Rainbow Flags Among the Ruins: Queerness in an Age of Collapse

 It's all coming down, dearest motherfuckers, and there isn't a damn thing we can do to stop it. A lifetime of obsessive-compulsively reading the tea leaves of every dead white doomsayer from Karl Marx to Ted Kaczynski has led me to the inescapable reality that after five thousand years of this crazy little fad we call the state, Western Civilization is finally on the brink of collapse. The signs surround us, and they are all written in flames. 

The ice caps are melting, the reefs are bleaching, the rainforests are burning, and the oceans are turning into rising pools of caustic acid. The only thing proliferating faster than failed states are the cold wars needed to justify their existence just long enough for World War 3 to reduce us all to radioactive vapor. Capitalism is devouring its own gangrenous limbs as it rapidly runs out of wasteland to expand upon with the global debt now more than 300% larger than the global GDP.

And as these malignant institutions that have defined a civilization that brought us the miracles of artificial intelligence, the Holocaust, and the hydrogen bomb enter a final state of freefall, the lumpenproletariat raised in the shadows of its skyscrapers and smokestacks are reacting with an epidemic of random acts of unspeakable brutality, pushing little old ladies beneath subway trains and shooting up elementary schools. I honestly don't know how many more plagues you people need. The Pharaohs only needed ten.

It's fucking over people. It doesn't matter how many UN Climate Panels, international peace summits, or green new deals you hurl at this Kraken called collapse, it's too fucking late. Frankly, it was too fucking late the moment we decided to play god-of-dirt with the Agricultural Revolution and invented this twisted little concept called property. 

The panacea of progress was always a poison pill and its suicide might be reason for celebration if it hadn't expanded to such gargantuan proportions that it threatens to take the entire classroom of mankind and most of our furrier friends down with it. If this post sounds apocalyptic that's because it is. I'm deeply sorry, dearest motherfuckers, I really am, but this really is the conclusion that all of my work has lead me too. Civilization is fucked and we're not all going to make it. But I will be goddamned if my tiny tribe of fearless freaks goes down with the ship.

Queer is more than just a lifestyle choice to me. It is my tribe. It is my race. It is my nation. After a childhood defined by self-esteem crippling systemic abuse, I didn't even know what safety felt like before I found my people. Belonging with the unbelongable literally saved my life. Now my jihad is to return the favor by finding my people a lifeboat and convincing them to abandon society and take it. This is the true motivation behind all of my wild contrarian schemes. 

This is why I abandoned the moribund revolution of Third World communism for the dynamic heresy of post-left free market panarchy. This is why I advocate the militant decentralization of secession, agorism, civilian militias, and direct democracy. This is why I risk total alienation from my left-wing comrades to build bottom unity among sovereign citizens, paleolibertarians, and Boogaloo Bois. Che Guevara's quixotic last stand against the raging windmill of global capitalism failed in the heart of the jungles of Bolivia fifty years ago and now survivalism is the name of the game. Everything I do, everything I am, is devoted to making sure that the people I love are among the survivors.

The good news is that Queer people are natural born survivors. It is the trait that defines our very existence. By any scientific or historical measure, we should not exist. Before there were Queer people, there were just people. Millions of tribes across every populated continent acknowledged and more often than not celebrated their members who defied the typical cis-hetero template. We were shaman, medicine women, and elite warriors. The notion of Queerness being the product of modern decadence is a myth with zero historical relevance. 

Queerness was a defense mechanism against modern decadence. We were only erased from our tribes when agrarian society created a patriarchy threatened by our biological inability to conform to the gender binary they invented to justify their rule and the pagan temples that exalted us were only paved over when the imperial bastardization of Christianity sought to annihilate our tribes altogether and assimilate them into the globalist constructs of class and race. 

With no place left to go, we created a new tribe in the shadows of bathhouses, ballrooms, temporary autonomous zones, and pirate utopias. Like the Black and Chicano communities who often overlapped with ours, we gathered the shambles of our shattered cultures and erected a vibrant mosaic that became a uniquely anti-colonialist race defined by our existential opposition to the puritanical white Anglo-Saxon Protestant power structure, and inspired by the ferocity of the Black Power Movement, we demolished our closets and took to the streets to confront the scions and paladins of Western Civilization with the righteous uprisings of Stonewall and the White Nights Riots. 

Beneath rainbow flags we became reborn as Radical Fairies and Street Transvestite Revolutionaries led by outlaw chieftains like Allen Ginsberg, Miss Major, Billy Burroughs, Sylvia Rivera, Hakim Bey, and Marsha P. Johnson. We torched cop cars, painted our faces, and fucked by the firelight in the streets. We were savages and we were free. Even their plagues couldn't tame us. They only made us wilder as we threw our freakish bodies into the guts of their medical apartheid machine until they were forced to acknowledge our pain and the pain of our comrades in the darker nations who shared our disease. This is our legacy and the good news is that it cannot be erased.

The bad news is that too many of my people have forgotten this legacy of resistance and joined forces with the very institutions we barked our knuckles resisting. Somewhere along the line, the straight establishment came to the wise conclusion that they couldn't quite annihilate all of us and decided to assimilate us instead, and somewhere along this same twisted line, Queer people forgot about the revolution and decided to settle for "equality" and "tolerance" instead. 

After centuries of abuse at the hands of institutions like church and state, my people excepted empty tokens of their conciliation, like government sanctioned marriage and positions within the ranks of their imperial armies, like battered brides with bouquets of bruised roses. Now we no longer march for Queer Power during Pride, we parade for our straight masters on corporate floats hand-in-hand with the pigs we pulverized at Stonewall. We raise our wine glasses to police state sluts like Pete Buttigieg and call it progress when this progress essentially amounts to our parade being assimilated into a toxic system on a suicide march. 

What I try to do with my writing and my activism is rip the megaphone from the hands of the Fourth Estate and scream at my people to get off the fucking float before they drive it off a cliff. The Queer tradition of rejecting civilization long before it metastasized was our greatest strength and reviving that proud tradition during our current age of collapse is our only hope. The bombs will go off. The oceans will swallow Babylon. The grid will collapse. We must abandon these institutions and mainstream society itself. We must do as our ally Timothy Leary instructed us and turn on, tune in, and drop out.

One great big cleansing revolution is no longer a viable solution if it ever even was. We must wage our own tiny revolutions by fortifying our tribe with the revival of our culture of resistance and applying it to the practical necessities of autonomy and self-determination. We must do as my Amish neighbors have done and create societies that coexist with the rotting English world without relying on it for our subsistence. We must create our own schools, our own currencies, our own mutual aid societies and counter-economies. We must learn to farm, to hunt, to gather. We must arm ourselves only with the machines that can protect our children and reject that which exploits and degrades them. 

The libertarian right has the right idea when it comes to survivalism, but their embrace of macho individualism will be their undoing. Bunkers are nothing but well-armed mausoleums without communities to populate them. The greatest tool for survival during any age is the mutual aid which allowed humanity to evolve until technologies driven by greed outpaced us and turned us into a broken species of slaves. Returning to the communal bosom of humanity is our only hope of returning to the road of social evolution that patriarchy and false progress drove us off of. 

This cannot be done on a massive scale because the massive scale itself is what damned us. There is no such thing as a global community and a melting pot is just another term for a crematorium. Globalism is, was, and always will be a coup against diversity waged by those too greedy to belong to any tribe. But if we all shift our focus away from the world and back to our own communities there may be hope for humanity to not only survive collapse but perhaps even to thrive amongst its ruins. But that is only my hope. My mission is to make sure that there are still rainbow flags among those ruins and it is a mission I am prepared to die to achieve. 

I don't mean to bum out the festivities, dearest motherfuckers. I like a parade as much as the next bitch unless the next bitch is me. But somebody has to say these things before the parade becomes a funeral march and I've always been too Queer to keep my fucking mouth shut. Just know that I wouldn't be screaming if I didn't love you all so loudly. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

*  Home Again Garden Grove by the Mountain Goats

*  Wave of Mutilation by the Pixies

*  Beginning to See the Light by the Velvet Underground

*  Margin Walker by Fugazi

*  I Don't Believe You by the Magnetic Fields

*  Trash by New York Dolls

*  The Man Who Sold the World by Nirvana

*  Wonderwall by Oasis

*  Keep Yourself Alive by Queen 

*  Big Time by Angel Olsen  

Movies for Queers Who Throw Bricks

 It's the first Pride Month since Covid has been defanged and I feel like going to the fucking movies. The only problem is that in 2022 all the movies fucking suck and what few Queer flicks that make it to the marquee are no exception to the rule. Every Hollywood asshole's idea of diversity essentially amounts to giving some poor unfortunate niche another reboot hand-me-down of something that already sucked to begin with, as if an all-genderqueer version of Police Academy or Ghost Birthing Person starring Leslie Jones is some kind of great leap forward for progress rather than just another shallow, quota-checking, excuse for starlet raping producers to give themselves a rim-job for being nice to weird people between cocktails. 

Even the streaming platforms that roll out the rainbow flag like a slip-n-slide to getting mugged by premium services don't fucking get it and how could they? Corporate breeders seem to see Pride Month as an excuse to proliferate an ever-expanding network of increasingly Disneyfied drag show competitions. I like RuPaul as much as the next dyke willing to ignore the fact that she essentially plagiarized her whole persona from the decidedly less PC Vaginal Davis, but reality TV is reality TV, and this isn't what Pride is about. Pride Month is a holiday to commemorate a fucking riot. A street fight with the NYPD where a pack of furious fairies and belligerent bulldaggers drew the line and beat the holy fucking Christ out of any breeder in blue dumb enough to cross it. We torched fucking cop cars and literally sent those pigs running for their lives for fucking with a seedy little Queer autonomous zone called the Stonewall Inn. 

So where are all the scary Queers now? Where are all the movies about faggots with guns and trannies who kick ass? Well, they're right here, dearest motherfuckers. As always, when I get mad, and I get pissed, I do as L7 instructed me, and write up a list, this time of movies for Queers like me who throw bricks. This is a list of movies about sexual mavericks and gender outlaws who are a force to be reckoned with. Freaks who bash back. And as always, it's a weird and decidedly upsetting hodge-podge of foreign films, indie flicks, and badly misunderstood movies that not everyone is gonna like. But this is my blog and until the government finally takes it away and drags me off to Gitmo, it will always be a safe space for me to piss you off. However, if you're like me and you feel like kicking (or fucking) a little ass every June then you might want to check these flicks out.

The Handmaiden (2016) by Park Chan-wook- I knew I was a lesbian before I even knew I was trans and this brilliantly mind-bending masterpiece by the undisputed Jesus Christ of Korean cinema, Park Chan-wook, is without a shadow of a doubt my absolute favorite lesbian flick. It's the story of a Korean pickpocket and a Japanese heiress who get exploited into a scam to rip-off the abused heiress and fuck over the penniless pickpocket sent to manipulate her out of her fortune only for the two damsels in distress to fall in love and turn the tables against all the male masterminds trying to use these women like pawns in their sexist little game. It also has the most beautifully shot lesbian sex scenes ever directed by a breeder. The moral of the story is that those who underestimate Queer women do so at their own risk because we've all been forced to become dangerous to survive the games powerful cis-men play. 

Monster (2003) by Patty Jenkins- Even Queer people don't want to think about women like Aileen Wuornos, whose tragically short existence serves as the basis for Monster, during Pride Month. But Pride Month is precisely the time when we should remember women like Aileen Wuornos, not just because even the monsters are our people too but because these are the Queer people who the Pride Parade left behind. Wuornos wasn't born a serial killer. She became one after years of abuse and survival sex. A rap sheet that is still despicably common to the Queer experience. By some strange miracle that monster was able to find an equally lost girl who could see the humanity behind her scars, and she literally killed to keep that girl safe because it was the only way she knew how to survive. We don't just owe it to Aileen Wuornos to remember that we still live in a society where our own people are disposable if they aren't pretty enough to be props for liberal do-gooders to virtue signal with, we owe it to ourselves.  

Fight Club (1999) by David Fincher- It might seem ironic that the film that essentially predicted the rise of incels and Proud Boys is also the most homoerotic thing Hollywood ever tried to pull the plug on but it's really not. Chuck Palahniuk, the brilliant Queer novelist who penned the story this cult classic was based on, was trying to warn us of what happens when you try to domesticate a gender identity. While women and other gender outlaws used the tools of feminism to pick the locks on our cages, stubborn cis-men became prisoners of a shrinking binary prison designed by the patriarchy that supposedly served them. Stuffed into monkey suits and office towers with their emotions on mute, they became ticking time bombs waiting to explode. The result was a lot of really pissed off bros willing to beat each other to a bloody pulp half-naked in sweaty basements just to be able to find some kind of intimacy within their own locker room without being labeled a fag. Mainstream society should be careful when they judge the fall out of toxic masculinity because mainstream society produced it. Fight Club just tried to warn you. You should have listened instead of shooting the messenger.  

Boys Don't Cry (1999) by Kimberly Peirce- There is no point in denying that Boys Don't Cry is a tragic story. After all, it's a movie that ends with a brutal hate crime. But it is a massive mistake to simply pass Brandon Teena, the transman this film is based on, off as a victim, because Brandon was a fucking outlaw, a man in black in the tradition of Leslie Feinberg and Johnny Cash. Brandon found himself a drifter on the wrong side of the law because he refused to play by any man's rules but his own and even after being outed by the wanna-be tough guys who envied his unique bravado, he refused to leave town with his head low. You see, Brandon Teena didn't die just because he was trans. Brandon Teena died because he was a man. He was at least twice the man as those cowards who had to put a bullet in his head and a knife in his heart just to keep him down. You can choose to remember the way Brandon died but make no mistake that this is a movie about the way Brandon lived. 

Set It Off (1996) by F. Gary Gray- While this criminally underrated classic about four Black women from the hood who rob banks to get on the right side of capitalism's rigged game isn't strictly a Queer film, Queen Latifah's powerhouse performance as the badass buck Cleo Sims is about the finest display of the delicate balance that is feminine masculinity that you'll ever find in a modern crime film. After seeing this movie for the first time, I wanted to be Cleo Sims when I grew up. She was a gangster who I could finally relate to. That's because what made Cleo such a bad motherfucker wasn't just the fact that she could out-swear, out-shoot, and out-fuck Nino Brown any day of the week, it was the fact that her strength came from a distinctly feminine place. It came from a place of deep empathy. The way she lights up one last cigarette and puts her Impala up high on its hydraulics before driving directly into a hail of police bullets to save her sisters in crime makes me cry every fucking time. We should all grow up to be like Cleo.  

Shortbus (2006) by John Cameron Mitchell- Once upon a time there was a place called DUMBA. To your average garden-variety straight person, it was just another shitty Brooklyn warehouse under a bridge but to a select few lonely horny faggots and trannies it was home, a lusty loft away from the prying eyes of Guiliani's Stop-and-Frisk and Dubya's Patriot Act, where the Queer revolution still roared red hot, and Stonewall never ended. John Cameron Mitchell knows because he was there. This boldly pornographic masterpiece plays like a love letter to what may have been Gotham's last pre-gentrified Queer sanctuary, and it is a glorious send off, resplendent with romance and comedy and fucking, so much glorious fucking. Because sometimes the only thing louder than a brick through a police station window is a throbbing cock clutched like a microphone.    

The Silence of the Lambs (1991) by Jonathan Demme- I know I'm going to get so much shit for this one but just hear me out. The character known as Buffalo Bill aka Jame Gumb is a heinously transphobic trope that plays into every awful stereotype ever hurled at my people by the likes of Hollywood, a deranged and perverted sissy who murders innocent cis-women just so "he" can skin them like game and wear their flesh like pelts. If this thing didn't exist, the GOP would have to shoot it themselves for the mid-terms. But what if we fucking owned it? What if we decided to reclaim Jame Gumb like an old slur and wear her like a woman-suit to spook the breeders? Where has being polite and respectable to these people ever gotten us? We send them camera candy like Caitlyn Jenner, and they still paint us as perverted monsters. So why not just fucking own it? Jame Gumb only started skinning his humps after being denied life-saving treatment by several elite universities full of cisgender medical gatekeepers who decided that she was too damaged to deserve to be made whole. The biggest tragedy here is that Billie didn't go around eviscerating those doctors instead of fat chicks who have almost always been our straightest allies. But straight men still fear Buffalo Bill. They still shiver when they hear "Goodbye Horses." Good. I say we take this Queer panic and weaponize it against the dicks who terrorize our children with their schools and their laws. Let's reclaim Jame Gumb and make her our patron boogeyman. Let's teach them what real pain is.

Paris is Burning (1990) by Jennie Livingston- Like Shortbus, Paris is Burning is a movie about a time and place that feels like my community has been robbed of by gentrification and Disneyfication. Jennie Livingston's brilliant documentary catches New York's Ball Culture at the height of its underground glory, where a vibrant tapestry of runaways and throwaways of every color found themselves and each other in the heady haze of street theatre and intentional families more intimate than blood. They're all gone now. All those beautiful people, lost to a plague that Anthony Fauci had to be harassed into taking seriously and sexually frustrated straight men who had to murder angels like Venus Xtravaganza because their unique beauty was too bold for their simple minds to comprehend. But that's the thing about the Balls and DUMBA. These were never really places to begin with. They were communities too rare and wild to last long enough for some asshole to ever assimilate them into the straight world. They were what the late Queer anarchist Hakim Bey called Temporary Autonomous Zones, roaming utopias that travel like magic dust storms, and as long as there are proud freaks willing to bleed to be free these moments of glorious temporary insanity will continue to be inevitable. 

The Doom Generation (1995) by Gregg Araki- My absolute favorite movie on this list is naturally the meanest and most brazenly politically incorrect thing to lurk from the smoke of the New Queer Cinema movement in the nineties. Gregg Araki never played by the rules. Just being unapologetically bisexual in that supposedly open scene made him a pariah, but fabulous freaks like Gregg make their own goddamn rules just so they can have fun breaking those too. The Doom Generation was his masterpiece, a psychedelic post-apocalyptic road film about a couple of nihilistic teens and the bisexual drifter who completes their menage, attempting to escape the ultraviolence of suburbia that just won't let them go without a fight. It is a gigantic obnoxious belch in the face of pink washed LGBTQ(TM) respectability and it's better than the drugs Gregg took to make it. But it's Rose McGowan in her first leading role who makes this thing burn like a fucking road flare by the side of a five-car pile-up, as the foul-mouthed slut, Amy Blue, telling the straight world to "Eat my fuck!" After seeing that punk rock porcelain doll hack a pack of skinheads to death with a pair of garden sheers, I knew I had to be a girl even if I had to kill someone.

Let the Right One In (2008) by Tomas Alfredson- While not often seen as a Queer film, too many people overlook the fact that this moody blood-soaked Swedish romance isn't actually about a lonely little boy who falls in love with the new girl in town who turns out to be an ancient vampire, it's about a lonely little boy who falls in love with the new girl in town who turns out to not only be an ancient vampire but a castrated boy forced to adopt her gender performance in order to survive as a creature society deems monstrous. But at its bleeding heart, Let the Right One In is about outcasts learning to stand up for themselves. It takes a century old Queer survivalist like Ell to empower Oskar to take on his bullies and this is exactly what Stonewall was really about and why it should matter to everyone. 

Being Queer is about being proud to be a freak and beating the shit out of anyone who tries to push you back into that closet, whether they're a 12-year-old-bully or a role-crazy cop. When we bash back, we make everyone stronger, not just the people in our tribe but every girl who's ever made herself sick to be some man's version of pretty, every redneck who's ever been ripped on for growing up poor in a doublewide, every scrawny boy who's been called a faggot for not meeting some jock's expectations for masculinity, and every fucking outcast who doesn't want to fit in to stand tall. The first brick at Stonewall was thrown for all of us and this brick is thrown for you.

In June, every freak is a member of my family, dearest motherfuckers, and every bully gets their ear split open with our flagpole. Stonewall was a fucking riot, and that riot isn't over until we all get free.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH   

Gun Control Equals Police Control: A Queer Argument for Bearing Arms

 "An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment."

-Huey P. Newton

"This is a beautiful country"

-John Brown

We all saw what happened in Uvalde, Texas and we all saw what didn't. We saw a horrific massacre, a deranged gunman mowing down a classroom full of children in a totally senseless fit of nihilism and rage. We also saw a well-armed, well-trained and very well-funded police force do absolutely nothing to stop it. The Uvalde Police received the first 911 call about the shooting at 11:30 am, three minutes before the shooter even entered Robb Elementary. One minute later the campus police officer for the school drove right by the motherfucker to tail a teacher. The first three cops entered the building at 11:35 and preceded to stand around with their hands in their fucking pockets for another 85 minutes. The 85 longest minutes in that dusty little border towns history. The last 85 minutes in the tragically short lives of one fourth grade class. For those 85 minutes that thin blue line stood still.

By noon the hallways of that school were packed with no fewer than 19 police officers with hundreds more waiting outside. A fucking army trained for this specific crisis and armed to the teeth with nearly 40% of that small town's budget stood by like Terracotta Soldiers while 19 children and 2 adults were executed one by one. Calls from inside the classroom flooded local emergency centers with nine-year old's begging for salvation in their slain classmate's blood and an army of our heroes in blue did nothing.

Well, that's not fair, to correct my previous statement, the Uvalde Police did do something. In the face of an unprecedented tragedy, they fell back on their instincts and did what pigs do best, they beat the shit out of unarmed brown people. While these heavily armed gestapo in ten-gallon hats were too timid to take on a single teenage novice on a suicide mission with a semi-automatic rifle, they were more than macho enough to mace and flog the parents of the children he killed for interfering with their official police business of being dickless fucking cowards. Apparently, the act of civilians demanding that the police do the job their taxes paid them to do and save their children or at the very least get the hell out of the way is a curb stomping offence.

While children were executed behind their backs, the Uvalde Police tackled their parents to the pavement of the Robb Elementary School parking lot, shackled and pepper sprayed them like common hoodlums, and threatened to tase anyone who interfered.  At around one o'clock, an hour and a half into one of the worst school shootings in American history, a squad of Border Patrol agents defied local police orders and finally stormed the classroom to kill the shooter who all but begged for anyone with a gun to do so.

The police response to the national anguish over their total failure to do even the bare minimum was to sputter and stonewall like a teenager caught shoplifting, changing their official story no less than twelve times and refusing to comply with state investigations into their appalling misconduct. The White House, for their part of the chicanery, initially refused to even join these investigations with Joe Biden robotically reiterating his "utmost respect for the men and women in law enforcement." The Department of Justice only announced an investigation after being rocked by a tidal wave of public outrage. Meanwhile, Uvalde's brave men and women in law enforcement have called in even more brave men and women in law enforcement from across the state to protect them from the fury of their own grieving citizenry. 

This is what a police state does. This is how fascism functions. These people are not here to protect us. They are here to control us, collect their protection money from our wallets, and protect their own ass. And these are the people who will be in charge of the Democrat's solution to this tragedy. This is the system that will be in charge of regulating the Second Amendment to Joe Biden's preferred specifications. That's right America, take a good hard look at Uvalde, Texas and drink it in because this is your gun control future. A future in which the only people available to stop a bad guy with a gun is a systemically racist mob of even worse guys with guns.   

This is precisely why I support defunding the police and defunding the police is precisely why I am against any form of gun control, because gun control always equals police control. It is impossible to disarm a citizenry without an armed regiment of government thugs to maintain that monopoly on the uses of force and it is impossible to maintain said monopoly without violating the natural rights of communities to defend themselves from all enemies, both foreign and especially domestic.

When you tell poor Black and brown people to hand over their guns you are essentially telling them to trust the exact same racist police state that lynched George Floyd and stood by while 19 children died in Uvalde. Regardless of whatever lofty intentions liberals may have, gun control is affectively a gift to white supremacy. The practice of disarming a nation as heavily armed as this one with a law enforcement apparatus that has always been a mechanism for internal colonialism is an invitation to a racist fucking bloodbath that has no peaceful resolution. 

As a genderqueer person in a conservative rural community, I am quite frankly terrified of gun control because that form of government control means that my small community of Queer hillbillies will be completely exposed. You will probably have little trouble disarming an already poorly armed and sadly docile community like mine, but you will never disarm the right-wing lunatics who stalk us like wolves at the edge of the forest. 

That's because your average hayseed fag-basher is a walking arsenal with a Blue Lives Matter flag in the back window of their pickup truck. Whose side do you think Biden's beloved brave men and women in law enforcement are going to be on, the subhuman outcasts who they only interact with when they're taxing us for engaging in survival sex, or the ass kissing badge bunnies who lick their boots at the local honky-tonk every Friday night? I'll give you ten seconds to get back to me on that... 

2021 was the deadliest year on record to be a gender outlaw with 57 fatalities tracked in my tiny community and there have already been another 14 in 2022. People like me don't call the police and we have little faith in a government that attacks our children with hate crimes that they call laws. Laws that threaten to take our children away screaming from our arms so they can deprive them of basic healthcare in Evangelical foster homes. I'm sorry, but when I hear some cis-hetero white liberal suggest that I should trust these same people with my safety during a month that commemorates our epic battle against the police state at Stonewall, my only reaction is this. Fuck. You. Breeder.

Guns are tools and the notion of prohibiting these tools, especially in a nation as vast and heavily populated as America is childish at best. It makes about as much sense as banning other potentially deadly concoctions like crystal meth or fentanyl. The problem with guns in America is that all the wrong people have them and that's not a coincidence. All of this nation's gun laws going back to the Second Amendment have been disproportionately used to disarm minorities. We weren't allowed to join the Founding Fathers' militias because these were boy's clubs designed to kill Indians and subdue slave revolts.

Gun control only became hip in this country when the slaves started packing heat and setting up militias of their own. One of the first legislation to police open carry was signed into law by Ronald Reagen in 1967 with the full-throated endorsement of the NRA after the Black Panther Party took up arms to defend their communities from the police. I find it fascinating, though hardly shocking, that even today, the one solution to our current onslaught of gun violence that both Joe Biden and Wayne LaPierre are in perfect harmony on is the need to beef up the presence of heavily armed chickenhawks like the Uvalde Police in our schools.

Whether you like it or not, guns aren't going away in this country. You could ban them all tomorrow and all you would really achieve is creating the world's biggest black market with more guns than people. As far as I'm concerned, as long as standing armies like the Uvalde Police and the federal government have access to firearms then my people in the Queer community and our Black and brown allies need them too to defend ourselves from their reign of brutality and the monsters they quite simply refuse to stop. 

What the swelling ranks of deeply disenfranchised people of every color in this country need isn't to be policed by more laws which will inevitably be used to fill the plantations and bottomless coffers of the Prison Industrial Complex, it's to arm and organize ourselves against these forces as well as to educate our children from a young age to respect firearms, not just as tools for liberation and autonomy, but as deadly weapons to be revered and reserved for the function of preserving these rights against all those who seek to trample them.

You can defund police with civilian militias like the Black Panthers or you can refund them with the totalitarian steroids of gun control. You can't have it both ways. The choice is yours, dearest motherfuckers, in the month of Juneteenth and Stonewall, I've already made mine. I walk with John Brown because a right only ceases to be a privilege when it comes from the barrel of a gun.

Fuck the Uvalde Police and all declared enemies of the poor. This is a call to arms. Only together can we say never again.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  911 is a Joke by Public Enemy

*  Life on Mars by David Bowie

*  Criminal by Fiona Apple

*  Coming Down by the Dum Dum Girls

*  Hey Joe by Jimmi Hendrix

*  Don't Forget by Sky Fereira

*  Spitting Off the Edge of the World by Yeah Yeah Yeahs & Perfume Genius

*  Lockdown by Fugazi

Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Honkies: Or Why We Should All Resist the Great Assimilation

 White people beware, "they" are coming to America. They're coming in record numbers, and we know just who they are. They are not like us. They will trample our pristine Western Civilization with their dirty unwashed feet, and they're coming to a suburb near you. They come from all over. They come from all the scary places on the map. They come from Mexico. They come from Honduras. They come from Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela, Nicaragua... You know, all the shithole countries that America has been so goddamn nice to over the decades. They're coming and they're coming for us. They're coming for our jobs, they're coming for our entitlements, and White Jesus knows they're coming for our women, and that liberal communist Joe Biden is just letting them in with borders wide open so he can steal another fucking election from the Great Orange Hope.

If I have to listen to this Fox-and-Friends-approved campfire story one more goddamn time, I swear to Brown Jesus that I'm going to put that fire out with my own vomit. Oh, there is a problem at the border. It's a goddamn mess down there and there are more desperate migrants crossing that invisible line in the desert than ever before. But it's not for a lack of trying on Biden's side of the border. For all the hysterical hoopla coming from the right about Biden's dangerous new border policy, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between him and Trump on paper. 

Comrade Joe's budget for 2023 includes $97.3 billion for the Department of Homeland Security. $17.5 billion of which is slotted for Customs and Border Protection. Both are all-time records and while Biden has only suggested a marginal increase of $8.5 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that still put's him at $26 billion being shoveled into America's colossal border police state, burying Trump's budget in razor wire and cement. The border wall is still being built. The concentration camps are still full of brown children, and the Rio Grande is now being surveilled by a growing phalanx of Israeli-built surveillance towers that can see for seven miles in all directions in the dark of night. 

Biden's border policy is Trump's border policy and Trump's border policy was Obama's. If anything, Trump is the most liberal of the three. After all, Obama built the camps and still holds the world record in mass deportations. If this policy is failing, and it sure as shit looks like it is, then it's a bipartisan failure. A failure to prohibit the basic right of human movement across the commons just like the failure to prohibit plants and chemicals from doing the same. Just don't tell this to my fellow honkies in MAGA country. They are still very much invested in the lie that wicked Democrats have opened the borders against them. If they learned that the very concept of closed borders has simply flunked, it would probably break their bitter little hearts. But hey, buck up sunshine, "they" are still coming, and you still have the Great Replacement to invest your resentment into.

This notion that the white man is going to be replaced by an unstoppable horde of culturally alien outsiders isn't exactly new, but it is more popular now that it's been in generations with 60% of Trump voters and one in three Americans buying into the Great Replacement. For their part, these excitable boys aren't completely wrong this time. There is a major demographic change going on. One that even borders can't contain. But it's also nothing new and the glorious white race isn't at risk of shrinking an inch so long as history repeats itself the way it all too often does. 

White nationalists like Tucker Carlson have a very short memory and a severely shallow understanding of how race works in this country. It isn't white people who are at risk of losing their identity, it's the scary brown migrants that they fear, because by the rules of whiteness, today's dangerous aliens will become tomorrow's howling white lunatics. I know because it happened before, and it happened to my ancestors and probably yours too. What America faces at the border is not a great replacement, it's another great assimilation.  

America's original great replacement came in the mid nineteenth century when my people came to its shores from Ireland to escape the Crown's genocide by starvation known as the Potatoe Famines. When Irish Catholics first came to this country, we suffered many of the same humiliations suffered by our darker Catholic cousins at the border today. We were harassed, jailed, beaten black and blue, horded into cramped slums, overworked for scraps, and just straight up fucking murdered, all because a few powerful people managed to manipulate middle class white Protestants into believing that we had come to replace them. 

You see, the Irish weren't even considered white when we first showed up. That was still a privilege reserved exclusively for the Anglo-Saxon Protestants who took to calling us "negroes turned inside out" and using mobs like the proto-MAGA Know Nothings to keep us in line, most notably during the Louisville Race Riots of 1855 also known as Bloody Monday, when working class Irish Catholics were violently attacked by Protestant thugs for attempting to steal an election by voting in it. Houses were set on fire and the men, women, and children who attempted to escape them were shot on site. At least 50 were killed, most of them burned alive. But we learned our lesson. We learned that if we wanted to survive the flames of America's scolding melting pot, we would have to shed our Celtic ways and become white. We would have to assimilate. 

Whiteness isn't an ethnicity. It has no language or culture. Whiteness is a race. A carefully constructed social class defined by an embrace of Anglo colonialist values like the observance of a rigid capitalist hierarchy, the rejection of cultural diversity, and the exclusion of all those outside of these norms that formed the foundation for the cult of whiteness that thrives in the state today. My people like many others had to earn our privilege by proving ourselves to be just as capable of imperial savagery as any self-respecting WASP. We achieved this by lashing out at our earliest allies in this country, our fellow former slaves in the Black community who we shared our slums with, and by proving ourselves to be proficient in killing our fellow Catholics down south during the Mexican American War. Basically, we had to fuck over other people like us.

We also had to forfeit our identity, to lose everything we were, our culture, our language, our traditions, and for what? So we could be one of them, the people who put us in chains and starved us off our own fucking island? So we could wear chinos and a Hawaiin shirt on casual Fridays and wait in line to sing Journey songs with all the other yuppie schnooks on karaoke night at Ruby Tuesday's? For this we gave up our jigs and our chanties and our folklore and our beautiful Black brides (the Census actually had to add the word "mulatto" to their records because we couldn't keep our peasant hands off each other). Was it really worth it?  Well it was if you wanted to stop being whooped like an outsider and if you think it can't happen again, think again. That's how white supremacy really works. It spreads like a virus to any ethnicity that challenges its hegemony. You can resist us or join us and disturbingly plenty of Hispanics have already made the latter Faustian bargain.

If you still don't believe me, just ask Alex Michael Ramos, the Puerto Rican resident of Georgia doing six years for beating an unarmed Black man at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville. Just ask Enrique Tarrio, the Cuban American former leader of the self-proclaimed Western chauvinists known as the Proud Boys. Or just ask the 46% of Hispanic Protestants surveyed by the Public Religion Research Institute who agreed with 52% of white Evangelicals that God intended for America to be a nation of European Christians or the 35% of Hispanic Catholics for that matter.

This is how whiteness works. Those lucky enough not to get thrown away into the bottomless pit of the Prison Industrial Complex or slaughtered by some skinhead at your local grocery store commit ethnic suicide and become douche bags like the rest of us. It could happen to you! Mark my words, if Latinos let their babies grow up to be Irish then our next generation's Tucker Carlson will be some smug asshole named Juan warning terrified mamacitas about the existential threat of being replaced by those sneaky Malaysians crossing President Hunter Biden's heavily guarded open borders. The whiteness will get you too if you don't watch out!

The good news is that a growing tide of Latino youths are rejecting this bullshit and actively resisting assimilation. The number of Latinos who identify as white had been on the rise for decades but over the last ten years the Census has seen this shift abruptly in the opposite direction, with self-identified white Latinos dropping from 53% to a measly 20% from 2010 to 2020. The reasons why can only be speculated but I believe that a new generation of Latinx individuals has borne witness to the horrors at the border and in places like Ferguson and has consciously chosen to reject the poison gift of whiteness and embraced their place among the oppressed resisting the gruesome empire for which it stands. I understand that they have a word for this south of the border. It's called cojones, and it should be an example to all of us.

Our ancestors may have chosen to be white but that doesn't mean that we can't choose to take that mask of assimilation off and break it to fucking bits on our knee. As both an Irish Catholic and a Queer gender outlaw who is thoroughly invested in both the heritage of my overlapping tribes and my resistance against America's despicable police-warfare state, I openly reject my whiteness, the same puritanical culture that turned my childhood into a trauma ward because I was born into the wrong gender, a gender I similarly rejected in favor of an androgynous identity my pagan Celtic ancestors revered and celebrated, but that isn't the only history lesson that inspires this radical position. 

The Irish fought on both sides of the Mexican American War. While most chose to earn their whiteness through the theft of one third of Mexico's territory, a small band of wily immigrant deserters joined the Mexican resistance under the banner of San Patricios or St. Patrick's Battalion and literally took up arms against their own assimilation. Most were hanged after the bloody Battle of Churubusco, but they all died free, and they all died Irish. Cojones my people call this south of the border. That is my heritage and it doesn't have a goddamn thing to do with Journey songs or Ruby fucking Tuesday's. It's about solidarity through radical diversity and rejecting America's fascist melting pot in favor of a nation of a thousand minorities too rare to be supreme, tearing down every border they try to build like nooses around our necks. Now that is a great replacement we can all get behind.

But what do you expect from a Queer negro turned inside out? We're born to it after all. We are "they."

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys by Waylon Jennings & Willy Nelson

*  Losing My Religion by REM

*  Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon

*  Ode to My Family by the Cranberries

*  Heroes by David Bowie

*  Dirty Old Town by the Pogues

* We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful by Morrissey

*  Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush

*  My Little Underground by the Jesus & Mary Chain

*  Don't Stop Believing by Journey