The War on Trans is a War on Liberty

 There are some very powerful people who want you to hate me, and they will tell you some very terrible things to convince you that I am your enemy and most of these things have to do with my admittedly unconventional gender identity. The anti-trans movement will tell you that my gender identity is a mental illness that poses an existential threat to the very fabric of a functioning society. They will tell you that my gender identity is a totalitarian ideology cooked up by crypto-Marxist Ivy League wonks to enslave Christians under some genderless new world order. They will even tell you that my gender identity is a perverted conspiracy to sexualize your children and groom them into compliant victims. 

They will tell you pretty much anything except the fact that my gender identity is a heartfelt expression of my own individuality and when their smear campaign against me fails the multibillion-dollar machine behind the anti-trans movement will begin telling you terrible things about other people who are even more marginalized than I am to keep you scared of them becoming empowered too. In fact, they've already gotten started.

Every other talking point these people regurgitate seems to be a hymn to protecting children from my kind but what does the anti-trans movement really have to say about their favorite age demographic? Their propaganda paints young people as innocent, feeble-minded, dupes who lack anything in the way of agency. They would have you believe that your own children are too stupid to tell you who they are and that they should have zero expectation of privacy or free expression. 

These people don't just want any notion of the very existence of people like me to be removed from schools and public spaces, they want to transform these commons into a hyper-vigilante police state that carefully governs the conversations and behavior of young people and urges public officials to report on their movements to legal guardians like the Stasi. Basically, according to the supposed libertarians of the anti-trans movement, your civil rights do not exist until your 18th birthday and maybe not even then.

The latest target of the war on trans is the mentally disabled, in particular those who happen to find themselves on the autism spectrum. It's actually quite the turn if you think about it. Suddenly, these braying hate-mongers care very deeply about degenerate groomers like me, they just believe that we're all retarded whack-jobs getting played by big pharma. Their proof, if you can call it that, is the fact that a lot of trans people seem to be nuts. Fair enough, they're not totally wrong about this. Rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation do run pretty high among trans people but they're high for a reason. Trans people struggle to cope because we live in a society that demonizes anyone who doesn't fit into a very confining script and refuses to perform the roles assigned to us before we're even old enough to say, 'shut the fuck up.' 

As for autism, the prevalence of this "condition" in the overall trans community is not particularly well known but it is elevated among people actually seeking care for gender dysphoria for the simple reason that these people are more likely to receive a diagnosis. With that being said, having personally known plenty of people on the spectrum, both inside and out of the trans community, a correlation between the two would not be particularly shocking to me. Your average autistic person isn't even nuts, they're just someone wired to be incapable of falling for the bullshit of pointless social norms like the gender binary. This is an admirable trait that autistic people happen to share with children which I believe is the real reason why the very powerful people behind the anti-trans movement want them both to be singled out to be sufficiently governed. 

Much like the transgender phenomena itself, there is nothing particularly new about the anti-trans movement. These charlatans may paint themselves as a grassroots coalition of concerned parents fighting big government intrusion into Christian family life, but this is all just smoke. The anti-trans movement is actually just the latest crusade of the Christian Right. All of the big names pushing the most draconian legislation along with the barely literate talking points that drive it home are agents of the same millionaire moneychangers behind such social engineering projects as the PMRC and Satanic Panic. In fact, the two biggest anti-trans lobbies, the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council, are both little more than front groups for Focus on the Family, an organization founded by Jerry Fallwell's heir apparent, James Dobson. 

These people don't give a fuck about free speech or civil liberties. They aren't looking to reign in state power, they want to hijack it for their own jihad to turn America into an Evangelical Saudi Arabia. Trans people like me are simply their latest scapegoat. But their willingness to demonize and control other ungovernable populations in the name of religious liberty should tip you off to their true agenda and that agenda has less to do with pronouns and hormones than it does with social control.

Regardless of how you may feel about my gender identity, powerful people have always felt threatened by the culture of individual liberty that it represents. This is why Christian statists have been suppressing the existence of third genders since they hijacked the Bible and turned it into a weapon for the same empire that murdered Jesus. If something as fundamental as biology cannot be governed then nothing can. My gender is just a loose thread that threatens to unravel the entire tapestry of social constructs that powerful people like James Dobson have long relied on to keep poor people divided against each other while he walks off with their wallets.

The mainstream trans movement often pushes back against the notion of gender as a choice because it belittles the fact that most of us didn't choose this, but I think this is a mistake and it's one that betrays what defines us as a people. Gender isn't a choice, but shouldn't it be? Shouldn't everything be? This is what the Christian Right is so terrified of, and I say we give it to them with both barrels by embracing voluntaryism as the only philosophy truly compatible with radical Queer culture. But first let me tell you a few things that the powerful don't want you to know about me.

They don't want you to know that I am an individual that can't be stuffed into anyone's box. They don't want you to know that I am a lifelong anarchist and a registered Libertarian who actually believes in the small government that they secretly fear. They don't want you to know that am a devout Christo Pagan who follows the traditions of the early Celtic church that still held third genders like mine as sacred. They don't want you to know that I am a survivor of real child abuse and that this experience informs my opposition to the very existence of any compulsory school system. They don't want you to know that I was groomed by the Christian Right for eleven years in the Catholic Church and that I lose sleep over the fact that adults are still afforded the right to break children just because they can. They don't want you to know that I actually support your right to hate me, to say terrible things about me, and even to teach your children to hate themselves, just so long as you leave the law off of their bodies and afford them the right to think for themselves without being policed by the state.

More than anything though, the anti-trans movement doesn't want you to know that I am more like you than the statist fanatics who run their con job will ever be, and they don't want you to know that if they can eviscerate my rights, and the rights of children and disabled people and any other individual, then they can eviscerate your rights too. Hate me if you want. That's your right. I just thought you should know.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Been a Son by Nirvana

* Here by Soccer Mommy

* Plump by Hole

* Salt in the Wound by boygenius

* Criminal by Fiona Apple

* Divine Hammer by the Breeders

* Kool Thing by Sonic Youth

* Free to Decide by the Cranberries

The Lesser of Two Evils is a Democracy for Psychopaths

 Donald Trump has to be stopped. The man is a menace to democracy with an insatiable appetite for debauchery, a geriatric career gangster with a rap sheet longer than his Freudian phallic tie. The bastard has left a gruesome trail of mutilated corpses in shallow graves from Atlantic City to Jerusalem and has grievously molested nearly as many institutions as he has teenage sex workers with his greasy little orange pussy grabbers. His crimes have all been absurdly well publicized and flamboyantly brazen, yet somehow all the available polls seem to indicate that this Hammer House monster of a political supervillain could very well take the White House back with a vengeance again in 2024. The mind boggles at such madness. How? How could any sane human being possibly justify voting for such an unapologetically revolting sewer mutant? 

The answer is actually pretty simple, because Joe Biden has to be stopped. After all isn't he also a geriatric career gangster with an insatiable appetite for debauchery? Pretty much every mortal sin that Donald Trump has ever committed, Joe Biden has committed at least twice. The man is a barely veiled racist sexual predator and serial plagiarist who has built a seemingly endless career pushing Black children in front of armored police trucks before posing for selfies with Bono and telling a crowded Baptist church that he was the first white member of the Jackson Five. 

And now that crusty old bitch has added full-blown dementia to his routine. This is why the Democrats store him in a warehouse freezer in Delaware for most of the year and only cart him out when the wreckage of his administration needs to be publicly surveyed in order to prevent an all-out riot. The reasonably dire need to stop a creature like Donald Trump is the only reason why a creature like Joe Biden is even in the White House and the equally reasonably dire need to stop Joe Biden is simultaneously making Donald Trump's seemingly unthinkable return to the scene of the crime a very real possibility.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is American democracy in 2024 and everybody is doing it. While polls show the two grabbiest perverts in the convalescent home neck in neck in their crawl to the White House, they also show a country horrified by these options with CNN finding more people who despise both of these candidates than anybody who actually likes either one of them. This is the rotten fruit of the lesser of two evils, that despicably American fetish shoved down ever bored teenager's throat by jingoistic civics teachers since Jefferson was in nipple clamps.

"There are only two monsters to choose from and you have to vote for whichever one nauseates you the least, otherwise you forfeit the right to bitch about getting raped by one of them at your local drinking hole for the next four years." Fuck you, Mr. Fitzgerald, stop living in my skull. This is the twisted reasoning that has led us to a contest between the two most hated and depraved plutocrats since the last two war criminals who ran for Duce and Americans are beginning to resemble what they vote for.

In every living room, bar, and hair salon across the country you will find perfectly decent working-class human beings mounting passionate defenses for increasingly heinous crimes in the name of American democracy. You will find loving stay-at-home moms defending Donald Trump's attempts to shred the votes of other loving stay-at-home moms because Joe Biden had his flunkies in the media kick sand over the latest escapades of his crackhead son. You will hear hippie peaceniks justify Biden sending cluster munitions to Ukraine because Trump sold worse to the Saudis. This is sick and it just keeps getting worse. The lesser of two evils is nothing more than a mask of sanity to place on the face of an insatiable imperial beast, the kind of moral parlor trick that serves as the cornerstone for any psychopath and that is precisely the path that Americans have chosen. 

We are a country of descent people living comfortably in a spacious ranch house in the suburbs of the first world but there are bodies rotting in the basement and they have been there for a very long time. The imperial killer who built this house for us has done a masterful job of keeping its occupants detached from the crimes committed in our name across the globe but the chickens always come home to roost and the killers we sanction with our votes are increasingly bringing their work home with them, behaving like the dictators they sponsor in the third world while we all smile politely and wash the blood from our dishes before shouting "Everything's fine!" over the screams and power tools. We are living in a horror movie. We aren't the victims in this story yet, but we will be shortly if we don't find a way to flip the script and retake our dignity.

Had they stuck to politics, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy would have had a running shot at winning this game by 2028. After all, Ted was a handsome and charming Rockefeller Republican who worked as an assistant to the chairman of the Wahington state Republican Party and Gacy was a successful Chicago businessman whose work for the local Democratic Party earned him an audience with then First Lady Rosalyn Carter. So, which is the lesser evil? I'm fucking serious here, this is the system, isn't it? If it's Bundy vs Gacy 2028 then which is the responsible choice for American democracy? Bundy is great on taxes but pretty vile on women's lib but hey, at least he's straight and most of his victims are over the age of consent and somebody has to stop that killer clown.

Do you feel sick yet? Are you ashamed of yourself? Good, that's a start. It's a sign that you still have a functioning conscience but mark my words, you won't for long if we continue to use democracy as an excuse to avoid the uncomfortable fact that America is a fundamentally evil institution, one built on genocide and slavery, one that exports mass murder and fascism to every corner of the globe, and both parties are in on it. The candidates are irrelevant. They all serve the same masters, but they are getting worse because America is getting worse, and America is getting worse for the simple reason that evil is not sustainable. Human beings are not designed to live in an amoral cesspool indefinitely. We all crack eventually beneath the weight of our sins.

So, what do we do? Who do we vote for? Here's a radical idea, how about no one? This is a rigged system, and we all know it, so, let's stop justifying its increasingly demented existence by refusing to participate in it. Even if some knight in white shining armor from a third party managed to jump the barricade, what difference would it make? You could put Eugene goddamn Debbs in charge of a slaughterhouse, and it would still be a fucking slaughterhouse. So, let's boycott the slaughterhouse and demand something better as loudly as humanly possible. Let's protest the debates. Let's hold sit-ins outside the polling stations and demand direct referendums on the war in Ukraine and the runaway police state instead of ferrying these responsibilities out to known psychopaths.

Or just simply stop engaging the American government at all. Use your campaign donations to buy a patch of dirt in the sticks and start your own goddamn government. Turn the nearest abandoned box store into a squat and turn that squat into a commune. Do what the real hippies and the Amish did, drop out of a sickening system and start living like human beings again. But whatever you do, stop making excuses for people that we all know are evil just because the other guy sickens you more. That kind of relationship is abusive and believe it or not, you deserve better than to be governed by a democracy of psychopaths. We all do.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* The Future by Leonard Cohen

* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

* Soul to Squeeze by Red Hot Chili Peppers

* Evil by Interpol

* People II: The Reckoning by Andrew Jackson Jihad

* Sin by Nine Inch Nails

* The House That Dripped Blood by the Mountain Goats

* Won't Get Fooled Again by the Who

* The Ballad of Jim Jones by the Brian Jonestown Massacre

* Like Dylan In the Movies by Belle & Sebastian

Revo: Portrait of an Unrepentant All-American Junkie

 "...You made me forget myself, I thought I was someone else, someone good..."

-Lou Reed, American

Hey, have I ever told you guys about my friend Revo, the pansexual recovering everything-addict with a thousand lives and at least twice as many stories? There are so many, it's almost hard to know where to start. There's the time Revo stole his dealer's car with his dealer's girlfriend in it and trashed them both. Or how about the time that Revo got court martialed on terrorism charges after he threatened to blow up the Army base he was stationed at when they refused to serve him a Big Mac at the commissary during a bad acid trip? Or what about the time that an entire gang opened fire on Revo's shitty Toyota during a drug burn and the only one who caught a bullet was one of the stick-up artists? Then there's the time Revo crashed on the couch of a county sheriff in the Deep South for a whole month before that motherfucker even realized that he was harboring a wanted Army deserter. And the time that Revo's deadbeat dad faked his own death for the second time and only told his favorite bastard that he was still alive on Father's Day. Or the time that Revo woke up in a mental institution after a bender only to discover that his wife put him there so she could shack-up with his best friend. 

That's my buddy Revo, the all-American super junkie who will fuck anything that moves with an eight ball up their ass and that's probably the version of him that both he and America wants you to see. The dangerous and insatiable menace to society covered from head to toe in a shadowy camouflage of prison ink and track marks. Revo isn't even his real name, it's a nickname picked up in the joint that's short for Repeat Violent Offender. Naturally, the two of us got on from day one like a house on fire. Afterall, both of us are lifelong misfits who turned to anarchism after every other form of social arson failed to sooth the rage that we share for the society that discarded us like trash. Playing the role of the villain can feel like a safe place when you spend your life running and that's the other side of Revo that very few people ever see. My buddy Revo was born Justin Pomeroy and Justin has just as many stories.

These stories just happen to be a lot less glamorous and a lot harder to tell with that cocky meth-head grin that makes Revo come across like an extra in a pirate film. The story of a sensitive effeminate kid raised by wolves in family clothing. The story of a little boy who was sold for drugs by his own mother and molested more times than he could count before he was old enough to even know what sex was. The story of a child bounced from foster home to foster home to juvenile detention center until he was too institutionalized to see straight. A white trash scale from a busted-up town who ended up in the Army because he didn't know any other way out of the holler. A crack shot marksman who watched nearly every brother in his platoon get blown to bits killing other poor people in Iraq. A disgraced veteran who turned back to his childhood friend heroin to make the screams stop before moving on to crystal meth and doing a decade in prison for killing a man who tried to kill him during a drug burn.

These are the stories about Revo that few people ever hear, not because Revo isn't willing to tell them but because most people can't be bothered to listen. Justin is Revo and Revo is an unrepentant veteran of the War on Drugs with all the scars to prove it, but he is also so much more than that. He is a gifted artist who hands out tattoos like party favors and writes songs that burn holes through your soul. He is one of the funniest and most resourceful people that I've ever met, and I am proud to tell anyone who'll listen that I love that twisted fucking bastard like a brother. My brother just happens to have an addiction to obliterating himself in nearly every single way imaginable and it breaks my heart that we live in a country that seems to agree that this is the hellish fate that he deserves.

All of these politicians wax philosophic and cry crocodile tears over the innocent victims of America's opioid crisis, but that notion is a contrived fiction pimped out for campaign dollars. There are no innocent victims of the opioid crisis because the War on Drugs has made them all guilty. Your average dealer and indeed your average repeat violent offender is your average junkie, and your average junkie is a child abused by the same system that both parties are currently engaged in using addiction to justify putting on life support.

The Republicans are the worst, calling for people like Revo to be shot in the streets as enemy combatants of the cartels, but the Democrats aren't much better. For every dollar they promise to spend on Narcan there is another ten that they want to hurl to the bevy of industrial complexes that take kids like Justin and convert them into menacing super predators like Revo and I'm not just talking about the armies, prisons and cops. I'm talking about the blatantly abusive compulsory schools and so-called child welfare programs like the foster care system that feed them with fresh recruits of broken and institutionalized little bodies every fucking day. And way too many of these bodies are Queer for that to just be a coincidence.

Nearly every study on the subject shows that Queer kids like me and Justin experience far higher rates of physical, sexual and emotional abuse then our heterosexual playmates. We are also more than twice as likely to experience foster care placement where the Supreme Court has decided that we should be many more times as likely to face violence, exploitation, discrimination and neglect as a price for the religious liberties of parental slavedrivers. From here many of my fellow Queer child abuse survivors like Revo graduate to other beloved American institutions of systemic violence like the military where their rage and boredom are mined and weaponized to kill even more broken kids until they too break beneath the weight of the trauma and get emptied out into the streets with nothing but a prescription to numb the nightmares and an endless procession of gladhanding assholes thanking them for their service before calling the cops to have them carted off the streets.

I wish I could tell you that there is a cure for addiction just like I wish I could tell you that my buddy Revo isn't going to return to the needle again, but fairytales are for politicians, and I refuse to traffic in those kinds of narcotics just to make myself feel better. What I can tell you is that the government has never done a goddamn thing for people like Revo other than to give them more reasons to use. I can also tell you that Revo stopped using narcotics for eight months straight after joining my little Queer anarchist tribe of broken toys because we are the first family that he has ever had that hasn't demanded his sobriety in exchange for our support. We've all been hurt too many times ourselves to pretend like we have any right to judge him that way. But we also love him too goddamn much to give up on him and let him believe all the bullshit institutions that convinced a scared child that he was too broken to exist without poison in his veins. And together we carry this weight so no one has to carry it alone.

This is the only real defense that any of us have against the state, its trauma, and the addictions that they feed, and that defense is called community, any group of people more committed to each other's mutual aid than any other ideology or institution. If you really want to help a junkie, then start by remembering that addicts are just human beings doing what they feel they have to do to get by and maybe try throwing some empathy their way before pushing a bunch of laws that just make them somebody else's problem. Just a few thoughts from an unrepentant misfit who happens to love an all-American junkie. 

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Fall Back Down by Rancid

* In the Garage by Weezer

* Like a Friend by Pulp

* My Way by Sid Vicious

* If I Ever Leave This World Alive by Flogging Molly

* Joiner by Blondshell

* I Am Trying to Break Your Heart by Wilco

* Doll Parts by Hole

* Hardline by Julien Baker

* Pictures of Success by Rilo Kiley

* You Can't Put Your Arm Around a Memory by Johnny Thunders

* See a Little Light by Bob Mould

* Perfect Day by Lou Reed

The Long Shadow of Yevgeny Prigozhin's Ghost or: How the New Cold War Became Another Slave War

 And just like that, they declared the Devil dead. After a meteoric career that found him playing the role of the bane of quite literally everyone's existence, Yevgeny Prigozhin: Russian super mercenary was annihilated in a death straight out of an eighties action flick. Burnt beyond recognition in a fiery plane crash with nine of his goons just north of Moscow in the rural Tvor Oblast.

Much like the rest of Yevgeny Prigozhin's biography, his demise seemed downright improbable but that doesn't mean it isn't true. A Soviet gangster-turned hotdog vendor who had climbed his way to the top of Yeltsin's crony capitalist dystopia to spin a catering empire into a globetrotting crypto-fascist death squad, Yevgeny the Terrible burst into flames as one of the most universally despised men on the planet. A real-life supervillain whose fearsome Wagner Group nearly single-handedly turned the tide of Putin's hopeless jihad to conquer Ukraine only to bite the hand that fed him caviar and human flesh by launching a mutiny against the Kremlin that ended as quickly and as weirdly as it had begun. But then in a poof of smoke, he was gone.

My first response was 'Bullshit!' There had to be a different angle here. The whole thing just didn't add up to me. On the two-month anniversary of his highly publicized and humiliating 24-hour uprising against Putin's rule, a career killer, all-but marked for death, gets on board a private jet headed straight for enemy territory with his fucking name on the charter. I'm just not buying it. 

How do we even know if this motherfucker is really dead? The paranoid side of me is thinking that Nosferatu is living it up on a steady diet of Johnnie Walker and brown-brown down in some Sub-Saharan outback, playing warlord to a bunch of teenage dope fiends in Toyota technicals. And I tend to trust the paranoid side of me. That bitch has a pretty tight record. 

But the rest of the world seems strangely content to just except the Devil's mysterious death at face value and move on. After making a few mincingly maudlin remarks designed to cream the panties of his tankie war-blogger fan-club, Putin publicly washed his hands like Pontius Pilate and disappeared back into his hole in the Kremlin. For his part, Putin's dilapidated Yankee counterpart, Joe Biden, basically just grumbled 'Putin did it" and declared the whole thing to be a "sideshow" before cautioning us all not to get too distracted from the big picture of blowing Ukraine to bits.  

Regardless of Prigozhin's true fate, both sides of an increasingly paranoid proxy war in Eastern Europe seem to be in complete agreeance that there is nothing to see here, and this fact fascinates me more than any conspiracy theory. Usually, the moneychangers in the war rooms of Babylon jump on any narrative that makes Vladimir Putin look like Ra's al Ghul with ICBMs and their doppelgangers in the Kremlin generally aren't too far behind them, declaring every body that shows up on their doorstep to be an American false flag operation. So why not this time? Why is the burnt offering of Prigozhin's presumed corpse the only smoldering heap that these creeps refuse to poke with a stick? 

If I were a gambling gal, I would hedge my bets on the possibility that this has something to do with the fact that what old Yevgeny represents is actually a whole lot more terrifying to a world at war than anything he actually was. Contrary to popular lore, the Wagner Group were a relatively insignificant horde of neo-Nazi hitmen for the lion's share of their putrid existence, but world wars have a tendency to make mountains out of mutants. 

Founded by Prigozhin following the 2014 NATO coup in Ukraine as a way for Moscow oligarchs to hijack legitimate popular dissent among ethnic Russians in the Donbass, Wagner evolved into a cruel posse of career sadists tasked with carrying out the dirty work that even a wanna-be despot like Vladimir Putin couldn't afford on his rap sheet. This all changed in 2022 when the Kremlin once again used the plight of the Donbass as an excuse for imperial plunder. This is when Putin opened the gates of his gulags to Prigozhin and Wagner transformed overnight into a formidable army of modern-day gladiators. 

Between February and December of 2022, western intelligence sources estimate that Wagner's ranks swelled from just several thousand to nearly 50,000 with the majority of the new recruits being Russian convicts offered the opportunity to fight for their freedom. To these men, Putin's "special operation" in Ukraine wasn't about denazification or national chauvinism, it was about their own liberation from one of the most heinous prison systems on earth and they fought like starving lions to receive it. 

But Mother Russia never had any intention of living up to their end of the bargain. To the Kremlin, Wagner's new recruits were nothing but expendable sacks of meat to be chucked into NATO's woodchipper. Tens of thousands of these desperate convicts were eviscerated in waves in Bakhmut alone and even after they actually managed to win that holocaust, they found themselves under attack from the regular Russian infantry who they were ordered to hand the territory back over to.

This isn't to say that Prigozhin was some kind of Spartacus, he just played one online to keep his men in toe, bragging about his own checkered past as a convict and playing the part of the rebel warlord for the camera phones. During a period of near universal consensus on the omnipotence of Putin's military brilliance among the Russian intelligentsia, Yevgeny stood virtually alone in provocatively thumbing his nose at the Czar with social media posts trashing his Kremlin sponsors. 

I'm of the opinion that this performance only became real when Prigozhin's star grew too bright and brazen for his master's comfort. He had to be reined in, but Comrade Spartacus was having too much fun to stop. The last straw came when the generals ordered Prigozhin to hand over his private army to the regular command structure before he was done playing the bad motherfucker.

This is when Prigozhin decided to launch his mutiny, a high octane hissy fit that saw an army of heavily tattooed war slaves take a major Russian army town like Rostov-on-Don with shocking ease before being met in the streets by local civilians like heroes. It turns out that Prigozhin's populist schtick sold big with the rest of the Russian population as well. A population who clearly hates NATO but hates their own nation's military industrial complex even more. And why shouldn't they? After all, Yevgeny's Heroes weren't the only indentured servants coming home in pine boxes. 800,000 Russian citizens have been conscripted against their will in this war and over 200,000 of them have died for the vanity of the same elites whom that former hot dog vendor dared to piss on.

Even after Comrade Spartacus was bought off in some strange deal brokered by Belarussian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, the specter of a renegade army of motley slaves bringing a former superpower to its knees remained toxic to forces far greater than the Kremlin. Joe Biden and his handlers have little interest in highlighting Putin's cantankerous slave army because they themselves are currently lording over one of their own in the nation NATO loves to burn with Raytheon matches. 

The official number of Ukraine's conscripts remains a tightly guarded secret, but Volodymyr Zelensky has sealed off his borders to all men between the ages of 18 and 60 and has declared his own dirty war against a growing tide of Ukrainians trying to escape an endless fucking war that makes less and less sense to the average prole with each passing hour.

In the beginning, Ukrainian conscripts were simply tasked with defending their own cities and these poorly trained civilians kicked ass for the same reason the gulag refugees in Wagner did, they were literally fighting for their own freedom. But after Putin's army retreated back to the Donbass, these victorious freedom fighters were sent to die in someone else's city. 

Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 largely on the strength of his promise to uphold the Minsk Agreement that was supposed to end NATO's war on the Donbass by granting that region the nominal autonomy they deserve. Now, after declaring martial law and being fed a steady diet of American tax dollars, Zelensky has declared his intention to fight forever to conquer that same damn territory and the Ukrainian people are calling bullshit by deserting in droves. 

Biden and Putin don't want anyone paying close attention to this because it all highlights the fact that neither side of this stupid fucking war is actually interested in fighting it anymore and they would both prefer that Yevgeny Prigozhin simply evaporate like a hot fart in a stiff wind because alive or dead he is a terrifying reminder that any army of slaves is just one mutiny away from a revolution. 

The antiwar war movements in both the east and the west need to approach ending this holocaust like abolitionists because whether they are convicts or conscripts or just desperate teenagers from dead-end towns, your average standing army is comprised largely of what any sane anarchist should recognize as a slave. The best hope we have to end this war and all wars is to encourage the slaves on every side to revolt the same way we did with the GI Movement that sabotaged the Vietnam War in a beautiful wave of officer fraggings and mass desertions.

Yevgeny Prigozhin may or may not be dead, but abolition lives on in the throat of every soldier shouting "Sir! No sir!" to a bullshit war with zero winners outside of the fucking yacht club and that's a mutiny we should all get in on.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* All Along the Watchtower by the Jimi Hendrix Experience

* I'll Believe in Anything by Wolf Parade

* Wardance by Killing Joke

* White Collar Boy by Belle & Sebastian

* Can't You Hear Me Knocking by the Rolling Stones

* El President by Drugstore featuring Thom Yorke

* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

* This is Why We Fight by the Decembrists

* We've Gotta Get Out of This Place by the Animals

* Atmosphere by Joy Division

The Passion of Imran Khan and the Price of Aggressive Neutrality

 Imran Khan should not be confused with a hero. He is really more of a dick, which I believe is the politically correct term for 'politician' now that most westerners have soured on 'pig-raping cunt-devil.' An international cricket star with a flair for the camera, Khan was part of a global trend of wealthy conmen posing as populist savior figures. He successfully ran for Pakistan's perpetually embattled premiership in 2018 under the banner of his Movement for Justice (PTI) Party with the promise of taking on the financial gangsters in the IMF and overseeing the institution of a grand "Islamic welfare state."

What Khan delivered upon his victory was really more of a series of concessions to his fellow elites, asking Pakistan's working class to shoulder the weight of a globally mandated austerity regime while the oligarchs who financed Khan's campaign continued to count their bounty untaxed and unmolested. It's for these reasons and many more that it has been very easy to discount Imran Khan's claims to be the victim of an American conspiracy to keep him out of power as just another theatrical circus trick by a daft political acrobat but just because you're a dick doesn't mean that they're not after you.

Pakistan has been a nation in catastrophic upheaval since Imran Khan was ousted as Prime Minister after an abrupt no-confidence vote in parliament last year. Such an event can't exactly be seen as particularly shocking considering that in the last 75 years no prime minister of an elected government in Pakistan has ever completed a full fiver year term, but the timing of this latest legislative coup is more than a little suspicious. 

After Khan provoked the ire of the western foreign policy establishment by refusing to join them in freezing out Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine, America's Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, Donald Lu, met with Pakistan's Ambassador to the United States, Asad Majeed Khan (no relation) the day before the telltale vote took place. Imran insists that the US demanded at this meeting that the Pakistani establishment, desperate for American aid, purge the prime minister from their ranks and cables recently leaked to the Intercept by anonymous military sources seem to corroborate this story. 

Unsurprisingly, Imran Khan has refused to go silently into that good night. In the months that have followed his ouster, with Pakistan teetering precariously on the brink of outright civil war, Khan's supporters in the PTI have held massive and at times downright violent demonstrations targeting the embattled playboy's former allies in the nation's notoriously corrupt military. The military in turn has lashed back with increasingly draconian crackdowns on dissidents that have seen thousands arrested and tried before military tribunals as a slew of laws have been passed crushing civil liberties, criminalizing criticism of the armed forces and granting those forces veto power over virtually all political and civil affairs.

During this time, Khan himself has been arrested, shot and arrested again as he continues an increasingly quixotic crusade to reclaim his leadership. His latest arrest on corruption charges has seen him barred from political office for five years in the months leading up to an election that most polls show Khan leading and this is where that dick's enemies find themselves in a potentially violent jam. The more aggressively the system opposes the former premier's demands for democratic restitution, the guiltier they look to a nation sick and tired of being the plaything of international power brokers, and confronting those powers was the one thing that Imran Khan did right.

For however you or I may feel about Mr. Khan and his dubious ambitions, the man is not being persecuted for the sin of corruption. That crime comes with the territory of running any state, especially in the post-colonial mire of the third world. No, Imran Khan was targeted because he is a neutralist, specifically in regard to the west's newly revived cold war against Russia and China. Secretary Lu made this quite clear during his thinly veiled threats at the Pakistani Embassy exposed by the Intercept. Before stating ominously that "I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington" that vaunted statesman mused in all his marbled omnipotence that "People here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position, if such a position is even possible."

Such a position is very possible as Khan has proved in spades. Not only had he refused to get involved in the NATO-Putin proxy war over Ukraine, but he had also strengthened ties with his neighbors in China and refused to offer the US military access to Pakistani bases as they fled their twenty-year clusterfuck with his other neighbors in Afghanistan. This is why America has slashed its military aid to Pakistan by hundreds of millions of dollars since Khan took power, sending a clear message to the Pakistani Military elites that America does not tolerate friends who refuse to share our enemies without reservation.

This is the primary reason that a jaded anarchist like me was willing to take a pig-raping cunt-devil like Imran Khan at his word on his cries of American conspiracy even before the evidence began piling up with the dead bodies in the streets. As an obsessive-compulsive student of empire, I have heard this story before, and it doesn't end well for anybody. The only thing more severe than Washington's hatred for the mortal sin of neutrality are the downright grotesque lengths that they seem willing to go to snuff it out. You can ask the ghost of Sukarno if you don't believe me.

Much like Khan, Sukarno was no hero. He was an authoritarian dick who came to be Indonesia's first president for life by collaborating with the Japanese and was more than happy to accept gifts from the American Military Industrial Complex to help him solidify his rule over a massive archipelago that never should have been consolidated beneath a single centralized authority in the first place. But Sukarno was also a wildcard with an independent streak. You know, the type of dick you'd like to share an opium pipe with. A founding father of the Non-Aligned Movement that sought to keep the third world out of the original Cold War, Sukarno insisted on maintaining ties to China and the Soviet Union and refused to crackdown on his nation's communist party, the PKI, which at 3 million strong was the largest cadre of its kind outside of the Sino-Soviet Bloc.

For these heinous alliances, our boy Sukarno had to go. After years of failed plots that involved everything from bankrolling worthy secessionist movements to producing phony sex tapes with Sukarno stunt doubles (seriously), the US used the murder of six top Indonesian generals in what now appears to have been a false flag attack to put Sukarno's top general, Suharto, in power in 1965. What followed was a year of savage bloodlust that should go down in history as one of the worst acts of mass barbarism of the past century.

Under the explicit direction of the CIA and the American Embassy in Jakarta, Suharto's military carried out the liquidation of an entire political party, slaughtering somewhere between 1 and 3 million men, women and children for their affiliation with the PKI as American officials gleefully checked thousands of names off a detailed hit list supplied to the killers. This is how America responds to aggressive neutrality. Sukarno got off easy, dying relatively comfortably under house arrest in 1970. The nation he founded has never recovered and I fear the same fate for Pakistan, specifically the mostly working-class proles in the PTI fighting for Khan in the streets. They're already being rounded up like animals. How long before America decides to finish the job with another friendly visit to the Pakistani embassy?

Dicks like Imran Khan and Sukarno don't deserve such loyalty and their willingness to sell it out has been well recorded. But this is bigger than the egos of powerful mavericks or even the empires that they chafe. This is about poor people who are sick and fucking tired of being caught between the rich and their stupid fucking wars. Why should Pakistan get involved in the Donbass any more than Ukraine should get involved in Kashmir? 

Wouldn't we all be better off if we just ended these imperial military alliances once and for all and stuck to our own goddamn neighborhoods? Wouldn't that send a far stronger message to meddling thugs like Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden? This commonsense populist approach to anti-imperialism is what a truly aggressive neutrality is really all about and this is why empires like America have to stamp it out in places like Islamabad and Jakarta. Because they know how affective the threat of a good example can be on their own unruly proles in places like Pittsburgh and Warsaw.

Our best hope as stateless anti-imperialists is to divorce these movements from the dicks and their parties as well as any other form of institutional leadership for that matter, to recognize neutrality as the only form of globalism that works because it encourages the diversity and self-sufficiency that all other forms of political universalism crush. When the non-interventionism of this civilized autonomy finally surpasses the political and returns to its proper role as a basic cultural trait implicit in every village, not only will imperialism fail, it will be rendered totally obsolete. 

My stubborn commitment to revolutionary optimism leaves me with few other choices but to grind my teeth and look forward to this day, with or preferably without Imran Khan.

Peace, Love and Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding by Elvis Costello

* Rainy Day Woman by Bob Dylan

* Geppetto by Belly

* Your Little Hoodrat Friend by the Hold Steady

* Give It Up for Love by Georgia

* The Man Who Sold the World by Nirvana

* I Bet on Losing Dogs by Mitski

* Voices Carry by Sky Ferreira

* Victim of Love by Erasure

* See No Evil by Television

* Fire Eyed Boy by Broken Social Scene

The American Empire Has Been Burning Hawaii for Over One-Hundred Years

 "Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have been abused, and this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come full circle, back to where they started. That's revolution."

-Russell Means

“Never cease to act because you fear you may fail. The true secret is to know your own worth. It will carry you through many dangers.”

-Queen Liliuokalani

It's been weeks since hell came to Maui, but the fire is still smoldering. The sights from paradise are almost too horrific to believe. One of the most beautiful places on God's once green earth has been reduced to an ashen death heap straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare. The word 'wildfire' doesn't even feel appropriate. What befell the people of that island is something more akin to the kind of genocidal weather terrorism performed by General Curtis LeMay during the Second World War. The kind of cannibal firestorm that devoured the people of Frankfurt and Tokyo. Something too wicked to come from Satan. The cruel hand of man was clearly at play here.

As of the writing of this dispatch the official death toll stands at 115 but by the time you read this that number will likely have doubled. There are still hundreds missing. Most of them children and most of them will likely never be identified because there is nothing left to identify. Ground zero of the Maui wildfires was the ancient city of Lahaina and a disproportionate number of its victims were working class kids sent home from school while their parents toiled for meager wages at nearby resorts. There is plenty of blame to go around for this atrocity, from climate change to inept government malfeasance, but very few people seem willing to address the giant flaming elephant in the room. Hawaii's answer to the firebombing of Frankfurt is the direct result of nearly two centuries of colonialism and Uncle Sam was the sadistic, cigar-chomping, general who led the siege. 

The wildfires on Maui occurred due to a deadly combination of unprecedented drought and high winds from Hurricane Dora. Those winds appear to have brought down several powerlines but the only reason the inferno those downed powerlines conjured was even able to crash into the city of Lahaina with such turbulent speed was because western invaders had built it the perfect highway out of fields of abandoned plantations infested with nonnative guinea grass. 

This tinder had been introduced to the island in the 19th century by American government backed conglomerates like the Dole Pineapple Company who forcibly shifted the land away from ancient indigenous resource management practices to massive factory farms. When those gangsters moved on to rape greener pastures in the 90s, greedy developers and land speculators swooped in, raising the price of the unused land too high for any subsistence farmer to afford, leaving these vast grasslands to sit unmanaged until the wildfires came. And the war on Hawaii's native poor burns on without mercy.

Modern Hawaii is a neocolonial playground of golf courses and gated communities that cater to the whims of elitist outsiders over the islands' indigenous community. The fires of Lahaina simply painted this hideous picture clearly by the light of the embers. A picture of an economic apartheid state in which a spiraling housing crisis has led to the median price of a single-family home to top $1 million dollars triggering a net population loss that sees more native Hawaiians forced to find a living off their own homeland than within it.

And many of the survivors of Lahaina are likely join this picture as more than half of Maui county's population lives on an income of less than $100,000 dollars a year per family, making the price of simply rebuilding too expensive for natives who have lived humbly on their own tiny slice of paradise for generations but not too expensive for the poachers of the American oligarchy. 

While Maui is home to some of the hardest working poor in the state, their neighbors include billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Oprah Winfrey who may be all too happy to be photographed handing out scraps to the lowly native proles but aren't about to be caught offering one square inch of their thousand acre plantations to the dispossessed who can't even afford the ashes they camp on because of the very gentrification those bleeding heart colonialist's wrought for a vacation home.

The only thing more despicably Dickensian than the schilling slinging charity of Hawaii's howlie Scrooge class is the stone-cold indifference of their puppet regime back in Washington. It took nearly a week for President Biden to cut his Rehoboth Beach vacation short to so much as comment on the massacre in Lahaina, with that increasingly senile old Meiser simply grumbling "no comment" from his boardwalk recumbent bicycle before he could be dragged before a podium to hurl $700 dollars to people who have nothing while he spends that much money per second on scatter bombs for Ukraine.

Is it really any wonder that when this bastard finally managed to schlepp his geriatric carcass to the scene of the crime with his slovenly coterie of DNC apparatchiks that this shallow photo-op was met by a raucous sea of fuck you's and middle fingers from the locals? That's because Joe Biden is not those people's president and Hawaii is not American soil. It is a sovereign nation that has been illegally occupied by the American Empire since its monarchy was violently overthrown in a military coup 130 years ago. 

There is quite simply no way for Americans to comprehend the devastation in Lahaina without first knowing the history of colonial plunder that led to its destruction and I may be but a gonzo howlie raconteur, but I still feel compelled by spirits greater than my own to provide you with the best crash course that my sympathetic rage can deliver.

Hawaii declared its independence from the United Kingdom in 1829 and passed its constitution in 1840 but even as an independent and internationally recognized sovereign nation the islands continued to find themselves throttled by the ravages of colonialism. The first Christian missionaries came to the islands in the early 1820s and they quickly sold the native monarchy on the virtues of using monotheism to keep their subjects in line. They also brought diseases that wiped out 84% of the island's native population in less than twenty years and invited corporate hegemons who pillaged the land with cheap cattle ranches and pineapple plantations.

Then came King Kalakua who took the throne in 1879 and attempted to put a harness on this bullshit, sparking the first Hawaiian Renaissance by promoting indigenous culture and building stronger ties with rising powers in the Pacific like Imperial Japan. This bold campaign to redeclare Hawaiian independence only accelerated under the rule of Kalakua's little sister, Queen Liliuokalani and a coup was hatched against her by a junta of corporate gangsters in 1893. 

Led by the fascist pineapple baron Sanford Ballard Dole and backed by 300 US Marines who had a stake in keeping their exclusive toehold on Pearl Harbor, the Crown was overthrown and replaced by the self-styled and unelected Republic of Hawaii. Even then-President Grover Cleveland protested this act of unilateral tyranny, but he also sat on his hands while Dole redistributed the land to his cronies and banned the Hawaiian language from being taught in schools.

In spite of a petition signed by 95% of Hawaii's native population, Cleveland's arch-imperialist replacement, William McKinley formally annexed Hawaii in 1898, pompously declaring it to be American soil the same year that he ruthlessly stole the Philippines and Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War. A fine young anarchist shot that genocidal pigfucker in 1901 but not soon enough to save Hawaii from over a century of colonial violence that includes mass militarization, ecological devastation, forced repopulation, sexual slavery, over construction and the ongoing rampages of gentrification.

A Second Hawaiian Renaissance was sparked by the revolutionary third world fever of the 1960s and 70s, with Native Hawaiians taking a page from their comrades in the Vietcong and the American Indian Movement in 1976 when they launched the brazen occupation of a little island in Maui County called Kaho'olawe which Dwight Eisenhower had ethnically cleansed and gifted to the Navy for target practice in 1953. Amazingly the American government backed down to popular local support for the Protect Kaho'olawe Movement, ending the bombing and transferring control back to the state. And from this unexpected grassroots victory a movement to restore Hawaii's God given sovereignty flourished on the fringes of country club country.

I believe that this is precisely what the people of Lahaina need right now. Not corporate charity or FEMA scams but independence from the empire that has illegally occupied their paradise and turned it into the headquarters for our next world war with China. After all, Lahaina was the original capitol of the Hawaiian Kingdom and a crossroads for trade and peace between tribes across Polynesia. It seems only fitting to me that this great nation should rise again from those ashes to sabotage America's last conquest in the Pacific Rim.

My own humble tribe may be but a dozen Queer anarchists in the backwoods of rural Pennsylvania, but I speak for our one-acre autonomous zone when I call on all stateless revolutionaries to stand united with the Hawaiian nation and support an end to America's illegal occupation. Our solidarity is all we have to give but if I know anything about Hawaiian culture it's that solidarity is the only thing those proud people have ever needed from outsiders to take back what's rightfully theirs.

Peace, Love & Mahalo- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Declare Independence by Bjork

* Misirlou by Dick Dale

* Drown by Smashing Pumpkins

* Paper Planes by MIA

* Moon Over Marin by Dead Kennedys

* Comeback Kid by Sleigh Bells

* Surfin' Bird by the Ramones

* Holiday Song by the Pixies

* Oblivion by Grimes

* What About Us by Ministry

The Free Market Should be a Weapon Against the Rich

"Every victim of statism has internalized the state to some degree... Should the taxpayers completely cut off the blood supply, the vampire state would helplessly perish, its unpaid police and army deserting almost immediately, defanging the monster."

-Samuel Edward Konkin III

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

-Antonio Gramsci

Everybody hates the rich and why not? We have nothing, they have everything, and they fucking stole it from us. I may not be the Castro worshipping Bolshevik I was in my twenties but as the Russians like to say, the communists were wrong about everything but capitalism. Just take a quick look around you if you don't believe me. As the world literally chokes and burns on the exhaust fumes of private jets and Reaper drones, contemporary global inequality continues to creep closer and closer to the rank levels of excess last observed at the peak of the Gilded Age and America still leads the heat with wider disparities of wealth between the rich and poor than any other major developed nation on earth.

From the Great Depression to the Great Recession, time and time again, the One Percent has dragged the rest of us to the edge of one abyss after another and they have learned absolutely nothing. If anything, they've gotten worse, exploiting every new crisis they provoke with another industrial complex that shakes us down for pocket change while they sodomize their cousins and bleach their assholes.

It's little wonder that class warfare has never been more popular. In fact, it's become downright mainstream with even the Republicans getting in on the outrage. As they desperately struggle to shed their well cultivated image as the greed-is-good party, the GOP is beginning to sound downright Maoist with their increasingly incendiary calls to use the heavy levers of big government to punish or even annihilate the coastal elites and their woke conspiracy to make working class heroes sit down to pee.

Naturally, it doesn't take Antonio Gramsci to realize that this is just another work. The Republicans despise big tech and their partners in the burgeoning green economy because those cocky new upstarts pose a threat to the GOP's own pet gangsters in the rusting industrial and extraction industries. What we're actually witnessing here isn't the working-class takeover of the GOP that populist gadflies like Steve Bannon like to wax philosophic about on their podcasts. What we're witnessing is a growing civil war between competing cartels of oligarchs during the collapse of the morally bankrupt western civilization that gave birth to them both. In other words, the silver spoon riding whores of the Second Gilded Age are building even more industrial complexes to exploit the crisis of their own demise. Dante wept for there were no more hells left to dream of.

The only real service that the Republican Party's new Hardhat Riot routine provides to the poor they seek to exploit is that this theater does a pretty fantastic job of exposing a lot of the long-standing myths about the GOP's relationship with socialism and the free market. Contrary to the ramblings of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, Republicans actually love socialism as long as it is the statist variety that transfers private property from the cold dead grip of the individual to the greasy mitts of big government. That's because there is nothing particularly revolutionary about this mutant breed of socialism. It's all about empowering an untouchable taker class to rob working people of their agency and this kind of socialism is actually precisely how the rich became the rich in the first place.

Gore Vidal wasn't just being cheeky when he called capitalism "Socialism for the rich." Every single billionaire, every global conglomerate, every Fortune 500 company is the direct product of the state. Without big government there would be no big business. Without highway subsidies and eminent domain there would be no Walmart. Without copyright laws and patents there would be no big pharma. Without the World Bank and the Fed there would be no George Soros. Without standing armies and world wars there would be no Exxon Mobile, no Lockheed Martin, no nuclear arms race, no global fucking warming.

No, Gore Vidal wasn't being cheeky at all when he called capitalism "Socialism for the rich." If anything, he didn't take that logic far enough. Any form of state socialism ultimately becomes just another luxurious plaything for the rich. Hell, even Castro died a millionaire. But state socialism isn't real socialism and capitalism doesn't have a goddamn thing to do with the free market.

Socialism at its base is any system that grants workers full control over the means of production. The very existence of the state renders this feat impossible by putting a permanent bureaucracy between the workers and the means of production, essentially monopolizing these means in the process. The free market or at least any truly free market is likewise rendered impossible by the existence of the state. The free market is essentially just the free exchange of goods and services without the intervention of coercive forces.

Quite possibly the greatest kept secret in the history of modern civilization is the fact that real socialism actually requires a truly free market to thrive. The original socialists of western Continental Philosophy, your Godwin's and your Proudhon's, the motherfuckers Marx ripped off, bastardized and then conveniently demonized, were all free marketeers because they recognized the free market as the greatest weapon in the working man's arsenal.

This isn't to say that the free market is an end unto itself. That kind of foolish utopian navel gazing is precisely what turned the International into a league of flatulence huffing dogmatic assholes. I don't fetishize the free market as some kind of silly Randian Lalaland of flowing wine and low hanging fruit. It is a tool to get what I want and what I want is the autonomy for all poor people to live in any kind of voluntary society that doesn't force its will on others because this level of universal working-class autonomy is likely the closest thing to a guarantee of living free that my own little tribe of Queer agrarian freaks is ever going to find. A simple social contract that reads 'get weird as long as I can get weird too.'

Needless to say, this unorthodox philosophy finds me at the awkward crossroads of some very strange territory. I now consider myself to be not just post-Marxist but post-left because I don't feel like any current left-wing movement has much to offer my people aside from crass tokenism and pandering assimilation. 

Quite frankly, Queer people seemed to be a hell of a lot better off in indigenous heathen tribes that pre-existed this whole left-right paradigm by a millennia. But I do believe that if the left wants to have any chance of achieving their goals, which are still largely my goals too, then they need to do the polar opposite of what the populist right is doing right now. They need to embrace the free market as a weapon against the rich as do we all.

We need to stop voting and start organizing. We need to diversify our tactics and we need to target the fixed capitalist market itself with a revolutionary campaign of guerrilla counter-economics. What the left-libertarian Gramsci, Samuel Edward Konkin III, called agorism, a complex and expanding network of voluntary exchanges that occur completely outside of the state's grasp. This wild territory already exists in the form of the black market with sex work, cryptocurrencies, dark web chatrooms, digital silk roads, undocumented labor, bootlegging and counterfeiting.

But this market needs to be radicalized with the inclusion of co-ops, homesteads, mutual aid associations, communes, free schools, squats and syndicalist trade unions. We need to integrate the underground into a united front of divided tribal organizations that can exist and thrive without the state and then we need to drop out, sit back, crack open a cold bottle of knock-off Coke and watch the billionaires of the vampire class starve without a neck to suck dry.

Because when and only when egalitarians of all stripes return to their free-market roots will the pigs of the One Percent's days of plenty truly be numbered and this is one free-market post-Marxist who's looking forward to that day with bated breath and a sharpened butcher knife.

Free the market! Fuck the rich!

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful by Morrissey 

* Beautiful Ones by Suede

* Eat the Rich by Motorhead

* Here Comes Success by Iggy Pop

* Veronica Mars by Blondeshell

* Bohemian Like You by the Dandy Warhols

* Lasting Friend by Samia

* Daddy Was a Bank Robber by the Clash

* Beginning to See the Light by the Velvet Underground

Dancing with Sharon Tate on Vincent Bugliosi's Grave

 "Where there is official censorship, it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers."

-Paul Goodman

America is a nation that loves its folklore and God help me, I do to. Who doesn't love a good bedtime story? The Good War that saved the free world from fascism, the benevolent reign of the Kennedy Dynasty over the grassy knolls of Camelot, the Space Race that put American democracy on the moon... These tales are all as much a part of the fabric of my childhood as Paul Bunyan, Jesus Christ and the Easter Bunny. 

The tricky thing about folklore though is that just because it's fun to believe doesn't mean that it represents reality and American folklore is no exception to this rule. After all, America only entered the Good War after communism had already kicked fascism's skinny white ass and the Kennedy's were just a bunch of drunken rapists who hired the leftover Nazis to put us on the moon just to stick it to the Soviets while we lost in Vietnam.

This August marks the 54th anniversary of one of my personal favorite American folk tales. One that has amazingly stood the test of time relatively unmolested by the ravages of reality. I speak of the legend of Helter Skelter, a horror story about a brutal spree of frenzied bloodbaths that claimed the lives of no less than seven innocent people including a beautiful blonde starlet named Sharon Tate and her four glamorous house guests in the Hollywood Hills. 

This story also gave America the sadistic gift of our most cherished supervillain, the hippie Rasputin, Charles Manson, who controlled the minds of a zombie army of quarterbacks and prom queens to do his evil bidding. The most incredible thing about this legend is that nearly every detail that we think we know about it comes from a single source; Vincent Bugliosi, the valiant prosecutor who used Helter Skelter to jail Charlie and his Family and turned the case into the highest selling work of "true crime" literature ever published.

The basic story goes that Charlie Manson used LSD to brainwash a bunch of all-American teeny-boppers into slaughtering several B-list celebrities and a middle-class suburban couple in order to spark a race war foretold in the lyrics of a Beatles' album. The Blacks would win but once it became clear that they couldn't handle the reins of power, they would gladly hand them over to Charlie and his Family who would rise from their hole in the desert to take their place as the rightful rulers of a post-apocalyptic utopia. This is the "official story", and most Americans still buy it even though the man who wrote it doesn't. 

Vincent Bugliosi admitted within a couple years of prosecuting the Manson Family that he didn't buy a single word he used to sentence them all to death. Over the years, while continuing to collect royalty checks for Helter Skelter, Bug has sported another popular version of the events that made him famous, claiming that Charlie Manson's real goal was to get revenge on record producer Terry Melcher and the music industry who screwed him out of a record contract by murdering a bunch of random people living in Melcher's former mansion on Cielo Drive. However, thanks largely to the hard work of Tim O'Neill's myth busting Manson tell-all CHAOS we now know for a fact that not only is this version bullshit too, but Bugliosi knew it and helped construct it anyway just like he did Helter Skelter.

There are numerous documented accounts of Terry Melcher and his celebrity friends like Beach Boy Dennis Wilson communing with Manson and his underage harem well after the mass slaughter that was supposed to have driven fear into their hearts and Bugliosi covered it all up, instructing Melcher and others to commit perjury under oath in the process. When O'Neill's findings became known, the venerable prosecutor turned true crime celebrity hounded the dogged sleuth with threats of million-dollar lawsuits and pederast slander that only ended when that crook finally dropped dead. But why? Why all these years of lies? And why does most of this nation continue to insist on believing them?

Vincent Bugliosi's motives are actually a hell of lot clearer than Charlie Manson's. The man had well known ambitions of becoming a powerful California politician and he saw this sensational case as his golden ticket to glory. This is why that scheming scoundrel began writing his bestseller before the trial even began. He even had his co-author, Curt Gentry, in the courtroom front and center every day taking notes. The only problem was that the victims at 10050 Cielo Drive weren't just well connected to Hollywood royalty but most of them were also nearly as guilty as the people who killed them, and their own crimes likely sealed their fate.

It has been an open secret in Hollywood for decades that Sharon Tate's husband, Roman Polanski and his buddies, celebrity hair stylist Jay Sebring and gutterland gadfly, Wojciech Frykowski, were little more than sexual predators and wannabe gangsters. Vincent Bugliosi revealed as much to Tim O'Neill when he told him early on in the latter's investigation that detectives investigating the murder scene at Cielo Drive had discovered a tape in Polanski's loft showing Sharon being raped by two other men with her husband presumably behind the camera. Bugliosi further displayed his willingness to cover up the crimes of the rich and famous when he told O'Neill that he had instructed the cops to put the tape back. Sadly, this was far from an isolated incident. 

Friends and family of Sharon have reported that Polanski was an abusive control freak, with many believing that Sebring, Frykowski and Frykowski's heiress girlfriend Abigail Folger were not at Cielo Drive as mere houseguests but as babysitters, tasked with making sure that the pregnant Tate didn't flee while Polanski was off shooting a movie in Europe. During this time those creeps were given the full lay of the land and according to friends and enemies alike, they turned that mansion into a den of depravity well before Manson crashed the party.

Roman's good friend, famous actor/director Dennis Hopper told reporters "They had fallen into sadism, masochism and bestiality and they recorded it all on tape." Hopper claimed that police had confirmed this when he was interviewed in the days following the murders. He also claimed that three days before the slaughter, 25 people were invited to the house to witness a "mass whipping" of a drug dealer who had allegedly sold Sebring and Frykowski bad dope. 

This dealer was a character named Pic Dawson, a Canadian career criminal who led a gang of notorious drug smugglers who were all sexually involved with Cielo Drive regular, Mama Cass. According to Frykowski's lifelong friend and accomplice, Witold Kaczanowski, who was also the last man to see him alive, Pic and his crew were not just the primary source of the mansion's drug supply, they were also staking out their claim as the primary source of a trendy new Canadian amphetamine known as MDA and Frykowski had ambitions of becoming their Hollywood connect. But Dawson wasn't the only career criminal who was a fixture of this increasingly freaky Hollywood party scene. According to none other than Neil Young, "A lot of pretty well-known musicians around LA knew Manson, though they'd probably deny it now."

That's because Charles Manson wasn't a cult leader, he was a pimp who hustled underage girls to the Hollywood elites like a fringe leather Jeffrey Eppstein. The ugly truth about the Manson murders is that the people who killed the residents of Cielo Drive were likely also on a first name basis with them and this is probably why they were hired out to do it. We will likely never know for sure. Too much time has passed, too many lies have been told and most of the people who know the truth are dead. The only two things that I know for sure are that Vincent Bugliosi was a goddamn liar and Sharon Tate did not deserve to die with her captors. But every bad folk tale deserves a good one to counter it, so here's mine for you.

Charles Manson was not some criminal mastermind. He was a career con artist who was very much a man of his times. Manson began his Family as a hustle to pimp out teenage runaways to Hollywood bigshots, but he needed muscle to keep them in line, so he hired a small-time drug dealer from the Lone Star State named Charles "Tex" Watson. Watson made a failed attempt to rob a competing Black dealer named Bernard Crowe, but Crowe got the drop on Tex, kidnapped his girlfriend and threatened to come down to the derelict movie ranch that Manson and his girls occupied with his crew and wipe the whole place from the map.  Manson decided to act first and gut shot Crowe, falsely believing that he had killed the gangbanger in the process. For reasons that remain unknown, Manson, a lifelong white supremacist, also came to believe that Crowe was a Black Panther, and that this terrifying militia of heavily armed brothers was now gunning for him.

Manson conspired to hire his own army for protection. He befriended a Canadian greaser named Danny DeCarlo, who served as the treasurer for a local outlaw biker outfit called the Straight Satans, by plying him and his friends with free underage scootch. Danny even took Manson's psychotic bottom bitch Susan Atkins for a lover, but his fellow bikers soon tired of jailbait and VD, so Manson needed another way to earn their favor. Bobby Beausoleil, who served as a sort of go-between for the Satans and the Family, managed to secure the bikers with 1,000 tabs of mescaline from a local basement chemist who he had bunked with named Gary Hinman. When the mescaline turned out to be toxic, DeCarlo roughed up Beausoleil and demanded their money back. Manson's attempt to squeeze Hinman ended up with Hinman dead and Beausoleil in prison for his murder.

So, what is a paranoid racist pimp to do when he has managed to conjure up the wrath of both the Black Panthers and the Straight Satans? Perhaps pick up a hit job on some Hollywood rapists that even the Satans were afraid to touch and try to make it look like part of a Black Panther murder spree by targeting a random white couple in the burbs the next night. Sure, it's a conspiracy theory but so was Helter Skelter and, knowing what we know now, which one do you find more plausible? 

But there are still more unanswered questions and terrifying possibilities on hand here. What gave Manson the idea that Bernard Crowe, a lowly two-bit hustler, was a Panther? And why the hell did it take the cops so long to bust the Family? Manson was a violent repeat offender and a documented sexual predator, yet he was allowed to violate his parole repeatedly without so much as having a charge brought against him. Manson's own playpen at Spahn Ranch was under heavy police surveillance before becoming the target of what was then the largest raid in Los Angeles law enforcement history just weeks after the Tate-Labianca murders. A cache of semi-automatic weapons, credit cards and stolen cars were recovered from the scene, but Charlie and his Family were all released without a charge.

Call me paranoid but this list of bewildering facts screams just one word loud and clear in my ears and that word is INFORMANT. A word that coexists quite uncomfortably with COINTELPRO, an FBI/law enforcement mission to destroy the sixties counterculture by sicking its various unruly factions against each other with lies and disinformation that frequently ended in paranoid bloodbaths. 

But perhaps the scariest possibility of all is that Charles Manson, snitch and pimp to the stars, may not have even been the devil after all but rather just another bit player in a melodrama far less climactic than anything Bugliosi could build a career on. After all, it was Tex Watson who actually committed most if not all of the murders and it was Tex Watson who was the Hollywood drug dealer with a recorded history of pulling disastrously violent burns against his rivals. But unlike Manson, Tex was not a camera-ready supervillain that Vincent could galvanize voters in the Valley against.

In fact, Tex could have easily been one of his constituency's native sons; a star quarterback and honor roll student who found himself so disenfranchised with the monotonous suburban purgatory that the Greatest Generation killed and conspired with Nazis to build that he chose to voluntarily throw in his lot with the freaky people they sneered at. This more than any other folktale about the Summer of Hate seems to be the hardest and darkest for the American mind to comprehend which is precisely why it demands comprehension otherwise another Helter Skelter remains just a kiss away.

When you raise your children on lies and throw them out like trash for not believing them, don't be shocked to find them recycled into blowback when the freaky people tell them the truth. As for this storytelling freaky person, I'm just a messenger spitting in Roman Polanski's eye while I wait for my turn to dance with Sharon Tate's ghost on Vincent Bugliosi's grave.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Happiness is a Warm Gun by the Beatles

* Expressway to Yr Skull by Sonic Youth

* Loaded by Primal Scream

* Dear Prudence by Siouxsie & the Banshees

* Frankenstein by New York Dolls

* Garbage Dump by Charles Manson

* Golden Hair by Slowdive

* Teenage Riot by Sonic Youth

* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

* All Tomorrow's Parties by the Velvet Underground

* Vapor Trail by Ride

* Helter Skelter by the Beatles

* My Monkey by Marilyn Manson

Bowe Bergdahl, Sinead O'Connor and the Virtue of Mental Illness

 

“Madness is the false punishment of a false solution, but by its own virtue it brings to light the real problem, which can then be truly resolved.”

-Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

It has been said that these are dangerous days, to say what you feel is to dig your own grave. Truer words have never been spoken by saints or sinners. Lately, it feels like all I do is dig and no matter how deep I sink my shovel, I never seem to hit rock bottom. 

Transgender children are being mauled by legislation that brazenly invalidates their existence, my friends are being thrown out into the streets by their so-called kin, Ukrainians are peppering their neighbors' playgrounds with cluster munitions for membership in a social club that openly despises them, my found family of misfit Queers can't seem to find a vehicle that can carry us for longer than a mile without catching fire, the Sahara Desert is slowly crossing the Mediterranean Ocean onto the scorched shores of Southern Europe and it all feels so goddamn personal to me that I could fucking scream bloody murder for hours on end without ever going hoarse.

It's moments like this when I feel like I just can't fucking do this anymore. Everything I do hurts. Everywhere I step is a landmine. Everything I hear shatters my brittle heart into a thousand little pieces. And every time I lose my shit, the world stares at me like a leper at a pool party and tells me to just calm the fuck down. Every week is a new nervous breakdown, another crying fit in a well-lit public space, another fist fight with an army of angry ghosts who never seem to get tired of watching me swing my bloody fists in the wind. And it was at the bruised ass end of another one of these weeks of being thrown curve ball after curve ball that I can only seem to catch with my face that two stories seemed to hit me just hard enough to put all this carnage into perspective.

After what feels like centuries of well-publicized disgrace, former army sergeant-turned-deserter Bowe Bergdahl had the bullshit charges against him vacated just days before Sinead O'Connor lost her own 56-year battle with ghosts alone in a London apartment. Try as I might, I can't seem to separate these two stories any more than I can seem to separate the endless trials of my loved ones with the suffering of the world around us. Much like me, both Bowe Bergdahl and Sinead O'Connor are complicated characters who have been defined by their struggles with mental illness. They have been branded by friends and foes alike as being unwell. But were they really? 

Bowe Bergdahl was a soldier who walked away from his post one day in 2009 and hasn't stopped being punished for that decision since. He spent five years as a prisoner of war in the custody of the Taliban, being flogged with copper wires and kept in a cage too small for an animal before finally being released as part of a prisoner exchange in 2014. Then-President Barack Obama celebrated this shallow victory in a pointless war he actively continued to stoke with Bowe's parents at the Rose Garden but when Obama's partisan adversaries succeeded in cajoling the military into persecuting the 44th president's political football he quietly washed his hands like Pontious Pilot and ignored Bowe's parents' pleas for a pardon as a man who had openly called for their son's execution prepared to take Obama's place in the White House.

"I am sorry for everything here... The people need help. Yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live... We don't even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks." These were the words that Bowe Bergdahl sent his father in an email before he walked away from a war that would take his country another decade to admit we lost before it even began. A group of his fellow veterans who left those same battlefields to seek employment on Capitol Hill sending other people's children to die in their place are now begging the Defense Department to retry Bowe and lock him up this time. But Bowe Bergdahl is the man that we call crazy. Just like we did Sinead O'Connor.

While the music industry loudly sings the praises of their fallen prodigal daughter, 'that poor crazy girl', they conveniently neglect to mention that it was they who hurled her out into the cold for defying their decree of silence in regard to the crimes of the powerful against the voiceless. Sinead sold seven million records for these gutless jackals and was showered with trophies and trinkets before she threw it all away by tearing up a single picture on live television. That picture was of a man named Pope John Paul II. A man in charge of a church whose crimes against children were rocking Sinead's home country of Ireland to its very core at the time of her performance on Saturday Night Live in 1992. The same church that robbed her of a childhood and me as well. In fact, 1992 was also the year that I was molested in the basement of one of the Catholic Church's schools in rural Pennsylvania.

For the crime of so much as even speaking our names, Sinead O'Connor was shunned by the waking world and turned into an international pariah. She spent the last thirty years of her life being heckled and mocked and belittled as mad, ill, unstable... Even after the crimes she threw herself on the flames to warn you people of were made horrifically public, Sinead remained persona non grata while John Paul was canonized as a saint. 

But Sinead also remained brazenly unapologetic, insisting that she "fucked up their career, not mine." And perhaps that was the craziest thing about this woman. She never wanted the shallow idolatry of her vapid peers. As she proudly proclaimed of the fallout from that telltale event, "There was no doubt about who this bitch is. There was no more mistaking this woman for a pop star." Clearly, the words of a crazy woman. For daring to utter such blasphemy, Sinead would only be honored in death.

What the fuck is crazy anyway? And who exactly gets to decide? Insanity is defined as a deviation from normal behavior. But what would have been "normal behavior" for a soldier and a pop star? Had Bowe Bergdahl been sane, he would have kept his mouth shut and his rifle steady while children continued to die in the streets and turned his career as a hired gun for the state into something to brag about in a resume for public office. Had Sinead O'Connor been sane, she would have kept her mouth open but allowed nothing but silly nonsense to escape it for the thoughtless pleasure of the masses. Thank God that Bowe Bergdahl and Sinead O'Connor were insane because when sanity is defined by a society that values blind patriotism and vapid cultural ephemera above the lives of children there is no virtue more honorable than insanity.

Our twisted society persecutes those of us brave enough not to conform to its collective sickness by making us feel bad just for feeling bad about living in a world that they made bad. Well, I'm through with feeling bad about feeling bad anymore. I am ill and I am ill because this world, this society, this civilization that we all hold in such high regard makes me ill. Quite frankly. it should make you ill too. And if saying these words out loud makes me crazy then I am proud to be crazy. Just remember what I told you, dearest motherfuckers, because if they hate Bowe, Sinead and me then they will hate you too. 

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* War by Bob Marley & the Wailers

* Black Boys on Mopeds by Sinead O'Connor

* Vampire Empire by Big Thief

* I Wanna Be Sedated by the Ramones

* The Day After Tomorrow by Tom Waits

* Mandinka by Sinead O'Connor

* Suffer Little Children by the Smiths

* Crazy by Patsy Cline

* Bug Like an Angel by Mitski

* Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle by Nirvana

Bringing the War Home to the Border to Make Imperialism Great Again

 There is no use arguing that Donald Trump hasn't existentially altered the conversation on war in this country and sweet Kali knows that I've tried. I've been crying bullshit in all caps on that swinging bologna salesman's phony isolationist, Pat Buchanan-with-dick-jokes act since he crashed the GOP primaries on his golden escalator in 2016. The man is a pathological liar with a long and well documented career of saying quite literally everything and anything to make a buck and keep his cojones out of the fire. Just try taking a jog through the ruins of Atlantic City without a fully automatic Uzi if you don't fucking believe me.

Orange-Man-Bad's America First strip tease was just his latest sales pitch but after eight years of George W. Bush and another eight of his mentholated doppelganger, Barack Obama, a lot of disgruntled conservatives and independents were just pissed off enough to buy it, hook, line and sinker. This included one of my heroes, paleolibertarian muckraker and co-founder of antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo, who literally went to his grave believing that Donald J. Trump would be the man who brought American conservatism back to its populist non-interventionist roots. Watching that brilliant son of a bitch go down with that ship is one of the most painful things I've ever witnessed but he was only half-wrong.

Donald Trump may have turned out to be every bit as ghastly and cravenly opportunistic as I smugly predicted he would be, increasing civilian drone strike casualties by 330% and overseeing a Saudi holocaust in Yemen which claimed the lives of over 300,000 starving peasants, but that walking jack-o-lantern did succeed in lighting a fire under right-wing isolationism that has significantly altered the DNA of America's bipartisan combat addiction. Trump may be full of shit but the wave of rural disgust with America's runaway war machine that he inadvertently gave license to is not and the recent wave of conservative dissent against Joe Biden's reckless proxy war in Ukraine proves it. 

Pew Research has found that 44% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe that America is sending entirely too much murder machinery to that hopeless death march to a third world war and that number seems to be growing daily. The opportunistic money changers in both the GOP and the right-wing media sphere have recognized this trend and some of them are cashing in.

Before running afoul of his corporate overlords, Tucker Carleson built a veritable tabloid empire trashing transgender freaks like me while simultaneously cussing out the wars that I've been raging against since he was busy deep throating Deepak Chopra on CNN. This included trashing Trump himself when he bombed Syria and apparently even talking him out of a full-scale air war against Iran. It was a crazy Malcolm McLaren-esque gamble that would eventually blow up in Tucker's face and send him to the wilderness of whatever the fuck twitter self-identifies as this week but if the almost exclusively conservative opposition to a nuclear holocaust in the Wild Steppes proves anything it's that he and Trump were following the money even when the system wanted to pretend that it didn't exist.

This is the real reason why Wall Street sewar mutants like Rupert Murdoch and Dick Cheney despise the MAGA phenomenon and it's actually the same damn reason why Wall Street sewar mutants like Hillary Clinton and Ted Turner despise the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. Because even a fraud can be a threat to the status quo when they empower the peasants to revolt against it. Now we have to contend with the bizarre spectacle of confirmed rapists and Zionist fuckboys like Matt Gaetz and Ron DeSantis chumming the waters of the partisan zeitgeist with brazenly antiwar legislation and campaign promises. I can just hear that old bastard Justin Raimondo now, hissing in my ear "I told you so!" before bumming another cigarette off Ayn Rand in the fires of hell.

But spectacle is not always reality, and you don't have to scratch the GOP's newfound isolationist rhetoric very hard to smell an illusion. While half the GOP may be running for reelection on cutting arms shipments to Ukraine, the entire party remains frighteningly united on redirecting them much closer to home with an open shooting war at the border. This terrifying bait-and-switch was made revoltingly graphic by the new lord of isolationism himself, Tucker Carlson, during an interview he did for the Blaze with 2024 GOP Primary darling, Senator Tim Scott. 

After rightly trashing Biden's recent decision to mobilize 3,000 reserve troops for possible deployment to Europe, Tucker exposed the real color of his peace flag, and it was anything but white. "Why not build a human wall with say, the reservists who were called up to go defend Ukraine- why wouldn't they be defending our border?" To which Scott responded like a good gimp with a drooling, ball gagged "Yup." before Tucker continued his messianic call to literally bring the war home to the Rio Grande. "If you've got millions of military age men coming into your country and hundreds of thousands of Americans are dying, why is that not the job of the military to stop?" After swallowing this salty load whole, Scott responded with another grinning, snaggle-toothed nod of approval, and I dearly wish that he was the only one.

Sadly, this isn't just some fringe position performed to turn on the Proud Boys. Even the most supposedly non-interventionist Republicans seem to be lockstep behind this insane plot to fight the failed War on Drugs with the failed War on Terror and it has become an early benchmark of the 2024 Republican Primaries with Donald Trump's only real challenger, Ron DeSantis, taking it to the edge and shoving it off with a demented proposal to conduct unilateral raids deep inside Mexican territory to disrupt fentanyl manufacturing , with or without their government's consent, along with throwing down a naval blockade on their ports to intercept raw materials from China.

Yep, that's right folks, the "isolationists" want to declare war on Mexico and the neocons and neoliberals do to. Longshot Ziocon heartthrob Nikki Haley has joined her critics in the chorus by calling to send US Special Forces into Mexico to attack the cartels "just like we dealt with ISIS." And none other than Hillary's 2016 VP pick, Senator Tim Kaine, is pushing bipartisan legislation to have fentanyl declared a "national security threat" as we speak.

I shouldn't have to tell you people how this tragic comedy ends because it already fucking ended with Plan Colombia, a Clinton/Bush era military crusade that was supposed to cleanse the Andes of the great white scourge of cocaine. The only thing it really achieved aside from mugging taxpayers of billions of dollars was help Colombia's despicably corrupt police state to expand its presence deep into the farthest reaches of the Amazon Jungle where they carried out multiple genocides against indigenous people who had the misfortune of existing on territory slated for rape by American mining conglomerates. In one final twist, Coca cultivation and cocaine production actually increased as it turned out that the fascist death squads that Plan Colombia armed and trained were far bigger pushers than FARC and Escobar combined. 

But the American war machine has never really been all that interested in results. They're much more interested in justifying their malign existence to an electorate that has clearly grown to hate their fucking guts. They achieve this goal by making war feel personal to the average, naturally isolationist, American prole. In 2001 that meant exploiting their own blowback at Ground Zero on 9/11. A lot of people forget that old Dubya actually ran against Al Gore in 2000 as a quasi-isolationist promising an end to feckless globalist campaigns like Clinton's "humanitarian" disaster in the Balkans. Then a few Saudis chucked some jetliners into Manhattan and the feeding frenzy began all over again.

In 2024, the closest thing the war machine has to 9/11 is the Fentanyl Crisis. Another colossal clusterfuck of imperial blowback brought on by Big Pharma and Big Prohibition. Their hope is to sell forever war back to MAGA isolationists by cleverly labeling it as a matter of territorial integrity. But if paleos foolishly believe that this thing is going to stop with a few drone strikes in Sinaloa then I have some swampland in Guantanamo Bay to sell them. 

We are talking about declaring war on an entire black-market industry here. An industry that reaches far into the Heartland and employs hundreds of thousands of American citizens, most of whom are just desperate addicts trying to get by. We are also talking quite glibly about expanding this war to China by blaming a rising superpower for our nation's appetite to alter its own consciousness just because Beijing happens to be home to the labs that make the best precursors for our current fix of choice. 

Long story short; once again, all roads lead back to derailing the Eurasian Century. Rabid animals like Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis don't want peace and isolation. They want to make America great again and prevent a nuclear confrontation with Russia by making forever war great again on our own borders and provoking a nuclear confrontation with China. This isn't populist regime change; it's imperial rebranding and you people should be smart enough by now not to buy this trash for the fiftieth goddamn time in a row. Justin Raimondo weeps.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Search & Destroy by the Stooges

* Shell Games by Bright Eyes

* Peace Sells by Megadeth

* Just Like Henry by Dressy Bessy

* I'm Waiting for the Man by the Velvet Underground

* Mandinka by Sinead O'Connor

* War Pigs by Black Sabbath

* Human Behavior by Bjork

* Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols

* Breathe by the Prodigy

This screed is devoted in loving memory to Sinead O'Connor, a ferocious woman with a loud voice who gave a frightened little girl inside a broken man the courage to stand taller than towers. She will not be forgotten and that is a promise you will have to kill me not to keep.