Nothing Succeeds Like Secession: Suggested Demands for CHOP From a Friendly Panarchist Ally

I have always been fascinated by secessionist movements. It goes back to my childhood love of maps, flags and geography. I use to spend hours poring over atlases and fixating on the strange autonomous zones that only existed inside fluid borders drawn in dotted lines. Strange places no American ever spoke of, with exotic names like Transnistria, Gaza, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Western Sahara. I would eventually grow into a commie, Third World, war nerd who fastidiously followed and supported these esoteric independence movements from afar. 

Secession often gets a dirty name on the American left, thanks largely to those slave driving frauds in the Confederacy who failed to get the approval of the citizens they called property before calling it splitsville. But globally speaking, secession has more often than not been a practice which usually favors the colonized over the colonizers, and one that could have given real teeth to the growing slave revolts of the South had it been held to the standards of Thomas Paine.

All things considered, it's really little wonder that after an adolescent flirtation with Bolivarian Guevarism, I became a devoted Panarchist, a school of anarchism that rejects globalism in favor of militant localism, and dreams of a world of a million autonomous zones, divided only by ideology and fluid dotted lines. So naturally I was pretty fucking stoked when the goblins on my aging mother's Fox News programs began hyperventilating over CHAZ. 

Born in the heat of urban social upheaval, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone or CHAZ rose from the tear gas like a great anarchist kraken to tantalize and toy with the posh gentrified towers of the purgatory the tech industry has turned one of America's fine outlaw cities into. Finally, the freaks, faggots and crusty dreaded junkies had taken back a six block piece of what had once been a thriving bohemian red light district and transformed it into an outrageous post-apocalyptic utopia, tattooed in graffiti and crawling with sketchy libertines who saunter through the war torn avenues with exotically modified AR-15's and fluorescent colored dread-hawks. The only gas that fills these streets now is the skunky fog emanating from flaming dumpsters and doobies the size of dinosaur bones. A glorious cacophony of grindcore and lo-fi Soundcloud rap bounces off the alleyways from a dozen feral ghetto-blasters tapped into the city grid through hacked streetlamps, as barely legal teen runaways go wild in the streets, shooting dark web procured psychedelic tryptamines and eating each other's taught assholes beneath signs reading "You are now leaving the United States of America." Finally, the American left appears to have discovered the magic of secession.  

If only the vivid nightmares of Sean Hannity were a reality, the world would be my wet dream. Those hysterical creatures who terrify the elderly for a living always make the left look way cooler than it really is. The somewhat disappointing reality is that the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone isn't really an anarchist project. In fact, in its latest capitulation to the melodramatic Karens of the straight world, it isn't even an autonomous zone anymore. CHAZ has become CHOP aka the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, which may very well include a fair share of anarchists among its contingency but is not in fact an anarchist commune.

CHOP is a loose collaboration between Black Lives Matter and a number of other Pacific Northwest protest movements, and aside from a recent highly publicized spatter of the type of seemingly random acts of violence inevitable in any new society, the whole thing has been almost depressingly chill. That isn't to say that CHOP ain't worth defending. As a Panarchist and a pan-secessionist, I try my damnedest to support all indigenous alternatives to the state, and the first half of the CHOP formerly known as CHAZ's original list of demands is a spot on assault on the local Seattle police state, calling for the wholesale abolition of the pigs and their prison system, as well as degentrification and increased autonomy for local anti-crime initiatives.

Sadly, the second half is bereft with the social-democratic gimme culture of the Bernie buttfucked left. After rightfully calling out the chattel style slavery of this nation's school-to-prison system, CHOP calls for blank checks to centralized education and healthcare systems without properly addressing the totalitarian architecture of these industries and their incestuous marriage to the injustice system CHOP came to stomp out. CHOP also suffers from this generation's dreadful lack of imagination. As proven by their name change concession, the partisans of CHOP underestimate the power of shocking the bourgeoisie. They lack the theatrical flourish of the Youth International Party, the Black Liberation Army, or the Situationist International. 

True revolutionaries are never going to win over the adults out their in TV land. But you can win over their jaded children by spooking their normie parents. The greatest blow ever delivered to White Supremacy was the day a Dixiecrat congressman came home from voting for the latest Clinton crime bill to find his lily-white teenage daughter in bed with the undocumented housekeeper, scissoring to the latest NWA album blasting from the family HiFi system. We need to shock and provoke. CHOP needs to own the bad rep Fox has fortuitously bestowed upon them because it might be their greatest weapon in a cultural war for the hearts and minds of the terminally bored.

With all this in mind, I've decided to write up a few new demands for CHOP to consider if they wish to remain lethal to the outside system which may very well be sabotaging them from within as we speak. The Feds weren't above "random" gangland shootings during Cointelpro, and who is Trump but the Satanic reincarnation of Dick Nixon. I remind all of you dearest motherfuckers, especially those within CHOP, to take my suggestions with a grain of salt or two. They are but the wild ramblings of an agoraphobic, genderqueer, pale-faced, suburban armchair anarchist from the other end of the country. Think of them as a few friendly suggestions from a Panarchist ally. I only pray to Christ and Kali that they reach you before Seattle steamrolls the whole damn thing. If not, save them for next time, because their will always be a next time.

I, Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit, speaking as the biologically male autonomous zone occupied by a genderflux coven of a dozen lesbian femmes, hereby suggest the following demands for consideration by the Capital Hill Organized Protest or however you may choose to self-identify this week. 

1.  We demand the right to mitigate our own justice system through both armed and unarmed peacekeepers, free of influence from the outside police state, including but not limited to the defense of our citizens and the investigation and subsequent mode of restorative justice we choose to handle those who harm them. We will not be a party to the mockery of justice that the outside police state uses to fight crime. That fight is a fight against poor people and it will not be allowed to be waged within this space.

2.  We demand the right to open carry and the formation of civilian militias promised to us by the United States Constitution, and we reserve the right to stand our ground against all enemies, foreign or domestic, whether they wear a badge or a bandana.

3.  We demand the full banishment of all law enforcement agencies from the Seattle city limits, not just the metropolitan PD, but the Sheriffs Department, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the DEA, the ATF, the IRS, ICE and the Border Patrol. Seattle must become a demilitarized zone. We recognize the police state as being a lethal injection table held up by many legs and we aim to saw them all off and ride that deathbed like a surfboard to liberty across the Puget Sound.

4.  We demand that our doublespeaking, police coddling mayor, Jenny Durkin, perform an unplugged rendition of "All Apologies" on bended knee, while wearing a pilgrim buckle hat. We don't think this will do much to heal any wounds. We just think it would be fucking funny. Fuck her and all her empty platitudes to social justice.

5.  We demand that all unoccupied properties within city limits be made free game for squatters to shelter in or on and transform into additional autonomous zones of their own, if they so wish. This includes the palatial vacation homes and pool houses of the tech magnates who have made this city unlivable for poor people.

6.  We demand that once the local police state disarms, they hand over their armaments to the local homeless shelters, so that the most desperate among us have the same means as the rich to defend themselves from gentrification.

7.  We demand that truancy be decriminalized within city limits. If our schools can't stimulate their student's attention, it isn't the students who should be penalized for their failings.

8.  We demand that all students in the Seattle area be given the right to grade their teachers and that these grades have the same affect on the faculties upward mobility as the grades they give do the student's, eliminating ageist class divisions and insuring equitable treatment. 

9.  We demand that all students of all ages in the Seattle area be provided with unions of their own and that all deals made with the teacher's unions be contingent upon the approval of said student unions, so as to create equality inside the classroom and out.

10.  We demand that all Seattle area hospitals and health care facilities be governed by autonomous democratic councils made up of patients and healthcare providers, including representation for nurses and orderlies that is proportional to their percentage of the workforce.

11.  We demand that the military and all institutions that serve the military industrial complex be permanently evicted from city limits under threat of local prosecution in tandem with international law for conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity.

12.  We demand that all city taxes be paid by individuals with a net worth of $10 million or more, since these citizens are undoubtedly the recipients of federal corporate welfare. Consider it a tax on the federal government that rob us all blind. If said individuals don't like it, they can leave and take they're skyrocketing property values with them. All other taxes within city limits shall be 100% voluntary. 

13.  And finally, we demand that CHOP/CHAZ be federally recognized as an autonomous administrative division, free from further federal regulation and taxation, with the full right to govern itself however it's citizenry sees fit and with the full right to secede completely from the Union if they see fit. A right once guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence as a stopgap to the growth of the kind of tyranny that has gone unchallenged in this country and made our existence a necessity for self-defense. America chose to become an authoritarian regime. We the people choose to opt out.

Submitted for your humble consideration, from one malcontent to another.

Peace, Love & Solidarity- Nicky/CH  

Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post

*  Only In My Dreams by Weezer

*  Joan of Arc by the Melvins

*  Ex-Lion Tamer by Wire

*  All Apologies by Nirvana

*  All My Little Words by the Magnetic Fields

*  National Crisis by Bob Mould

*  Running Up That Hill by Chromatics

*  Please Let That Be You by the Rentals

*  You Suffer by Napalm Death

*  Hip Hop by Dead Prez

*  Territorial Pissings by Nirvana 

Silence of the Swine: Abolish the Police and Bring Back the Panthers

One thing that has become crystal fucking clear to any sane sentient creature with a pulse who has paid attention to current events over the last month is the fact that America's cherished fascist institution known as the police is completely and totally fucking useless to working class people. By night, our self-flagellating martyrs in blue become harder to find than Waldo as they're outnumbered by the most irate of the citizenry they've wronged, who've turned their rage inward towards defenseless small business' while the true target of their anger cowers in the shadows of the flames. By sunrise however, these heavily armed cowards suddenly rediscover that old fighting side of them and prove their shriveled manhood by laying into guitar-strumming pacifists with flailing truncheons, Covid-friendly tear gas, and a torrential downpour of barely-less-than-lethal rubber rounds. Just like schoolyard bullies and neo-Nazi skinheads, the neckless jarheads of the American police state are only badass' when its ten against one and that one is a sickly old peacenik that could be bowled over by a stiff wind. 

This little ritual of jackbooted nocturnal pussyfooting is only broken up when these uber-macho alpha males take the time out of their busy ruthless schedules to cry on Tucker Carlson's shoulder about how they're the real victims in all this. Speaking as a transgender anarchist who has literally had friends murdered by my local police force, there is nothing more nauseatingly hilarious then watching a bulging clump of roided-out, military armed, poster boys for toxic masculinity throw themselves a pity-parade masquerading as a press conference so they can tell faggot snowflakes like me how oppressed they are now that they're finally being called out for their hyper-homicidal behavior. "Well, I'm proud to be a pig! My pistol goes Bang! Bang! My siren goes Woo! Woo! And mommy says I'm still a hero!" "Yeah!" "That's right!" "You tell em Sarge!" For the love of Christ, talk about crisis actors. Someone bring me the world's smallest violin so I can play a maudlin tune for these blubbering baby-killers.

Naturally, the only people more sickening than the endangered white males of the right are their sycophantic, glad-handing, partners in crime in the Democratic Party. While Joe Biden is kept a safe distance from anymore black men with microphones in his basement, Nancy Pelosi and her posse of woke Clintonian dinosaurs dawn dashikis, take a knee, and work hard to heal our nation's wounds with wheel spinning empty gestures like changing the Confederate names on our war criminal factories to something more politically correct, because god knows George Floyd will rise from the grave if we can just train Bolivians to waterboard their Indians in a building named after Harriet Tubman.

All this frivolous virtue signaling is being done while the left in this country is finally making some goddamn sense again. Once radical notions like reigning in the prison industrial complex and defunding its club-swinging lackeys have become downright mainstream as the smoke settles on the greatest American uprising since 1968. Unfortunately, this also means that they are becoming downright watered down to the point of utter pointlessness. Even the Democrats not trying to distract their off-white base with glorified political blackface are selling us a bill of goods labeled as reform. Most of the few police defunding bills to actually see the light of day are merely moving the money around and changing labels on the same damn top-down police state that lynches young black men and rapes young transwomen like it's a motherfucking competitive sport.

I'm not a reformer, I'm an abolitionist. There is no reforming a system that's very premise is inherently colonialist and undemocratic. We don't need to defund the pigs, we need to fucking abolish them. That means those crybaby psychopaths in blue are fucking fired and need to find a real job that doesn't involve looting taxpayers so they can strut through other people's neighborhoods like Vic Mackey with a hard-on. I suggest stripping. They'll have to actually work for a living, serving women and queer folk, but they can hold on to the Village People uniforms and pompous sense of vanity without murdering anybody. Cue "Working for the Weekend" and crack out the singles.

Of coarse the response to this suggestion by every naysaying statist on either side of the aisle is "How do we protect our lily-white cis-het suburban communities from the Mongol hordes waiting at the gates?" This question may sound hilarious to anyone who's ever occupied a gayborhood or a barrio where the police are that Mongol horde, but it gets a lot of play in Middle-American neighborhoods like the one I currently occupy, so I'll try to respond with something a bit more sensitive than hysterical laughter. Let me see, how do I put this politely? It's called the Second fucking Amendment, stupid! There we go. 

Now even though my commie ass is technically a part of the Libertarian Party (it's a long story), I don't share my fellow party member's somewhat childish fetish for the Founding Fathers. I'm not going to sit here and attempt to convince you, much less myself, that the original intention of that amendment had anything to do with poor people of any race. It was written by a bunch of slave-raping Indian killers for Christ's sake. I will tell you that a few of the saner pederasts who authored the Bill of Rights were very much aware  that any form of less than fascist government simply could not coexist with the menace of a standing army, whether they wore redcoats or badges. They also understood that the only thing strong enough to permanently prevent this menace was a well armed populace with a civilian militia, and you don't have to go back to the Whiskey Rebellion to find a good example of one that serves the people. You just have to go back to my childhood heroes in the Black Panthers. 

In the wake of the Watts Riots and the assassination of Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale decided to get their Second Amendment on and start an inner city militia for black people living under the jackboot of the notoriously corrupt Oakland PD. Contrary to popular mythology, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense actually worked pretty damn well until the feds started to fuck with it. Not only did they manage to protect they're streets from the gangsters in blue with bitchin leather-clad patrols armed with walky-talkies and law books as well as rifles and shotguns, but they started up a wide array of decentralized social services and "survival programs" that empowered disaffected youth and fought crime at its roots in the garden of urban despair. In Chicago, young Panthers like the late Fred Hampton even went so far as to convert well known street gangs to radical organizations that serviced their communities rather than preying upon them. I think we need to bring these kind of experiments in community self-defense back and make them even more radical.

I honestly believe that if allowed to flourish rather than being sabotaged by J. Edgar Hoover's Cointelpro, the Black Panthers would have likely developed into something akin to the more popular militias active now in the Middle East, who not only provide an alternative to centralized law enforcement but an alternative to the centralized state itself. The safest working class neighborhoods for minorities to live in in the Middle East are the ones governed by groups like Hezbollah and the Sadrists. I see no reason why our nation can't model their successful stateless organizational skills while "westernizing" these kinds of institutions with libertarian values like free speech, voluntarism and mutual aid.

As a Panarchist and a Syndicalist, my ideal for a democratic society is one in which every profession and social culture has a union and every union has a militia, making the notion of governments totally voluntary and non-territorial. Everyone would be free to choose what government to engage in or choose no government at all, and weigh the benefits accordingly. We need to abolish the police and bring back the Panthers, but we need to do more. We need to abolish the state by giving every individual the right to choose their own government, their own Panthers. Black Panthers, Brown Panthers, Queer Panthers, Capitalist Panthers, Communist Panthers, the possibilities are endless and we don't need any government but the ones we create in our own damn neighborhoods to make it happen.

Fuck the police and create a new underground and no force will be able to keep us down cuz we're Queer or we're Brown. Now lets get armed and organized and make some motherfucking history. It's high time we silence the swine.

Peace, Love, Empathy, & Solidarity- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.

*  The Fighting Side of Me by Merle Haggard

*  Across 110th Street by Bobby Womack

*  Down Rodeo by Rage Against the Machine

*  Down in the Streets by the Stooges

*  911 is a Joke by Public Enemy

*  Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

*  The Big Payback by James Brown

*  Fuck tha Police by NWA

*  Hate to Say I Told You So by the Hives

*  I Fought the Law by Dead Kennedys

*  Workin' For the Weekend by Loverboy

*  Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones

Speaking Queerly About Whiteness

White people hate to talk about race, even the supposedly woke ones. When they do, the entire conversation is almost inevitably governed by fear. With white conservatives, it's usually the fear of being made irrelevant by darker bodies. With white liberals, it's usually the fear of being outed as being just as scared as the conservatives they mock. I've never really had much trouble discussing race myself, though that does seem to get me into a lot of trouble. Identity fascinates me, probably because my own has always been so goddamn elusive. In spite of the color of my flesh, I can't recall a time in my life where I wasn't treated as an "Other". It's why I'm so fascinated by the various notions of tribalism that play such a huge roll in my work and my worldview. Now, with notions of White Supremacy and White Privilege once again becoming hot button topics, I naturally can't help myself but to enter the fray. I can't be just another pale face on the sidelines, and once again, white people are gonna be pissed. What else is new?

By far the most controversial thing I've ever wrote was an article from about a year ago in which I openly rejected my whiteness and embraced my lifelong queerness as my race. It's also naturally one of my favorite articles, but it royally pissed off my mostly white readers on both sides of the aisle, from fuzzy feel-bad hipsters to that charming old paleo grouch, Paul Craig Roberts (still love you Paul, lighten up.) People on the left seemed to think I was shirking my responsibilities to White Guilt, while people on the right seemed to think I was unfairly vilifying their race. For me, it all goes back to my queerly idiosyncratic philosophy, one ironically governed by thinkers on both the left and the right.

I've long viewed race and other class structures like gender, sexuality, sanity, and even age as being largely social constructs. It was a hardcore communist named Noel Ignatiev who taught me that whiteness was a concept designed by and for racism and imperialism. It was invented to justify the racialization of the slave trade and to control the landless Europeans, who had previously been slaves themselves, with a petty sense of privilege over the empires black property. The reason why white people, especially self-proclaimed progressives, are so goddamn shitty when it comes to talking about race is that they're left in the impossible position of defending an identity manufactured to control them and everyone else. Your average White Supremacist wouldn't have even been considered white a century or two ago. My own ancestors who came to this country to escape an Anglo genocide called the Potato Famine weren't considered white until they lost who they were and were properly assimilated into the puritan values of the same race of people they fled from.

The other major influence on my eccentric post-white values is actually an old hardcore right winger often quoted but rarely understood by those desperate honkies in the Alt-Right, a German Conservative Revolutionary named Oswald Spengler who could be a real ass but made some rather fascinating observations in his classic epic Decline of the West. My fellow queer malcontent Billy Burroughs turned me on to it. For all his White Supremacist fanfare, it was Spengler who taught me that a race, or a nation, as he referred to it, was not defined by blood and soil but rather by a shared vision and culture. The vision and culture of whiteness is not only what nearly slaughtered my Catholic ancestors back in Ireland before engulfing them in America, but my spiritual and biological opposition to these puritanical values as a heathen third gender is precisely what defines my queerness, the only culture that has ever felt like home to me.

I don't hate white people. I hate a polluted concept that keeps them from forming authentic bonds with their own communities and others. The concept of whiteness didn't just ethnically cleanse the darker continents, it ethnically cleansed the ethnic cleansers. Diverse cultures like that of the Scots, Italians, Irish, Greeks, Polish, and Germans were dissolved in a vat of acid sold as a melting pot and used to keep poor people blind and divided. Your average trailer-dwelling redneck has far more in common with Black Lives Matter than they ever will with blue-blooded populist frauds like Donald Trump. Cops kill poor people in defense of order and property. To them, we're all filthy fucking mongrels. Why not embrace it and chuck all the white pride horseshit in the fucking garbage where it belongs. Find an old race or build a new one. Stop being a prisoner to the 1%'s convoluted social experiment and get free.

I'm also not trying to outrun my pale-faced privilege. As traumatically bad as I had it growing up as a genderqueer transgirl in a conservative Catholic community, I have no doubt that I would have had it ten times worse were I a shade or two darker. But when it all comes down to it, who fucking cares? Shit can always be worse for any given minority. I realize that this sentiment is politically incorrect, but does it really fucking matter who got fucked worse? The Oppression Olympics popular with today's left is a game everybody loses but the rich. While we're busy squabbling over who got it worse, they just keep raping and pillaging and robbing us all stupid. Ditch the globalist bullshit of whiteness and own what really defines you, but remember that class is what defines us all. These social constructs were manipulated to reinforce that tyranny by dividing us and as long as we embrace identities defined by destroying it, why not destroy it together? 

I envision my queer race in a similar light to the Black Power, Chicano, and American Indian Movements which it has always overlapped with. We are a race of imperial rejects who chose to embrace our slurs and turn them against the master class who pushed us from our mother tribes. We were stripped of our original heathen identities by an imperialized Christianity and forced to create new ones from the ashes in order to defend what remained of our colonized cultures, the first cultures to be colonized. I see the Queer Nation as a Third World nation within the rusted shell of the First. A tribe of people who transgress the sexual and gender norms of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant society to express our love and our pride. A race of many colors that seeks not only to provide a borderless non-territorial homeland for the lost and and abandoned such as myself, but also seeks to be an organic device that helps our people to retain their queerness even within other pre-existing and future anti-colonialist tribal identities. And if that shit ain't woke enough for you than don't wake me. 

I'm here, dearest motherfuckers, and I'm not white, I'm Queer. But don't get use to it, cause I'm gonna burn your fucking house down.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Burning Down the House by Talking Heads

*  White Minority by Black Flag

*  Awoo by the Hidden Cameras

*  Young Americans by David Bowie

*  Jason by Perfume Genius

*  Wolf Like Me by TV on the Radio

*  Ocean Size by Janes Addiction

*  List of Demands by Saul Williams

*  Your Best American Girl by Mitski

*  Be a Body by Grimes

*  Guilty of Being White by Minor Threat

*  The Day the Politicians Died by the Magnetic Fields

A Message Written in Fire: In Defense of Social Upheaval

It always ends this way, you can almost set your watch to it. A glamorous soirée rambling into the wee hours of the morning in an opulent townhouse on a tony tree lined street of any given international city. The kind of event held for some obscure charity to save a species of bird that likely never existed as anything but excuse for a deceptively benevolent orgy like this. Glamorous beautiful people with household names, dressed to the nine in three-piece-suits and silk gowns that cost more than most people will see in a lifetime. Ornate ballrooms echo with the bellowing sounds of the kind of excess that only this kind of downright flammable income can afford. Senators and Wall Street bankers dry hump underage courtesans, slurping Champaign twice their age and snorting Scarface-grade amounts of the same kind of narcotics they have twelve year old children of color locked up for decades for peddling in dime bags. Obnoxious plastic debutantes force theatrical laughter at racist jokes delivered by the direct descendants of Mayflower monsters and slave drivers. The only people of color are token police chiefs dressed like ornate African dictators. The only poor people are servants and the victims of white slavery, but suddenly they become very scarce. 

Half empty horderve dishes litter the marble floors and bottomless cocktails go un refilled. The bourgeoise guests begin to scoff and bitch amongst themselves until loud explosions can be heard in the not so far distance. "Fireworks!" some dizzy general's wife exclaims ignorantly and everyone becomes silent for a moment until a flaming trash can comes crashing through the plate glass window, scattering ashen refuge across the Persian carpets. The privileged partygoers gather at the windows to see an ocean of unwashed faces flooding the streets like a human storm, lit by torches and Molotov cocktails. Some of them carry rifles, most just sticks and pipes. A handful busy themselves assembling a makeshift guillotine in a nearby park. The beautiful people gasp and clutch their pearls, but it's already too late. It always ends this way, every empire built on the broken backs of the poor, from Carthage to Bastille. What makes them think it could ever end any differently?

No, dearest motherfuckers, the violent uprisings multiplying in cities across the American Empire and beyond are not this end, not yet at least. They are merely a warning. A message written in fire to our current elites reading, "Your days of plenty are numbered!" to paraphrase a favorite film of mine. After another grotesque public lynching of what seems like the thousandth unarmed black man, poor people of every race have finally had enough. They have decided to draw a flaming line in the sand, constructed with turned over cop cars and shattered brand name boutiques. This was inevitable, and this article is neither an endorsement nor a condemnation on my part, but merely a weather report. This uprising is not a conspiracy or a movement, but a man-made natural disaster like the roaring wildfires of climate change. I am merely an articulate weathergirl, but any illiterate fool can tell you which way the wind blows.

It's popular for journalists and media types to look down their noses at the excesses of populist violence. I won't do that. I haven't the right and neither do they. I may personally be far from a pacifist but I am a devout believer in that old libertarian spiritual tradition known as the Non-Aggression Principle, that condemns all initiatory violence and teaches us to never throw the first punch. But I cannot ignore the uncomfortable fact that for many of these besieged neighborhoods this is not the first but rather the 17th or 18th strike. Black and brown people, and many poor whites as well, have lived under the knee of a fascist gestapo state for generations, undertaking daily humiliations from an occupying force of heavily armed thugs from the suburbs who behave like wicked gods behind badges. The news wants the peasants to ask nicely to be treated with the respect you would afford a goddamn farm animal. But haven't we all been asking nicely for decades?

We asked nicely after Trayvon Martin. We asked nicely after Eric Garner. We asked nicely after Freddie Gray, Breanna Taylor, and my friend Osaze Osagie. But all their killers walked free. They stroll the streets whistling like cartoon wolves who've gotten away with bloody murder because that's precisely what they did. We asked nicely with Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, and Huey Newton, but all our pacifists and pragmatists have been shot dead. The chalk outlines still haunt us on the sidewalks long after their blood has been washed away. We asked nicely with Black Lives Matter, but those pleas too fell on deaf ears. So now George Floyd is dead and it's a new day in America, where only black rage seems to count for a goddamn thing.

This is tragic. It didn't have to be this way. I am the daughter of a small business owner. I grew up watching my mother build something proud from nothing, it still inspires my commitment to this blog. No hardworking person should have to watch that go up in flames. But I'm also a Queer person, a transwoman who's identity is too complicated for binary choices on bathroom doors. This month marks the 51st anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, where irate dykes and drag queens said enough with beatings and having white hands thrust up their skirts and went toe to toe with New York's finest street gang. A movement was built on the ashes of torched cop cars outside a dingy fag bar that night. A movement that may have literally saved my life and countless others. So who am I to tell the United Ghettos of Amerika that they can't have a taste of liberation too? We pretend like force never works but sometimes it does, usually in conjunction with the kind of peaceful protests we've seen bloom from this carnage in recent days. A diversity of tactics. This is what ended the Vietnam War. This is what forced America's unwilling hand on labor and civil rights. There were riots between the guns with flowers in their barrels, war cries between the Baptist hymns. Los Angeles had to be burned to the ground before anybody got serious about reigning the gangsters of the LAPD in.

It's not too late. The beautiful people who selfishly horde power in this empire could just let go. We might even let them keep their pilfered riches if they could just end this 500 year campaign of greed, of raping and pillaging the Third World at home and abroad, of Manifest Destiny and indispensable power. If they could just stop dropping their bombs. If they could just let our children walk free from their prisons. If they could just give us back our streets. But who are we kidding? It always ends this way. Our so-called president hides behind a forest of soldiers, cowering in his own mess in the irritable bowels of the White House, as the hands of the poor and perpetually fucked-with shake the bars around him. Even a belligerent imbecile like him knows its over. The grand illusion of our "democracy" has been demystified. There's nothing left but pure uncut fascism and they don't have enough knees to lynch us all. Yes, dearest motherfuckers, it doesn't take a weathergirl to tell you that it always ends this way, but here I am. Somethings never change.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.

*  Rebel Without a Pause by Public Enemy

*  Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan

*  Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley

*  Wild in the Streets by Circle Jerks

*  Sleep Now in the Fire by Rage Against the Machine

*  Free to Decide by the Cranberries

*  Police Truck by Dead Kennedys

*  Express Yourself by NWA

*  Bring the Noise by Public Enemy

*  Life on Mars by David Bowie

*  Like a Rolling Stone by Drive-By Truckers