolutionary allies against the state. This act of blasphemy made him a defacto member of the national anarchist movement in spite of the fact that he's really more of a fellow traveler, a cautionary tale that will probably feel like deja vu before I finish this post.

The national anarchists themselves preach advocacy for a post-capitalist society of stateless tribal communes. If it wasn't for their tacit support for racial separatist societies being allowed to coexist with mixed racial tribal communities, their vision would be virtually identical to my own Bookchinite democratic confederalist pipe dreams. I'm not going to pretend that I'm OK with the idea of enthno-pluralism, as I've said before, I find it to be quite ridiculous. But it can't be emphasized enough that nearly every national anarchist that I've encountered is also a card carrying Voluntaryist/anti-interventionist that would sooner cool out to Graceland than force their weird beliefs on anyone else. That doesn't make these beliefs any less gross to me personally but the whole point of panarchy is local self-determination. I will never be able to create a queer syndicalist world anymore than they would be able to create a racially purist one. It would be stupid to even try. Human beings are just too goddamn complex for a single Utopian vision. Panarchy doesn't just protect the tribes you like, it protects the tribes you hate. Provided that these people don't force their will upon anybody else, their lives are their goddamn business.

Compare this to the fine upstanding citizens of the antifa scene and you have to wonder who the real fascists are. Antifa, like the national anarchists, are a loose knit tribe of mostly white cis-men allegedly committed to combating tyranny. Unlike the big tent national anarchists however, they feel that they have the inalienable right to force their so-called values down your fucking throat with a goddamn ax handle. They claim to be standing up for maligned minorities like me but rather than taking on the police state, they seem to focus most of their energy reenacting scenes from The Warriors with their doppelgangers in the alt-right. It's little wonder that most of the founding fathers of the antifa movement are former neo-Nazi skinheads who've gone from bashing fags to bashing on our behalf as if we need their fucking help. Like Tyler Durden's lost boys in Fight Club or the PC Bros on South Park, these assholes aren't about any specific ideology, they're about the action. They just wanna fucking break shit and pound pussy. Ernst Rohm would be so proud.

And it's these patronizing pricks who lead the front to deny national anarchists and any other anti-statist who doesn't jibe with their adolescent interpretation of anarchy a voice in the movement. What made them so fucking high and holy? Tell me, when was the last time you heard a story about national anarchists fucking up kids at a Noam Chomsky conference? From what I can tell they're much more interested in Renaissance fairs and pagan festivals. Antifa throwing shade on these weird motherfuckers for being "fascists" feels a bit like neckless jocks calling D&D nerds bullies. And I think you all know where I stand in that scenario.

So has Comrade Hermit gone over to the dark side? Truth be told, dearest motherfuckers, I've always kinda been there. I may be an anti-racist, genderfuck, cultural Marxist but I'm also a lifelong fan of Yukio Mishima and Norwegian black metal. I'm a creature of the fringe, I've always felt most at home among the freaks, be they drag queens and leathermen or wickerman burning Odinists. A stated mission I've had since this blogs infancy several years back has been to unite the anti-statist fringe into one big revolutionary vanguard against the tyranny of the status quo. If this means breaking bread with some right-wing oddballs then I say pass the bread, we've got work to do.

And to all you "anti-hate" haters out there, I have only this to say while you unwad your collective panties. The National Anarchist Movement has published one of your own on their Facebook page, twice. Can you honestly say that you would return the favor? Check your mirror, dearest motherfuckers, check your mirror.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this piece

* All Tomorrows Parties by the Velvet Underground
* Transylvanian Hunger by Darkthrone
* Up the Wolves by the Mountain Goats
* Freaks Come Out At Night by Whodini
* Danse Macabre by Celtic Frost
* Walk On the Wild Side by Lou Reed
* Sober Motel by Dilly Dally
* Atmosphere by Joy Division
* Heaven by Charly Bliss
* The Passenger by Iggy Pop

My Shitlist 2018

This blog is a lot of things to me. It's art. It's therapy. It's a bullhorn from which I can shout my radical diktats to a small horde of loyal followers whom I lovingly refer to as my dearest motherfuckers. Hopefully it's a launching pad for a future revolution that will liberate poor people once and for all from the shackles of big government and big business (or do I repeat myself.) But when it all comes down to it, lets face it, I'm here to bitch. That's why once a year I drop all artistic and political pretenses and simply make a list of all the people who piss me off the most. I call it my shitlist and 2018 has provided me with no shortage of shit. Now if I put everyone that chaps my ass on this list it would be longer than fucking Gravity's Rainbow, so I'll just pick a handful in no specific order to roast like pigs on a spit. So here it is, dearest motherfuckers, My Shitlist 2018.


John McCain-  After a lifetime as America's most celebrated war monger, the one thing that John could do for the world, the only act of mercy that that rapacious murder junkie should have been capable of performing is to finally do us all a big goddamn favor and just fucking die already. But no, John McCain even has to die like a fucking dick. Over a week, a goddamn week of funerals and parades and tributes and memorials and animal sacrifices and imperial orgies, all of them carefully planned by that ego-drunken light bulb factory bomber, to celebrate his foul legacy of homicide advocacy like a goddamn pharaoh. By day five of this ordeal, I was screaming at the TV set "Just give me a goddamn shovel! I'll bury the cunt myself!!" All I have left to say to the first dead man to make this list is bon voyage you putrid butcher of civilians. Tell Satan that Armageddon's going great.

Pope Francis-  This crafty motherfucker snowed all of us, even me. With all his radical posturing on capitalism, gay rights, and Vatican reform, I thought maybe, just maybe, my ancestral church had finally began to get it's fucking shit together. No such luck. It turns out the Red Pope is all bark and no bite. In spite of all his lovely little words, the international pedophile cartel known as the Catholic Church continues to pump out fresh victims like Air Jordan's at an Indonesian sweatshop and Franky has gone out of his fucking way to cover their collective ass, putting the company name before basic bare minimum common decency (the latest cover-ups occurred in nearly every arch-diocese bordering my own in Central Pennsylvania) and I'm beginning to think that was the point all along. Like Obama, Pope Francis was just a hip new mask to cover the madness of the same filthy old empire, a shiny new rape van full of fresh kittens. Well no more. When you're trans, part of you will always be that battered child in the closet. The church put me in that closet. It's other victims will always be my comrades, so this jihad is fucking personal to me. Sinead O'Connor was right, It's high time we fight the real enemy. In 2018, that enemy is you, Frank. Commie or not, I'm going to kick your fucking ass. I'm not just lapsed, I'm done with Catholicism. You can officially mark me down as a Trinitarian Wiccan and this witch is pissed.

DJ Khaled-  Social media has done some wonderful things, even a bitter Luddite like me can admit it. Its sparked revolutions, exposed powerful creeps like the ones on this list, and emboldened maligned weirdos like myself. But its also awarded fame and fortune to brain-dead blowhards like DJ Khaled, a C-list hip hop nobody before he constructed an empire on his shallow, re-baked Chicken Noodle Soup for the millennial's soul, self-help, horseshit. Now the motherfucker is everywhere, not just Twitter and Instagram but commercials, billboards, bus benches, designer drugs, urinal cakes, subliminal messages, and most ironically of all, prime time "talent" shows, because who better to assess artistic ability than a second rate, B-boy, Dr. Phil knock-off, who wouldn't know talent if it creeped up and fucked him in the ass? Yep, social media has done some wonderful things, but I'm beginning to suspect that we retired Ted Kaczynski a bit too early.

Robert Mueller-  The vaunted Matlock of the so-called Resistance, this newly minted liberal lion cut his teeth as a key player in George W. Bush's post-9/11 torture factory, heading the FBI while they were busy bugging mosques and sending framed Muslims to rot for life in Git-mo. And this is the guy who's gonna bring justice to Trumplandia? Please excuse me as my disgusted laughter cracks into hopeless sobbing. Robert Mueller isn't leading an investigation into election meddling. If that was true Mossad would have given his skull a skylight months ago. Bob is running a three ring witch hunt designed to sabotage even the faintest opportunity for detente with Putin's Russia. It's a war against peace and, surprise, surprise, months and millions of dollars in and Mueller has proven approximately jack-dick in the way of Russian collusion. He's exposed a few Wall Street mercenaries and entrapped a couple of geriatric old goons, all of which might be reason for amusement if this campaign wasn't riling the country into the worst Russophobic furor since J. Edna rocked a Missile bra. Go ahead and fire him, Trump. Maybe you'll get impeached for it and everyone will win.

Bibi Netanyahu-  There's a reason this twat makes my list nearly every year. Every year he gets a little more powerful and a little more gross. In an era awash with vibrant autocrats like Erdogan, Trump, and Orban, it's a cruel irony that no one looks more like Hitler than the worlds leading Jewish supremacist. With his nimble fingers busy pulling our president's strings (Putin ain't got shit on Bibi), the Kosher Fuhrer has managed to use his fucking toes to machine gun hundreds of peaceful protesters in Gaza, plow entire villages in the West Bank, and even offer a helping toe to his kindred spirits in Al-Qaeda by launching illegal airstrikes in Syria, all while playing power bottom in Moscow and Washington's devils triangle. The motherfucker is like Jim Henson with a body count. Even the Jews are beginning to hate his fucking guts as Bibi's autocratic apartheid state increasingly turns the Uzi's on the chosen people. It's official folks, the golem has become the master. Moses help us.

Tom Arnold-  Best known for porking Roseanne in her pre-MAGA heyday and riding bitch to Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies, quite possibly the most blatantly Islamophobic blockbuster of the Nineties, Tom Arnold is the kind of Z-list Hollywood loser who just wont go away. And now he's groping for another 15 minutes with a show on the usually excellent Viceland in which he plays the role of a yammering crusader for truth searching for the missing and likely fictional Trump tapes. It's kind of like Michael Moore on whippits hosting a Resistance friendly season of Finding Bigfoot. And Roseanne gets canceled? Where's justice? And when does the next season of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia start? I need to wash the taste of mediocrity out of my mouth with Ayahuasca and get high like I've never gotten high before.

Mohammed Bin Salman-  The media just loves this sick son of a bitch, or at least they did until he threw a Scarface-style chainsaw party for one of their own. Up until lately however, if you had based your opinion on the Fourth Estate's drippy smoozefest coverage of the Crown Prince you'd think he was some kind of made-for-TV hybrid of Lawrence of Arabia and Nelson fucking Mandela. The reality is that the only thing the heir apparent to that hateful little dust-land terror-factory of a kingdom has reformed is Saudi Arabia's PR game. His much celebrated anti-corruption campaign is little more than a thinly veiled purge of the Crown Prince's royal competition and his minor concessions to women's rights are essentially a shiny set of jingle-keys to distract the infantile liberal class while he brutally ethnically cleanses Yemen and continues to stoke a dying garbage fire in the Syrian hinterlands. The swarthy young psychopath seems to be hellbent on outdoing his barbaric ancestors in the bloodbath department and the last folks on this list seem more than eager to give it to him on a pike like Khashoggi's head. This is one faggot who's not ashamed to admit that I'm rooting for the Shia Crescent. Someone's gotta stop this cunt.

Donald Trump & Co. Vs. The Fourth Estate-  I despise nothing more on this slow-boiling planet than the endless cro magnon shit-slinging festival between the current gang of banksters occupying the White House and those putrid self-fellating sycophants in the establishment media who got the prior elected and then spent every square second of the last two years bitching and moaning about it. It's a never ending competition between two clans of conniving crybabies over who gets to be the top victim class of the One Percent. Both sides win by hijacking every dinner table conversation from coast to coast while we all lose by choosing sides in a cat-fight between soulless fucking hypocrites who we should all despise equally. If you hate Trump, that's great, you should. He's a petulant oligarch who believes in nothing but himself. But don't let that hate fool you into giving your trust back to the same tabloid hucksters who've sold us into every military quagmire from Vietnam to Libya. If you're sick to death of the press, that's a good thing. That's a completely healthy reaction to a toxic corporate cartel of bourgeois popcorn propagandists who play Woodward-and-Bernstein like cops-and-robbers while they service Nixonian trolls such as Henry Kissinger like a Saigon whore.

I guess what I'm trying to say here, dearest motherfuckers, is there's more than enough hate to go around. Why waste it all in one place? The press will try to tell you that your anger is a bad thing. That's fucking bullshit. The planet is dying, representative democracy has officially flopped, and children are murdered by our sinking empire on nearly every continent. Frankly, you would have to be fucking stupid not to be pissed. Don't reject your anger. Own it. Weaponize it. And use it to obliterate the human clutter that pollutes this god forsaken place we call Earth. Rage on, dearest motherfuckers, rage on. Make your own fucking shitlist and let the ass kicking begin. Pay it forward. Increase the hate.




Rage, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; Theme songs for the shitheads above.

* John McCain- Angel of Death by Slayer
* Pope Francis- Suffer Little Children by the Smiths
* DJ Khaled- Hip Hop by Dead Prez
* Robert Mueller- I'm Waiting for the Man by the Velvet Underground
* Bibi Netanyahu- Sabotage by the Beastie Boys
* Tom Arnold- Loser by Beck
* Mohammad Bin Salman- Psycho Killer by Talking Heads
* Trump & the Press- Colors by Ice-T 



P.S.  My friend Lily, one of my favorite people, wrote this in an email and I just had to fucking publish it.

Empress Nicky of the Dark Luddite Realm, Anarchist Champion of the People, SHALL NOT BE IGNORED. 

Kink is her body, and FIRE is her blood,
She has created over a thousand blog posts,
Unknown to light, nor known to gender,
Has withstood pain to write many arguments
Yet his hands will never hold anything
So as she prays... UNLIMITED NICKY WORKS

Fucking A.

Voluntary Tribalism: Why Not?

I've always found it absurd that white nationalists bitch the loudest about identity politics when they're the winy snowflakes who fucking invented the goddamn concept. White isn't even a race for Christ sake. There is no Whitestan. There is no traditional white tribe. It's a class concept designed to justify an oligarchy without a royal bloodline. I'm pretty sure that the first "white" guys were just a bunch of slave owners who settled on the superiority of their lack of melanin after they finished taking inventory on eye color and penis size and came to the conclusion that skin was the one thing they had in common that the field hands couldn't lay claim to. In today's divided states of America identity politics are mostly used to keep different genres of poor people at each others throats while the one percent rapes their wives (often literally) and pollutes their land.

This doesn't mean that race and other identities can't have a positive place in society. I take great pride in being a gender-bending Irish (lapsed)Catholic dyke. But if ancestry.com has proven anything it's that their is no such thing as purity. Through centuries of war, rape, and pillaging, we've all become a little bit of everything. There is no biological basis to racial identity. It's all a cultural crap shoot. So go ahead and take pride in being German, just know that you're making a choice to identify with 20% of your DNA and try not to be such a dick about it.

I know a lot of people hate to hear this, but gender identity is the same damn thing. Contrary to popular belief, human beings are not defined by their genitalia anymore than they are by their skin color. We all start out female in utero and are largely shaped by the amount of testosterone we're exposed to during pregnancy. They're are many cultures from Santa Fe to Sulawesi who have acknowledged the existence of three, four, five gender identities for longer than our loafer dragging puritanical medical establishment has recognized the existence of two. (Before the Victorian era, the Johns-Hopkins-class naively believed that male was the only gender and women were simply defective males.)

"So what does this mean!?" I can hear the hysterical cry-babies of the troll army weep through a veil of tears, soiling their pressed Fred Perry polo shirts, "If gender and race aren't determined by biology than people can be anything! Oh the madness!!" Many of my fellow left-wing queermos would now take the time to launch into some kind of complex post-modern argument about the nature of western civilization and dialectical materialism and blah, blah, blah. At the ripe old age of thirty, I've simply grown to old for this shit. I'll leave the intellectual hair-splitting to younger minds and longer attention spans. My only response to what can only be accurately described as the rise of voluntary tribalism is, so the fuck what? If race, gender, and sexuality are fluid concepts then why shouldn't they be at least semi-optional?

Many indigenous American tribal nations took a similar approach, accepting escaped slaves and impoverished paupers into the fold as long as they committed themselves to the tribal order. Even that pillar of Prussian nationalism, Oswald Spengler preached that race was not defined by blood but rather by shared ideals. So what if Rachel Dolezal is whiter than a bleached gym sock? Or Ward Churchill has less Indian blood than George Custer? Or that I identify as a lesbian with a stubby cock and a six o'clock shadow? We've all chosen our tribes and devoted ourselves completely to serving the only communities that feel like home to us. I may not have chosen to be non-binary but I did choose to leave the closet and embrace my spirit above my biology and it saved my life. Why shouldn't everybody be afforded that same opportunity? Isn't this the logical outcome of embracing voluntaryism and individuality?

This may also be the best way to hobble racism and rise above the incessant bitching of identity politics. If we're all whatever the fuck we want then what really matters? As I noted above, class is the real game changer here. When it all comes down to it, the real deciding factor in a capitalist society is cold hard cash and the power it affords. Things like race, gender, religion, and sexuality serve the state as distractions from the common thread that ties us all together. Black kids in Ferguson have far more common ground with rednecks in the Ozarks than the millionaire uncle toms in the Congressional Black Caucus. Honky Rust-Belt casualties in Youngstown have far more reasons to vote for a black radical like Ajamu Baraka than a Wall Street corporate welfare queen like Trump. As I said here before in the wake of the Charlottesville brouhaha, we're all niggers and faggots in the eyes of the one percent.

So pick a tribe, any tribe, dearest motherfuckers. Loose yourself from the shackles of identity tyranny and come together to smash the state that divides us against ourselves and our radical individuality.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.

* Cult of Personality by Living Colour
* Beast of Burden by the Rolling Stones
* She Walks On Me by Hole
* Absolutely Sweet Marie by Bob Dylan
* See America Right by the Mountain Goats
* All Along the Watchtower by the Jimi Hendrix Experience
* Say It Loud- I'm Black and I'm Proud by James Brown
* Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones
* Personality Crisis by New York Dolls