Who is Nicky Reid? If some random suit on the street asked you that question, what would your answer be? Aside from a pussy crushing genderfuck fox and the baddest fucking blogger alive, of coarse. Your answer would likely be something along the lines of a proud part of the problem, a rebel rouser, a degenerate, a devil's advocate, a crowd exciter, a provocateur, a contrarian, a riot inducer.... Nicky Reid is an anarchist with zero respect for order or the status quo. Nicky Reid is an unabashed enemy of the state who spreads discontent online like digital milk. Nicky Reid is a flag burning anti-American bitch who breaks bread with Boogaloo Bois, defends Hezbollah, and lionizes the Black Panther Party. Nicky Reid is a cop hating prison abolitionist who openly promotes armed insurrection. Nicky Reid is an anti-government revolutionary who frequently and consistently advocates for the overthrow of the United States Government, and nearly every other government for that matter. Nicky Reid is a domestic extremist, and she needs to be stopped.
Guilty as charged, but I also happen to be a hell of a lot of other equally important things as well. I'm a devout Christopagan who believes in the sanctity of all human life. I'm a strict civil libertarian who firmly supports the Non-Aggression Principle which preaches that no truly righteous person should ever throw the first punch. I'm also an agoraphobic cripple on disability who doesn't even own a gun (yet), volunteers at a local AIDS resource center, and takes care of my aging mother who suffers from worse chronic pain than I do. But none of those details matter once you've slapped someone with a broad and dehumanizing label like 'domestic extremist,' and that's precisely the point.
Overseas, in parts of the world the news rarely covers like the supposedly under covered scourge of American extremism, in places like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, carrying such a label makes you a disposable target of the War on Terror. Someone who openly peddles radicalism and/or associates with known radicals like me gets drone striked or whisked away to some black site in the Indian Ocean to be tortured with waterboarding and jumper cables on their junk. This is the fruit of the bipartisan Patriot Act and the entirety of our current political establishment is fighting like hell to spread the love and change the domestic rules of engagement to give declared enemies of the state such as myself the same rights as any foreigner labeled the same way. It's really quite woke when you think about it. To the corporate duopoly, Third World lives not mattering isn't fair. No lives should matter beneath the iron heel of the war state.
But this shit doesn't begin on January 6, when the same feds pushing for unlimited power and resources chose not to inform the Capitol Police of an impending riot that could expand their own wallets. The American Empire has been advocating bringing the war home well before Biden reached the White House. Way back in the 90's, our daughtering commander in chief advocated using international anti-terror laws against American citizens with the original Patriot Act in the wake of another suspiciously avoidable attack in Oklahoma City, and none other than Donald Trump's Attorney General, Bill Barr, announced the creation of a nation wide task force to combat anti-government extremists like Antifa and Boogaloo in the wake of the unprecedented uprisings last summer. This is what empires do when they begin to lose control of their own populaces during forever wartime. They take what they do best on foreign soil and apply it to their own people. This is why every empire inevitably ends in a dictatorship. The banana republic always comes home to die.
They're going to tell you a lot of things about people like me. Some of them will be true. Most wont. They will tell you that they need these powers specifically to fight the most odious of offenders, neo-Nazis and violent Salafists, when any asshole with a scoreboard can tell you that domestic extremists like me have a far more consistent track record of fighting such elements than a government that more often than not actively fosters their existence. Go to a Proud Boy rally and try throwing a wrench in any given direction without hitting an informant. And name me one chapter of Al-Qaeda who hasn't spent time on the CIA's dime. They will go after these paper tigers first, specifically so they can lump antifascists like me in with them. It's a tail as old as totalitarianism. First they came for the Oath Keepers but you said nothing because you didn't want to be seen defending assholes.
I know people will say I'm just going off the rails again and I can just hear the eyes rolling like railroad drunks. "You're just being paranoid, Nicky." Yeah, no fucking shit. If you bothered to pick up a history book not sponsored by Time-Life you would be too. I'm scared of what my government will do with expanded anti-terror powers because I'm scared of what they've already done without them. Lets not forget that the FBI itself was founded as a violent "anti-communist" aka fascist organization by an open bigot named J. Edgar Hoover. Lets not forget that every anti-terror crisis over the last century has been used as an excuse to persecute the radical left and our comrades in the libertarian right. Lets not forget the state sanctioned murders of Malcolm X, Mark Clark, Fred Hampton, Bunchy Carter, and Filiberto Ojeda Rios. Lets not forget the totally illegal imprisonment of Leonard Peltier, Geronimo Pratt, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange. Lets not forget MOVE, Waco, and Rainbow Farm. Lets not forget that this countries last great fight against domestic extremism in the late 90's and early 2000's was used largely as an excuse to persecute radical environmentalists and anarcho-primitivists by handing out life sentences for torching SUV's.
This thing is a trap. Our government has been committed to crushing brown people and their domestic extremist allies from the beginning. Giving an institution defined by racism the powers of god to fight racism is completely batshit insane. Our government has more than enough tools already to prevent racist violence and they almost always choose not to use them because they don't fucking care. Fascism is no threat to its ideological heirs in liberal democracy. What is a threat is working class solidarity across racial and political lines of the kind advocated by the better chapters of Antifa and Boogaloo and online domestic extremists like me. Give this government any gun you like and they will put us in the crosshairs. I pray to god that I'm being paranoid, but as the late Kurt Cobain once sang, just because you're paranoid, don't mean their not after you.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Territorial Pissings by Nirvana
* What About Us by Ministry
* The Prisoner by Iron Maiden
* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins
* The Suburbs by Arcade Fire
* The Bends by Radiohead
* Margin Walker by Fugazi
* Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger
* Paranoid by Black Sabbath
Thanks for the introduction. At a rather advanced age I am not as optimistic as you seem to be that humanity can remedy the fundamental lacks in social and political performance which moves it inexorably towards extinction. The preparations to send a small package of adventurers off to Mars to a rather expensive and most unusual way to commit suicide does have its darkly humorous aspect. although I admire your rather forceful language I have strong doubts it will deter the idiotic world leaders from their determination to die richer than anyone else but it does resemble many of the aspects of a Marx Brothers comedy.
ReplyDelete"I pray to god that I'm being paranoid, but as the late Kurt Cobain once sang, just because you're paranoid, don't mean their not after you."
ReplyDeleteI have been diagnosed with paranoia, among other things, for the better part of my adult life. However, I saw the dangers of the existence of the state before officially becoming paranoid or psychotic in any way. And, so it goes, paranoid or not, I recognize that the state presents real dangers to the continuation of civilization (or, from some perspectives, the creation of civilization).
I tend to agree with Jan Sand about the prospects for fundamental change in the publicly held paradigm required to avert further disaster. When I was your age, Nicky, and particularly when even younger than that, I was oh so hopeful about the revolution taking place in the near future. From the perspective of an oldster, I look back on my life, though, and realize that there were so many things I could have done to improve the lives of myself and those I care about if I had not wasted so much time on trying to bring about the inevitable revolution. I realize that you are not nearly as unbalanced as I was in that respect, and truly admire your combination of both youthful energy and optimism, and care for those around you.
While I am not a fundamentalist, there are many prophecies in the Bible I think have at least some truth to them. In particular, I think the acceleration of the expansion of the powers of the state we are observing now is in reality equivalent to the birth of the Antichrist. Everything is in place now, from the worship of the state as an institution, to the widespread acceptance of torture and mind control as a means of fighting “terrorism” (as if torture and mind control are not, in themselves, terrorism?). The state holds all the cards at this point, and it seems all we can do is watch, and perhaps make one last stand to improve the lives of ourselves and our loved ones before we die.
Sorry to leave you on a downer. I see my resignation, though, as perhaps in itself a small moral victory in terms of wisdom, in that I now understand what can and cannot be changed. If I am wrong about this, though, I do not see this as tragic, in that the one thing that is most effective in stopping the inspiration of revolutionary tendencies in others is the display of bitterness by a revolutionary. I shall not make that mistake.