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