We Should All Abandon Biden and the Two-Party Junta He Rode in On

"Some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity."

-Fred Hampton

 'If you have trouble figuring out whether you're for Biden or Trump, then you ain't Black! So sayeth the DNC prescribed lord of liberal progressivism.' As shocking as that sentiment may have sounded coming from a career white supremacist like Joe Biden in 2020, this is what marginalized people of all shades have been telling ourselves for decades and that includes pale-skinned Queer folk like me.

By November of that year of our lord Satan, my people in the trans community were practically throwing up blood, living in a nightmare that seemed to get worse by the hour. While Donald Trump gassed churches and starved Yemen, his flunkies across the Bible Belt passed a vile slew of aggressively fascistic laws that seemed to be designed to torture gender nonconforming children into suicide. Doctors were being threatened with felonies for treating them while their own parents were being investigated for child abuse just for acknowledging their right to exist.

I saw the effects of this campaign of cultural terrorism firsthand on the faces of my own friends and family. I also saw the craven way in which the Democratic Party used this fear to hijack their votes without doing a goddamn thing to earn them. Suddenly, Joe Biden, the pitiless architect of a prison system that targets a higher percentage of transwomen of color than nearly any other demographic in the country, became our only hope, the straight white savior who could shelter us from Donald Trump and his hordes of bible-swinging backwoods savages. Sadly, it worked. Again.

This sick game has been going on for far too long. The relationship that minorities like mine have with the Democratic Party is nothing short of abusive. Those super predators have systematically degraded our self-esteem, groomed us into believing that we don't deserve any better and then left us in one ditch after another with nothing to show for our trouble but bruises and track marks. 

Republican governors have continued their fascist crusade against the civil liberties and basic human dignity of trans kids and Joe Biden and his handlers have stood by with their filthy hands in their pockets and done absolutely nothing. 

And we're not alone. Last time I checked cops were still shooting Black boys on mopeds and migrants continue to get mangled by the flailing police state at our prolapsed border. The Democrats treat us all like sadistic white pimps on a bender but thankfully some of daddy's tricks are getting heroically mouthy.

After months of watching the man they voted for in droves facilitate an open genocide against their brothers and sisters in the Gaza Strip, the long silent Arab and Muslim communities of this country are in open revolt against Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. 

With a rapidly growing community in the battleground state of Michigan, these folks have slyly recognized their strategic value and told their gladhanding DNC bamboozlers to put up or fuck off, hitting the streets armed with signs that read "Abandon Biden" and organizing a campaign calling on all Democrats with a functioning conscience to vote "uncommitted" in Michigan's Democratic primary.

The Biden junta is listening. In fact, they appear to be scrambling scared and it is a beautiful sight to behold. First, they sent the manager of Biden's 2024 bid, Julia Chavez Rodriguez, to Dearborn to quietly meet with the local officials of America's Muslim capital. These local officials, including Mayor Abdullah Hammoud promptly sent Joe's apparatchik packing and issued a public statement that they would not be meeting with anymore campaign officials, only policymakers. 

When Team Biden sent them a groveling national security advisor named Jon Finer for a closed-door meeting, they chewed his head off and leaked an audio recording of that scumbag admitting that Biden fucked up but had no plans to make it better with any actual policy changes.

This may all sound like little more than pageant drama to jaded radicals like me who have long given up on the ballot box as a tool for anything but theater, however, I believe that this clusterfuck might actually have the potential to become something way bigger than 2024. One of the most marginalized minorities in the country has recognized their untapped power and announced that they aren't willing to sell it for empty promises anymore. 

All at a time in which the entire third world, from the lawyers of Pretoria to the militias of Hodeida, are uniting against America's latest proxy Nakba. And the once invisible Muslims of the Rust Belt aren't the only irate demographic breaking bad either.

With an increasingly incoherent Joe Biden trailing the openly racist Donald Trump in the polls by wider and wider margins, minorities are leading the exodus. According to the Roper Center, Biden's support among the Black voters who handed him his Hail Mary against Bernie in 2020 has shrunk from 87% to 63% in less than four years. Among Donald Trump's favorite scapegoats in the Hispanic community the plunge has been even more perilous, dropping from 65% to a downright pitiful 39%.

The woke wonks on cable news are scratching their heads and reading the tea leaves for answers but it doesn't take a gerbil-brained talking head to know which way the wind blows. The various fucked-over classes in this country are sick and tired of being pandered to every few years and then left to swing from the branches like strange fruit until the next election cycle. 

The mighty Muslims of Michigan have the right idea getting organized and publicizing their grievances unfiltered but if you're asking this proudly radicalized minority, they aren't going nearly far enough. We are all getting pissed and we are getting loud, but we are still essentially demanding a better contract from a party of straight white slumlords. 

Their photogenic tokens aside, the Democratic Party is still a machine run by the same predominantly Anglo-Saxon, cis hetero, corporate hegemons who also own their supposed enemies in the GOP. They all talk culture, but they all vote for more war and bigger prisons. It's a fucking scam and even if it wasn't, the notion that one or two universalist parties could ever fairly represent dozens of colonized minorities in a nation built on genocide and slavery is offensively absurd.

The radical reality is that what we really need is our own goddamn parties, all of us. A Muslim Intifada Party, a Queer Liberation Party, a Black Power Party, a Chicano Party, a Queer Chicano Party, a Black Muslim Party, a Queer Black Muslim Party... as many parties as there are tribes disenfranchised by the assimilationist crematorium of the American melting pot. 

And our parties shouldn't be modeled after the Democrats and the Republicans either. They should be modeled after the parties of other oppressed minorities throughout history and across the globe. Parties like the Black Panthers, Hezbollah, the Brown Berets, the EZLN, and the YPG. Parties devoted to building thriving, self-reliant communities, totally autonomous from the state. Parties with their own schools, gardens, farms, militias, and hospitals.

And to all my straight white liberal "allies" in the peanut gallery, no, this isn't about separatism. It is about power and self-determination. It's very easy to sing kumbaya and give peace a chance when inclusion means including other people into your culture. Liberalism is a privilege people like me can't afford anymore and we're through begging. We want our communities back and we want the pimps in the DNC to pack up their shit and get out. But more than anything, what I want is what Fred Hampton wanted with the original Rainbow Coalition. I want a radical diversity that reflects the many shades of a truly post-colonial rainbow, and I don't think that's too radical to ask for.

But this all begins with abandoning Joe Biden and the two-party junta that thinks we owe them anything but a kick in the ass. All power to all the people because all the people deserve power.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones

* Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday

* Ahead by Wire

* These Boots Are Made for Walking by Nancy Sinatra

* Black Boys on Mopeds by Sinead O'Connor

* Everything Right Now by Arcade Fire

* What Have You Done for Me Lately by Janet Jackson

* Power To the People by John Lennon

* Bored by Waxahatchee

* Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan

Learning to Love the Voices in My Head and Embracing "Crazy" as a Lifestyle in Revolt

“People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.”

-Thomas Szasz

People have been telling me that I'm crazy for about as long as I can remember. Teachers, priests, psychiatrists, all kinds of professional adults assigned to define me have defined me as damaged goods because of the perceived abnormality of my behavior. There was always something wrong with the Reid child. I cried too much at school, I didn't perform my gender correctly, and I seemed to prefer the world inside my head to the one around me. I spent countless hours and God knows how much money on expensive sofas in fancy offices trying to explain why I consistently failed to be normal.

I had a lot of people try to define me with an endless thesaurus of scary sounding labels; Attention Deficit Disorder, Clinical Depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Agoraphobia, Autogynephilia (fuck you, Khytam Dawood), Social Anxiety Disorder.... All of them just seemed like long and elaborate labels for the same diagnosis; Nicky is fucking crazy. But it has only dawned on me just recently to ask the one existential question that all the professional adults in my life seemed to conveniently overlook. Just what the fuck is crazy anyway?

If the definition is as standardly prescribed, the inability to act in a normal or rational manner, then I guess I fit the bill, guilty as charged. But just how the hell is a child supposed to act when simply being different makes them profoundly unsafe? I cried too much at school because the people who ran that fine institution went out of their way to humiliate and abuse me. I didn't perform my gender correctly because nobody fucking asked me what my gender was in the first place. And you are goddamn right that I preferred the world inside my head. It was the only place where the adults couldn't reach me. There was something wrong with the Reid child, alright. She was a little girl shamed into performing like the gender on her birth certificate and she was sick and tired of every adult with a diploma on their wall putting their hands and their theories all over her body.

It's taken me thirty-five years, but I've finally realized that mental illness is not my fucking problem. That's just another label like 'heretic' or 'woman' that powerful men use to marginalize the small so they can feel big and important in their luscious ivory towers. Don't get me wrong, I'm plenty fucked up alright. I can't even walk past a church or a school without having a panic attack and I have tried to treat this trauma in nearly every way conceivable. I have talked to complete strangers, paid by the hour, until I'm blue in the face and I have popped more pills than Richard Nixon. But I have only just recently begun to repair the damage from a lifetime of being treated like an emotional leper and I have been doing this by embracing something downright crazy. I've been consulting the voices in my head. 

The scientific term for this prescribed insanity is Parts Work Therapy, which is frequently used to treat Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by recognizing the disowned parts of a patient's personality and granting these parts with the agency to tell their story. But what this really all amounts to is a kind of voluntary multiple personality disorder minus the disassociation. 

Instead of telling those voices in my head to shut the fuck up and keep it down, I ask them who they are and what exactly they have to say. The results of this very simple shift in perception can be a total mindfuck if you've spent your life being abused by the mental health establishment. The result is fully formed sentient beings with thoughts, wills, and opinions all their own. So far, I have met two of them, Agnes and Max.

Agnes is a five-year-old girl who dresses like a haunted Victorian doll from a horror movie and carries a hammer instead of a dolly. I have been seeing her face in nightmares and mirrors all my life but after simply giving her the opportunity to be heard I have discovered that she isn't some terrifying monster, she is just a very hurt and very scared child who doesn't understand why the adults won't stop putting their hands on her body. She carries that hammer to break those hands but what she really wants is to be loved for being different instead of vilified and to be allowed to be the peculiar little girl that I was never allowed to be.

Max is a very pissed-off, androgynous teenager who smokes like a chimney, despises anyone over thirty, and watches over Agnes like a hawk. She spends most of what little free time she has left preparing for the day when the priests come back for Agnes. She's a pint-sized survivalist straight out of some queered Sam Peckinpah movie; building pipe bombs, sawing off shotguns, loading revolvers, reading books on Nietzsche and Albert Camus novels, all while she keeps one eye on little Aggy and the other on the door. She also speaks to God even though she thinks he's a dick and might be Joan of Arc in torn jeans and plaid flannel. 

If all this sounds fucking insane then just imagine living it. Suddenly, I feel like a single mother of two emotionally volatile bitches that nobody else can see but me. But the most bizarre thing about this fucked up acid trip that has become my life is just how normal it all feels. How good it feels to see Agnes smile for the first time in thirty years when Max teaches her a new swear word. How rewarding it feels to tell Max that I'm proud of her for letting her guard down instead of building another bomb. However crazy it might sound; I love those two girls with all my heart and that feels so good because it is the first time that I've ever truly loved myself. 

What is mental health? What is mentally healthy? If the answer is attending to one's own emotional needs and wellbeing, then the healthiest thing that I've ever done is embracing my so-called mental illness as a lifestyle in resistance to the violence of 'normal.' So, what then makes me any different from your average garden variety schizophrenic and what makes them any less valid than the prophets in the Bible? Today's lunatics are yesterday's heretics and yesterday's heretics were shaman before we built a society in which it is considered unhealthy to hear voices but it's perfectly rational to grant armed drones with the sentience that we deny to the damaged children in our heads. 

I have a Native American friend who once told me that before the white man came his tribe had no crazy people, just brothers who spoke to the trees and sisters who carried spears because they also carried the spirits of brothers. In small tribal societies there are no marginalized people because every voice can be heard, and every perspective needs to be respected in order to achieve harmony within the village. The same people who call me crazy called these people savages. If this world is normal, then I'm proud to be crazy and I'll take the voices in my head over the ones behind my flickering screen any day of the week. Max and Aggy tell way better jokes anyway.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post 

* (Nothing But) Flowers by Talking Heads

* Lithium by Nirvana

* Read My Mind by the Killers

* Hummer by Smashing Pumpkins

* No Cars Go by Arcade Fire

* Doll Parts by Hole

* Sin by Nine Inch Nails

* Do You Realize by Flaming Lips

* Not Too Soon by Throwing Muses

* Tilted by Christine & the Queens

Sympathy for the Shia Militias

 Quick hypothetical: Let's say that you are a member of a disenfranchised global minority, and some pompous foreign superpower is building bases all over your ancestral homeland, a homeland which they have spent decades bombing to smithereens. Then let's say that this same superpower decided to use these bastard bases to annihilate another disenfranchised global minority. Under such extraordinary circumstances don't you think that the rational and moral response that you and your kin might take is to gather whatever arms you have available and confront these hostile invaders? Don't you think that under such extreme and extenuating circumstances that you might accept weapons from pretty much anyone willing to provide them? And would doing any of these things make you or your neighbors the "terrorists" in this scenario? 

You don't have to answer all of those questions right now. In fact, all I really want to know is can you relate. Because I can and it's getting downright infuriating feeling like I'm the only one. I may be a decadent gender bending infidel, but I am also very familiar with the condition of being stepped on and if some pompous foreign army was using an illegal base in Altoona to carpet bomb Queer kids in Jamaica, I would light that motherfucker up with whatever ordinance I could get my hands on. This is what the Shiite militias of Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen are doing right now, and Kali help me, I don't believe that they deserve to be vilified and annihilated for it.

There are some 3,400 American troops in that region. 900 in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq, and as bad as I may feel for the misfortunate life choices of our brave men and women in uniform, they are not there handing out stickers and bubblegum. They are there to serve as an advance force for America's various imperial enterprises in the region, and right now that means assisting the American puppet regime of Israel in committing genocide against the people of the Gaza Strip. The Shia militias in the region that have formed over the last two decades to deal with the fallout from our post-9/11 hijinks have decided that they aren't OK with this, especially considering that the Americans assisting it have long occupied their nations in blatant disregard for every international law and rules-based order in the book.

Over 160 attacks on US bases have been launched by various Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria alone since America's homebase in the Pentagon began supplying Israel with the ordinances they require to flatten hospitals. These rebel forces have mostly used cheap drones and artillery, some of it undeniably supplied by the only truly autonomous Shia republic in the region, and most of these attacks have been little more than pot shots lobbed at the imperial parades of the powerful in order to send them a simple message of anguish from the powerless. Until recently, these attacks have resulted in little more than minor head injuries for a handful of occupying troops. Tragically, that changed recently with the drone strike on Tower 22. But just what the hell is Tower 22 exactly anyway?

A shadowy collection of trailers just this side of Jordan's border with Syria, Tower 22 houses some 350 American soldiers allegedly there to fight ISIS. But the last time I checked, what was left of ISIS in that region was in shambles and it was our new enemies in these Shiite militias who put them there. So, what the fuck are all those troops still doing on the Syrian border then and why does Jordan seem downright frightened to even acknowledge their existence? 

American troops are at Tower 22 to facilitate the 900 American troops illegally occupying the oil fields of Eastern Syria with some help from our own proxies in the region. Our reason for this illegal occupation, as expressed explicitly by none other than Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is to prevent the government of Syria from rebuilding their shattered civilian infrastructure after a decade of fighting ISIS, who let us not forget began as a loose knit coalition of western and Saudi proxies themselves.

So, let me play that back for you just one more time. The United States is using bases typically reserved for starving out indignant Shiites in Syria to facilitate the wholesale annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza and who are the fucking terrorists here? Why, the scary brown people of course. This is why our liberal progressive president, Joe Biden, has seen it fit to respond to this "terrorism" with more goddamn terrorism, because that method of madness has really worked out smashingly over the last couple of decades. 125 bombs were delivered to 85 targets by nuclear capable B-1B bombers in the opening salvo alone, killing at least 40 people, including civilians, across Iraq and Syria. 

But it's OK everybody, this isn't a war crime! Those dead bodies don't belong to real people, just Iranian proxies.

Let me rip the needle off the record right now and call bullshit. The majority of America's targets belong to an organization known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, who have taken credit for most but not all of the recent attacks on US bases (no one has officially taken credit for Tower 22.) The Islamic Resistance is essentially just an alter ego for the extracurricular activities of the Popular Mobilization Front and the PMF is a coalition of various Shia militias that organized with support from the US as well as Iran to confront the Islamic State in 2014 when that American sired Frankenstein menace was actively engaged in committing heinous acts of genocide against Shiite Muslims. Since all but eliminating that contagion, these militias have essentially been integrated into Iraq's military.

While these organizations have certainly received aid and advice from Iran, they have also become quite notorious for rejecting the latter. American officials have been quoted on numerous occasions observing that, much like the Houthis and Hezbollah, these organizations do pretty much whatever the fuck they want. That's because Iran is far from the regional powerhouse that its enemies project it to be. Iran is a heavily sanctioned, cash-strapped, economic catastrophe, lurching from one financial crisis to the next. They have a bustling industry of well-made and very affordable weapons, and they hand them out like candy, but they lack anything in the way of the institutional gravitas that it would take to manage a puppet army consisting of every Shia with a gun across three continents.

But there is one thing that the Islamic Republic does supply militias across the region with other than drones and rockets and it is the only export that America is truly terrified of. Iran may be a corrupt and crippled mess of a country but much like other American boogeymen like Vietnam and Cuba, they are the product of a successful popular uprising that totally shattered the illusion of western invincibility in the region. 

In 1979, a loose knit coalition of students, clerics, feminists and communists overthrew the Pahlavi Dynasty and its fascist reigning thug, the Shah, at the height of the Cold War with zero support from any superpower in the Global North. At the time, Iran maintained the fifth largest military on earth and one of the most vicious police states of the twentieth century with America picking up the tab for all of it in exchange for unfettered access to the nation's oil.

This revolution was humiliating and unforgivable to the west. The Iranian people had taken the tainted gift of an Americanized secular society and shattered it on the floor in favor of something shockingly indigenous. This is what inspires populations of Shiites as diverse as the Zaydis in Yemen and the Alawites in Syria and this is what America is currently at war with, not Iran, but the ghost of the Islamic Revolution and the spirit of anti-imperialist resistance that has defined the Shia sect since they first revolted against the Caliphs who inherited Muhammed's throne.

You shouldn't have to be a true believer in anything but radical self-determination to relate and you shouldn't have to have skin on the sand to feel the pain of any people besieged by tyranny. I guess the only question that I'm really asking here is where is your empathy? Because mine is with the poor and that means having a little sympathy for those dastardly Shia militias. 

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* All These Things That I've Done by the Killers

* Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones

* Cherub Rock by the Smashing Pumpkins

* Young Americans by David Bowie

* Welcome to the Black Parade by My Chemical Romance

* Baby's On Fire by Brian Eno

* No Cars Go by Arcade Fire

* Satellite of Love by Lou Reed 

* Are "Friends" Electric by Tubeway Army

* Blackstar by David Bowie

* Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones

Censorship and Child Abuse Go Together Like Israel and Genocide

 As I'm sure many of you already know, it's not exactly unusual for me to have problems with the various censorious regimes that make up social media. I've written about it here before and I'll probably write about it again. I've been hoodwinked, banned, deboosted, bamboozled and canceled by virtually every platform known to Orwell's ghost and this trend shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. 

I've been persecuted for hurling "hate speech" because I dare to self-identify as an unrepentant tranny bulldyke and I've been prosecuted for promoting "radical extremism" because I've declared my undying solidarity with the people of Yemen in the face of a proxy genocide. I've hocked loogie after loogie into the smug face of every billionaire cyber tyrant from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg and I've been thoroughly thrashed from one corner of the web to the next for my vulgar pride.

It's all been said and done, and you'd think that I would finally take a hint by now and accept that me and this panopticon masquerading as a town square just don't mix. But I can't and I won't. Something very deep inside still desperately thirsts to be heard and I refuse to abide by any self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" who refuses to afford me access to an audience. So, I shout, and I scream obscenities at the top of my lungs, and I get bound and gagged by the same old benevolent thugs over and over again, and I always take it personally.

It's an endless game of cat and mouse that probably seems to defy all reason to any casual observer and I've asked myself on more than one occasion, staring at fresh bruises in the mirror, why I even fucking bother. Late last year, the bruises finally responded. Something very dark shifted in this ongoing melodrama this October that irrevocably altered my entire perspective on the trials and tribulations of censorship in the social media age. In fact, it was two things, the first one political and the second very deeply personal, but both feel tethered to one another by a single noose.

The political darkness that seems to have swallowed social media whole over the last three months is of course the fruit of Israel's almost brazenly sadistic war on the children of the Gaza Strip and more specifically their effortless manipulation of the modern machinations of political correctness to cover it up. While one of the most fearsomely advanced militaries on earth utilizes all the latest in state-of-the-art weaponry to demolish crowded maternity wards, a second parallel army of Fortune 500 lobbyists and PR firms has descended on any debt be sodden coed with a megaphone who dares to cry foul in the face of genocide so as to blackball them with breathless accusations of holocaust denial and antisemitism. 

Just ask anyone who has so much as typed the word genocide and the word Israel in the same sentence on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter since October 7th and they'll tell you exactly what I'm talking about. Posts by well-respected activists and journalists with tens of thousands of followers have completely vanished from their loyal followers' feeds without a trace. All the while, tiny brown bodies stack to the rafters of what few smoldering ruins are still left standing in the Gaza Strip.

Sadly, none of this probably would have even been particularly shocking to me at this point if it wasn't for the personal darkness that swallowed my universe whole last year in tandem with this censorious crime spree. You see dearest motherfuckers; this is also the October that I finally broke down after months of mounting flashbacks coinciding with my accelerating gender transition and began undergoing a comprehensive regime of trauma therapy to deal with a childhood long shrouded in the shadows of the Catholic Church. Frankly, I was completely unprepared for what confronted me.

A screaming five-year-old girl inside a boy who begged the world to see her only to be sexually violated and terrorized into making herself disappear for decades because she just wouldn't take a hint and shut the fuck up. That stubborn child just couldn't except the insistence by a shadowy coterie of adult authority figures that her very existence was vulgar until a few of these adults gave her body something else to be terrified by other than the gender on her birth certificate. And suddenly the war became personal.

Every child dragged, dazed and bloodied, from the rubble became that little girl shattered in the mirror. Every callous IDF storm trooper became another pedophile priest. And every shadow ban on Facebook became another hand wrapped firmly around her bird like throat. I don't write these things for fame and fortune. I write because something frail and proud deep inside me keeps screaming to be heard, begging to be seen. The only thing that has ever soothed that child's bottomless rage has been arresting the fleeting attention span of an oblivious world, not for her, but for other children forced to exist in the shadows of the cruel and powerful.

This is why I write about war. This is why I pour hours into researching the places on the map that only drones seem to reach. It's too late for that fiery little child who required rape upon the threat of eternal hellfire to be a good little boy. But it's not too late for the broken children of Gaza, of Yemen and Kashmir and Artsakh and Donetsk. I hear their screams like my own in bed at night and I can't fucking sleep until the whole world hears them too. This is how Palestine became painfully intimate this year and this is why censorship feels like fucking violence to me. 

Try as I might, I can't seem to separate the darkness of the personal from the darkness of the political and I refuse to try any longer. I see no difference between the Knesset and the Vatican, between Pope Benedict and Benjamin Netanyahu, between Catholic sex abuse and the Nakba. It's all the same fucking shit. Powerful men breaking fragile bodies just to prove they can and devout followers silencing the noise made by the carnage they leave behind because order matters more to them than children. 

This isn't a conspiracy; it's a strategy and it works. All systems of institutional power are threatened by the very existence of the individual because individuals are defined by an innate reluctance to be governed. We are all born individuals, so systems of power must disenfranchise and dehumanize children until they can be groomed into knowing their proper place among the silent masses.

A grotesque but inevitable side effect of this sick campaign to objectify the very young is the invention of an entire population specifically reared to be preyed upon by powerful men. It only follows that predation would then become a downright recreational activity for a certain subset of these powerful men elite enough to engage in it without repercussion and this includes the untouchable scions of social media.

As if genocide, censorship, and molestation weren't enough, this winter of children's discontent also happened to coincide with the revelation that Meta, the colossal conglomerate that owns both Facebook and Instagram, has been actively profiting off the exploitation of the children who they don't bother to censor on their platforms. 

Internal corporate documents unsealed as part of a lawsuit filed by the New Mexico Department of Justice against both Meta and their CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that not only did top executives market its messaging platforms to children while fully aware that the abuse of minors was rampant in these spaces, but they opposed measures made by their own employees to prevent this behavior specifically because it would put them at a "competitive disadvantage" with rival platforms.

Now, I personally reject assertions by rival authority figures like New Mexico's Attorney General, Raul Torrez, that policing the social interactions of minors is an effective tool for combatting child exploitation, but Meta clearly does and there is something deeply deranged about a platform that can affectively silence someone for bringing attention to genocidal child abuse in the Gaza Strip but cannot be bothered to use that same technology to stifle known child molesters and it says everything that you need to know about the value these institutions place on children.

We live in a nation where children's rights have been reduced to the level of livestock and freedom of speech has been reduced to a set of privileges bestowed upon us by a new technocratic feudal class and we have the nerve to act shocked when entire generations are being sold into a lifestyle defined by trauma. The only people who should be ashamed of themselves here are the adults in the room and the only way to shame them is to reverse their toxic power imbalance by weaponizing free speech. 

I don't possess the skills to do this but the generations beneath me do. Your average ten-year-old can hack circles around any Meta censor in their sleep. What they lack is the agency to defy a social order built on a collective learned helplessness. The only thing that I can do is scream like a five-year old girl and hope that they can hear her when she tells them that only they have the power to stop this madness.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs influenced by this post

* Across the Universe by the Beatles

* I Think That I Would Die by Hole

* Children of the Revolution by T. Rex

* Mayonnaise by Smashing Pumpkins

* Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen

* Everything Right Now by Arcade Fire

* Circle the Drain by Soccer Mommy

* Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John

* Hug of Thunder by Broken Social Scene

* Never Said by Liz Phair