Horror Movies Against War

 I am a lifelong antiwar activist and a diehard horror movie buff. A lot of people seem to find those two facts to be a contradiction, and I guess on the surface I can comprehend their confusion. Showing up to a Free Gaza rally in a Blood Feast t-shirt does seem to send some mixed messages. However, at their finest, horror films must be understood as unflinching investigations into what terrifies society most and nothing should be more terrifying to society than war. 

This is why some of the most influential movies of the genre, some of the movies that form the very foundation of what every day Americans think of when they think scary movies, are actually the byproduct of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement.

Vietnam was a real-life horror movie, the first modern war that America lost badly played out on live television too quickly to be censored for public consumption. The empire was stripped bare every evening at six for the hideous, brutish thing that it was, and this spectacle irreversibly altered the DNA of American culture on a very fundamental level. In many ways, it temporarily radicalized pop culture as we knew it and horror movies were far from an exception.

One of the least understood consequences of this cultural Vietnam syndrome was the invention of the modern-day slasher film. The first and debatably most influential picture of that grotesque oeuvre was the 1974 grindhouse classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Most of the oft repeated tropes were in place; five teenagers stranded in the middle of nowhere being stalked by a psychopath in a mask. But anyone who has actually seen this film can tell you that there is something unsettlingly different about its delivery. The entire thing feels raw and almost intimate in its depiction of young tourists at the mercy of a hostile and alien environment. The sticks and weeds of the unforgiving Texas scrublands seem to conspire with the killers and there is a pervasive feeling that we shouldn't be watching this even as we can't look away.

That's because director Tobe Hooper shot the film specifically to look like the war footage that kept him up at night. This is also what convinced the young director to cast the monsters of this movie as a perverted portrait of the average American family, literally clamoring for blood at the supper table from their deranged young son, armed to the teeth with a power tool and concealing himself beneath the flesh of his own victims.

But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre wasn't the first bloodbath with roots that reach from the My Lai Massacre to Elm Street. One of horror cinema's most influential auteurs and the man behind Freddy Krueger, Wes Craven, got his start shooting shocking and grotesquely misunderstood exploitation films that attempted to make sense of the horrors of Vietnam much the way that Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre did.

Craven's 1972 directorial debut, The Last House on the Left, was also deeply influenced by the horrors on the evening news with a story loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's Virgin Spring. A pair of teenage girls are kidnapped and brutalized by a gang of fugitive psychopaths who then unwittingly seek shelter in the nearby house of one of their slain victims' parents. When the parents discover the crime and the criminals in their midst, they prove themselves to be every bit as capable of savagery in the service of revenge.

There are two messages to be learned by this ugly story. The first is that a society defined by violence has no right to be shocked when that violence shows up unannounced on their doorsteps. In the early seventies, Wes Craven was baffled by a nation that had found itself in the midst of a gruesome crimewave but didn't seem capable of making the connection that perhaps this was merely a reflection of the violence that their own government was committing on a daily basis in the jungles of Indochina. 

The second uneasy lesson from this deeply uneasy picture is that anyone can become the monster in their own horror movie once they begin defending violence as a means justified by its ends.

Craven explored this theme further in his 1977 follow up to Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes. This time a normal suburban family find themselves stranded in the barren Nevada desert where they are preyed upon by savage mutants. But once again, this films power comes in the form of two revelations which come far too late. The first revelation being that the mutants these milquetoast Nixonites encounter are in fact the desperate and deranged byproduct of nuclear testing committed by their own nation's military. 

The second is that these upstanding Americans find themselves as capable of the same kind of savagery when they too are tormented by forces that defy their comprehension. By the final scene the lines between the good guys and the bad guys become so severely blurred that the film can only end in still shots that fade to red.

Sadly, like much of the American counterculture of that era, the slasher film found itself a victim of commercial assimilation and so did Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven for that matter. But the greatest contribution that the antiwar movement made to horror cinema has to be the zombie movie and this subgenre continues to serve as a pliable tool for social criticism on a shoestring budget. We have the late, great George Romero to thank for this.

While this Rust Belt cult icon made scores of terrifying pictures over the decades, he is most notorious for the original trilogy of his Living Dead series. The truly fascinating thing about these movies is that they are all monster movies in which the actual monsters serve largely as a faceless backdrop for the evils of average human beings who find themselves embattled, isolated, and surrounded by an unstoppable force. 

This template was set by 1968's Night of the Living Dead, in which seven strangers hold up in a vacant farmhouse when they find themselves inexplicably surrounded by man-eating corpses who have risen from their graves to lurk and feast. But it doesn't take long for those strangers to find greater conflict between each other than their shared enemy.

This scenario was inspired not only by the Vietnam War but by the fact that in the midst of this holocaust, America found itself hopelessly at war with itself with the violence that erupted across the country after the failures of the Civil Rights Movement. It is particularly telling that the closest thing to a hero that this movie has is a Black man named Ben (brilliantly played by Duane Johnson) who manages to survive the onslaught of the living dead only to be shot dead by the posse of heavily armed white men allegedly there to rescue him. 

Romero expands upon this theme with the sequels, 1978's Dawn of the Dead and 1985's Day of the Dead, each with a new batch of stranded survivalists attempting to make sense of an increasingly senseless apocalyptic American landscape. 

In Dawn of the Dead, the unlucky survivors manage to isolate themselves in the luxury of an abandoned shopping mall only to find themselves crippled and despondent by depression, agoraphobia, and nihilism. Day of the Dead shows a spark of hope in the fact that the undead appear to be evolving into something more human only to have the movie's hardened warriors double down on their forever war on these creatures that has come to define their existence.

All of these gore fests are really movies about empire, about the horrible things that society can consign itself too in an endless state of constant warfare. The war always comes home, even in a bunker designed to survive nuclear winter, and the zombies always come home to roost. As Nietzsche famously observed, those who fight monsters frequently find themselves reflecting that which they fight.

Many movies have continued to mine this unique post-apocalyptic scenario for gruesome lessons about the banality and inhumanity of western consumer culture today. The best, in my opinion, are Danny Boyle's 2002 masterpiece 28 Days Later and it's 2007 sequel by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 28 Weeks Later. Both of these movies involve everyday people attempting to survive an apocalyptic, rage-inducing virus by putting their faith and safety into the hands of modern-day standing armies only to find these soldiers to be far more likely to kill the innocent in a crisis than to save them.

This is the horrific world that we now find ourselves in and it's not just a movie anymore. The western world has found itself held captive by a military industrial behemoth that creates monsters simply to justify its own increasingly nihilistic existence. Francois Truffaut once said that "every film about war ends up being pro-war." My response is that Francois should have spent less time at Hollywood matinees and more time at the grungy grindhouses of Times Square. 

Working class directors slumming it in exploitation cinema new all too well that the only accurate way to capture the horrors of modern warfare is with a monster movie.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs influenced by this post

* Hybrid Moments by the Misfits

* Mandatory Suicide by Slayer

* Release the Bats by the Birthday Party

* For Whom the Bell Tolls by Metallica

* TV Set by the Cramps

* Let's Have a War by Fear

* Peace Sells by Megadeth

* Rooster by Alice in Chains

* There Won't Be Many Coming Home by Roy Orbison

* Too Many Puppies by Primus

* American Nightmare by the Misfits

Hezbollah is Not Hamas

Victory comes quick to cowards with superior firepower, but that victory is almost always short lived. You would think that Israel, or any other proxy student of western colonialism, would have learned this lesson by now but here comes Bibi, landing on an American battleship in his shiny new F-16, mugging it up for the cameras beneath a big banner that reads 'Mission Accomplished.'

And there is no denying that this has been a pretty sweet Indian summer for Zionist terrorism in Southern Lebanon. After obliterating several international laws and several children with thousands of exploding handheld devices, Israel kicked off its new offensive against Hezbollah by assassinating the organization's mercurial Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, and about 300 other people including a senior commander for Iran's Revolutionary Guard with a massive 2,000-pound bomb with the American gift card still attached. According to western sources, these attacks and others like them have left the plucky Shia militia in shambles with a large portion of their leadership decapitated.

True or false, this is all a part of a much larger plan, as Benjamin Netanyahu established with the public relations choreography surrounding Nasrallah's murder. The bombing took place a day after Bibi had very publicly rejected the latest in a long line of half-assed, western-backed ceasefire proposals and only an hour after he berated the United Nations General Assembly on live television, calling the body a "swamp of antisemitic bile" for politely suggesting that maybe he should tone it down with all the genocide and then declaring a "seven-front war" that can only end in "total victory" over the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and of course Iran. Bibi then retired to a five-star hotel room and personally flipped the kill-switch on an entire neighborhood in Beirut.

But in all his brazen bravado, Netanyahu has actually exposed his cowardice and the delusional hubris which will inevitably damn his conspiracy to tame the Middle East with American ordinances to failure. While all the braindead talking heads in the English-speaking world ooh and awe over the Wagnerian theatrics of Israel's bombastic fireworks display, none of them really seem to grasp the big picture beneath the mushroom cloud.

Israel had to drop an American-made doomsday device the size of an elephant and reduce six apartment blocks to rubble just to kill one man. Had the IDF attempted to enter the suburban Hezbollah stronghold known as Haret Hreik on the ground they would still be attempting to bushwack their way to a retreat through a concrete jungle of hardened Shia guerrillas as we speak.

You see, dearest motherfuckers, Israel is terrified of Hezbollah, and they should be. They have never won a single ground campaign against the outfit even though they have consistently outgunned them, and the reason why should be painfully clear to any casual student of recent Middle Eastern history. To put it simply, Hezbollah is not Hamas. 

Hamas is a grubby, thuggish little Frankenstein that never would have even escaped the laboratory without Israel's support. Bibi and his bros in the Likud intelligentsia have openly bragged about this, their smug conspiracy to arm, fund, and support a two-bit Salafi charity affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood during the First Intifada in order to sabotage the Two-State Solution by confining the PLO's influence to the West Bank. It worked but it also led to October 7.

Hezbollah however is no Zionist Frankenstein monster. If anything, they are much more like an anti-colonialist Van Helsing, born in the fires of Israel's vampiric foreign policy and hardened by every new bomb they've thrown their way. Hezbollah was formed in 1985 by South Lebanese Shia clerics in order to fight off Israel's occupation of the region using the lessons of Iran's uniquely indigenous revolution as a blueprint. Hassan Nasrallah himself was only elected to lead the organization after its previous Secretary-General had been assassinated by Israel in 1992 and he would lead the organization from the ashes to fight Israel to a standstill during two separate military operations designed to eliminate them in 1993 and 1996.

Ultimately, it was Hezbollah, the scrappy Shia militia that should have died with its leader in 1992, that would finally rid Lebanon of its Zionist occupiers in 2000 before going on to become the world's most heavily armed non-state fighting force, with a paramilitary wing surpassing Lebanon's own army in strength. Hezbollah would best Israel once again in 2006 and then play a pivotal role in razing the Islamic State to the ground by building the Axis of Resistance with a legion of other Shiite militias formed in the craters of western munitions in places like Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

It was on those desert battlefields that the model for Bibi's seven-front strategy to Zionize the Middle East was born. America referred to it as 'Shock and Awe' but it really just amounts to a post-Cold War remake of Nazi Germany's Blitzkrieg in which overwhelming displays of industrial-grade terrorism are used to demoralize and paralyze an adversary. 

As we saw during both the Second World War and the War on Terrorism, this works like a charm at crushing states, but it also rapidly radicalizes civilian populations, creating a virulent breeding ground for partisan militias who end up overwhelming the victorious conquering armies and purging them violently from the host.

In the Middle East, a land totally alien to the Westphalian Nation State foisted upon its sands by generations of western colonialism, Shock and Awe resulted in the birth of a whole new generation of warfare, Fourth Generation Warfare, as it's been coined by paleoconservative cold warriors who became critics of empire during the neocon era. This theory essentially amounts to warfare's return to its decentralized tribal state in which the sainted nation state no longer commands a monopoly over the battlefield, but I personally think that it reaches much deeper than this.

Hezbollah didn't just replace the Lebanese Military in its region, it replaced the state itself with a successful network of welfare and infrastructure projects that have made that state virtually irrelevant and ingrained Hezbollah into the very fabric of South Lebanese society. Yemen's Houthi rebels and Iraq's Sadrists have similarly followed suit, and I believe that this is what Israel and its western sponsors are truly afraid of, a No-State Solution.

Israel only exists at the mercy of completely facetious borders that divide a Palestinian population that dwarfs their occupiers in size, four to one. If physical boundaries were abandoned entirely and Arabs returned to their previous state of stateless kinship societies, Israel would disintegrate, and the west would lose its imperial beachhead at the gates of the Eurasian Century.

This isn't just a theory either; it becomes a reality every time western forces attempt to confront the enemy on the ground in Lebanon. Within days of Israel's spectacular bombardment of Haret Hreik, its first ground operations in the region were met with the quick death of half a dozen commandos from Israel's supposedly elite Egoz Unit at the hands of Hezbollah militiamen literally fighting without a leader. The dead included the squad's decorated commander and was followed shortly by the destruction of three Israeli tanks in a separate ambush.

This is why cowards fight from the sky, raining down thousands of pounds of modern machinery upon civilian populations and starving children by manipulating globalist trade regulations. But as the Nazis learned the hard way at Stalingrad, modern technology alone cannot save an invader surrounded by a decentralized population. Hitler wasn't defeated by the United States or even the Soviet Union. He had his ass kicked by starving Jewish girls with bolt-action rifles built before he was born.

This same fate will fall upon Benjamin Netanyahu and his stormtroopers who seem to have learned nothing from the Holocaust other than how to exploit its memory in order to repeat its crimes. 

Had they paid better attention to the wisdom of their ancestors, they might know that Hell hath no fury like a stateless people scorned. But that's ok, I know a few fellow travelers in the local gentile community willing to remind them.

Peace, Love, and Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Blinded By the Light by Manfred Mann

* Golden Hair by Slowdive

* Kim's Watermelon Gun by Flaming Lips

* Frankenstein by New York Dolls

* Glory by the Airborne Toxic Event

* Divine Hammer by the Breeders

* Bright Lights by the Killers

* The House That Heaven Built by Japandroids

* Impressively Average by Brigitte Calls Me Baby

* Punching Bag by the Front Bottoms

Could Orange-Man-Stupid Be the Lesser Evil?

 I despised Donald Trump long before he became a lumpy soapbox for self-congratulating neoliberals to virtue signal on. In fact, I hated that miserable cunt back when he was still financing the campaigns of said self-congratulating neoliberals. 

Long before Donald Trump became billed as the perennial threat to liberal democracy, he was a race bating slumlord, gentrifying New York into a Disneyfied yuppie playground then parlaying the relationships he built with DNC swamp monsters at Jeffrey Eppstein's underage orgies into an even more lucrative career as a Chapter 11 flaunting corporate welfare queen, dismembering Atlantic City with eminent domain and grotesque casinos too big to fail. 

Far from being the antithesis of liberal democracy, this lecherous scum puddle packed into a suit is the byproduct of its pollution and I have a bit of a hard time listening to its scions bitching because he bit the hand that feeds. 

It's not that I don't recognize the threat that beast poses to anything remotely resembling individual liberty, it's just that I fail to see what makes his brand of blunt force fascism any more destructive than what his opponents wield behind a rainbow curtain. 

After all, last time I checked, Barack Obama deported more migrants, built more prisons, and shredded more pages of the Constitution than two Trumps sown together, and he did it all with a benevolent poker face that earned him a Nobel Peace Prize while he murdered brown babies with drone strikes in Pakistan. But, somehow, none of that was an existential threat to democracy.

That's because Democrats and neocons don't give a flying fuck about democracy. What they care about is empire or more specifically, dressing empire in the festive drag of democracy. And it is this carefully choreographed charade that Trump is a threat to because his pathological pomposity pushes him to lead this death star we call a republic like Caligula in bronzer. The only thing particularly exceptional about Trump's last four-year tirade in the White House was the messy ineptitude that defined it. This is the only reason why Washington insiders cringe at the possibility of a second term for Orange-Man-Stupid.

While the deep state uses its economic clout to quietly harass the European members of NATO into allowing tanks in the Louvre parking lot, Trump crashes into Brussels with his fly down and his filthy little hand out, barking "Where's the money, Frenchy!" 

While the deep state prefers to discreetly shuffle migrant children from one police state depot to another in the dead of night, Trump screams racist obscenities and turns Obama-built concentration camps into highly publicized human zoos. 

While the deep state uses the fine print on peace deals to carefully police the half-hearted nuclear ambitions of Israel's rivals, Trump unilaterally rips them up and offers up Jerusalem like a pudding while the rest of the neighborhood plots revenge.

This is the real reason why the Donald is so despised by his fellow swamp critters, he's a pathologically unhinged glutton who makes the most exceptional empire in the history of mankind look like a grubby crew cut from The Sopranos for wearing too many gold medallions over their blood-soaked tracksuits. This is also the reason why this Gambino clown show actually frightens me less than most of his rivals and I'm a goddamn genderqueer rape survivor living on the rural fringe of a fucking swing state. 

However, after four years of the Democratic Party's grand restoration of imperial order, I remain as endangered and marginalized as I did under Orange-Man-Stupid, and I'm supposed to vote for a tranny bashing cop like Kamala to save me from the knuckle-draggers at MAGA inc. Kiss my Queer ass.

And I know what you're going to say to scare the living vote out of me. "Project 2025 is coming! Project 2025 is coming!" Let me tell you something about Project 2025. The Big Bad Wolf in this admittedly nefarious plot by the Heritage Foundation to "institutionalize Trumpism" is Schedule F, an executive order that could hypothetically allow the president to fire as many as 50,000 members of the federal bureaucracy and replace them with Bible flinging zealots. But presidents already have the ability to make 4,000 political appointments and Donald Trump couldn't even do that in four years.

In fact, Orange-Man-Stupid couldn't seem to stop firing his own pea-brained flunkies for not licking his unwashed taint in the style he had become accustomed to. If this motherfucker ever actually got his shit together long enough to restaff the federal government, that racist colossus would become so clogged with pro-wrestlers and Proud Boys that it would cease to function, which means the FBI might miss its quota for framing Muslim kids online and demonizing sex workers as human traffickers. 

Oh, the humanity, someone please send me a savior! I'll vote for anything to save me from the threat of a government that hates me in chaos!

Of course, there are still plenty of good reasons to be terrified of Donald Trump. His plans to further militarize ICE and the Border Patrol to carry out the largest mass deportation since Josef Stalin is a massive injection of steroids to the police state's buttocks that could easily threaten all of us and God knows if Tom Cotton gets within arm's reach of the Button, we're all as good as vapor. 

However, in accordance with America's national sickness known as the lesser of two evils, Donald Trump, in all his grotesque glory, still looks like a lesser to me when compared to his prim and proper alternative. I made a similarly sacrilegious argument way back in 2016 when it was Donald V. Hillary with something that I like to call the Multiple Miggs Defense in reference to the horror classic, Silence of the Lambs. 

Upon her arrival to Dr. Frederick Chilton's insane asylum in Baltimore, Special Agent Clarice Starling found herself face to face with a bevy of monsters but two stood out from the rest. The first, Multiple Miggs, a semen flinging madman climbing the bars and belching crude expletives. The second, Hannibal Lecter, a neat, polite, and almost impossibly still gentleman with something terrifying sparkling just behind his glassy eyes.

If you were to ask Clarice upon her first encounter with these creatures, she would likely declare Hannibal to be the lesser evil, especially after he gently convinces Miggs to swallow his own tongue after becoming insulted by his lack of decorum towards their guest. But Clarice would be dead wrong. The question here isn't which candidate is less gross than the other, it's who you would rather have manning a fucking battleship, an unhinged rapist like Multiple Miggs or a formidable sociopath with elaborate elocution like Doctor Lecter. 

In 2012, Hillary felt like a clear stand-in for Lecter with her long record of manipulating rapacious imbeciles like her own husband into destabilizing the planet with massive war crimes. In 2024, Donald Trump is still very much Multiple Miggs, but Kamala Harris is much more like the snide and sinister Dr. Frederick Chilton, a vain and transparent civil servant with delusions of grandeur who has no lasting values and is completely unburdened by what has been.

Under these circumstances, who do you honestly think is more capable of navigating the Byzantinesque architecture of American power? Who do you think is more likely to allow themselves to be used as a glorified vessel by the fascist bureaucrats who actually know how to run this thing designed to compartmentalize a superstate built for genocide and slavery? 

I'm sorry, dearest motherfuckers, but everything that I have learned from Antonio Gramsci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Critical Race Theory tells me that Kamala is more dangerous to humanity than Trump.

I can just hear my progressive colleagues shouting from their peanut galleries with blood vessels bursting in their eyes, "She's mad! She's sick!" And I would readily concur with this conclusion if I actually bought into the Faustian cabaret that is the lesser of two evils. Only in a system this morally depraved would a semen slinging Nazi orangutan become a moral option for validation. 

Which is the other reason why I don't tremble in fear before the looming shadow of Orange-Man-Stupid. Because I tremble in fear before the looming shadow of the fraudulent democracy we are being compelled to protect from him.

Any system that could produce a creature as foul as Donald Trump and then allow just one lunatic the ability to abuse so many people for four years straight is not a democracy, and I refuse to vote for anyone who does not explicitly promise to dismantle such a machine.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon

* Up the Wolves by the Mountain Goats

* The Denial Twist by the White Stripes

* Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

* Mistress by Red House Painters

* Goodbye Horses by Lazarus Q

* I Wanna Be Your Dog by the Stooges

* Drain You by Nirvana

* Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Marilyn Manson

* Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon

Blowback Comes to Mar-a-Lago

 Once upon a time there was this place called Afghanistan, a mysterious, mountainous and magical land of endless poppy fields and warlords with beards thick enough to stop bullets. A place where white men feared to tread, and empires went to die. 

In fact, no white man would likely have ever even heard of this hole in the Hindu Kush if it wasn't for the fact that every pale faced vainglorious crusader going back to Alexander the Great had chosen these valleys to fall on their swords, making it the perfect setting for a fantastic geostrategic conspiracy. And so, it was here in the year of our lord nineteen-hundred-and-seventy-eight that one empire conspired to bleed another one dry by turning this mystical graveyard into one great big trap.

It was the heat of the Cold War and America was still licking its wounds after a humiliating defeat at the hands of a bunch of starving rice farmers in the jungles of Vietnam. Washington needed a win, so then-President Jimmy Carter and his Machiavellian National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brezenski, cooked up a plot too despicable to fail. Why not, they queried mischievously, give their rivals in the Soviet Union their own Vietnam? 

A tumultuous series of events had recently put a left-wing government in charge of Afghanistan, a nation nestled right in the crook of the Soviet Union's contentious Central Asian borderlands. This new secular government's reforms were actually quite popular in the cities but had stirred up conflict in the rural countryside where tribal warlords were not fond of handing over their opium plantations and women to a pack of European educated atheists. 

So, Jimmy used this opportunity to arm these fundamentalist gangsters to the teeth with a little help from Pakistan's American-trained intelligence outfit, the ISI, while also securing them a steady flow of Salafi psychopath recruits from our friends in Saudi Arabia.

The idea, which both Jimmy and Zbigniew have shamelessly admitted to over the years, was to create a bubbling cauldron of Islamic extremism right next door to the Soviet Union's disgruntled Muslim republics, believing that the Kremlin's quite legitimate fear of the tumult spreading would lure them into a bloody and unwinnable quagmire. It worked. 

Within six months of the CIA launching this conspiracy, which would come to be known as Operation Cyclone, the Russians invaded Afghanistan and the US spent the eighties dispensing some $3 billion dollars of military aid to the warlords who killed them, a ragtag coalition of fearsome zealots who would become renowned internationally as the Mujahideen. 

After a decade of bleeding like stuffed pigs in those mountains, the Soviets finally fucked off in 1989 and that left-wing government in Kabul collapsed three years later shortly after their Kremlin sponsors imploded.

Empowered by their victory over the infidels in Moscow, the now hardened warriors of the Mujahideen quickly turned on their former sponsors in Washington for their own crimes in the region. Former "freedom fighters" like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar formed new organizations from the ashes of Operation Cyclone like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and within a year of America's Afghan trap snapping shut, its much-vaunted alumni began launching attacks on our shores. 

In 1993 alone, Mir Aimal Kansi assassinated two CIA agents in Langley and Ramzi Yousef bombed the World Trade Center. Both of these gentlemen were veterans of the Mujahideen, and they weren't the last to haunt their former sponsors. By September 11th these motherfuckers were hijacking commercial airliners and ramming them into skyscrapers.

This disturbing phenomenon: when sponsoring, arming, and training dangerous people attracts them directly to your doorstep, is known as blowback. Any sensible human being would take this bitter medicine and learn a hard lesson about the dangers of starting fires in other people's neighborhoods. 

But neither Washington nor Moscow is run by sensible human beings, so no one learned a goddamn thing from Jimmy Carter's catastrophic Afghan trap and in 2014, we started the same fucking process all over again in Ukraine with results that only seem to shock the people intimately involved with both episodes.

When a democratically elected thug in Kiev named Viktor Yanukovych chose a Russian economic package over one presented to him by America's flunkies in the European Union, the US used open neo-fascist hooligans in organizations like Right Sector to hijack a protest movement and use it to overthrow the Ukrainian government. The puppets we put in power then wasted little time antagonizing their neighbors to the east by terrorizing Ukraine's ethnic Russian population in the Donbas region.

America further baited this trap by sending literal shiploads of weaponry to neo-Nazi mujahideen like the Azov Battalion while dangling NATO membership over Kiev like a matador with a red flag. After eight years of this game, Putin fell for it and launched a full-scale invasion into another neighboring nation that America had rigged up like the cottage in Straw Dogs. 

The results were heinous and still ongoing. Gruesome war crimes have been committed by both sides and both Russia and the United States have armed and trained foreign extremists to commit the worst of these acts. This time however the target demographic is something far closer to home; pissed-off, jobless, white bros who were promised the world from their nation's respective elites and chose to take white supremacy into their own hands when their masters failed to follow through.

And it is precisely because of this proxy intimacy that the blowback has come to both sides before the war has even ended, with the fascists in the Wagner Group launching a short-lived but humiliating putsch against their sponsors in Moscow and one career loser with connections to the Azov Battalion attempting to take potshots at former President Donald J. Trump at one of his ritzy golf courses in West Palm Beach.

Ryan Wesley Routh is no fascist. He's a 58-year-old petty criminal whose political compass seems to shift with the dial of the clock. But Routh is a veteran of America's fascist proxy war in Ukraine, spending time in Kiev attending neo-Nazi rallies in the name of humanitarian interventionism and trolling the dark web for recruits on behalf of Ukraine's International Legion. 

After being rejected by the Legion himself do to his age in 2022, Routh started up an organization known as the International Volunteer Center which attempted and failed to gain Visas for lunatics from Iran to Pakistan. Routh also appeared in a propaganda film made by the aforementioned Azov Battalion, posing next to boot boys with Wolfsangel flags. 

While both Azov and the International Legion have worked hard to distance themselves from this globetrotting fabulist in the weeks following his aborted assassination attempt of a former American president, none other than Semafor cited Ukrainian intelligence sources in a 2023 article confirming begrudgingly that Routh was indeed authentically involved in their recruiting efforts. 

Naturally, MAGA types have gone berserk trying to paint Donald Trump as an innocent isolationist victimized for his mealy-mouthed criticism of the Ukrainian crusade but they're only half right at best. It does appear that, like many Democrats and neocons, Mr. Routh blames the former president for Volodymyr Zelensky's mounting failures on the battlefield, but Trump is about as innocent of Ukrainian skullduggery as most of his critics. Truth be told, Ryan Wesley Routh is essentially just another in a long line of disgruntled employees of the Donald.

After all, it was Trump who approved the first shipment of Javelin missiles to Ukraine in 2017. It was also Trump who sent the first American naval vessels to buzz the Russian coasts of the Black Sea through his Free Transfer Program. In fact, around $850 million dollars of US military aid made its way to Ukraine under Trump's watch and the only time he even attempted to interfere with it was to get dirt on Joe Biden and his crackhead son before the 2020 election. 

The only thing that Donald Trump is a victim of beyond his own pathological delusions of grandeur is the same kind of blowback that befalls all warmongers who outlive their usefulness to the extremists they arm, and he won't be the last. 

Neo-Nazis with connections to Azov have already been busted smuggling weapons from the Ukrainian battlefield into both France and Italy, and that same battalion has also hosted get-togethers with America's Atomwaffen Division, a White Power outfit recently caught plotting attacks on the power grid. And with every tirade that Donald Trump launches against pet-devouring Haitian migrants, he only hands another bucket of fuel to this fire.

You see dearest motherfuckers, America loves convoluted conspiracy theories, which I guess is the privilege of people throwing stones in iron domes, but we really don't need Manchurian candidates or inside jobs to explain why our elected psychopaths keep getting shot at. America is a nation that ships war to every corner of the globe and every once in a while, that war follows us home and cracks the shell of our iron domes. And someday, maybe someday soon, those domes are going to shatter just like they did in Moscow in 1992.

Wake up and smell the napalm people, it's coming back around again.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Baby Blue by Badfinger

* Provisional by Fugazi

* The Pretender by Foo Fighters

* White Minority by Black Flag

* Dirty Boots by Sonic Youth

* Sacrilege by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

* Back In the USSR by the Beatles

* Runner by Alex G

* Triptych by Samia

* All Tomorrow's Parties by the Velvet Underground

Only the Mullahs Can Save Us from Samson Now

 Israel is fucking crazy, and they have nukes. I honestly don't have a more tactful way to start this diatribe, I am legitimately terrified, and you should be too. While the world teeters perilously close to the brink of a Cuban Missile-style crisis in the haunted bloodlands of Ukraine, there is another geostrategic clusterfuck unfolding in the Holy Land that could just as easily go nuclear and the danger has very little to do with Iran. The danger is Israel, an increasingly unhinged rogue state with an illegal and unregulated nuclear stockpile who is at war with itself and losing badly.

Based on the towering body count alone, even a well-informed war nerd could be forgiven for believing that Israel's crusade against Hamas is a smashing success, but you would be sorely mistaken. Commander Yahya Sinwar, the big cheese in Gaza, isn't being glib or delusional when he brags about having Israel "right where we want them." Israel's war against the children of Gaza may be the most hideously successful holocaust since Hitler but the actual war against Hamas has been a disastrous failure and the people of Israel know it.

In a vile attempt to save his own ass from facing the divine retribution of his own people after failing to keep them safe on October 7, Benjamin Netanyahu has locked his nation into a totally unwinnable quagmire on its own soil. But this entire adventure actually began when Bibi basically handed a bunch of Zionist terrorists in the West Bank the keys to the IDF in exchange for them agreeing to keep him out of prison for a downright dizzying tower of corruption charges. 

While Israel's more than capable gestapo were busy stoking the Muslim world's rage by repeatedly raiding the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque, Hamas were busy plotting their revenge. They got more than they bargained for when their own raid turned into a tumultuous free-for-all at the poorly guarded border of a badly traumatized prison colony, but they didn't have to wait long for Bibi to bite off more than he could chew.

Though the civilian death toll in Gaza has been an unmitigated catastrophe with estimates placing the dead as high as over half a million, Netanyahu has achieved nothing but the ire of his own people for this holy war. Polls show that the only thing the Israeli people hate more than Hamas is Bibi, with many holding their fearless leader responsible for the disaster on October 7 while quickly losing patience with the war being waged in its name. 

Sickeningly, 56% of Israeli's still support this slaughter, but only 15% believe that Bibi should remain in power once it's over, giving that sociopathic gangster all the incentive he needs to make sure that the slaughter never ends. This is why Netanyahu is opening a second front in the West Bank and this is why he's launching increasingly provocative terrorist attacks in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. I shouldn't have to tell anyone with an IQ over 20 that this is a heinously dangerous game he's playing and not just because it has dragged Israel's western sponsors to the brink of World War 3.

Israel has a massive and well-armed fighting force, but the IDF is also a mobilization army, meaning that keeping a large number of men and women in uniform indefinitely also means keeping a large percentage of the nation's entire workforce in uniform indefinitely. This has already inflicted severe economic devastation on the Israeli economy with some estimates putting the cost as high as 30% of the nation's GDP. 

This is part of the reason why Israel's largest labor union, the Histadrut, has threatened Bibi with what could easily be crippling general strikes if he doesn't stop sabotaging the hostage deals that should have ended this thing month ago. This is also why the Israeli Supreme Court has taken the unprecedented measure of ordering the drafting of men from their nation's quietist Ultra-Orthodox community. A move that Bibi's own government lawyers argued against, predicting it could literally tear Israeli society apart at the seams.

What all this adds up to is a nation on the brink of implosion. The growing protests calling bullshit on Bibi's endless stalling of another ceasefire have erupted into massive street battles with the nation's police state. Meanwhile, Hamas remains the only viable source of leadership for a Palestinian population too massive to erase completely without incurring the wrath of the various militias of the Middle East, militias that have already successfully locked down the Suez Canal and large swaths of the western economy along with it. 

On top of all this, while the US and its Atlantic flunkies continue to ship Israel the hardware they require to keep the region burning, popular opinion among the western citizenry of Babylon regarding America's 51st state has never been lower. Long story short, after 80 years of raping and pillaging the Levant, Israel's military elites have been painted into a corner by a single crook. What's even worse is that these goons have a long-established plan B for just such a scenario and it's one that could easily fuck us all straight to hell.

Over the last half century, Israel has established a massive stockpile of hundreds of nuclear weapons complete with their own reactor in the Negev Desert and missile sites in Galilee and on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy both made attempts to convince Israel to disarm but for the most part America's power elite have decided to look the other way on this illegal stockpile with a policy of "nuclear ambiguity" which essentially amounts to an absurd game of don't-ask-don't-tell. 

If Israel agrees not to openly tell the world that they are armed to the fucking teeth with doomsday devices, America won't tell them to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty like they do every other nation with a stockpile. But Israel hasn't exactly been shy about using this stockpile to coerce their sugar daddies back in Washington into giving up the candy. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War they even blackmailed Nixon into airlifting them military supplies by threatening to nuke their Arab neighbors on day three of the battle.

It's this kind of kamikaze brinksmanship that has allowed Israel to occasionally call the shots on the foreign policy of the empire they are largely dependent on even when these shots have blown off Uncle Sam's toes and it's this kind of reckless all-or-nothing philosophy that informs what is known as the Samson Option, an Israeli nuclear strategy which essentially amounts to atomic mass suicide.

In reference to the biblical figure of Samson who would rather push down the pillars of his own temple than be humiliated by Philistines, it is a part of Israeli military policy that if the Zionist State finds itself overrun, it will launch a massive retaliatory strike to take us all down with them Skynet style, or as then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon once so eloquently put it, "We can take the Middle East with us whenever we go." 

So, are you scared yet? I am and that's why I'm about to suggest something likely to get my Queer ass drummed out of the antiwar movement for good this time. Iran should have nukes. Just hear me out! 

America is never going to reign these lunatics in even if we could find someone in the Pentagon with the ovaries to fucking try. Quite frankly, most of our military brass are at least as crazy as Israel's Old Testament Zionist lunatics which is probably why they've never really made much of an effort to stop them. This leaves the fate of humanity in the unsavory hands of rival rogue states and the only one left with any nuclear capabilities who isn't already in bed with Israel or the United States is Iran. 

This isn't to say that Iran is a nuclear power. Not even close. America's own intelligence puts the Mullah's enrichment capabilities at just over 60% on a good day, far below the 90% needed for weapons grade uranium, and even if Iran managed this feat they would still need to produce, test, and miniaturize a deliverable nuclear warhead which, once again, all available American intelligence suggests they haven't even attempted to do in decades. 

As if their own illegal stockpile weren't infuriating enough, Israel has a long and storied history of crying nuke to give their western sponsors the propaganda they need to obliterate their rivals. It worked with Iraq, and they would very much like it to work with Iran too. But America wasn't engaged in a nuclear Mexican stand-off with the Kremlin in 2003...

If Vladimir Putin really wants to put his rival war mongers' balls in a vice, he should consider handing over some of his Cold War army surplus to the Mullahs. Or maybe the Mullahs should just make that the price of the next shipment of drones that Russia needs to take back Kursk.

Don't get me wrong, in a perfect world we would have no nukes and all of those motherfuckers above from the Mullahs to the Mossad would be locked in the same bunker somewhere in the desert with two chains and one rusty saw. But we don't live in a perfect world. We live in some place just north of hell where a bunch of macho imbeciles with small dicks and even smaller brains have us all held hostage by their states and the stockpiles they've compiled to keep them relevant.

The best I can hope for under these circumstances is a stalemate that can even the playing field for just long enough before the clock runs out and this sick civilization collapses beneath the weight of the egos that run it like a satanic carnival ride. Call me a dreamer, but I still believe in weird miracles and that may be what it takes for a few bold Mullahs to save us Philistines from the wrath of Samson.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Song that influenced this post

* War Pigs by Black Sabbath

* Shine On Sweet Jesus by Flamming Lips

* My War by Black Flag

* Pepper by Butthole Surfers

* Run for the Hills by Iron Maiden

* Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden

* Ever by Flipper

* Disarm by Smashing Pumpkins

* Raining Blood by Slayer

* Pilot Can at the Queer God by Flaming Lips

Why I Refuse to Vote Anymore

 America is an imperial slaughterhouse and every four years that bloody kill room floor hosts a jingle-brained three-ring-circus that the men with hammers call a presidential election season. A ghastly, multibillion dollar display of buggery, cuckery, pomp and circumstance in which spineless sociopaths without a gag reflex are pitted against each other in a shit eating contest while we the people are all shamed into picking sides by pitiless wonks who won't stop shouting that this glorified reality television abortion is the most important democratic happening in recorded history and that we won't have the right to complain about getting raped for the next four years unless we choose our rapist.

Fuck you, I ain't voting. After Satan knows how many cycles of this shit, I'm through. I won't do it anymore and you can all go ahead and burn me at the stake so long as you use ballot boxes for kindling and put the latest debate on mute while my eyeballs melt. Anything is better than spending ten months straight pretending that choosing my least least-favorite millionaire to be the Pentagon's mouthpiece for the next four years is a fucking democracy because it's not. 

This doesn't fucking matter, and we all know it. Even if a few good radicals managed to find a way to shut down the corporate tractor beam of the two-party system long enough to get a half-decent son of a bitch into the White House he would still just be little more than the nicest guy at the concentration camp. America is a plutocratic dictatorship, and these elections are little more than pet fashion shows for their poodles.

I used to vote. I used to be pretty goddamn passionate about it too and not because I bought into that holier-than-thou lesser-of-two-evils bullshit either. I was a diehard protest voter who realized that this thing was a show but tried to hijack it anyway in hopes of using the platform it provided to further a populist movement against empire. 

My strategy was pretty simple, I would pick whichever candidate was the most aggressively antiwar and do everything I could to keep the censors from yanking them off the stage for as long as humanly possible in the hopes of waking just a few zombies from their military-industrial slumber. During my first election I campaigned like a motherfucker on fire for Dennis Kucinich and then voted for Ralph Nader when they tried to package a sweet-talking bologna salesman named Barack Obama as a pacifist based largely on the color of his skin. 

In 2012, I put my proletarian pride aside to support Ron Paul when I was still a Guevara-quoting communist because I saw the way that this plainspoken free-market peacenik galvanized an antiwar movement in freefall after the Bush Junta finally fucked off. I voted for Jill Stein twice before supporting Jo Jorgensen in 2020. I switched parties from Green to Independent to Libertarian as I abandoned Marxism for a more free-market oriented hybrid of post-left anarchism and Queer libertine socialism, all while maintaining the same goal of smashing the war machine by any means necessary and those means included manipulating the empire's own circus as a zoonotic tool for agitprop. 

So, what happened? 2020 happened and then a savage midterm followed like Rosemary's afterbirth. In an age of Trump and anti-Trump hysteria, the election cycle itself became an increasingly violent tool for division and its effects on the people around me became increasingly horrifying. As a muckraking anarcho-populist, bottom unity is my bread and butter, the basic notion that left and right and conservative and liberal are totally irrelevant labels in the face of the fact that everyone outside of the country club is getting fucked by the same greedy elites in both major parties. 

I had worked my ass off for years reaching out to antiwar conservatives and convincing them that Queer people like me were not the enemy and in a single election season I saw all of this hard work washed away when the Christian Right turned my gender identity into their latest electoral boogeyman and other trans people responded by seeking shelter behind the strong arms of progressive warmongers while MAGA "isolationists" decided to put America first by going after our kids.

It got worse. It spread. People stopped having positions anymore, they just had enemies. Even sensible radicals like Noam Chomsky had to vote for a white power warmonger like Joe Biden in order to stop a white power warmonger like Donald Trump from doing all the horrible shit that Joe had already spent the eighties and nineties doing. The MeToo Movement devoured itself when they refused to stand with one of that jackal's victims and Black Lives Matter followed suit. Then January 6 came, and pissed-off people finally rose up in anger against power, but only in defense of more power, wasting legitimate revolutionary momentum on throwing a hissy fit for the other rapist on the ticket.

The elections themselves have become a device for lower class division in ways never seen before. This is no longer simply a tool to distract a nation from the monster behind the curtain. As the American Empire begins to collapse beneath the rust of its sins and rapidly disintegrates into just another failed state it is turning the two-party system into camps of rival apocalyptic suicide cults who have been convinced that the fate of humanity rests on the whims of a single reality television rodeo clown named Donald J. Trump. 

If he gets elected democracy is over or if he doesn't get elected democracy is over. And even third parties have been infected by this partisan contagion, with my own adopted Libertarian Party collapsing into a petty bitch fight between antiwar voters who hate Trump and antiwar voters who hate trans kids enough to let him speak at our convention. 

You stupid motherfuckers don't seem to realize that democracy is already over in this country and Donald Trump is nothing but a symptom of the final stages of this electoral cancer. When Donald Trump was president, the same bullshit wars rolled on towards oblivion. All of his Putin ass kissing didn't stop him from eviscerating nearly every Cold War treaty we had left with the Kremlin. And since Trump has been chucked from the White House, the same bubbling cauldron of chaos continues to permeate throughout Babylon while the same concentration camps remain packed to the gills on our prolapsed border. 

The system has already collapsed. Only the illusions remain but the illusions have become existential, something falsely tribal for people to cling to for warmth while the mandarins prepare for a final kamikaze assault on the inevitable Eurasian Century in Ukraine and Taiwan.

Well, I'll say it again, just one more time, I'm done. American "democracy" has somehow become even worse than an illusion. It has become a full-blown mental illness, and I have enough of those already. There is nothing remotely revolutionary to be done with this circus ride anymore if there ever was to begin with. I will no longer validate a flunked empire with my vote. 

But that doesn't mean that I'm finished waging war against war. I have simply altered my tactics to something more realistic than hijacking the Hindenburg and I seriously suggest that anyone serious about opposing empire do the same. We must do the polar opposite of engaging this systemic sickness. We must actively disengage. We must drop out.

With the empire twisting and flailing in the wind like a scarecrow, now is the time to build something new to survive the collapse of the old. We can do this by using the new tools of distraction like social media to create a thriving counter-economy in which all goods and services can be exchanged free from taxation or corporate interference on the dark web, or you can kick it old school and just start a farm. Either way, the idea of this tactic, known in left libertarian circles as agorism, is to starve the powerful of the resources of our labor while fostering self-sufficient voluntary societies that don't require a managerial class to function.

From there we secede from the state and create a vast panarchy of many stateless societies. Every self-sufficient voluntary community divorces itself from an increasingly illegitimate union and declares themselves to be a sovereign nation existing totally free from borders wherever its citizen's roam. Each of these polities would come with its own government, its own schools, its own militias, its own medical services, but all of which would be completely voluntary and completely un-dependent on physical territory. 

My Queer Hillbilly Autonomous Zone could exist in the same goddamn apartment complex as the Rastafarian Republic and the Mormon Fundamentalist Dutchie of Deseret. We could borrow sugar and make peace deals over Friday night poker. America could become a bit more like it was before the white man and his electoral circus fucked it up, a disorganized tribal hodgepodge of competing governments without a monopoly on the use of force. It wasn't perfect but nobody got nuked because there was nothing big enough to be worth destroying the world to evaporate.

Maybe it'll fail. Maybe humans really are fucked. But if that's the case, I would much rather go down building something than standing in line to vote for some asshole who represents a system defined by tearing people down. You can do whatever the fuck you want this November. I'm through telling other people how to live. Just don't expect me to feel guilty for not indulging your electoral fetish because I've got better shit to do with my time.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs influenced by this post

* Behind the Wheel by Depeche Mode

* Driver by Soccer Mommy

* Shine On Sweet Jesus by the Flaming Lips

* Big Empty by Stone Temple Pilots

* The Concept by Teenage Fanclub

* Quarry by Wednesday

* Buildings by Regina Spektor

* Lessons Learned by Matt & Kim

* Some Candy Talking by the Jesus & Mary Chain

* Seattle by Public Image Ltd.

The Big Business of Electing War Junkies, From Trump and Kamala to Zelensky and Bibi

 If you were foolish enough to take sociopaths at their word, you could be forgiven for believing that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are the world's most violent pacifists. Both of these repugnant candidates for Godfather of Babylon seem to traffic in vague suggestions of world peace punctuated by breathless declarations of total war. 

Donald Trump seems to be attempting to make avoiding nuclear apocalypse in Ukraine a cornerstone of his barely coherent campaign platform while simultaneously calling the Democrats Marxist pussies for not murdering more children in Gaza. 

Meanwhile, Kamala seems to be running a campaign devoid of even the pretense of a platform beyond some Disneyfied reimagining of her biography that carefully excludes the fact that she was a pampered Berkley brat who grew up to be a glorified prison warden. But, in the few cases where her Clintonian handlers actually let her speak, Kamala, she-wolf of Pelican Bay, tends to lean heavy on vague calls for a ceasefire in Palestine snuck between proclamations of the sanctity of Israel's right to defend itself from infants and pregnant women. 

The end result of this contrarian food fight matinee is an election between proven killers promising peace when it's politically correct for their target constituency and promising catastrophic violence pretty much everywhere else. 

Regardless, it's hard to believe that a diligent observer with a view unobstructed by their own asshole could come to any conclusion other than the sad fact that both Ukraine and Palestine are pretty much fucked under either one of these belligerent imbeciles. 

In fact, both bloodbaths seem to be largely defined by the multitude of opportunities for peace that have been grievously sabotaged by America's two-party war machine and the quislings they groom, but let's focus on the ones in Kiev first and circle back to Tel Aviv for the finale. 

The Russian invasion of Ukraine actually began with Vladimir Putin offering a proposal to the US on mutual security guarantees defined by a perfectly reasonable request that Ukraine not be made a member of the NATO colossus. It was only after the US responded to this offer by doubling down on turning Russia's next-door neighbor into a gas station for the military industrial complex that Putin sent in the troops he had been amassing on the border for leverage. 

However, even then he limited this raid to between 120,000 and 190,000 soldiers. More than enough skinheads to fuck shit up and raise cane but far short of the number necessary to overthrow and indefinitely occupy a nation of Ukraine's size. 

Putin may be a cold-blooded sociopath in his own right, but I still strongly suspect that the initial goal of his bloody little "special operation" wasn't conquest but a brutish attempt to terrorize Ukraine into neutrality, and it nearly worked.

A round of peace talks in Istanbul held within the first few months of the war were said to be 90% prepared by Ukraine's own advisors and they continued even after the horrors in Bucha were uncovered. It wasn't until Boris Johnson showed up unexpectedly in Kiev that this peace was successfully averted. 

Both then-Prime Minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, and former German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, acting as intermediaries during the talks, have admitted to witnessing this screw-job firsthand, with Schroader remarking, "Nothing could happen because everything else was decided by Washington... the Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed too."

Basically, the Atlantic Empire, represented by the US, the UK, the EU, and NATO, made Volodymyr Zelensky a counteroffer to Putin's latest ham-fisted peace proposal; fight this fucker forever and we'll foot the bill. Flash forward a couple years and Zelensky is the one launching his own insane special operation inside Russia's Kursk Oblast. 

Nothing about this operation makes any rational sense from a purely strategic standpoint. At a time when Ukraine is getting pulverized by Russia on the frontlines of the Donbas, they decide to send more than a thousand of their best armed and best equipped men over the border to occupy 1,000 square kilometers of strategically irrelevant territory where they are being quite predictably decimated as we speak.

No two western analysts can seem to agree on what the fuck Volodymyr Zelensky hoped to achieve with this mess but that's because no two western analysts seem to be considering the possibility that two years into his embrace of Babylonian proxy-dom, Volodymyr Zelensky has become a full-fledged war junkie, cruising the bloodlands for another fix.

This invasion of the invaders came on the eve of a planned summit in Qatar that promised to see both Russia and Ukraine cease strikes on each other's energy and power infrastructure. These were set to be the first serious negotiations held since Istanbul and many western security wonks have trotted out the spurious argument that Zelensky was simply maneuvering for a better strategic position in these deals with a surprise invasion of the nation he was allegedly trying to convince to trust him. 

It doesn't take a genius to figure out a far more likely outcome to such outrageous behavior and here it comes. The peace talks are dead as disco with no sign of revival in sight. However, Russia wasn't the superpower that Zelensky was trying to make a deal with.

This man's already fragile government has collapsed into a hive of corruption and vicious infighting in the years since he chose war, with the military holding more power than Parlaiment and generals being fired left and right for rampant insubordination. 

The only thing keeping these gangsters from tearing each other to shreds in a civil war is a forever war with the gangsters next door. In this context, Zelensky's invasion of Kursk appears to be some sort of absurd advertisement to his western sponsors, and he hasn't exactly been shy about admitting it.

As Ukrainian conscripts are blown to bits on Russian soil, Volodymyr has announced a grand "Plan for Victory" which he apparently intends to submit to both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump this September. 

What precisely this plan entails remains a mystery, but Zelensky has stated that it will involve a proposition to increase his crumbling nation's participation in "the global security infrastructure", signaling even further integration of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into the for-profit western defense industry.

This proposition mirrors one that Vlod made just last year when he invited 250 international defense companies from 30 countries to participate in Ukraine's First International Defense Industries Forum where a former comedian who once ran as a peace candidate promised to establish a "special economic regime for the defense industrial complex" while turning his country into one "Big Israel." 

If you want a preview of what such a horror show might entail, just take a glimpse south to the Holy Land and look upon Washington's works, ye mighty, and despair.

Israel has developed into a veritable military industrial peace-deal shredding machine, and nobody shreds them like Benji Netanyahu who seems to come up with a fresh new way to sabotage a ceasefire every single week. His latest is the six hostages allegedly executed by Hamas during a military raid in the tunnels below Rafah, but even Bibi's own constituents aren't buying this bill of goods. In fact, they are rioting in the streets, with the family members of the slain hostages leading the charge against a veteran war junkie who has reduced himself to using genocide to keep his scheming ass out of prison.

This is Volodymyr Zelensky's future foretold in the present and while it is very tempting to look at the crimes of such proxies as purely blowback, the reality is actually something far more sinister. 

Both Bibi and Zelensky perform their heinous stunts with the full cooperation of American military intelligence. In fact, we have "advisors" on the ground in both of these countries providing them with everything from satellite imagery to detailed logistics on how many children they can expect to kill with our bombs. 

Why would any superpower behave so despicably? Because war is a racket, and America has built an empire to corner the market. Look no further than the Pentagon if you still don't believe me.

The man commanding that death star shaped liked Satan's asshole is one Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, a former board member of Raytheon, which is one hell of a coincidence considering that Raytheon just happens to be the corporation which produces both Stinger missiles and Javelin rockets, dated military hardware flying off the shelves since Ukraine began lobbing them at Putin's gestapo. 

Raytheon also just happens to be the corporation that manufactures Israel's Iron Dome rocket defense system, which might explain why a Zionist isolationist like Donald Trump hired Lloyd Austin's predecessor, Raytheon super-lobbyist Mark Esper, to serve as his last Secretary of Defense.

You see, dearest motherfuckers, anything from black tar heroin to Super Mario Bros. can become an addiction as long as it derives pleasure from the addict. But only a state can turn a relatively peaceful and popularly elected prankster like Volodymyr Zelensky into an unhinged and unimpeachable genocide junkie like Benjamin Netanyahu, and with a pusher like Uncle Sam on every corner, a new junkie gets elected every other minute. 

So, why then should our elections be any different? Trump or Kamala, Zelensky or Bibi, smack or coke... pick your poison and spike up soldier, it gets worse.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH  

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Lightning Man by Nitzer Ebb

* Ever by Flipper

* You Trip Me Up by the Jesus & Mary Chain

* March of the Pigs by Nine Inch Nails

* Heroin by the Velvet Underground

* Kerosene by Big Black

* Just One Fix by Ministry

* Only Shallow by My Bloody Valentine

* Here Comes Success by Iggy Pop

* Mistress by Red House Painters

Opposing War Should Not Be a Partisan Issue

 America is deeply engaged in two simultaneous and rapidly expanding proxy wars that could both very easily end in a nuclear third world war... 

I want you to sit down with that sentence for a couple of minutes because it is a fact that no one denies and a point that gets chucked around a lot on the campaign trail of our current presidential election circus, but I don't feel like anyone with power is really homing in on the downright existential insanity at play here. 

NATO is supplying a conscripted slave army in Ukraine with deadlier and deadlier machinery as Kiev launches the first foreign invasion on Russian soil since Operation Barbarossa in the Kursk region. Meanwhile, America continues to arm Bibi Netanyahu to the fucking teeth and shield him with goddam aircraft carriers while he slaughters Arab babies on live television and bombs everyone and anyone in the neighborhood who tries to get involved.

Both of these conflicts are the result of America's vampiric imperial foreign policy. Both of these conflicts are pretty much guaranteed to drag the world deep into Dr. Strangelove country if they haven't already. And both of these conflicts would end in a week if Uncle Sam simply closed his checkbook. Where the fuck is the antiwar movement? Well, they're busy going to war with each other at your local diner over which candidate is a marginally less repulsive sack of shit and which nuclear Armageddon is worth being more freaked out about. 

An unprecedented amount of red meat rural Americans in flyover country are sick to death over seeing huge gobs of their tax dollars going to blow shit up in Ukraine but most of these same nouveau-isolationists have also been deluded into believing that we should send even bigger gobs of their hard-earned cash over to Israel so they can blow up orphanages and maternity wards in Gaza. On the flipside, kids on the left have never been more willing to confront the sacred cow of the Israel lobby on behalf of one of the most marginalized populations on the planet and yet they are still too terrified of being labeled as a Putin puppet to take down their Ukrainian flags and hold Volodymir Zelensky to the same standard.

Once again, dearest motherfuckers, we have come to the part of my weekly diatribe where I inform you that this is no coincidence. This is in fact the entire point of the two-party system, to divide and conquer, to sic poor people on poor people, to chop the country into color coordinated warring parties like the Crips and the Bloods so that you rubes are all too busy ripping each other's throats out and riding dirty on drive-byes to realize that the same oligarchs win no matter who's left standing because they supply the TEC-9s.

The only difference this time is that the empire they represent is getting too violently reckless to hide behind abortion clinics and gay bars alone. So, they have you fighting over which war to stop first. Which nuclear holocaust do you find more alarming? Do you want to die in the desert or the steppes? What form of imperial suicide are you willing to kick your neighbor's ass to defend?

Aside from what should be the fairly obvious notion of 'Hey stupid, let's just stop bombing people', there is also the fact that there is nothing particularly special about either one of these fatted proxies that we are being prodded into coddling with weapons of mass destruction. To put it simply, if you oppose one you should probably oppose the other for the same damn reasons. Israel and Ukraine, or rather what America's steady diet of missiles and lobbyists have turned these countries into, are equally grotesque fanged manifestations of Westphalian orthodontia.

Everything that conservatives hate about Ukraine they should hate about Israel. After all, what is Israel but the original Ukraine? A toxic, tax sucking, moocher state with about as much regard for the sanctity of human life as your garden variety back-alley abortionist. Israel slurps down $3.8 billion of your hard-earned tax dollars a year so they can build condos for Ashkenazi atheists on the ruins of Jesus Christ's tomb. And don't even give me that shit about these ghouls being America's number one ally. This is an ally that openly spies on our universities, businesses, and government facilities and has been directly implicated in tampering with CIA equipment in the Holy Land and in engaging in criminal espionage in the homeland.

This is an ally who has illegally acquired hundreds of nuclear warheads and literal tons of biological weapons and still demands that we go to war forever with any Arab on the block that they frame for possessing weapons of mass destruction. This is the ally that lobbied your local congress goon to vote for every bullshit war that your nephew lost a limb in. And these weren't the first Americans they've killed either, because this is also the ally who attacked the USS Liberty in 1967, murdering 34 American crew members and wounding 171 others with torpedoes and napalm in what appears to have been an attempt to hoodwink us into nuking Egypt for them during their Six-Day War. 

And to all my fellow social justice warriors righteously rising up against genocide in Gaza, everything that sickens you about Benjamin Netanyahu should also sicken you about Volodymyr Zelensky because the longer NATO's crusade cranks on in Ukraine, the more those two crooks look like the same fucking guy. Let's not forget that long before Russia invaded, America's coup-appointed proxies in Kiev launched a bloody eight-year war against the people of the Donbas, killing some 14,000 people, most of them Russian-speaking civilians, with cluster bombs, white phosphorous, and neo-Nazi mercenaries, all because they asked for a divorce when Kiev tried to ban their language.

None of this justifies Russia's own sickening behavior but Russia's sickening behavior hardly justifies Zelensky's either. A man popularly elected to end the savagery in the Donbas is now sending Ukrainian conscripts to die in Russia in an insane scheme to take it back by force. All the while this little Putin has used his unlimited war powers to nationalize Ukraine's tv news, lock up journalists, ban 11 opposition parties, shutter his nation's largest Orthodox church, and hold off presidential elections indefinitely. Does that honestly sound like the kind of "democracy" that you're willing to blow up the world to preserve?

This absurdity would all be pretty brazenly obvious to any sane population not being brainwashed into believing that even pacifism is a partisan sport that requires capitulation to some mythic lesser evil. And the worse thing is that neither party is actually particularly interested in peace in either theater. 

Donald Trump may talk a big game about peace with Russia, but this was the motherfucker who armed Ukraine to the fucking teeth during the height of Kiev's genocidal campaign in the Donbas. This is also the motherfucker who triggered the build-up of Russian troops on Ukraine's border by throwing dress rehearsals for World War 3 in the Black Sea with nuclear compatible battleships. And this is why Trump's supposed bosom buddy, Vladimir Putin, still refuses to endorse the Orange Bastard, wisely noting the total lack of any concrete peace proposals being put forward. 

As for Kamala Harris, while that wretch shook her ass on TikTok and gushed about ceasefires and Palestinian dignity for the cameras, her administration sent Israel another fat check for $20 billion dollars and tossed Arabs and Jews out of her DNC coronation just for holding up peace signs. The Democratic Party also used that sacred event to make Barack Obama's Memorandum of Understanding, promising Israel a standing order of $3.8 billion dollars a year in military aid until at least 2028, an official part of the party's platform, essentially guaranteeing that Kamala's first term will be one defined by empty threats and blank checks. Not to mention a warzone that can't possibly be maintained without expanding it directly to China's doorstep in Iran.

This is insane and we all know it. I am a genderqueer anarcho-feminist, a dick swinging daughter of the culture wars, but I will go to church tomorrow and break bread with fundamentalist fag-bashers if it means preventing nuclear oblivion and this is what it's going to take. America is an antiwar nation with a war machine that has grown into the greatest threat to humanity in recorded history. If we can't drop our tribal bullshit for five fucking minutes to keep this psychotic duopoly from blowing up the world then maybe that's the fate we deserve, but our kids deserve better. 

Fuck both parties and all their proxies. Opposing war should not be a partisan issue. We should all be a part of the same antiwar movement and that starts with us throwing these war parties beneath the treads of their own tanks before they can blow us all to kingdom come.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Hatebreeders by the Misfits

* Times Like These by Foo Fighters

* Eighties by Killing Joke

* Cult of Personality by Living Colour

* The Flaming Spear by Sonic Youth

* Party at Ground Zero by Fishbone

* Finest Worksong by REM

* Let's Have a War by Fear

* We Were Never Alive by Brigitte Calls Me Baby

* El Scorcho by Weezer

For the Love of Gaza, Bring Back the Students So They Can Bring the War Home Again

 I was born and raised in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, a small-town cowering in the shadow of a vast college metropolis known simply as State College and I fucking hate State College. I hate State College because nine months out of the year State College is the home of Penn State University, a massive tax funded corporation that floods my otherwise bucolic corner of nowhere with an ocean of football rape culture and the faceless swarm of brats standing in line to go into debt just to be a part of it. 

Needless to say, as a recovering agoraphobic with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, I generally count the minutes until June when these alcoholic tourists finally fuck off for a few months so I can actually drive to my therapist's office without having flashbacks in the heat of a goddam traffic jam. But this year, I find myself in a strange new predicament. For the first time in my life, I find myself begging Kali goddess of destruction to bring those brats back.

What the hell could inspire such seemingly contradictory behavior, you ask? Perhaps yet another mental illness? Yes, a global pandemic known as holocaust, but for once I'm not the one inflicted by this demented disorder, the political establishment of the western world is. You see, there is a genocide raging across the Gaza Strip and while the racist apartheid state of Israel may be providing the shock troops on the ground wiping an impoverished population from the face of the planet, it is the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union that make this savage final solution possible.

America alone has delivered nearly 30,000 bombs to Israel since the tragic blowback of October 7 gave them the greenlight to kill. The official body count delivered by that arsenal stands at a staggering 40,000+, over 16,000 of them children. That is 2% of Gaza's entire population. However, medical experts at The Lancet believe that the miasma of indirect devastation that comes with this level of total war likely puts the death toll somewhere between 149,000 and 598,000, the latter would place around 15% of Gazan's underground, easily making this bloodbath one of the most devastating genocides of the last century. 

So, what do all these grim statistics have to do with Penn State University? The only reason why half the people in this country even knows that this massacre is occurring is because of the holy fucking hell that campus brats across the country have raged over it. Last spring, universities from sea to shining sea became virtual battlegrounds as legions of college students put down their bongs to take to the streets and demand that these institutions cut their ties to genocide. They occupied large swaths of property that their tuitions maintain with encampments on at least 75 campuses across the country and this movement quickly spilled out into the streets with students haunting Democrats and Republicans alike at every possible public appearance and campaign stop with heckling catcalls and profane accusations.

The Democrats responded by working in tandem with universities and local police to suffocate this uprising in its cradle. The Biden Administration has even quietly admitted to coordinating and overseeing the ensuing crackdowns that turned these campuses into open air prisons flooded with heavily armed gestapo in riot gear, flogging and gassing peaceful protestors before dragging them off to jail. Over 2,000 students were arrested across the country in a massive sweep against free speech. It didn't work. More protestors came. The Republicans responded by calling to bring in the National Guard and soldiers with rifles were spotted at several campus events in the Midwest, just a stone's throw away from the killing fields of Kent State.

As if the violence wasn't enough, these kids were also dragged through the mud by every corporate news hole from the New York Times to Fox News who slurred them as terrorists and antisemites. But they just kept coming. These pissed-off kids were joined by legions of equally pissed-off Muslims and together this unlikely coalition boldly threatened to deprive the Democrats of the pivotal swing state of Michigan with over 100,000 of them voting uncommitted during the party's one-candidate primary. 

Soon the same Democrats who were siccing the pigs on these kids just weeks earlier began paying lip service to the notion of a ceasefire even while the weapons continued to flow to Tel Aviv. Something wonderful had happened. The system learned to fear their children's wrath again. Then the bell rang, and class was dismissed but the genocide just kept on burning.

If anything, it's only gotten worse. While the pressure from Michigan undoubtedly helped force an increasingly decrepit Genocide Joe from office, Kamala Harris has changed nothing but the brand image. That Bay Area prison warden may be skulking around to kiss Bibi's ring behind closed doors but she's still passing that butcher checks with one hand while wagging a virtue signaling finger with the other. Thus, this August brought more gift-wrapped hardware and killing sprees to the Holy Land. The administration that Kamala still actively serves in approved a $20 billion dollar arms deal to Israel that included 50 F-15 fighter jets while Netanyahu used their existing fleet to bomb no fewer than 13 shelters, including 9 schools in 8 days. 

Even worse, Israel and its sponsors seem to be signaling their intentions to expand the massacre across the region to every corner of the map where people have dared to stand with the Palestinian people. While increasingly targeting civilian infrastructure in South Lebanon, Israel has also taken to assassinating possible negotiators in Iran and firebombing oil facilities in Yemen. For their part, America is surrounding their mad dog proxy with an armada of battleships that now includes both the USS Abraham and the USS Theodore Roosevelt. The message here is clear. With no cantankerous students upsetting the elites at their universities there is simply no reason for these imperial arsonists not to turn up the heat.

The Democrats are hoping that their kids will cool off by fall while they sell Kamala on TikTok as some kind of breath of fresh air in the gas chamber. It is my sincere hope that these kids come back as pissed-off as I am and resist falling victim to the delusions of electoral democracy in a failed empire. Even if they weren't rigged, an election has never ended a war in this country, but students have when they've tossed over the ballot box and stuck to the streets where real democracy happens.

Richard Nixon won the biggest landslide in electoral history in 1972 against George McGovern, the only real pacifist the Democratic Party has ever nominated. But within a year, the troops were home from Vietnam and Nixon was out of office because the campus protests had spread to military bases and lead to widescale mutinies and acts of sabotage. The Pentagon folded out of fear of losing control over their own soldiers and an already paranoid and pill-popping Nixon collapsed beneath the pressure.

This is what we need now to end the slaughter in Gaza, and I believe that the brilliantly obnoxious student agitators of the BDS Movement and Jewish Voice for Peace have what it takes if they're willing to take this motherfucker to the next level. 

This means increasing the occupations, openly boycotting the elections, doxing corporate warmongers on campus, and generally making America unlivable for the people who profit off of genocide. I also hope that this movement doesn't stop with Gaza, that these kids make the same demands for America's other victims in places like Yemen, Syria, West Papua, Haiti, and the Donbas, and that every student with a conscience in this country becomes another monkey-wrench in the gears of the rusty battleship we call empire.

I still fucking hate Penn State and the shadow it casts over my tiny hillbilly sanctuary. But I will bomb through the crowded campus streets of State College with my face buried in a brown paper bag and my fist raised high above my Ford Taurus if it means siccing these kids on the war machine. I will embrace my agoraphobia like a dangerous lifestyle choice if it means spreading the fear to the powerful. Kali help me, but for the love of Gaza, bring back the students so they can bring the war home again where it belongs.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* U-Mass by the Pixies

* Wild in the Streets by Circle Jerks

* Bloodletting by Concrete Blonde

* 21 by Samia

* Young Americans by David Bowie

* What's Fair by Blondshell

* Monkeywrench by Foo Fighters

* Teenagers by My Chemical Romance

* Down On the Street by the Stooges

* Rockstar by Hole

* Panic by the Smiths

Kamala is Still a Cop

We came pretty damn close to losing the finest democracy that slaves can build this election cycle but all the woke folk seem to be enjoying a collective sigh of relief as the better angels of our nature slowly unclench their sphincters. 

The second reign of the Orange Duce appeared to be a forgone conclusion when the DNC's insane conspiracy to defeat him with a barely reanimated Dixiecrat went up in smoke at the first debate after FrankenBiden's head fell off on live television. Things only went from bad to worse when some incel with an AR shot off the Donald's ear and that sociopathic showmen galvanized the remaining incel vote by immediately grabbing his crotch and pounding his chest for the cameras like Conan the Barbarian.

In this hallucinogenic minefield of a late capitalist presidential election circus, not only did Donald Trump's biblical reascension seem likely, it was looking downright inevitable, and while very little of this batshit pageantry managed to move my jaded genderfuck heart more than an inch in any one direction, a lot of my girlfriends, both trans and cis, were getting pretty bummed. 

But never fear fellow marginalized people, Kamala the caramel avenger is here to save us all from Satan's powers, and the MAGA maniacs are running scared. With her carefully choreographed stadium tour of star-studded blowouts complete with dance marathons and teleprompter recitations of Hopelandish gobbledygook, Kamala Harris seems to be selling herself as a Barack Obama style messiah and the public appears to be just desperate enough to get fooled again.

The Republicans, for their part, seem to be reprising their circa-2008 roles as well, dusting off Tea Party era tropes about crazed Black Marxists queering your kids with open borders and free healthcare. These pea-brained hummunculoids don't seem to grasp the fact that these tired hysterics just play directly into the Democratic party's hands by creating the illusion that Kamala is something different enough from the mainstream to make old white guys shit their Depends. 

Needless to say, my girlfriends are sold, leaving me once again in the treacherous position of having to slap some goddamn sense into them, and please believe me when I tell you that this hurts me far worse than it hurts you.

You see, sweet babies, Kamala Harris is neither an inspirational angel of mercy in very mean times nor a wild-eyed Black lesbian communist. To be perfectly honest with you, the latter actually sounds a lot more like the kind of chick I could split a spliff with, but both of these narratives are equally bogus, and it really doesn't take a tenured professor of political science to tell you who the real Kamala Harris is. 

The sharper kids in Black Lives Matter actually put it best during that woman's last presidential run in 2020. Kamala is a cop. She may have spent one term in the Senate as a squishy feel-good progressive and one primary kissing up to a country still reeling from the George Floyd Uprisings, but Officer Harris spent thirty years as a loyal power broker for the prison industrial complex and that record speaks for itself.

Starting as an intern for the Almeda County DA in the late eighties and working her way up the ladder of California's heinously corrupt police state to serve lengthy tours as both the District Attorney of San Francisco and Attorney General of California, Kamala's jacket reads like something Popeye Doyle would jack off to between hate crimes. Even back then, Kamala would campaign as some kind of progressive but the moment she successfully suckered the hippies into voting for her again she would trample over every campaign promise she made and start cracking skulls. 

Rhetoric aside, Kamala Harris worked her frosty ass off turning the Golden State into a racist gulag archipelago. She never once failed to fight ferociously for stiffer sentences, heftier bail requirements and longer prison terms, all too often for rinky-dink offenses like petty theft, panhandling, prostitution, graffiti, vagrancy, loitering and especially non-violent drug offenses.

She oversaw California's notoriously racist three strikes law, instituted mandatory minimums for misdemeanor gun charges, worked to shutter drug courts and defended the sanctity of the gas chamber. All of these putrid positions disproportionately crushed Black and brown people, but Harris seemed to display a particular zeal for harassing children and Queer folk, and I cannot pretend, as a genderqueer survivor of institutional child abuse, that this record doesn't hurt me the most, especially since I spend so much goddamn time explaining to people I love why I despise their new fucking savior even more than the tranny-bashing hicks do.

School is hell when you're different and California's massive industrial school system is notorious for being no exception to this rule. This is the real reason why the state has a motherfucker of a time keeping kids from skipping class. As both a DA and an AG, Kamala Harris went out of her way to use the police state to fix this problem, first with a $450,000 anti-truancy initiative in San Francisco launched with then-mayor Gavin Newsom and then with a statewide program that literally made it a criminal misdemeanor just to be the parent of a truant child. 

Mind you, California defines a truant as any child more than thirty minutes late to class without an approved excuse on more than two occasions. Based on personal experience, I am going to take a wild guess that an outsized portion of California's truants are probably trans kids dodging bullies, but in the Golden State, Kamala Harris was the ultimate bully, a mean girl with a badge and an army of child wrangling gestapo at her disposal.

Harris further targeted her state's Queer community with her long running jihad against sex workers. She often bills herself as a reformer by advocating for policies that target johns and pimps over prostitutes, but these policies are little more than a bait-and-switch and Kamala made this painfully clear when she opposed San Francisco's efforts to decriminalize sex work despite the fact that they received the full support of her own party and most of her constituency. Instead, District Attorney Harris stepped up the heat by increasing police raids on her city's massage parlors and ramping up stings on immigrant communities in a blatant fit of racial profiling against the Bay Area's Asian community.

Kamala Harris would also lead the charge on using the boogeyman of human trafficking to suck the federal government into her crusade with legally redundant legislation that led to nearly zero prosecutions for trafficking but fed legions of mostly Black and brown transwomen to the prison industrial complex for the mortal sin of trading sex for survival. And once these women found themselves trapped behind Kamala's walls, what few rights they maintained on the outside evaporated.

Few cases make this harsh truth and the despotic shape of Kamala's true character more revoltingly clear than that of Michelle Norsworthy, a transwoman incarcerated in California State Prison who sued the state for denying her access to medically necessary surgical treatment. Not only did Kamala-the-ally defend the state's denial of treatment but she continued to appeal decisions in Norsworthy's favor even after she became increasingly suicidal, even suggesting callously in a brief that she should just seek therapy instead.

This is the real Kamala Harris, a duplicitous, double speaking, snake who speaks fluent progressive and then uses any influence she can grasp to juice the police state that made her a millionaire, and she continued this twisted MO well into her tenure as the most liberal senator in Washington. Kamala was a leading force behind FOSTA-SESTA, a gargantuan prison industrial boondoggle that made it a felony to simply advertise sex work online. She also further pulverized Queer kids as a vocal supporter of the Kids Online Safety Act, which empowered tech giants to silence online speech deemed to be too adult for anyone under 18.

Long story short, this woman is nothing less than a menace to civil liberties in this country but neither side will call her out on it because the truth is an inconvenience to both of their delusional narratives. 

The Democrats are terrified that their voters will figure out that they're still the same fucking racists they were when Joe Biden was still vital enough to commit sexual assault. They only use identity politics to protect their precious police state from the only thing about Donald Trump that truly threatens them and that's poor management. 

The Republicans on the other hand seem to be afraid that Kamala might do what Obama did and prove to be a far more affective white supremacist than any of the white boys in the locker room. After all, the only reason Orange-Man-Bad was able to lock up all those brown children was because a Black man built the camps.

What else can I say. We live in a hideous country, a white power war machine that grinds Queer bodies of every color into mulch. In 2024, this increasingly cantankerous machine really only has two choices to market its horrors to the masses. It can either double down on the evil with openly despotic gangsters like Donald Trump or it can conceal its true nature by putting compliant minorities in charge of the podium and nothing else. Either way, the results are the same and I refuse to be complicit.

If this makes me a bummer at the Pride parade, then so be it but I will not sit silently by while my culture is hijacked by cackling quislings in savior drag. Kamala is still a fucking cop, and a cop will never be an ally to any individual.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35 by Bob Dylan

* Big Empty by Stone Temple Pilots

* I Wanna Be Your Dog by the Stooges

* Game Shows Change Our Lives by the Mountain Goats

* I Shot the Sherriff by Bob Marley & the Wailers

* Never Let Me Down Again by Depeche Mode

* Chosen to Deserve by Wednesday

* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails

* Your Dog by Soccer Mommy

* The Captain by Kasey Chambers

Hillbilly Minstrel: JD Vance is a Redneck Uncle Tom

 I come from a part of the country where people have become accustomed to getting played by elitist outsiders with name brand suitcases packed full of empty promises. Somewhere between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, where the Rust Belt fades into Amish Country, you'll find my bitter heart surrounded by junked cars and haunted steeples. Gummo Country, I often half-jokingly refer to it as, after Harmony Korine's modern Vuadville arthouse masterpiece. Not exactly the easiest place to grow up stuck between genders but I don't think I could breathe anywhere else.

Say what you will about my neighbors, I often do, but much like me, they are a people accustomed to getting fucked over and tired of putting up with the experience. These are the people who lost their jobs to NAFTA, lost their sons to bullshit wars in the Middle East, and lost pretty much everything else to Oxycontin. This is MAGA country, but these people didn't vote for Donald Trump because they're racist or sexist or xenophobic.

These people don't vote for Republicans or Democrats. In fact, they don't really vote for anyone at all. They vote against whichever Beltway rapist was the last one to fuck them up the ass without even spitting on their dick and Trump was just shrewd enough to get this. In 2016, that Wall Street con artist won over the Rust Belt by taking a ball bat to both of the partisan dynasties that fattened themselves more than most off of pillaging the holler, first the Bush Cartel in the primaries and then the Clintons under the big top.

Don't get me wrong, many of my neighbors are hardcore bigots but they're not fascists and they're not imbeciles. They were well aware that Trump is a belligerent bologna salesman, but they cast their vote for that cunt like casting a brick through the White House window. You see, dearest motherfuckers, for Gummo Country, voting Trump was an act of revenge. But the results were more or less the same old song. The jobs didn't come back from China, the Middle East kept on burning, and opioid addiction continued to provide the holler with its only growth industry aside from the local penitentiaries that it feeds.

But Donald Trump is a repeat offender who knows a good con when he sees one. Being seen seeing the forgotten Americans in these hills allowed him to hotwire the Electoral College once before and now he seems to think he can pull off this grift just one more time with a little help from "one of us" in his VP slot.

If you ask either side of the partisan divide who JD Vance is, political gripes aside, they are both likely to tell you the same story. The story of the son of Appalachian junkies who pulled himself up by the bootstraps and made something of his life, rising above the mud to become an inspiration to hillbillies and rednecks everywhere. A war hero and bestselling author turned working class populist crusader, storming the Senate and putting America, our America, first. There is just one problem with this narrative but it's a pretty big one. It's about 90% bullshit.

JD Vance is actually a middle-class Midwestern suburbanite raised by Appalachian grandparents on the outskirts of Cincinatti. His parents were dicks but his interactions with actual hillbillies growing up seem to be limited to random urchins he bumped into during part time jobs on the bad side of town. Vance spent his time in the Marines avoiding any real combat as a glorified PR rep for the public affairs section of the Aircraft Wing where he likely picked up the bullshitting skills that he would polish as the editor of the prestigious Yale Law Journal.

Vance wrote his bestselling tearjerker, Hillbilly Elegy, on the suggestion of one of his professors, Amy Chua, who used her fame as the bestselling child abuse apologist behind Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother to get her pupil the New York Times Review of Books treatment right out of the gates. By the time Hillbilly Elegy hit the shelves, Vance was already living the high life in San Francisco, working as a corporate lawyer for Big Tech goons like AOL's Steve Case and PayPal's Peter Thiel.

The latter oligarch would bankroll JD's 2022 Senate campaign to the tune of $13 million dollars, and it was during this telltale campaign that Vance shed his previous visage as a neocon Never Trumper like a serpent and embraced his new drag as a MAGA GI Joe, promising to put America first and use the full weight of the Federal Government to annihilate the scourge of transgenderism. Too put a long, gross story short; JD Vance is no Hillbilly hero. At best he's a Redneck Uncle Tom, using his questionable heritage to fill his pockets with taxpayer dollars while he grows the government to lethal levels on culture war bullshit and shifts military industrial fun bucks from Ukraine to Israel.

Donald Trump picked JD Vance for his wingman for the same reason that Joe Biden picked another fraudulent representative of a fucked-over underclass for his VP. It's a diversity hire that crassly tokenizes a marginalized section of the electoral map that another Northeastern country club racist needs to win. But much like Kamala the Cop, JD Vance's most heinous crime isn't simply pandering to poor people, it's actively stoking the bigotry that keeps them desperate enough to vote for thuggish clowns like Trump.

Hillbilly Elegy, the book that made JD Vance a darling of the same liberal media that he now pretends to hate, is not a memoir about overcoming adversity. It is an openly elitist attack on the kind of people that I grew up with and Vance didn't. Vance uses his deadbeat parents like hillbilly scarecrows and blames the woes of systemic disenfranchisement not on Wall Street poachers or Washington warmongers but on the very culture of the impoverished themselves, deriding rural rebellion against elitism as the "regressive" byproduct of a Celtic heritage that treats "poverty as the family tradition." 

JD's suggested solution to our backwards backwoods ways is to escape our "socially isolated" environment and join the more mainstream conservative class of Ivy League corporate creeps who rob us blind with big government handouts in the city.

After all, it worked for JD Vance. Hillbilly Elegy became a bestseller among upper-class liberal literati during the election season of 2016 for a reason. Every bougie, pearl-clutching, Beltway insider was looking for some way to explain how the Bush's and Clinton's lost control of their dupes in cousin-fucker country to a reality television shock jock and JD was their man, an Appalachian pedigreed deplorable-whisperer who could tell elitist fuckups from Bill Kristol to Wolf Blitzer that it wasn't their fault that their abused pet electorate bit them. We were just born rabid.

And maybe he's right. I may have spent my teens cursing redneck jocks for bashing me, but I stayed in this corner of the country for a reason. For all the bigotry that my neighbors all-too-often fall prey to, these people are still my people, and their culture makes sense to a genderfuck anarchist like me because it is one defined by resistance to mainstream American society. Whether you want to call them rednecks, hillbillies, or trailer trash, your average lower class rural white person hates war, taxes, sobriety, cops, and wage slavery every bit as much as your average unassimilated Queer or inner-city person of color. In fact, your average lower class rural white person isn't really that white at all.

Most of our ancestors came to this country fleeing ethnic violence from the Celtic regions of the British Isles to work the farms and mines of Anglo-Saxon Protestants who considered us to be about as despicable as the Black folk toiling beside us. White wasn't even a thing in this country until Celtic paupers and Black servants rose up together against our shared oppressors during Bacon's Rebellion. Even then, most of us had to earn our white privilege the same way JD Vance earned his way into Washington, by assimilating to polite WASP culture and proving ourselves capable of slaughtering darker poor people.

I for one say enough with this melting pot bullshit. I am sick and tired of seeing my neighbors vilified as deplorables by racist frauds like Vance only to be manipulated into bashing their queerer cousins whenever the master class needs their votes. These elitist scum fucks don't represent hillbilly culture any more than Kamala Harris represents Black culture or Pete Buttigieg represents Queer culture. 

Hillbilly culture is a counterculture built in resistance to colonialist homogeny. These are the people who joined the slaves in seceding from the Confederacy to form West Virginia. These are the people who joined their fellow coalminers across the color lines to take on the National Guard during the Battle of Blair Mountain. These are the people who helped Fred Hampton's Black Panthers build the original Rainbow Coalition as members of the Young Patriot's Organization.

These are my neighbors and as a proud pink trash panarchist, I know firsthand that the only way to take on first world oppression is by joining third world resistance. Consider this hit piece against a shameless impostor to be an open invitation to a riot. You know where I live.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Tuesday's Gone by Lynyrd Skynyrd

* Chosen to Deserve by Wednesday

* Serving Time in the Middle of Nowhere by Eyehategod

* Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival

* Marry Me by Drive-By Truckers

* Rebels by Tom Petty

* Problem With It by Plains

* Dragonaut by Sleep

* Fooled Around and Fell in Love by Elvin Bishop

* Never Been Wrong by Waxahatchee

* Quarry by Wednesday

* Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other by Orville Peck & Willie Nelson