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

The Border is a Ponzi Scheme

 There is something happening at the border, and it's fucked up. These are the only two things that the loudest of the yammering heads on either side of America's partisan divide seem to agree on when it comes to immigration and they're probably the only two things about this issue that either side actually gets right. There are millions of people flowing back and forth over that invisible line in the desert as part of a tumultuous tide of violence and exploitation that seems to be beyond anyone's comprehension, let alone control. This much is hard for anyone with functioning eyes and/or ears to deny. The rest of the popular narrative however is generally comprised of one of two fictions. There is the liberal fiction that these folks are just clambering for the milk of American exceptionalism and old Joe Biden is just doin his damnedest to let em on in. And then there is the slightly meaner but no less delusional conservative fiction that Biden is in league with the ghost of Joseph Stalin to open the borders so he can replace white cultural conservatives with slightly darker cultural conservatives.

Please allow me to do what I do best and rip the fucking Band-Aid off of this infected wound right now. First off, these people aren't rushing the ramparts of the world's biggest police state because they're just jonesing for our superior brand name of freedom. They are fleeing for their fucking lives from the flaming shitholes that our superior brand name of freedom has reduced their homelands into after we failed to outsource it by the barrel of an M-60. The top four nationalities currently seeking refuge at the southern border are Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians. The first three in that bunch were actually doing relatively fine by post-colonial standards until we chained their countries up in strangling economic sanctions and kicked them into the bottomless well of human misery that tends to come with that sort of economic terrorism and Haiti has been fucked over so many times by Uncle Sam that we all lost count about a century ago. These people are refugees of American violence flocking to the land where all their wealth is being horded by a bunch of lazy fucking gringos with sharing issues.

As for the big bad open border, it's being policed by a larger and more heavily armed squadron of crypto-fascist boot boys than ever before. Even before the Democrats all hopped aboard the border hysteria express, Biden had approved of a $97.3 billion budget for the Department of Homeland Security's fiscal year of 2023, the largest budget in that Orwellian apparatus' putrid history. This includes a combined $26 billion dollars for border protection and immigration alone, which is once again the highest sum in human history, burying Donald Trump's mighty wall in the fucking sand. The jagged little reality that neither species of partisan Washington sewer mutant can seem to swallow is that the border is not open, it has simply collapsed beneath the weight of an insatiably massive police state that both parties have consistently conspired with their shared corporate overlords to construct.  

Like all of America's forever wars, the border war is an ongoing multi-administrative affair passed down from generation to generation, from Democrat to Republican to Dempublican to Republicrat. This carefully manufactured crisis began under Clinton in an attempt to make sure that the supposedly free trade of NAFTA only went one way. From that point on, the differences in how each successive administration fought this jihad were largely cosmetic in nature but they generally followed a downward trend of becoming more and more totalitarian with each changing of the guard. Bush transformed this war into a matter of national security in the wake of attacks that could have been easily avoided if our intelligence monstrosity wasn't too busy hassling Latin American freedom fighters to guard base camp from a few well-known Saudi whack-jobs with green cards and box cutters, but it was actually our sweet-talking humanitarian wunderkind Barack Obama who really kicked the shit into high gear with gulags and mass deportations on a downright Soviet scale.

Donald Trump simply took what Obama had quietly erected and swung it around over his head like a coked-out berserker slathered in virgin calf's blood. He definitely ramped up the cruelty and turned what had been a largely covert war into a blatant act of terrorism by advertising it like a goddamn monster truck rally. But every single weapon at that raving orange supremacist's disposal was provided to him gift-wrapped by the same bleeding-heart liberals who wagged their fingers at the bad man and consoled his victims before the cameras with warm blankets, hot cocoa and Sarah McGlocklin jams. 

And all of these deadly weapons have remained in use long after the bad man went away, however, I will concede that Biden should be given credit for stepping up a program to phase out the horsewhips and cattle prods with more high-tech solutions to improve American border savagery. Joe didn't tear down Donald's silly Great Wall of Atzlan, he simply increased funding on efforts to bring it into the age of Philip K. Dick with a virtual wall of autonomous surveillance towers, armored robot dogs and low-flying Predator drones. Oh, that wet-brained motherfucker didn't come up with this Brave New World, but he and his Department of Homeland Security maestro Alejandro Mayorkas were the first psychopaths sick enough to sell it to the public as a more safe, sane and humane alternative to flaming moats and machine gun turrets. They also stepped-up long-standing efforts to both privatize the border and affectively outsource it farther south to darker quisling rump states like Mexico.

This brings us to the Biden Administration's latest pseudo-humanitarian hustle, labeled the Safe Third Country Policy because apparently Alzheimer's isn't a post-irony condition. While both Joe's grumbling critics and groveling supporters focus on that old bastard's plan to allow 30,000 asylum seekers in the country each month from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti, they also both conveniently avoid the devil in the details. The only asylum seekers allowed in the country will be those with the substantial financial resources and first world computer literacy to be able to do so from their embattled third world countries currently under siege by American imperial designs. This affectively counts out everyone but the wealthiest classes most likely to be collaborators in America's failed regime change schemes as well as the kind of doctors and engineers those countries desperately need to function. Add to this the fact that Biden is also using this decidedly conditional benevolent gift to lay cover fire for his plans to purge as many impoverished refugees as he excepts, enshrining Trump's most dystopian border policies into law in the process, and you get a vastly different picture than the political cartoon being painted by both sides of the partisan Peso. 

However, all of these details still don't change the inconvenient fact that all of this effort, the decades of military machinery, the jackbooted shock troops and Skynet-grade technology, haven't done a goddamn thing to slow the relentless tide of desperate people crossing these trillion-dollar trenches. That's probably because none of this shit was actually designed to keep poor people out of this country. It was designed to control poor people inside of it and make powerful people very rich. The unavoidable solution to this confounding equation is that much like other forms of prohibition, the prohibition of human movement on a massive scale is a very profitable failure and the border as we know it is affectively a massive Ponzi scheme.

Whereas in your typical Ponzi scheme, a fraudster pays existing investors with the funds of new investors while promising high returns and pocketing the money instead, the border Ponzi scheme promises last year's immigrants protection from next year's immigrants but actually just invests this money in a fascistic police state that only benefits the fraudsters pulling its strings. All of this is part of the fastest growing international cartel on the planet, a sinister cabal known as the Border Industrial Complex which is set to reach a value higher than the combined GDP of the entire third world by the time we reach the apocalypse. In an age of collapse, these blood-sucking weasels have cornered the market on an industry committed to defending the besieged Westphalian nation state from the human blowback of its own putrid existence during the final stages of the Kali Yuga.

It is indeed a hideously spectacular scam, and everyone seems to have fallen for it. But like all scams, it is damned to failure by the insatiable hubris of the sociopaths running it. Any boundary defined by a construct larger than the community it supposedly serves is simply too artificial to be sustained indefinitely. Every tribe has some right to define their own boundaries, but this includes the right for me and my tribe to defend ourselves from the real fucking predators of a fanged deep state that none of us actually voted for. It should also include the right for me to invite whoever the hell I want over to dinner, regardless of which fanged deep state claims the soil on their boots. 

As for the desert wilderness that stretches beyond the reach of Ozymandias, no-man's-land is anybody's land and I wish anybody who passes it peacefully nothing but luck in protecting their own tribe. After all, we were all nomads once before we found a space to call our own. There but before the grace of Kali go I.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

*  I'm Set Free by the Velvet Underground

*  Circle the Drain by Soccer Mommy

* Tugboat by Galaxie 500

* So Far Gone by Weird Nightmare

* All the Rage Back Home by Interpol

* Rocket by Smashing Pumpkins

* I'm Beginning to See the Light by the Velvet Underground

* Emma's House by the Field Mice

* Heaven by the Walkmen 

* Oh, Sweet Nuthin by the Velvet Underground

Volodzymandias: US Aid is Turning Ukraine into Another Israel

 

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Volodzymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias", 2023 edition

Americans in general aren't exactly a bunch renowned for their global solidarity but they really do seem to legitimately give a fuck about the besieged people of Ukraine. As a lifelong anti-imperialist who has spent the raw end of a lifetime trying to convince these same motherfuckers that Palestinians and Iraqis are people too, the temptation to roll my eyes at this sudden outpouring of empathy for the one population on the business end of a bomb that doesn't have "Made in America" stamped on the side of it is understandably high. 

But I think this instinct is a mistake, both tactically and morally. People getting bombed are people getting bombed, regardless of what color cowboy hat the despot throwing the switch is wearing. The truth is that your average clueless American normie gives a fuck about Ukraine because it's the one place being bombed where CNN keeps the cameras rolling. People should give a fuck about Ukraine for the same reasons they should give a fuck about Palestine. Telling them not to does nothing to promote the suffering of other victims of international violence. What productive anti-imperialists should be doing instead is asking these bleeding-heart blue-and-yellow flag wavers, what happens when the bombs stop dropping?

No one on any side of any aisle seems to be asking this question. What becomes of the valiant martyr state of Ukraine if the war ends tomorrow? What will the result of western efforts in that nation be when the Russians finally pack up their jackboots and fuck off back to Moscow? The answer isn't pretty, but it is pretty clear if you read carefully between recent headlines. Congress has just recently approved another $3 billion arms package for Ukraine just in time for Orthodox Christmas. This latest deficit multiplying bundle includes 50 heavily armored Bradley fighting vehicles complete with 500 TOW missiles and a battery of America's deadliest Patriot missiles. That puts the price tag on America's aid for the current regime in Kiev at just over $112 billion during the last ten months alone. This is almost twice as much as Russia's entire military budget for 2021.

Volodymyr Zelensky, Time magazines man of the year and the fearless leader in charge of what has swiftly become one of the developing world's most colossal arsenals, brought in the holidays himself by signing a new bill into law that expands his government's censorship powers to print and online journalism. This after he already nationalized the country's broadcast media in 2022 with his "Unified Information Policy" that forcibly combined all of Ukraine's news channels into a single state-run 24-hour propaganda mill dubbed "United News." But Zelensky didn't limit his holiday revelry to Orwellian censorship. He also revoked the citizenship of 13 Orthodox priests for belonging to a sect accused of being a Russian front despite the fact that they cut all ties with that nation in the wake of last year's invasion and have consistently denounced the Kremlin's so-called special military operation since.

So, basically what Ukraine will inevitably be left with after fending off the rapacious advances of a violent autocratic gangster like Vladimir Putin is a nation armed to the fucking teeth and run by a violent autocratic gangster that marches a little more like Putin with each passing Patriot missile. If people in this country legitimately give a fuck about the Ukrainian people, and I want to believe that they do, then they need to put down the fucking Kool-Aid and recognize the fact that Volodymyr Zelensky himself has become an existential threat to whatever freedoms his people have left and America's support for his regime is what made that comedian a monster.

Volodymyr Zelensky began his meteoric rise to international fame as the star of a hit TV show about a pissed-off schoolteacher who unexpectedly becomes the president of Ukraine on the strength of a viral classroom rant against his nation's corrupt elites and that's essentially how he was packaged to the Ukrainian electorate during the 2019 presidential election. After suffering under the yoke of the same clique of hoods and neo-fascists that America put in power with the 2014 Maidan coup for half a decade, the Ukrainian people desperately wanted a change. 

But more than anything they wanted an end to the gruesome civil war in the nation's eastern Donbass region that had already seen over 14,000 mostly ethnic Russian civilians killed and hundreds of thousands more displaced. The lion share of this dirty work was performed by private death squads with swastikas on their uniforms who had been integrated into their nation's newly American micro-managed National Guard after proving a willingness to joyfully slaughter their own former countrymen in the name of the master race.

Zelensky ran on a campaign to reign these savage berserkers in and hold them accountable with the Minsk Agreement that promised the Donbass autonomy and he won this campaign in a landslide victory that included the overwhelming support of his nation's understandably bitter Russian speaking community. The only problem is that the Zelensky campaign's number one doner was a boorish billionaire oligarch named Igor Kolomoisky who had also bankrolled some of the same bloodthirsty neo-Nazi militias that Zelensky was elected to squash, including the notorious Azov Battalion.  

When the new president confronted his master's army in the occupied Donbass village of Zolote with a well-publicized attempt to get these racist gangsters to disarm, Zelensky was torn to shreds by Kolomoisky's phalanx of private news stations and even members of his own government openly joked about having him murdered. His poll numbers quickly plummeted and stayed on the basement floor even after he bravely called out his other masters in Washington for trying to provoke a war with the Russians on his border who had grown impatient with the new president's broken promises to rehabilitate the Minsk Agreement and end the incessant shelling of ethnic Russian civilians. 

Few people in his current western fan club know that Volodymyr Zelensky was actually one of the least popular men in his nation before Vladimir Putin turned him into an overnight superstar with his reckless invasion and even fewer people seem to know that his lack of popularity stemmed largely from his inability to fulfill his promises for peace while also pleasing the violent men who financed his rise to power.

This all changed very quickly last February. Putin's invasion was met with an unexpected amount of resistance from Ukraine's disgruntled Russian-speaking population who it turned out appreciated the Kremlin's violent meddling about as much as they did Washington's. Meanwhile, the once locally despised and internationally unknown President Zelensky was treated to a high-powered corporate media make-over that rapidly built a global cult of personality around the myth of the Jedi who stood up to Darth Putin. 

Volodymyr Zelensky's early attempts at negotiating a peaceful solution to this mess, largely built around the same Minsk Agreement that both he and his assigned nemesis actually agreed was basic common sense, were strongly discouraged by the same jerks who wagged NATO membership over his head in a provocative game of imperial keep-away. Thus, any hope of this bloodbath ending in its infancy seemed to crumble beneath the shadows of the growing egos of two men manipulated by Washington into fighting it to the last man, woman and child. 

It's hard to say what kind of leader Volodymyr Zelensky might have become if Vladimir Putin hadn't taken NATOs bait and invaded a nation rigged up like the farmhouse in Straw Dogs but it's equally hard to deny that with each passing day that this pointless war continues to rage, this one-time reformer leads a little bit more like the autocrat the West urges him fight to a nuclear stand-off. Just like Putin, Zelensky has banned any meaningful opposition to his increasingly dictatorial rule while playing the victim card like a riverboat gambler, and just like Putin, he has also totally abandoned the diplomacy he once advocated in the form of the Minsk Agreement in favor of a Quixotic jihad to return regions to his nation that clearly want as little to do with him as the rest of the country does with the other despot in this proxy pissing match.

With all of these hideous things considered, it should come as little surprise that Volodymyr Zelensky's new geopolitical role model isn't Paris, London or even Washington but the apartheid Mecha of Tel Aviv. Zelensky has openly called for Ukraine to become a "Big Israel" while waxing fascistic about a brave new nation in which the armed forces maintain a permanent presence in every facet of civilian life, raving that in "all institutions, supermarkets, cinemas, there will be people with weapons." In a society like this, war becomes a way of life. Israel can only justify this increasingly oppressive style of existence long after their own Arab neighbors gave up on resisting it by inventing a mythical fifth column of permanent enemies in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Even when Putin leaves, and he will leave, the ethnic Russians of the Donbass will remain, and no one will be left to save them, or the people kept in a state of perpetual martial law justified by their lingering existence.

This is Ukraine's future if the Military Industrial Complex has its way. This is what the billions in American tax dollars are really going to fund. Not salvation for the Ukrainian people. Not peace or democracy. The money of the hard-working Americans who have finally decided to give a fuck about a bombed population will go to building the Ukrainian people a prison in the shape of a nation with an increasingly unhinged autocrat playing the role of warden. The best thing that Americans can do for Ukraine, perhaps the only thing left for Americans to do for Ukraine, is to demand that our so-called representatives in Washington stop funding this tragedy and hope that the equally besieged people of both Kiev and Donetsk recognize that they are both victims of one tormentor with two heads known as the war state.

Fuck Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. If you truly care about the people of Ukraine who have been tormented by both of these bastards, then you'll stop turning Ukraine into another Israel by turning the latter despot into Volodzymandias.

Peace, Love and Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Cult of Personality by Living Colour

* Celebrity Skin by Hole

* The Last of the Famous International Playboys by Morrissey

* Not by Big Thief

* TV Eye by the Stooges

* Posing for Bondage by Japanese Breakfast

* Surrender by Cheap Trick

* Natural One by the Folk Implosion

* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins

* Goodbye Stranger by Supertramp

Max Stirner as a Girl: How a Bunch of PC Brats Balkanized Identity Politics and Why You Should Too

I may be the queerest anarchist between Fire Island and the Salton Sea, but I've never had a great deal of patience for the current fad of political correctness that seems to be all the rage with the other Queers of my generation and younger. At times this makes me feel like a 34-year-old grandmama lecturing young sprites about the glory days when drag shows weren't G-rated and poppers only cost a nickel. At other times it makes me feel like a seasick sailor on a ship of fools, trying to convince my people to care more about canceling FOSTA-SESTA than Dave Chappelle. I love my people. I would be dead without them, but identity politics in this country have been commodified by that gruesome little conglomeration of breeders known as big government/big business and rendered into a toxic distraction from truly revolutionary politics. 

This all began after a glorious cabal of wild faggots and pissed-off brown people turned straight kids on to the magic of revolution in the sixties and pulled the plug on the holocaust in Vietnam. Back then, identity politics were lethal. Every minority had been radicalized by the example of Black Power into a feral pack of heavily armed anti-colonialists hellbent on replacing the United States with a Rainbow Coalition of stateless nations. But then the feds killed Fred Hampton, Jesse Jackson assimilated his outlaw confederation into the Democratic Party and the next thing you know, they're flying rainbow flags at Langley and using the vocabulary of radical feminism to justify exterminating half the Muslim world with drone strikes and sanctions. Identity politics have been affectively colonized by an obnoxious yuppie cult that prioritizes good table manners over anything remotely revolutionary. 

The only thing more reactionary than political correctness however is the melodramatic hissy fit against it coming from supposedly rational adults on both the left and the right who have become convinced that teeny bopper wokeism is the new white supremacy. I shouldn't have to say this out loud, but nobody has ever been lynched for using the wrong pronouns. The kneejerk tendency of straight white cis men to play the victim card every time they're even minorly inconvenienced by liberal overreach makes it at least as hard to have a rational conversation with them as it does with well-intentioned hipsters who hyperventilate every time I call Joe Biden a fucking cunt.

The reality is that the woke kids get it right about most of the big picture shit. The American school of perpetual imperialism is defined by a form of pervasive and systematic white supremacy that either assimilates or annihilates everything and everyone that exists contrary to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant values of collective subjugation and absolute conformity. Notions like gender and race aren't static facts but social constructs invented to control the various tribes who resist this conspiracy and more often than not to turn us against each other. Conservatives don't seem to get that just because the master class has adopted a few of us minorities as pets doesn't mean that the rest of us aren't the first people to taste their wrath and most liberals seem to fail to realize that these constructed identities are worthless shackles unless we take them back and define them based on the radical individual liberty for which they once stood after we reclaimed them in the awesome name of freak power.

I say most liberals because this is the one place where the youngest generation of woke Queer kids really hits it out of the fucking park and puts grouchy politically incorrect grandmamas like me in our place. The anti-PC alarmists are constantly going off about the radical proliferation of new gender identities but I for the life of me can't think of a better example of using identity politics as a lethal weapon for radical individualism. Queer kids create ten new gender identities a day, pick three and then reject them all and start over tomorrow. It's absolute fucking chaos and it totally turns me on, though it's not as new as the youngins or their cranky parents may think.

Genderfluid, genderflux, bigender, agender, polygender, neutrois, pangender, androflux, antigender. This dizzying Kaleidescope of crowdsourced IDs may be relatively new but before a nasty clique of Romans hijacked Christianity and turned it into an excuse to turn gender into a binary tiered chauvinistic class system, we had identities like nadicchi, chukchi, wakawahine, bangala, hijra, mahu, muxe, bakia, fa'afafine and khanith. Every tribe had their own diverse school of Queerness with its own regional variants. More than 150 Native American tribes alone had third genders, and many had as many as five. But this wasn't just an Indian thing. Ancient Jewish rabbinical legal writings designate the existence of six genders and the existence of transgender priestesses has been recorded in ancient Mesopotamia, Symaria, Assyria and Babylonia going back to the Paleolithic Era. 

All of this jibes perfectly with what we know about the animal kingdom which contains thousands of species of snakes, lizards, fish and birds who routinely and often quite fluidly portray behavior inconsistent with their reproductive ascribed sex as a means of survival. Back in pagan times, survival was defined by diverse tight-nit communities. Today, the very survival of humanity itself is being threatened by a corrosive globalist society that is attempting to use the drag of identity politics to dress up conformity into its white Anglo-Saxon Protestant order in the clothing of inclusion. They achieve this evil trick by turning individuality itself into just another collection of capitalist lifestyle choices. 

I honestly believe that the recent rise in gender chaos amongst young Queers is an instinctive and evolutionary attempt to defend individuality against this toxic trap of homogeny by demanding that all identities, even those that are literally fifteen minutes old, are considered as valid as any other. By doing so, these kids have once again found a way to make identity politics ungovernable. They have affectively turned these new genders into what that old German anarchist wizard Max Stirner would refer to as Unions of Egoists or totally voluntary and spontaneous associations of individuals drawn together by nothing but mutual interests for only as long as those interests remain mutual. 

It's a common misconception, even among many anarchists, that Mr. Stirner and his Egoists were all just a bunch of anti-humanist nihilists, but this is only true if you consider the society they were committed to burning down to be in the service of humanity. Stirner, much like other controversial secular shaman like Ted Kaczynski and John Zerzan, saw the sickness before the storm and called on individuals to reject all systems contrary to their nature and only accept unions based on the interests of their survival as free radicals instead. What Max Stirner was essentially advocating for was a totally voluntary school of socialism based on mutual aid and I believe that the current trend of gender chaos invoked by these wee woke youngsters not only follows in this proud and deeply misunderstood tradition of radically individualist egalitarianism, but it also offers us all a wild new alternative to shallow liberal identity politics. 

What if every identity followed this fantastically erratic pattern? What if other modern social constructs like race, age or even sanity became fluid too? How would Fox News demonize the great brown menace if Latinos suddenly exploded into Mayans, Aztecs, Chicanos, Tejanos, Chicanoflux and Nicaraguan-Neutrois? Even better, what would become of white supremacy if European Americans began to voluntarily reject the poison privilege of identifying with the master class in favor of identities based on something other than conquest? What if honkies suddenly became Rednecks, Irish Catholics, Celtic Revivalists, Cajun Americans, Hillbillies, Anglo-Fluid, Greco-Slavic Orthodox or just old school Italians, Poles or Jews? All committed to fighting the same WASP conspiracy that assimilated them into becoming agents of a global capitalist rape culture. The same culture that continues to crush Queers and people of color everyday while carefully minding its manners for the cameras.

This has long been my Queerest psychosexual fantasy. A hopped up panarchist fever dream about a nation of minorities too Balkanized to assimilate into any politically correct hivemind. A thousand voluntary tribes engaged in a thousand voluntary revolutions against one enemy before multiplying into a million. It would be pure fucking chaos and it could be beautiful. Imagine it, dearest motherfuckers, Max Stirner as a girl!

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influence this post

* Venus as a Boy by Bjork

* Imagine by John Lennon

* Danny Nedelko by IDLES

* Oh! You Pretty Things by David Bowie

* Townie by Mitski

* Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell

* Country House by Blur

* Shitty Ballet by Bleached

* Been a Son by Nirvana

* Personality Crisis by New York Dolls

 

Ten People Who Actually Didn't Suck in 2022

 2022 sucked. That's how I usually introduce this annual list of people who miraculously didn't, and I wouldn't be totally off base to do so again. 2022 was a year as chock full of horrors as any other year you might expect to survive during this dark age of Cthulhu. After all, this year was decimated on every conceivable front by a grotesque imperial proxy war in Ukraine that seems frighteningly likely to end in a thermonuclear third world war. On a far more intimate front, gender outlaws like myself have never faced such well-publicized vitriol, with the partisan industrial complex using us as their go-to props for their latest midterm election circus.

I get called groomer six times a day with mushroom clouds blooming on the horizon. For all intents and purposes, it really is the end of the world as I know it. So, why then do I feel strangely fine? Could it be the estrogen finally coursing through my veins after 34 years of testosterone poisoning? Or maybe something that my therapist suggested about rewiring my grim brain in the positive finally clicked. I don't know. But for whatever reason, 2022 was a heinously apocalyptic year that didn't quite suck and here's at least ten reasons why.

Richard Fierro & Thomas James- 2022 was a year that found my tribe under near constant attack, both figuratively and literally and it didn't get much more literal than the recent massacre at Club Q in Colorado Springs that stole five beautifully freaky people from us too soon and grievously wounded dozens more. But it could have been much worse, and it would have been much worse if it wasn't for the aggressive mutual aid of a tribe under attack. Richard Fierro was an ally and an Army veteran of multiple stupid wars who was at Club Q that night with his family to support his daughter's friend performing in the drag show. Thomas James was a US Navy Petty Officer celebrating another day of Queer survival during the Kali Yuga with the family he had found. 

When faced with a heavily armed beast in their midst, these two men and countless nameless others reacted automatically by throwing themselves before the bullets. By the time the cops finally managed to show up, my people had already subdued this beast and beaten him to a bloody pulp. The cops should have stayed home. We didn't need them. We never have and we never will, because, as Thomas eloquently put it from his hospital bed, "When you come out of the closet, come out swinging." In the eternal words of Oscar Wilde, people have gone to heaven for far less.

Roger Waters- I'm not really a Pink Floyd fan. truth be told, I lost all interest in the band after their madcap ringleader Syd Barret took his experiments solo before vanishing altogether. I'm even less of a fan of celebrity activists. Neoliberal saints like Bono and Angelina Jolie just use poor people as another stage to masturbate their insatiable egos on and I can't help but notice that they've only gotten richer and more powerful by hitching their names to obnoxiously newsworthy causes. This is precisely what makes a character like Roger Waters so inspiring. Waters didn't set out to be an activist. He never showed up at Live Aid or rocked the vote. But one year, a few Palestinian fans convinced the rock star to visit the West Bank Wall before a scheduled concert in Tel Aviv. What Roger saw changed him. He canceled the stadium performance and chose to play to a far smaller crowd at the Arab Israeli commune of Neve Shalom instead and he never looked back. 

Since then, Waters has gone out of his way to isolate himself from his bourgeoise industry by becoming the highest profile spokesman for ending Israeli apartheid and this stance has cost him millions if not billions of dollars in the process as he's been tarred by that apartheid state's international lobby as an anti-Semite for standing up for the rights of the only Semites still facing an imminent genocide in Palestine. And Waters hasn't stopped there. After a year of celebrities posing for photo-ops with Volodymyr Zelensky and pledging their undying allegiance to peace by supporting a new Cold War, Rogers stood virtually alone in condemning the violence on both sides and calling for an unconditional ceasefire. The result was as predictable as it was depressing. More canceled shows and more mainstream venom. But somebody has to sing "Give Peace A Chance" and thank Kali that there is still at least one rock star who lives by the lyrics he sings. 

Omali Yeshitela- This may come as a shock to some of you, but Black Power isn't dead and the feds who brought you such Motown hits as Cointelpro remain as committed as ever to stomping it out like an ebony flamed campfire. They made this abundantly clear this July when the FBI launched a series of multi-state raids against the Uhuru Movement and their political arm, the African People's Socialist Party that together form the oldest existing Black Power Movement in the country. Several members were arrested, including the movement's founder and spiritual leader, Omali Yeshitella, whose been scrapping with these cunts since J. Edna wore kitten heels. Their crime was simply maintaining an open and constitutionally protected relationship with a Russian anti-globalist activist accused of having ties to the Russian government. People who condemn Uhuru out of hand for simply maintaining relations with a government you or I may disapprove of are missing the whole point of stateless third world nationalist movements like the one built by men like John Africa, Omali and Malcolm X. 

Marginalized people seeking autonomy from the colonialist states that oppress them should have every right to engage in diplomacy with any nation that may help them gain the recognition they require to ensure their very survival and if the government succeeds in criminalizing these relationships through draconian measures like the Foreign Agents Registration Act, it won't just be Yeshitela's ass on the line. It will be any socialist organization that works in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, any Shiite Twelver Mosque in contact with state sanctioned imams in Tehran, any charity sending aid through Lebanon that might pass through Hezbollah territory. What Omali Yeshitela and his comrades are standing defiantly against isn't a war on Russian influence, it's a war on international solidarity. Omali spoke for every stepped-on tribe living under the boot of this colonialist empire, including my own, when he stood on the courtroom steps and roared, "Don't tell us that we can't have friends that you don't like!" Well, Uhuru has friends like me and I'm one bitch who knows how to throw a punch in kitten heels better than any chickenhawk closet queen.

Chase Oliver- 2022 was the year I officially gave up on electoral politics. I never held on to any dizzy schoolgirl delusion that my vote was ever good for anything more lethal than a protest ballot but as this year's midterms quickly devolved into a downright violent turf war between warring tribes of peasants carrying the portraits of virtually identical oligarchs, it became disturbingly clear to me that the process itself has become a weapon of mass distraction designed to divide the poor against themselves. However, there was one candidacy that I couldn't help but admire. In the most expensive senate contest in the country which pit two confirmed wife beaters against each other in South Carolina, a plucky, pro-gun, anti-cop, gay trekkie named Chase Oliver triggered a run-off as a Libertarian candidate armed with little more than $8,000 dollars and a second-hand Toyota Corolla. By Chase's own admission, he didn't have any intention of winning, he simply wanted to expose how fucked America's electoral system really is and this brazen act of democratic monkeywrenching earned him the hatred of both sides of the two-party cartel and a special place in one non-voting Queer anarchist's heart. 

Pamela Adlon- I had to say goodbye to a family very close to my heart this year. For five seasons, Sam Fox and her daughters Max, Frankie and Duke, along with her seemingly indestructible elderly English mother, Phil, gave us a place at the table of a charmingly dysfunctional matriarchy with Pamela Adlon's FX dramedy Better Things. Based loosely on Pamela's own experiences as a defiantly single mother with a B-list Hollywood career circling the drain, I don't think words can accurately convey what this show has meant to me. I discovered it late at night during the early hours of the pandemic while grappling with suicidal ideation and a flurry of emotional flashbacks revealing a cryptic lifelong struggle with suppressed childhood trauma and Complex PTSD. 

All three of Sam's daughters felt like broken reflections of some piece of my childhood that I had buried alive beneath the floorboards of my subconscious, but none more so than Sam's rebellious genderqueer middle child, Frankie, who steadfastly refused to embrace any single gender label and forced her begrudgingly supportive but frequently vexed mother to love her regardless on Frankie's terms and no one else's. This is a message America still refuses to learn. Your children are beyond your command. If you truly love them, you must relinquish control and let them show you the way, their way. I can only thank Pamela for being big enough to step back and let wildflowers grow in her garden while allowing us all to share in the bittersweet experience. It may have saved my life.

Sophia Allison- The last decade has seen a veritable renaissance in the long-lost art of guitar driven indie rock and it is a movement overwhelmingly led by young Queer women and all the better for it. Mitski, St. Vincent and Phoebe Bridgers have all released refreshingly volatile masterpieces that stand shoulder to shoulder with anything created by Connor Oberst or Kurt Cobain, but 2022 was Sophie Allison's year to blaze through like a runaway comet. Less than two years after her brilliant sophomore album, Color Theory, Sophia, who performs under the moniker of Soccer Mommy, somehow managed to outdo herself with the year's best album, Sometimes, Forever, which saw the 23-year-old artist pull off the seemingly impossible feat of creating a work of art that was simultaneously more accessible and more experimental than anything else on college radio. 

What's even more impressive is that she also managed to use this unlikely combination of abstract industrial noise and intoxicating Top 40 melody to convey a harrowing portrait of another young woman in a state of evolution, liberating herself from the turmoil of childhood trauma, not by rejecting her loneliness and anxiety but by embracing it and coexisting with the chemical imbalances that make her a dynamo of pure weapons grade empathy and courageous intimacy. Lyrics like "You know I'll take you as you are, as long as you do me" come across like a battle cry for a generation defined by malaise but not consigned to becoming a casualty of it.

Malik Diamond- Have you ever wondered what John Zerzan would sound like if he were raised to be an urban shaman by the Wu Tang Clan? Yeah, me neither, but I thank a host of heathen deities every day that I found out when I met Malik Diamond. An impossibly versatile Swiss Army Man, Malik has been a force to be reckoned with in the Bay Area's underground hip hop community for years, putting out a steady stream of albums, books, zines and comics as well as coaching the next generation of anarcho-gangstas in everything from Kung Fu to hip hop history. But I know Malik as the second weirdest motherfucker on CounterPunch. His fluid, stream of consciousness essays on the everyday terrors of being an Afro-Indian half-breed who talks to trees in a rapidly gentrifying metropolis are both instantly relatable to a genderfreak hillbilly extraterrestrial like me and unlike anything else I've ever had the pleasure of reading. 

The left likes to pat itself on the back for its commitment to diversity but diversity isn't about checking quotas with different shades of people that agree with you, it's about Muslim drag queens, undocumented egoists and schizophrenic sewar hermits. It's about people who bring radically unique perspectives to the table that couldn't be provided by any other human on the planet. And it's this spicey weirdo gumbo of socio-political chaos that builds the empathy we all need to survive the collapse of a civilization designed to assimilate us into its beige monolith. People like my comrade Malik don't just make revolution possible, they make it dangerously fun. And I love him like a brother from another mother for it and you should too if you know what's good for you.

Penny Logue & Bonnie Nelson- I've long had a dream that has haunted the darker corners of my skull. A dream of vast wide-open spaces without a single concrete monstrosity in sight. A dream of a space where people too Queer to be smashed into any theme park's corporate alphabet can simply exist, wild and free. Free from labels. Free from passing. Free from abusive cops and gladhanding politicians and hate mongering talking heads. A land free from the debasing moral architecture and constant surveillance of the metropolitan cis world or its carefully segregated gay ghettos. And, quite frankly, a place with guns. Lots of guns. AR-15's and WASR-10's and Ruger Mini-14's. All bedazzled with rhinestones and carried in the manicured hands of people far too fucking rare and beautiful and freaky and colorful to conform to any single gender marker on a bathroom door. In 2022, I discovered that this place of my dreams already exists in the form of the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch, a heavily armed genderfuck compound in the dark heart of Southern Colorado QAnon Country.

A couple of fellow rural transgender anarchists named Penny Logue and Bonnie Nelson started up this alpaca ranch back in 2018 in an attempt to provide freaks like us with a much needed refuge from the hostile slumlords and record shattering trans murder rates of the big tolerant cities, and over the last four years they have created a magnet for other Queer casualties of the modern world seeking to get back in touch with the pagan soil from which we all once bloomed, by any means necessary. But this real-life fairy tale didn't just speak to me because of some impossible dream. It spoke to me for the same reason that 2022 itself miraculously didn't suck even among the carnage of collapse. It spoke to me because this year that dream became a reality for me as well in my own terrifying little corner of Central Pennsylvania QAnon Country. 2022 was the year I found my family. A handful of Queer hillbillies like me who want nothing more than to raise animals and shoot guns in the holler and be left the fuck alone by the straight world around it.

This is the revolution that I've been fighting for my entire life, and I don't even have to kill a single breeder to achieve it. All I have to do is build the world I want now out of the scraps of the old and be prepared to defend it from the toxicity of the outside world. My community and others like Penny and Bonnie's may be far from utopia but we're done waiting for some biblical showdown to make it a reality. 2022 was the year I realized that each and every one of us makes our own goddamn reality. So let the cities burn and let the fag bashers pass their stupid fucking laws. I know a little place in the country where I can ride out the apocalypse and I know it's not the only one.

Happy 2023, dearest motherfuckers. Bring on the Armageddon. We've got nothing left to lose and nirvana left to gain.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH