The American Monster Machine

 America likes to think of itself like Van Helsing in a world full of monsters; a rogue vigilante republic cursed with the responsibility to protect the weak and the downtrodden from the forces of evil with it's superpowers. After all, without the great benevolent savior state of America, who would be there to combat autocracy and rid the world of the scourge of drugs and terrorism? And it's true, America does wage a constant battle against a veritable rogues gallery of supervillains. But there is just one tiny detail that's often left out of this Hammer House narrative. America may be defined by its forever war with the monsters of the world, but this Helsing nation gave birth to most of them. In reality, the American horror story bares far more in common with Frankenstein than any other mythology, with our indispensable nation playing the titular role of the mad scientist at war with the scourge of it's own hideous creation. A simple glance at history makes this analogy painfully clear.

America detests autocracy. Or at least so we're told. Ours is a nation which markets itself as a champion of freedom and democracy across the globe. However, this marketing campaign rings a bit hollow when you count the bodies. For a shining beacon of hope, America caries a rather odd addiction for launching coup d'etats against downtrodden nations it deems unworthy of autonomy. By some historical estimates, such as that of the work of late State Department hack turned imperial historian, William Blum, America has launched nearly 60 coups in the last 60 years with more than half being successful, and the targets have far too often been those democracies we claim to protect.

There's the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran in 1953, Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954, the great Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1960, Joao Goulart of Brazil in 1964, Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973, all the way up to Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti in 2004 and Manuel Zeleya of Honduras in 2009. The list literally goes on and on. America has become so devoted to sabotaging democracy in it's own hemisphere that it runs a school, formerly known as the School of the Americas, who's curriculum includes everything from torture to propaganda and who's alumni reads like a who's who of human rights abusers, including some of Latin America's more heinous autocrats, like Argentina's Jorge Videla, Bolivia's Hugo Banzer and Panama's Manuel Noriega.

In fact America has a rather storied history of creating and propping up some of histories most heinous strongmen. Creatures like Suharto of Indonesia, who inaugurated his thirty year reign of terror by helping his masters in Washington to liquidate the third largest communist party on the planet with paramilitary hordes of machete wielding fiends. Over the span of several months between 1965 and 1966 more than half a million people were butchered. Men strung from flagpoles in town squares, women raped to death with knives, their heads decorated the streets on pikes, their severed genitals decorated the quarters of Suharto's proud headhunters, what remained of the bodies were impaled with bamboo to keep them from floating and clogging up the rivers. All while unrepentant State Department hacks at the American embassies checked off the names of the slain that they provided to these ghouls one by one.

Then there's the blood caked reign of Haiti's Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son, Jean Claud "Baby Doc" Duvalier, who terrorized their impoverished island nation for decades with the American trained demons of the Tonton Macoutes, a death squad of witch doctors who burned and stoned their victims alive and then hung their corpses from the trees and slaughtered any civilian who dared to take them down. Some estimates put their body count at 60,000. Their fearless leader, Luckner Cambronne, better known as "The Vampire of Caribbean", died in exile in Florida a rich man after making a fortune selling the blood and corpses of his victims to American universities and hospitals.

Of course, when our monsters take their reign of terror too far, usually by nationalizing a prized resource or sharing the sugar with the wrong neighbors, America gets to play it's coveted role of hero, saving poor nations from the monsters we built by bombing them into oblivion. When our old friend, Saddam Hussein, outlived his usefulness gassing his own people with the chemicals we sold him, we simply used another monster in neighboring Kuwait to goad him into invading the wrong nation so we could save them by subjecting our former allies in Iraq to decades of starvation sanctions and infant warping depleted uranium. We offered a similar treatment to School of the Americas alumni, Manuel Noriega, of Panama, which we also decimated with weapons of mass destruction, leaving razed ghettos and mass graves of civilians in our wake.

But America also detests drugs. We must, after all, we've burned through a trillion dollars of the tax payer's money on a fifty year war on getting high and created an entire industrial complex to warehouse more than one million Americans who dare to partake a year. But once again, America has a long history of disturbingly cozy relations with the monsters we fight. On no fewer than two occasions, the CIA has virtually constructed and coddled the world's number one suppliers of heroin on the globe. During our multinational bloodbath in Indochina during the 60s and 70s, the US erected the Golden Triangle with the help of Taiwan's KMT and warlords like General Ving Pao, supplying 70% of the world's supply of opium, shipped in the corpses of dead GIs and slung on the streets of New York by our old friends in the Mafia during one of the nation's worst heroin epidemics. History repeated itself again during the 1980s when we helped those fine gentlemen in the Mujahedeen to turn Afghanistan into the new Golden Triangle, supplying half of America's heroin, all while helping Nicaraguan death squads introduce the crack epidemic to South Central Los Angeles with a little help from Mr. Noriega. 

America combats the scourge of its own beasts in the drug trade the same way it does with wayward dictators, by declaring more endless wars. We've turned both Colombia and Mexico into killing fields, often combatting death squads we once trained like Los Zetas and the Cali Cartel with new death squads which will inevitably take their place. In the meantime, back on the home front, America has used this war on consensual behavior to re-enslave the Black community, tearing generations of families in twain and creating a new multi-trillion dollar Jim Crow with America's colossal prison system. Liberal drug warriors like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden have made Jefferson Davis their bitch by achieving the same goals of enslaving an entire race of Americans for profit while selling themselves as their virtue signaling white saviors. Remember kids, if you don't vote for master, you ain't black. 

And then there's America's latest Frankenstein monster, that beast called terrorism, which America has poured $8 trillion and counting into combatting and has murdered over 900,000 brown people to avenge the lives of 2,000 in the Twin Towers. But who brought down those monuments to American capitalism? Well, none other than the offspring of our former partners in the dope trade back in Afghanistan. The true father of modern Islamic extremism is none other than dear old Jimmy Carter, who built the Mujahedeen with a little help from his favorite dictators in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, in order to lure the Soviet Union into an unwinnable quagmire in the mountains of heroin country. But America's endearing bromance with jihadism didn't end with Gorbachev. It didn't even end with 9/11. We continue to arm and train Wahhabists from Libya to Syria to topple dictators too secular to buy into our holy war bullshit. And round and round we go.

You see, dearest motherfuckers, America isn't a monster. America is something far more horrifying. America is a monster factory, building heinous ghouls so it can justify it's very existence fighting them and footing you for the fucking bill every step of the way. The wars on autocracy, drugs and terror are little more than massive hustles and the hustle never stops. America's latest imperial hustle is the so called crisis at the border. Refugees worldwide have doubled to 82 million in the past decade alone thanks to our Frankenstein wars, and now the same mad scientists who created this international tragedy want to get richer fighting it with more guns, more troops, and more prisons. This fucking madness doesn't end until we end it. We need to stop wasting our torches and pitchforks on monsters and turn them on the mad doctors who build them. The root cause of all this violence is Uncle Sam and we're never gonna vote him out of power, so we might as well burn his laboratory to the fucking ground and rebuild on the ashes.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  I Put a Spell On You by Screamin' Jay Hawkins

*  Frankenstein by New York Dolls

*  American Nightmare by the Misfits

*  Stigmata by Ministry

*  Uranium Rock by Warren Smith

*  Closer by Nine Inch Nails

*  Tommy Gun by the Clash

*  Search & Destroy by the Stooges

*  New Kind of Kick by the Cramps

This post is dedicated in loving memory to William Blum. May his ghost continue to haunt us with the knowledge of our empire's sins in hope that we can rectify them with the fire of true democracy.

Even More Scary Movies for Anarchists to Watch In the Dark

 It's that time of year again, dearest motherfuckers. My favorite time of year. A time for mischief and chaos. A time for goblins, ghosts and ghouls. A time for swirling leaves, raucous bonfires and flickering jack-o-lanterns. A time for soaped windows, toilet paper strewn streets and getting even with the role crazy adults who govern the rest of the year. A time when juvenile delinquency is celebrated and everyone is just another freak in drag like me. A time my Celtic ancestors use to call Samhain, when the barrier between mortals and the spirit world was broken and we were all encouraged to partake in the tricks and treats of the sprites and faeries. A sacred time for good natured blasphemy. The perfect time for macabre cinema and anarchy.

That's right, dearest motherfuckers, it's time for my annual list of scary movies for anarchists to watch in the dark. Horror movies are the perfect vehicles for radical social commentary because they are all about boldly confronting that which terrifies us most. So every year around this wonderful time, I compile a list of horrifying films that should provoke the anarchist in all of us. As usual, this list is full of politically incorrect, provocatively profane and critically disdained masterpieces of modern terror, and not all of them technically fall into the category of traditional horror cinema, but they're all bold studies in the dangers of authoritarian living and they're all worth surviving through. So without further ado, I give you even more scary movies for anarchists to watch in the dark.

Battle Royale (2000) by Kinji Fukasaku-  In a future that feels disturbingly nearer with every viewing, a middle school class is subjected to a twisted experiment in curbing juvenile delinquency by a totalitarian Japanese government. After being drugged on their way to a field trip, these unsuspecting teens find themselves captive on an island in which they are forced to fight each other to the death to survive. If all this sounds familiar, it's probably because Hollywood badly copied it with that dreadfully banal dreck known as The Hunger Games. But trust me when I tell you that the mercilessly gory original is far superior. In his final film, the great Kinji Fukasaku creates the perfect allegory for the evils of compulsory schooling, where power drunk adults bring the worst out of children to prepare them for the cruelties of adulthood in a totalitarian society. But as long as the young are willing to fight back for love and liberty, there will always be hope to turn the guns on the headmaster.

Green Room (2015) by Jeremy Saulnier-  The ultimate Antifa flick, after the anarcho-punks in the Ain't Rights find themselves Shanghaied at a rural Pacific Northwest skinhead bar and witness the savage murder of a would-be defector, they are forced to put their radical beliefs where their mouth is and fight for their lives from a barricaded green room against a horde of bloodthirsty neo-Nazis. The best thing about this wickedly funny survival horror masterpiece, aside from Patrick Stewart's instantly classic performance as the skinhead kingpin, Darcy Barker, is that it encourages the very best angels of Antifa's nature. Before the murder these punks put on a performance raucous enough to win over their enemies even when they opened with the Dead Kennedys classic, "Nazi Punks Fuck Off." But the moment the audience turns on an innocent, they fight like fucking hell. They may not realize it, but this is what the libertarian Non-Aggression Principal is really all about, defending peace by any means necessary. 

American Psycho (2000) by Mary Harron-  Bret Easton Ellis' woefully misunderstood cult classic is given the perfect cinematic treatment by feminist auteur Mary Harron who clearly comprehends the savage satire at the heart of the novel. Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman is the perfect embodiment of American capitalism; handsome, charming, well groomed and completely empty inside. We follow the Wall Street serial killer as he cascades into a downward spiral of commercial banality juxtaposed against the psychotic violence it represents. The American Empire in the 1980's is pretty savagely summed up by a stockbroker murdering a colleague like a Contra with an ax while Huey Lewis covers his screams. We are all Patrick Bateman in this country, aren't we?

Baise-Moi (2000) by Virginie Despentes & Coralie Trinh Thi-  I'm not going to sugarcoat it, dearest motherfuckers, Baise-Moi is a severely unpleasant film and quite possibly the most uncomfortable viewing experience on this list. It's little wonder almost every critic alive in 2000 despised the picture. Only Patrick Bateman would be sick enough to actually enjoy it. But sometimes your medicine is a bitter pill to swallow, but that doesn't make it any less necessary. A movie about two women in the sex industry who go on a cross-country killing spree after being brutally raped, Baise-Moi (French for 'Fuck Me') may not be pretty but it is the perfect display of the aching nihilism that defines what it means to be a woman in a society that only values us as vessels for male satisfaction. If you feel sick by the credits, the medicine is working.

The Fly (1986) by David Cronenberg-  Jeff Goldblum might as well be starring as Tony Fauci in this sticky sci-fi cult classic about the dangers of brilliant men playing god. Mad scientist Seth Brundle seems to be really on to something groundbreaking when he creates pods that can allow genetic teleportation but after testing the devices on himself, something as seemingly insignificant as a fly in the machine causes him to slowly mutate into a gigantic hideous insect. If you can think of a better allegory for the horrors of gain of function research, I'd sure as fuck like to hear it. The only difference here is that the bat in the telepod turned us all into Jeff fucking Goldblum. Anything for science!

The Corporation (2003) by Mark Achbar & Jennifer Abott-  Their is plenty of shocking history to terrify you in this documentary, from the Business Plot to overthrow FDR in favor of something even more fascist to IBM's complicity in the Holocaust, but nothing is more horrifying than The Corporation's tightly researched argument that if a corporation truly is a human being, as our masters in the Supreme Court insist, than it fits the clinical definition of a psychopath like a glove. You thought Michael Myers was scary? Try a multinational Michael Myers the size of a small country. Now that's a monster too big to fail.

Cannibal Holocaust (1980) by Ruggero Deodato-  Ruggero Deodato's grindhouse goregasm may not exactly be politically correct but it does a pretty devastating job of exposing the brutal nature of colonialism and the western mass media's active participation in it. What begins as a seemingly racist attempt by an American news team to rescue a group of fellow documentarians from a tribe of uncontacted Amazonian cannibals gets completely flipped on its severed ear when halfway through the film, the rescue team finds the now graphically devoured documentarian's footage only to discover that the victims began as victimizers; doctoring footage between bigoted jokes about their subjects before provoking the barbaric response from them that they desired by murdering innocent tribesmen and setting fire to their village. It's one of the most shocking left hooks in cinematic history. The victims are revealed to be the true savages. It's a bit like discovering that their were actually little Eichmann's hiding among the innocent in those Twin Towers. 

Pi (1998) by Darren Aronofsky-  Darren Aronofsky's starkly cerebral black and white debut is a bit of a psychological companion piece to The Fly. Max Cohen, a brilliant and reclusive mathematician, is on a one man jihad to prove that the chaos of the universe can be completely explained by a code. As his search for order in the universe brings him closer and closer to the brink of insanity, he finds himself the target of Wall Street brokers and religious zealots who seek to use his work to serve their own twisted schemes for power. The message becomes terrifyingly clear by the end of the picture. There are certain advances in technology that human beings simply aren't evolved enough to be trusted with. Ted Kaczynski could have spared a few lives with an 8mm camera.

Us (2019) by Jordan Peele-  A lot of people went nuts for Peele's groundbreaking debut, Get Out, about the horrors of racial appropriation, but I actually believe Us, his surreal treatise on class, was far more superior in both style and message. A nation wide uprising of subterranean clones known as the Tethered sends a family to war with themselves, against what are revealed to be the vengeful products of a failed government experiment. The message is perfect. For everything we the privileged take, something from our tethered doppelgangers is taken away until the tether snaps and the deprived say enough. This is precisely how the American Empire operates. One nation can only have everything if the rest have nothing. The Third World, both at home and abroad, are the Tethered, but they won't be tethered forever. Us is a warning.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006) by Guillermo del Toro-  Guillermo del Toro's dark fantasy about a little girl in Francoist Spain who escapes the tutelage of her cold Falangist stepfather to a beautiful and terrifying labyrinth of fantastic creatures in order to save her sickly mother and her newborn brother is the perfect anarchist fairytale. At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter if Ofelia's visions are reality or a childlike fantasy to escape it. What matters is that we are all born with hearts big enough to make the impossible a reality. It's in times like these, more than ever, that we need to be big enough to dream the way we did when we were small to defeat the very real monsters that threaten to devour us all. The world we seek to build on the ashes of the old is already all around us, it's just that it's visible only to those who know where to look.

Happy Halloween dearest motherfuckers. Keep dreaming.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

The Boogaloo Path to a New Rainbow Coalition

 Fred Hampton had a dream. It was a little more militant than Doctor King's, but no less ambitious. The young chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party dreamed of a grand coalition of revolutionaries spanning across racial and class boundaries, united to bring down the American Empire and the police state it fostered in the ghettos of Chicago that he called home. Fred began to build his dream locally, creating the original Rainbow Coalition with Jose Cha Cha Jimenez of the Puerto Rican Young Lords and William "Preacherman" Fesperman of the Hillbilly Nationalists in the Young Patriots Organization. He also brokered unprecedented city wide ceasefires between warring street gangs by convincing them that their true power lied in their ability to protect their turf from the real thugs in the Chicago PD.

Soon Hampton's dream began to spread across the country, creating a paisley quilt of countercultural tribes devoted to uniting to take down the man by any means necessary, from the modern day Aztec warriors in the Chicano Brown Berets to the Rock n Roll dope jihadists in John Sinclair's White Panther Party to the new Dog Soldiers of the American Indian Movement. Fred didn't dream of an army, Fred dreamt of a thousand armies, with a thousand flags, fighting a thousand revolutions at once, overwhelming the most powerful empire in modern history with not one, but two, three, four Vietnams, all raging in solidarity with their brothers and sisters in the Third World from the belly of the beast. For this daring dream, Fred Hampton had to die.  

So his enemies, both local and national, devised a plan. The FBI used an informant named William O'Neal to drug Hampton so their would be zero possibility of the courageous young warrior defending himself. Cook County States Attorney, Edward Hanrahan put together a police hit squad and on December 4, 1969, they performed a no knock raid, murdered Hampton's bodyguard, Mark Clark, dragged Hampton's pregnant girlfriend from their bed and put three bullets into the 21 year old revolutionary dreamer, including two in his head, execution style. Sadly, do to the top-down structure of Hampton's Rainbow Coalition, it quickly collapsed without its iconic leader. But Fred Hampton's dream of revolutionary bottom unity lives on in some very unexpected places. 

On the surface, today's Boogaloo Bois couldn't be more different than the Black Panthers of yesteryear. They are a coalition of mostly white militiamen far more inspired by Murray Rothbard than Mao Zedong, but the two iconoclastic organizations actually have more than a few things in common. They are both heavily demonized groups of young revolutionaries who seek to take on the police-warfare state with the high powered tools of the Second Amendment, and they both share Fred Hampton's dream of a diverse coalition of radicals devoted to bringing Babylon to its proper place on it's knees.

The Boog have recently announced their intention to create their own Rainbow Coalition Army, made up of decentralized unity coalitions devoted to bringing radicals of all stripes together to pool their resources against common enemies like the police, the feds, and the military industrial complex. Their hope is to totally rewire the way this country views politics by convincing it's subjects to reject the phony partisan tribalism of the culture war and focus on the common ground we share to fight on. Speaking as a lifelong leftist who grew up idolizing sixties icons of revolutionary solidarity like Fred Hampton and Huey Newton, I couldn't be more on board. But too many of my comrades have rejected this opportunity out of hand based largely on the lies used by the feds and their dickless flunkies in the mainstream media to unfairly demonize the Boogaloo.

The mainstream narrative on the Boogaloo Movement is that it's a dangerous gang of armed white supremacists out to foment a race war. I use to suffer from this delusion myself before I actually met and got to know some Boogaloo Bois online. The group's real history is a lot more complicated than the mainstream mythology. It all began as an online joke, a broad meme shared among the ranks of the gun rights community predicting a second American Revolution and comparing the tongue in cheek prospect to the epic cheeseball cult classic, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. A wide variety of eccentric characters got involved in the initial joke, including some assholes on the far right, but this wasn't what materialized into an actual physical movement on the streets. What we now know as the Boogaloo Bois were born from two eerily familiar murders in early March of 2020.

Duncan Lemp was an ambitious young student and software engineer who had a passion for guns, Wikileaks, and transhumanism. He was also involved with a number of right wing militia groups in his native Maryland. The local Potomac police, who had run-ins with Lemp as a teenager, acquired a search warrant based on an anonymous tip that the young rebel possessed illegal firearms. What resulted on March 12 2020 was a bloody no-knock raid in which Lemp was shot dead in his bed through his window next to his pregnant girlfriend . No illegal weapons were found. He was only 21. 

The very next day, on March 13 2020, Breonna Taylor was murdered by police in Louisville, Kentucky when her boyfriend attempted to defend their home with his Second Amendment rights during another bloody no-knock raid. The juxtaposition between these two tragedies shook something loose in the Boogaloo Bois. If militiamen and inner city Blacks were being slaughtered by the same runaway police state then maybe they should be fighting side by side together against this shared enemy. When George Floyd was lynched a little over a month later, Hawaiian shirt clad Boogaloo Bois joined the subsequent uprising across the country with their AR-15's in toe and a movement was born. 

The reality of the Boogaloo is that they are a loosely affiliated, decentralized collection of libertarians and anarchists of various stripes. They are predominantly white and largely lean towards the free market school of stateless agitation that this genderfuck Yippie has come to embrace. But they are anything but racist. Quite the contrary. their movement only moved from social media to the streets out of a desire to express solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement. The only acts of violence connected to the group were one lone active shooter who mindlessly adopted their rhetoric and a rioter who was filmed firing an AR-15 into a Minneapolis police station that had been abandoned and burning for hours. But too many of my fellow leftists can't seem to get past the mainstream smears and embrace what I see as a game changing opportunity to bring Fred Hampton's dream of revolutionary unity into the 21st Century.

One thing that both Hampton and the Boog understood is that we cannot go it alone. Any revolutionary who truly seeks to smash the state and end it's global imperial massacre needs to except that no single faction or school of thought can achieve this goal alone. We have to look beyond left and right, Black and white, Queer and straight, to what truly unites us all. Whether you're a Black kid in the hood, a Redneck in the holler, or a tranny in the trailer park, we are all on the bottom of a system that only serves the savages on the top. There is more than enough America for every kind of stateless society to coexist peacefully, but none of us are gonna get there until we come together to tear this motherfucker down.

The state realizes this and they are terrified. That is why the same moneyed mandarins who used Cointelpro to dismantle the Panthers and Fred Hampton's dream of a rainbow revolution are now very busy trying to use the same evil tricks against the Boogaloo. Both Bill Barr's National Task Force against radical extremism and Joe Biden's National Security Council Strategy against domestic terrorism explicitly name the Boogaloo Movement as a top priority target and their dutiful whores in the corporate news machine are hard at work trying to demonize and isolate this movement for revolutionary social justice. Take it from Chuck D, don't believe the hype, and accept the opportunity from the Boogaloo Bois to keep Fred Hampton's dream alive while the fire's still hot. Divided we crumble. United they fall.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Come Together by the Beatles

*  Don't Believe the Hype by Public Enemy

*  Children of the Revolution by T. Rex

*  Hip Hop by Dead Prez

*  Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

*  Ruff Ryder's Anthem by DMX

*  The Universal by Blur

*  War Pigs by Black Sabbath

*  Bull's On Parade by Rage Against the Machine

*  Sex Bomb by Flipper

*  A Pillar of Salt by the Thermals

The AOC Industry: Selling Empire As Socialism

 There are few things that strike terror in the dark hearts of god fearing, beef eating, Republicans like the scourge of the Squad. Transgender bathrooms, the female orgasm, pissing off the Israel Lobby. All pale in comparison to the fury of four junior congresswomen of color, Ayana Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and the ferocious Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This fearsome foursome has somehow single-handedly hijacked the most powerful political party in the country and forced it to do their bidding. Their malignant influence reaches all the way to the top. The White House itself is their plaything and soon it will be painted a Bolshevik shade of red as they unleash a socialist wave of terror across the fruited plains of the heartland. The rich will become poor, the poor will become entitled, police stations will be razed to the ground, and the Marines will be replaced by a new Red Guard who will send Scotch bloated right wing talk show hosts to work in the fields. Oh the humanity!

I think the Republicans have been huffing paint thinner and digging into their daddies John Birch Society agit-prop again. As much as I would love to believe that the Squad are the reincarnation of the Symbionese Liberation Army, even Patty Hearst wouldn't be caught dead voting 'present' on genocide. Once again, if the left in this country were even half as scary as the right make them out to be, I would probably be a lot less ashamed to be a part of it. The sad dismal truth about those radical ideologues in the Squad is that they really aren't that radical at all, at least not where it counts. And nothing should count more to a successful leftist strategy than anti-imperialism. On this subject, the Squad is inconsistent at best.

Oh sure, they've thrown a few bones to us starving peaceniks with bills to hold their beloved president Joe Biden to his worthless word on Yemen and to shave a few bucks off Mama Bear Nancy Pelosi's record shattering Pentagon budget, but time and time again these ladies have folded like deck chairs on George Soros' yacht when it comes to empire. Ayana Pressley co-sponsored a bill defending the BDS Movement only to vote to condemn the same group. Rashida Tlaib voted for a bipartisan budget act that allocated billions to the Department of Defense. Even mighty little Ilhan Omar, who I myself was once briefly and madly in love with, broke my bleeding anti-Zionist heart by signing on to a letter by those Hebrew supremacists in AIPAC in support of the UN's crippling sanctions regime on Iran during the height of the pandemic.

But no one capitulates quite like the queen of right wing cringe, AOC. We really probably should have seen this coming after the plucky self-styled proletariat bartender responded to a simple question about Israel/Palestine from Margaret Hoover on the campaign trail with "International relations just aren't my thing." Like, totally gag me with a spoon, girlfriend! It was all pretty much down hill from there. For every full throated tweet about taking on the military industrial complex there was another praising lightbulb factory bomber John McCain, opposing troop withdrawal from Syria, and chastising Republicans for being too weak on national security. She praised Obama's bloody surge in Afghanistan, she voted to remain in NATO, and she backed her Prius right over her supposed comrades in Venezuela, stating sickeningly, "I defer to caucus leadership on how we navigate this" before voting in favor of gifting $33 million to Venezuela's failed coup government for "Democracy promotion." All this bourgeoise statecraft can probably be best explained by considering who AOC's "radical" role model is. The pendent on the congresswoman's lapel doesn't contain a portrait of Che Guevara or Eugene Debs, but that of Bernie Sanders.

There are few cases in recorded history of a wider gulf between reputation and reality than that of Senator Bernie Sanders. The wild eyed socialist rebel rouser is really little more than a yipping partisan lapdog for the elites he pretends to oppose. In spite of his status as an independent, maintained largely to placate those woodsy iconoclasts back in Vermont, Bernie votes with his caucus like any other DNC dupe. He plays up the antiwar pose every time a Republican occupies the White House, but he's put his red stamp of approval on pretty much every war crime a Democratic president has ever committed. He was all in on the obliteration of legitimately socialist nations like Yugoslavia and Libya. In the prior example he even sicked the cops on his own constituents when they protested the Balkan massacre with a sit-in at his Burlington office, and in both cases, once prosperous modern welfare states were reduced to hell-scorched no-man's-lands for slave drivers and kidney thieves to call their own.

None of this sad history stopped throngs of young idealistic kids to flock towards Bernie's quixotic presidential campaigns in such great numbers as to terrify the Democratic establishment into pulling out all the stops to make sure they weren't too successful. In both 2016 and 2020, Bernie could have and should have taken the Democratic Primaries and probably the White House too, but in both cases, his campaigns were brutally sabotaged by his own beloved party, and in both cases, Bernie threw his own diehard followers under the Democratic bus by sitting on his hands and saying nothing until it was time to endorse the establishment candidate who screwed him. You see, Bernie never really ran for president. He ran to herd young wayward leftists into supporting predator capitalist scions of mediocrity like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. In the successful case of Old Joe, Saint Bernard was such a good boy that he was awarded with a cushy position in his masters cabinet and that's all Bernie really ever wanted. But even good dogs don't live forever and the DNC needs a new breed of sheepherder for a new era of media savvy partisan depravity.

That's where AOC comes in, and that's why we see the so called radical being groomed by the establishment who supposedly fears her. That's why CNN celebrated their spunky little socialist with that primetime cheese job, "Being... AOC." That's why we see the congresswoman playing the part of rebel at the Met Gala as delighted plutocrats swarmed to receive photo-ops with that couture gown threatening fecklessly to tax them. "Look Buffy, it's the socialist, AOC. How fun!" And that's why we witnessed the bizarre spectacle of AOC bursting into crocodile tears after voting present on a bill funding Israel's apartheid enabling thunderdome. It's all fucking theatre, darling, and AOC is auditioning to play the role of the new Bernie Sanders, a blood and butter social democrat who talks like Rosa Luxemburg and votes like the rose clutching cowards who had her shot in the back.

I may have cut up my socialist card a few election cycles ago, but take it from a bitter anarchist who still respects the fortitude of brave creatures like Rosa, Che and Debs. This shit that the Squad is slinging like fiver dollar crack rocks ain't socialism, because socialism without anti-imperialism is just a bribe for the lower class in this country to subsist on while the third world gets raped. Don't let frauds like Bernie and AOC silence your comrades screams with tabloid theatrics and welfare payola. Lets all ditch these fucking cowards and give Republicans and Democrats alike something to really be afraid of.

Peace, Love, & Solidarity- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill

*  You're No Rock N Roll Fun by Sleater-Kinney

*  God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols

*  Cut Your Hair by Pavement

*  Rebel Rebel by David Bowie

*  Ex-Lion Tamer by Wire

*  A Time For Heroes by the Libertines

This post is devoted in loving memory to Daphne Dorman, another mouthy trans broad who took her life after having her own community turn on her for defending freedom of speech. This is not what being Queer is about. Being Queer is about embracing the liberty to be whoever the fuck you wanna be, regardless of societies prudish expectations. When did we become the church ladies who once condemned us to hell for not fitting in? We can and should do better than this.

Beware of Any War On Terror Fought by a Terrorist Nation

 January 6 was a day that will live on in infamy, an unparalleled assault on the precious vital organs of our exceptional democracy that this great nation is still reeling to recover from, or at least so I'm told. According to the mainstream media and heavy hitters in both parties, this thing was worse than 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and Showgirls rolled together. I'm sorry dearest motherfuckers, believe it or not, I'm really not trying to be a contrarian bitch here, but I just don't see it. From where I was sitting, the whole shit-show looked more like a glorified soccer riot for pissed off diabetic boomers than any kind of coordinated assault on what passes for a democracy in this shithole country. A weird grab bag of QAnon imbeciles, Proud Boy informants, and Archie Bunker armchair racists got all hopped up on the insane rhetoric of their one term demagogue and stormed the Capitol without a game plan that amounted to much more than fuck-stuff-up-for-Donald!

Our heroes in the Capitol Hill Police, with a few over publicized exceptions, did everything but hold the door open for these out of breath hooligans and the majority of the fatalities were caused by the unruly horde's own stampede. The only clear cut homicide was an unarmed woman shot by a cop. Even the FBI, who never misses an opportunity to scare the public into approving more funding for another boondoggle, conceded that this clusterfuck was an unplanned fiasco, and considering that the Proud Boys are basically on loan to the Bureau, they oughta know.

All being said, the whole ordeal was more of a humiliating spectacle that showed the country how flimsy state power truly is than any kind of white power coup d'etat. But the imagery of weekend militiamen aimlessly stalking the halls of power played perfectly into a dream that the newly elected president, Joe Biden, coddled well before dementia rendered him a babbling nincompoop. A dream that formed the foundation for the Patriot Act. A dream to use the threat of the radical right in this country as a convenient excuse to bring the War On Terror home. The notion of domesticating America's horrific foreign policy should be terrifying enough even if the universally loathsome neo-Nazi's of this nation were the real target. But the published White House Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, which Biden tasked his National Security Council with authoring a week after January 6, has made it startlingly clear that this is not the case.

The document, released in June, doesn't just single out the far right but casts a disturbingly wide net for its potential targets to include everything from animal rights activists to the dangerously broad scourge known simply as "anti-government extremists." Perhaps even more startling is the Department of Homeland Security's related Center for Countering Domestic Extremists, which has announced its ominously vague intention to "deradicalize" suspected thought criminals like you and me before we even become terrorists by using the Rhodes Scholars in local law enforcement along with mental health services to surveil those deemed to be socially isolated or mentally ill.

Lets call this what it is, a federal booster shot for America's already bloated police state, and judging by this white supremacist institution's track record, the real targets will never be the Blue Lives Matter Mafia that made up the mob on January 6. Like always, the true targets of government domestic warfare will be the groups that pose the greatest threat to its malignant power; pissed off people of color and their radical white allies. I know this because I've heard this story a few times before and it always has the same ending.

Communism was J. Edgar Hoover's excuse to the suits in Washington for his counter-insurgency program, Cointelpro, and he picked the perfect scapegoat for the height of the Cold War. But communism was always a secondary target at best for Hoover, a renowned white supremacist in his own right. Hoover's number one target was always the Civil Rights Movement and its more militant progeny in Black Power. Over two decades, that lumpy old sack of bastard launched a covert total war against everyone from the Freedom Riders to the Black Panther Party. 

The FBI tapped phones, planted evidence, and locked up peace loving radicals for decades on phony charges. They attempted to black mail Martin Luther King into committing suicide with evidence of his infidelities and actively fomented violence within radical organizations leading to the deaths of promising voices for revolutionary change like Bunchy Carter and Malcolm X. By the end of the sixties they were terrorizing movements as diverse as the Youth International Party and the American Indian Movement and setting up gangland executions like that of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

Cointelpro was the original war on terror, and it rapidly devolved into a bloodthirsty jihad against any American who dared to challenge the status quo in a country at war with the third world. On September 11 that war was delivered back to our doorstep with the blowback at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. This tragedy could have been a teachable lesson in the karma that comes with an imperial foreign policy. George W. Bush decided instead to use the trauma caused by these events to double down on the war machine and launch his own war on terror. The official target of this new forever war was radical Islam. But this boogeyman was largely just an excuse for America to level any third world regime that refused to bow to our quest for international hegemony.

Of coarse all of these regimes just happened to be lead by charismatic if less than heroic men of color like Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad who attempted to offer their region alternatives to western dependence. In the most sickening of ironies, the US chose to destabilize these secular strongmen with the very jihadists we were supposed to be over there fighting. Our new scapegoat, radical Islam, ended up more powerful than it ever was before, giving us a perpetual excuse to fight these wars forever. J. Edgar would've been proud if he weren't already burning in hell.

And so it goes. Each generation's new war on terror relies on scapegoating whichever group happens to be most loathed by the public during its respective era. In the 1960's it was the commies. In the 2000's it was radical Islam. Today it's white supremacists. But the scapegoat is never the true target and the true target is usually the same, Black and Brown anti-colonialists, both at home and abroad. Biden's war on domestic terror didn't begin with the white riot of January 6. Hell, it didn't even begin with Biden. Biden's government wide strategy to reign in anti-government extremism is nearly identical to Bill Barr's Task Force under Donald Trump to do the very same. I don't believe this is a coincidence. Joe Biden made the unusual decision to keep Barr's point man on this operation, Christopher Wray, as director of the FBI. This is the same Christopher Wray who infamously testified before congress that "Antifa is a real thing." before railing against the scourge of "violent anarchist extremists."

25% of the FBI's current domestic terror investigations are related to the George Floyd Uprisings of America's 2020 summer of rage, and I believe that this was the cataclysmic event that truly provoked our new war on domestic terror, not some sad partisan riot at the Capitol, but the largest domestic uprising since the days of Cointelpro. An uprising that torched police stations and inaugurated anarchist autonomous zones in their place. An uprising that brought everyone together, from inner city Blacks to suburban anti-fascists to rural Boogaloo Bois. An uprising too popular for Joe Biden to declare war on, so he needed a scapegoat so loathsome that no sane human being could possibly defend it.

Don't believe the hype, dearest motherfuckers. The new war on domestic terrorism has nothing to do with combatting white supremacy. If it did, it wouldn't be fought by the American government, the greatest source of white supremacy the world has ever known. From this source, any war on terror should be considered just another terrorist attack.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  White Riot by the Clash

*  Territorial Pissings by Nirvana

*  What Goes On by the Velvet Underground

*  Halo by Depeche Mode

*  Paper Planes by MIA

*  Justine Go Genesis by Sleigh Bells

*  Blind Justice by the Business