Trans Butch Blues: Notes from a New Lesbian Underground

 Boys are loud and rambunctious. Girls are quiet, meek and well behaved. Boys get dirty, climb trees and scrape their knees. Girls stay neat and clean. Boys are husky growing lads. Girls are thin, dainty creatures who must be careful to watch their weight. Boys fight back with swinging fists. Girls sit back and take the abuse. This is but a Whitman's Sampler of the kind of binary bullshit that our chauvinistic society has used for ages to demolish the self-esteem of an entire gender. 

You hear it every fucking day, even in our self-congratulating woke society. They all point at the busted glass ceiling and wait for applause but the only women with anything even resembling power in this country are the ones who murder like men with the poise and dignity of Mary Crocker in a Chanel pant suit. Boys still wear blue, and girls are still defined by their approval regardless of what they wear. The result isn't just less pay and less agency, it's a sickeningly disproportionate rate of self-abuse, depression, eating disorders and suicide. The patriarchy still kills little girls who don't perform on key, and I should know. I may have been raised male but that didn't stop the unwritten laws of the patriarchy from stealing my childhood and teaching me how to destroy myself.

You hear the same Hallmark transgender story from the mainstream zeitgeist over and over again. You can practically recite the lyrics like a song. "She knew she was really a girl in a boy's body from day one. She dreamed of wearing pink dresses and playing with dolls and dating boys and she breathed fairy dust and she quietly farted sparkles and rainbows and blah blah blah..." If I have to listen to that Oprah-approved trans-female narrative one more time, I swear to Kali that I'm going to jam my head in the nearest Easybake Oven. This may be some trans girl's story but it sure as shit wasn't mine. I didn't grow up in some convoluted Lisa Frank fairytale. I was a weird little kid who dressed in black and grew up obsessed with pro-wrestling, heavy metal music and horror movies. There was nothing pink and frilly telling me that I was a girl, so I just assumed I was boy, but it never felt right.

I had plenty of male friends early on, but I never felt like one of them and when I was surrounded by them at Cub Scout meetings and sleepovers, I never felt more alien. As I got older those gross feelings of otherness became increasingly hard for me or anyone else to ignore. There was always something wrong with the Reid boy. Something not quite right. The adults seemed to pick up on it first. Every few years my conservative Catholic school would hold a secret convention among the concerned teachers and parents to discuss what should be done with me and my bewilderingly 'other' ways. They never came up with a proper plot, but they made their disdain painfully well-known through snickers and stares and it wasn't long before their children followed suit and all those male friends became taunting hecklers one by one, repeating what they had overheard at the dinner table.

I heard the word faggot a lot growing up, but I never quite fit the bill. Truth be told, I have been attracted to girls for as long as I can remember. In fact, I found them to be downright fascinating. I didn't dare to even speak to one until after I had already been thoroughly ostracized by every boy I knew. Even being seen playing with a girl was social suicide on the parking lot that Saint John's called a playground. But I couldn't shake the feeling that their secret world contained some kind of answer to the painful loneliness that plagued me even in a crowd of boys. 

I still remember the first time that I learned that lesbianism was a thing. An alarm went off in my tiny head screaming "That's it!" The idea of two girls together was the first time that love made any sense to me. Even knowing nothing about gender identity, I just knew in my soul that that was who I really was but knowing nothing about gender identity and way too goddamn much about sin and Catholic guilt, this revelation terrified me. The only conclusion that I could come to was that I was some kind of twisted fucking pervert and that I was going straight to hell to burn in a lake of fire for all eternity.

Even after I rejected the church and embraced the salvation of punk rock and anarchism, I still couldn't shake this cloud of toxic impending doom that always seemed to hang just out of reach above my head. As the secret witch trials became fiery parent-teacher conferences complete with open accusations of me plotting everything from school shootings to Satanic ritual abuse, my gender began to feel more and more like a claustrophobic prison sentence, and I prayed for execution. 

Even when I learned about the existence of the transgender phenomena, everything that was publicly available about the concept at the time told me that I didn't belong there either. I didn't belong anywhere. The only time I ever felt safe was when I was around the few girls who didn't treat me like a boy. It wasn't until after several nervous breakdowns and half a decade as a shut-in that I finally figured out that trans girls were just girls with defunct plumbing and that I had always been a tomboy in a boy's body. My life made absolutely no sense to me until the day I could look myself in the mirror and say, "I'm a dyke."

Radical feminists endlessly demonize trans women for representing an obscene caricature of stereotypical femininity, but who gets to define femininity in a chauvinist society? Who gets to define what is woman enough to be "real?" White cis hetero men, of course. And who do you think controls all the levers of power that define access to femininity? Who gets to decide whether or not trans people are even afforded the medical treatment necessary for transition? Trans women are hostages to the same sexist archetypes and institutions as any other woman only we have to be more feminine than female. Our tits have to be bigger. Our hair has to be longer. Our heels have to be higher. We have to be Dolly fucking Parton just to be visible and then we get stoned for that too. It's fucking exhausting. I just want enough hormones so I can be feminine enough not to have to try so damn hard. I don't want to be Dolly Parton. I just want to be Julien Baker. 

I wear my hair long and paint my nails, but I feel about as awkward in a dress as I do in a suit and tie. I'd much rather wear Doc Martin's and wrap the few curves Estradiol has afforded me in a trench coat. I'm loud and I'm rude. I talk with my mouth full, and I swear like a fucking sailor. My legs and armpits are hairy, and I have zero intention of ever shaving them. My heroes aren't ladies. They are brash and ballsy bitches like Joan Jett, Courtney Love and Frida Kahlo who built entire careers on terrifying cis men and quite literally flipping off the patriarchy. But somehow, I'm part of some sexist conspiracy to destroy womanhood and apparently our number one target is the endangered butch lesbian.

Every other week you'll find some TERF on Fox News going off about the coming extinction of the bull dyke. According to these hyperventilating gadfly's butch girls are being abducted by mad scientists and transformed into mutilated transgender pod people. There is a very fine grain of truth to this hysteria. A lot of young butches feel trapped by the perilously high expectations of the gender binary and get pushed by heterosexist adults into picking another gender stereotype and conforming to it surgically. Sexism exists in the trans community too. It's why I still have to fight every fucking day just to belong there as a gender-nonconforming female. But assuming that the only solution to this problem is to double down on chauvinistic schools of thought like biological essentialism isn't just stupid, it's downright un-lesbian.

The original radical lesbian movement was an insurrection against the gender binary that sought to define the dyke as a revolutionary third gender that existed completely outside of the expectations of the heterosexual establishment. Monique Wittig, the poet laureate of radical lesbianism said it all when she proudly declared that "lesbians are not women," insisting that to be a lesbian was about a hell of a lot more than flannel shirts and munching carpet, it was about rebelling against the chauvinist norm of the woman as defined by cisgender men's needs. Our Malcolm X, Andrea Dworkin, took a similar approach before she forgot about the revolution and conspired against her sisters in the sex trade with the same sexist Jesus freaks who destroyed my childhood and now call for my extinction. This Faustian bargain against free speech was in many ways the beginning of the end for the original radical lesbian movement.

But there is a new radical lesbian movement bubbling like molten lava to the surface from the underground and its one that has about as much use for the gender binary as Monique Wittig did. A growing number of butch lesbians are micro dosing testosterone, getting top surgery and experimenting with new pronouns. Some of them are transitioning to male while still proudly declaring themselves to be butch. Some butch women even fuck men and some of us have dicks. What unites us all is an existential drive to define ourselves outside of the reach of a patriarchal society that invented the gender binary to reduce human beings into easily commodified and governable categories that leave little room for individuality. This new radical lesbian movement is a conspiracy to make butch a revolutionary third gender again. One that seeks to liberate every gender outlaw who has ever suffered beneath the yoke of some pompous straight man's definition of what womanhood means and this is one pissed off bitch with a dick who is proud to be a part of this insurrection.

So, the fucking TERFs can go choke on their shallow hypocrisy. They have become willing tools of the patriarchy and I don't need them to tell me who I am. I am butch, hear me roar and I am not alone anymore.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Miss World by Hole

* Born On a Train by Samia

* Only Women Bleed by Alice Cooper

* Go Home by Julien Baker

* Handsome and Gretell by Babes in Toyland

* Under the Wire by Haim

* Bad Reputation by Joan Jett

* Teenage Whore by Hole

* Bad Catholics by the Menzingers

* Been a Son by Nirvana

Queer Anarchism is More Conservative Than the GOP

 Those motherfuckers in the GOP have been talking shit about me and my tribe again lately. In fact, it doesn't seem like they've shut the fuck up about us over the last six or seven years and the racket just keeps on getting louder. With less than 300 shopping days before the next sham that this failed state calls a presidential election, the Republicans have gone all in on making gender outlaws like me the official scapegoat of 2024. They made this frighteningly clear at this year's sparsely attended CPAC Conference where trendy right-wing gadflies like Michael Knowles and Candace Owens essentially called for the annihilation of "transgenderism" by any means necessary to resounding applause.

I'm touched, really, I am. Unlike your average vanilla agent of LGBTQ assimilation, I fully embrace my tribe's role as the glimmering harbingers of the decline of Western Civilization. What I have no stomach for is a party of warmongering sore losers who use the colossal hammer of big government to smash Queer children to bits and then sell this shameless hypocrisy as some kind of conservatism. 

Over the first few months of 2023 alone, Republican legislators have upchucked an acidic tsunami of over 340 anti-Queer bills across the country that seek to use armed government agents to police everything from children's healthcare to public restrooms. What this toxic slurry of judicial hate crimes really amounts to is growing the police state to gargantuan proportions and expanding their ability to intervene into even the most intimate corners of private life.

There is absolutely nothing conservative about this jihad but that shouldn't be shocking to anybody who has paid even the most cursory amount of attention to the GOP over the last fifty years. I may be a genderfuck Yippie anarchist but even I'm more conservative than those neocon crusaders and I'm not just being cute. In spite of my decadent lifestyle choices or perhaps even because of them, my uniquely Queer school of stateless existence is far more conservative on nearly every conceivable front than the current platform of the Republican Party.

Let's us first dispense with the contrived notion that my very existence is the product of rampant modernism. Quite the contrary. Every heathen tribe from Prussia to Peru celebrated the existence of at least three genders before the original globalist groomers in the Vatican forced them all by the barrel of the musket to conform to the modern social engineering experiment known as the gender binary and it is actually precisely the pre-Christian conservative tribal diversity that the Papists trampled that drives my own distinctly Queer school of anarcho-primitivism. 

You see dearest motherfuckers, I am more than just a Queer anarchist, I am a Queer panarchist. While my own private Catalonia may consist of a communal love-in of polyamorous gender freaks living like savage libertines in yurts on the weed-infested parking lots of flaming stadium churches, I believe that this radical utopia is only possible under a system of panarchy or many anarchies that affords the existence of an infinite amount of stateless tribal societies. These societies could be based on quite literally everything and anything from Black nationalism to Mormon fundamentalism, provided that every single tribe remains 100% voluntary and that every individual can choose to leave and start over just next door at any time.

The result of this Queer new world would be infinitely more conservative on every level than the rampant statism of the Republican Party. Just look at the debauched reign of their current boy-king, Donald Trump, if you don't believe me. That dayglo Caligula added $7.8 trillion to the national debt between 2017 and 2020. That is an increase of 33.1%, the third highest increase of any presidency in history. 

Part of this can be chocked up to the rampant corporate welfare that Trump used a totally avoidable pandemic to excuse, but even before Covid reached our shores, that orange lunatic was well on his way to the record books after taking the tax dollars of his own working-class constituency and redistributing it to his country club friends in the multinational corporate elite under the guise of tax breaks.

This fiscal blasphemy of reverse Robin Hood larceny is the Republican way. No more under my Queer anarchist system. No more corporate welfare. No more eminent domain. No more fucking taxes period. Taxation is a form of legalized theft that reinforces class divisions based on those who take and those who get taken. The taker class is an incestuous rat's nest of lazy thieves with shiny badges, and I am committed as a Queer anarchist to ending their infestation once and for all. This means defunding the police. All of the police. This means no more FBI, no more ATF, no more DEA, and no more fucking IRS. No more pencil-pushing bureaucratic thugs with guns breathing down your neck and asking for their cut. People's money would remain in their communities to do with as they see fit.

This would also mean an end to those corporate elites that Trump and his interparty competition pretend to combat. The One Percent only exists at the behest of a colossal international government that the rich built to justify their own parasitic existence. There would be no billionaire oligarchs like George Soros or the Koch Brothers if it weren't for a complex network of fixed trade deals and economic regulations that rig the game in their favor, all of which the Republican Party overwhelmingly supports. 

A panarchist society would run on a localist economic order similar to that of a massive network of decentralized farmer's markets in which everyone would be free to buy, sell and trade their wears with no federal middleman to tip the scales in one direction or the other. This is what a true free market really looks like, a place where anyone with the skills to sling the finest product wins the day instead of federally backed cartels and massive industrial complexes.

 This includes complexes of the military industrial variety like every Republicans favorite charity in the war machine, and you better fucking believe that a panarchsit system would erase that corporatist construct post haste, not just because its very existence is patently evil, but because it is little more than a big government boondoggle. 

Contrary to what the Grand Old Party would have you believe, there exists no Chinese threat to American military supremacy. There exists no threat of any kind to American military supremacy and there never has. This nation spends more money on "defense" than the next dozen nations combined and that includes China, Russia and India. America maintains 750 permanent bases on foreign soil in 80 different countries.

 This isn't defense and this sure as shit isn't conservative. It's empire and in spite of all his isolationist posturing, Trump was no exception to this rule. He literally broke records with his military budgets which included hefty doses of aid to foreign armies in places like Egypt, Ukraine and Israel. All part of the Republican Parties long shameless tradition of consistently countering every already bloated Democratic defense budget with demands for even more tax-pilfered loot to be carted away to blow people up on parts of the map that most Americans have never even heard of.

As for grooming, I'm as against that practice as any Bible-thumping fag-basher but it's a two-way street and it's one that I would never cross. I have never met another Queer person who has not been abused by America's compulsory school system. I carry scars in the form of complex PTSD from my own experiences of having a bunch of straight adults push their heterosexist gender ideology down my throat at a tender age. 

Unlike Ron DeSantis, my solution to this systemic barbarism isn't to replace one form of cultural hegemony with another, it's to obliterate the power structure endemic in the American school system entirely by putting children in charge of their own damn education instead of one pack of role-crazy adults or another. This means deschooling society entirely because if you don't want the government to indoctrinate your children then you shouldn't give those motherfuckers so much power over your children in the first place. This is something we should all agree on. 

That's because Queer anarchy isn't about queering society. It's about queering governance. If everybody was fucking Queer, then Queer people would be as boring as the rest of you bitches. Our power actually comes from being a minority because only minorities can truly be communities. The queerest thing that we can do is spread that philosophy by encouraging everyone to become a minority too and by encouraging the autonomy that minorities require to remain strong. This means encouraging the existence not just of Queer communes, but Amish communes and Objectivist communes and Catholic Worker communes, because only small governments truly serve their people and the smaller the better.

The GOP doesn't foster small government any more than the DNC fosters egalitarianism. They are two arms of the same colossal beast and regardless of how you or anyone else may feel about my kinky lifestyle choices or my unorthodox gender ideology, being a sworn enemy of that beast makes me far more conservative than Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis will ever be. There is nothing queerer than anarchy and if you're truly looking for small government like I am, then anarchy is the only answer. 

So, tell me breeders, Did I turn ya?

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* I Blame Society by Titus Andronicus

* Androgynous by the Replacements

* Not Strong Enough by boygenius

* Shoplifters of the World by the Smiths

* Lose You by Bully & Soccer Mommy

* Jennifer's Body by Hole

* Candy Says by the Velvet Underground

* Debaser by the Pixies

* Mississauga Goddamn by the Hidden Cameras

* Trash by New York Dolls

Pick a Cold War, Any Cold War: The Limits of Isolationism Under Yellow Peril

 It's an old plot and the bastards of Babylon have been at it for ages. From Halford Mackinder to Zbigniew Brzezinski, from the British Crown to their Yankee progeny right here in Pax Americana, the Atlantic powers known collectively as the West have been motivated by a single waking nightmare since white power ran on black coal, the fever dream of the dreaded Eurasian Century. The simple fact that the backwards landlocked Huns of the World Island that is Europe, Africa and Asia hold the keys to 60% of the world's land mass and an even larger share of its natural resources has kept western imperialists up at night for centuries and motivated every great bloodbath in the era of modern warfare.

It's why London and Washington engineered two world wars with hasty borders and crippling sanctions. It's why these same mandarins initiated the first cold war with an invasion of the barely formed Soviet Union in order to strangle the Bolshevik Revolution in its cradle. It's why they reignited that quixotic crusade with an atom bomb long after the Japanese had surrendered, and Stalin had begrudgingly agreed to keep his hands to himself. It's why we provoked the rise of the Iron Curtain with the neo-colonialist contraption known as NATO and rearmed the fascists with Operation Gladio to keep it valid. It's why we lured the Kremlin deep into the Hindu Kush by inventing modern-day jihadism with the Mujahedin and its why NATO just kept on expanding even after that geopolitical boobytrap finished off the communist threat that alliance was supposedly designed to contain. It's also why we continue to stoke the flames of a third world war by funding the current autocratic duel over Ukraine.

Every bottomless forever war, every convoluted conspiracy against world peace, every bomb that has ever been dropped beneath the contrived banner of liberal democracy and the American way has all been part of a plot to divorce Berlin from Beijing and prevent a common-sense economic union between East Asia and Central Europe that would permanently damn the empires of the Atlantic Ocean to global irrelevancy. This is the dirty little secret of American power. The despots who run this titanic battleship we call a country have never given two flying fucks about fascism, communism or Islamic Fundamentalism. It has all been one great big shapeshifting shadow puppet show projected over the graves of a craven plot for pure naked global power.

This isn't to say that those graves haven't long been populated by twisted ghouls that are more than deserving of condemnation from any sane observer with a functioning conscience. Stalin, Mao, Putin and Xi are all repugnant rapists in their own right but there is a reason that those monsters have become household names while others like Pinochet, Suharto, Duvalier and Salman have received the full blessing of those that combat them. The only monsters that Washington is willing to blow up the world to contain are the ones that threaten to replace it on the world stage. 

The latest cold war is no exception. Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a savagely venal crime against humanity and it's one that America actively encouraged. We have set Ukraine like a gigantic mousetrap over the last decade with this tragic fate in mind. We overthrew a corrupt but neutral democracy with a phony revolution in 2014 before packing their security forces with the most insanely Russophobic ultra-nationalists that money could buy. 

We encouraged the violent repression of Ukraine's Russian speaking population while running round the clock war games with American battleships and bombers capable of carrying nuclear payloads right off the shores and borders of an increasingly paranoid Russian behemoth. Then we turned up the heat by predicting their imminent invasion even while our own Ukrainian quislings begged us to cool it down. All so we could provoke a thin skinned capitalist Übermensch with daddy issues into obliterating his neighbors while we ran the footage of his savagery on a loop to discourage the blue bloods of Central Europe from investing in a future we didn't micromanage for western hegemony.

It worked, except it didn't. Putin more than lived up to the role we wrote for him as the ultimate boogeyman to end all boogeymen, but half of the American homeland still isn't willing to leverage the farm in order to dig him a bottomless grave in Bakhmut and it isn't the half some might expect. Since Putin began his special military rampage in Ukraine polls have shown a steady decline in Republicans willing to encourage its continuation with a steady diet of Stinger missiles,

Pew has the number of Republicans opposed to fueling this thing indefinitely at 40% and rising. Gallup has it even higher at nearly 50%. These are the blood and butter conservatives that America has long relied on to mindlessly support even our most batshit interventions long after their futility has become almost comically obvious. Democrats have always been the quickest nitwits to start a war but it's the Republicans who stick around for Old Glory and apple pie to finish the fucking thing long after it has become too heinous for the coastal elites to virtue signal over the carnage. So, what the fuck is going on here? Are we finally witnessing the second coming of the isolationist right in MAGA country? 

I wish, but as an often less than willing occupant of America's rustbelt outback, I can tell you from personal experience that it's actually a lot more personal than that. Once again, Hillary Clinton has shit this bed, this time by tarring the deplorables in flyover country as Russian dupes in 2016. All because they would rather vote for a reality television rapist then one of the two dynasties that sold their children into servitude to opioids and Walmart by hollowing out their futures with crooked trade deals. 

Regardless of where you land on Russia's supposed involvement in the 2016 election, the notion that backwoods farm folk are too fucking stupid to realize that even a goon like Trump is a lesser evil to a Bush or a Clinton without the assistance of Kremlin manipulation is beyond fucking offensive. The blowback from this campaign to blame the humiliating spectacle of a Trump presidency on anyone but the people who made it inevitable is that now middle America has finally become increasingly immune to Russophobia and right-wing shills like Tucker Carlson are chasing that money even if they have to sing "Give Peace a Chance" to earn it.

So, what's an empire to do? Pack it up and sue for peace? Never. Instead, the bipartisan war machine is tearing a page form the playbook that hoodwinked the original America First movement into throwing its weight behind total war. When all else fails, just try good old-fashioned American racism and stir twice. Republicans and Democrats alike weren't willing to return to the trenches of Europe in the wake of the Great Depression to kill a bunch of white people. But once FDR turned the war effort into a fight to keep filthy yellow hands off of Lady Liberty's creamy white bosom, all it took was goading the Japanese into bombing an American colony in the Pacific to get every farmer's daughter to willingly chuck her own sons straight into the wheat thresher.

Just turn on Fox News and you'll realize that things haven't changed a bit. Peace peddling peckerwoods like Carlson flipped the switch from isolationism to imperialism at the speed of a scatter bomb the moment an errant Chinese weather balloon passed over an American farm. That smug asshole went from blowing Glenn Greenwald to screeching for the blood of every first-born Chinese son faster than you can say 'Lindberg lovingly licks Lemonheads.' Now, it's Chinese fever around the clock. They're scuttling across the border. They're slipping fentanyl into your favorite soft drinks. They're training bats to peddle pandemics and critical race theory door-to-door. Biden and his gray-care handlers are already on the bandwagon too, sniping at UFOs with F-22s and fessing up to the dangers of gain of function research while they sail battleships through the Strait of Taiwan and dare Xi Jinping not to flinch.

And just like that, the Cold War is back in tetanus country like crystal meth. My neighbors have gone from sensibly questioning the efficacy of poking a nuked-up basket case with a NATO stick to calling for a ground invasion of Peking if those commie cunts are two weeks late with the next fucking X-Box. One step forward and a great leap backwards into the frying pan of 1950s-style xenophobic hysteria.

So, pick a cold war, any cold war! China or Russia, Ukraine or Taiwan, either way the Atlantic Empire achieves its real goal of isolating the bustling markets of Beijing from the sophisticated banks of Europe and stalling the Eurasian Century for another 15 minutes. The only problem with this conspiracy is that middle America isn't the only landlocked rust heap growing weary of constant war and it's a little bit harder to sell Sinophobia to Polish farmers when they're starving just three hours from a highspeed rail system that can sling them prosperity straight from the Orient. All while the fat cats of NATO tell them to take another one for the team.

I'm not the Bolshevik Barbie that I used to be. One century is as sick as the last one as long as rich men with small dicks and big bombs still run the show. But I also can't ignore the fact that a Second American Century is only possible with a nuclear bomb or that a Eurasian Century would put my trailer park smack dab in the middle of the next empire's blind spot. Call me a communist, but I'll take those daylight vampires in the Politburo over the double-speaking Doctor Strangeloves on Fox News any day of the week. I just wish that I could convince my neighbors to hate the bomb more than "the other" it drops on and learn to eat their grits with chopsticks.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Give Peace a Chance by John Lennon

* Home Again Garden Grove by the Mountain Goats

* Shark Smile by Big Thief

* China Girl by Iggy Pop

* Jesus Built My Hotrod by Ministry

* Holidays in the Sun by the Sex Pistols

* Faith Healer by Julien Baker

* My Girl by the Jesus & Mary Chain

* Counting Backwards by Throwing Muses

* Drunk Walk Home by Mitski

The Better and Worse Angels of Jimmy Carter's Nature

 Every time an ex-president dies a demon gets his wings. It's a time-honored tradition in these hallowed halls of Babylon. Lucifer himself could drop dead and provided that motherfucker spent no less than a hot minute in the Oval Office, every self-proclaimed journalist from the Wall Street Journal to Penthouse Forum would be lined around the block to polish his horns with their filthy flicking tongues. In fact, fuck Satan, just look to Ronald Reagan if you don't believe me. That B-grade cowboy slung crack to grade school kids for rapists in Nicaragua and limp-wristed Bay area liberals are still tripping over the AIDS quilt to throw themselves sobbing on his casket.

Naturally, being the terminally jaded cunt that I am, I have made it my own private jihad in life to pop a squat over the graves of the powerful and unleash a hot steamy piss on their sacred soil. I have plenty of reverence for the dead, but nobody lights a candle for Hitler during Suicide Awareness Month. What the hell makes our monsters so fucking special? A cult of personality is a cult of personality and if I'm not game to deface a few monuments then I might as well turn in my slingshot with my shoplifted copy of Never Mind the Bollocks and call it quits on being an anarcho-anything.

With that being said and may Bill Hicks have mercy on my soul for even saying this out loud, I'm finding myself feeling oddly pee shy as old Jimmy Carter shuffles towards the light. As surreal as it may seem, at least for the past forty years, that soft-spoken peanut farmer appears to have led the life of a halfway decent human being. While the Clintons would perform at a supper club for the Khmer Rouge if the price was right, Jimmy has spent the lion's share of his long retirement from power building houses for the Dollar Tree class and literally eradicating diseases in countries that Anderson Cooper couldn't even pronounce right with a goddamn Speak-and-Spell. The man will die in a one-story house he built with his own hands in a town even smaller and poorer than mine. I'm hard set to admit it but that motherfucker was a good ex-president. That does not however mean that he has a guaranteed table reserved for him passed the Pearly Gates between Gandhi and Dorothy Day.

Jimmy Carter does have a dark side, a downright hideous dark side in fact and that dark side is the 39th presidency of these United States of Babylon. While Jimmy may have spent the last four decades teaching Sunday school to pint-sized bumpkins, between 1977 and 1981 he spent four years dressing up an empire like Mr. Rogers and setting the stage for one of the most violent quarter-centuries in the storied history of its sick existence.

You can quite literally thank Jimmy Carter for Al-Qaeda. During the early hours of his presidency, Jimmy conspired with his twisted Machiavellian little National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski to arm, train and organize some of the Muslim world's sickest lunatics to start a rampant garbage fire on the Soviet Union's southern border in Afghanistan for the express purpose of luring Moscow into burning itself alive stomping out the flames. 

Jimmy and Zbig have all but admitted this with Brzezinski gloating mincingly that "the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, we now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War." Mission accomplished. The resulting fallout of the Carter Administration's midwifing of the Mujahedin speaks for itself. $3 billion US tax dollars, 1. 5 million Afghan lives, two Twin Towers, a partridge and a pear tree.

This was far from an isolated incident either. The all-knowing corporate zeitgeist generally considers the biggest triumph of Jimmy's one term tenure to be the 1978 Camp David Accord and its biggest folly to be his botching of the Iran Hostage Crisis but neither one of these incidents is generally given the proper context their casualties deserve.

The peace deal that President Carter organized between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin wasn't really a peace deal at all, at least not for the Palestinians. It was a bribe. Jimmy Carter agreed to arm Egypt's colonels to the fucking teeth if they agreed to look the other way while Israel continued to slaughter their fellow Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank like lambs. Gamal Abdul Nasser would have shot Sadat himself if he were alive to witness this Noble Prize winning screwjob, the end result of which being a military dictatorship in Cairo that even the Arab Spring couldn't upset and the Nakba that never ends.

As for Iran, few popular historical observers seem to pay much attention to the fact that the only reason hostages were even taken in the first place was that Jimmy had given sanctuary to one of the region's cruelest dictators, a loathsomely venal creature known as the Shah of Iran who Carter openly supported as he massacred student protestors during the Islamic Revolution and even threw a military coup to save him from the righteous wrath of the Mullahs. 

Even fewer historical observers waste the ink to report that Jimmy's most lasting response to this revolution was his establishment of the Carter Doctrine which officially made it a matter of public policy that the United States would treat any perceived threat to destabilize the Persian Gulf and its precious resources as a national security threat to be "repelled by any means necessary, including military force." By 1981, Carter had reorganized a gargantuan chunk of the United States Military into a 200,000-man Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force who would later be used in two Gulf wars and usher in the age of ISIS.

But perhaps the darkest chapter of Jimmy Carter's brief but eventful massacre on Capitol Hill occurred in 1980 in a Korean college town called Gwangju. After an assassination and a coup replaced a dictatorship in Seoul with a military dictatorship, South Korea exploded in a wave of largely peaceful student protests, demanding democracy on the peninsula. The boldest of these uprisings broke out in Gwangju, where students were joined by local blue-collar workers in an epic groundswell of resistance that reached 300,000 people in the streets. When soldiers attempted to violently shut these protests down, its partisans raided local arms depots and police stations to repel the troops, courageously holding their own for six days. Then Jimmy sent in the Black Berets.

While publicly condemning the increasingly gruesome crackdowns, documents released through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that the Carter Administration used the US Military's leadership over their joint command with the Korean Military to plan, lead and execute a colossal bloodbath with the hopes of avoiding a repeat of the Iranian Revolution. The Korean Army used American tanks to cordon off the city of Gwangju and after a 90-minute gun battle with the civilian militia organized by the protesters, these brave kids surrendered, the American trained Korean Special Forces known as the Black Berets invaded and the massacre began. Homes were raided, mass graves were dug at the edge of town and some two thousand of the bravest people America never knew simply ceased to exist.

This is the side of Jimmy Carter that no one but his victims knows, and it makes the side of Jimmy Carter that we've all gotten to know over the last four decades incredibly hard to reconcile. It's very tempting to believe that the better angels of Jimmy Carter's nature are simply part of a conspiracy to wash the blood from a callous killer's hands, but I honestly believe that the truth is far more complicated than that. Most of Jimmy's post-presidential actions don't seem designed for popular public fanfare. In fact, many of them have only provoked the ire of the manufactured consensus.

What did Jimmy have to gain from calling out his former homies in Israel for their apartheid ways other than being smeared by their lobby as an antisemite? Whose good graces were gained by preventing another American coup in Venezuela with the Carter Foundation's endorsement of Hugo Chavez's victory in his 2004 recall referendum? All of this smacks of something very different than your standard Washington whitewash. All of this smacks of legitimate liberal guilt, attempts made by a man with a functioning conscience to redeem himself for the evils of his office and no single effort was more heroic or more thankless than the one Jimmy made in Pyongyang in 1994.

Few people remember that the Second Korean War was set to begin before the end of Bill Clinton's first term in office. Hellbent on proving to the GOP that he wasn't the dovish pussy they had painted him as, Bill was fully prepared to launch a preemptive strike against North Korea's nuclear reactors. Ex-president Jimmy Carter was sent over the DMZ to meet up with legendary Stalinist strongman Kim Il-Sung as part of an "unofficial" and largely symbolic pre-war PR stunt, but then old Jimmy went rogue.

Not only did he go off-script to reach a deal to prevent the war with a deal that Clinton never actually signed off on, but Carter even called a press conference to announce it live on CNN before the White House could squash it. What resulted was the framework for a nuclear freeze and the closest thing to peace that peninsula that President Carter once so violently fucked over has likely ever seen, 7 years of free trade and a Sunshine Policy that only ended with Dubya's Axis of Evil. God only knows how many lives were saved in the process. Probably at least two thousand.

The Clinton's never returned Jimmy's phone calls again. He was ostracized by both the media and the DNC and only recently rehabilitated so Joe Biden could pose with the only Democrat old enough to make him look young. So, was Jimmy good or evil? 

The truth likely lies somewhere between. While Jimmy's post-presidential actions in Korea were undeniably inspiring, the fact remains that he has also never apologized for the horrors of the Mujahedeen, Hosni Mubarak or the Black Berets. All I can really tell you for sure is that the office Jimmy served in required the actions of a psychopath and the hideous legacy of these actions requires a very sophisticated cult of personality to turn every servant of American power into a saint upon the hour of their death. This institution is a danger that should not exist.

With that being said, I won't be pissing on Jimmy Carter's grave this year. For once, I would rather pray to Kali that the better angels of Jimmy's nature are reincarnated in some species not eligible for office. I'd like to think that the saints of Gwangju would approve.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* I Found a Reason by the Velvet Underground

* Salvation by Rancid

* Sixers by the Hold Steady

* Debaser by the Pixies

* Old College Try by the Mountain Goats

* The Pretender by Foo Fighters

* 100% by Sonic Youth

* Trying by Bully

* Makes No Sense at All by Husker Du

* Carry Me Out by Mitski

Remembering Kuwasi Balagoon and the Forgotten Legacy of Black Anarchism

 I know this has kind of become a virtue signaling cliche in this day and age, but Black History Month really does end way too goddamn soon. I thoroughly recognize that the entire month is largely a contrived ritual devoted to historical revisionism much like what the vanilla conquistadors of mainstream wokeness have reduced Pride Month too. But the obnoxious history geek in me just can't seem to help but jump at any opportunity to set the record straight when it comes to America's criminally whitewashed outlaw history.

I've been accused by people on both ends of this nation's hopelessly antiquated left-right paradigm of taking Black history way too personally, with some people on the left even going so far as to accuse me of appropriation. It's bullshit but I can see it. After all, what the fuck does some transgender Irish Catholic hillbilly know about the Black experience? Maybe not much but my lifelong fascination with the revolutionary end of Black history taught me everything that I desperately needed to know about being an outnumbered freak and living to tell about it. The rise and fall and rise of Black Power inspired my own vision of Queer Panarchy and no chapter of that history has taught me more than the lost one on the modern school of Black Anarchism that came out of that movement's collapse.

We have probably never come closer to a second American revolution, a real American revolution, than we did during the fiery maelstrom of the sixties and seventies. The American Empire pushed its luck just one inch too far both at home and abroad during this era and the new mandarins of Manifest Destiny finally appeared to be paying a steep price for their sins. What should have been a routine conquest in Indochina had spiraled out of control into a bottomless quagmire as a bunch of poorly armed and half-starved peasant rice farmers took the military industrial complex to the fucking woodshed and exposed it as little more than a trillion-dollar Gundam suit stuffed with squealing pigs and the tiny men who fuck them.

Meanwhile, pissed-off Black kids in the ghettos of Babylon seemed to be winning the same fight parallel to their comrades in the Cong. As the Tet Offensive raged like a rabid tiger with a chainsaw so did massive riots in Detroit, Newark, St. Louis, Baltimore, Atlanta and New Orleans. J Edgar Hoover's ritual sacrifices of Black Messiahs like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had only reaped the whirlwind and cities across the home front burned brighter than napalm while teenage snipers with zipguns held their own against entire platoons of the National Guard.

The Black Panther Party seized the moment and took the lead in a revolutionary vanguard that quickly metastasized into a growing coalition of disenchanted American outlaws of every conceivable stripe, the Young Lords, the American Indian Movement, the Youth International Party, the Gay Liberation Front, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the Weather Underground, the Brown Berets, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the White Panther Party, the Symbionese Liberation Army, all declaring allegiance to their nation's enemies in the Third World and all devoted to smashing the empire that failed to contain them at any cost. It wasn't always pretty but this how you blow up a Deathstar with a stick of dynamite.

At its glorious zenith, this freak rebellion stretched across the ocean and infiltrated the ranks of America's own military machine with conscripted Black nationalists and disenchanted dope smoking longhairs taking over entire barracks and fragging their commanding officers like it was going out of style. The Pentagon and the State Department were convinced that they stood at the brink of an unprecedented imperial mutiny that threatened to collapse everything that their ancestors had built a continental Indian burial ground to achieve. The weird people were winning and ghetto warlords like Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver were leading the charge. Then somehow, seemingly overnight, it all just blew away like the exhaust fumes of an arsonist's fever dream in a stiff winter breeze.

What the hell happened? We were kicking ass, weren't we? The empire certainly thought so and they swallowed their pride to pull the plug before their asses could break. In a span of just a few years they canceled the war, the draft and even Nixon, thus robbing the movement of its momentum and convincing its more privileged partisans to hang up the rifle and go back to class. And as the war wound down abroad it ramped up into a killing spree at home. The FBI transformed their COINTELPRO campaign against the Civil Rights Movement into a full-blown jihad against the Black Panther Party and their remaining revolutionary allies.

Cadres were pit against each other by infiltrators and most of their leaders were locked up on phony charges, exiled by rumors of treachery or just straight-up fucking murdered. The top-down structure of these organizations made these tragedies downright devastating and the greed it fostered was even worse. The once mighty Panthers soon found themselves tearing each other apart in a government manufactured civil war that splintered the entire anti-imperialist movement into paranoid militant cells knocking over armored cars just to stay alive and one step ahead of the law. It looked like a tragic end to a beautiful dream but from these ashes a new dream slowly immerged like a phoenix in the night.

A handful of committed Black revolutionaries took a long sobering look at what had become of the revolution in the cracked mirrors of their cramped prison cells and embraced a new school of stateless resistance that both built on their movement's triumphs and learned from its mistakes. What they came up with would become known collectively as Black Anarchism. 

While this new movement was built out of a diverse array of concepts and schools of thought, it was congealed by its uniquely anti-colonialist critique of traditional Eurocentric left-wing authoritarianism and its celebration of a distinctly tribal third world cultural identity. It had no leaders but the thinkers who would come to define its mission weren't professors or activists but imprisoned revolutionaries like Ashanti Alston, Kuwasi Balagoon, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin and Martin Sostre. Men who had already given everything to the cause of Black liberation and weren't willing to give up the struggle without at least one more fight.

The man whose message has always spoke the loudest to me is that of the Black Anarchist Movement's tragic martyr, Kuwasi Balagoon. Partially because as an open bisexual polyamorist he was a member of my own stateless tribe as well but also because so much of his ideological evolution resembles my own. Kuwasi was born Donald Weems in the poor Black community of Lakeland, Maryland. His first taste of Black Power came at a young age when Donald got a front row seat to the militant civil rights movement lead by Gloria Richardson in nearby Cambridge which ultimately cumulated into an explosive riot in 1963 that required a year-long occupation by the National Guard and a peace treaty inked by then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

With few prospects at home, Weems joined the Army out of high school where he experienced a pervasive climate of racial violence at the hands of white GIs. After recognizing that any Black soldier who dared to fight back got the brunt of the reprimands just for defending themselves, Weems decided to settle the score on his own terms by forming a clandestine gang of vigilantes of color dubbed "Da Legislators." However, the military also offered Weems an opportunity to come into contact with other members of the African diaspora in Europe which provoked a lifelong thirst for a higher Black consciousness that would ultimately lead him to embrace revolution. 

Upon leaving the military, Weems moved in with his sister in Harlem and began working as a radical tenant organizer in order to give a voice to the poorest members of his community. He made waves by crashing a session of Congress armed with a cage full of tenement rats in order to confront the powerful with the ravenous results of the poverty they trafficked in and got locked up for disorderly conduct for his trouble. 

Weems also dove deeper into his heritage with his studies in African paganism under the Yoruba Temple where he was reborn as Kuwasi Balagoon, a Yoruba name roughly translating to warlord. This journey accelerated when the born-again African soldier seemed to finally find his calling with the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party where he cranked up the heat on his engagement in grassroots ghetto organizing with increasingly brazen direct actions like the community take-over of the derelict Lincoln Hospital. But like many of his comrades in the struggle, Balagoon's refusal to compromise with the system increasingly put him on the wrong end of the law in order to survive.

Kuwasi was arrested on bank robbery charges in 1969 before being indicted as a part of the infamous Panther 21 case, a massive FBI coordinated conspiracy against the New York leadership of the party in which police informants encouraged embattled Panther's to strike back at the police state with a planned series of bombings and ambushes. The case would ultimately end in the acquittal of every single defendant except Balagoon who proudly pled guilty of self-defense, largely out of principle alone. 

It was during these days of hot lead that Kuwasi and many other New York Panthers became increasingly disenchanted with their own party's leadership which was run out of a central committee in California modeled after the Chinese Communist Party. An arrangement which left little room for indigenous dissent. The Central Committe used the largely trumped-up Panther 21 case as an excuse to clean house in New York and put their own leadership in charge who seemed to be more concerned with national politics than local community organizing and took a hostile stance towards the New York chapter's less secular Afrocentric cultural identity.

Naturally, the FBI took full advantage of this rift with a spree of disinformation and poison pen letters, widening the divide between the two coasts of the party. A divide which would ultimately climax in the Central Committee expelling Balagoon and the rest of the Panther 21 for their insubordination and declaring them to be "Enemies of the People" in their national paper. 

To Kuwasi it had become painfully clear that the party's central leadership had become completely detached from the rank and file on the streets and that it was the size of the party itself that was to blame. Even behind bars, Balagoon quickly became one of the movement's loudest advocates for increased local autonomy, but it was his involvement in the 1970 uprising at the Queens House of Detention that proved most prophetic. The riot itself was a bust, a hostage situation that ended in brutal reprisals against the prisoners involved, but the multi-racial consensus-based leadership of the uprising inspired Balagoon's drift towards increasingly anti-authoritarian waters.

After launching his first prison break in 1973, Kuwasi joined up with a group of outlaw Panthers known as the Black Liberation Army. Once it had become brutally clear that the FBI was waging open war on Black Power and that the central leadership of the Panthers couldn't be relied upon for solidarity, members of the New York chapter of the party organized the BLA to serve as an underground railroad for marked men and women to fight back. Most of their attention was directed towards the liberation of wrongfully convicted Panthers abandoned by the movement. Balagoon himself was arrested just 8 months after his own escape during an attempt to liberate another one of his comrades. It wouldn't be the last grenade he would throw himself on.

It was during Balagoon's second stint behind bars that he began working with the prison abolitionists in the Anarchist Black Cross and devouring the works of Wilhelm Reich and Emma Goldman who inspired Kuwasi to embrace both anarchism and free love. During a time when homophobia was still rampant in the Black Power Movement, Kuwasi Balagoon came out of the closet swinging as an openly Queer revolutionary. He also took this time to embrace a movement to create a Black separatist homeland in the Deep South known as the Republic of New Afrika and by the time he had escaped for a second time, Balagoon rejoined the revolution as a self-proclaimed New Afrikan Anarchist.

Balagoon's uniquely idiosyncratic ideology may have initially miffed many of his old comrades, but it would ultimately become a defining feature of Black Anarchism. While embracing statelessness Kuwasi also refused to abandon Black Nationalism. He rightly observed that traditional African nationalism had nothing to do with states and borders. It was about a collective tribal consciousness which observed the consensus of the village above any form of hierarchy. Balagoon may have embraced the tactics of 19th century European anarchism, but he rejected the phony color-blind universalism that made it come across as more white virtue signaling bullshit to colonized people who didn't need some government to be a nation or some honky liberal to tell them how to be free.

This is the message that spoke to me as a genderqueer born-again heathen. I take great pride in the ancient pagan roots of my third gender, a tradition that was stolen from peasants like my Celtic ancestors by the same churches and kings who colonized the New World and put Africa in chains. I also take great pride in the unique cultural identity that the modern primitivists of my Queer tribe constructed in resistance to White Anglo Saxon Protestant civilization and I don't appreciate attempts by this society's bratty offspring to assimilate these traditions into some beige melting pot of international inclusion. 

I've been called a Queer separatist and sometimes I am, but my school of thought could much more accurately be described as Post-Colonial Queer Nationalism and it's not lost on me that my Black and brown comrades seem to be the only other anarchists who really get this.

Kuwasi Balagoon influenced this evolution when I first came out of the closet. I had spent my youth as a devoted third world influenced Marxist in the tradition of Che Guevara and Muammar Gaddafi but my rebirth as a uniquely pagan Queer revolutionary made internationalism feel like an ill-fitting sports bra while modern Queer anarchism seemed to lack the commitment to anti-imperialism that still felt existential to my mission. Kuwasi Balagoon was the first revolutionary to provide a school of thought that made sense, but he wasn't the last.

In many ways his message predates that of other stateless refugees of the New Left like Abdullah Ocalan and the EZLN. Kuwasi's tireless struggle for revolutionary bottom unity also served as a major inspiration for my own post-left recipe for panarchist solidarity with his willingness to rejoin his comrades in a diverse coalition united against the state. Kuwasi's last run before being thrown away for life was with the Revolutionary Armed Task Force, a ragtag coalition of Black nationalists and white communists who came together to achieve the last great victory of the Second American Revolution with the daring daylight prison break of the wrongfully convicted revolutionary Assata Shakur in 1979.

For this sacred sin and many others Kuwasi Balagoon died a young man of AIDS behind bars in 1986 but he didn't die in vain. Assata remains free to this day and thanks to Kuwasi's legacy and the legacy of Black Anarchism, I do too. And I just needed one more fucking week of February to thank him. Oh, well. Maybe next year. For now, I guess this belated tribute will have to do.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

* Queen Bitch by David Bowie

* I Against I by Bad Brains

* The Big Payback by James Brown

* Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley

* Across 110th Street by Bobby Womack

* Waiting Room by Phoebe Bridgers

* Lean On Me by Bill Withers

* I'm a African by Dead Prez

* You Can Have It Back by Wild Pink

Black Power and Rock n Roll: Black History for Dangerous Americans

 History is fucking boring in this country and sadly, Black history is far from the exception that proves the rule. According to the straight white corporate guardians of Black History Month Incorporated, It's all pacifism and peanut butter. The entirety of 500 years of anti-colonialist struggle has been lumped into a 28-day infomercial for the resilience of the American experiment. We are all led to believe that when not engaged in providing their masters with mind-blowing new sandwich spreads, Black people or rather African Americans spent the lion's share of their free time sitting on their hands and singing "We Shall Overcome" until the police state, in all of its benevolent wisdom, grew tired of clubbing these patient bible thumpers over the head and finally awarded them with the consolation prize of civil rights, chief among them being the right to freely engage in what the slave trade declared democracy.

Is it really any wonder that kids are so fucking bored. Just writing that last paragraph makes me want to erase myself with whippets and Benadryl. This is no mistake. History wasn't written by the victors. It's written by rich assholes who are heavily invested in convincing poor people that they've already won. If people in this nation knew the first thing about its real history not only would they be excited, they would be downright pissed off. The people who run this country are the most disgusting, lazy, pigfucking pond scum that has ever accumulated on Satan's balls, and they always have been. George Washington was a coward, Thomas Jefferson was a rapist and Abraham Lincoln could have cared less about freeing the slaves. Assholes, one and all. The real heroes are the unruly renegades who they needed to build entire armies to kill, and an overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of those fine renegades were people of color with attitude.

Black history is chock full of uppity negroes and negras who kicked their master's pale ass until it was blacker than theirs before giving their indentured wives the first real orgasm of their miserable lives. Black history has to be rendered boring as fuck because otherwise people might actually take enough time to figure out that it is a history defined by an ongoing populist revolt against the mind-numbing conformity of WASP supremacy and that what it has to teach us applies to every shade of pissed-off lower class scum. Lenin once observed that if America is to ever have a revolutionary class, it will be the negro. He wasn't wrong, but as usual that asshole was a day late and a ruble short.

Black folk have always been America's most revolutionary class because no class has ever done so much fucking damage with so little ammunition. Black history, real fucking Black history, is a gift to everyone who has ever been fucked over in this country, by this country, and the greatest and naturally least understood gifts of real fucking Black history are Black Power and Rock n Roll. Two ingredients that when properly applied provide the collective fucked-over class with everything we need to build a bomb big enough to bring this prison state to the ground where we can kick its ass with our bare feet.

The fact that most Americans don't understand the first thing about Black Power is hardly shocking when you consider the fact that most Americans don't understand the first thing about race and the first thing about race is that it's all bullshit. It's a bunch of crap created to destroy the unity of class and the diversity of ethnicity. Black and white weren't even widely embraced concepts until the late 17th century. Before then, America wasn't so much a melting pot as it was a disorganized gumbo of different kinds of servants; African servants, Irish servants, German servants, all getting whooped and bamboozled by the same master class of cousin-fucking English noblemen until they could be properly assimilated long enough to pay off their debts, learn their place and praise Angloid Jesus. Then they could become servant-whooping noblemen too. 

This all changed with Bacon's Rebellion, when a disgruntled tycoon named Nathaniel Bacon decided that he wanted a bigger slice of colonial pie and gathered an army of African and European servants to take it by force. But what Bacon really did was arm and organize Colonial Virginia's poorest subjects while inadvertently giving them a license to challenge the state's monopoly on the use of force. Long after Bacon dropped dead of fever, the English planter class remained haunted by visions of multi-ethnic peasants united by a shared lust to burn their precious capital of Jamestown to the ground. So, the aristocracy adopted the rigid legal caste system of Black and white. All Africans became a permanent slave class and most European Protestants were afforded the petty privilege of getting whooped less if they turned on their darker comrades and identified with their masters. This same formula was later tweaked and used to assimilate other slave classes into the melting pot of whiteness in order to make sure that they maintained the majority indefinitely.

Plenty of renegades of all different ethnicities, from the Seminole Nation to Saint Patrick's Battalion, challenged this concept over the years but it wasn't until the Civil Rights Movement broke bad that this resistance was finally crystalized into a movement that continues to threaten the very fabric of the system to this day. Stokely Carmicheal was a young negro organizer who spent the first half of the sixties as the hardest working man in the Civil Rights Movement. Between the years of 1960 and 1965, Stokely played a major hand in nearly every major civil rights demonstration across the South but by the time he reached the top of the movement as the head of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, Stokely was tired. He was tired of seeing his friends get chewed on by German shepherds. He was tired of being polite to the white establishment. He was tired of being a negro. So, Stokely made a conscious decision to be Black and make Black beautiful.

Carmicheal first coined the term Black Power during a Mississippi rally in 1966 but he didn't turn this slogan into a full-blown movement until he published the groundbreaking manifesto Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America a year later. In this fiery treatise Stokely officially rejected the then vogue label of negro as an attempt to Americanize the culture of the African diaspora and curry favor with a system designed to destroy it. Instead, Stokely chose to embrace the original white supremacist slur of Black because the colonialists had adopted this word specifically to differentiate African people from the master class and Stokely wanted to do the exact same thing.

Black Power masterfully pointed out that everything that made Africans so dangerous to the system was precisely what made them strong. They were a fierce, communal, resourceful people who weren't fooled by the empty materialism of mass capitalism. Stokely dared his people to embrace what made them dangerous and in the process, he managed to hijack race itself, a social construct built on oppression, and transformed it into a social construct defined by resistance. Stokely Carmichael weaponized identity politics and fed-up Black folks weren't the only ones listening.

Following in the footsteps laid down by Carmichael, who subsequently adopted the African name of Kwame Ture, and his brothers in the Black Panther Party, movements aiming to repossess their own oppressive castes popped up across the country like daisies on Lincoln's grave. Soon there was a united coalition of American Indian tribes occupying federally stolen land and shouting Red Power with rifles in their hands. The brown people that the border crossed became Chicanos and pissed-off perverts like me became Queer. 

We all built our own little tribes and the tribes just kept getting smaller, but we were all united by the fact that each of us had been fucked over by the white power system in our own way and we were all through with asking these motherfuckers for table scraps. We didn't want inclusion into their sick system. We wanted autonomy so each of our communities could have the power to create our own systems, a tribal confederation of freaks made equal by the flames of Jamestown that we danced around naked like merry savages, and Kwame Ture and the Panthers were the human giants who gave us the license to burn.

But Black people didn't stop at liberating other minorities. They liberated white kids too and they did it with an electric guitar. A lot of people forget how badly America fucking sucked after World War 2. After taking credit for beating the Nazis and pulling itself out of the grave it dug for itself with the Great Depression, American capitalism took a gray flannel victory lap during the late 40s and early 50s. It was a time of abundance for white folks when every nuclear family had an identical box in the suburbs with a white picket cell door and a new car in the garage. Every wife also had a stove to be shackled to with a steady supply of Valium to keep her in line. Every man had a socially respectable drinking problem to carry him through the empty death march of his 9 to 5 job. And every child had a stable two-parent example of how empty assimilating into a globalized master race really is.

Then came Rock n Roll, a wild electric hybrid of Black rhythm and blues and redneck hillbilly music named after a slang term for fucking and that is precisely what Rock n Roll was all about. During an age of unparalleled puritanical subjugation, unrepentant perverts like Chuck Berry and Little Richard were hooting and hollering about big Black dicks and the joys of anal sex while inviting everyone to get busy to their racket. When Chuck was riding his Stratocaster like a forty-watt strap-on or Richard was beating his piano like the bitch owned him money, nobody gave a flying fuck about what the rules were. They were all too busy getting down and more often than not, white kids were getting down with Black kids.

The establishment was terrified. They tried everything; censorship, segregation, Pat Boone, even good old-fashioned violence, nothing worked.  Major labels refused to record this noise, but kids just bought it from Jewish mom-and-pop operations instead. Cops tried dividing audiences by color with lynching ropes, but once the music got started, the crowds got too wild to police. Finally, the establishment had to pull out their trusty last resort card by assimilating Rock n Roll into the hive mind by having watered-down honkies like Elvis turn it into something more palatable to the conformist diet, but the genie was already out of the bottle and every generation of grumpy parents continues to fight the losing battle of trying to push it back in.

There is a direct line from Chuck Berry to the man who inspired me to write, Kurt Cobain. Punk rock has always been a populist attempt by weird kids of every color to revive the undomesticated wilderness of uncut Rock n Roll. Lou Reed wanted to write R&B songs for dope fiends and faggots. Iggy Pop learned how to stalk the stage like a panther by watching James Brown flip the fuck out. Joey Ramone was just a lonely Jewish kid from Queens inspired to form a gang in the form of a band by a couple of Black girls from Harlem named the Ronettes. And when the establishment came to transform this feral noise into commercial garbage called new wave, four inner-city Rastafarians from DC blew it the fuck up by creating hardcore, with the Bad Brains playing faster, louder and wilder than any white kid with a pink mohawk had ever thought possible. This shit is my history and its fucking Black history.

Black Power taught us all that we have the power to define our own identities and Rock n Roll pointed out that you don't have to be dark and/or Queer to be oppressed. White privilege is a gilded prison cell that only keeps you safe as long as you keep it down and know your place. It is a form of domestication that is abusive even to the people on the highest floors of the panopticon. Chuck Berry told miserable American kids that they don't have to be white as long as they were willing to be dangerous and Kwame Ture taught us that there is power in being dangerous. This is the Black history that they don't want you to know about and this is the history that we all need to celebrate year-round if we ever want to get free.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Express Yourself by NWA

* You Never Can Tell by Chuck Berry

* Aneurysm by Nirvana

* Say It Loud- I'm Black and I'm Proud by James Brown

* Rock & Roll by the Velvet Underground

* Tutti Frutti by Little Richard

* 1969 by the Stooges

* My Ding-a-Ling by Chuck Berry

* Be My Baby by the Ronettes

* The KKK Took My Baby Away by the Ramones

* Banned in DC by Bad Brains

 

Confessions of a Keyboard Forest Defender

"Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, I lived in a small house surrounded by a great big forest. I won't lie to you and tell you that my childhood was idyllic because in many respects it was anything but. I was a child trapped between genders beneath the weight of the Catholic Church during a time when the world didn't even have a word to explain my existence. There are entire chapters of my childhood that are quite frankly too traumatic for me to even remember and there are other chapters that I dearly wish I could forget. But I felt safe beneath the branches of the tall oak trees that were every bit as much a part of my home as the four walls and black tar roof gently caressed by their swaying shadows.

I would lose myself for what felt like years in the hollows of those groves, dancing between the massive, knotted tree trunks, turning over great boulders clothed in moss to commune with the strange tiny creatures that somehow thrived beneath their mass, chasing after frogs and snakes amongst the ruins of rusty pick-up trucks and abandoned refrigerator carcasses. No one cared about my Queer ways in that sacred space. The trees never tried to hang a gender around my neck like a noose. In the great big forest that surround my small house I was afforded the criminally rare right to simply exist unmolested by the preconceived notions of the outside world. It was a place that seemed pregnant with the magic of spirits too rare to label and I was one of them. A world not unlike those captured in dreamy films like My Neighbor Totoro and Uncle Boonmee. Naturally, it couldn't last.

As I grew and my body betrayed my spirit, the violence of the outside world slowly creeped in like smoke to strangle my sanctuary. The forest where I spent some of the few happy moments of a childhood haunted by gender dysphoria and clerical abuse slowly mutated into some beast called a neighborhood. I still remember how the rampage began. Skipping merrily through the trees one day, I came upon my favorite frogging hole to watch the tadpoles grow only to discover an empty can of gasoline floating like a corpse in the water. It felt like someone had plunged a dagger deep into my tiny chest. No amphibians would ever leap from that pool again.

Then came the bulldozers, terrifying armored beasts belching black soot and pulverizing everything that dared to breath clean air in their wake. Then came the houses that seemed to grow taller and taller with zero regard for their wild-eyed neighbors at the edge of the trees. Then came suburbia with its toxic manicured lawns and its ear blistering rider mowers and its petty greedy citizens with their authoritarian neighborhood governments and their unblinking judgmental eyes. The Vatican may have grievously wounded my childhood, but it died a lonesome death with that great big forest that once surrounded my small house and I have never forgiven civilization for shattering that strange little girl between the gears of its cruel progress. The wind begs me for revenge daily between the branches that still stand tall enough for the breeze to cry between their dying leaves.

People tell me that I take politics too personally. Friends tell me that I shouldn't let it get me down and editors tell me to remove my uncomfortably intimate prose from the stories I tell. They all just sound like the machines that murdered the trees to me. Their logic feels cold and meaningless. I take politics personally because politics wounds my soul with its madness and my writing is the only thing that I have to make sense of that madness without hurting anyone, including myself. A few weeks ago, the politics of madness slaughtered one of my people for trying to protect a forest not unlike the one I grew up in and since this heinous crime was committed the cry of the oak trees has grown into a mighty scream.

Manuel Teran, better known to their comrades as Tortuguita or Little Turtle was a proud member of my tribe of traumatized children, a non-binary Queer environmentalist who like many others over the last year traveled to Atlanta to serve as a forest defender with a local collective known as Defend the Atlanta Forest. The forest they gathered to defend is 265 acres of public land known to the state as the South River Forest, 85 acres of which has been arbitrarily slotted by the city of Atlanta to be bulldozed to make room for a massive police training complex. This monstrosity has been dubbed Cop City by an infuriated local community tired of existing beneath the tyranny of a blue apartheid state that has colonized their very existence with an endless list of pointless laws and an endless procession of sadistic thugs with badges sent to mercilessly enforce them.

The South River Forest was once known as Weelaunee Forest by the Muscogee Indians who coexisted peacefully beneath its branches for centuries before being fed by progress to the Trail of Tears. The stolen land then spent another 70 years as a prison farm where homeless men were worked to death before being buried unceremoniously in unmarked graves. The trees of Weelaunee forest now stand defiantly over this haunted soil as one of Atlanta's largest remaining green spaces in a predominantly Black, lower-income area and after a date was announced for their execution in 2021, dozens of brave souls like Tortuguita offered themselves up as human shields by occupying these embattled commons with little more than their bodies and an archipelago of makeshift encampments.

Tortuguita was shot dead by a joint police task force that included federal agents during the latest in a long series of raids on these encampments. Police claim that Tortuguita fired first, injuring one of their co-conspirators in uniform in the process but their story continues to change, and no body-camera footage actually exists of the alleged shootout. I honestly don't know if Tortuguita fired first, but quite frankly, I don't care. He was an American citizen on public property that was being stolen at gunpoint by a runaway police state. 

$30 million of the taxpayer's hard-earned money has been pilfered by the city of Atlanta and awarded to a conglomeration of private corporations to hijack the commons of a community that was never offered a vote on whether or not they wanted the fucking Death Star built in their backyard. This land belongs to that community, to the children who find shelter from a hateful world beneath its branches and as far as I'm concerned, volunteers like Tortuguita have every right to defend that land by any means that community finds necessary.

 Those means were made necessary by an increasingly aggressive campaign to vilify what had been a movement largely committed to nonviolent resistance in order to credibly charge its members as domestic terrorists. 19 of Tortuguita's comrades have been arrested and charged with a local anti-terrorism law that carries a sentence of 5 to 35 years for the absurdly vague crime of "destruction of critical infrastructure." 9 of these "violent extremists" have been charged with nothing more severe than trespassing on stolen property. Property being stolen by the state for the purpose of destroying the critical infrastructure of a community forest. Only in a world governed by madness could Tortuguita's alleged actions be construed as anything other than an act of self-defense.

And the assault on Weelaunee Forest is just the tip of the spear. Cop City isn't just part of a national campaign to militarize America's police forces as the state they protect collapses beneath the collective weight of its own karmic sins. It's part of an international campaign against the world's forests in a sinister conspiracy to urbanize the planet while it burns. Forests are home to at least two-thirds of the world's living species. Their trees also protect the water sources that communities depend on for their very existence and create fertile soil for sustainable agriculture. A threat to the forest is a threat to humanity itself and every year humanity loses another 25 million acres to the rapacious advance of mass urbanization, a landmass larger than the state of Indiana. 

Cities worldwide are growing twice as fast as their own populations with 1.4 million new inhabitants every week building high rise condos next to shuttered box stores and abandoned ghost malls. The area covered by these urban hellscapes is projected to expand by more than 740,000 square miles between 2000 and 2030, causing the loss of 7.4 million acres of agricultural land a year during an age of growing famine and crippling food insecurity. All so human beings can imprison themselves in boiling gulags of searing blacktop beneath towers tall enough to block out the sun, and I believe that the impact of this urban assault goes far beyond traditional environmental politics.

Turn on the news and you can find some braying asshole willing to blame the rise of violent nihilism in first world society on everything from handguns to puberty blockers, but nobody seems willing to consider the fact that human beings are animals and animals tend to become violent when they live in cages. That is precisely what the modern city has become, a sprawling kennel for domesticated beasts and I believe that this is killing us the same way that it killed my childhood, by cutting us off from the natural world and replacing it with something sick and unsustainable. The people shooting up Walmart's and pushing people in front of subway trains aren't evil, they're rabid. It is the society that fosters this desperation for profit that is evil, and it must be smashed before it smashes us all.

This is what the trees are trying to tell me. The same trees that once spoke to my ancestors who worshipped the earth beneath their groves back in Ireland. They called themselves druids, a Celtic word meaning "knower of the oak trees" and these people knew a lot. They knew how to live without police and prisons. They knew how to live without the state in cities based on cooperative associations and built around market squares and the nearby gardens and fields that sustained them. They also knew how to venerate and cherish children born between the genders like me and Tortuguita, and they knew these things because they took the time to listen to the trees.

Now when I listen to the trees, they tell me to fight. Fight this deranged sickness packaged to us in cellophane as progress. Regardless of who fired first, Tortuguita died with honor fighting this sickness and the way things are going in this country, I will probably die in a drone strike with a keyboard in my hands doing the same damn thing, by taking politics too personally with my uncomfortably intimate prose and using them like bullets in a desperate attempt to make sense of this madness, because in a world where forests have become just another expendable commodity, we should all become forest defenders.

Godspeed Tortuguita, the forest will not forget your name.

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell

* Cop Car by Mitski

* All My Life by the Tallest Man on Earth

* Feed the Tree by Belly

* In the Garage by Weezer

* Silent All These Years by Tori Amos

* Roots Bloody Roots by Sepultura

* (Nothing But) Flowers by Talking Heads

* Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix

* Human Behavior by Bjork

Israel has Always Been a Dictatorship of Criminals

 The Israelis are pissed off and for once they're not just pissed off at the Arabs. They're pissed off at Bibi. They made this pretty clear during the final days of the first month of 2023 when they welcomed the new gangster coalition of Israel's longest serving prime minister with massive protests against their announced plans to overhaul the nation's justice system and reduce its courts to the glorified playthings of any simple majority powerful enough to hijack the Knesset. 

Over 130,000 Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. Among their ranks were some the biggest names in Israeli politics, including Bibi's own former deputy prime minister, Benny Gantz, and former defense minister Moshe Yaalon. The latter seemed to capture the spirit of the event with his defiant proclamation, "A country where the prime minister appoints all the judges and is responsible for promoting and firing them has a name, it's called a dictatorship. When this prime minister is also a defendant who the state of Israel is accusing of serious crimes, it has a name, it's called a dictatorship of criminals."

Stirring stuff, and the motherfucker isn't wrong. Facing down the barrel of being sent up the Dead Sea for charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, the man who used to be the most powerful man in the Holy Land since Saul wore jackboots essentially made a Faustian bargain with a bushel of fascist creeps and religious zealots to keep his ass from being mowed like grass. Why else would any sane human being hand over the Middle East's most ferocious (and nuclear armed) military machine to celebrated kooks like Bezalol Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir whose lives would read like one long hate crime if they didn't take the Sabbath?

Still, something was very wrong with this picture. I couldn't quite place my finger on it at first but as hundreds of thousands of well-dressed Europeans took to the streets of the Middle East's toniest neighborhoods, waving blue and white flags emblazoned with the Star of David, it finally hit me with a flash like a burning bush, "Holy shit, these people have no idea that they're white supremacists bitching about their squandered privileges in the world's worst apartheid state." 

Moshe Yaalon, a man who once called Palestinians a cancer that needs to be severed, doubled down on this sick irony as he rambled on to his adoring audience, "The Jewish people paid a heavy price for the fact that in democratic elections in Germany a government came to power that eliminated democracy." And it took less than a week for the Palestinians to pay yet another installment in a long receipt of heavy prices for Israel's so-called democracy when the soldiers Yaalon once led raided the besieged refugee camp of Jenin.

During a five-hour raid, the IDF slaughtered nine people including a 61-year-old woman and two children in a totally unprovoked attack on one of the poorest square miles on earth. They added another body later that night when they murdered an unarmed protestor just north of Jerusalem. This massacre was just the latest tragedy in a killing spree that has murdered more Palestinians in 2022 alone than in any year since the Second Intifada, 220 civilians, including 48 children and many of these deaths were presided over by Israel's very own champion of liberal democracy, Benny Gantz. 

Just over a month into 2022 and that sick record is well on its way to being broken. As of the printing of this rant, 35 Arab bodies have been buried in the desert with Israeli bullets waying down their caskets in 2023, including at least 6 children. And where the fuck are those 130,000 protestors now? Where is their righteous fury for the democratic rights of starving children gunned down in the ghettos of the Middle East's only liberal democracy? They don't count because just like Nazi Germany, Israel's democracy exists solely for the pleasure of the master race. 

Israel's descent into fascism can only be a shock to the historically illiterate. The very notion of the Jewish State is steeped in racist folklore which bares very little resemblance to reality. All races are social constructs, but the Jewish race is actually a relatively modern one. Most of today's Jews are actually the descendants of converts to Judaism with little to no proven connection to modern-day Israel and it was actually this status as a proudly stateless people with an allegiance to no one but God that made members of the tribe the perfect scapegoats for tyrants from the Czars to the Fourth Reich and they had good reason to be scared. Nearly every popular uprising in the last four centuries of European history was made possible by a steady stream of Judaic revolutionary mercenaries ready to die for any cause greater than that white supremacist contraption known as the Westphalian nation state.

This is why I laugh my fat tranny ass off every time some WASPy Jesus freak calls me an antisemite. I wouldn't have two fists to swing with if brazen Jewish heretics like Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman hadn't taught this stone butch shiksha how to throw a fucking punch. Sadly, this proud history of boldly rootless resistance has been all but erased by the invention of the Jewish race which actually came out of the same 19th century cesspool of malignant nationalism that gave birth to the Holocaust.

The notion of the Jews as a singular race in search of a homeland was the invention of a small clique of Jewish German intellectuals influenced by folkish Germanic nationalism to create a secular school of Zionism defined largely by European colonialism. The Zionists didn't see themselves as German or Russian, but they did openly embrace the idea of a superior European diaspora in a twisted philosophy that could only be described as a form of kosher white supremacy. 

These racists weren't above collaborating with antisemites either, in fact many Zionists seemed to embrace antisemitism as a totally justified reaction to Jews who dared to exist outside of Israel. Chaim Weizmann, president of the influential World Zionist Organization and the first president of Israel told an audience in Berlin in 1912 that "each country can absorb only a limited number of Jews, if she doesn't want disorders in her stomach, Germany already has too many Jews."

Under these circumstances it's hardly surprising that Zionists found allies among their fellow white supremacists in England and Germany. Avraham Stern, who led a terrorist organization in the British Mandate of Palestine that would come to be called the Stern Gang and which counted many of Israel's founding fathers, including two-time prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir amongst its ranks, actually openly sought an alliance with Nazi Germany after the British soured on the Zionist experiment. 

Avraham even went so far as to advocate a Jewish state based on "nationalist and totalitarian principles... linked to the German Reich." The Nazis considered the offer, even sending Adolf Eichmann to Palestine in 1937 to promote Zionist emigration, but ultimately decided that it would be cheaper just to annihilate the Jews. A decision the Zionists would arrive at themselves to solve their own question of how to deal with their own unwanted Semites.

It was only after the horrors of the Holocaust that the Zionists managed to get traumatized Jews to sign on to their violent vision of Ashkenazi supremacy and the Zionists expertly harnessed the well-earned rage of these people to carry out their own final solution against the Palestinian people with a campaign that would become known as the Nakba. Even before the Holocaust, Zionist terrorist organizations like the Stern Gang, Haganah and Irgun covertly infiltrated Arab villages, gathering detailed intelligence one everything from demographics to water resources which they would use to carefully choreograph massacres that easily rivaled the Einsatzgruppen in their sheer brutality.

Crowded homes were bombarded with hand grenades and any grown man caught escaping was forced to dig his own grave before being executed. Women and children were routinely raped before being sent to the hills with nothing but the clothes on their backs. 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes at gunpoint and 500 villages were razed to the ground. The racist death squads who carried out these massacres would become the first officers of the new Israeli Defense Forces. Irgun, who took part in the Nakba's most heinous massacre in Deir Yasin, which resulted in the slaughter of 107 men, women and children, would become Benny Gantz and Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party. 

Any lingering doubts about Israel's commitment to bringing white supremacy to the Middle East should have been stomped out with the creation of gigantic Nazi-style ghettos in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank but this cruelty towards the native peoples of the Near East extended to Jews as well. While Mossad went so far as to launch terrorist attacks against Oriental Jews in Iraq in order to pack the Holy Land with a stampede of refugees, Israel's Ashkenazi elites welcomed their darker cousins with tent cities, forced secularization, DDT and deadly radiation treatments.

Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion pounded this point home, stating emphatically, "We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystalized in the diaspora." You see, it wasn't enough for the Zionists to make Palestine Jewish; their mission was to make Jews white, and it was none other than Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism described as "the spiritual father of the Jewish State" in Israel's declaration of independence, who called for his dream nation to "form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism" and referred to him and his fellow Zionists as "representatives of Western Civilization" sent to bring cleanliness and order to the Orient. 

The dirtiest secret about Zionism and its increasingly genocidal apartheid state in Israel is that these forces are in fact the greatest source of antisemitism on the planet, a snake's nest of European elitists seeking to scrub the desert clean of its diverse Semitic culture while assimilating Jewish people into the white race by any means necessary. And for daring to even speak of this hideous truth out loud I am to be condemned as a racist. After all, how can the Middle East's only liberal democracy possibly be an agent of white supremacy?

But what greater tool for white supremacy has ever existed? What exterminated the stateless Native Americans and enslaved the anarchists of Africa? The entire premise of liberal democracy is built on notions of western superiority that can only be reinforced by the state. It is not a coincidence that Hitler, Mussolini and Netanyahu all rose to power in liberal democracies. Fascism is merely the inevitable result of the state's failure to homogenize the diversity of mankind beneath the banner of a single order. Rosa and Emma understood this all too well. But perhaps they too are antisemites.

A country that packages conformity to white Anglo Saxon values as progress has a name, it's called a liberal democracy. And a liberal democracy that fails to fool its subjects into embracing this slavery as progress has no place left to go but to embrace its true nature as a dictatorship of criminals. You can't reform fascism and white supremacy. Fighting these hideous creatures with the liberal democracy that birthed them is like fighting the AIDS virus with good old-fashioned HIV. The host must be destroyed and until the people of the Levant unite against this Zionist host, they will never be safe from a virus that thrives on pitting every tribe of poor people in the desert against each other. The only solution to Palestine's white supremacist question is a no state solution.

So, go ahead and call me a fucking racist. I have too many states to smash to pick favorites based on foreskin and too little time to waste on the fragile feelings of gaslighting fascists.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* When You Sleep by My Bloody Valentine

* Heart-Shaped Box by Nirvana

* Raping the Slave by Swans

* Cruel by St. Vincent

* What About Us by Ministry

* Sin by Nine Inch Nails

* Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan

* True Blue by boygenius

* Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush

* Search and Destroy by the Stooges

Welcome to the Out-Group: A Call to Turn and Radicalize the Strange

I watch the ripples change their size

But never leave the stream

Of warm impermanence

So the days float through my eyes

But still the days seem the same

And these children that you spit on

As they try to change their worlds

Their immune to your consultations

They're quite aware of what they're going through

-David Bowie, Changes

Come as you are, as you were
As I want you to be
As a friend, as a friend
As an old enemy

-Nirvana, Come as You Are

 Are you depressed, bored, disenchanted or just plain pissed-off with the humdrum banality of straight white suburban bourgeoise existence? 

Has the American Dream begun to feel more like a waking nightmare with beige carpet swatches? 

Have you quit your dead-end 9-to-5 office job and have zero intention of looking for a new one? 

Are you beginning to suspect that the overpriced IKEA furniture you own actually owns you? 

Do you find yourself hoarding large supplies of dried goods and canned foods in a heavily fortified basement? 

Have you begun to find it easier to communicate with other human beings while dressed up like a candy-colored andromorphic animal?

 Are the long weekends you spend sleeping in your van out in the desert just getting longer and longer? 

Does the make-believe life you live pretending to be a goblin out in the woods with other Tolkien addicts feel more real than the one you lead back in the real world? 

Would you rather be spanked and diapered by a pissed-off bitch than have sex like a missionary with the lights off? 

Do you find yourself secretly hoping for a zombie apocalypse just so you don't have to mow the lawn this weekend? 

Does marching around town with an AR-15 in military fatigues and a Hawaiin shirt feel more like progress than voting for some smug asshole in a monkey-suit who swears that he's just marginally less toxic than the other smug asshole in a monkey-suit?

If you answered yes to one or more of the questions above, then you might be a member of the out-group, a loosely affiliated population of proudly disgruntled minorities that find themselves uncapable or unwilling to conform to the narrow expectations of White Anglo Saxon Protestant society during the collapse of Western Civilization. This may come as a shock to you because you may in fact identify as a White Anglo Saxon Protestant. You may have even been raised to believe that this vanilla prison sentence is in fact a grand privilege and rejecting it to embrace being a fucking weirdo instead may feel like blasphemy, but it may be time to consider that being one of "them" might be for you. 

You might want to consult a Black and/or Queer friend before committing social suicide as reactions from the police state may vary. Common side-effects of out-group affiliation may include unhousing, unemployment, ostracization, online censorship and even no-knock police raids as well as feelings of belonging to something bigger than the crass commercialism of late-stage capitalism that you've secretly thirsted for your entire life. You may even find yourself ecstatically happy as the world burns down around your feet. 

My humble suggestion, for whatever it's worth to you, is to just fucking embrace your madness if it makes you happy and pisses off the establishment because life ain't getting any longer and the world is coming unglued.

Yes indeed, dearest motherfuckers, this is it, the end-days, Armageddon, the Kali Yuga, tooth-for-tooth time. Whatever you wanna fucking call it, the jig is up, all bets are off, the center cannot hold, the falcon cannot reach the falconer. After centuries of prophecy from every dangerously woke lunatic from Jesus Christ to Ted Kaczynski, the age of Ozymandias is finally upon us. Just turn on that flickering idiot box the government tracks you with in your pocket if you still don't believe us. Even the beautiful imbeciles on the news are starting to spout bad poetry like Charlie Manson. Moneyed oligarchs are sicking different wings of their precious police state on each other for a change, the polar ice caps are melting faster than cellophane environmentalists like Al Gore can profit off it, and the largest superpowers on the planet are locked in multiple nuclear Mexican stand-offs at once as their economies tank and circle the drain. 

This is it. The ship is going down and you can either drown with those fancy deckchairs you bought from Sharper Image or grab a life preserve but don't you dare act like the freaky people didn't fucking warn you because we've been warning you like fucking crazy for a thousand years. Christ, Mohammed, Spengler, Marx, Stirner, Nietzsche, Malcolm, Gramsci, Fanon, Genet, Hicks, Kaczynski, we all told you that this colossus doesn't float, and you called us heretics and imbeciles and threw us in your packed prisons and asylums. Well, maybe now you'll fucking listen, now that the wreckage of your sick modern lifestyle is affecting your stock portfolio and your beachfront property values. Swim, swine, swim. No state will stand long enough to save you from yourself now.

For those of us who have spent our lives on the outside of this bread and circus funhouse with our frostbit noses pressed firmly against the glass, this catastrophic cataclysm is actually downright cathartic. For Western Civilization's long-demonized out-groups, be they Black anarchists, American Indian mystics, neurodivergent outlaws or unassimilated Queer folk like me, all of this mayhem feels more like justice than tragedy and why the fuck not? After centuries of rule by sadistic bullies, rapacious priests, role-crazy cops and corporate Klansmen, this sick little trip called society is finally coming down like a ton of bricks and all the people who got rich torturing us are trapped beneath the ruble. Fuck em. I brought my popcorn. Let the walls of Babylon come tumbling down and I'll jack my man-clit to the blooper reel.

But for your average vanilla, mostly white and supposedly straight normie suburbanite the seemingly inevitable decline of what they were raised to believe is the static status quo is quite shocking, even downright traumatic and they're handling it in some pretty weird ways. When the collective public loses faith in civilization, we commonly see a mass proliferation of tiny counter-civilizations, often derisively labeled as counterculture. 

We've experienced this before during decade long blackouts like the Great Depression and the bloody descent of Camelot into the jungles of Vietnam, but we've never seen anything quite like what we're seeing now. After the seismic seizures of the Great Recession and the Pandemic, with the dark clouds of climate change and World War 3 on the horizon, an unprecedented number of seemingly normal stable civilians have quit their jobs, abandoned their dangerously over-mortgaged McMansions and disappeared into a chaotic online landscape of strange new lifestyles. Vanlifers, LARPers, digital nomads, otherkin, doomsday preppers, adult babies, otaku, Juggalos, furies, boogaloo boys... 

This whole thing is dizzying and at times downright amusing to witness and it may be quite tempting for those of us who have been outcasts by birthright to mock these silly suburbanites as they desperately try to escape their comeuppance with trendy lifestyle shifts but I believe that this reaction is a mistake. It is the sad influence of colonial oppression that has taught even marginalized people to marginalize those who we struggle to comprehend, and we must shed this skin. 

The hide-and-seek make-believe of cottagecore and cosplay may seem childishly shallow to someone who drags around a concertina cobweb of post-traumatic stress from a childhood dominated by pious child molesters who condemned my tiny soul to eternal hellfire for being an unsalvageable faggot, but I must remember, we must all remember, that these amateur freaks, in their own often silly ways, are attempting to shed their skins too. Behind every suburban survivalist and weekend kinkster is a lost fellow traveler desperately attempting to purge the vestiges of their privileged conformist existence before it drags them to the ocean floor like a millstone around their necks. These people may miss the big picture, but at least their instincts are all on the money.

And believe it or not, these people actually need our help more than we need there's. Systemically marginalized people like gender outlaws and racial minorities have been robbed and raped six ways to Sunday by that phallic shining beacon on the hill known as American exceptionalism. But these days of plenty are numbered. When white powers collapses, Black, brown and Queer folk will still have the tribes that we carefully constructed to resist colonization, but straight white people will be lost. 

Without their hollow privilege, largely predicated on the illusion of power projected by the state, what do these people have left to cling to but violence? This is why seemingly comfortable middle class white boys are pledging their allegiance to sick little cults like the Proud Boys and marching into supermarkets with AR-15s. They were raised by a system that taught them that social weakness could be avenged through senseless slaughter. We should welcome any refugee attempting to escape this fate no matter how privileged their background may be.

The best example that I've witnessed through my years of agoraphobic research on how to approach this kind of reverse conversion therapy is the freak culture of the sixties and seventies as best embodied by stoic urban warriors like Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party who formed a Rainbow Coalition of diverse oppressed people united in their commitment to communal autonomy, self-determination and anti-imperialism. This coalition included former street gangs-turned-revolutionaries like the Young Lords and the Blackstone Rangers, but it also included paler refugees of the pig power system like the White Panther Party, who organized on a campaign of solidarity between the Third World and suburban stoners committed to "rock and roll, dope and fucking in the streets" as well as the underprivileged Appalachian migrants in the Young Patriots Organization and the white working-class greasers in Rising Up Angry.

Sadly, it didn't take much for the feds to take down the Rainbow Coalition because it was a top-down network formed during the temporary crisis of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, but the rules have changed, and I believe that they have changed in our favor. New Left casualties like Abdullah Ocalan and the Black Anarchist Movement have rectified the error of their ways by rejecting the reactionary violence of Marxist-Leninism in favor of far more stateless and indigenous forms of resistance, and the cataclysm currently sending suburbia to the desert isn't a single war that can be ended by a last-minute armistice, it is a fundamental collapse of a way of life built on endless war and environmental degradation.

We, the elder tribesmen of the out-group should encourage everyone to reject the empty power worship of whiteness. We should embrace any identity built on rejecting the institutional violence of the status quo and teach our freaky new dauphins the importance of mutual aid and rejecting all the hierarchies that we had to tear down the hard way. We should radicalize these countercultures and convert their members into committed anarchists, not just for the betterment of their weird new communities but for the betterment of ours as well. After all, during the Dark Ages that followed the fall of Rome, those poor assimilated tools who failed to see the idiocy that led to this collapse only violently fetishized it as barbarian mercenaries for the scattered feudal remains of the master class. We can do better.

So, are you a freak, pervert, weirdo, geek, outcast or degenerate who is thirsty to belong to something bigger than yourself but smaller than an omnicidal nation state? Do you despise the petty despotism of mainstream society and universal identarian essentialism? Do you wish to build a deranged utopia based on an obscure sexual fetish or the rantings of a 19th century children's author or at least die trying? Then welcome to the out-group dearest motherfuckers! We've been waiting a long time for you to see the light and we don't fucking care what color it is as long as it burns brighter than a Molotov cocktail. Now let's get together and build something strange on the ashes of that dust heap called Western Civilization. Anarchy is loosed upon the world, and I feel frisky.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* The Future by Leonard Cohen

* Changes by David Bowie

* True Blue by boygenius

* Margin Walker by Fugazi

* Someday by the Strokes

* Pinhead by the Ramones

* Describe by Perfume Genius

* Can't Hardly Wait by the Replacements

* Freak Scene by Dinosaur Jr.

* Down In the Streets by the Stooges

* Come as You Are by Nirvana