A Dozen People Who Didn't Suck in 2020

 America has had some shit years lately, in fact, rapping about the general Spenglerian shitty-ness of America on the brink of decline has become a traditional feature of this annual list. But I doubt even Spengler would argue with my decadent Queer ass that 2020 is the undisputed motherfucker of all shit years. I mean, we literally had a plague for Christ's sake. The shit has gone biblical. Between COVID murdering people, the police murdering people, and the COVID police murdering what's left of democracy in the name of not murdering people, this year has pretty much been 80% to 90% murdering people.

But every cloud of shit has its silver lining. In times of great crisis, renegades find opportunity, and that is precisely what this list is for, a celebration of renegades for renegades by a renegade. People on this list aren't perfect. Some of them can be fucking assholes. But this year, the Year of the Shit, these dearest motherfuckers got in a few punches for the freaks, and I'm gonna celebrate them regardless of whether I get along with them, and if anybody's got a problem with that they can line up and kiss my Queer ass. In 2020, these motherfuckers didn't suck. In fact, some of them were downright heroic. Let's salute them.

Rose McGowan-  The MeToo Movement died a rather fast and undignified death this year at the hands of it's own founders the moment Tara Reade came forward about a sexual predator they had already fallen for. Rose got the memo, she just chose to jam it up their collective ass. After coming forward about being one of Harvey Weinstein's many victims, McGowan became a leader of this feminist movement. But when her comrades decided to get another rapist elected president, she burned what was left of it to the ground, torching every last bridge she had left in Hollywood along the way. I've adored Rose since falling in love with the Queer teen cult film, The Doom Generation, in high school. But Amy Blue ain't got shit on the real thing. Real feminists don't let feminists vote for rapists. Anyone who's got a problem with that can eat our fuck.

Garret Foster-  Garret Foster became a martyr for bottom unity this year when he was shot dead putting his body between a crowd and a killer during an anti-police brutality protest in Austin, Texas. A 28 year old veteran and unapologetic gun nut, Garrett had become a fixture at his local George Floyd uprising, always with his AK and his high school sweetheart, a quadruple amputee and Black Lives Matter activist named Whitney Mitchell. When a psychotic Army sergeant charged the crowd with his car, Garret instinctively put himself in front of his fiancé and their fellow marchers and was murdered for his heroism. Garret foster is a clear example of why I write this blog. To bring radicals, left and right, black and white, together against the state. We owe it to Garret to make sure his death was not in vain, just like he owed the same to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The march goes on. They can't run us all down.

Jo Jorgensen-  Jo got a lot of shit from fellow Libertarians for reaching out to PC woke culture and not making much of a dent in the 2020 elections in the process. But I thought she steered the ship of liberty in the right fucking direction for a change. Murray Rothbard himself, during his saner years, recognized that libertarians had far more in common with his era's New Left than they ever would with the right. The Libertarian Party has as much to offer today's radical left in BLM and Antifa as these kids have to offer the LP. Is it a perfect marriage? Fuck no. But I'll take Jo Jorgensen over dope-smoking Republican drop-out artists like Gary Johnson any day of the goddamn week.

Raz Simone-  After the Seattle police abandoned the gentrified streets of Capitol Hill to lick their wounds, something downright groovy happened. For about 15 heady minutes, the neighborhood became a stateless commune bathed in bong smoke known as CHAZ before changing its name to CHOP. The right needed a boogey man to sell this utopian horror story to the nursing homes, so they naturally found the biggest, blackest motherfucker they could, and thus the legend of Raz Simone, the Soundcloud warlord, was born. It was 90% bullshit but so was the original rap against Angela Davis. Sometimes the times make the bad motherfucker, and with his gold grill, bullhorn, and AK-47, Raz was the kind of antihero marginalized freaks like me needed. We needed somebody that could scare the pigs for a change, and for fifteen beautiful minutes, Raz delivered like a gangsta rap outlaw.

Perfume Genius-  For years now, Michael Hadreas, better known as Perfume Genius, has been the Queer indie scene's dirty little secret. This year he decided that even straight America deserved to have that secret out by launching his greatest album yet, Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, to his widest audience yet, and it gets my vote for best album of the year. A lush gothic R&B tour de force, Set My Heart On Fire was precisely what I needed this year. Something beautifully broken to hang in my dark suburban COVID prison cell like a mirror ball. The videos alone for singles like 'Describe' and 'Without You' were Harmony Korine grade cinematic reminders of life at the bottom of the ocean. But nothing was more 2020 than watching Michael get busy with himself in the dirt to the epic grandeur of 'On the Floor.' It was like a filthy peasant Flashdance, only way gayer. We fucking needed that. I fucking needed that.

Grandmaster Jay-  You could hear a hundred southern gentleman collectively shit themselves this summer when Louisville's typically depraved Kentucky Derby was hijacked by several hundred heavily armed black guerrillas in the form of the fabulously named Not Fucking Around Coalition, the most fantastically terrifying thing in Black Power since Huey and Bobby hit the streets with the Black Panthers over fifty years ago. Sadly, this phenomenal show of force couldn't go un-scolded. Months after the fact, the police hauled the NFAC's shit talking, rifle cocking, fearless leader, hip-hop legend, Grandmaster Jay, on trumped up charges of Assaulting, Resisting or Impeding Officers or Federal Employees. The only thing Jay did, and we've all seen the footage, was check a roof for snipers with his AR's tactical light. For this they wanna throw the man away for a decade. Good luck. Word has it, he has an army.

Ammon Bundy-  Ammon became a sweetheart for the right wing militia movement after a series of sketchy occupations of federal property, including his racist daddies ranch, but he became a symbol for bottom unity when he quite literally put his own well being at risk to stand up to the hypocrites in his own movement, first by condemning Donald Trump's draconian border practices and then, this year, coming out in support of both Black Lives Matter and the movement to defund the police. He fearlessly pissed on his own base to point out the basic fact that these were movements against big government tyranny and thus causes the libertarian right should get behind. It was a bold move for a bold motherfucker. He's still receiving death threats from both sides of the aisle, but he's earned at least one left wing faggot's begrudging respect.

William X Nietzsche-  The Kinney Family have lived in the Red House on Mississippi for 65 years, since coming to Portland to escape the racism down south. But racism found them. It found them in the form of of gentrification, redlining, predatory loans, and eminent domain. They have watched their suburban home disappear in the shadows beneath towers of swanky condos and big business. When their slumlord foreclosed just before a moratorium on such vile actions during the height of COVID was passed, the Kinney's decided to make a stand. Lead by William Kinney Jr. under the fantastic nom de guerre, William X Nietzsche, the family and a few hundred of their closest friends and comrades launched an armed occupation as William declared he and his Black-Indigenous kin sovereign citizens on stolen Native land above the crooked letter of our government's corrupt authority. This marriage of Black Power and libertarian anti-government activism now threatening to take the Pacific Northwest back from the crabs of big tech has been a long time coming. Zuck and company best check themselves. It just got real.

Luis Arce-  After three+ years of one imperial belly flop after another, Donald Trump finally achieved his first successful coup when he had left-wing Bolivian maverick and this-list-alumni, Evo Morales overthrown and replaced with a white conquistador witch named Jeanine Anez. Less than a year later and her ass is grass. While Trump is likely to be replaced by more confident imperialists, Jeanine was given her walking papers by Luis Arce, the dauphin of the man she deported, in a massive campaign victory. Can you imagine Salvador Allende coming home to a heroes welcome in 1974 like Evo in 2020? Sometimes the good guys still win and the conquistadors fall on their swords. Suck it, Pompeo.

Glenn Greenwald-  2020 was a shit year for journalism. I mean, shit, the greatest journalist alive is currently being slowly tortured to death in Belmarsh as we speak. Even typically sharp cookies like Amy Goodman and Naomi Klein fell victim beneath the sway of Trump Hysteria, Russiagate, and Biden Fever. But Glenn Greenwald has never been a typical journalist. In a span of a few years, he went from schilling for the Iraq War to aiding and abetting Edward Snowden in a realistic attempt to end it, and he's been one of the very few voices of reason on the periphery of the mainstream to survive the Trump era with his dignity intact. This year he underlined that legacy with three red lines by resigning from a multi-billion dollar cash cow he helped build when he resigned from the Intercept in protest for refusing to run an unredacted story critiquing the Fourth Estate's attempts to silence the whole damn internet on the crimes of our president-elect's scumbag son. Wherever Glenn lands, people like me will follow because we're still thirsty for the fucking truth.

Maj Toure-  "Well how are ya gonna fight crime without the police?" was the dipshit question lobbed in Don Knotts' voice by every superspreader from Thanksgiving to Hanukah. Maj Toure answered that question handily with his bombastically flamboyant Black Guns Matter movement. Upon hearing of George Floyd's lynching, Maj hopped on the first flight to Minneapolis and set up shop teaching rioters and shopkeepers alike how to defend themselves without getting shot because, believe it or not, the only thing that will ever stop a racist with a badge is a hood full of anti-racists with guns. I don't get along with Toure on every issue, but this country badly needs a new Robert F. Williams to show us the way. Don't hate the police, replace the police.

Pamela Adlon-  This may be far from the hippest way to end a list of terrifying iconoclasts but the stone cold reality is that this has been one of the hardest years of my life. I struggled for years to overcome my crippling agoraphobia and the gender dysphoria that likely sparked it, only to find myself locked away again in my house by COVID and my state's gestapo overreach on the crisis. Pamela Adlon's critically acclaimed dramedy, Better Things, has been a rare light in the darkness for me. I only really discovered the show this year and binged it ravenously before the triumphant fourth season. I rarely get through an episode without crying. Nothing seems to trigger my childhood trauma so cathartically. 

That's likely because the complex gender identity I've been struggling my whole life to comprehend is a lot like Sam Fox's house full of assholes with cunts, as she stoically describes her daughters. I'm several different dykes locked in a skull. A theatrical diva, an androgynous teenage rebel, and that pure hearted little girl the Catholic Church tried to bury alive in the basement of my soul. Somehow, something as seemingly banal as a TV show brings these ghosts to life and gives them peace. Thank you, Pam, You saved an insane person's life this year. I promise, when the revolution reaches Hollywood, not to torch your house. It's the least I can do. After all, I'm every bitch, its all in me.

Take care of yourselves and each other, dearest motherfuckers. At the end of the episode, we're still all we got to hold on to.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Girls Will Be Bois and Parents Can Fuck Off

 Maybe you missed it, but there is a second terrifying virus spreading like spilt milk across the media zeitgeist. A hip new mental illness plaguing that precious resource known as teenage girls. All across the country our precious flowers are defiling themselves with butchy hairdos and weird pronouns. It's called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria and it's coming to a town near you! Everything will be peachy fucking keen until bam! Suddenly all your daughters friends will start changing. They'll stop wearing dresses and talking about Korean boybands, and just when you pick up on the signs of gender degeneration, zap! They've got your daughter too. Brenda will become Brandon and start juicing up on testosterone and standing up to pee. It's a terrible disease in the form of a fad and it was all started by dangerous online faggots like me. And we would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those meddling heroes on the Intellectual Dark Web. 

This all started with a book and a misbegotten if well intentioned campaign to censor it. Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. The title reads like an early nineties episode of Donahue and the crap inside it is at least twice as vapid. The sad thing is nobody would have even heard of this intellectually shallow piece of tabloid psychology if it wasn't briefly banned from Target. That stupid move by the trigger happy Karens of cancel culture put this piece of crap and the imbecile who wrote it, a desperate Wall Street Journal opinion writer named Abigail Shrier, on the map, from Tucker Carlson to Joe Rogen, playing the role of free speech martyr while the conversation has completely shifted away from the quality of her argument that teenage girls are turning trans just to be cool. This is one of the many reasons I fucking hate censorship of any kind. It all too often achieves the goal of turning imbeciles into cause celebres.

A single 90 question survey. That is the basis of Shrier's entire goddamn tirade. A single solitary 90 question survey of parents from three openly anti-trans blogs. That's it! The survey wasn't even properly pier reviewed. Just a bunch of frightened bigots bitching about their crazy kids. This thing shouldn't be banned, it should be sold as toilet paper near gender neutral bathrooms at the airport. Like most transphobic tirades, it pretends to be all about protecting the children without so much as asking for their opinion, and like most transphobic tirades, it feeds into the historically lazy notion that third genders are some kind of modern anomaly.

If anything, the gender binary is the anomaly. The notion of only two genders defined purely by exterior genitalia is only a few hundred years old. Its "science" comes from the same well informed era that brought us leach therapy and cocaine soda. The recent awakening of transgender and non-binary identities isn't a fad, it's a return to nature before we were all pulverized stupid by Abrahamic dogma and progressive social engineering. Nearly every culture on the map had a place for genders that didn't conform with gonads. This doesn't mean we were all treated well, but our tribal elders were at least wise enough not to question our existence. Now the science is finally catching up to thousands of years of briefly subjugated culture and we're the child mutilating heretics? Well pardon my French, ladies and gentlemen, but you can choke on my man-clit.

But this is bigger than knee-jerk censorship and pompous bigots. This, all of this, comes from a culture that doesn't value its children. As I mentioned above, Abigail Shrier wrote an entire book about "our daughters" without ever asking them about what they thought about their own bodies. That's because to liberal do-gooders and conservative chauvinists alike, young adults don't have bodies. They have property that belongs to their hyperventilating parents. It's the one place where I have the biggest rift with many of my more conservative libertarian friends, the notion of parental rights. Well, I'm sorry again, but if parental rights impact individual rights then fuck em, fuck em, fuck em.

Your children are not your fucking property and they're not the states either. They are individuals who have every right to make their own damn decisions as long as they are properly informed. Forget the fact that no sane doctor would give pre-pubescent children hormones (What good would hormone blockers do with no hormones to block?), no one should have the right to tell anyone what should or shouldn't be done with their own bodies, even if they did fall out of yours. You have the right to bring up your kids and teach them whatever values you see fit, but by post-pubescent young adulthood you should have enough respect for them to allow them to take what you taught them and make their own decisions accordingly. And I think if they just lay off on the censorship, these daughters being harped about are doing a pretty damn fine job of it. 

This crazy philosophy of laisse-faire parenting has worked for the Amish for centuries and they're so conservative they think buttons are sinful. They give their kids a solid decade called Rumspringa to rage through their adolescents without restriction before allowing them to chose between the old ways and new freedom. That's because they have enough faith in god to have faith in their own children. All things considered, we should too. Our kids might just have a thing or two to teach us along the way.

It was the kids, time and time again, who have lead every fight for Queer rights. Adults in the form of parents, guardians, schools and doctors stood in their way every step of the way and got blown down like straw houses. Queer people were evil, they told us. Queer people are crazy. And now assholes like Abigail Shrier and JK Rowling are telling the kids they claim to care about so damn much that Queer people are stupid. We're not and these kids have shown us the way. These aren't idle minded teeny boppers. 

Abigail's "Daughters" are righteous gender outlaws beating a trail back to our pagan right to exist. Every time the adult world has attempted to shove them into a box, they've snarled back with a chorus of fuck you's. They imbody the spirit of the individualism that defines the better angels of America's nature by rejecting Victorian notions of gender and inventing their own on the ash heap. Today it's Neuro, Fluid, Non-Binary and Boi. But they speak with the voice of their ancestors who knew words like Burnesha, Eunuch, Hijra and Mahu. Through their furious individuality they have awoken the mighty spirit of third gender and we all owe them a thank you for this service. God knows I do.

I grew up scared and confused as a genderqueer girl in a boys body. I realized that I wasn't like the other children at my conservative Catholic school at around the age of 9. It was at this age that I began having terrible waking nightmares about burning in hell for all eternity. I became convinced as a child that I was an abomination and the damage done to me by this spiritual abuse was severe. It lead me to isolate myself from the outside world completely. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder gave way to Agoraphobia which devoured most of my twenties whole. It wasn't until I began to read about concepts like gender fluidity online and interact with the non-binary kids a generation younger than me that I understood myself enough to stop hating who I saw in the mirror.

It was "girls" who just "wanted" to be bois who saved my life, and I will be goddamned if I let some bougie bitch from the Wall Street Journal try to convince their parents to clip their wings the way the Vatican attempted to clip mine. This is a warning from an unhinged genderfuck anarchist; I support your right to publish trash and I will be maimed defending it, but back the fuck off my siblings. You have no right to pass judgement on young renegades without getting verbally mauled by freaks like me. Reap the whirlwind, cissy bitches, sow it and reap.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.

*  Bite the Hand by Boygenius

*  Cosmonauts by Fiona Apple

*  Rebel Rebel by David Bowie

*  Girl Just Want to Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper

*  Awful by Hole

*  Boys Wanna Be Her by Peaches

*  Androgynous by the Replacements

*  Drunk Walk Home by Mitski

*  Your Dog by Soccer Mommy

*  1979 by the Smashing Pumpkins

Donald Trump Puts Israel First

 Tensions are hurtling towards a fever pitch again in the Middle East. The entire region seems to be haunted by a phantom chaos. All through out the deserts of the Orient, an ugly rash of seemingly random acts of violence are building up into what can only be properly categorized as a Category 5 shitstorm of rank disorder. Strange explosions are going off again in the shipyards of the Red Sea. All logical signs point to more mystery mines, but Saudi Arabia insists it's the handiwork of Houthi rebels, using James Bond style drone boats. 

The typically boastful renegades remain silent, while threats to double down on Yemen's genocidal famine by declaring them terrorists grow from whispers to mumbles. Meanwhile, airstrikes presumed to be Israeli are ratcheting up to the north, all around the Levant, as a steady stream of leaks informs the Fourth Estate that the nation of Zion is preparing for an imminent attack on Iran during the final hours of the Trump regime, which itself promises new sanctions against the Covid ravaged Islamic Republic every week until inauguration.

All of this, this building symphony of not so random mayhem, swelled to a foul crescendo with the brutal gangland shooting of Iran's top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in the sleepy suburbs surrounding Tehran. Rumor has it that those creepy crawly cultists in the MeK dispatched a death squad to slaughter the venerated civilian maestro, much beloved by the Iranian people, in cold blood. But everyone knows who the real culprits are. They barely concealed it. The Trump regime and its sponsors in Israel have been throwing hints like rocks, left and right.

Apparently an unhinged Orange Man Bad recently had to be talked down by his own neocon goons from launching a massive airstrike against Iran's nuclear facilities. This could be logically presumed to be more random de rigueur for the administration who couldn't shoot straight if it wasn't for the fact that it coincided closely with the world's creepiest slumber party since Potsdam.

A clandestine gathering in the Saudi city of Neom between the lords of chaos, Bibi Netanyahu, Mike Pompeo and Mohammed bin Salman was held around Thanksgiving. Word has it that the swarthy head-chopping Wahhabi sociopath, MBS,  of all animals, was actually the voice of reason at this Satanic menage a trois, as Bibi and Pompeo angled for total war. The writing appears to be written in blood on the wall, high enough for the whole neighborhood to see. In fifty different languages, from Persian to Esperanto, Donald Trump has declared a greenlight on Iran and drawn a red line that any Shiite or psuedo-Shiite can cross with a single rocket to set off Gulf War 3.

I had foolishly held out hope that Donald Trump would use his final weeks in power to reek chaos against his own neocon establishment for working overtime to make sure his presidency was a single term flop. I wanted to believe that that bronzer slicked bastard would at long last have enough common sense to realize that the only way he could leave the Oval Office as anything but a sobbing loser was to actually put America first for once and bring the troops home. I'm not incredibly shocked that such a consistently foul creature went the other way with things, but I am disappointed none the same. Even revolutionaries want to believe in miracles at Christmas.

The Donald has made it crystal clear that the only thing he intends to accomplish with what's left of his presidency, aside from harassing the courts with hissy fits, is the wholesale sabotage of any hope for Joe Biden to achieve his single benevolent campaign promise of returning to the relative sanity of the JCPOA nuclear peace deal. The good news is that the Mullahs aren't half as nearsighted as their aging Yankee adversaries. The word has come down across the Shiite Crescent for every militia who doesn't want to see more of their own starve and burn to politely hold their breath and sit on their hands until January 20th. The bad news is that Trump has followed his own twisted doctrine to its natural conclusion by officially taking the leash off that rabid animal called Israel.

Most people seem to be unaware that Trump even has a foreign policy doctrine, which is understandable considering that his peculiar collection of anti-social personality disorders precludes him from any moral code higher than limp-spined self-fellatio. But their is indeed a Trump Doctrine. A very simple doctrine that goes, 'If you got the money, we've got the bombs.' Donald has turned out the American war machine like a two dollar whore to every thug and pervert with an allowance, from Erdogan to MBS, but Israel has always been Mack Daddy Trump's number one John and they've paid handsomely for the privilege. That ginger haired Mason Verger, Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump's coffers, practically putting a leash on the pimp himself like a Zionist gimp.

This really isn't too far off from America's previous doctrines. The American Empire has always operated like a mafia protection racket, bombing the shit out of defenseless weaklings like Grenada and Serbia, then suggesting to their neighbors that it would be a shame if something similar happened to their pretty nation if they weren't protected by the same thugs. Like most of his policies, Trump has simply taken all the magic out of our already fascistic policies by ripping the curtain down and charging the highest bidder to see how the sausage is made. This means officially publicizing America's long standing doctrine of putting Israel first. The colossal elephant bathed in Arab blood in the corner now gets his spot at the head of the table.

The entire history of the Israeli-American relationship can essentially be summed up with the ancient Hebrew folktale of the Golem. America wanted a 51rst state to wage new crusades from in the Middle East, so, along with England, we built one out of Red Sea clay and called him Israel. Only now, as the west reaches the apex of its decline, Israel has decided to become an empire in its own right. People don't like to talk about the Israel Lobby, mostly because they're afraid of being labeled as an anti-Semite by it's slime squad in AIPAC. 

This has allowed our supposed ally to get away with quite literally unspeakable things. Consider for a moment the bizarre fact that Israel is given the microphone by every cable news outlet from Fox to MSNBC so it can wax philosophic about the immorality of a totally fictional Iranian nuclear weapons project while they pack over one hundred illegal bombs themselves without so much as an IAEA membership after stealing the formula from Washington, and nobody ever says a goddamn word about it on air. Nobody! Go ahead a check. That's like having Ted Bundy on as a women's rights advocate while barring anyone from mentioning the fucking body count.

Apparently acknowledging the empirical facts of reality is anti-Semitic. Who knew? Aside from all the self-hating Jews who make up the spine of the anti-Zionist movement, of coarse. Israel gets whatever Israel wants, unless we get the hose again. But Donald Trump has taken this peculiar sadomasochistic relationship to the next level of slobbering subservience, openly gifting the apartheid state Jerusalem on a spit and creating a "peace plan" that appears to be a blatant plagiarism of the Trail of Tears.

 But what our whip fondling golem dom really wants for Hanukah is Iran's head on a silver platter. This is because Iran is the last big brother Palestine has left that's willing to step up to their bullies. The Iranian funded Hezbollah has become a low-emissions anti-Zionist ass whooping machine, delivering the cruel golem regime the kind of humiliating defeats half the Arab world's standing armies failed to achieve. Tehran has to go, not because they're guilty of possessing toys like Zions, but because they're guilty of the unforgivable crime of being a good neighbor. Those sick fucking bastards.

The big question is what happens after Trump? Chances are, Iran will win the waiting game against a belligerent orange idiot. But then what? While Biden promises a return to the Obama-era glory of the JCPOA, he also promises ominously to make it great again by pushing for the inclusion of ballistic missiles to the deal. This would essentially cripple Iran from defending itself against the ICBM-slinging psychos in Riyadh and Jerusalem while making them completely dependent on the whims of the same nation who brazenly shithoused the last deal.

Like I said, there is nothing unprecedented about Trump. The tyranny of the Trump era is only possible because the last three administrations, including Biden's, idiot-proofed a murder machine. The number one lesson to take away from America's nuclear peace deal isn't how easy it is to restart, but how easy it was to throw away. Under these circumstances, should Iran even take us back? They may not have a choice. Meanwhile, the West Bank continues to burn with a single starving neighbor to put the fire out. 

Ain't peace grand, dearest motherfuckers? Well ain't it!!?

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Peace Sells by Megadeath

*  Start Me Up by the Rolling Stones

*  Oh Sweet Nuthin' by Velvet Undergound

*  Frankenstein by New York Dolls

*  Gold Lion by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

*  Rock the Casbah by the Clash

*  Beat on the Brat by the Ramones

*  Adults are Talking by the Strokes

*  Fuck Christmas by Fear

*  Run for the Hills by Iron Maiden

Left Against Lockdown

 People often ask me why I continue to insist on identifying with the far-left considering my growing rash of beefs with the movement and my increasingly contrarian tendencies, and its not a bad question. I find myself asking it from time to time. I rarely make it 36 hours without threatening to castrate a Bernie Bro. But as sick as I've become with partisan turf wars and the antiquated left-right paradigm, I still can't see myself identifying with anywhere but the far-left. Some of it, I admit, has to do with a degree of tribal familiarity. I can't just drop the Mau Mau chic and go mall walking with Patty Hearst. 

No matter how far into libertarianism or post-left anarchism I drift, I'll always wake up screaming "Death to the fascist insect who preys on the proletariat!" from time to time. Red is the only color that doesn't run on me and the last scene of Che will always make me cry. The strange reality is that my core values remain consistently leftist in nature. My goals are largely identical to those of Noam Chomsky or Angela Davis. My methods, and to some extent how I interpret the ends of those means have just evolved in ways the left, even the far-left, often finds distasteful or even downright alien. To me, gun control is a radical right wing position because it disproportionally shackles the will of the working class, and taxation gives way too much power to a single class of managers to be worth the admittedly tempting Robin Hood kick.

Needless to say, my creative interpretations of Marxian and Kropotkinite ideals creates a great deal of friction between me and the dogmatic intellectual theorists of the far-left elite. The only thing worse than a capitalist pig is a reactionary heretic, and on no current event do I feel more like a Titoist traitor than on COVID-19 and my outspoken opposition to the mandatory lockdowns being pushed to treat it. It's a subject that the whole left-right spectrum has dismally fucked up the discourse on. Both sides of the fence see it in stark binary tones with little room for creative interpretation. The right just wants to walk it off like a goddamn Charly horse and treat it with the miracle cure of free market capitalism. The left, on the other hand, wants to shut society as we know it down for the next decade, Pol Pot style, and treats anyone suggesting otherwise like a nursing home strangler.

I am a recovering agoraphobic. After spending the last six years painfully rebuilding my life from the mess that left me a shut-in for the better half of my twenties, Covid crashed in and dismantled nearly all of my progress in less than six weeks. It has been nothing short of emotionally devastating for me and the toll it has taken on my mental health cannot be overestimated. But I also suffer from Chronic Lyme Disease and my borderline elderly parents who I live with are both recent cancer survivors. I have very little choice but to self-isolate, especially when you consider that I share a county with a college town which has given my bucolic hillbilly surroundings the Covid levels of a Cambodian fish market. But I chose to quarantine myself, which is a privilege many people in my community can't afford. One of my biggest problems with the lockdowns is that they are effectively super-spreaders for poverty, which also happens to be the number one cause of fatality in this Dickensian plague.

It's very easy for Hollywood celebrities and Washington swamp monsters to preach the virtues of staying home forever when you consider that their palatial mansions are roughly the size of your average trailer park and they have the bank accounts to sustain their sedentary existence indefinitely. Across this country, lockdowns have created a growing new depression that hasn't even begun to peak. Small business' are going belly up left and right while the Stock Market rallies and corporate juggernauts get fat stimulus checks so they can remain superficially too big to fail. What's left of main street is being gutted like a carp. 

The restaurant industry has been pulverized into a fine powder by what often amounts to random, arbitrary, and downright unconstitutional restrictions inflicted by mostly Democratic governors like mine and that Emmy nominated serial killer in Albany. The number one employees of this industry and many others are undocumented laborers, and to their families back home in the developing world these lockdowns all too often mean death. They mean food being stolen from the table and life sustaining medical treatment becoming unaffordable. And as this poverty deepens and spreads across the globe, the global police state reaches Frankenstein proportions to keep the impoverished rabble in line.

Many of America's tax funded caudillos in Africa and Latin America are using this lockdown to consolidate their power and liquidate their opposition, all in the name of public health, and if you honestly think that America is immune to its own overseas devices than you haven't been paying very close attention in history class. The third world is America's testing ground for first world oppression. It is not a mere coincidence that this country's largest urban revolts in decades have occurred during the height of Covid hysteria. People are poor and desperate, and police are more powerful than ever. It amazes me to no end that so many people on the left can righteously call for defunding the police from one side of their mouth while calling to give them the power to police what's left of the Constitution out existence from the other. Do you honestly believe that these people, the same fucking gangsters who lynched George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in cold blood while the world watched and got away with it, are going to stop at rolling rabbis and Jesus freaks? That shit is just the beginning. They are testing your tolerance for tyranny and you are flunking with flying colors

'The ends justify the means' is the clarion call of every police state from Uncle Joe to Big Brother. They told us the ends justified the means after 9/11. They told us that the Patriot Act was only temporary and strictly for our own safety. Twenty years later and the Patriot Act is stronger than ever. And how many lives has it saved? Millions hypothetically, according to the military industrial complex. Every single day would have been a new 9/11 if their steel toe wasn't permanently wedged up our asses and we're told the same goddamn thing, often by the same goddamn people about these lockdowns. Yet the science is still far from definitive. There has been no proven correlation between aggressive authoritarian measures and fewer fatalities by Covid. Some of the deadliest outbreaks have occurred virtually unabated by some of the strictest lockdowns. Manhattan has been turned into Attica and bodies just keep stacking up past the Empire State Building. Meanwhile countries like Japan and Sweden have chosen to put their faith in their own people to socially distance and have seen far less carnage.

 Ask any self-respecting anarchist and they'll tell you that there is no such thing as temporary when it comes to the state. Every inch given to big government will be measured in miles and shared handsomely with their friends in big business. Every tourniquet will become a noose wrapped tightly around the throats of the poor. Many people on the left who will condemn me for this piece have said that this virus is a savage referendum on capitalism, that it has exposed the callous depravity of a profit driven society, and I full heartedly agree. But I would add that it has also exposed the depravity of the very state that makes this society a cruel reality. Any lockdown that is not 100% voluntary is an investment into that depravity industry. It will be used to crush the proletariat like glass. I know because it already has and if confronting this truth makes me a heretic, then burn me at the stake for my insolent vision. I'll keep shouting 'The pigs are coming!' until those flames reach my eyes and my lungs.

The only thing that burns worse than the flames of reactionary statism is the toxic vitriol of blind dogma. The idea that the left or the right can be painted by numbers has made us all braying imbeciles. It's created pro-lifers who drone strike children and environmentalists who travel by private jet. The core values of leftism as I understand it are an egalitarian commitment to empower the poor and an equally vigorous responsibility to smash the institutions that strive to keep them enslaved. Under this criteria, I have a hard time seeing how any leftist couldn't oppose the lockdown, but I'm not too damn dogmatic to invite you to try.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs influenced by this post.

*  Midnight Rambler by Rolling Stones

*  Oblivion by Grimes

*  New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones by Fear

*  Tell Em by Sleigh Bells

*  Call from the Grave by Bathory

*  Pills by New York Dolls

*  Gloria by Patti Smith

*  Midnight Rider by the Allman Brothers

*  New York City Cops by the Strokes