War is Not a Queer Right

 Even a bitter Queer curmudgeon like myself has to begrudgingly admit that we've come a long way, baby. I don't know if I can join the chorus of pretty pink-washed celebrities in singing "It gets better!" After all, I'm still home alone with PTSD and miles away from getting laid. But there is no denying the colossal gravitational sea change in Queer tolerance we've seen over just the last decade. Openly gay commentators now have the cultural gravitas to join the rabid breeders on Fox News in demonizing trans kids, and even those demonized trans kids now have a devil's lexicon of words and labels to make sense of our weird bodies. Back when I was in high school, not only was trans rights not even a thing but we had no idea what transgender even was. All we knew was we weren't "them" and that was way bad. As a teenage non-binary dyke with a dick, not only did I not come out of the closet, I didn't even know I was in one. I just thought I was some weird new subspecies of freak. I guess I wasn't wrong, but it would have hurt a hell of a lot less if I had the tools to realize I wasn't alone.

But all progress comes at a price and many of the most cherished tokens of LGBT rights are little more than concessions to assimilation that aren't worth the price of the parades that celebrate them. Hate crimes laws empower the very same Prison Industrial Complex that disproportionately enslaves, mutilates, and rapes Queer bodies. Gay marriage offers validation to gays and lesbians who choose to celebrate their partnerships with heterosexual legal traditions while simultaneously legally invalidating traditionally Queer partnerships that don't invite the state for a menage. But the worst of the worst when it comes to toxic progress can be found in that token of hetereo-cis-masculine ultraviolence known as the Military Industrial Complex, and this is why I cannot be found celebrating President Biden's decision to allow transgender people like myself serve in our nation's killing machine.

This, once again, makes me a minority within a minority. You see, dearest motherfuckers, I don't support LGBT rights, I don't even support that clownish corporate acronym. I support Queer power. I am what you might call a Queer Nationalist, which makes me a young member of a dying breed. We rose up from Stonewall with fists in the late Sixties and early Seventies and took our cues from the fledgling Black Power and Chicano movements. They weren't begging congress for equality. They were demanding autonomy. They saw their people as a stateless third world nation and they didn't want shit all to do with the American horror show that brought them on stage in chains.

Queer warriors like Masha P. Johnson and Miss Major heard the call of Huey Newton and came to an iconoclastic conclusion that we were a nation too. Queer people have been many things to this country, from whores to the Conquistador's dog chow, but we have never really been Americans, and that was just fine by us. We are a multicultural race defined by our refusal to comply with the biological tyranny of White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. We too are a stateless third world nation imprisoned by the first, and the last thing we wanted was to serve in the imperial slaughter house that defined our captor's power on the world stage. I continue to doggedly fight to keep this tradition alive, the tradition that shouts with a pink fist held high that there is simply no place for a Queer person in the straight man's army.

But this shit cuts far deeper than anti-imperialism. What Joe Biden's executive order to reverse Donald Trump's executive order to reverse Barrack Obama's executive order really stands for in no uncertain terms is slavery. It is a gift to the draft that puts my people one step closer to the tyranny of forced conscription. As it stands, all US citizens and legal residents between the ages of 18 and 25 assigned male at birth are forced to register with the Selective Service System, a pool of able young bodies ready, willing or not, to be thrown into the Buzzsaw of total war. 

A lot of Americans suffer under the delusion that the draft was done away with in this country when in reality it was just put on hold after resistance to our genocidal campaign in Vietnam brought America's youth to the brink of widespread open rebellion. The draft lottery was put on mute until things cooled down, but the right for the most violent military on earth to violate the shit out of the 13th Amendment and build another slave army of poor people to kill other poor people remains terrifyingly valid and I'll be goddammed if I just sit by and watch tanks join the pride parade.

There are victories and there are hollow victories. Queer folks, like most minorities, pretty much subsist on the hollow variety in the game of civil rights. It was a hollow victory when Biden revoked Trump's horrifically transphobic manipulations of Title IV because Trump had already made it frighteningly clear that that civil right could just as easily be turned into a lethal weapon as a token to diversity. That's the dirty little secret of the Civil Rights Movement. It will always remain a fist fight for privileges as long as the power imbalance between white straight cis-male plutocracy and the rest of us Third World freaks remains. 

This latest executive action isn't even a hollow victory though. It's an act of war against Queer bodies, and the assimilated LGBT civil rights movement has been fooled into cheering it on in the name of inclusion. "Hurray! We get to be fucked like breeders into killing other poor people on the other side of the world for a prison nation that continues to prey on us like Serengeti gazelle!" Well I'm sorry, dearest motherfuckers, but I'm not celebrating. War is not a Queer right, not one I want anything to do with anyway. Besides, we already have a war to fight and it's against the very system that "includes" us.

Fight the real enemy.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  War by Sinead O'Connor

*  Lexicon Devil by the Germs

*  Gloria by Patti Smith

*  Freak on a Leash by Korn

*  Bad Mouth by Fugazi

*  Pretend That We're Dead by L7

*  Mandinka by Sinead O'Connor

*  Jennifer's Body by Hole

*  N.W.O. by Ministry

*  Hardline by Julien Baker

You Can't Fight Fascism with Fascism

 January 6th was a day that will live on in infamy, or at least so I'm told. Maybe I've just become too jaded in my young age, but three weeks later and I still don't see it. The great Capitol Hill Siege sounds terrifying coming from some breathless dweeb at CNN but the whole thing seemed like a pretty second rate shitshow from where I was sitting. With the last gasp of Orange Man Bad, the Administration Who Couldn't Shoot Straight whooped up a few thousand devoted MAGA monsters with tall tales of stolen elections and sicked them on a congress playing democracy with the Electoral College. Shit got out of hand and some of the loonier tunes in the bunch invaded the building, chasing off our dear leaders and goofing around the hallways and offices until the pigs who let them in lost their patience. Five people died, which is always tragic, but most of the deaths were freak accidents that could have just as easily occurred if that many out of shape fogeys attended Coachella. I'm sorry if I'm being a dick but I just don't see this septuagenarian riot as being the new 9/11.

But that is exactly how the Washington politicos and their mainstream media hype-men are playing this. According to them and all their corporate think tank "experts," this thing was an act of terrorism. It was a neo-Nazi coup, and the next one is just around the corner. Speaking as somebody who actually kind of gives a shit about the civil liberties that these new Brown Shirts supposedly threaten, I'm far more concerned by the perfect synergy of the mainstream establishment's response to January 6 than January 6 itself. Within hours, the faceless scions of social media were launching sweeping crackdowns that banished far more than just Trump and QAnon from their pages. After a single patch was photographed on a Capitol Hill hooligan, the largely post-racial third positionists of the National Anarchist Movement were completely scalped from the internet. All of their Facebook pages were gutted like a carp and it turns out the asshole with the patch had been kicked out of the group years ago, precisely for his support of Trump and his fascist policies.

This was far from an isolated incident and the social media purge which is promised to just be beginning is only the tip of the spear. The talk from Washington is far more severe. On every news channel we see a bipartisan consensus on the need to pass sweeping legislation to crack down on the vague rising scourge of domestic extremism. Our new president himself is talking up his tough on crime credentials as he turns the Capitol into a dystopian police state, and this is one promise Joe is likely to keep. After all, he was the author of the draconian Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995 that his neocon homie, John Ashcroft, used as a blueprint for the Constitution shredding Patriot Act.

A lot of people on the left seem to be just fine with this shrill overreach as long as it's directed at their enemies on the right, but you have to be a goddamn fucking moron to believe that that's even going to happen. Apparently the progressive wokesters in the "Resistance" slept through their Black Lives Matter homework last summer. We already live in a goddamn white supremacist state. Every weapon you hand our gestapo in blue will be wielded overwhelmingly at Black and Brown people and their allies, from Antifa to Boogaloo. The only time our government ever takes the far right seriously is when they attack them directly, like at the Capitol or Oklahoma City. The rest of the time they could care less. And why shouldn't they? As long as Nazis stick to killing other poor people, they're just a bunch of violent imbeciles advocating for a white power that already fucking exists.

The most maddeningly insane thing about this whole sordid affair. The absurdity that would make even Kafka scream "What?!," is the fact that the specter of a largely empty suited fascism is being used to justify the real thing. If those asshats at the Capitol really wanted a Fourth Reich, they got it. Only it's Fuhrer Biden leading the jackbooted parade instead of Donald Trump. But we've been headed this way long before Old Joe even stepped foot into his first set of steel toes back in the late 1880's. America is and has always been an empire above all else, and fascism, as I see it at least, is the final stage of imperialism. The Caesars who inspired Mussolini used a heady mix of full spectrum militarism and statist mysticism in a last ditch effort to preserve the bad name of Rome as it collapsed beneath a colossal cross of war debt unto its own sword. Fascism is a syncretic monster by nature but it always acts as a desperate attempt to preserve the bloody vestige of a fallen nation's imperial greatness. We see it in the sanctification of the sacred Capitol and its godly Paladins. Only now it stands scarier than ever before because our desperate leaders have the new techno-oligarchy of social media at their full disposal. They've centralized the commons themselves and they plan to turn them into the world's largest panopticon. 

As a Queer Panarchist, this leaves me pretty much fucked. The whole basis of my entire belief system is that the only way for outsiders like me to truly be free is to let literally everyone choose their own possible utopia so long as it doesn't infringe upon anybody else's right to do the same. This would mean allowing even the imbeciles of the White Power Movement the right to open up their own knuckle dragging little communes and fail by their own merit. It's a philosophy that uses diversity and voluntarism to weed out the more authoritarian mental illness' by challenging them to put up or shut up. And if/when they finally step out of line and get violent, they have no excuses to fall back on when the rest of the communes come together to kick their fucking asses. Parler gets autonomy so if Parlor can't cut it, they've got no one left to blame but themselves, rendering their pseudo-free speech posturing laughably irrelevant like their half-assed ideology.

This is how a peaceful anarchist wins, and it involves supporting the rights of those we despise because we have faith that without the state they'll fail. This ideology has put me in some pretty fucking weird places. It's lead to me being threatened by fellow antifascists and anarchists like Antifa for my rejection of concepts like deplatforming, and it's lead me to make some equally unexpected allies on the right for my embrace of free speech absolutism. I have good friends involved with weird scenes like Boogaloo and National Anarchism. People I was told are bigoted terrorists turned out to be allies of my own debauched genderfuck riot parade. They didn't expect this outcome anymore than I did. But when you fight fascism with stateless liberty you bring the best out of everybody, including yourself. The state is the real enemy. Without it, fascism withers away into dust. Lets all make that shit happen and lets make it happen together.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

* You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory by Johnny Thunders

*  Best of You by Foo Fighters

*  Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth

*  I Like Fucking by Bikini Kill

*  Nazi Punks Fuck Off by Dead Kennedys

*  Olympia by Hole

*  Sing Out by Cat Stevens

*  Shell Game by Bright Eyes

*  A Better Union by Titus Andronicus

*  Family Farm by the Hold Steady

*  I Feel It All by Feist

Killing Nora: The Real Reason Trump Should Have Been Impeached

 It's pretty much an open secret at this point that all American presidents are certifiable war criminals, even the supposedly good ones. Thomas Jefferson killed the Indians he admired and raped his slaves when he wasn't busy denouncing slavery. FDR put an entire race in concentration camps and even that dovish hayseed, Jimmy Carter, was a founding father of Al-Qaeda. Violating human rights comes with the job description when you run a runaway empire. Noam Chomsky probably put it best when he observed that, if held to the same standards as the Nuremberg Tribunals, every American president would swing from the end of a noose- "Every white one of them" as Zack de la Rocha once added a few years before that poetic sentiment became tragically dated. All this considered, there really is little room for self-respecting historians to get, well, histrionic. If this were anything resembling a fair country, every one of those bastards would have been impeached, from Washington up to Trump and Biden next. But historians are people too and every once in while there is a case, a single war crime, that leaves a stain on your soul that just wont come out. The tragic case of little Nora al-Awlaki is one of those cases for me. So while the whole country hyperventilates over the Donald's latest dance with thuggery, I'm left wondering, what the fuck took you people so long?

Its been 4 years. Jesus Christ! Has it really been 4 years? The Yakla raid was launched a week after Trump's inauguration, so yeah, its been 4 goddamn years since Donald Trump sent a Seal Team 6 death squad to a rural village in central Yemen to murder an 8 year old American girl named Nora al-Awlaki. She was shot in the neck and left to bleed to death over a period of two agonizing hours in her wounded mother's arms. A mountain of excuses has followed. At first the Seals were there to collect intel. The fact that they wiped out an entire village and came up with nothing but some dated videos on bomb construction made that excuse feel a little hollow though. Apparently Seals don't get YouTube. Now the new official story is that the Seals were there to nail AQAP emir, Qasim al-Raymi. Once again, there is no proof and al-Raymi only bought the farm this past year.

Lets get real here people, we all know exactly why Donald Trump rubber stamped the first known US ground assault in Yemen in history. It's the same reason Nora's name sounds so hauntingly familiar. Nora al-Awlaki was the surviving daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the famed American jihadi propagandist. Barrack Obama had him extrajudicially murdered in a drone strike back in 2011. Two weeks later, by coincidence of course, Anwar's teenage son was murdered in another drone strike. The troubling fact about Anwar himself that no American seems willing to touch is that the man has never been empirically tied to a single crime. The CIA ties him to everything and anything but never offers anything in the way of proof. Anwar's crime was that he was an American Muslim who advocated for other western Muslims to reject western materialism and embrace jihad against the nations killing their family back home. He was an extremist agitator and kind of a prick. To America, that's reason enough for a death sentence, and the murder of his next of kin simply underlines the point. Scoff at the scraps of empire and even your children will suffer.

You add to this the fact that Donald Trump openly ran a presidential campaign in which he literally promised to murder the family members of declared terrorists and you begin to get a clear picture of precisely how petty and heinous American foreign policy has become in the age of Trump. An entire village, some 40+ people, nearly all kin to Nora, including at least 9 children, an infant and a pregnant woman, a mosque, a clinic, a school, 120 farm animals- all annihilated to maintain a campaign promise and murder a second grader. And nobody cared. Not really. The news flipped out about the one American psycho killed; some glorified mercenary likely wiped out by giddy friendly fire during the climax of a murder spree. 'Why did he have to die?' Fuck you, you callous slime. He was literally a baby killer. That lasted about a week before it was back to Russiagate.

To me, that is the most repulsive fact of the Trump regime. The Democrats wasted millions of dollars, thousands of hours, pouring over one ridiculous conspiracy theory after another, while Trump literally got away with murder after murder after murder. In those 4 years since little Nora died, hundreds of thousands of Yemeni children have followed her to the grave and that orange bastard's fingerprints are on every tiny body. We gassed up Saudi Arabia's fleet of American bombers as they nailed schools and highways and playgrounds and hospitals. We held off the international community while those rabid Wahhabi dogs starved the poorest nation in the Muslim world and we declared the only people defending this godforsaken place terrorists for fighting back. And what did the media do? They spent hours of prime time on obvious horseshit like the Steele Dossier while they remained deaf to the screams of Trump's real victims. Democrats attempted to pass a few bills blocking the genocide, but nothing with even a fraction of the breathless energy and gobs of money hurled down the bottomless Russiagate pit.

Why? Why is it that time and time again both parties go all in on largely trivial and often downright facetious impeachment scandals when the real crimes these fuckers, all of them, are really guilty of go ignored? Why go after Monica Lewinsky when Bill Clinton brazenly violated the constitution to invade Kosovo for a bunch of Salafi kidney thieves. Why did Nancy Pelosi herself turn up her nose at Dennis Kucinich when he built an airtight case to impeach Bush and Cheney for torture and murder? Why quibble over the Donald's refusal to sell bombs to the Nazis in Ukraine while he keeps children in cages at the border? Why do the real crimes go ignored and unpunished while the chicken-noodle shit gets a fucking parade?

The answer is as ugly as it is simple. Because every American president, every white power supporting one of them, is a war criminal and neither party plans to end the massacre anytime soon. If you held Clinton accountable for Yugoslavia then you would have to hold Bush Sr. accountable for the Persian Gulf. If you held Bush Jr. accountable for Abu Ghraib then you would have to hold Clinton accountable for opening that Pandora's Box with his child starving sanction regime in Iraq, and on and on and on. They don't punish the real crimes, they will never punish the real crimes, because they have every intention to commit them again and again and again.

And who will cry for little Nora al-Awlaki while these cretins cry for our besieged republic? Just soon to be canceled degenerate extremists like me. We get thrown on no-fly lists and kicked off Twitter right alongside the pipe swinging Jethros of QAnon for giving a fuck about dead children. I published my first article for the Libertarian Institute on Nora four years ago. The case haunted me then and it haunts me now. One white supremacist enters the White House as another one leaves and I can't sleep with that child's lifeless body on my mind. I wrote that article near the beginning of my transgender journey, long before I had even heard the words 'Complex PTSD', but something lonesome in Nora's eyes reminded me of another terrified little girl I had seen years ago in my mirror. This is called empathy. Why is it so goddamn hard for Americans to understand? Trump should have been impeached during his first month in office. Don't you dare fucking bitch because it's too late now. I mourn the loss of that child because no one else will. I mourn her with the weight of knowing there will be many more like her in the years to come. May god forgive this country. I can't. I just can't.

Peace, Love, & EMPATHY- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.

*  Everybody Does by Julien Baker

*  Holland 1945 by Neutral Milk Hotel

*  There is a Light That Never Goes Out by the Smiths

*  I Think That I Would Die by Hole

*  Chinese Satellite by Phoebe Bridgers

*  Two Slow Dancers by Mitski

*  Nightswimming by REM

*  Have You Forgotten by Red House Painters

*  Into Dust by Mazzy Star

*  Bulls On Parade by Rage Against the Machine

The Sahrawi Nakba in an Age of Insurrection: When "Peace" Sells, Don't Buy It

 Mainstream pop culture historians always deify the 1960's as some kind of Woodstock utopian fantasy gone to seed. But any true countercultural history buff knows that the Seventies were where it was really at. After Charlie Manson scared off the flower children, things got truly radical. The left got the message and stopped playing nice. The Students for a Democratic Society became the Weather Underground and the Black Panther Party gave way to the Black Liberation Army. A pervasive revolutionary culture permeated the zeitgeist and, for a few heady moments, an entire generation embraced a common goal of overthrowing "The Man." 

The wild heart of this movement wasn't in Washington or Moscow or even San Francisco. The tribal heartbeat came straight from the belly of the imperial beast in the Third World. White kids burned dollar bills beneath Vietcong flags as Victor Charlie offered to send choppers to Attica. Japanese punks jacked jetliners for Palestine and received a heroes welcome in the streets of Bethlehem when the PFLP added their release from Israeli custody to their list of demands. Algiers became the new San Francisco as Eldridge Cleaver turned skyjacking into a cottage industry and weird sugar daddies like Fidel Castro and Muamar Gaddafi spread the love to the darkest corners of the earth.

One of these dark corners was Western Sahara, the last African colony. And this tiny piece of desert's renegade Polisario Front comes from this era of revolutionary opportunity. Unlike many of their brethren, the Polisario Front neither burned out nor faded away. They simply kept up the good fight and built a nation out of sand and grit. The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, founded in 1976, has kept up the good fight for the Sahrawi people and even earned the recognition of 84 UN member states, all while defending their very right of existence from an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing from their northern neighbors in the Kingdom of Morocco. All this hard work, blood, sweat and tears has recently been thrown into question however by a far less legitimate regime in Washington.

Under Donald Trump's jihad for Israeli recognition in the Muslim world, the United Sates has openly violated the Geneva Convention by recognizing Morocco's sovereignty over Sahrawi in return for the Kingdom's official recognition of Israel's sovereignty over Palestine. In a very twisted sense this seems like a fair trade. A Nakba for a Nakba. In many ways Morocco's vicious campaign in Western Sahara mirrors Israel's own genocidal agenda in Gaza and the West Bank. As the stagnant fascist fiefdom of Francoist Spain lost control of their last colony, Morocco and their allies in Mauritania embraced the opportunity by launching what became known as the Green March in the mid Seventies. 

Much like Israel's devastating Nakba nearly thirty years earlier, the March was a military facilitated invasion of civilian settlers which pushed hundreds of thousands of Sahrawi people from their homes and into exile in neighboring nations. To this day nearly half of the republic's native population lives in desert refugee camps in Algeria while Morocco illegally occupies three quarters of their land behind a 1,700 mile wall of sand. Over two thirds of the nations current population is now made up of illegal settlers and America has become the first sovereign nation to recognize this crime as "sovereignty."

There was a time when such brazen imperial thuggery would be unthinkable without repercussions. Not because Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter wouldn't do such a treacherous thing, just ask East Timor. It would be unthinkable for Morocco to justify their own private Nakba by recognizing Israel's because the chaos it would invite from the revolutionary Arab community would obliterate such cowards. King Mohammad would never see his private jets again as the PLO would have embraced the Polisario Front with waves of outlaw solidarity. But it's not the Seventies anymore and the Palestine Liberation Organization has already sold their legitimacy down the Dead Sea for their own twisted "peace" deal. Bill Clinton offered Arafat a stainless steel suitcase full of dirty money to fuck off and the so-called Palestinian Authority has been a glorified quisling of Israeli/American aid ever since. And just like that, the revolutionary Arab community was no more.

There is no making peace with nations like America and Israel because nations like Israel and America remain about as legitimate as Morocco's claims over Western Sahara. The very existence of these countries is predicated on genocide. The only way to make peace with such barbarism is to become an accomplice to it. Fatah and the PA now wage a constant war against their own people just as the United States does against the modern colonies of our inner cities and Indian reservations. This was the muscular genius of the Seventies counterculture. 

It wasn't defined by some white guilt subservience to the Third World. It was defined by the recognition that all poor communities were part of the same subjugated Third World consciousness. There was little difference between the armed occupation of Indochina and the armed occupation of Watts or Wounded Knee. We were all in this together. Even middle class white kids recognized that they became Third World citizens the moment they refused to conform to their parent's puritanical culture. Kent State was its own tiny freak Nakba and groups like the Weathermen and the White Panther Party chose to openly join forces with the Third World against the First.

50 years after the beginning of the Seventies and this is precisely what we need right now. This is what Sahrawi and Palestine need right now. This is what Artsakh and Somalia and Ferguson and Appalachia need right now. We need a new decade of revolutionary consciousness and we need to embrace it before opportunists like Donald Trump can hijack our collective outrage for profit. Movements like Black Lives Matter have provided us with the necessary wokeness but their own leadership has already sold out to Fortune 500 think tanks and mainstream politics. 

Your never hear about Third World solidarity or revolution at these rallies. It's all get-out-to-vote assimilationist bullshit. That's work-with-the-enemy-talk and Gaza is what it leads to. Black, Brown, Queer, and Blue Collar folks should be the ones in the streets right now, beneath Sahrawi flags. We should be bombarding the Moroccan embassy like an inner city police station. The Stonewall Nation should declare allegiance to a Palestinian single state solution. Their should be no wall of sand dividing us from our brothers and sisters in the desert. We outnumber the conquistadors, we always have, and they know it. All we need to do to win is stop selling out to Nakbas in peace drag and storm the capitol for the right goddamn reasons. No justice? No peace.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post

*  Wasted Youth by Jenny Lewis

*  Hey Hey My My by Neil Young

*  Ahead by Wire

*  Seventeen by Sharon Van Etten

*  White Riot by the Clash

*  Rise Up with Fists by Jenny Lewis

*  Blind Justice by the Business

*  Ohio by Neil Young

*  Children of the Revolution by T. Rex

*  Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones

  

The Bigotry of Inclusion

 Finally, mercifully, it's twenty-hundred and twenty-one, dearest motherfuckers. The year of our lord Satan, 2020, is finally fucking over and all around America there are signs of life. It's a brand new spanking day for democracy, because 2021 doesn't just bring an end to 2020, it brings an end to the tyranny of the Trump era. That nasty little quarter decade will magically be no more. Poof! Like waking from a four year nightmare. We're back to square one. After four long years of dayglo orange madness, four long years of thuggish knuckle-dragging and boorish dick wagging, after four years of petty dog-whistle white supremacy, the nightmare is over and America has been saved. Saved by another thuggish, knuckle-dragging, dick-wagging, petty dog-whistle white supremacist. No! No, that's negativity. That's 2020 talking. No more cynicism. It's a new day in America. It's a new day in America. It's a new day in America. Say it with me now.

Besides this whole thing is much bigger than Biden. That old honky gangster is just a transitional president. He's simply holding open the door for a dynamic and diverse cabinet of revolutionary new thinkers. More women, more Queer people, more people of color, more people like you and me. More minorities than we've ever fucking seen before. It's like a goddamn Barnie and Friends reunion up in this bitch. Everywhere you look, it's a first. First this. First that. Who can be cynical about a new day in America when you have the first bisexual quadriplegic cabinet member, who worked for Raytheon, or the first blind Sikh cabinet member, who worked for Raytheon, or the first dyslexic Jamaican bobsledder, who worked for Raytheon. Wait a fucking minute? What the fuck? This is just the same goddamn shit. If it's such a brand new goddamn day in America, then how come everybody still fucking works for Raytheon or Goldman goddamn Sacks? I think we've been had here.

Well, what do you fucking expect when you switch one racist old bastard for another? America is submerged in institutional racism. You have to be Tucker Carlson not to realize that. It's hardwired into our DNA. We spent an entire summer getting our face shoved into this reality by Black kids in the streets, then we go and vote for the motherfucker who ghost wrote the new Jim Crow with Bill Clinton and we're shocked to get more racist fucking bullshit in a rainbow package? 'But what about Kamala Harris? Isn't she inspiring?' No, dearest motherfuckers, she's way worse. In almost gleeful spite of her racial heritage, Kamala built a career on sticking it to other, less lucky, minorities. Kamala isn't the new face of democracy. She's the new face of racism. A very special brand of bigotry called inclusion.

Donald Trump represented the last gasp of the old brand of American racism. The blunt, white-is-might-and-might-is-right brand of white supremacy that openly bathes itself in it's own self-assured superiority. The racism of Muslim bans and flaming border moats. The racism of bombing the shit out of "them" and taking their oil. The kind of racism you encounter on a walker with two tennis balls at the gift shop of your local Cracker Barrel. That "Hey faggot, get out of my way!" brand of bigotry loudly splayed by crude nightmare men like Strom Thurmond and LBJ. The kind of motherfuckers Joe Biden use to golf with between war crimes. But that era is over. The Trump Administration was more than likely its last fart. Old Joe plays a new game of golf now, with a whole new brand of bigots.

The best display we've seen so far of this new school of inclusive bigotry was the much vaunted but barely understood presidency of Barack Obama. Barry was an eloquent, inspiring, trailblazer. The first Black president. But if you scratched just beneath the surface, you found a machine every bit as committed to the tenants of systemic American bigotry as Donald Trump. Barry built the camps on the borders. Barry deported more peace-loving undocumented laborers and their families then any president in modern history, including Trump. Barry brought the American war machine, the greatest device of white supremacy in the history of mankind, into the 21rst Century with "humanitarian" interventions and drone warfare. Over 70 years after Operation Barbarossa, he put Nazi's back in power in Ukraine. And the very fact that Barry is a person of color only made this whole machine more powerful.

It doesn't fucking matter what color or gender our masters are, as long as they remain committed to Manifest Destiny. Every single cabinet position could be filled by a Black transwoman, it wouldn't change the fact that that government they're being included into still disproportionally violates the rights of poor people of color worldwide. The prisons would still be full of young Black men and Queer women of color. The Fortune 500 would still be stacked with with straight white cis-men who can trace their lineage directly back to the Mayflower. The wars that give our nation meaning would still be waged against brown people who didn't know their place, and that is precisely what inclusion is all about- Knowing your place. America loved Saddam Hussein when he knew his place. He was an inspiring Third World revolutionary, an Arab Nationalist, just as long as he kicked up to Uncle Sam and killed the right neighbors. His place in power was no less symbolic and culturally empty than Obama's or Kamala's.

Inclusion becomes an act of betrayal when the very system you are being included in is the source of the bigotry we face. My first response to learning that Pete Buttigieg would become the first openly Queer cabinet member, as Secretary of Transportation, was thank god they didn't put him in a position to kill more poor people. As an amateur historian and an agoraphobic autodidact, I've seen this story before. My other tribe, my original tribe, the Irish, came to this country like Salvadorans, to escape an English genocide called the Potato Famine. We weren't considered white. The WASPs actually worried about the bad influence our hard drinking, freewheeling ways would have on our favorite drinking buddies, the freed slaves. But the Irish proved themselves worthy by killing more Mexicans than any WASP could and forming the first police forces to protect their property. And so the Irish became white. The Irish were included.

The system itself is the problem. The killing doesn't stop unless we destroy it. The bigotry simply shifts shape. Muslims become the new Jews. Trans people become the new faggots. And dark skinned killers become the new tokens of superiority, proof of the benevolence of the bloodbath. The only way to end this massacre, one that began with Indian genocide and chattel slavery, is to overthrow the system itself and start over with something that isn't built on a foundation of state tyranny. I know this may come across as a bummer. This isn't the shining new day America wants out of 2021. But if we don't get real about the real problem here, the only thing 2021 will be a new day for is a brand new genre of bigotry. I have to believe that we can do better than that. It's our only real hope for anything even resembling change we can believe in.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* This Year by the Mountain Goats

*  Cult of Personality by Living Colour

*  What Goes On by the Velvet Underground

*  L.E.S. Artistes by Santigold

*  Wolf Like Me by TV on the Radio

*  Walking Backwards by Throwing Muses

*  I Don't Know You Anymore by Bob Mould

*  Rape Me by Nirvana

*  A Change Is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke

*  Dirty Old Town by the Pogues