Smash the Fourth and Make America Tribal Again

 If there is just one thing left that quite literally everyone in this country can agree on this Independence Day, it is the indisputable fact that there is something profoundly wrong with America and it's not hard to see why. 

America is a country where the economy can be a booming success while the middle class evaporates and the rest of us starve in the streets. America is a country with a colossal dystopian police state that continues to expand with the full support of both parties even while their own federal agents admit that crime is on the decline. America is a country that maintains a phalanx of nuclear armed bases on nearly every continent on earth while playing the role of the victim to second string despots like Vladimir Putin and the Ayatollah. And America is a country eagerly fueling increasingly gruesome proxy wars on those lesser bullies' doorsteps in places like Ukraine and Gaza just so a few oligarchs can sling missiles to duplicitous baby butchers like Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelensky.

But perhaps what's most disturbing of all is that America is also a country with a population who seems to be very well aware that their government is becoming dangerously dysfunctional and despotic but has resigned itself to the role of hapless observers, watching the fire crawl closer and closer to the city limits from their smart phones while resting their dwindling hopes on whichever presidential candidate seems less likely to rape their children this week. 

Yes indeed, dearest motherfuckers, there is certainly something quite profoundly wrong with America. I and the various radicals who I collude with have been saying this for some time now and while we all seem to agree that this nation needs something a bit stronger than anything our demented electoral duopoly has to offer, we all seem to have very divergent theories on how to save this country. 

Most of my fellow libertarians seem to be convinced that if we simply return to the vision that this nation's Founding Fathers painted in the Constitution, we could arrest the despotic powers of the federal government and return to a state defined by natural law. Meanwhile, my former comrades on the far left rest their hopes largely on turning America into a multicultural workers' paradise by transforming that same federal government into a bludgeon to be wielded by the proletariat against the rich.

While I personally find both of these theories to be rather charming in their own ways, I can't help but to feel like both of them miss the most fundamental problem at the heart of our downright apocalyptic age even though it's standing dressed in dripping blood and a goddamn hockey mask right in front of them. 

There is absolutely something profoundly wrong with America and that something is the basic existential fact that America itself is profoundly wrong and it always has been. There were no glory days of bread and roses for this country. There is no chapter where it all went wrong. The men who founded this country were despicable fiends and they found this country for the express purpose of doing despicably fiendish things. America is not an institution designed for liberty or social justice. Quite the contrary, it is a merciless murder machine designed for subjugation and annihilation.

Over 4 million Indians were slaughtered during the first two centuries of this nation's existence and they weren't systematically annihilated to build a playground for free markets or organized labor. This vast nation was hollowed out to make room for the greatest slave cartel in human history. More than 15 million men, women, and children were the direct victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade with as many as 60 million dying as a result of its putrid existence in both Africa and the New World. 

Two massive dueling holocausts define this nation's very existence and nearly every one of our precious Founding Fathers was complicit in one or both of these tragedies with the revolution that gave America its independence playing a major role in the conspiracy.

For all its own atrocities, the British Empire made a couple of desperate attempts in the late 18th century to reign in an increasingly rogue American colony that they feared might destabilize their international dominance. In 1763 they made a proclamation that colonists could push no further westward into Indian Territory and in 1772 the Empire declared slavery to be incompatible with English common law which resulted in the freedom of some 15,000 slaves living in England.

Both of these decisions threatened to cripple the ill-gotten wealth of fatted colonial oligarchs like Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, so they threw in their sordid lot with the Minutemen while corralling them beneath a single constitution that fettered their Declaration of Independence and explicitly guaranteed America's future as a land of rape and honey. 

And it was all a downhill sprint to the ninth circle of Ozymandias from there. America's grotesque police state which continues to define its leadership at home is a direct descendant of the law and order of chattel slavery while the gore fueled war machine that defines its reign of terror on the world stage is the direct progeny of Manifest Destiny. In other words, these aren't the aberrations of an otherwise benevolent republic. These founding sins are what defines this nation's very existence and they continue to inform that beast's slouching crawl toward inevitable imperial collapse.

So, how then do we save this perilous nation? Here's a truly radical notion, how about we don't. Let's stop wasting our time on bullshit elections and historical revisionism and just pull the plug on a machine that has never represented anything resembling moral decency and never will. We can achieve this goal by quite simply dropping out of the American nightmare. The left libertarian radical, Samuel Edward Konkin III, had the right idea with Agorism. American radicals of every stripe should build a grey market counter economy that can simultaneously starve this evil government of tax revenue while denying its corporate masters of their profits with a diverse network of homestead agriculture and bootleg swag.

As the American juggernaut grows weaker, we can take this strategy a step further by embracing a policy of pan-secession in which every conceivable polity can essentially become its own nation provided that any group of its citizens is free to follow their lead. In other words, the People's Republic of Pennsylvania is free to leave the Union so long as the Amish Dutchy of Lancaster is free to leave the People's Republic of Pennsylvania and so on and so on...

And the greatest thing about this solution is that it doesn't require a massive and diverse population of radicals to adhere to any one radical ideology. My fellow libertarians are free to write a constitution that actually reflects the values of natural law for any population who consents to be governed by it and my former comrades on the far left can build a totally voluntary worker's paradise right next door, while I'm free to tell them both to politely fuck off so I can build my own Queer little pirate utopia that embraces the best of both worlds in doublewide republic on their border.

If America has any legacy left worth preserving, it's that of a vast and ungovernable land where outlaws fled long before the white man to start over and try something weird in the wilderness. This dream has defined every wild tribe of fantastic savages from the Seminole Nation to the Mormon Deseret. My radical theory is that they were all right because no single ideology can possibly govern a truly free people. No single constitution can ever represent every generation. So, let's stop trying to preserve the unsustainably counterrevolutionary and embrace something that's both brand new and far older. Let's smash the state and make America tribal again.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Game Shows Change Our Lives by the Mountain Goats

* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

* Bleed American by Jimmy Eat World

* Fourth of July by X

* Rockin' in a Free World by Neil Young

* Young Americans by David Bowie

* All My Little Words by the Magnetic Fields

* Looking for America by Lana Del Rey

* A More Perfect Union by Titus Andronicus

From Stonewall to Blair Mountain: A Rant in Defense of Riots

 Once upon a time, in a village called Greenwich, there was a dingey little bar called Stonewall where several shades of queens and dykes used to hang out, get lit, and get their rocks off. It wasn't much to look at, just a punchy little hole in the wall run by the Genovese Crime Family on the Queer end of Manhattan. The truth is, there were actually a lot of Stonewalls. They came and went, popping up here and there only to be crushed by the cis-het state for this reason or that. 

However, in June of 1969, this Stonewall was a temporary autonomous zone, a shitty little pirate utopia for the most marginalized members of the Queer community; a dizzy hodgepodge of drag queens, bulldykes, trannies, twinks, hustlers, and street kids, most of them Black and brown, extras cut from a Lou Reed song for forgetting to shave their legs that mourning. But they were family and, for fifteen minutes, Stonewall was their home.

Then the pigs came. The pigs always came. Aggressive, sexually confused white men with no necks, limp dicks, and square haircuts. Nasty, role-crazy, civil servants hitting up any place misfits dared to call home for their "gayola," a dirty wad of cash the mob would pay these glorified welfare scroungers just to fuck off for a few weeks. 

And when the pigs didn't get what they wanted they took what they wanted. Throwing teenage runaways up against the wall and thrusting their grimy hands up their skirts. Beating us. Raping us. Locking us up for crossdressing and then beating and raping us some more. But something happened when the pigs came to Stonewall in late June 1969. The queens and dykes said enough.

You can call it a riot. You can call it an uprising. You can call it a rebellion. I call it an ass whooping and it was well deserved and a long time coming. After the Public Morals Squad of the NYPD attempted to trap about 200 Queers inside the Stonewall Inn, a small army of their comrades slowly swelled outside the bar. 

A stone cold butch bulldyke and Black buck drag king named Storme DeLarverie threw the first punch. In fact, she threw the first twenty, taking on multiple pigs at once for nearly ten minutes straight before being cracked wide open by a truncheon with her fists chained behind her back. Bloody but unbowed, Storme barked to her people, "Why don't you guys do something?" as she was being crammed into a police cruiser. So, we did something.

The crowd of irate Queers, which now outnumbered the pigs by several hundred, armed themselves with bricks from a nearby construction site and rained down hell on the invading army in blue. When those ham-fisted cowards barricaded themselves in the bar, our bar, with a bevy of handcuffed hostages in tow, this spontaneous Queer army tore out a parking meter, turned it into a battering ram, and burned that motherfucker down. 

More pigs came, tactical patrol forces with their helmets and tax-funded, "less than lethal" toys. The Queers met them with a kicking chorus line, and when the pigs failed to get the joke, when they failed to get that they were now the fucking joke, we kicked their pink asses black and blue, up and down Christopher Street, until they literally ran home screaming for their lives.

I wasn't there. I wasn't even born yet. But I say 'we' because a movement was born that night, a movement that literally saved my life and the lives of so many other strange, beautiful things raped and ravaged by a state designed by satanic cunts who call themselves Christians to confine the individual in a jar with no holes in the lid. I, like many others, would have suffocated there, broken and alone, if a few pissed-off queens and dykes hadn't said enough at Stonewall and detonated the closet. 

The assimilationist Homophile Movement had been begging breeders politely to abuse us a little more softly for decades and achieved nothing. It took a riot to wake this country and gather its broken toys into an army and I'm tired of pretending that this act of vengeance was anything but justly violent and absolutely fucking necessary.

I have been a part of the antiwar movement in this country for nearly as long as I've been Queer. I have opposed every imperial bloodbath that this country has ever partaken in, including literally every war since I was born screaming in the wrong gender almost 19 years to the day after the Stonewall uprising. 

From Panama to the Persian Gulf to the former Yugoslavia and back to the Gulf again, from Afghanistan to Libya to Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, and Gaza, I despise war like I despise my dick, but I am not a pacifist. I am a rare post-left student of the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle, which opposes all initiatory violence, including taxation and carceral confinement. But there was nothing initiatory about Stonewall and it wasn't the first or the last popular uprising necessary to defend the public from the oppression of the state in this country. 

Every single chickenshit privilege that we call a right in this nation was taken by force in uprisings frequently labeled as riots. There would have been no eight-hour workday or five-day workweek if it wasn't for the West Virginia Coal Wars that forced Washington to send in the National Guard to put down the largest uprising since the Civil War at Blair Mountain in 1921. And we might have held onto a few of those hours too if we had kept fighting instead of joining the federal government with FDR's duplicitous New Deal. 

Every single civil rights act pushed through by liberal progressives like the Kennedys and LBJ was a desperate attempt to extinguish the growing fires of the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s, with the patron saint of pacifism, MLK himself, often using the specter of looming Black Power to bring white power to the table and the riots inspired by his assassination spooking forward the last of these congressional pay offs.

The antiwar movement itself achieved its greatest victories, pausing the draft and ending the Vietnam War, with a rash of riotous behavior that spanned from the campuses of this nation's finest universities to the jungle bases where LBJ drafted Black ghetto rebels to kill for Uncle Sam. The Pentagon estimated that 3% of its officers killed in Vietnam between the years of 1961 and 1972 had been fragged by their own GIs with their acts of incendiary insubordination peaking between 1969 and 1971 with 730 known incidents. 

And this war against war was mirrored back home with at least 174 antiwar bombings occurring on campus during the school year of 1969-1970 alone. Long story short, the only reason why we aren't still killing babies in Indochina to this day is because the Pentagon believed it may have cost them the entire empire and it probably should have.

This isn't to say that violence is the only answer. Far from it. Every single one of these riots and insurrections was furthered by the tireless work of non-violent activists who provided the status quo with proof of a peaceful alternative to the violent lifestyle that their system made inevitable and many of those uprisings also include cases of good people taking direct action too far. 

What we need is a diverse and tempered movement open to all non-initiatory tactics available to affect change. But in an increasingly despotic nation engaged in dueling genocides directed at both trans kids and their siblings in Palestine, pacifism practiced as a dogmatic religion is complacent at best and complicit at worst.

The sad fact of the matter is that the only way poor people have ever been afforded any real and lasting peace in this country is with a brick in one hand and a flower in the other. This empire has smashed enough fag bars and refugee camps. It's time to make like my Queer elders and smash back.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

* All Born Screaming by St. Vincent

* Rise Above by Black Flag

* Rock & Roll by the Velvet Underground

* $20 by Boygenius

* Down Rodeo by Rage Against the Machine

* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones

* Fuck tha Police by NWA

* Police Truck by Dead Kennedys

* Riot Rhythm by Sleigh Bells

This post is dedicated in loving memory to Tom Plotts, a loyal friend, ferocious ally, benevolent dope fiend, and one of my favorite dearest motherfuckers in the history of dearest motherfuckerdom. This world is a shithole without you, brother. Catch you on the other side.

The Real Queer Conspiracy Against Western Civilization

 It may have taken me decades of careful introspection to find myself amidst the wreckage of decades of institutional trauma, but it seems like every other asshole on the right has my gender identity all figured out the moment they clock me in as trans. I was pretty fucking sure that this was an intensely intimate issue defined by the complex interactions between biology and culture but according to amateur genderologists like Matt Walsh and those fine young libertarians in the Mises Caucus, my entire existence and that of millions of others can be boiled down to a single ideology and that ideology is some kind of convoluted Marxist conspiracy to erode traditional American values and destroy the very fabric of Western Civilization itself.

While these paranoid fabulists clearly need to cut down a bit on their steady diet of rainwater and grain alcohol, they actually aren't totally off base. Those stuffy breeders in the Frankfurt School may not have known a tranny from a drag queen if one fucked them in the ass but Third World Marxist movements like Black Power and Aztlán had a profound and tragically under sung influence on the modern Queer Liberation Movement and this is nothing to be ashamed of. Movements to expand revolutionary consciousness frequently empower one another simply by expanding beyond each other's designated boundaries and blurring the lines that once superficially separated them.

When Stokely Carmicheal boldly reclaimed Blackness as a concept defined by empowered otherness and Chicano firebrands like Oscar Zeta Acosta followed suit, Black and brown Queer folk like Marsha P. Jonhson and Sylvia Rivera were paying attention. And when the streets got wild from Watts to Detroit, it was these gender outlaws of color who decided to bring that same fire to roast the pigs at Stonewall.

At their heart, the Third World consciousness movements of the sixties and seventies were defined by colonized people struggling to recover what was stolen from them by generations of annihilation and assimilation. It was about building new cultures informed by what shreds remained of the old and this is what today's straight white conservative culture war "experts" remain totally blind to. 

While Marxist concepts on class oppression may have strongly informed our approach, much like Afrocentricity and Aztlan, Queerness is a construct defined by a decidedly conservative yearning for traditional values, our traditional values. We are a people in search of a home and this home can still be found if you blow the dust from the right history books.

Long before there was any need for concepts like Queerness and Blackness, the planet was divided into a diverse array of tribal ecosystems, each with its own classes, genders, gods, and spoken histories. While defined by diversity, gender fluidity was rife throughout these primitive cultures. Across nearly every continent, archeologists have found evidence of third genders existing amongst thousands of tribal cultures for thousands of years, from the Iron Age grave markings of Persian antiquity to the Bronze Age figurative art of Ancient Greece.

Many of these traditions relied on unwritten oral histories but some of them still survive to this day and many of those who don't were recorded by the vicars and conquistadors who annihilated them to make room for their pseudo-Christian imperial new world order. Over 100 third genders were observed to have existed in North America alone during the age of first contact and they were far from the only ones. 

In Africa you had the Ashtami of the Maale in Ethiopia and the Oracles of Mukura of the Ankele in Uganda. In the South Pacific we still have the ancient Maha of Hawaii's Kanaka Mauli and the Fa'afafine of Samoa. The Incans had the Quariwarmi, the Ancient Sumerians had the gender bending servants of Inanna and Rome had the transgender priestesses known as the Galli.

This is my culture and not only is it older than Western Civilization, but Western Civilization is what razed it in the name of modernity and progress. Christianity may have been the weapon Rome used to cull us, but it was merely one of countless spiritual traditions of the ancient world that the Ceasars plucked from the Garden of Eden and stripped of its indigenous divinity in order to use it as a battering ram for the real enemy of traditional divinity, the state and its debauched mutant progeny, empire. This is what destroyed a thousand tribal identities and decimated their people to the point of requiring revolutionary recycling projects like Black Power and Queer Liberation.

And this is what women and gender outlaws have been attempting to revive through populist pagan reform movements like Wicca and Asatru for decades, a spiritual consciousness that reflects our own diverse and ignored personal experiences. Conservative pagans will often take such communities to task for failing their historical purity tests, but the point here isn't that any single tribal tradition is morally superior to Christianity or capitalism. The point is that many tribal traditions will always be morally superior to any single tribal tradition because humanity is far too diverse and complex to be homogenized in a single melting pot without that cooking implement becoming a genocidal charnel.

The transgender ideology, if any single one exists, is not a symptom of modern decadence. It is an act of resistance against it. So, you are goddamn right that we are at war with your precious civilization but that is only because what you call traditional American values remain an existential threat to any truly indigenous tribal society, new or old. In other words, it is not the Queer Liberation Movement that is modern and decadent, it is the vapid globalist monstrosity of the American Empire. A soulless monolithic corporate culture actively working to transform Queerness into just another brand like Marxism and Christianity.

But I still believe that it is in fact Queer people, and Black people and Chicano people, who must lead a new struggle against state sanctioned modernity with a revival of truly traditional values like communalism and diversity beneath the banner of a bold new primitivism, not just because it has always been the 'others' of the lumpenproletariat who have carried the fire of revolution, from Amistad to Stonewall, but because revival is the only way forward for all of us in a world where the past has been ravaged by imperial conquest.

It isn't just the traditionally marginalized who have been throttled into submission by imperial homogeny. It is the Irish and the Italians and the Polish and the Germans and all the other cultures erased by toxic modern concepts like race, gender, church, and state. Western Civilization has stripped us all of our traditions and movements like mine have found a way to revive them by embracing a culture of resistance through decentralized tribal diversity.

This is my transgender ideology, a form of Queer post-civ panarchism beyond left and right. But I'm not here to recruit you, I'm here to encourage you to rebuild your own tribe so that together we can build a thousand tribes, too diverse to be governed by any single power, civilization be dammed.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* All I Really Want by Alannis Morrissette

* Describe by Perfume Genius

* Ocean Size by Jane's Addiction

* We Oh We by the Hidden Cameras

* Territorial Pissings by Nirvana

* Satanist by Boygenius

* Teenage Riot by Sonic Youth

* Ziggy Stardust by Bauhaus

* What's the Frequency, Kenneth by REM

* Hot Topic by Le Tigre

Schooled Straight: Confronting the Cis Hetero Compulsory School System

 “Humankind is innocent, loving, and creative, you dig? It's the bureaucracies that create the evil, that make Honor and Community impossible, and it's the kids who really take it in the groin.”

-Paul Goodman

Well, it's another Pride Month and the so-called Christian Right's increasingly statist culture war against Queer folk just continues to rage on with the reckless abandon of a runaway bushfire. And why the fuck not? It keeps the faithful stupid and the coffers heavy with their money, so let the hate legislation burn! None of this shocks me. I'm a genderqueer lapsed Catholic in cousin-fucker country, I grew up being terrorized by these goons. But what does disgust me is the way these cretins have targeted children, specifically trans kids, and the way they use the compulsory school system to do it.

2024 will be the fourth consecutive year in a row in which the sheer volume of anti-Queer bills being pushed across the country will shatter the record books. Less than halfway into the year and there have already been 38 of these bills passed and another 579 being considered. Most of these bills will likely fail to do anything but terrorize one of the most statistically vulnerable demographics in the country, but too many of them have already given the public school system a new set of fangs.

Seven states have laws in place that affectively silence any classroom discussion that acknowledges that Queer people actually exist. Eleven states have laws denying trans kids access to bathrooms where they won't face the kind of mob violence that killed Nex Bennedict this year. And seven states have laws demanding that school officials violate the privacy of their students by outing them to their parents.

The strategy here, beyond the economics of crass political football, isn't hard to discern. It's a strategy pretty familiar to the American school system. Kill the Queer, save the child. These people see "transgenderism" as a contagion that should be eradicated, and they have been proven to be more than willing to use the strong arm of the state to strain it from impure children by any means necessary. This strategy can only be accurately described as a form of social genocide and with the suicide rate amongst its targeted demographic already through the roof, this slaughter is becoming increasingly literal.

Many mainstream LGBTQ people and their sundry liberal allies are attempting to push back with their own legislation seeking to make the public school system more inclusive. Washington has recently become the seventh state to enact legislation actually mandating that public schools incorporate some form of LGBTQ-inclusive curricula, and the Biden Administration is attempting to revise Title IX to protect Queer kids from sex discrimination. This all sounds wonderful on the surface, but I've received way too many false promises from straight white liberals with blood in their veneers to believe that the very system designed to crush us is suddenly going to become our salvation.

Title IX is actually the ultimate proof of this fickle duplicity. In this dwindling plutocratic empire, a law passed to be a civil rights act is just as easily transformed into a weapon of bigotry depending on whatever demographic the current breeder in the White House happens to be pandering too. Donald Trump used this same law to affect a nationwide bathroom apartheid system in order to protect the civil rights of cis parents who didn't want their kids' sharing bathrooms with designated perverts and he has promised the Bible thumpers back in cousin-fucker country that he'll do it again if they just vote to make Israel great again.

The cold hard reality is that systems designed for oppression cannot be reformed and the compulsory school system itself is one of the most heinous examples of this fact in recorded history. Despite what the liberal teachers' unions may tell you, public schools have never been bastions of inclusion and tolerance, they are in fact an invention of the original Christian Right, designed specifically for indoctrination and assimilation.

Compulsory schooling has its origins in the Protestant Reformation, with Martin Luther himself envisioning a system in which Christian education would be forced upon children in a fashion similar to the way that the draft forced war upon their fathers. The first public schools were established in Germany during the 14th century under heavy Lutheran influence and would become the seed for the militant compulsory school system of the Prussian Empire which would itself serve as the template for nearly all the public-school systems that followed across the west and beyond.

The Prussian school system was explicitly devised to create a compliant citizenry groomed from an early age into submitting their will to authority with a strict regimen of harshly enforced rules built around a centrally controlled curriculum. It worked. This system helped turn Prussia into an imperial military powerhouse by subjecting generations of children to the same kind of disciplinary indoctrination usually reserved for prisons and boot camps, and the line of morally blind nationalism that it fostered is commonly acknowledged to have created the foundation for the rise of national socialism. It also created the foundation for the American public school system.

The first American public schools were devised by the Puritans of New England as a means of perpetuating their own twisted blend of Calvinism and quite literally suppressing dissent in the cradle. Massachusetts enacted the first general school law in the country in 1789 but it was the Prussian school system that inspired these lunatics to take the system national in the 19th century as a means of enforcing homogeny upon the unruly and diverse masses of a rapidly expanding empire. 

This remains the goal at the heart of America's compulsory school system even in its current secular incarnation. Teachers and administrators across the country are encouraged to enforce a standardized curriculum not for the purpose of education but as a means of tracking and controlling large numbers of children with the ultimate goal of maintaining the order of an authoritarian status quo.

In these glorified prisons it is the individual that suffers the worst. This means any child unable or unwilling to conform to the manufactured will of the majority and among the disabled and the neurodivergent this has always meant Queer children who are defined by their inability to conform to a set pattern. 

This is the system that is literally killing our kids. 86% of Queer students in America report having been harassed or assaulted at school and 84% of trans kids do not feel safe in these environments specifically because of their gender. All of this statistically leads to lower GPAs, lower self-esteem, higher dropout rates, and higher rates of suicide, with Queer kids more than four times as likely to commit suicide than their straight peers. 

This is personal to me because I experienced the very worst of it firsthand in both parochial and public compulsory institutions. During my twelve-year sentence, I was beaten, molested, humiliated, bullied, demonized, and ostracized by both adult authority figures and the students who mimicked their cruelty. Nearly all of this abuse stemmed from a stubborn unwillingness on my part to conform to conventional gender norms followed by attempts to overcompensate by building a deliberately antisocial persona to protect myself from more abuse.

The result is Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The result is crippling agoraphobia. The result is violent flashbacks, seizures, and multiple personalities. But most importantly, the result is an unwillingness to cut deals with fucking child abusers in allies clothing.

The compulsory school system is a form of indentured servitude designed to break the individual in two. The notion that such a system can be reformed into anything worth salvaging is about as offensively absurd as believing that the prison system can ever be reformed into anything but a glorified plantation or that the police can ever truly serve the communities that they have been tasked with subduing. 

As I said before, systems designed for abuse will always be abusive. Even under the best-case scenario, a woke public school system will never amount to much more than a bunch of straight authority figures teaching Queer kids how to be Queer and this is the kind of shit that results in phenomena like detransitioners when non-binary kids are forced to pick a gender defined by cis heteronormativity.

What Queer kids really need are Queer schools or no schools at all. The ideal would be a form of communal unschooling, governed by Queer parents, elders, and found families, that make children a vital part of a multigenerational community and helps them to learn through natural life experiences. However, for the sake of Queer kids in straight households, free schools of the Sudbury model in which students make their own curriculum and exist in a direct democracy with equal rights for both staff and pupils is likely the best option.

But the worst way to combat the Christian Right's genocidal war on trans youth is to double down on saving the tools designed by authoritarian zealots just like them to destroy us. If we are ever going to protect our kids, then we must destroy these institutions. In other words, save the Queer, smash the school.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Oh! Sweet Nuthin' by the Velvet Underground

* Smells Like Teen Spirit by Tori Amos

* Rebel Rebel by David Bowie

* Sheila Take a Bow by the Smiths

* In Bloom by Nirvana

* School's Out by Alice Cooper

* Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton by the Mountain Goats

* Teenage Whore by Hole

* Thirteen by Big Star

* Rock & Roll by the Velvet Underground

There is Nothing Queer About Liberalism

"The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines."

-Michel Foucault

 I've been called some pretty heinous things in my life, and I'll proudly own most of them with a smile, but every time I get called a liberal someone has to die. Call me a faggot, call me a shemale, call me a fucking tranny, and I'll respond, 'so what?' But never call me a goddamn liberal unless you're looking to get your skull pierced with a Schrade Sharpfinger. Even in my past life as an unrepentant communist, I chafed beneath that label and the reason is pretty simple. Ideologically speaking, American liberals are fucking pussies and not the kind I like to eat for breakfast. 

Your average American liberal progressive is antiwar until a Democrat is dropping the bombs but also has zero problem pushing pacifism on darkies and faggots to keep us in line. Your average American liberal progressive will dawn a dashiki every time another cop shoots another Black boy on a moped but is the first motherfucker to scream 'law and order' when they find tire tracks on their freshly sodded lawn. These people may dress up like allies for trick-or-treat, but they voted for Hillary and threw Chelsea Manning beneath a men's prison. They are cowards, scoundrels, and above all else, frauds.

Liberals also tend to be unbearably vanilla, with their polo shirts and their Kennedy haircuts and their NPR tote bags, gentrifying the countryside one trailer park at a time until the whole goddamn country looks like one big golf course infested with McMansions and Panera Bread franchises and swarms and swarms of Prius driving Karens belting out Michael Bublé songs on their way to yoga. So, even as a born-again Queer anarchist, I would rather be curb stomped by Proud Boys than lumped in with these pandering casualties of respectable heterosexual society.

And I know what you're going to say, you're going to say the same thing that my mother says in between fumbling my pronouns, 'I thought all Queer people were liberals.' First of all, fuck you. Second of all, you, like 99% if this politically dyslexic country, clearly have no idea what the words 'liberal' and 'Queer' really mean, so please allow me to give you a brief revisionist history lesson before I'm forced to hurt you. 

Liberalism, as a political philosophy, has its foundations in the western sanctified 17th century European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. Despite what your high school history teacher may have told you, this was not the miracle that introduced reason and democracy to humanity. While men like Immanuel Kant may have declared human rights to be universally sacred institutions, they also essentially invented the scientific racism that brought us chattel slavery in order to ensure that human rights would only be bestowed upon those of us who conformed enough to Western European culture to be considered scientifically human.

When it all comes down to it, the Enlightenment and the philosophy of liberalism that came with it were just civilization's latest excuses for blind obedience to endless conquest. When the churches and monarchs began to get stale and the proles began to get restless, a bunch of straight rich white guys decided to turn the state into a secular church and declared science to be its new religion, switching over from spiritually defined institutions like the temple and the crown to more "reasonable" ones like the courthouse and the asylum.

But the results remained largely the same. White Anglo Saxon Protestant culture was sold as the only solution to the ungovernable savagery of tribal diversity, and all those who failed to assimilate to its dictates were condemned to trial by fire, be they Indian Dog Soldiers resisting the progress of the railroads or backwards Muslim mujahadeen resisting some European's definition of democracy.

At the core of the liberal philosophy is the concept of universalism, the notion that the entire world should be united beneath a single set of values, a globally homogenized melting pot of inclusion which sounds charming until you remember that what liberals are including us in by the barrel of a gun is the same western culture that brought us concepts like whiteness, prisons, the gender binary, mental illness, the standing army, and the Westphalian nation state just to make damn sure that we all just got along. To put it bluntly, liberalism is just white supremacy with a secular face, and it was essentially modelled after the same evangelical Christian universalism that attempted to convert people like me out of existence.

You see dearest motherfuckers, Queer is not just a repurposed pejorative for sexual and gender minorities. It is a uniquely diverse pastiche of the pagan tribal traditions extinguished by the church to make room for progress. Before Christianity became the favored tool for imperial subjugation, every tribe had its own gods, its own traditions, and its own genders. Every pagan culture from Vanuatu to Vladivostok had its own unique concepts for what defined sex and sexuality, and most of them reserved hallowed spaces within their communities for those of us who deviated from the norm by nature with many of us serving as shaman and priestesses due to our unique connections to multiple genders.

Of course, all of this was just way too complicated for the church to homogenize, so our identities were erased, a single binary gender system was established, and those who failed to conform to it were slaughtered in mass as witches and heretics.

But when the churches and the monarchs began to get stale and the proles began to get reckless, liberalism replaced spiritual hegemony with scientific hegemony and the witches and heretics were declared perverts and lunatics who could only be cured by the miracle of the enlightened asylum. However, some of us resisted. Some of us kept shreds of our heathen identities locked away in the closet and even celebrated our diversity in the shadows until the third worldism of Black Power and the Chicano Movement gave us a blueprint of the prison and a way to break out of it. 

At its very core, Queerness is a radical rejection of the same puritanical Christian universalist values that define liberalism to this day and that is why there is absolutely nothing Queer about liberalism.

Liberals may pose as allies but what they're really after isn't diversity but inclusion into their straight white monoculture, and since outright annihilation has lost its zing with the youth demographic, they've created carefully color coordinated little boxes to stuff us in with alphabet brand names like LGBTQ. This is why anti-assimilationist Queer radicals like me reject that label, but I'm here to call on my tribe to take this rejection one step further to include the rejection of the liberal universalism that gave birth to this progressive school of assimilation.

Ideas like liberalism and globalism should be considered every bit as anathema to the Queer experience as the Vatican and the asylum because they represent the same damn thing, a slow and painful death by bourgeoise conformity. To be Queer is to strive for absolute diversity, a thousand stateless tribes of throbbing heathen savages with a million fluid genders and sexualities swirling about like the colors and shapes of a kaleidoscope. 

Even anarchy isn't wild enough to contain us all. What we need is many anarchies, a grand panarchy to revive what the bible thumpers and their liberal bastards stole from us. This should also mean embracing a radical diversity that transcends Queerness and affords room for all the beasts that liberalism failed to assimilate, from the Indian Dog Soldiers to the Muslim mujahadeen, so long as they can all agree to coexist voluntarily. That and to never call me a fucking liberal again.

The only true enemy of any stateless Queer nation should be any asshole telling us that we're all the same. Humanity is way too complicated for that evangelical bullshit and that's precisely what makes it beautiful enough to kill for.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Walk On the Wild Side by Lou Reed

* Under You by Foo Fighters

* Black Boys on Mopeds by Sinead O'Conner

* Personality Crisis by New York Dolls

* Motion Sickness by Phoebe Bridgers

* I Wanna Be Your Dog by the Stooges

* Volcano Girls by Veruca Salt

* Not Strong Enough by Boygenius

* Orange Crush by REM

* The Passenger by Iggy Pop

* In Bloom by Nirvana

* Free to Decide by the Cranberries