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

Seasonal Depression and the Fallacy of White Guilt

"And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone."

-Chief Seattle

Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans.

-Russell Means

 Goddamn, I fucking hate November. Somehow between the pagan sugar rush of Halloween and the gold-leaf grandeur of Christmas, Satan shit out thirty days of windburned misery. My depression is a year round affair, but come November, the bitch breaks violent. Everything becomes heavy, basic daily chores become acts of contrition to a vengeful god, and all the jolly people, where do they all come from? All sins considered, it seems only natural that this awful little month should be topped off by Thanksgiving, a strange celebration of American colonialism with Type 2 Diabetes. We all know it's a racist fucking holiday, that if the Indians ever actually did share a smorgasbord of carbohydrates with the pilgrims, they paid for it with more than just indigestion. But what are we not going to scream at each other over a colossal bird stuffed with a soggy loaf of bread? That would just be silly. 

The consolation this year is that the whole damn country seems to be nearly as miserable as me for a change. America is a full blown basket case. The election that never ended never did, leaving a nation of shrieking partisan imbeciles with one more reason to mow each other down in holiday traffic. We now have two sexual predators with dementia proclaiming themselves leader of the free world and our only hope for salvation from the other. Our best hope may be that the Covid plague kills them both before anyone can bomb another hospital. Precious moments like these find me pondering the people we stole this hemisphere from and thinking out loud; Jesus Christ, we fucking deserve this.

And even in the sweet psychosis of my depression fried lizard brain, I've got a point worth making. America is essentially a colossal luxury resort built on an Indian burial ground. How can any of us feign shock that this country is haunted? There was no First Thanksgiving Dinner. Not really. Just a bunch of Colonel Kurtz-ian colonial psychopaths in buckle hats, murdering tribe after tribe and fucking their daughters before they burnt them at the stake for doing long division. And the massacres never stopped. That tsunami of blood loosed from the elevator of the Santa Maria known as Manifest Destiny swept from sea to shining sea in what is still likely the most devastating holocaust in recorded history. 

But we didn't stop with the Indians. We couldn't stop. By the time this nations native people were safely tucked into their desolate reservations, mass slaughter had become a booming global industry that defined our national character. So we just kept on killing, in the verdant jungles of the Philippines and Nicaragua, and right on to the desert hell scape of the Levant. And we seriously have to wonder why we're not happy? Because mass murder is bad for you, stupid. There's a reason most mass shootings end in suicide by cop, and now we're coming at China with a Buck Knife in our hands and Helter Skelter in our eyes, daring them to pull the trigger. But do we really deserve this? Does anyone?

In order to survive my mental illness's, I've had to learn that the hardest thing to do is forgive yourself. The United States of America is a gruesome experiment not unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. A nation built on the principles of conquest is a nation built to self-destruct, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Americans, as a people, deserve to go down with this ship. As tempting as white guilt can be to indulge in, it's no more productive than seasonal depression. The harsh truth is that our dear empire is something of an orphan factory that runs on disenfranchising everyone but the very rich.

 America was built on the graves of slaves and Indians by a population comprised largely of refugees, indentured servants, and other assorted shiftless immigrants who came to this country because it was the only one that would take them. When my people came here to flee another genocide back in Ireland, we were called "white n*ggers" and treated like animals until we could prove ourselves useful by killing other poor people. We were jumped into America like a hoodlum. We can sit around and feel guilty about this shit until next November, or we can get up off our asses and try to make things right. The closest we will ever come to achieving that goal is by joining the Indians to get revenge on the empire that fucked us both and stole this country. Custer is just another word for Cromwell.

One of my heroes, the red outlaw, Russell Means, once stated that we are all Native Americans. I don't think he meant this literally but I do believe that that is the kind of mindset pale faced revolutionaries need to adopt. We need to think like the white trash paupers who joined the slave revolts to get even with their crooked creditors or the starved settlers who fled puritanical settlements to join local Indian tribes. We are all oppressed and though that oppression may be far more heinous for some than it is for others, that doesn't mean that we don't all deserve to get even, and we can only get there together. The Bidens and Trumps of this world thrived for centuries by pitting us against each other, over differences both petty and colossal, in order to distract us from the fact that we are all Native Americans now, we have all invested our blood and heritage into this soil for better or worse, and we have our masters outnumbered. Sweet Jesus, lets make like H. Rap Brown and burn this motherfucker down already.

The late great Chief Seattle once dreamed of an America drowning in the ghosts of his people. He predicted ominously that the white man would never be alone. All I'm suggesting here, all I'm asking, is what if we're all those ghosts? What if the ultimate karma for the "white man" is that his own children turn against him and embrace the ways of his enemies? As an anarchist collapsitarian, my ideal for a post-US America isn't that far removed from what this hemisphere looked like before the colonialist psychopaths in buckle hats fucked it up. A land of many non-homogenized tribes where concepts of race and gender were as fluid as the borders. A land where the earth was sacred and there was little difference between religion and environmentalism. A land where wars were small and strictly personal and slaughter was never trivialized into an industrial complex. A land like this existed once not so long ago. Why not again? Maybe we can still do it right this time, together.

I feel a little less depressed already. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Best of You by Foo Fighters

*  We Oh We by the Hidden Cameras

*  Imagine by John Lennon

*  Margin Walker by Fugazi

*  Cosmogony by Bjork

*  Don't Look Back In Anger by Oasis

*  Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush

*  The Words That Maketh Murder by PJ Harvey

*  Sea Swallow Me by Cocteau Twins

*  Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Indigo Girls

*  Keep On Rockin' In the Free World by Neil Young

Dear Orange Man Bad: An Open Letter From the Enemy of Your Enemy

 Dear Orange Man Bad,

Well, winter is coming with a vengeance and I'm guessing that you're feeling pretty bummed. I've noticed the dayglo orange has drained from your cheeks and your once histrionic tirades have taken on all the petty melodrama of a garden variety adolescent hissy fit. And who could blame you? After months of some of the finest race baiting since Willie Horton danced with the devil in the pale moonlight, after what felt like years of a vast Soros funded conspiracy of Black lesbian Bolsheviks and fire breathing Mau Mau flag desecrators coming to put their filthy Marxist fingers all over a daughter near you, even the excitable suburban soccer moms have agreed that they'd rather spend the next four years with a disintegrating fossil like Biden than the next four minutes with you. Tough blow motherfucker! And usually that would be all I have left to say to a glorified chatroom troll getting his comeuppance but, believe it or not, the two of us have something in common and I think it might just be something worth looking into.

I know what your thinking, what could you possibly have in common with me? On paper we couldn't be more different. I'm everything you despise; a BLM supporting, Marx quoting, genderqueer anarchist dyke. I "chose" to be a woman and I don't even have a pussy to grab, just a tiny limp dick like yours and a big set of those things you gave to Bibi Netanyahu for the keys to the White House. I probably disgust you, and trust me honey, the feeling is more than mutual. As far as I can tell, you've spent your whole miserable existence failing your way to the top, burning other people's money like Marlboros just to grab another pack from the taxpayer's pocket so you can buy more gaudy crap no one on earth needs and get your rocks off next to Bill Clinton with some teenage sex slave on Jeffrey Epstein's private airline. As far as I can tell, you're all the toxic byproducts of state sponsored crony capitalism poured into one disgusting lumpy orange beanbag chair and you've generally ran the White House like a call girl service for Israel and their head-chopping peace-pals in the Persian Gulf.

But you and I do have one thing in common, however unsettling it might be for either one of us to admit. We share a common enemy. Your worst enemy. Way worse than Antifa hipsters or Muslim immigrants. They're the motherfuckers who have been aiming for your ass from the Grassy Knoll from the moment you suggested maybe getting along with Putin wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. You call them the Deep State. I just call them the Establishment, and they're the ones who screwed you out of another four beautiful glorious years of White House shenanigans. They're the ones who cooked up that casserole of hopped up nonsense called Russiagate to steer your periodically Russophilic ass back onto the Cold War straight and narrow. They're the ones who've been snitching you out every 15 seconds to the fake news, making every shart you took on a peace summit a headline before you could even change your pants. They're the real enemy, Donny boy. It's all their fault. The neocon menace that has infested both parties and got Sleepy Joe elected. But I know how to get revenge, Mr. President. I know how you can get even with those sick fucks. You may have had to sweat these creeps for the last four years but I've been after them for decades and I know their Achilles heel. I know just how to make them squeal like the little piggies they are. 

It's the wars, Donny, their beautiful precious little wars. The neocons, Biden included, love those endless fucking wars more than life itself, more than you love Big Macs and forced oral sodomy. They've put years, decades of their lives, whole careers into filling every third world nation with oil and sand to the brim with barely legal GIs trying to pay for two years of city college with PTSD. They can't get enough of those fucking wars, and you seem to love them too. You've bombed the Middle East stupid over the last four years and bankrolled every mass starvation and full blown genocide the sheiks could afford to buy in backroom deals with promised golf courses among the dunes. But I know you, Donny. I know that you are way too goddamn petty for anything resembling a coherent foreign policy, and I know that there is one thing you crave more than ill-earned money, more than undivided attention, more than your hottest daughter's sweet sweet ass, and it's revenge, and all you have to do to get it, to get even with those fuckers, is to follow through with just one goddamn campaign promise and end their stupid precious wars. End them all. 

I'm not talking about this 2,500 by Christmas chicken-noodle-bullshit. If you leave even 25 GIs in any one of those countries, Biden and his buddies will have it back up to quadruple digits by Easter, and they'll blame it on you the same way you blamed every bloodbath you committed on Obama and Bush. No, Mr. President, you have to go all the way to make this sting. You have to bring home every last soldier and not just from Iraq and Afghanistan, but from Syria, Somalia, Kuwait, and Kyrgyzstan. You have to shut down the DMZ and abandon NATO, and for once, you have every right and power to do so as Commander In Chief. Hit the cameras and announce the great withdrawal on live television, and publicly fire any official who so much as drags their feet. Fire them all. Fire the whole goddamn Pentagon and fill it with reality TV stars and washed-up pro-athletes. Make it crystal fucking clear that every firing is for peace, to end these wars this whole goddamn country despises, and if they still resist, go over the brasses heads and command the soldiers on the ground to disobey any commanding officer who tries to keep these wars burning. Most of those grunts voted for you and even more of them are sicker of these stupid fucking wars than the rest of us.

Do this Donny and the deep state will have an epic conniption. Decades of imperial statecraft flushed down the fucking toilet with your rotten pumpkin ass on the seat. Oh, it will be glorious. They will howl and sob in despair and curse your name on every news outlet. But the people will love it. They'll love you. You'll be a goddamn rock star. You might not even have to pay for consensual pussy anymore. And you will ruin Biden's presidency in the process. His team is stacked to the clouds with weapons industry wonks and neocon thinktank parasites. They paid for their wars already and they're gonna get them. But Biden will be forced to own them completely. He will have to be the asshole to send everyone back, to break up thousands of holiday family reunions just to feed the beast and make the wars forever again. If he lives through a single term, he'll lose reelection to a cheap suit filled with gerbils, shit, he may even lose to you. But you'll never know unless you pull the plug on that war machine. I still won't vote for you. I'll keep on advocating for the destruction of the whole damn government that imprisons my people for profit. But it'll take the military industrial complex years to recover from the damage, and that fact will put an evil little smirk on both of our faces, even as we prepare to duke it out.

Think about it, Orange Man Bad. It could be a beautiful Christmas.

Yours in hate eternally,

Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Up the Wolves by the Mountain Goats

*  Faith Healer by Julien Baker

*  Glorious by Adorable

*  Happy Xmas (War Is Over) by John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

*  Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan

*  I Bet On Loosing Dogs by Mitski

*  Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival

*  Fight Test by Flaming Lips

*  Untitled (How Does It Feel) by D'Angelo

Why Artsakh Still Matters to American Anarchism

 The news broke like a fever last Monday night. A deal had been signed by Armenia and Azerbaijan to end the bloody month long war in Nagorno-Karabakh which had claimed the lives of thousands on both sides. This is a good thing right? How could any peace be bad? But something felt all wrong about this one. Armenia's Prime Minister announced the deal on Facebook before adding that said deal was "unbelievably painful for me and our people." The response of those Armenian people back in Yerevan was equally pained but somewhat less somber. They rioted and stormed the buildings of their government peacemakers, demanding their resignation for treason. That's because this was not a peace deal made between equal sides on an even playing ground. It was a hostage situation with one side, Azerbaijan's side, armed to the teeth and openly backed by some of the most powerful and merciless militaries in the world, who helped that nasty little gas station threaten the impoverished Armenians to concede to the demands of their tormentors on nothing short of the pains of genocide.

The Nagorno-Karabakh region had already been affectively ethnically cleansed. It's ethnic Armenian population cut in two with 90,000 of their 150,000 citizens in exile as refugees back in mainland Armenia. Shushi, the region's second largest city, had just been captured and a Second Armenian Genocide seemed terrifyingly imminent. What's more, a major player in this bloody conflict was oddly absent from the deal. The Armenian Government was poorly represented along with the Russians who had failed miserably to defend their allies. The viciously racist regime of Azerbaijan was there with their neo-Ottoman Turkish puppet masters. But what of the Republic of Artsakh? The autonomous nation they were supposedly fighting over. They were nowhere to be found. Apparently their opinion on their own fate was irrelevant to the masters of the universe, even though it was their republic being ransacked and sold off to foreign "peacekeepers."

Most Americans had never heard the words Nagorno-Karabakh before late September. Even fewer have heard of it's proper name, Artsakh. But the mountainous dark garden, as it's Russo-Azeri name alludes to, is an ethnic Armenian exclave which has struggled gallantly to maintain their autonomy from the Ottomans and their Turkic ancestors for centuries. Like many nations in the volatile Southern Caucuses, Artsakh is a mountain stronghold that breeds warriors. It had been its own autonomous republic within the Azerbaijani autonomous republic in the Soviet Union, but had been divided from the nearby Armenian autonomous republic by none other than Joseph Stalin in the 1920's in what was rumored to be a strange attempt to curry favor with the recently de-Ottoman-ized Turkish Republic, who had just murdered 1.5 million ethnic Armenians less than a decade earlier. This cruel gift clearly failed to impress, as by the early 1960's Turkey was fully in league with NATO and helping America to spark the Cuban Missile Crisis by letting them park their nuclear-tipped Jupiter Missiles in their territory and aimed at Ivan's head. This cat and mouse game between the Russians, the Turks, and the Americans would come to define both Armenia and Artsakh's fate. 

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the people of Nagorno-Karabakh took to the streets peacefully and voted to return to Mother Armenia. Azerbaijan responded with a brutal 6 year long war that would claim the lives of tens of thousands and lead to atrocities committed by both sides. The Russians mostly just sat on their hands as the Soviet Union continued to unravel. A ceasefire was finally brokered by the Minsk Group, a ménage of malevolent meddlers consisting of France, Russia, and the United States, and the proverbial can was kicked down the road. In the meantime, the rag-tag Armenians who had fought the militarily superior Azerbaijani's to a stand still decided to take matters in their own hands. Sick of leaving their fate up to everyone but themselves, they chose to secede from the UN recognized borders of Azerbaijan and declare independence as the Republic of Artsakh. Even Armenia failed to recognize the will of their own people, but they did continue to occupy 7 districts of Azerbaijan to keep their ethnic brethren from being completely cut off from the outside world like the Gaza Strip. The two remained close to the point of even sharing Presidents over the years. Never the less, conflicts continued to spark along those contentious borders, but nothing like what erupted this fall. 

Contrary to what many would have you believe, the latest Nagorno-Karabakh war was far from spontaneous. It was barely even a war. It could be more accurately described as a siege lain by Azerbaijan at the behest of its sponsors in Turkey, the US, and Israel for two distinct geopolitical reasons. The despotic Turkish regime of Recep Erdogan sought to continue its blood spattered campaign of Ottoman revanchism which has killed thousands from Libya to Idlib. Meanwhile, their NATO handlers back in Washington along with their partners in crime in Jerusalem quietly sought to sow discord among the populace of Armenia and Azerbaijan's southern neighbors in Iran, a sanction/Covid weakened nation which including large populations of both Azeris and Armenians. The siege began in late September, but all indications point to it being planned months if not years in advance. Under the Trump Administration, Azerbaijan's US military aid exploded from $3 million in 2017 to a whopping $100 million by 2019. These are the tools used by Baku to ethnically cleanse Artsakh in 2020, along with Turkish drones and Israeli cluster bombs, not to mention US/Turkish trained Syrian jihadists.

This wasn't a war. It was a well choreographed massacre. Whole villages were hollowed out. Ancient churches were bombed. Prisoners were tortured and journalists were targeted. It was a Yankee funded campaign to strip a proud nation of it's autonomy, and that's why this tragedy should matter to anarchists, even western anarchists like me. Artsakh wasn't punished for simply being Armenian. They were punished, including by their supposed allies, for having the gall to define their own sovereignty outside of the confines of northern colonialist constructs like the UN. A Stalinist dunce like Azerbaijan's Sultan Ilham Aliyev was able to parade around with his jihad to restore his nation's UN recognized borders while he launched a second Armenian Genocide because his totalitarian farce of a government is granted more legitimacy than the democratic will of the people of Artsakh, who now find themselves held hostage by the white saviors of another UN Peacekeeping mission. These words make me sick because they have nothing to do with peace. An occupied nation can never be at peace. Is Gaza at peace? How about the Warsaw Ghetto? Fuck your statist peace. It is a stench in the nostrils of free people everywhere. 

I took this crime personally because I am a Panarchist. A school of anarchist thought that embraces localism as a far more democratic and far less imperialistic alternative to globalist internationalism. It is my belief that secession is a basic god given human right afforded to all people, and that all people have the right to voluntarily establish their own nations anywhere as long as that right is afforded to all people. Under this understanding, Stepanakert would have as much right to declare its independence from Artsakh as Artsakh has to declare independence from Azerbaijan and Azerbaijan does from Russia. Tyranny thrives on size. The more massive a system is, be it a monarchy or a liberal democracy, the less truly democratic it becomes. Which leads me to the other reason Artsakh should still matter to Americans. Artsakh is our future, for better or worse.

The Soviet Union was never the mythic "Evil Empire" dreamed up by the CIA and their friends in Hollywood. But it was a superpower built on the foundation of a popular if misguided revolution and torn asunder by a monolithic gulag-warfare state. Does that sound familiar? In the final days of the Soviet Union, this massive benevolent society began to burst at the seems with divisions of every kind imaginable- territorial, cultural, religious, linguistic, economic.... In the end it didn't simply collapse, it disintegrated into 15 sovereign states and dozens of unofficial ones. This became a massive crisis, but from an anti-statist point of view it could have just as easily become an opportunity. The only truly egalitarian societies that have ever thrived have been small autonomous movements sparked in times of great crisis- Paris, Catalonia, Chiapas, Rojava, CHOP.... These are the revolutions fought without pogroms, the ones that, for however short a period of time, managed to replace tyranny, not with more tyranny, but with hope and mutual aid.

This is how we save Artsakh. This is how we save Palestine and Yemen and Kurdistan. This is how we save ourselves. We create a million Artsakh's until their are too many embers for the massive tyrants to stomp out. We become a storm of Artsakh's, disintegrating the cowards of America, Turkey, Israel, and Russia in a vat of caustic chemical voluntarism. We stop trying to be the answer for everyone and create true solidarity by being the answer for ourselves and no one else. Armenia's reliance on massive Russia betrayed them. Can you imagine if instead they could rely on Donetsk, Luhansk, Chechnya, Dagestan, and roaming tribes of Cossacks in Russia's wild and mineral rich Siberian far east? If Turkey had to contain sultanates and confederations of Alevi, Kurds, Maoists, and Shiites? If America had to do war with sovereign citizens in New Hampshire, Mormon Fundamentalists in Arizona, and Black Nationalists in Mississippi who all formed pacts with the people we kill on the other side of the world? If all Black and Brown lives mattered or else? If Artsakh has taught us anything it is that false nationalist unity is the last thing we need in an age of division. What we need is swarm solidarity.

....And all the sultan's horses and all the czar's men couldn't put globalism back together again....  

Think About it, dearest motherfuckers. It could be a beautiful crisis.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Ode To My Family by the Cranberries

*  Soda Jerk by Buffalo Tom

*  Seal My Fate by Belly

*  Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers

*  B.O.B. by Outkast

*  Sister Jack by Spoon

*  L.E.S Artistes by Santigold

*  None of Your Business by Salt-N-Pepa

*  Shitty Ballet by Bleached

Trump Has Made the Left Fucking Stupid

Donald Trump has made the American left fucking stupid. I honestly can't think of a more eloquent way to put it than that. In one of histories most vicious ironies, the greatest legacy of Orange Man Bad may be that he drop kicked his enemies IQ in half to match his own. Like a Reddit troll, the Donald dared the left to overreact and then nailed them for taking the bait. The mainstream left has never fully recovered from the Reagan Revolution. They had the opportunity to take the grass roots infrastructure of McGovern and the Antiwar Movement and pivot to its natural successor, Ralph Nader, but they chose to go another way with it instead and ended up giving the Democratic Party back to the right with the Clinton Regime. 

Your regular rank and file Democrat has never been more hysterically unhinged than they are right now on the cusp of a Biden victory. Their response to an unthinkable Trump presidency has been a binge on Russophobic Cold War paranoia and an open armed embrace of the psychotic neocons in the "Intelligence Community," who saw Trump as merely a threat to brand marketability. Your average garden variety leftist now sounds like a politically correct Joe McCarthy, out to deplatform anybody who smells like borsch and questions the omnipotence of their geriatric savior-elect. Sadly, even the far left doesn't seem too far behind the caboose of this crazy train.

We've seen this recently with the exile of two of America's last great left-wing journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, to the social media outback of Substack. Both of these gentlemen were goddamn rock stars during the Bush era and rightfully so, but after just four short years of Trump hysteria they've gone from A-list muckrakers to persona non grata for the unforgivable crime of bringing up the unpleasant fact that Russiagate was a totally baseless farce cooked up by the same clowns who sold us the Iraq War. Greenwald has gone so far as to abandon the bottomless billionaire piggy bank he helped build known as The Intercept after it's editors violated his contract and refused to publish a piece for observing another unpleasant fact, that Joe Biden's son is an errant scumfuck. The left, even the far left, have responded to this blow by shrugging and saying, "Well, he talks to Tucker Carlson so he can suck it." This is the motherfucker who helped break the biggest story since Watergate with Edward Snowden, but he talks to Tucker Carlson so he can fucking suck it.

Glenn committed the cardinal sin of damaging the shit caked name of our great grey hope to destroy the great orange menace. The far left has never closed ranks behind a lesser evil the way they have with Joe Biden. From Angela Davis to Noam Chomsky to Code Pink, they've all decided that the threat of Donald Trump is so deadly that endorsing a corrupt lifelong warmonger is the only solution. On no occasion has a candidate been coddled like that racist imbecile and now that racist imbecile is our president. They kept him on ice in some Delaware bunker for the last six months except for the off coherent day when they could afford to push him over to his adoring press corps to answer questions about ice cream flavors until he called some random ass-kisser the N-word and it was time for more Geritol. This man is clearly batshit bonkers even by post-Reagan standards and no one but those morons on Fox News will say dick about it or his crackhead trust fund brat of a son. This is a dangerous ecosystem to build a presidency on. Some might argue that it's one ripe for the very fascism it supposedly defeated.

This all becomes justifiable as long as you buy into the notion that Donald Trump is an unprecedented tyrant who has brought us all to the brink of a Fourth Reich with his Alt-Right reign. Even morally responsible leftists have chosen to throw objectivity into the wood chipper based on the notion that they're doing what they have to do to save democracy. But what has Trump done to makes him any worse than any other president? When you look at the man's few actual policies, he looks pretty fucking basic. In fact, compared to the regime he followed, you know, the one Biden was actually a part of, he looks downright mild. The Obama Administration destroyed half of Africa to overthrow Gaddafi and set the stage for the rise of the Islamic State with their scheme to kill Assad in the sequel. Obama nearly quadrupled the size of the police state currently at Trump's disposal and afforded the executive office with the ability to murder random American teenagers by remote control on command. And in spite of all of Trump's race baiting bluster, Obama and Biden out-fashed the shit out of Mr. Border-wall by deporting more undocumented immigrants than any regime in modern history.

So I'm sorry, maybe I'm missing something here, but where is the goddamn fire and why did we need napalm to put it out. On every single goddamn issue, Biden matches Trump on evil and frequently doubles it. When you turn off that asshole's Twitter account, Trump looks a lot like a right-wing Jimmy Carter. Half a jackass who can't seem to shoot straight at the broadside of a barn. Speaking as an anti-imperialist who puts issues of war and peace front and center, Trump's record reads like a list of failures and even a couple half-decent decisions. He helped push Saudi Arabia's war on Shiites on the Arab Peninsula to genocidal proportions (think Jimmy on East Timor) and pointlessly pushed Iran back into sanctioned poverty to please his hyper-Zionist donors, but he belly flopped big time in our own hemisphere, making Maduro more popular than ever with his half-assed cockeyed coups and overthrowing Evo Morales just to have his party comeback with a vengeance in Bolivia's recent elections. America First was always a pose but Trump has generally resisted calls within his own administration to make things way worse everywhere in the Middle East but the West Bank. How is this the next Hitler?

You want the beef? Here it is. The establishment hates a loser. That's why they hated Carter, that's why they turned on Bush during his second term and pushed forward a superficial token agent of change with Obama, and that's why they hate Trump. Trump is embarrassing. He's an openly racist imbecile that makes our daughtering empire look like a wolfpack of inbred hillbilly cannibals. The establishment clearly prefers carefully closeted racists like Biden and Obama, who can ethnically cleanse the Rio Grande with a smile and then cover up the smell of fascism with a glorified air freshener like DACA. The only thing unprecedented about Trump was that he was never supposed to happen. The same media who pretends to hyperventilate every time that asshole cracks a fart gave his ridiculous 2016 rodeo round the clock coverage because they figured their darling Hillary was a shoe-in. They badly underestimated how toxic the Clintonian brand of globalist neoliberalism had become to Rust Belt America. They blew it. They got a practical joke elected president and now they want us to unite and turn back time to when they successfully sold us eight more years of Bush as change we can believe in.

The left has taken the bait and swallowed it whole. Nobody gives a fuck about war anymore. They just want free shit. If 2020 or 2016 had been run fairly, they would have got it with Bernie. They would have gotten another drone strike progressive White House slaughtering poor people on four continents while they kept us happy with free healthcare and affordable education. And that seems to be enough for the left in this country. A Faustian Socialism that's willing to look the other way as long as the empire doesn't bring the war home like Trump did and uses the right pronouns. This is what latter day morons like Noam Chomsky think they can push Biden into, as if that strategy has ever worked before. Anyone who interferes with this casserole of delusional fantasy can now be cast off as part of some mythical Red-Brown conspiracy to hand the White House over to Putin. And that is Trump's legacy, and Biden's as well. May god have mercy on our souls.

I know, I know, your offended. Queers like Glenn Greenwald and I were built to be seen not heard. Just ignore my latest heresy and ship me off to Bolivia. If I'm to be exiled, I'd like it to at least be to a shithole country who hasn't sold off the left half of their souls to Max Boot. Gracias.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne

*  Karma Police by Radiohead

*  Crank by Catherine Wheel

*  Game Shows Touch Our Lives by the Mountain Goats

*  What Goes One by the Velvet Underground

*  Motion Sickness by Phoebe Bridgers

*  Norman Fucking Rockwell by Lana Del Rey

*  I Wanna Be Your Dog by the Stooges

*  In the Street by Big Star

*  Here Comes Success by Iggy Pop

*  Northside by Jesse Kivel

*  (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding by Elvis Costello

Democracy as Mental Illness: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Cross 2020

 It's early November in the dark heart of my Rust Belt swing state and I am getting dangerously close to the end of a very short rope. Or maybe it's a lit fuse. Attached to a dangerously explosive skull. Either way it's burning and I find myself in desperate need of drugs. Hard drugs. Schedule IV narcotics. Name brand benzodiazepines. I'm talking Valium, Xanax, Halcion, Ativan, Klonopin, Rohypnal. The kind of Halloween candy they feed senator's wives after they've learned about the fourth underage mistress. That's the good stuff. That's my poison. Two or three weirdly shaped elephant pills and I'm fucking sailing over mountains and valleys. To some corner of this fucked up country where that incessant swarm of super PAC fueled adds can't fucking find me. That's what I need now. Where the fuck did I put my pills? Take me away, Joey Ramone. I wanna be sedated.

I haven't felt this unhinged and desperate for oblivion since the first weeks of the lockdown and that shit was kid stuff compared to the last weeks of the 2020 presidential abortion. The most important election of my life, I'm told. I've been sold that bill of goods every four years for the entirety of my short and painful life and it's beginning to ring a bit hollow. Then again, there does seem to be something extra special about this years campaign season. It's never felt more unhinged. Both sides have adopted the tactics of the Manson Family to get their chosen mentally depraved scion of scumfuckery in the White House. Scrawling their names in blood across suburban doorways with subtle threats to take back America and make it heinous again. I'm starting to believe them. I can feel the fear and loathing closing in.

This post isn't about the election. It isn't about Biden or Trump. By the time you read this, one of those two rapidly disintegrating conmen will likely be our president-elect and I could honestly give five fucks and hardy shit which one it is. They're two different flavors of the same goddamn hand grenade. Cram either one in your mouth and your skull won't know the difference. No dearest motherfuckers, this is a post about America's national mental illness, election fatigue. Some fancy fuckers in white lab coats on cable news call it Election Stress Disorder, and ain't that just swell. Another clever word salad for the next installation of the DSM. America is supposedly the freest country on earth and voting is supposedly our most sacred right. Then how did this right become a mental illness? And how many sticks of Xanax do I have to down with Two-Buck-Chuck to make it go away? Four? Five? Better double it and chase it down with a shot of Robitussin.

In case you haven't noticed, I don't need this shit. I have enough mental illness' to fucking deal with. Depression, anxiety, OCD, ADD, PTSD, gender dysphoria, and all that shit is on top of Chronic Lyme Disease and the numerous Cronenbergian digestive disorders caused by the mountains of antibiotics I shoveled down in a failed attempt to murder that fucking sickness. Long story short, I'm already fucking crazy. I make Ted Kaczynski look well adjusted. I write about war crimes and state sponsored terrorism to get away from that shit. But 2020 has been stalking my dearly demented ass with three nails and a crucifix since 2019.

That's when the hopped up circus known as the Democratic National Primary began. A bottomless clown car of virtue signaling wokesters aping like Greta Thunberg on molly while downing five hundred dollar schnapps at Wall Street wine caves. They had one of everything, all vying to be first something. First woman. First Latino. First gay man. First albino epileptic to take it up the ass for the Great Satan and sell their tribe down the river with the manure of industrial grade tokenism. So many awful things to choose from. The only half descent choices were shoved to the back of the shelf like last years fruit cake. Mike Gravel was probably the only candidate running not guaranteed a seat in hell and this is probably the first time most have you have even heard about his campaign. The only sane candidate with half a chance was Tulsi Gabbard. She earned herself the honor of being slimed by every arsenic cupcake from Hillary to Joy Reid by committing treason and running a campaign McGovern might actually recognize. A Democrat who wants to get along with Russia? Well, if that ain't fascism clearly everything else already is. 

The real campaign though, the one the DNC and their friends with benefits in cable news could agree to conspire on, was how the fuck do we keep Bernie out of the White House? I could live to be a thousand and I will still never fucking understand this. In spite of his democratic socialist pose, Bernie is the most milquetoast manipulatable leftist chickenhawk since those cunts who fed Red Rosa to the Freikorps. The motherfucker has almost religiously voted for every major Democratic bill, including the fucking wars, and still managed to hang on to a shred of lefty street cred. He's perfect for the late capitalist era of this sick countries dying empire. I mean, a socialist shoveling American greatness down the Third World's throat in the name of humanitarian interventionism? That shit is genius. Rumsfeld must have been kicking himself. Even late into 2019 and early into 2020 that crusty old soup jockey and his Squad of multi-culti Manson girls looked like shoe-in's to write a hip new chapter in American imperialism. It was heady shit, but not enough to convince the old guard.

Every news station from here to Algiers either blackballed Bernie as an unrealistic radical gadfly or just straight up refused to cover his existence. Even when he was winning state after state after goddamn state, the talking heads would only mumble his name beneath their breaths like the adults on a Peanuts cartoon on Quaaludes, before becoming excitable yipping Shih Tzu's once it was time to announce which token minority flavor of the month Wall Street chose to shove money in this week. Eventually those lazy fucks just chose to fall back on that comfortable place for monsters to relax and breath known as neoliberalism with Joe Biden, gods favorite dunce. And with a little elbow grease they pushed his mummified old corpse down America's throat. Bernie did what he does best and gleefully thanked his rapists for the dazzling evening of Last House on the Left-grade shenanigans before ordering his unruly groupies to shut the fuck up and take a seat.

The one absolutely phenomenal thing about this year's soul battering election season is the blatantly one sided treatment of Old Joe. For once in their putrid existence, those neocon shock jocks on talk radio and Fox News are excruciatingly correct about the so-called liberal media. They have fallen lock, stock, and barrel behind Biden like North Korean Soldiers serving their dear leader. It's as if they all took a secret vote and decided that this year they weren't even going to play objective journalists for Halloween. Donald Trump was just too much of a threat, but a threat to what exactly? When you look at Biden and Trump on paper they are virtually identical. Mirror images of uncut white supremacy. Even their sex crimes were similar enough to be plausibly committed by the same creature. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are both grabby, racist, corporate shills with staggering body counts. If anything, Biden is further to the right, criticizing our War Criminal In Chief for not dancing naked on the graves of more brown children. But Biden can sell the dance, even in the throws of late stage dementia, he can strike a pose like Reagan and read his lines off the cue card. Trump is just simply too erratic, and quite frankly, too gross.

So what was the point of all this insanity if we just end up with a slightly different flavor of war criminal? What is the point of turning this sick joke into a seizure inducing mental illness that has driven that shining city on the hill to the edge of a cliff and dared us all to jump. If they really wanted to create the elaborate illusion of a functioning democracy they could have just as easily let Bernie win with the same long term results. But maybe that's just it. Maybe democracy is the true target here. I've long held the sneaking suspicion that the primary mission behind the public school system is to turn kids off of the dangers of actual education. Send in a five year old beam of light into that mediocrity machine and by 3:00 PM she'll never read another book again without a loaded gun to her head. Maybe "American Democracy" is the same sick game of aversion therapy. Turn the very notion of an election into a glorified colonoscopy and they'll beg for fascism on bended knee.

Six sticks and a fifth deep and I think its working. I've finally learned to love Big Brother. Bring on the wars, dearest motherfuckers. I'm ready to party.

Peace, Love, & Insanity- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  I Wanna Be Sedated by the Ramones 

*  Vogue by Madonna

*  I Think I Would Die by Hole

*  Young American by David Bowie

*  Come On Everybody by Sid Vicious

*  Some New Kind of Kick by the Cramps

*  Last Cigarette by Dramarama

*  Too Drunk to Dream by the Magnetic Fields

*  Drug Train by the Cramps

*  Pennyroyal Tea by Nirvana

More Scary Movies for Anarchists to Watch in the Dark

 It has been one supremely horrific year since I wrote the virgin instillation of this list last October, what with apocalyptic plagues, dystopian police death squads, and collapsing empires. In many ways life has come to resemble many of the movies on it. Some might argue that horror movies are gratuitous at this point, I mean, haven't we had enough? No, dearest motherfuckers, not by a longshot. The fact that everyday life has come to resemble a George Romero flick is just proof of his unsung brilliance. No genre in cinema gets dumped on like horror movies. Yet no genre of cinema is more stunningly prophetic. That's because horror movies, good horror movies anyway, are perfect vehicles for social commentary. They seek to illuminate that which makes us uncomfortable and force us to actually fucking deal with it. And that is what 2020 needs now more than ever. We realize that we're living in a goddamn zombie apocalypse, but how do we deal with it? That is the ultimate question that anarchists wrestle with. How do we create a new society amidst the collapse of the old? And that's also what great horror movies strive to figure out.

So I made another goddamn list. A dozen more scary movies for anarchists to watch in the dark, and it's as eccentric and idiosyncratic as the last. I have a love for both foreign arthouse shockers and overlooked grindhouse pulp. They both take the necessary measures to punish the audience into thinking about shit that scares them. Like last time, many movies on the list are not horror movies in the traditional sense, but they are all movies that seek to terrify their audience into challenging authoritarian institutions. Spoiler alerts abound. Read at your own risk.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)-  A movie about a black guy who tries to save a bunch of fucked up white folks during a plague and gets shot for his trouble? How the fuck was this thing made 50 years ago? George Romero's iconic budget shocker that practically invented the zombie genre was made to be a gruesome allegory for the times. Vietnam and urban upheaval inspired this terrifying story of plague induced braindead cannibalism. But its protagonist, Ben, played brilliantly by the Sorbonne trained Duane Jones, is much more George Floyd than Martin Luther King. After all, Ben wasn't trying to lead a movement, he was just some hard luck son of a bitch trying to get home without getting wasted. But the movement found him and his martyrdom made him a revolutionary hero of outlaw cinema. George Romero was a visionary.

28 Weeks Later (2007)-  While in many ways inferior to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, this sequel feels far more relevant to the Corona Virus, mainly because it addresses the horrors of authoritarian overreaction to such a crisis. In other words, it's a lockdown movie. 28 weeks after the original, the Rage Virus has been contained by NATO, and its survivors have been safely quarantined. But the moment their armed and sanctimonious overlords begin to lose control, they become the one thing more monstrous than plague; fighting one with a police state. The results are as terrifying as they are inevitable.

The Wicker Man (1973)-  One of the greatest horror movies ever made, the frightful tale of a doomed Christian police sergeant investigating an alleged human sacrifice on an insular heathen island in Northern England has enjoyed a strange and wonderful second life as a cult favorite of traumatized post-Christian heathens like myself, who not only enjoy the sights and sounds of a neopagan utopia, but relish in seeing an openly bigoted cop get his comeuppance in the sacrificial inferno of the wicker man. For sick kids like us, The Wicker Man is one horror movie without an innocent victim, just a joyous celebration of sanctimony in flames, DJed by the great Christopher Lee as a fantastically weird neofolk Willy Wonka named Lord Summerisle. Buck up, love. After all, aren't all cops bastards?

Revenge (2017)-  With the establishment-fixed rise of pussy-grabber Joe Biden, 2020 was the year #MeToo died. Making it a perfect year for a wicked spin on the long maligned Rape Revenge subgenre. After being lured to her powerful married Wall Street boyfriend's desert bachelor pad and raped by one of his sleazy hunting buddies, Jen wants nothing more than to get on the next chopper out of hell. But her cheating hubby has other plans and casually shoves her off a cliff rather than dealing with the inconvenience of another mouthy mistress. What is all too typically the end of tragic stories of sexual violence among the socially privileged is just the beginning of Jen's gruesome revenge saga, as she crawls from her grave and rises up as a survivor, taking bloody justice into her own hands. It may not be politically correct, but after the merciless railroading of Tara Reid, all a pissed off feminist really wants to see is another slick sex criminal getting his black heart blown out of his chest with a 12 gauge. Metaphorically speaking, of coarse.

Irreversible (2002)-  ....Then again, vengeance has a flipside. The brilliantly transgressive Gaspar Noe turned the Rape Revenge genre on its ear by simply playing it in reverse. By starting the movie with the hero getting taken away in cuffs for committing one of the most brutal murder scenes in horror history, the audience is deprived of a convenient conclusion to violent crime, and our whole moral code is called into question. Irreversible makes the perfect critique of any justice system based on reactionary vengeance by showing us that its consequences are often every bit as savage as what inspires them. Thug life attorneys like Kamala Harris should have to watch this film 16 times in a row. The ends rarely justify the means, they just make us all a little more guilty.

Waco: The Rules of Engagement (1997) & Let the Fire Burn (2013)-  I put the two documentaries to make this year's list together because they're both about essentially the same damn story. The Branch Davidians and MOVE were both experimental communities trying in their own peculiar ways to drop out of the toxicity of modern society. Both were attacked by the police state for daring to live differently. And both were cowardly burned alive for defending themselves. The fact that the Branch Davidians were mostly white Jesus freaks and MOVE was a mostly Black Anarchist commune didn't make any difference to the pigs or the state they represented. They said 'No!', so they died. The only silver lining to this cloud of black smoke is that they both died fighting with their heads held high. Sadly the same can't be said for their children. The state is the ultimate monster. Only bottom unity among the peculiar class can slay it.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)-  Half a century later and people remain incensed by Stanley Kubrick's stylishly vicious little farce. Debates rage on about the real meaning behind the story of the charismatic young psychopath named Alex, played by the heinously charming Malcolm McDowell. The teenage hooligan rapes and kills for fun before being corrected by an equally sadistic method of state psychiatric torture which renders the victimizer a victim before becoming a cause celebre and being summarily returned to his smashing old predatory self. I see it as a parable about what society becomes when it leaves all its values up to crass consumer culture and authoritarian institutions. The American public school system makes droogs every day, and droogs make for equally good prisoners as they do police. God help us all.

Man Bites Dog (1992)-  From brutal satire to grizzly satire. Man Bites Dog took Stanley Kubrick's challenge and raised the bar with something far more heinous and far more hilarious, a Belgian mockumentary about a sadistic serial killer who slowly drags the film crew following him into becoming active participants in his increasingly brutal crimes, all in the name of journalism of coarse. Man Bites Dog is essentially CNN and NBC's coverage of  Donald Trump's tumultuous 2016 campaign in black and white. The crew knows they should just turn the fucking camera off and get some help, but they just have to get one more kill on camera for the ratings, and then another, and then another, and then another, until it's too late to turn back and we're all fucked.

Videodrome (1983)-  David Cronenberg's body horror magnum opus about a TV producer infected both sexually and mentally by the hypnosis of right wing snuff footage is essentially Manufacturing Consent with a stomach cunt. It's shockingly gruesome psychosexual nightmare imagery serves to underline the awesome and all too often savage power modern day information technology wields upon both witting and unwitting consumers alike. Anyone who has ever lost a loved one to the toxic sway of Fox News or MSNBC should be intimately familiar with the rise of the new flesh. Kill your television before it can retaliate.

Hostel (2005)-  The original torture porn flick has never gotten a fair wrap as far as I'm concerned, especially in the US. Critics got so lost in the buckets of gore and graphic nudity that they lost all site of what Eli Roth was trying to say with those salacious mediums. Hostel is a movie about imperialism and its post modern cousin tourism. The bros come from the West to Eastern Europe to rage and fuck local whores for sport only to find themselves the sport of an even higher class of libertine tourists who pay good money to torture and kill. Rich kids come to poor countries to get laid while their parents come to kill anyone with enough of a conscience to give a fuck. But eventually the adults just keep coming to kill, even if it means killing their own children. Sex sells. Murder will cost you double.

Funny Games (1997)-  What would any truly woke horror movie list be without at least one savage critique of the genre itself? Michael Haneke's Funny Games may be the cruelest film on the list and they barely need a drop of blood to get there. The story of a happy family being tormented on vacation in the Austrian Alps by a couple of handsome young house guests makes the audience complicit in their cruel games by routinely breaking the fourth wall to directly engage us and encourage us to participate. At one point one of the victims even manages to get his hands on the shotgun to make a climactic stand against us, only to have one of our fellow killers literally pick up a remote and rewind the scene to replay it in his favor. Funny Games asks us the ultimate horror movie question, did you come here to learn or are you just here to wallow? The harsh reality is probably a little bit of both, and we probably should be at least a little ashamed of ourselves.

The Road (2009)-  This stunning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel is both incredibly depressing yet movingly inspiring. Just a man and his son struggling to make it to the shore through a poisoned planet teeming with clans of murderous cannibals. Viggo Mortensen plays the unnamed protagonist who does whatever it takes to keep him and his son one step ahead of the danger that always seems to be stalking them just one step behind. It's only after he succumbs to his wounds that his son realizes that they were actually being followed by another family who had been looking out for them the whole time. It's a harshly moving film about faith and mutual aid in horrific times, and I'm not ashamed to admit that it moved me too tears. Something tells me Tolstoy would approve. We need this too. We really do.

Thelma (2017)-  Thelma is a lonely girl from an isolated Christian family in her first year away from home at college in the big wicked city. She begins to suffer from fits of uncontrollable telekinesis whenever she finds herself near her classmate Anja. These powers turn out to be the ghosts of her long repressed childhood trauma, as well as her long dormant homosexuality. Thelma could easily be called Nicky. I spent my early twenties crippled by a powerful mental illness that turned out to be the result of my suppressed gender identity and the childhood trauma that came with a religious upbringing that robbed me of the ability to confront it. Thelma is a horror movie about being Queer, and it leaves us with the seemingly cliché but totally valid message that love can conquer anything, even ourselves, and at the end of the day isn't that anarchism is truly about, demanding the impossible and courageously fighting to make it a reality? Maybe that's what horror movies are about too.

Take care of one another this Halloween, dearest motherfuckers. Only together can we survive this horror show. That's what anarchism really means, not chaos and flaming cop cars, well ok, maybe a little of that too. But at it's heart, anarchism is about empathy, putting other people above laws and leaders. That's what movies like these inspire in me. Hopefully, I'm not the only bleeding heart psycho to find strength in gore.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH