Dear Queer People: A Message to My Battered Tribe

 There are few things more heartbreaking in this world than watching someone you love in an abusive relationship. Sadly, I've seen it firsthand, up close and personal, and it's harder to sit through than a train crash. To see a selfless and loving spirit sacrifice their safety and self-esteem on the altar of some conniving predator with a bouquet in one hand and a hammer in the other... Trying to convince that selfless and loving spirit that that bouquet and that hammer are a package deal, and they deserve better than to be trapped in an endless loop of empty apologies and sadistic degradation... It's infuriatingly sickening and downright soul shattering, especially when you are a survivor of abuse yourself.

Sadly, this is a pretty common story for Queer people on the margins like me and I've seen it play out in more ways than one. Too many people across virtually every conceivable demographic can probably relate to the scenario that I've presented above. However, I invite all of you to try and imagine what it's like to have to watch everyone you love, your entire community, trapped in that kind of scenario on a national scale and you might begin to comprehend what it feels like for me to be a Queer anarchist post-November 2024. Everyone I know is terrified and they have good reason to be. Donald Trump was elected in a landslide victory on a campaign that promised to the cure the country of "transgenderism" by using the full weight of the federal government to shove trans kids back in the closet and nail the door shut.

But Donald Trump and his MAGA Mensheviks aren't the only ones abusing my people intimately. Fascist gangsters like the goons of the GOP have been chasing us around with torches and pitchforks since Rome declared our heathen existence to be an affront to their new sky god's authority. I don't like it but it's nothing new, it's almost expected at this point. What hurts me far worse is seeing my people run to the arms of the Democratic Party for sanctuary only to have those milquetoast breeders' shame and berate them. 

Over the last four years Republicans across the country have been on a hate crime spree, using the government to violate our rights in nearly every way conceivable; passing thousands of laws that declare the supposedly constitutionally protected speech of our gender expression to be a misdemeanor, that bar us from making sound and informed medical decisions for ourselves and our children, that have gagged our kids from even speaking of their existence in our nation's compulsory school system... And the Democrats have done absolutely nothing to protect us.

Now, with Queer people feeling more exposed than ever before, that same party that many of the people I love are currently looking to for protection is throwing us under the fucking bus and blaming us for their failure to run a candidate in the latest election that anyone could stomach voting for without a goddamn gasmask. 

Despite the fact that trans rights didn't even rank in the top 50 concerns for voters in most polls and that Kamala Harris could barely make eye contact with us while the Republicans poured hundreds of millions of dollars into our wholesale defamation, every left-of-center rag from the Guardian to the New York Times has been running nonstop opinion pieces by pithy little neoliberal shits calling for a more Clintonian approach to their already cellophane support. Meanwhile, Joe Scarborough and the spawn of Zbig have been running these stories daily like headlines on MSDNC, that is when they're not busy visiting the Orange Duce to kiss his ring, and Democratic representatives like Seth Moulton and Tom Suozzi have gotten in on the act as well.

Unbeknown to most, this too is nothing new. The Democrats have always been manipulative fair-weather friends at best to pretty much every minority in the book but the Zionists and Queer people are no exception. Bill Clinton won his first Democratic primary in 1991 on a campaign to treat a community still reeling from the AIDS epidemic with compassion and tolerance only to restrain us with Don't Ask Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act. 

Mind you, military service and state marriage have always been pretty empty symbols of assimilation but even these tokens were too much for the DNC hierarchy until very recently. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton all ran repeatedly on keeping fags from sullying the sanctimony of nuptial slavery until a Supreme Court victory for Marriage Equality became an inevitability. Only then did these self-proclaimed allies start crashing Pride parades and painting the White House pink, all while continuing to savage our people by growing a police state which disproportionately violates the rights of Queer people, especially trans women of color, to Frankensteinian proportions. 

Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris actually built their long and illustrious careers on this stealth wave of Queer bashing fascism, from the Clinton Crime Bill to FOSTA-SESTA, but that didn't stop MAGA inc. from accusing them of the mortal sin of granting trans prisoners' basic human rights. The biggest Republican slight against the Biden-Harris White House in 2024 was a well-publicized lie that Joe and Kamala had provided prisoners with sex change operations. 

The policy they were referring to was actually enacted in 2019, during the Trump Administration, and as Attorney General of California, Kamala Harris actually opposed similar measures while she busied herself throwing transwomen into men's prisons and denying them access to basic medical services. This might explain why Team Kamala didn't even bother to respond to these adds. In fact, it actually took an organization of ex-Republicans called the Lincoln Project to do that but not before the lie was spread across the zeitgeist during half-time of every NFL game in October.

You would think that this would be enough, that Queer people, my people, would finally get the message loud and clear that these sycophantic frauds don't fucking love us, they are just using us like human shields to keep straight, suburban, cat ladies distracted from the fact that the party of hope and joy is just another pawn of the prison industrial complex. But no, my friends, my sisters, my beautiful people just keep crawling back to those pitiless scoundrels, begging for shelter from the same state being used to crush them. They do it because they don't believe that they have any place left to go. They do it because the other guy, their ex in the GOP that they were raised in, is worse. And perhaps worst of all, they do it because they don't believe that they deserve any better.

Well, I am here to tell my people once more, in no uncertain terms, bullshit! Everything that we have, everything that we are, everything that Queer people have ever achieved in this land of rape and honey, we have won alone without the aid of either one of these abusive parties. Who sent the pigs screaming for their lives from the wailing flames of Stonewall? Who drug those Freudian incels at the DSM by their gray hair into removing homosexuality from their dirty list of mental illnesses? Who survived a plague to throw our sickly bodies into the guts of the medical machine until they would so much as even address the existence of the AIDS holocaust. Us! Us, goddammit, and no one else. In fact, the only reason that DNC rapists like Bill Clinton even came slinking to our back door was because we made revolution look so goddamn sexy that even the straight kids wanted in. 

We don't need the fucking Democrats, they need us, but they need us passive and battered so they can show us off between war crimes like cheap whores and then cram us back in the closet whenever it suits them. This isn't our fault. This is just what the state does to minorities that they fail to annihilate the old-fashioned way. But we need to end this toxic relationship once and for all and take back our power while it's still a live hand grenade. 

We need to go back to the basics of the Gay Liberation Front and build our own goddamn party, our own goddamn everything... Our own schools where our children won't have to rely on straight bureaucrats and corporate textbooks to tell them who they are. Our own mutual aid societies that can provide us with the level of healthcare we deserve even if they have to do so illegally. And yes, our own fucking militias, so we will never have to rely on another crooked bigot with a badge to protect our streets ever again.

But more than anything, Queer people must reject the state. Pride is nice but it's a pretty petty substitute for power and much like Black Power, Queer Power is about a communal devotion to self-reliance which can only ever truly be achieved through anarchism. Like all survivors of abusive relationships, Queer people need to separate ourselves entirely from our current corrosive environment of learned helplessness and build a support network among fellow survivors so we can heal and avoid getting trapped in the same cycle over and over again. 

The good news here is that we have plenty of other tribes to choose from because the Democrats have plenty of victims getting thrashed for refusing to vote for their latest human billboard. The undocumented and the Muslims both find themselves in similarly dire straits, with one party gnashing their teeth at them and the other scolding them for their lack of obedience. Both of these communities know a thing or two about self-reliance and living outside the law and I'm sure we can probably teach them a thing or two about shouting theater in a crowded fire.

Revolution makes for some pretty strange bedfellows, especially when that bed is on fire, but revolution is also the only salvation left amidst a system comprised of dueling wife-beaters reliant on the same liquor of prison state privilege and at the end of the day, what is strange but another word for Queer? I say let's get strange and make some more goddamn history and I say let's do it with our hands unbound by petty partisan chains. Together, the battered tribes of America can bring the Ike Turner state to its knees where it belongs.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Piece of My Heart by Big Brother & the Holding Company

* Personality Crisis by New York Dolls

* Bloodbuzz Ohio by The National

* Only Women Bleed by Alice Cooper

* Been a Son by Nirvana

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

* Proud Mary by Ike & Tina Turner

* Mississauga Goddam by the Hidden Cameras

* Not Strong Enough by Boygenius

* Shoplifters of the World Unite by the Smiths

A Second Trump Term is the Beginning of the End and That's Not All Bad

 How could this happen? Again? On what planet, in what parallel universe does it make any logical sense for Donald J. Trump, the ghastliest beast to ever stalk the West Wing, to return to power in a veritable landslide victory? Didn't we learn our lesson the last time? It feels like it was just yesterday that they were carting that orange lunatic away in a bronzer soiled straitjacket, babbling rabidly about insane conspiracies against his precious bodily fluids while his flailing personality cult swarmed the Capitol like insulin starved insects in a parallel hissy fit.

I honestly believed that the imbeciles who vote in this country collected a few of their senses and swore on a stack of John Grisham novels that they would never try a crazy fad like Trumpism again. And on a normal planet, in a sane universe, that would be the end of it. Orange Nixon would be pardoned from the Arkham Asylum by some mild-mannered GOP yes man to play golf in the obscure wilds South Florida and America would collectively convalesce on a steady diet of quaaludes and Fleetwood Mac while the war machine ferried out their atrocities to some second-rate Suharto for a while.

But this is not a normal planet. This is not a sane universe. This is Babylon during the end times. Rome is burning, so Caligula gets a second term while Nero plays "Rhiannon" on the violin. The craziest thing is that Trump didn't even really win. The motherfucker actually got two-million fewer votes than he did in 2020 when he got his ass whooped by a Dixiecrat sarcophagus on life support. Kamala Harris just lost that badly, by five-million votes to be precise, and it's actually not really all that hard to see why if you just take the 3D glasses off. The woman had all the warmed-over charm of a Rust Belt ghost mall renovated into a cut-rate casino. She had virtually no ideology to speak of other than being just slightly more animated than the dead man from Delaware that the Democrats tried shove down our throats until July.

And it would be pretty easy to blame this on Joe Biden, God knows that career criminal deserves to die in shame. But the bitter truth is that the rot runs much deeper than that. The Democrats made the rise and return of Donald Trump inevitable the same way that every centrist bourgeoise liberal government has made fascism inevitable going back to Weimar Germany; by tainting anything to the left of Genghis Khan with their own clueless venality while transforming the nation state into a juggernaut. The Democrats have always been frauds, but their scam began to get sickeningly obvious under the reign of the Clintons when every crony capitalist atrocity from outsourcing the middle class to expanding NATO to the Kremlin gates got stamped "liberal."

Every state ends in fascism sooner or later. This tragic fate becomes inevitable the moment that you sanctify power by monopolizing the use force in the hands of the few and it usually plays out the same way. A plutocracy masquerading as a democracy becomes increasingly authoritarian as its veneer of legitimacy begins to disintegrate. Once this farce fails and words like 'left-wing' and 'liberal' lose all meaning in the mouths of elitist oligarchs, the masses flock to more brazenly authoritarian solutions because that is precisely what the state has groomed them to do. This didn't begin with Trump. It began with Lincoln's evisceration of habeas corpus to preserve an imperial union and continued with a thousand other revisions to this empire's trappings of civil liberties, from the dissolution of the War Powers Act to the rise of the surveillance state. 

So, yes, dearest motherfuckers, I must conclude with my more hysterical colleagues on the far left, this is indeed the end of the world as we know it. However, there is good news, and that good news is the very fact that this is indeed the end of the world as we know it. If you are a straight white liberal, this may be of little comfort to you, but for anyone outside of the margins of the mainstream this world has sucked pretty hard for a very long time. Just ask an Indian if you can find one. 

Fascism is the final stage in the state's life cycle after the orgy of imperialism, and the American Empire couldn't die soon enough. Even under the tutelage of the neoliberal insiders of the Biden-Harris Administration, we are currently tempting fate every day by playing nuclear football in both Ukraine and the Middle East while we melt the ice caps and hand the Button over to Skynet with AI.

This doesn't mean that Trump and whichever cabal of Christian-Zionists who actually manages to pull his strings for fifteen minutes shouldn't be opposed with every fiber in our beings, but we can't oppose fascism with the very state that birthed it. We must reject this system entirely and resist it with something totally untainted by its tentacles. Otherwise, we're just handing the Reichstag Death Star back to the Social Democrats until Hitler can make another comeback.

As ugly as this picture promises to get, true antifascists do have a few things working in our favor historically speaking, the best actually being the sheer size of the American Empire itself. Hitler wasn't done in by any one nation, he was done in by dozens of them because he tried to take them all too fast. Donald Trump will be tasked with controlling more territory than Hitler could ever dream of from day one, along with a massive Byzantinesque federal bureaucracy. 

This is what kept Orange Man Bad from blowing up the world during his first four years and a number of ambitious think tanks like the people behind Project 2025 are jockeying to fix that problem by offering to do the big picture work for Trump. Whether that man's massive ego will even offer these mincing Little Eichmann's with the opportunity to do this remains debatable but what doesn't is the fact that America's sheer size, even if you don't count our bankrupt phalanx of imperial quislings, makes successful German-style consolidation highly unlikely.

What we are far more likely to encounter is the kind of violent Balkanization encountered by the similarly monolithic Soviet Bloc as their power began to disintegrate. This will also very likely lead to a great deal of chaos and violence, but I believe that at least some of this turmoil can be circumvented if the various colonized peoples of America choose to embrace our tribal diversity rather than clinging desperately to dated government solutions. There are a lot of ways to achieve this, and we should probably try all of them.

We should try agorism by building extensive black market economic networks beyond the reach of the federal government and its corporate masters. We should try panarchism by creating totally stateless communities capable of governing themselves without outside interference. We should do what the Amish do and grow our own food, build our own schools, and create our own networks of social services that can coexist with the "English World" without having to rely on it. And we should do what Hezbollah does and build well-armed, well-trained, and well-organized civilian militias prepared to defend those communities when the collapsing Cthulhu of the fascist pig state catches on that they're losing control.

What we definitely shouldn't do is allow our communities to be preyed upon any longer by failed agents of a failing state like the Democratic Party. These are the Weimar nitwits that idiot-proofed a death machine for a fumbling manchild like Trump to commandeer and now they actually have the nerve to try to guilt trip us into investing even more of our time and energy into another billion-dollar swindle like Kamala Inc. 

They actually have the gall to blame trans kids, Muslims, and Black men for their failure to sell Fascism Lite as salvation with rainbow colored Oprah telethons. These are the same people who used to share teenage prostitutes with the current Orange Further elect back when he was still funding their campaigns. We are not going to slay this monster by getting back in bed with Doctor Frankenstein. Our best hope of surviving this failed state is by divorcing ourselves from it entirely and building a society that will never have to rely on its filthy favors again.

It's hard fucking work and it might fail but what other option do we have besides looking on the bright side of the apocalypse? This crisis can still become an opportunity for those of us brave enough to fight for it by every means necessary. So, what do you say, dearest motherfuckers, let's get creative and knock this motherfucker we call fascism on its orange ass once and for all.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  London Calling by the Clash

* Rhiannon by Fleetwood Mac

* The Mess Inside by the Mountain Goats

* Last Monkey by Buffalo Tom

* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

* Slow Dog by Belly

* It's the End of the World as We Know it (and I Feel Fine) by REM

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

* Suppose by Buffalo Tom

* California Uber Alles by Dead Kennedys

The Weird Turn Pro: A Revolutionary Call to Turn and Embrace the Strange

 In case you haven't noticed dearest motherfuckers, I'm pretty goddamn weird and I seem to be getting weirder by the hour. This isn't a flex; every time I think I've got my proverbial shit figured out I seem to add another asterisk to my colossal list of obnoxious eccentricities that makes me just a little bit more marginalized than I already am and it's beginning to get hard even for me to keep it all straight.

As if simply being genderqueer wasn't enough, it turns out that I'm really more of a butch lesbian trapped in a man's body which is virtually impossible to express without just looking like a fucking dude. And as if convincing Queer cis women to find Andrea Dworkin in Mikhail Bakunin wasn't enough of an uphill climb, it turns out that my childhood trauma makes it pretty much impossible for me to have a sexual relationship unless it's part of some kind of sadomasochistic roleplay where one of us performs the part of the innocent Catholic schoolgirl and the other becomes some mystic maternal figure saintly enough to restrain her without leaving a bruise. 

My ideology has taken a similarly labyrinthine path into esoteric absurdity. I started out as a better-red-than-dead Tankie-Guevarist then jumped ship to left-Rothbardian free market anarchism before coming to the conclusion that civilization itself is the fucking problem and rejecting the whole damn left-right paradigm for some kind of Queer, post-civ, heathen revivalism. All the while managing to maintain just enough Marxian solidarity with third world revolutionaries and resistance to any form of non-voluntary governance to isolate myself from pretty much everyone. People on the left think I'm a fascist, people on the right think I'm a Maoist, and my only response to both is that you people have no idea what those words even fucking mean anymore.

But it's probably my psych eval that really takes the cake. After decades of haunting support groups and out-patient psych rehabs as a perpetually broken, agoraphobic basket case, my gender transition tripwired a cascading avalanche of repressed memories that resulted in a year of spine rattling seizures and horrific flashbacks revealing that not only did I realize I was born in the wrong gender at an obscenely young age but I was also quite literally beaten and sodomized by Catholic priests into making that part of myself disappear. Now the only way that I can cope with this truth is by assuming multiple personalities, most of whom aren't old enough to feel safe leaving the house without having another one of us holding their invisible hand. Oh yeah, and then there's the chronic Lyme disease. 

So, it turns out that I'm a transbian mommy domme primitivist with three badly battered children that no one else can see but me unless one of them gets triggered enough to hijack my thirty-something body for a public hissy fit. Don't feel bad for feeling exhausted. Even I'm rolling my eyes at me, or at least my 14-year-old alter Max is. The most common responses that I receive to this circus that I now call life are "You're fucking crazy, dude" and "You just want attention." The first I agree with whole heartedly but the second is almost laughably absurd.

If I just wanted your fucking attention, I would buy an iguana and get a face tattoo like every other desperate white bro, and if my laundry list of increasingly severe social dysfunctions were just a ploy for attention, it would be a pretty fucking stupid one considering that the result has been having less and less people take me seriously while handing my rapidly multiplying collection of enemies more and more pointy things to throw in my general direction.

So, why do I do it then? Why do I bother putting my pathological eccentricities on display like this? Well, for one thing, when you spend your life keeping 90% of yourself a secret even from yourself the only way to heal is to find a voice and scream your guts out from the tallest rooftop. But the other thing, the really strange thing, is that the more marginalized I get, the more sense my life seems to make even while it baffles everyone around me. With a little help from a committed trauma therapist who isn't a slave to the DSM, I've actually found that being five pagan dykes in an estrogen dosed caveman's body feels strangely normal and that's probably because what passes for normal in this twisted civilized world has always felt dangerously strange to me.

What exactly would be the "normal" response to having every adult in my life ignore my rampant gender dysphoria before losing my virginity to a pair of clergymen in preschool? I suppose if I was normal, I might buy a big truck, join the Republican Party, and take my rage out on Haitian migrants and Palestinian toddlers. Or I could just do what those two priests did and find some old-time religion in a locked rectory closet. Sorry normies, not my style.

I may be an insane pervert defined by my jihad against the modern world, but I didn't start this fight. Normal fired first. Me and my girls just came back to church with a can of gasoline to get even and perhaps the strangest thing about our presence is that we are not alone. America and Western Civilization in general has become a veritable petri dish of abnormal behaviors. Rates of mental illness and neurodiversity are exploding from Bakersfield to Berlin, as are the growing list of brazenly bizarre subcultures and identities being used to cope with them. 

I spend a great deal of my time writing about these post-modern tribes right here. Asexuals, otherkin, antiworkers, Boogaloos, adult babies, drag queens, sovereign citizens, furies, race traitors, sex workers, Wiccans, larpers, tulpamancers, chaos magicians, radical traditionalists, Afrocentrics, forest defenders, psychonauts, urban explorers, nudists, vampires, stoners, weebs, neopagans, body modifiers, junkies, agorists, Russophiles, transhumanists, homesteaders, homeschoolers, doomers, Squatters, guerrilla gardeners, and ageplayers.

We are all different, but we all have at least one thing in common; society doesn't fucking fit, and we all want out. None of this is a coincidence. It is all connected, from my so-called mental illness to yours. The growing diversity of people choosing to live outside the increasingly stultifying boundaries of normal is spreading and it's about time. One of my favorite Marxists, Antoni Gramsci, referred to us as the Subaltern. Karl himself more derisively labeled us as the lumpenproletariat. Both essentially amount to an unorganized underclass amongst the post-colonial masses that exists on the margins- criminals, vagrants, migrants, convicts, drifters, loners, and lunatics, the homeless, the unemployed and the unemployable, an entire caste excluded from the socioeconomic institutions of society in order to deny the strange agency.

But when society itself has become a sickness, we on the outside become the cure. We are living on a dying planet managed by a superrich elite who are willing to drive the entirety of humanity and virtually every other living thing to extinction just to satiate their nihilistic thirst for more. This is the inevitable result of civilization itself, of man attempting to possess nature and monopolize it beneath a colossus of carcinogenic constructs like property, agriculture, corporatism, capitalism, and the state. All of this was achieved through a concerted campaign of homogeny and universalism, of sameness and assimilation, through the church and Walmart and NATO and Walt Disney.

Strange is the solution. Marx's Russian rival and my apparent cis-doppelganger Mikhail Bakunin knew this well. While his prissy German nemesis shit on the unpoliticized underclass and told us all to get a job at one of his blessed factories, Bakunin declared lumpenproles to be the natural leaders of any successful revolution specifically because we already existed outside of society. I hate to date my own craziness here, but Jesus Christ said the same thing too. He walked past the banks and temples and declared the whores and lepers to be the people of God because they had already divorced themselves from a vain and vapid world.

So, I've come here to boldly embrace every aspect of my identity that removes me from the status quo, and I encourage you in these trying times to do the same. Civilization has made western society too big to be anything but dangerous and we all need to get together to chop it up. So, flush your meds, fuck a stranger, start a gang or a cult, buy your pot from the Amish, encourage your kids to change their gender identity twice a week, go weird, go pro, tune in, drop out, turn and embrace the strange, because normal got us into this mess and lunatics like you and me and me and me are the only way out.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Wild Wild Life by Talking Heads

* Changes by David Bowie

* Floyd the Barber by Nirvana

* American Music by Violent Femmes

* Describe by Perfume Genius

* Lithium by the Polyphonic Spree

* Mr. Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan

* Ever by Flipper

* Levitate Me by the Pixies

* Turn it On by Flaming Lips

The Bipartisan Border War is Turning America into a Prison

I write this screed during the waning hours of an election season that has made me thirst for the taste of a blue steel shotgun barrel like a newborn craves mother's milk. I hate all of you people so fucking much and I will never forgive you for doing this to me every four years. But I digress...

Chances are that by the time you read this you will have done one of two hideous things which will likely end in the same tragic outcome. You will have voted for Donald Trump for some stupid fucking reason or another, which will give him the mandate to carry out the largest mass deportation since Josef Stalin, or you will have voted for Kamala Harris to stop him even though she has more or less promised to do the same goddamn thing in slow motion with a side of joy as displayed by her administration's recent attempts to slam the border shut like the jaws of life.

All of this is fucking insane and what makes it even crazier is that it is driven by tabloid stoked popular demand. Around the country, Republicans and Democrats alike are flipping out over the border. Why, most of my neighbors in rural Pennsyltucky have never even seen a Venezuelan and yet they still seem to believe that scores of them are coming scuttling down the chimney for their daughter's virginity with freshly sharpened knives in their teeth. 

All of this hysteria, what we now call the "border crisis", is built on the fundamental lie consistently embraced by both parties that more "border security" aka "police state" equals less immigrants and a more orderly border. This is total bullshit, and it is easily disproven with pretty basic statistics.

Tax funding for a wide range of border security experiments has pretty consistently increased in this country over the last several decades with funding for the Department of Homeland Security between 2001 and 2020 more than six times as high as the previous twenty years. 

This spending spree continued to increase under Biden and Kamala, with their 2024 budget for border and immigration enforcement breaking Trump's record at $30.2 billion dollars, which is nearly double what it was in 2012. In fact, the "open borders" administration has forked over $28.1 billion dollars in private contracts for border and immigration enforcement since 2021 which is $8.2 billion more than Donald Trump's $20.9 billion between 2017 and 2021.

Meanwhile, the border has only became increasingly ungovernable during this time. The undocumented population has more than doubled since the mid-nineties, growing from 5 million in 1996 to nearly 12 million in 2024. And this trend only continued during Trump's reign of terror. 

While that loud-mouthed terrorist sent children to concentration camps, illegal entry measured by apprehensions doubled between 2016 and 2019. In fact, the Cato Institute actually estimates that the number of immigrants who have gotten into this country without being caught increased during every year of Orange Man Bad's first term.

So, what does all this bewildering math mean? Well, for starters it means that border security, at least over an area as vast and unpopulated as the Rio Grande is a fucking flop. It doesn't work. It never worked. But we all keep shoving money into it anyway and the Democrats are far from a lesser evil on this scam. They fucking started it. 

Bill Clinton's Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act aka IIRIRA, unleashed with overwhelming bipartisan fanfare in the wake of his similarly fascistic Crime Bill, essentially created the modern-day deportation apparatus. Before IIRIRA deportations were actually pretty rare in this country. After it, they became a veritable cottage industry. Billions were pumped into migrant detection and removal with an army of heavily armed guards whose jurisdiction now includes any patch of dirt within 100 miles of either border.

As stated above, none of this worked. In fact, it had the opposite effect. Before 2014, your average border crosser was just some dude going back and forth across an invisible line for his day job. When the border became militarized, those dudes simply stayed where the work was and brought their families with them. In other words, IIRIRA only succeeded in making the border more chaotic and every administration that followed Clinton simply decided to double down and make it worse.

Despite the fact that every single one of the 9/11 hijackers was a green card holder who came through a legal port of entry, Bush used those attacks to move the flailing border Cthulhu from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security and juiced it up like Schwarzenegger with militaristic surveillance paraphernalia like drones and aerostats. And Barack Obama still holds the title belt for deporter in chief, building the concentration camps and turning ICE into the dick swinging gestapo that Trump used to raid kindergartens and children's hospitals to fill them.

Of course, everything got way more complicated in 2014 when Central American women and children seeking sanctuary began to outnumber Mexican men looking to make a paycheck. The root causes behind this migrant sea change are not particularly hard to figure out when you consider that most of those families were fleeing from the Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. 

All three of those poverty racked nations has been subjected to decades of American funded death squads and juntas, including the one that Obama put in charge of Honduras in a 2009 coup which pretty much openly colluded with local gangsters and Mexican cartels. However, by the end of Trump's first executive killing spree, this deluge became just one small piece of a massive international refugee crisis, exacerbated by the Pandemic but largely born from the wreckage of two other disastrous American experiments known as the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.

And this is actually how America's border crisis can probably be best understood. Just like the war machine and the prison state, the American border is a failure industrial complex. Nobody has ever been made safer by any of those rackets, but a very small group of corporations and federal bureaucracies have gotten very rich, and the sickest part of the con is that the worse the blowback from its fascist adventures gets, the more money the scumbags behind them get to clean up their own mess or fail trying.

Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans have taken this industry to new lows and they're still digging. Whether that dayglow corporate crybaby wins or not, his party is now defined by an insane conspiracy to use war powers to evict 3% of this country's population, and if Kamala has proven anything with her long miserable career as a glorified deadbeat cop it's that her only real ideology is 'just following orders' unburdened by what has been. Either way, the border police state wins and no one should feel safe.

The federal government detains and deports thousands of American citizens every year and federal policy permits the use of racial and ethnic profiling to enforce migration restrictions in so-called "border areas", which thanks to Bill Clinton and his Democrats now legally includes two-thirds of American territory. And for every honky sitting pretty on a porch swing saying, 'not my problem', let me remind you of the increasing diversity of the refugee crisis and the expanding battle lines of NATO's proxy apocalypse in Ukraine. In other words, what's going to stop the ATF from sending your pale ass back to the old country when Kamala comes to take your guns away, Jethro?

This is how borders work, especially when applied arbitrarily on a massive scale to govern nebulous colonial territories. They don't do jack shit to keep people out because they aren't designed to. They're designed to police and control the people trapped between them and when imperialist maniacs in decline are manning the guard towers that nation in question might as well be a prison. 

Happy Election Day, morons. Regardless of which asshole wins, we're already fucked.

Peace, Love, & Antipathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* No Children by the Mountain Goats

* Atmosphere by Joy Division

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

* White Minority by Black Flag

* Sea Swallow Me by Cocteau Twins

* Old College Try by the Mountain Goats

* Police Truck by Dead Kennedys

* I Bet on Losing Dogs by Mitski

* Dot Dash by Wire

* Danny Nedelko by Idles