Because Polygamists Are Queer People Too, Goddammit

 Nicky, why can't you just smile and join the pride parade? I must hear this refrain at least ten times a day from people both inside and out of my community. With all the progress, with all the popular approval, why can't I just be one of those happy Queers you see on TV? Why must I insist on being such a fucking bummer? And sometimes I wish it was that easy too. That I could just put on a pair of heels and embrace the simple pleasures of mainstream inclusion. The only problem is that I know way too much about the history of Western Civilization to pretend that progress isn't a fucking trap.

I can't pretend that the globalized corporate culture that defines the collective West isn't a moral desert defined by commercialism, conformity and assimilation. I can't pretend that this culture isn't the direct descendant of the White Anglo-Saxon Puritan culture that wiped out the pagan tribes who once revered my people for what made us unique, and I can't pretend that being Queer isn't defined by our long history of resistance to this culture and that allowing ourselves to be absorbed into it would be tantamount to genocide.

Every right that these people have given us has been rigged. We have the right to state protection from bigotry as long as we consent to recognizing the authority of an institution that violates the rights of more Queer people than every Bible Belt fag basher combined in the form of the Prison Industrial Complex. We have the right to serve openly in the straight man's army as long as we consent to the wholesale slaughter of other marginalized people that defines its very existence. And of course, there is the most sacred right that a Queer person could possibly ask for, what every little trans girl dreams about, the right to marriage.

This was the right on full display just a few weeks ago when Joe Biden officially signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law. A bipartisan smash hit, this law codified federal recognition of same sex marriage as well as interracial marriage after the Supreme Court reminded us all of the unpleasant fact that the Founding Fathers were a bunch of sexist bigots like them with the overturning of Roe V. Wade. 

Once again, I can't pretend to be impressed by this thing called marriage. I'm an anarchist for Stirner's sake. The state's approval of who I love and how I love them is about as meaningful to me as receiving the blessing of the Mafia. But I have nothing against the institution in and of itself and consenting adults should have every right to enjoy it. Kali knows the weird shit that turns me on isn't every Queer's cup of tea. But there was something that just wasn't quite right about this picture.

The sight of all these shiny, happy, camera-friendly Queers whooping it up on the White House lawn as Cindy Lauper belted out the hits couldn't erase the fact that many of the Beltway ghouls who invited them to the party, including our hero Joe Biden, had long and economically fruitful careers defined by fucking us over with sickeningly bigoted laws like DOMA and FOSTA-SESTA. I mean, after decades of drowning us in pigs' blood, the cool kids invite us to a party in our honor and this doesn't seem weird to you? 

I know, I know, Nicky is such a fucking downer. I've heard. But I can't seriously be the only faggot asking, 'what's the catch?' here. The answer to this million-dollar question can actually be found in the fine print of the bill itself. The Respect for Marriage Act codifies any marriage between two people into federal law. It also explicitly forbids the recognition of polygamy in no uncertain terms. In other words, our marriage rights come at the expense of someone else's.

Who cares about a bunch of dusty old Mormon bumpkins, right? Well, you should if you have any respect at all for the cultural institution of Queerness. After all, what is a Queer person? A sexual and/or gender minority whose existence runs against the grain of the Anglo-Saxon Puritan order. And what is a polygamist? Say it with me now, people- a sexual and/or gender minority whose existence runs against the grain of the Anglo-Saxon Puritan order. Polygamy is a form of polyamory, love between multiple partners, that is as Queer as any lifestyle you're likely to find at your local fetish ball. 

The fact that your average American polygamist is a Fundamentalist Mormon fag basher shouldn't matter anymore than the fact that your average radical feminist lesbian thinks that I'm a male chauvinist pig for having a prick under my dress. They are still our people whether they realize it or not and we can't pretend to support marriage equality while we throw other consenting adults under the state's bus.

America has been at war with polygamy for as long as it's been at war with every other form of Queer love and the Mormons have been savagely persecuted for generations for once daring to recognize it. In 1838, the governor of Missouri chased them from their original homeland on the threat of extermination in what can only be accurately described as an act of Queer ethnic cleansing. A few years later, their founder Joseph Smith was lynched by an angry mob in Illinois and the Mormons escaped the Midwest to the deserts of the Great Salt Lake in search of a safe space where they could simply exist in peace.

Polygamy was officially banned by the federal government with the Edmund's Act in 1862. When a few brave Mormons challenged this law as a clear violation of their constitutional freedom of religion in 1878, the Supreme Court upheld the law in the Court's first decision to limit religious freedom with reasoning that is sadly still sited to this day. This reasoning included the justices referring to the practice of plural marriage as "odious" and claims that it offends polite society that should sound strangely familiar to all ears. It seems that constitutional rights like religious liberty are only sacred when the people practicing them conform to the puritanical confines of our slave raping Founding Fathers. Who knew?

The Mormons attempted to peacefully secede and established their own sovereign communities in what is now largely modern-day Utah, but the United States government just wouldn't let them be. President Buchanan invaded the Deseret with 2,500 soldiers to put down the "Mormon Rebellion" and forcibly confiscate church land. This persecution only received a brief reprieve during the Civil War but Abraham Lincoln's bloody suspension of Habeas Corpus to keep the Union whole made it violently clear that secession was another institution that the American government was willing to kill to suppress. In 1890, the Church of Latter-Day Saints finally bowed to pressure and traded one of the founding principles of their faith in exchange for the safety of mainstream inclusion. 

 But all this carnage was about much more than just one guy shacking up with two wives. Much like with all Queer rights, the government's animus had a lot more to do with social cohesion than anything else. Early Mormon society was far from utopian, but it was defined by a form of pious collectivism that placed the community before the state and every straight man's favorite fetish, capitalism. 

Families were larger and more powerful than any one government institution and women and children generally enjoyed more independence than the lesser captives of most 19th century monogamous communities. Any degeneration from sexual and gender mores poses a direct challenge to the carefully constructed western class system that evolved out of the rise of patriarchy during the agricultural revolution. This is why Queer people of all kinds are only ever left with two choices, conformity or persecution. 

The Church of Latter-Day Saints chose conformity and lost a society that was nearly entirely autonomous from the wickedness of the western world that now ravages the streets of Salt Lake City with crime and addiction. The Mormons who chose to embrace this assimilation embraced the federal government that killed their ancestors as a divinely inspired institution while the few who chose to resist were chased by this divine institution into the shadows where they could be easily poached by rapacious creeps like Warren Jeffs. 

Polygamy remains a felony on the books in all fifty states. Refugees whose ancestors have practiced this form of family values since long before Joseph Smith wore short pants are denied citizenship and deported. Families continue to be forcefully separated and shattered by the federal government in routine raids on polygamist compounds. These people cling to their faith because everyone but God has forgotten them. Speaking as a genderfuck outcast who spent the better part of her childhood at the mercy of Catholic creeps not unlike Warren Jeffs, I can't help but to believe that my community owes these people a little better than this. Hell, we owe it to ourselves too, because polygamists are Queer people too, goddammit and if we don't look out for each other, no one will. Certainly not Joe Biden.

The problem with mainstream inclusion is that it always comes at the price of the persecution of those who wish to live their lives outside of the confines of mainstream society. State sanctioned marriage comes with benefits that should belong to all of us by birth right, regardless of how many people we love or how we choose to love them. If Queer people abandon our rebellious principles for this conformist sacrament, it won't just be at the expense of a bunch of forgotten pioneers, it will be at the expense of our own sacred identity as renegades against puritanical conformity. Call me a fucking bummer ten times a day, but I would rather die like an odious apostate than dance on their graves for a White House photo-op any day of the week.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* God Only Knows by the Beach Boys

* Gigantic by the Pixies

* Rebel Rebel by David Bowie

* Laura by Bat for Lashes

* We Oh We by the Hidden Cameras

* Lonely Planet Boy by New York Dolls

* Y Control by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

* Gloria by Patti Smith

* Townie by Mitski

* Today by Smashing Pumpkins

* Fallout by Yo La Tengo

* Awoo by the Hidden Cameras

Nicky Battles the Progressive Killer Robots

 America has become a downright surreal place during the twilight hours of our imperial decline. We can't seem to finish one potentially apocalyptic cold war before starting another and the lesser evilism of our sham elections has reduced us to a pack of peasants bickering over which geriatric rapist should pretend to push us around for the next four years. But it doesn't get much more batshit bizarre than the perverse dystopian spectacle of the most progressive city in America sicking an army of killer robots on the homeless.

I really do wish I was being hyperbolic with that last line. I wish hyperbole was even possible anymore. But in their ongoing efforts to clear the streets of unwashed vagrants, San Francisco, the city that gave us the Summer of Love and the butt of every corny right-wing joke for well over half a century, has officially approved the use of robots equipped for deadly force against its own citizenry.

In a vote of 8-3, San Francisco city supervisors approved this perverse "deadly force option" while consoling the Tesla driving Apple executives who have colonized that once freaky city and elected a ten-headed jackass to govern it that this new cyberpunk death squad would only be used in potentially life-threatening circumstances. But considering the San Francisco Police Department's less than stellar track record for human rights and that America's finest can and do regularly characterize an absurdly wide variety of shit as being potentially life threatening to justify their hyper-homicidal urges, these promises hardly inspire anything even remotely resembling hope. 

Sadly, this is in no way, shape or form an anomaly. Across the country, the most progressive cities west of Amsterdam have all become the least equal places on earth to live in and have chosen to cleanse their tree lined streets of the homeless casualties of this twisted irony with a uniquely passive aggressive war on crime. California's dear leader, Gavin Newsom has set the standard by sanctioning a statewide rampage of armed sweeps against tent cities while smiling beatifically for the cameras like a used car salesman and telling the watching world that it would be downright "uncompassionate" to allow these communities to exist unmolested by state intervention.

He's used this same strange brand of cuddly authoritarian logic before to justify the creation of so called "Care Courts" allowing third parties, including law enforcement, to petition judges to order the treatment of those deemed by the state to be mentally ill on the threat of a conservatorship that would affectively remove their right to be considered a human being. Over on the other left coast in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams has similarly ordered his thugs in blue to institute a new regime of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, once again, all in the name of social hygiene and compassionate grooming.

There is nothing particularly unusual about the continued growth of America's insatiable police state but when this long march towards total tyranny is accompanied not by Trumpian dog whistle racism but the comforting social justice bromides of gentle people with flowers in their hair it begins to feel like the whole goddamn country has already been involuntarily institutionalized by a smiling master class of lute strumming Nurse Ratchets. It's fucking creepy but this is American progressivism, and it always has been. Sit down around the fire my children, it's time Auntie Nicky finally told you the whole truth and nothing but about modern liberalism, the western world's answer to Santa Claus. 

Progressivism is generally seen by both its supporters and its detractors alike as the use of big government to further the cause of America's downtrodden classes from on high and that is how this movement generally markets itself, but the reality is that progressivism has always been defined by the far more sinister goal of radically expanding the state into every facet of private life in order to affect a regime of top-down social engineering that purifies western civilization of its radical discontents or as stalwart progressive Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once referred to us, "those who sap the strength of the state for those lesser sacrifices." 

 This may sound strange considering its current secular humanist posture, but the original Progressive Movement actually has its roots in the 19th century Protestant fundamentalist revival known as the Second Great Awakening, which preached that the return of Christ could only be brought about through the creation of a benevolent utopia within the gears of American power. These cranky Jesus freaks sought to achieve this goal through a deluge of government reforms which would gradually mutate into a secular jihad to save the American race from disintegration in the tumultuous years of gilded excess and working-class upheaval that followed the Civil War.

These puritanical reforms included closing the borders to filthy Catholic mongrels like my Irish ancestors who threatened the centralized cohesion of a truly United States of America with their private schools and mystical heathen ways. When this inevitably failed, they created that liberal cornerstone known as the compulsory public school system to "Christianize" the Papists into being deserving of the poison privilege of whiteness. 

The Progressives may have dropped a lot of the Jesus talk for more godless appeals to the necessity for state sanctioned conformity, but their message has remained uniquely puritanical in tone and their mission has remained a conspiracy to rapidly expand the powers of the state in order to create the ideal society as defined by the guidelines of White Anglo Saxon Protestant values. 

Women were to be protected in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the nation even if this meant forced sterilization under the guise of reproductive health. The women folk were also afforded suffrage in order to increase the White Protestant vote against the unassimilated Catholic hordes who were expected to keep their own women home. Alcohol was prohibited in order to keep the working-class men efficient by protecting them from the evils of their own free will. Child labor was abolished so that the minds of the nation's youth could be carefully molded by state institutions that would create a more civil and obedient work force for the future. And the outrageous greed of the robber barons was reined in by replacing their widely despised private monopolies with more orderly federal cartels.

But the most important mission of the early Progressives and arguably their greatest triumph was the domestication of the downright revolutionary threat posed by America's Labor Movement. This was achieved under the cloak of reform by carefully integrating the nation's largest and most influential unions into the federal government in order to create a grand partnership between big business and big government that would expand American industrial greatness from sea to shining sea and beyond. This fusion of private and public elites is known as corporatism and it is no mere coincidence that it ended up forming the foundation for the Progressive Movements European cousin, fascism.

Adolf Hitler was strongly influenced by the Eugenicists of the Progressive Era and FDR's famed Brain Trust was teeming with Mussolini fanboys. That's because fascism and progressivism are both defined by a common mission to preserve pristine western values through a counter-revolutionary regime of populist flavored state-run capitalism. 

FDR achieved this feat where Fuhrers failed with the New Deal, a massive corporatist Trojan Horse which offered the anarchists and Marxists of the Labor Movement a series of concessions like paid leave and the five-day work week in exchange for having their organizations effectively defanged and integrated into a federally regulated economic conglomeration. Factory workers rejoiced and reaped the rewards of upward mobility in the short run but in the long run it was these very progressive reforms that would serve them up like a pudding to a program of rapid globalization that would have been impossible without this consolidation of private and public power. It was a brilliant trap. I'm sure Hitler kicks himself in hell every day for not coming up with it first.

I strongly suspect that this kind of big picture treachery remains the primary mission of today's progressive movement with their march towards tolerance and inclusion. In the sixties and seventies, a New Left resistance to progressive conformity reared its ferocious head in the form of a new revolutionary class comprising largely of the outcasts that Margaret Singer failed to abort. Black Power and Queer Liberation ended the Vietnam War, trashed the gender binary and taught a generation of straight white kids how to shoot straight. 

So, the progressives went to work assimilating us the same way that they did with the once equally ferocious Labor Movement of the Old Left, by offering Queer freaks like me party favors like marriage equality and hate crime legislation that only serve to build the same state we bloodied our knuckles to smash at Stonewall before those pigfuckers can integrate us into it. But some of us aren't buying it, some of us still refuse to play their rigged game and this is when those benevolent authoritarians in the Progressive Movement show their true colors again and get mean like they did back in 1899.

I've said it before, and I'll be killed by wild robots saying it five more times before breakfast. If America still has a revolutionary class, then it's the lumpenproletariat, a growing caste of pathologically ungovernable people who find themselves incapable of existing inside the rotting Jacko lantern of Western Civilization. These people, my people, have found themselves with little other choice but to reject this empire of conformity by joining the ranks of the unemployed and the unhoused. The progressive solution to this biting anti-assimilationist question is to classify people like me as mentally defective with hyper-statist contraptions like Care Courts and FOSTA-SESTA so they can forcibly institutionalize us and throw us away into the bottomless dustbin of the Prison Industrial Complex.

There is no more room to mince words, dearest motherfuckers. The Progressive Movement is, was and always will be a stealth tool for white supremacy. It is not a coincidence that homeless people and sex workers are overwhelmingly Queer and/or people of color. We are the wretched mongrels who refuse to be house pets and we will be destroyed by our so-called progressive allies if we don't learn to bite the hand that feeds hard and reject the state in its entirety. We must form communal ties based on mutual aid and direct democracy too strong for their death machines to break or assimilate. This may very well be our last stand, but I for one would much rather die a rabid faggot tomorrow than live one day as another vanilla cog in the progressive hivemind.

So, bring on the killer robots you progressive cunts. I came here to do two things, kick ass and eat lipstick, and I'm all out of lipstick. You wanna get nuts? Let's get nuts.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by the Flaming Lips

* Rock N Roll N*gger by Patti Smith

* We Appreciate Power by Grimes featuring Hana

* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails 

* Man Sized by PJ Harvey

* Only Acting by Kero Kero Bonita

* Hardline by Julien Baker

* Savage Good Boy by Japanese Breakfast

* Bring the Noise by Public Enemy

* Turn It On by the Flaming Lips

The Kremlin's Cold War with the Modern World Has Become a Russian Tragedy

"Russia is the least statelike, the most anarchistic land in the world. And the Russian people is the most apolitical of peoples, never having managed to set its land right."

-Nikolai Berdyaev

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

-Friedrich Nietzsche

 I despise all wars, especially those of the initiatory variety. I'm not exactly a pacifist but I am a very strong believer that there is never a good reason to throw the first punch. With that being said, when it comes to understanding warfare, it is of the utmost importance to understand the so-called enemy, especially when you exist within the walls of an empire that thrives on assigning them daily like math homework. Sometimes this means struggling to comprehend what can bring even the most honorable of people to throw that first punch that initiates a war.

Imbeciles on the right have long condemned this form of politically incorrect critical thinking as sympathizing with terrorists and dictators but sadly, increasingly, once wise people on the left have joined these imbeciles in rejecting the hard work of asking 'how the hell did it come to this?' When I was first initiated into the antiwar movement as a pissed-off teenage dirtbag, I was enlightened by left-wing firebrands like William Blum and Ward Churchill who dared to put themselves in the uncomfortable shoes of the men who hijacked four planes on September 11th to initiate a holy war. 

They weren't justifying such clearly despicable violence; they were attempting to provide context on how it became inevitable. Now, whenever I attempt to do the same thing by comprehending the equally despicable actions of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, I get accused of being an apologist for authoritarianism and, all too often, the person hurling this insult at me is a fellow self-described anarchist.

The most frustrating thing about this is that the motives that inspired the unspeakable acts of barbarism on 9/11 are actually shockingly similar to the ones that convinced Russia to commit the unspeakable act of invading their own brothers and sisters in Ukraine. Islamic fundamentalists don't hate the West's freedom any more than Moscow does. What they hate is the decadence we obnoxiously flaunt as the world's indispensable empire and our insistence on pushing this morally bankrupt culture down their throats at the expense of the traditions that they hold dear. 

I may disagree strongly with both of these people's values regarding my sexuality and my gender identity but I'm not going to sit here in posh first world judgement and pretend that these people aren't 100% right to fear the modern world when that modern world has brought us all nothing but pain and misery with the Westphalian nation state and global capitalism. The truth is that what inspires Pashtuns to join the Taliban is precisely what inspired a Queer pagan anarchist like me to join the antiwar movement. I don't want to see my people assimilated into a soulless empire any more than they do. And this is also precisely what drives your average Russian, who once raped and pillaged the Pashtuns, to support a decadent neoliberal ass wipe like Vladimir Putin in raping and pillaging Ukraine.

Russian culture is one that is uniquely defined by its deep and almost mystic reverence for its own history. Your average Russian does not live in 2022 alone. They live among the Pagan Rus of 922 and the Orthodox Old Believers of 1322 and the Bolshevik jihadists of 1922. The Russian soul exists in a museum in which time is not linear but rather a seamless continuum. This existence stands in direct opposition to a world that has long since lost any use for history. 

A world defined by a mutated interpretation of progress that valorizes an endless and often mindless push forward into the abyss of monolithic global universalism and endless technological expansion. The Russian soul looks upon the modern world with its paved forests and stadium temple marketplaces with horror and sees the western imperial forces pushing it towards their borders with righteous fury. It is this fury that has been the driving force behind most Russian aggression towards the outside world, whether justified or not. 

This includes the supposedly modernist Russian Revolution. What ultimately convinced the devout serfs to back the godless Bolsheviks in their putsch against the Tsar was the Tsar's embrace of modern globalism at its baptism by blood during the First World War in which the Russian people were demanded to forfeit the lives of their children on the altar of some western global order that was totally alien to them. Your average Russian didn't give a flying fuck about internationalism or dialectical materialism. They were revolting against the imperial schemes of modern warfare and the spiritually bankrupt specter of capitalism that possessed it.

This honorable spirit of resistance to the demonic forces of progress defines Russian Orthodox culture but it also transcends and predates it. It is the spirit of the lonesome heathen who first tamed those wild steppes. It is the spirit of the village resistance to the Mongol Hordes and the Nazi Stormtroopers. And tragically, it is also the spirit that was abused to build a state and an empire that stood in utter contradiction to these values. The same spirit that serves Vladimir Putin in his suicidal conspiracy to build a new one on the graves of his own people.

Outsiders have conspired to destroy the Russian people for centuries specifically because they are a people so resistant to conquest who have had the misfortune of building this culture on the most strategically valuable piece of real estate on the planet, the land bridge that unites Europe and Asia. For this sin, the Russian people have rarely known a day in which they weren't under threat of foreign subjugation, and it was this existential fear that inspired the Russian people to build a state in the first place. For centuries, the majority of the Russian people existed in insular communal farming villages divided amongst city states known as Uzeyds. These city states were ruled by a hereditary line of princes though the majority of this royalty's subjects existed far beyond their reach and their rule was largely symbolic in nature. 

It is this age of pastoral isolation that most defines the Russian national character. A rugged spirit that embraces the hardships and toil of farm life in order to embrace a deeper spiritual freedom that only exists in the shadows cast by tight nit families around a roaring fire or tribes performing ancient pagan rites in reverence to Orthodox saints in the torchlight. A stateless existence shattered by the Mongol Yoke who ravaged this sacred countryside for centuries and burned many of these villages to the ground.

The first organized Russian state which would eventually give birth to the venal reign of the Tsars was built to resist this conquest but many of its institutions were actually modeled after the Mongol Yoke and would ultimately corrupt the Russian way of life with its roads and cities and centralization of power into fewer and fewer hands. 

This state would ultimately hijack the Russian Orthodox Church and purge it of much of its Slavic pagan character in order to bring it into uniformity with Greece. This state would also give rise to Peter the Great who would finally bring an end to the conquest of the Khans only to build an equally bloodthirsty empire of his own to take its place. This empire was sold to the Russian people as a fortress for their nation's greatness but as it expanded in all directions, so did the Russian spirit until it was warped and torn beyond recognition.

Peter may have made Russia a world power to be reckoned with, but he did so at the expense of everything that made Russia unique. In order to compete with his rival European contemporaries, Peter forcefully westernized Russia into a modern European superstate. He enacted harsh social reforms that required the Russian people to embrace Franco-Germanic cultural traditions and he built a massive gilded city called St. Petersburgh modeled on the decadent palaces of Paris and Vienna to serve as his new empire's capitol. 

But like all empires, Russia grew too big to sustain its own autonomy and then it grew some more. The growing addictions to western excess by Russia's shrinking master class would ultimately lead to both constant war and towering debt. Meanwhile, the serfs became slaves in all but name, creating a perfect playground for western capital to expand its toxic Industrial Revolution. By the First World War, Britain, France and America essentially owned the Tsars like toy poodles and ran most of the factories and railroads that polluted what Trotsky once called the "pristine roadlessness" of the Russian countryside.

Disgusted by the shameless prostitution of their vain leaders, the Russians revolted but tragically only embraced different forms of western statism that continued to find them subjugated and divorced from the spiritual world that defined their own uniquely Slavic vision of liberty. The Soviet Union collapsed after the Carter Administration fooled them into attempting to enslave their fellow stateless traditionalists in Afghanistan and the west circled in to pick the bones.

After being savagely ravaged by Boris Yeltsin's shock capitalism and encircled by an ever-expanding NATO empire bent on nothing short of world domination, Vladimir Putin was able to unite the Russian people in their darkest hour with allusions to Russian nationalism, but Putin himself is the product of the very excesses he has pledged to fight. Yeltsin's boy wonder may have overthrown the old drunk and his fat rich entourage of pig fucking oligarchs, but he has only replaced them with his own entourage of fat rich pig fucking oligarchs who continue to shock the Russian poor with the soulless neoliberal gutter capitalism Putin picked up from the visiting Wall Street elites of the Clinton era.

The west is undeniably a threat to the Russian people. It is a threat to all people. But the only force that poses an even graver threat to the Russian soul than the Atlantic empire is a man like Putin who seeks only to replace them in the region. Russia's limited resources pretty much guarantee that Putin's insane plot to fight western imperialism with western-style imperialism will only lead him to the same fate as Tsars, only this time he will be inviting the offspring of the Mongol Yoke in Beijing back to carry the weight of his imperial predilections.

The fastest way to destroy a culture is to try to export it by becoming an empire. You cannot conquer another man's land without sacrificing your own land's soul in the process. The best hope for the Russian people to resist western imperialism is to reject its manifestations within the motherland along with the state that birthed it.

Russia's greatness lies not on the battlefields of Europe but in the windswept plains and birch tree forests that inspired men like Peter Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy to seek the kingdom of heaven within. It is this culture, a culture of asceticism and mercy, a culture of Cossack drifters and solitary dreamers, that continues to inspire those of us who resist assimilation into a modern world starved of reverence for the beauty of the old one. Russia must once again become too wild for princes to tame and invite the world to join her around the fire. Then and only then will the conquest end. 

Peace, Love, and Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Atmosphere by Joy Division 

*  Golden Hair by Slowdive

*  Human Behavior by Bjork

* Teenage Dirtbag by Phoebe Bridgers

*  Tommy Gun by the Clash

*  Hey Joe by Jimi Hendricks

*  Heads Will Roll by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

*  Jane Says by Jane's Addiction 

* War Dance by Killing Joke

* Heroes by David Bowie

* Look On Down from the Bridge by Mazzy Star

* Us by Regina Spektor   

Notes from the Queer Hillbilly Underground

 I do my damnedest to put up a bad bitch front but I can't lie to you dearest motherfuckers, sometimes it really hurts to be a Queer anarchist in Trump Country. The pay is shit, the hours are endless, and retirement usually involves a hate crime and a pinewood box. I'm a minority committed to poor people who is surrounded by poor people who are all too often committed to erasing that minority. 

I spend half my time trying to remind other Queer people that the state won't protect us and the other half trying to convince hillbillies that the state doesn't represent Queer people. This isn't exactly easy when the feds drape themselves in rainbow flags to prove their newfound benevolence while they continue to secretly ferry us fairies away to glorified concentration camps for the high crime of survival sex. But just try explaining the complexities of assimilation and FOSTA-SESTA to your local Rust Belt militia and wait for the eyes to roll.

It's a shit job, but I actually feel like I was making some assemblance of progress in building bottom unity across these tribal divisions before the Republicans decided to double-down on QAnon style transphobia for the Midterms. Even supposedly moderate Republicrats have adopted demonizing gender outlaws like me by labeling us as groomers and pedophiles and too many conservative libertarians on the fringe have boughten into this horseshit hook, line and sinker. I don't think that words exist in any language that can properly display the horror that I feel in the pit of my soul when people that I have spent years trying to convince to become allies start throwing these sickening words around.

I, like way too many trans people that I know, am a survivor of child abuse who lives with the wreckage of PTSD every fucking day because some pedophile in a white collar taught a genderless 7-year-old child that their body's failure to comply with their soul put them in the same category as your garden variety rapist. Building solidarity among various oppressed classes is kind of a lot to carry when some of them insist on triggering emotional flashbacks with absurd conspiracy theories. That weight becomes downright crushing after five of your people are shot dead in Colorado based on the same bullshit. But I refuse to blame the Republicans alone for this sickness. I blame the entire bipartisan system that is built on dividing poor people against each other.

In today's America, every person who hangs below the one percent has become some other poor person's enemy and the solution to every enemy always seems to be the same. So called conservatives like Tucker Carlson and JD Vance bitch non-stop about the existential threat posed to traditional rural values by lecherous undocumented workers and vile grooming drag queens before suggesting that somehow the conservative solution to these paper tigers is to grow the federal government with steroids by militarizing the border like the DMZ and granting civil servants the authority to kidnap trans kids from loving parents and hurling them into the jaws of the foster care system.

Johnny-come-Trumpers like Mr. Vance, a Wall Street hustler who built a career on demonizing the rural poor of his native Appalachia, call this crap Christian Nationalism but what it really amounts to is old school progressive social engineering with a side of Uzis handed out to those fine folks who torched Waco so long as they promise to toss a few fags onto the fire after the next siege.

And when this campaign to scapegoat some of the most powerless people in the country gives some pissed-off kid on the edge a convenient excuse to dress his naked nihilism up in moral fortitude by shooting up his local Queer bar, it's the Democrats turn to do the demonizing. They blame this high-powered campaign to market big government as a family value on everyday MAGA Republicans like my mother who may have been foolish enough to fall for Trump's bullshit but would gladly throw herself before any bigot's bullet to protect her loud weird Queer daughter.

Naturally, the Democrats solution to the threat of the terrified hayseeds that Fox News manipulates is to manipulate terrified Queer people like me into growing the same federal government that breaks the backs of minorities on the Prison Industrial Complex with another heaping helping of tax funded steroids. They dress it up as social justice but they're really just endowing those fine fag bashers in law enforcement with more totally arbitrary powers. These come in the form of federal hate crime legislation and red flag laws that afford them the ability to hurl decades onto prison sentences and strip anyone they deem a threat to the state or others of their basic constitutional rights with little more than a rubber stamp from a hanging judge. 

Are you sensing a theme here? Behind door number one is insane amounts of state power in the name of poor white trash and behind door number two is insane amounts of state power in the name of poor pink trash! Our cup runneth over! Either way, the same fucking people get shiny new toys to shoot us all in the back with every time we get another massacre and I'm starting have serious doubts that this is all just another fantastic coincidence.

The left talks a lot about the notion of stochastic terrorism, the practice of the mass media stoking violence through the constant demonization of one marginalized group or another in order to foster the rise of fascism. I used to call bullshit on this theory, mostly because the solution provided for it usually involved some form of censorship, but now I'm starting to think the liberals are on to something here. Only, I don't think the goal is to incite fascism. Take a look around you honey, we're already there.

The real goal of this bipartisan terror campaign is to create a visceral climate of division and stasis so poor people of every persuasion are too busy demonizing each other to realize that we are all being played by the same government that robs us all blind and uses our pocket change to blow shit up in other countries. I call this concept stochastic statism and it's as old as Bacon's Rebellion. The only reason twisted little bugaboos like white supremacy and the gender binary even exist is because powerful people made them up to keep different tribes of desperate people at each other's throats and some of these tribes have way more than just class in common.

I may be a decadently demented genderfuck provocateur, but I risk my own safety to live outside the closet in the sticks for a reason. I do it because I also happen to be a fucking hillbilly and believe it or not, I'm not the only hick outside of the gender binary. My found family of pink trash misfit toys live in old farmhouses and double-wides. I love guns and pick-up trucks and Patsi Kline every bit as much as I love pegging and glitter and Rocky Horror and I'd much rather spend my next birthday at Dollywood than Disneyland provided I can perform "Jolene" in full drag. This is who I am and I'm not ashamed of it anymore.

The only really hard thing about being a Queer Hillbilly is the fact that these two overlapping communities hate each other so damn much when they have so much in common. We all just want to live free and raise hell without some thug with a government paycheck climbing up our ass. I don't think that this should be too much to ask for, but the state does, and they are using their tools in the corporate media to divide us up even if they have to kill us to do it because their precious empire is finally crumbling beneath its own weight and the angry serfs can smell the blood in the water. They can't kill us all, so they have us killing each other and then begging the state to save us from ourselves. It's a trap and it's one that I've devoted my meager pink trash existence to exposing even if I have to get hate-crimed in the process.

In the age of Ozymandias, every poor person has been transformed into some other poor person's other. If poor people are going to survive this collapse and thrive on the ruins, we're going to have to turn off the fucking news and work together and I refuse to believe that this is impossible. Sometimes it hurts like hell to be a Queer anarchist in Trump Country, but somebody has to be fierce enough to bring Stonewall to the hoedown. I'll supply the Molotovs if you mix the cocktails and together, we can finish what Bacon started and burn Jamestown to the fucking ground.

Peace, Love and Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced This Post

*  Feel It All the Time by Soccer Mommy

*  Pretend We're Dead by L7

*  Heaven Only Knows by Emmylou Harris

*  Teenage Whore by Hole

*  People Have a Lot of Nerve by Neko Case

*  I Fall to Pieces by Patsy Cline

*  Can't Do Much by Waxahatchee

*  Jolene by Dolly Parton

*  Queen by Perfume Genius

*  Our Town by Iris Dement

*  Hardline by Julien Baker