Kherson Calling: Peace Sells... but Who's Buying?

 Where is the sun? Have we been marching through this darkness forever? It's barely December but it already feels like the longest winter in recent memory. In fact, it feels like last winter never really ended. That was when Putin's army foolishly goosestepped into a NATO-baited trap in Ukraine and then proceeded to ruthlessly attempt to kill their way out of their own imperial hubris. That was nine months ago but it feels a lot more like nine years. Nine years of indiscriminate carpet bombing and bottomless mass graves. Nine years of crippling economic terrorism and recession inducing embargoes. Nine years of collapsing empires collapsing the world for the egos of delusional old men who should have died and gone to hell decades ago. Nine years of a pointless death march to a third world war that can only end in thermonuclear oblivion. Nine goddamn years of winter darkness with no sign of light in sight.

During this darkness the only thing that has become frighteningly clear is that there are no more good guys left alive in this fight. No heroes to give this endless graveyard some assemblance of meaning. Just thieves and killers and their victims piling up between them. Vladimir Putin has made this painfully clear by checking off every box in the neocon guide to imperial lunacy and Volodymyr Zelensky has made this even more painfully clear as that so-called beacon of democracy has used the NATO provoked invasion of his country as an excuse to rule it like Putin's Russia. Whatever heroes that might have once existed on this battlefield are all dead now. The Donbass rebels and Kharkiv partisans who both bravely sacrificed themselves to kick some marauding army of assholes off their lawn have been replaced by two armies of conscripted slaves.

Your average Russian invader is a mirror image of your average Ukrainian Nazi. Just some poor 19-year-old kid who should be getting stoned and laid back in the sleepy ruins of an abandoned factory town he never stepped two feet from before a cigar chomping monster with brass stars on his shoulders sent him to kill some other poor 19-year-old kid he'd probably much rather split a spliff with than blow away. All so two crypts of ancient oligarchs can sell missiles and prove that their dicks can still get hard like the bad old days. World war three is nothing but Viagra for the monied predator class and apparently it takes an entire generation of shredded corpse meat to get those rapists off.

In a nine-month long season like this hope becomes as rare as sunlight but strange things have been unfolding over the last few weeks that could tempt even the most suicidal of pessimists to pull that cocked revolver from their mouth. In fact, if you study the ruins of Kherson with just the right set of eyes at just the right time of night, you might just be able to spot a fleeting ray of sunlight threatening to warm the frozen horizon. I myself had no choice but to drop my loaded Nagant as I reached for my dusty old pair of binoculars this November while a curious series of events unfolded like a holiday miracle on ice.

On November 6th, news hit my dark corner of the net that after months of virtual radio silence National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had made contact with Putin's Foreign Policy Advisor Yuri Ushakov and Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev. This news was followed shortly by word that Sullivan had also been privately pushing Volodymyr Zelensky to drop his refusal to even engage in peace talks before a mythical regime change in Moscow took place. 

On November 7th, more information leaked to La Republica that both the US and NATO had floated the notion that once unthought of peace talks could become a possibility if Ukraine managed to take back the Russian occupied territory of Kherson before the first winter freeze. This message was quickly confirmed by a separate report by NBC News. On November 8th, Zelensky publicly announced a willingness to talk to the devil himself, Vladimir Putin, under certain circumstances. The next day certain circumstances shifted in his favor. 

On November 9th, Russia began a hasty withdrawal from the capitol of Kherson which they had previously shown a willingness to sacrifice thousands of soldiers and threaten nuclear war just to keep beneath the Russian flag. Even stranger was the fact that they managed to do so without a single casualty despite being wide open to a Ukrainian assault. The entire scene felt strangely staged. It looked more like a well-choreographed handover than a defeat. The next day things only got stranger when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley announced in a speech to the Economic Club in New York that the withdrawal from Kherson City could provide an opportunity to end this war peacefully, stating boldly that "When there's an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it."

What the fuck is happening here? I find myself asking as the binoculars join my revolver on the carpet. This is the same administration that baited this trap with months of nuclear war games in the Black Sea and has refused to so much as even return Putin's phone calls after he marched into it. This regime has dumped billions of dollars into turning Ukraine into a well-armed dumpster fire for the Kremlin to burn in while Putin has similarly put his entire legacy on the line to kill his way out of the flames. Why in God's name would such loathsome butchers choose now to dawn love beads and give peace a chance?

As usual, I can only speculate, but historically speaking even monsters will embrace the forbidden fruit of pacifism when their precious wars begin to threaten their grip on power. Both sides lost this war months ago in every way that counts. It is highly unlikely that Russia or Ukraine is capable of making any more lasting territorial gains without committing nuclear suicide. An endless stalemate was probably the goal of America's Military Industrial Complex. Raytheon is practically printing their own fucking money at this point. But the economic effects of their proxy war have reached far beyond the killing fields of some shithole country and have become downright devastating on the home front.

The largest embargo in human history has resulted in record shattering inflation and the worst energy crisis to rack the western world since the seventies. This hasn't kept the usual suspects in the oil and arms industries from seeing record profits, but it has scared the shit out of the military brass back in Brussels and beyond as this economic turmoil has stoked a rising wave of dissent across Central Europe among working class schmucks on both the left and the right who would much rather see NATO smashed than burn their own furniture for heat this winter. Hundreds of thousands have gathered in the streets of the Czech Republic alone to oppose their nation's involvement in a war against a country that once enslaved them. In other words, the shit is getting real.

NATO's Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, has warned about the dangers of growing instability in the dark heart of the alliance himself and in a country already coming apart at the seams from twenty years of failed forever wars and coked out Wall Street hijinks, there is every reason to believe that this pathogen could spread across the pond to Babylon like Monkeypox. This is what ended the war in Vietnam. America was more than willing to keep that dumpster fire burning indefinitely the way they did in Korea until dissent spread from Berkley to the barracks and the generals chose to pull the plug before they could get fragged by their own slave armies of indentured dope smokers.  

This is far from a guarantee for peace this winter, however. This nation's deep state would be wise to heed General Milley's warnings but there is ample evidence that the State Department is not on the same page as the Pentagon when it comes to knowing when to fold em. In the weeks following the Kherson peace offensive word has come down that Antony Blinken and even Jake Sullivan are in bitter disagreement with Milley's sobering assessment and continue to encourage Ukraine to keep the charnels burning. 

It appears now that Sullivan's suggestions to Zelensky about dropping his hardline stance may have had more to do with the dissent riling optics of an unhinged NATO quisling declaring he'd rather blow up the world than hand over the Donbass than it did anything in the way of diplomacy. Further proof of Zelensky's lack of commitment to moderation was on terrifying display late last month when that little Putin wannabe bombed his NATO neighbors in Poland during a Russian offensive and then tried to stoke an apocalypse over what I pray was a mistake.

So, what does this all mean and what do we do now? America's chickenhawks are divided in ways too big to conceal, so we the peaceful must become united in sewing these divisions the same way we did back in 1973. That means that we have to get our hands dirty and bring the war home again. We have to fill the streets with fire and make it clear to the holdouts in the State Department that Milley and Stoltenberg's fears are more than warranted. 

In other words, the villagers have to threaten to burn Camelot to the fucking ground if the King doesn't end the siege. And then, when he does, we need to burn it down anyway, so this sick shit never happens again, and we have to hope that our dope smoking counterparts in the streets of Moscow follow our example and do the same. Then and only then will this endless imperial winter cease and peace-loving people will know the heat of the sun on their flesh again.

Yeah, it's a longshot, but Christmas miracles are the only thing that keep the revolver out of my mouth during this time of year and I haven't heard any better ideas lately. So, come on people now, lean on your brother, pick up a brick and give peace a chance.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this piece

* London Calling by the Clash

* Give Peace a Chance by the Plastic Ono Band

* Lessons Learned by Matt & Kim

* Peace Sells by Megadeath

* Get Together by the Young Bloods 

* I'm Allowed by Buffalo Tom

* The Gambler by Kenny Rogers

* War Pigs by Black Sabbath

* The Worst Day Since Yesterday by Flogging Molly

* Orgasm Addict by the Buzzcocks

* The Universal by Blur

* No Children by the Mountain Goats

Make Anarchism Great Again: A Call for a Stateless Form of Populism

 Something very stupid is happening in America. People have never been more disgusted with their bullshit form of government and yet they've never been more devoted to engaging in the partisan bullshit that defines it. It is a weird hot mess of bipolar enlightenment and social lunacy that quite frankly baffles me. Poll after poll after poll shows voter disenchantment with America's rust-rotten two-party oligarchy to be at an all-time high, especially among young voters and yet voter turnout in recent elections has been higher than it's been in decades, especially among those same wisely disenchanted young voters.

What in the high holy fuck is going on here? The state has clearly flunked every existential test of faith you can possibly conceive of, from Covid to climate change, but the same kids with a front row seat to these epic gorings just keep on lining up to ride that feral bull. This is precisely the kind of polluted ecosystem that should be ripe as rabies for another rise in anarchism, but no one can seem to relate to salvation. So, they lose themselves in the electoral market for saviors instead.

Some of this sickness is just good old-fashioned partisan hysteria. While people may be increasingly aware that both parties are in league with psychopaths, as long as one party can convince them that the other party is just a little bit more psychopathic than they are then they can frighten them into voting to stop the other guy's serial killers with serial killers of their own, so long as they can convince them that their own serial killers have a slightly lower body count. It's a degenerative mental disorder in the form of a time-honored American pass time known as the lesser of two evils. Vote Bundy and keep that rancid cannibal Dahmer out of the White House!

But even this national disease isn't quite malignant enough to explain America's growing gulf between disenchantment and engagement. To grasp this maddening conundrum, you really have no choice but to consult the American voter's mortal enemy- history. America isn't the first liberal democracy to go down with the ship of a failed state with dry land in sight. This is pretty much what liberal democracies do, but they usually require the narcotic of authoritarian populism to keep their passengers sedated as they drown. The pop historians on the New York Times Review of Books junket would have you believe that authoritarian populism is some kind of rejection of their precious liberal values, but the truth is actually quite the opposite.

Liberalism is little more than a grand authoritarian illusion itself. You keep a nation of perpetual children so dazzled by such a wide array of shiny choices that they fail to realize that every door leads to the same prize of total state control. It's just fascism in a wide variety of festive colors to match your mood. At the end of the day, it is always the same cartel of elitist pigs on top while we the people are free only to decide from a diverse array of scraps at their feet. 

When people finally catch on to this charade and sooner or later, they almost always do, the illusion of safety is always the first fairy tale to fall. People realize that there is no real invisible blue line to keep them from knocking off the local liquor store and things get a little nuts before they can eventually stabilize. The ensuing chaos, however temporary, mixed with the recognition of liberal impotence that fostered it tends to leave desperate people thirsty for supermen to save them from what the state has groomed them to fear most- themselves.

It is from this primordial gumbo of shattered dreams that the authoritarian populist arises to save the day, usually in the shape of some folksy messiah preaching about the need to show those evil elites who's boss. They can come from the right or the left. They have taken the form of fist-swinging daddy figures like Donald Trump and Benito Mussolini, and they have taken the form of softer patriarchs like FDR and Bernie Sanders. But here's the rub- they are all owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the same goddamn elites that they pretend to confront while the cameras are rolling.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but this is how they all magically to rise to power through the same crooked system they supposedly oppose, and this is why their solutions to a failed state always seem to take the form of consolidating more power into that same fucking state. When the illusion of democracy fails, the elites double down on the authoritarianism that has always lurked quietly just behind its facade, and they use the language of populism to convince the masses that this was really their idea all along.

But this isn't to say that language is bad in and of itself. Populism at its very core is essentially just a form of class consciousness that exists beyond the confines of the left-right paradigm. It is an untapped well of righteous rage that comes from generations of being robbed and just because the state has become adept at tapping into this raw fury doesn't mean that it can't or shouldn't be tapped into for the purposes of smashing that state. In fact, I believe that the failure of anarchists to do just that is precisely why we have been effectively rendered into such a tragically marginal force. It didn't use to be this way.

At the turn of the Twentieth Century, anarchism wasn't just a force to be reckoned with, it was the force to be reckoned with. For about forty years, we were the premier threat to elite omnipotence worldwide and we embodied this threat because we embodied the voice of the poor. Anarchists dominated the Labor Movement back when it was still a black-market phenomenon. We went to war with the coal barons of Appalachia and gave their National Guard goons a run for their money at Blair Mountain. We wacked autocrats across the expanse of every colonial powerhouse in the Western World and the threat we posed to the system is the only reason why workers in this country are afforded any human rights whatsoever. The elites had to fork over the eight-hour workweek just to keep their necks out of the guillotine. So, what fucking happened?

A couple things. The first was that the state hijacked populism and the second is that anarchists gave it up and turned the revolution into a hobby rather than a struggle. Today's average American leftist gives credit to the Teamsters and Franklin Delano Roosevelt for everything working class anarchists died to achieve, but all these thugs really did was Disneyfy the Labor Movement and make it just another flaccid appendage of the state that it was built to burn. Sure, factory workers were given tokens of state privilege like health benefits and basic human dignity but how long did that last? Just long enough for the Labor Movement to lose its fangs by the time FDR's conveniently centralized state sold their jobs to China while the Teamsters stood by whistling with their fists in their pockets. 

In the meantime, anarchists lost all touch with the poor as we slowly lost ourselves up our own assholes in the echo chambers of academia. Let's face it dearest motherfuckers, today's average self-proclaimed anarchist is a snot-nosed college brat who is more concerned with the abstractions of theory and dogma than how any of that shit is ever supposed to translate on the streets where it can do any real damage. We need to drop the fucking thesaurus and get back to the basics here. I love knocking out the teeth of Proud Boys as much as the next genderfuck faggot but without proper context this just amounts to little more than schoolyard larping.

The first thing that anarchists need to realize is that they don't need to radicalize the poor, if anything, we need to let the poor radicalize us. Your average blue collar trailer park urchin and inner-city round-the-corner girl doesn't need to be told that they're getting fucked and could care less about feckless labels like anarcho-capitalist or anarcho-communist. Your average all-American peasant smokes dope, carries a gun, cheats on their taxes if they pay them at all and openly dreams about shooting their boss and lynching their landlord. In other words, your average American peasant is already a fucking anarchist. The only thing initiated brats like me really need to do is wake them the fuck up to this fact and get them to realize that they are the only master they will ever need to throw the illusion of state power off their backs once and for all.

The second thing that anarchists need to realize is that the age of the proletariat is over. Between automation and offshoring, the American factory worker is an endangered species that no longer represents the needs of the unwashed masses. America is rapidly becoming a two-class society and the only other class besides the bourgeoisie is the lumpenproletariat- the underemployed and unpoliticized outsider- your drifters, fry cooks, basket cases, unhoused and ex-cons. The biggest issue to organize this class around is not labor but housing or rather the lack thereof.

There are millions of voiceless Americans experiencing homelessness in this country and millions more like myself who are perpetually just one crisis away from joining them on the streets. This is a growing community with nothing left to lose and everything to gain. Let's arm them to the teeth. Let's organize militias, autonomous tent cities, free stores and squats. Let's target slumlords, real estate moguls, gentrification and eminent domain with the same righteous ferocity that we do the Alt-Right. And as the rest of the subjects of this rapidly disintegrating empire inevitably finds themselves inching closer to the black hole of the housing crisis, let's watch Donald Trump and John Fetterman try to convince them that the state is a vehicle for populism that isn't headed off a fucking cliff. 

Let's embrace the stateless side of populism and make anarchism great again, dearest motherfuckers, because the American system is already fucked and all we've ever really had to survive it is each other and that's what anarchism is really all about, that heavy love of the masses against those bastard elites who play us for chumps. We're the only ones who can show them who's boss but we're never going to do it unless we burn down the factory itself and build something better on the ashes.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Take This Job and Shove It by Johnny Paycheck

* Floyd the Barber by Nirvana

* Working-Class Hero by John Lennon

* Start Chopping by Dinosaur Jr.

* Down in the Streets by the Stooges

* Shell Games by Bright Eyes

* We're Coming Back by Titus Andronicus

* Finest Work Song by REM

* Palamino by First Aid Kit

* I've Been Tired by the Pixies

 

Society's War on the Mentally "Ill" Gets Political

 I'm a crazy person, or at least, so I'm told. I could dress it up with all kinds of politically correct labels and DSM approved diagnoses for you, but let's just cut the bullshit right here and call a spade a fucking spade. I'm nuts, crazy, bonkers, a loon, a psycho, bash steel baby, corner cuckoo. But the best way I can think of to put my condition is that I am pathologically at war with normal. I can't cope with mainstream society. Civilization makes me fucking nervous- crowds, traffic, tall buildings, elevator music, nine-to-five jobs- all of this shit gives me fucking panic attacks and the social isolation that results from this inability to play nice with normal often leaves me so fucking depressed that I can barely get out of bed.

This situation has put me in the incredibly uncomfortable position of being an anarchist on disability in order to stay off the streets. Shockingly, none of this is particularly fruitful for my self-esteem but I can't help but to blame society, especially when you consider that society and its deadly devices in the state and the mass media have essentially declared war on those of us who find ourselves pathologically at war with normal. 

If you don't believe me then just turn on your TV. The 24/7 news circus is teeming with lurid stories of unhinged vagrants on the prowl in a city near you. Homeless people wandering the streets aimlessly like the living dead in a George Romero flick, just looking for the nearest pearl-clutching suburbanite lost on their way to Pottery Barn so they can shove them in front of an oncoming subway train. Both major parties have made containing people like me and my homeless cousins a major cornerstone of their post-midterm agendas and I don't deny that the shit is coming down like Helter Skelter but we're not the ones who fucking started it.

It is only after centuries of abuse at the hands of sadistic cops and role-crazy shrinks that America's mentally unstable class find themselves lashing out recklessly at a cruel system designed to contain us along with the stable people it benefits. The result is an epic crime spree of blowback in the streets of America's wealthiest and most economically unequal metropolitan areas and increasingly this violence is spilling over into the palatial estates of the monied elites with a rash of quasi-partisan attacks on the once sacred cows of the Beltway duopoly. None of this should be misconstrued as a defense. This kind of nihilism solves nothing, and initiatory violence is always despicable but for the straight world to act like this carnage is unprovoked amounts to gaslighting of epic proportions. 

The facts are that people suffering with what society has labeled mental illness are much more likely to be the victims of initiatory violence than to commit it and homeless people are murdered at a rate 25 times higher than the housed. In other words, we have been getting slaughtered in the streets of your precious cities for generations and more often than not it is the state itself with its finger on the trigger. People with untreated mental disabilities are 16 times more likely to be killed during a police encounter and 25% of the people shot and killed by the police in their own blue crime wave are people suffering from a mental crisis.

This includes my friend Osaze Osagie, who the State College Police put three bullets in for the crime of being suicidal while Black. So yeah, shit's getting a little wild in the streets of this glorious fucking nation, but my people didn't throw the first punch and you're going to have to forgive us for fighting a little dirty. After all, we don't have the luxury of a well-funded militia or a cable news PR team to spin their tax funded carnage.

The state threw the first punch in this brawl, but the state doesn't learn lessons. It just uses the fallout from its mistakes to excuse its continued malignant existence and double down on the abusive tactics that got it there. Government officials in both parties have only stepped up their blowback inducing campaigns to contain the pathologically divergent and while Republicans may be the shrillest in their justifications, Democrats have been equally vicious. In supposedly progressive and tolerant cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, liberal do-gooders have unleashed heaps of legislation that criminalizes the very existence of unhoused people with restrictions and prohibitions on everything from soliciting donations to sleeping, eating and even simply lying down in public. 

Those who don't comply with this campaign of legal harassment are herded into camps which are then raided in violent moonlight sweeps. San Francisco's mayor, London Breed (amazingly not a porn moniker) has found herself the subject of class action civil rights lawsuits for her scorched earth campaign to cleanse the Tenderloin District for luxury condos with truncheons and Los Angeles is slowly pushing its own homeless community out to fry in the Mojave Desert.

But nobody represents the benevolent face of liberal aggression towards the emotionally un-pure like California Governor and former mayor of San Francisco Gavin Newsom who has not only ramped up his state's assault on tent encampments but has tried to repackage this violence as some twisted form of charity, claiming to potential voters that it would be downright uncompassionate to simply allow people to live peacefully outdoors the way the savages they stole that state from once did. 

This walking Neutrogena add could solve the homeless problem in his state overnight if he simply decriminalized the equally peaceful practice of squatting. In San Francisco alone there are 61,000 housing units sitting vacant while their owners run Google from their yachts in St. Kitts. That's ten vacant homes for every homeless person in the city, but Gavin Newsom is too progressive for libertarian socialism. He'd much rather string up the undesirables in strait jackets and call it tough love.

The governor's latest act of steel toed kindness is an Orwellian piece of legislation approved nearly unanimously by legislators in both parties that establishes what are called CARE courts aka Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment tribunals. These civil courts would give a broad array of "interested parties" in the sane class, including but not limited to those fine and well-adjusted folks in law enforcement the opportunity to petition a judge to order the treatment of someone deemed ill.

This would-be patient is free to refuse said "treatment" but will be considered by the court for conservatorship if they do. For those unfamiliar with the plight of Britney Spears, conservatorship is essentially a form of therapeutic slavery where a court can grant a third-party total control over an individual declared mentally unfits basic bodily autonomy. In Britney's case this included whether or not she could remove a birth control apparatus from her own uterus. Apparently, the good Governor's supposedly iron clad commitment to 'my body, my choice' comes with certain ableist preconditions.

All of this is grotesque but tragically none of this is new. The realization that I have come to about my own mental health is that it is at least as much the product of the society I find myself an unwilling hostage to as it is anything innately biological. The things that make me nervous essentially amount to the normalized pollution of modern civilization. The overpopulation and over development of state assisted capitalism. The abusive atmosphere of the corporate managerial state. The technological isolation of existence in a post-industrial panopticon. 

In fact, the lion's share of my therapy is actually devoted to treating the childhood trauma I endured for failing to conform to these structures the same way that I was emotionally degraded by the same forces for failing to conform to my biological gender. They say that Queer people were once mentally ill. I say that mentally ill people are Queer in the sense that their difference is only an illness in the eyes of a deeply sick society. 

There was a time when those who spoke to trees were considered prophets in tune with nature. Then some asshole turned nature into property and created a sky god to justify his right to rape it. The prophets were declared heretics. They were accused of being possessed by demons and subjected to exorcisms or simply burned at the stake. Society may appear to have progressed but the only thing about these coercive power structures that has really changed are the labels they use. The heretics became lunatics. The demons became mental illnesses. The priests became scientists and the religion used to justify their crimes became labeled as progress itself, a dogma devoted to social hygiene and cleansing society of its malcontents for their own good through the seemingly banal scourge of brain numbing pharmaceuticals and carceral medical facilities. 

The people you call crazy aren't sick, we are allergic to the sickness you call civilization, to a world where serial killers are called presidents and nuclear oblivion, environmental devastation and wage slavery are marketed as normal. We are human weathervanes for the storm you've been stoking since the Agricultural Revolution and once you tape our mouths shut there will be no one left to warn you of the hell you're provoking and maybe that's what you want. 

In a world gone mad, only the nutjobs dare to speak the truth. Don't institutionalize the messenger. We were just trying to warn you in the violent language you're fluent in.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Credit In the Straight World by the Wipers

* Elevate Me Later by Pavement

*  Lithium by Nirvana

*  Helter Skelter by the Beatles

*  Bae by the Front Bottoms

*  I Blame Society by Titus Andronicus

*  Shady Lane by Pavement

*  Throwaway Kids by the Virus

*  Voices Carry by Sky Ferreira

*  Garbage Dump by Charles Manson

       

"American Democracy" is the Real Threat to Democracy in America

 If you're reading this now, chances are you've already saved democracy by voting for some asshole and chances are you were probably guilted into it on the fear of semi-fascism by a relentless campaign of 24/7 multimedia harassment. Chances also are that in spite of all this heavy-handed peer pressure coming from the virtue signaling class, you probably still feel like shit about pulling that filthy lever on election day and I'd like to use my latest rant to try to explain to you exactly why you feel so damn cheated by this thing we call "American Democracy" even though you're supposedly the last action hero for taking part in it.

I have been credibly accused of being an insufferable contrarian cunt who relishes in being the kind of leftist heretic that mainstream shitlibs love to hate. What can I say other than guilty as charged. But even I'm not going to sit here and pretend that Donald Trump and his witless lackeys aren't guilty of at least 90% of the things that the establishment intelligentsia breathlessly accuses them of on a near daily basis. Trump is a grotesque wannabe despot hellbent on winning pretty much anything he can win at any cost just for the bragging rights. 

After he failed to convince his supposed allies in the Republican Party to just hand him the last election, Orange-Man-Bad threw a riotous temper tantrum at the Capitol and has spent the better part of the last two years trying to replace anyone with even the smallest degree of influence over the election process with a member of the most hysterically devoted pack of lunatic goons that Israel's money can buy. Many were on the ballot this Thursday and sadly, quite a few probably won. I'm sure these spineless imbeciles probably have every intention of following their orange duce's orders, whether this means rigging the machine to insure he wins or discrediting it with bullshit conspiracy theories when they fail to do so. 

All of this is true. The label of semi-fascist may be overkill for your average blue collar MAGA dupe, but it fits the Donald like a fucking slipper, and I've never contested this fact. Trump is many, many, many heinous and unspeakable things. He is a soulless, lecherous, race-baiting, pathological sex fiend with the busted moral compass of your average entitled yuppie antagonist in a Bret Easton Ellis novel. But there is one thing that motherfucker is not, and it is also the one thing his equally loathsome foes in the mainstream media will never be caught murdered denying. 

Doanld J. Trump is not original. He is a consummate plagiarist and a shameless fabulist. In fact, this is probably the biggest attribute that he shares with Adolf Hitler aside from his weird dick and daddy issues. Just like Hitler, Trump is a hopeless waste of a copycat criminal. The tragic Fuhrer cribbed the lion share of his brilliant persona off of the one erected around Benito Mussolini and the absurd Donald totally ripped off his own Big Steal from his longtime frenemies, the Clintons. 

Donald Trump only won the 2016 Presidential Election, largely fair and square by Electoral College standards, because Hillary Clinton fucking blew it by cheating in the Primaries. That neoliberal pit viper had been mercilessly plotting her hostile takeover of this nation's highest office since she agreed to marry a dope smoking sexual predator just to play that sexist hayseed like a satanic Liberace on horse speed. But after being unanimously dumped in 2008 for some Chicago-trained Hawiian novice, Hillary decided that she would be goddamned if she was going to let it happen again. So, in 2016 Hillary rigged an election.

Don't take my word for it. I'm just a lunatic tranny anarchist who still morns the loss of Muammar Gadhafi. Take the word of Hillary's own hysterical pack of lunatic lackeys in the DNC. Their vile plot to hand the white man's Eva Peron an election on a silver platter was exposed in their own handwriting by those fine martyrs at Wikileaks who released a treasure trove of the Democratic politburo's private emails showing a concerted effort from the very top to sabotage irresponsible young Democratic voters from electing Bernie Sanders instead of the dragon lady in the blood red pantsuit.

This conspiracy to pervert America's election process was confirmed further by one of the Clinton's own loyal henchmen, DNC Vice Chair Donna Brazil, who revealed that Hillary's Victory Fund had essentially bought the party before the Primaries, promising them a thief's ransom of the kind of Wall Street cash that only the Clinton's could provide in exchange for an unprecedented degree of control over the party's strategy, finances, staffing and analytics and there is more than a little proof to suggest that Hillary took full advantage of this all access pass to burn the Bernie Bros to the ground.

Well over a dozen primaries polled well outside of the margin of error without anything in the way of a recount or even a proper investigation. The 2016 Primaries saw widespread purges of voter rolls and mountains of uncounted ballots. More than 117,000 Democrats in Brooklyn alone were turned away from the polls by New York City's heavily Clinton influenced Board of Elections. Another 91,000 ballots in Gotham went totally uncounted altogether along with another 20,000 in Arizona's Maricopa County. 

Not to be topped by the Nevada Democratic Convention where 56 Sanders delegates were denied voting status for weirdly innocuous administrative reasons, swinging the vote to Hillary. And when those mugged delegates protested this administrative thuggery, they were baselessly blackballed as rioters by Hillary's loyal shills in the media.  

We may never know the full extent of Hillary Clinton's blatantly illegal attempts to rig the 2016 Democratic Primaries, largely because Bernie Sanders himself, ever the consummate party apparatchik, decided to embrace his historic role as the American left's answer to Nikolai Bukharin by refusing to stand with his own supporters after they were brutally bamboozled by the DNC. 

But we do know now from the polls that even a neutered sheepdog like Bernie would have beaten a hopped-up circus clown like Donald Trump like a fucking snare drum at Ozzfest. That's because Trump didn't win in 2016, Hillary lost. Trump's victory was a technicality of the Electoral College guaranteed to him by the fact that states like mine in the Rustbelt would rather vote for a bag of busted hammers than the family that sold our industry to Third World slave drivers for a buck and a song.  

None of these hollow point facts managed to pierce Hillary's bulletproof ego though. She just blamed throwing an election to a reality TV rapist with her own ham-fisted thuggery on a vast and baseless Russian conspiracy that included an ensemble cast of primetime villains from Vladimir Putin to Bernie Sanders to Jill Stein to Black Lives Matter, Keyser Soze and the ghost of Bob Ross. 

If any of this is giving you a grand mal case of DeJa'Vu that might be because Donald Trump sloppily attempted to rip-off the whole damn con job when he managed to out-Hillary Hillary by losing his own fair-and-square reelection bid to an actual corpse. But Donny-boy didn't have a coterie of deep state hacks in his pocket like his former nemesis did, so he had to settle on throwing a Maoist audible with QAnon Red Guards on Capitol Hill. 

And if this whole sad, sorry, sordid fucking tale sounds depressingly familiar that's because Hillary isn't much more unique than Trump is. This next line may get my Queer ass chucked off of every social media platform that hasn't already canceled me yet, but "American Democracy" is a fucking joke, and it always has been. 

This is a system established by an oligarchy of cis-hetero-white-male-chauvinists for an oligarchy of cis-hetero-white-male-chauvinists. Landless undesirables like women and Black folk were only granted the right to vote after these elitist pigs had already been irretractably entrenched into the system in ways that no popular vote could ever affect and even then, they were just shining us on so we wouldn't chop their fucking heads off. Sadly, it worked.

Donald Trump didn't invent the deep state, Thomas Jefferson did, and it isn't a cabal of limp-wristed Cultural Marxists, it's a revolving door of industrial complexes representing that blurry line where big business becomes big government and vice versa. Your sacred right to vote essentially amounts to partisan reality TV contest called America's Got Democracy. You may get to choose from a pre-selected pool of glorified karaoke singers, but the same generals and CEOs still write all the lyrics regardless. The two-party system is little more than an elaborate distraction to keep bored viewers invested in a program that clearly doesn't serve their interests and frankly never has.

Trump didn't invent this semi-fascist chicanery either, he simply exposed it for what it's always been with his obnoxious table manners and his pathological greed. MAGA is the inevitable Frankenstein monster of bourgeoise liberal democracy, and the deep state has turned reigning in their own beast into a mass market campaign to revive the ratings for the crooked gameshow that gave it a microphone. Thank God most Americans still aren't buying it. After the Great Recession, the Pandemic and multiple fucked-up forever wars, American skepticism in their own government has never run deeper.

Unfortunately, though, the two-party system has responded to this disenfranchisement by misdirecting it at other poor people with intensifying fear tactics that have upped the ante to downright alarming levels just to keep the rabble in line. Your average blue-collar Republican has been transformed by the DNC into a goose-stepping, white power, cattle rapist and your average blue-collar Democrat has been transformed by the GOP into a fetus eating, communist, groomer. The results have been as violent as they've been divisive, with well-intentioned imbeciles going to jail for clubbing elderly oligarchs with hammers and being shot in the head during fascist soccer riots in federal buildings.

This shit isn't fucking worth it. It's not worth your life, it isn't even worth your vote, and it sure as shit isn't worth a goddamn civil war. It's a fucking sham and I won't make myself complicit in it anymore just for a jolly and a sticker that proudly announces, "I Got Played Today!" Democracy isn't picking your favorite millionaire to push you around for the next four years. Democracy is taking complete control of your life from the town square to the factory floor with a grassroots system that affords every citizen with a direct say on every decision that directly affects their everyday lives, and you don't need a superPAC or a hammer to build this system. All you need is to drop out of the old one and start over in the space where you live.

"American Democracy" is the real threat to democracy in America and direct democracy is the only solution worth bleeding for. Now, do yourself a huge fucking favor and turn this crap off.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Don't Believe the Hype by Public Enemy

*  American Ruse by the MC5

*  Tilted by Christine & the Queens

*  Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers

*  Guerrilla Radio by Rage Against the Machine

*  Rainy Day Women #12 and 35 by Bob Dylan

*  Runner by Alex G

*  Ex Lion Tamer by Wire

*  Only Acting by Kero Kero Bonita

*  Stand by REM

*  I'll Be Seeing You by Liberace