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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Search & Destroy by the Stooges

* Shell Games by Bright Eyes

* Peace Sells by Megadeth

* Just Like Henry by Dressy Bessy

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

* Mandinka by Sinead O'Connor

* War Pigs by Black Sabbath

* Human Behavior by Bjork

* Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols

* Breathe by the Prodigy

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

Ukraine is a Land Lynched by Borders

 "From these unfolding vistas of human misery and from personal misery, man must forge convictions, call other men his brothers, and fight for freedom. Man is only free if he is prepared to kill every hangman and every power magnate if they do not wish to stop their shameful tasks."

-Nestor Makhno, Ukrainian

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person on the planet who has noticed that pretty much everyone seems to be losing the war in Ukraine. You would never know it from all the shameless cheerleaders on the mainstream news, but this thing is a downright ghastly dumpster fire and Vladimir Putin isn't the only one getting burned. The entire Eurasian landmass is gagging on the toxic fumes of that endless proxy war and the pollution is spreading fast. 

We're all generally kept abreast of Putin's imperial blunders but just because the NATOcrats on CNN publicly jack off to the details doesn't mean they're not true. That mincing little shit isn't fucking up nearly as bad as Zelensky's English-speaking fanboys would have you believe but he's still fucking up. Desperately trying to advertise himself as some kind of heroic patriot for sucking his people into an unwinnable crusade that any first-day Kremlinologist should have been able to deduct was a trap designed by Russia's western adversaries to ensnare them into the kind of imperial regime change nightmare that usually only neocons are thick enough to act on.

Not that Volodymyr Zelensky has fared any better from this hideous conspiracy. If last week's NATO summit in Vilnius should have made anything painfully clear it is that Kiev is getting poned by this plot every bit as Badly as the Kremlin is if not worse. Nation after nation at that satanic shindig took turns thanking Ukraine for feeding an entire generation into their woodchipper before announcing that their country club isn't excepting any new members until old members drop dead. Meanwhile, Ukrainian-born strippers are jumping out of cakes and blowing Sweden in the next room while "Celebrate Good Times" ushers in their rushed membership. 

Basically, if Putin is playing Carry in this Disney remake of a Brian De Palma classic, then Zelensky is the hunky dud in the feathered hair getting nailed in the dome by the blood bucket and that bucket is coming down hard in the Donbass where this waking nightmare started and refuses to end.

Even with Putin's favorite neo-Nazi privateers in Wagner pulling pranks on him in the motherland, Ukraine is still getting savagely bushwacked in their long-anticipated spring offensive. With an arsenal of Lucifer's finest toys and a price tag three times higher than most of their neighbor's GDPs combined, Zelensky's plucky conscripts haven't managed to move their trenches more than an inch to the east. But fuck it, maybe a fresh batch of cluster bombs will do the trick. Hell, why not napalm and agent orange too while we're pimping out the civilian killing winners? 

No, the only winners in Ukraine are the pimps themselves in the arms industry and they don't even have to sully their ring fingers with peasant's flesh just so long as they can draft more Slavic teenage slaves to smack their bitch up for them.

This shit is fucking depressing me. As a lapsed-tankie war-nerd turned collapsitarian Putin-skeptic, I never thought I'd get sick of analyzing my old ideological stomping grounds in the former Soviet Union, but no one seems to be heeding my observations and they're actually pretty fucking basic. Everyone is losing this stupid goddamn war because everyone is on the wrong side of the wrong border. Russia has no right to run roughshod over Ukraine regardless of what twisted john they allow to cum in their unprotected asshole and Ukraine has no right to do the same damn thing to the Donbass for the same damn reasons.

All people have the right to secede when their nation acts without their consent and that nation has the right to get blown to bits like a bully in Straw Dogs for trying to stand in their way. Russia gets their ass kicked every time they forget that Ukraine doesn't want to play Soviet Union anymore and Ukraine gets their ass kicked just as hard every time that they forget that "liberating" the Donbass with cluster bombs is how this sick quagmire got started in the first place. 

There are no more heroes left alive in this war, only imbeciles that refuse to take a time-out from murdering each other to read a history book and what history should teach everyone in this campaign of carnage is that the biggest villain in Ukrainian history has and always will be that imperial contraption known as the border.

Borders have lynched these wild steppes for centuries. Putin likes to play up the fact that Ukraine has never been able to hold those imaginary lines on his fancy maps in place for longer than a few decades but more often than not it has been his own nation moving them back and forth at will to serve their own fleeting imperial pretensions. Most of the territories that comprise present-day Ukraine have been Russian property for at least fifteen minutes but large portions of them have also been Polish, Ottoman, and German too. 

The current Russified colonies of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhya, and Crimea were all part of a Russian territory known as Novorossiya aka New Russia after being acquired throughout the 18th century and Catherine the Great pumped them full of their current ethnic Russian populace to secure this new vassal state.  Ukraine's borders and the impoverished tribes trapped between them continued to be warped beyond recognition by moneyed outsiders throughout the bloody World Wars, with English armed Czarist henchmen reigning White Terror over ethnic Russians, Stalin starving insubordinate ethnic Ukrainians, Hitler arming the survivors to get genocidal revenge, and Khrushchev stapling Crimea to the battered ass of the bloodlands like a pinata.

Basically, it has been one wild game of imperial grab-ass after another in that region with only the poorest Ukrainians and Novorossiyans being asked to foot the bill, often with their own lives. But the reality that neither side seems willing to own is that the western steppes of Ukraine have always been a wild and stateless region of nomadic warriors and shiftless drifters, and this is precisely what makes that place great when meddling outsiders aren't turning it into a bog full of blood.

Ukrainian culture was defined by distinctly Eurasian stateless federations, including the Rus who would come to define Russian culture as well. The finest among these proud heathen mongrels though were the Zaporizhian Sich, an anarchist Cossack polity that ruled the very land their ancestors on both sides are killing each other over as we speak for nearly three centuries.

Much like modern Ukraine, this feared and respected entity of unapologetic barbarians was by no means racially pure. They were a mixed-up hodgepodge of serfs and outlaws who fled the stuffy Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to build a life without masters in a land too wild to be governed. They pledged their loyalty to no state and ran a uniquely egalitarian society led by popular assemblies with elected representatives that could be recalled at the drop of a sword by popular decree. Even after the Anglophilic Czars broke up the Sich the way they did their own Cossacks and assimilated them into their armies, that land remained haunted by their ungovernable spirit.

This was the same region that proved to be a hotbed for the populist Narodniks who would inspire the Russian Revolution. This was the same region where Europe's original Jewish converts held their last stand as a truly stateless nation in the Pale of Settlement. And this is the same region that briefly served as a homebase for Nestor Makhno's infamous Black Army who took on both the Reds and the Whites during the Russian Civil War and continue to inspire generations of anarchists like me across the globe to dream wild and demand what assholes like Putin and Biden tell us is impossible.

The real reason why Ukrainians and Novorossiyans cannot peacefully coexist is because Ukraine itself cannot peacefully exist within anyone's borders. That Westphalian concept makes no more sense for those steppes than it does for the Middle East or the American Southwest. The only sustainable borders on this planet are those governed by nature, by shores and forests and mountain ranges. By bioregions where nature dictates culture rather than the other way around. And in an environment with no oceans and no forests and where the only mountains to be seen are a hundred miles aways and the deserts and fields stretch on into oblivion, no border can sustain itself and only the wild can live in peace.

When I pray to the gods for Ukraine, I pray for the harmonious chaos of the Cossacks, because theirs was a fire that only burned tyrants and tyrants hold no right to the wild steppes.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Like a Rolling Stone by Drive-By Truckers

* All Tomorrow's Parties by the Velvet Underground

* Rite of Cleansure by Burzum

* Celebration by Kool & the Gang

* Chosen To Deserve by Wednesday

* The One I Love by REM

* Southwood Plantation Road by the Mountain Goats

* Equimanthom by Bathory

* Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division

* Smack My Bitch Up by the Prodigy

* International Small Arms Traffic Blues by the Mountain Goats

From Oslo to Jenin: A Call for a No-State Solution

 The West Bank is on fire again. In fact, that patch of sand hasn't stopped burning since Benjamin Netanyahu hijacked the Knesset late last year. In a seven month stretch that shameless gangster has taken Israel's seven-decade Nakba and pushed it into increasingly genocidal territory. 190 Palestinians have been killed, 174 of them in the first half of 2023 alone. Israel's American armed gestapo in the IDF have carried out near daily raids in the West Bank while swelling mobs of openly fascist illegal settlers have matched them with their own sweeping pogroms, burning entire villages to the ground.

This latest wave of mutilation is all part of a Faustian bargain that Bibi has made with Israel's rising far right. As long as this coalition of religious whack-jobs and Jewish supremacists agrees to keep that hoza's pink ass out of the slammer he is more than happy to hand them what's left of the West Bank on a spit. This was made obscenely clear with Bibi's promise to expand Israel's illegal settlements by 13,000 homes and his decision to toss his openly genocidal finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, the keys to the Nakba with his own customized private army in the Ministry of Defense.

The result has been a whistling pressure cooker of creeping ultraviolence that finally exploded in Jenin this month with a two-day raid that set a new precedent for ethnic cleansing in the West Bank but also raised the bar on their increasingly desperate citizenry's refusal to go down without a fight. For 48 hours the entire weight of Israel's hulking military might rained down on this tiny, impoverished refugee camp. Swarmed by over 2,000 heavily armed troops with hundreds of armored vehicles, Jenin was encircled and completely cut off from the outside world, with bulldozers obliterating all roads leading out of the camp and destroying its capacity to provide its citizens with clean water and electricity. 

Between airstrikes from Reaper drones and Apache gunships, IDF loudspeakers instructed the besieged population to abandon their homes or be obliterated. More than 3,000 civilians out of a population of just over 20,000 heeded their warning under a storm cloud of tear gas. But those who stayed behind had the final word with a brazen message written in fire reading 'fuck around and find out.'

12 Palestinians were killed and over one hundred were injured but they held their own against one of the most ferocious armies on earth with little more than glorified zipguns and bottle rockets. Ultimately, they left the hopelessly bogged down IDF with little option but to retreat. This David-and-Goliath spectacle was made all the more stunning by the fact that the militants in these poorly armed brigades were quite literally children, teenage boys with a whole life of oppression ahead of them and nothing to lose but blood and anguish. The oldest casualty was 23 and five of the dead were minors. Israel retreated with its pointed red tail between its legs, promising to come back for more with their hoza-in-chief declaring the operation to be "open ended." Their unshaken teenage targets shouted back, 'Bring it!' with their fists balled and bloodied at their sides and the watching world shuttered.

The only thing more delightfully consistent than Israel's failure to take their victims seriously in the streets of their own neighborhoods is Palestine's ability to kick their fucking ass with its arms tied behind its back. However, Bibi was right about at least one thing. This isn't over and there is no reason to believe that it won't get worse. If the latest attempt to ethnically cleanse Jenin failed with flying colors to break the iron will of a few very pissed-off Arab kids, it sadly succeeded in proving that even the most obnoxiously PC administration in White House history still doesn't give a single solitary fuck about brown lives on the wrong side of the Dead Sea.

After the Biden Administration made all the usual cowardly noises about their Zionist Gollum's inalienable right to defend itself from crumbling ghettos packed with orphans, Israel's Defense Ministry proudly announced its plans to buy another 25 stealth F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin by 2027 with $3 billion of the American taxpayer's hard-robbed money in military aid. In other words, put your wallet away Bibi, the next ten bloodbaths are on us.

My old comrades on the far left will blame this ongoing holocaust on Bejamin Netanyahu and the rise of Israeli fascism that he is presiding over in exchange for a pardon for his corruption spree and they won't be wrong, but they will be missing the point. The most tragic detail about this deadly new stage of the Nakba is that its results became inevitable the day that Yasser Arafat forfeited the duties to defend the West Bank to its fucked-over orphans by signing the Oslo Accords in 1993. It pains me to no end to admit this, but the roots of the bomb in Jenin were formed by a fuse lit with a flaming peace deal called the Two-State Solution and too many good people on the left continue to foolishly warm their hands by the embers of its smoldering ashes.

Once upon a time, Yasser Arafat was our everything. As the fearless keffiyeh clad leader of the PLO, he was like Che Guevara and Mahatma Ghandhi rolled into one mind blowing spliff. After decades of taking the stick to Israel's ass with bold revolutionary actions on nearly every continent on earth, Yasser switched gears and lead an equally daring campaign to make hay with his street cred by breaking bread with his enemies in exchange for a sovereign Palestinian state. In 1993, his labor led to a historic agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin that was supposed to negotiate a settlement to a two-state solution with a Palestinian national entity on the land occupied by Israel since 1967.

The western world rejoiced but Palestine mourned what felt like a cheap consolation prize for being raped by a winner. Edward Said would famously describe the Oslo Accords as "Palestine's Versailles" but it was actually far worse. For all his lofty ambitions and tireless efforts, the only thing that Yasser Arafat had really achieved with that supposedly historic deal was reducing a vibrant revolutionary movement into an easily corruptible state called the Palestinian Authority.

By the end of the nineties, the number of Zionists illegally colonizing the West Bank had nearly doubled and Palestine had lost its patience with Arafat's broken promises of peaceful coexistence with an unrepentantly abusive spouse. Radical young Islamist upstarts in groups like Hamas launched a fiery second Intifada in 2000. Arafat may have grown corrupt and rich in his new position as king of the ghettos, but he still couldn't bring himself to do the Israeli's bidding against a bunch of headstrong kids who merely picked up the sword he had dropped for a headline. Arafat bravely refused to sick the PA's new western funded security forces on Hamas and Israel responded by putting him under virtual house arrest until he died a strange and mysterious death in 2004.

This death was later proven to be murder years later when an autopsy revealed traces of radioactive polonium in Arafat's exhumed corpse. The culprit was pretty clear to anyone with a functioning set of eyeballs. Israel was the only nation in the region with access to that kind of nuclear material and then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had quite openly admitted to toying with the idea of assassinating the peacemaker for years. But this assassination would have been impossible without conspirators in Arafat's inner circle and the events proceeding his death make it hard not to come to the conclusion that those same people took his place in running the Palestinian Authority on Israel's behalf.

A fat little technocrat named Mahmoud Abbas took Yasser Arafat's place in 2005 and after helping Israel to quickly wrap up the Second Intifada he essentially declared war against his own people by turning the Palestinian Authority into one of the most oppressive police states on earth. With a CIA trained security force of 83,000, the West Bank now suffers from the highest ratio of security personnel to civilians out of any territory on earth. These thugs regularly abuse and torture their own people while acting as de facto security guards for the illegal Israeli settlers who rob them blind. 

With prisons being built faster than schools and entire communities being razed to the desert floor, the people of Palestine finally called bullshit on this raw deal by electing Hamas to a majority in parliament over Abbas' fat cats in Fatah in 2006. Israel and the PA responded swiftly in tandem by turning the entire territory into a prison. The Hamas stronghold of Gaza was blocked off from the outside world by air, land, and sea with a crippling Israeli blockade while Abbas earned his keep ruling by decree in the shrinking West Bank. Oh, that deformed gremlin still grumbles loudly over each of Israel's increasingly sensational war crimes, but he conveniently refuses to spare a single member of his own private army to back up the kids they police in the camps when they do their jobs for them by trying to fight back.

I hate to play the anarchist know-it-all card here, but this is what happens when a revolutionary movement makes the mistake of becoming a state, they become the oppressors. The Two-State Solution isn't a failure just because Israel has no right to exist. It's a failure because no state has the right to exist, especially not a European-style nation state in a region with zero indigenous history of that brand of subjugation. Muslims, Jews, and Christians all coexisted peacefully in the Holy Land for generations back when it was a poorly governed Ottoman outpost. It wasn't until the British showed up and started carving up the desert like a Westphalian birthday cake that things began to get crazy, and this insanity won't stop until the people of that region reject thugs like Bibi and Abbas and stop trying to be Europe.

Fuck Europe. Europe is fucked. Be something better. Look to the roadmaps of regional mavericks like Muammar Gaddafi's Isratin Proposal or Abdullah Ocalan's Democratic Confederalism. Recreate the autonomous tribal democracies that ruled those deserts peacefully without a state long before Israel or Palestine even existed. It's up to you, Palestine, but we can all start right now by giving the brave child soldiers of Jenin a little fucking back-up against the forces of Babylon with a Stateless International Third Intifada. Because there is no state solution like a no-state solution.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.

* Spitting Off the Edge of the World by Yeah Yeah Yeahs & Perfume Genius

* The Bends by Radiohead

* Wave of Mutilation by the Pixies

* Tommy Gun by the Clash

* Ahead by Wire

* Time for Heroes by the Libertines

* Where Eagles Dare by the Misfits

* Anti-Curse by boygenius

* Sonic Reducer by Dead Boys

* My Hero by Foo Fighters

* The Narcissist by Blur

* Heroes by Peter Gabriel 

Poisoned by Prohibition: Sympathy for the Endangered Junkie

 I have a tendency to view most pharmaceuticals, be they therapeutic or recreational, as neither good nor bad, but fentanyl is one lethal concoction that has really sunken its fangs deep into the collective throat of this nation and even a live-and-let-libertine like me has little choice but to shake my weary head sorrowfully at the grim statistics. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 100 times more potent than heroin, kills an average of 200 Americans a day, beating out nearly every other drug combined along with cancer and suicide as the greatest single cause of death among Americans under 50. In 2021, the CDC counted 107,375 deaths by overdose in this country with an estimated 67% of these fatalities involving synthetic opioids and most of those casualties likely had little to no idea what the fuck they were even shooting.

To me, that is the greatest crime behind this epidemic and what truly sets it apart from many of the other hyped-up pharmaceutical fads. Unlike most pearl-clutching normies in the straight world, I fully except and even begrudgingly respect the individual right to commit mass suicide by having a good time and I despise all the crowd-exciting tricks that the government and their willing Cassandras in the mass media play to try to horrify the public into embracing totalitarianism as the only elixir worth shooting directly into your prick.

They are playing this twisted fucking game with fentanyl, telling a gasping public that you can overdose just by breathing in the fumes of a junkie's belch on the subway train. The fact that does set fentanyl apart from many other drug hysterias however is that what America is experiencing is indeed by and large a wholesale poisoning, only the population being poisoned has been conveniently obscured by the mass media to mask the fact that most of these individuals are actually just consenting adults being poisoned by the toxic fruit of prohibition itself.

The just-say-no-crowd has only just recently stumbled over their long-anesthetized empathy for the actual addicts caught up in their holy war and the reason behind this sudden sea change is likely that the corpses washing up on their shores are now increasingly white and suburban in nature. Not that this has prevented them from presenting these victims as mere things, like creatures straight out of a George Romero picture, totally devoid of anything in the way of agency. Don't get me wrong, there certainly are plenty of kids keeling over after popping mystery pills from the dark web for the first time, but your average fentanyl casualty is actually an absurdly misunderstood citizen of the western counterculture known as the junkie and the long-term demonization of this population is a big part of what is serving them up to fentanyl like an endangered species.

When most people think about heroin users, they generally think of some filthy derelict slumped over in an alleyway with the rest of polite society's garbage. The reality however is that this lurid narrative bears very little resemblance to the average dope fiend. Your average heroin user is actually a relatively high-functioning adult with a job, a car, a family and all the responsibilities that come with such mundane trappings of the so-called American Dream. Most of these people have also made a conscious commitment to a lifestyle of narcotic dependency because it is preferable to an existence with chronic pain. Many are former users of prescription opioids who have been cut off and forced to seek salvation from the streets after fascistic federal crackdowns brought on by mass media hysteria. But there is also more than one form of chronic pain and more than one legitimate excuse to embrace addiction as a way of life.

For centuries, artists, philosophers, and seekers have flocked to the poppy fields to sooth their aching spirits while the more well-behaved citizens of western civilization have scratched their heads and shrugged their shoulders at this pervasive trend. Some of the greatest poets of the 19th century drew inspiration from the altered states of consciousness they conjured up under the influence of opioids. Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud championed these narcotics and the "Fantasias" they elicited for taking them to spaces where rapture was bottomless and detachment from the modern world around them actually allowed them to comprehend it more clearly. This same form of toxic meditation was later mined by the greatest jazz musicians in American history, pharmaceutical daredevils like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, who boldly celebrated the transcendent relaxation of heroin with bebop and the sonic aesthetics of cool.

Heroin would later come to define the work of many of my own tortured musical heroes on the outskirts of rock n roll. Analog outlaws like Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, Lou Reed, Tom Verlaine, Johnny Thunders, Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love would all follow the lead of bebop and Baudelaire by using that dirty water to step outside themselves and touch our lives in ways that sobriety may or may not have afforded them otherwise. I'm not trying to sugarcoat addiction here. Many of these same brilliant artists would also ultimately destroy themselves but I think it is foolish for us to simply blame the tool they chose to do that with while totally ignoring the magnitude of the art that came out of that same experience. Alex Trochi, the resident junkie laureate of the Situationist International once referred to his own addiction as an act of "artistic self-destruction" and I believe that this observation cuts to the very heart of the so-called Opioid Epidemic.

All opioids including heroin are essentially painkillers but as I noted above, who is to say that physical pain is the only kind of pain worth killing? Why not psychological pain or even spiritual pain? How about philosophical pain? The collective pain of entire generations forced to endure the deep bottomless ache of an empty, vacuous, and materialistic civilization that seeks to render the human spirit into a veritable commodity to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. Heroin is an undeniably toxic substance, but it is also a substance that affords the individual with a level of deep introspection that allows them to divide themselves from the herd. This is what makes the junkie such a vile caste in the eyes of mainstream society. Because the junkie represents a lifestyle which is arguably the most radical rejection of mainstream society available. A kind of chemotherapy for the domesticated spirit. And now that these sullied renegades are becoming a downright endangered sect, mainstream society is suddenly all broken up about it?

Mainstream society brought this poison on with its war on certain drugs and the drug users that they fail to control. No seasoned junkie goes out looking for fentanyl. Fentanyl came looking for them when the US government decided to clamp down on their own opium farms in Central Asia and the Golden Triangle after white people started spiking up and bringing the ghetto to the suburbs. The cartels only turned to fentanyl because prohibition required them to come up with something cheap, lethal, and easy to manufacture and this isn't the first time we've seen this kind of police state blowback either. During this country's disastrous prohibition against alcohol up to 50,000 consenting adults looking for a good time dropped dead after ingesting bathtub gin or rotgut whiskey manufactured on the cheap using industrial alcohol. We have also seen this with vitamin E acetone in THC vapes, synthetic cathinones in MDMA, levamisole in cocaine and now even animal tranquilizers like xylazine in fentanyl.

All of this is the direct product of prohibition, and yet the state's response to this product is more fucking prohibition. That is because the state and its various industrial complexes are the real cartels and they don't just traffic in prisons, borders, and 24/7 surveillance, they traffic in an endless cycle of misery that makes consensual behavior toxic and then sells the violence that caused it as the solution. It is a massive con, and it is a con that requires a virulent form of chemical bigotry to grease the gears that it dismembers us all with.

If people really truly want to stop other people from using certain drugs, then they need to ask themselves why those people choose to use those drugs in the first place. They should also probably ask themselves why exactly it is so goddam important for them to stop other people from doing things they don't like with their own bodies. Is it truly a concern for their wellbeing? If so, then why aren't they equally committed to stopping people from using cars or cellphones or the government? Perhaps these people should look towards their own addiction to controlling other people's choices and ask themselves when was the last time a junkie put an entire generation in prison to achieve their fix? Consider this an intervention.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones

* Loaded by Primal Scream

* Heroin by the Velvet Underground

* The Bird by Charlie Parker

* Hit So Hard by Hole

* Dirty Water by the Standells

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

* Blue Train by John Coltrane

* Pennyroyal Tea by Nirvana

* Head On by the Jesus & Mary Chain

* You Can't Always Get What You Want by the Rolling Stones

* Marquee Moon by Television

Stonewall On a Farm or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Agorism

 

"Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now! Whatever you would do then, do it now. When you run up against obstacles, people, or things that won't let you live that way, then begin to think about how to get over or around or under that obstacle, or how to push it out of the way, and your politics will be concrete and practical."

-Paul Goodman

• "If you don't like what you're doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove."
• 
  
• -Timothy Leary

2023 was a pretty cruel year to be a Queer revolutionary. While one half of America's two-party junta excitedly stoked the flames of transgender genocide with a slurry of unabashedly fascist laws that exploited the full weight of the breeder pig state to police Queer bodies back into the shadows of the closet, the other half effectively colonized Pride Month and turned a celebration of revolutionary insurrection into a corporate coronation welcoming LGBTQ people like terrified sheep into the bloodthirsty jaws of capitalist assimilation.

And somehow, I can't seem to convince my people that these two campaigns are not a coincidence but a conspiracy. Just like my Irish ancestors before them, my beloved tribe of sexual mavericks and gender outlaws are being offered two choices by the same double headed serpent in the garden of Babylon. You can either embrace the prison industrial complex that Pappa Biden built before losing his marbles or you can be mowed over by it. Assimilate or be destroyed. 

Both of these heinous choices end in the erasure of Queer culture as anything but a tacky knickknack on the warden's bookshelf. But try as I might, I can't seem to convince other Queer people that they have become the latest pawns in a very old con job known as the melting pot. I have screamed this hideous truth until I'm blue in the face from the rooftops of the Stonewall Inn, waving a flaming rainbow flag and dressed like Carry in a prom gown bathed in swine's blood, and I still haven't been able to illicit much more than a shrug from the passing parades.

It's in hybrid moments like this that my chemically imbalanced passion converts over to depression, and I begin to lose hope. What is the use of scribbling these cantankerous diatribes if nobody fucking listens? What is the point of belonging to anything when people only let you down? Why not just draw the curtains, crank Elliot Smith songs at eleven and cuddle up with that large hunting knife that I keep conveniently close to my bed while watching the parade go by with pinpoint eyes full of smoldering anger. It's in moments of dark despair like this when I have to unplug my computer, grab my car keys and drive out into the holler to escape from myself.

About forty miles from the middle of nowhere, in the junk strewn heart of central Pennsylvanian tetanus country, just passed the outlaw biker bar and the half-charred scarecrow in the melting latex Donald Trump mask, there is a poorly paved winding country road off a poorly paved winding country road that leads to a little shack that used to be a barn in a past life. You'll know it when you see it because it's the only hovel in fifty miles standing beneath a battered rainbow flag and it's covered from head to toe in anarchist graffiti like a Charles Bronson era New York City subway car. This is my sanctuary. A feisty little love shack that my found family affectionately refers to as Misfit Manor.

It is the fulltime home of two and a half trannies, nine ducks, four cats, an old German shepherd and a recovering crystal meth addict. I met Archie and Em during group therapy, and we congealed into something of a perverse family unit during the post-apocalyptic panic of the pandemic. Their story reads a bit like the lyrics of a John Mellencamp song hijacked by Lou Reed on a moonshine bender. Just a couple of farm raised furies who became high school sweethearts, switched genders and had a kid who defies both of them. You know, the American dream, little pink strap-ons for you and me... and all the redneck chicks go doo do doo do doo do doo do do doo...

In addition to Kiddo, their eleven-year-old non-binary smart-ass who self-identifies as a threat, calls me Auntie Anarchy and is clearly more mature than the rest of us sown together, Archie and Em have also adopted Revo, a thirty-something bisexual troubadour, Iraq War vet, recovering everything addict and unrepentant nihilist who lives in the attic, breathes cannabis and pays his rent in folk songs and prison tats. His nom de guerre is short for Repeat Violent Offender, a charming little moniker he picked up while doing a dime in one of Pennsylvania's finest maximum-security gulags.

Besides the faggot Waltons on acid, Misfit Manor has also become a second home for a roving circus of other lovable losers too Queer to qualify as full-blooded hillbillies. Apart from me, the poet laureate and yammering minister of propaganda for this motley crew, there is also my best friend Lily, a wispy, pixiesque, transgender hacker who I've formed something of a plutonic mommy-domme/little girl relationship with over the years. Then there's Brendan, a permanently stoned bisexual masochist who never seems to run out of lethally medicated gummies, and a Queer Civil War reenacting gun-nut named Bruce who is attempting to teach the rest of us how to shoot straight.

On a clear night with a full moon, it's something just next door to paradise. A cozy little hole in the mountainside with a roaring campfire out back, haunted by the friendly ghosts of long-lost drunken uncles and the howls of lonesome coyotes. Archie earned this square acre of paradise fair and square, inheriting it from his hardscrabble grandparents as a reward for being the hardest working black sheep in show business but he and Em have selflessly opened its doors to all the local Queer freaks that the Pride parade left behind and it's the only place outside of my basement that I have ever felt safe enough in to call home. But it's also so much more than that. For a few weird kids without a penny to our name, it's a future.

It is a place where we are all learning to grow our own produce and raise our own livestock. It is a place where we are learning to bear arms, not just to feed ourselves but to defend ourselves from the roaming pick-up trucks full of fag-bashers that still buzz the Manor and attempt to run us off the road at every turn. It is a place that we are preparing to take off the grid with rooftop solar and it is a place where we are trying to cut the umbilical noose from Walmart by bartering goods and services with the local breeders who still remember that we're all just country folk with our backs to the Appalachians and our fingers held out firmly to the metropolitan elites who sneer at us for our peasant ways.

It is a place where I have found hope. Don't get me wrong, we are far from the survivalist preppers that we all need to become to survive the coming collapse of the Kali Yuga. We're always broke, and we probably spend more time getting stoned and playing Dungeons and Dragons than we do with the Mosin-Nagant. But this is what a real revolution looks like in 2023. This is how the adventure begins. Not with dead bankers swinging from the lampposts but with a tight-knit tribal community building their own little pirate utopia right here and now that doesn't need Joe Biden's filthy hand-outs to survive the bigots he shares cocktails with when the cameras aren't rolling. 

It's about two little words that mean something far bigger than bombs. The first one is Agorism, a theory of revolutionary resistance that rejects party politics in favor of starving the toxic conglomeration of big government and big business by creating a counter-economy of subsistence level gray market institutions that rely on things like bartering and mutual aid while offering the system nothing to tax or profit from. To put it in simple terms, this monster cannot thrive if we simply refuse feed it anymore.

The second word is Panarchy, which I believe should be the ultimate goal of Agorism. Panarchy is the creation of not one, but thousands of stateless little pirate utopias devoted to everything and anything from Maoism to Objectivism so long as they all remain completely voluntary in nature. You chose your own damn nation, not the other way around, and you choose when you've had enough of it and want to take off and start a new one down the street. Once again, to put it in the simplest of terms, keep your monsters small enough to drown in the crick.

The dream isn't a climactic final gun battle with those fag-bashers in the white pick-up truck. It's to show them that they don't have to like our utopia to coexist with it. Quite the contrary, they themselves will need a diverse collection of allied weirdos like us if they ever want to escape Brandon's boot like we do. We don't have to be enemies or friends. All we have to do is abandon the state as a bludgeon to wield against each other for the sin of choosing to live our lives differently. That game is a trap that only guarantees that we all get bloody and stupid while the state gets strong on a steady diet of our battered brain matter. Panarchy is for everybody, even faggots and assholes.

I wish I could get the entire Queer community to see the sun set on this place. I wish Misfit Manor could become the new Stonewall. But if there is one thing that my new family has taught me it's that you can't force change on the people you love without strangling them in the process. It's far better to simply start your own little revolution in the backyard and leave a space for them by the fire in case they come around.

See y'all at the holler, dearest motherfuckers. Come by and see us sometime and feel free to come as you are because we're all misfits by light of the flames.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Ballad of Big Nothing by Elliot Smith

* Hybrid Moments by the Misfits

* Love Shack by the B-52s

* Tarmac by Blondeshell

* Jack & Diane by John Mellencamp 

* Take a Walk on the Wildside by Lou Reed

* When I Come Around by Green Day

* Come As You Are by Nirvana

* I Found a Reason by the Velvet Underground

* Where I Find My Heaven by Gigolo Aunts