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

Every American President Should Be Prosecuted

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