The Free Palestine Movement Could Finally Make the American Left Dangerous Again

 I grew up in the American far left and I'm really not exaggerating when I tell you that the movement saved my life. I discovered libertarian socialism and its various stateless sub species at an age when I was feeling increasingly endangered as the last genderqueer kid on earth in the thick of rural Pennsylvania's conservative Catholic pedophile country. I felt about as hopelessly 'other' as it gets until I discovered the Bush-era antiwar movement and began scraping the history books for other otherized voices like mine. 

I found them buried about a mile beneath the bullshit in the lost chapter on another antiwar movement, the very distinctly 'other' antiwar movement of the sixties and seventies. Boldly countercultural voices like those of Michel Foucault, Fred Hampton, Paul Goodman, Huey Newton, Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Russell Means gave me something to believe in when I didn't even believe in myself. The fight against American imperialism at the bloody birth of the New American Century gave me a place to belong and a jihad to devote myself to long before I discovered that I wasn't in fact the last genderqueer kid on earth, and I will remain grateful for this gift unto my dying breath.

But over the last several years I have found what passes for the left in this country, even the "far left", to be disturbingly unrecognizable. I have seen an increasing willingness by so-called social anarchists to embrace downright authoritarian statism as the solution to nearly every social ill. I have seen seemingly lucid libertarian socialists galvanized behind the DNC's elderly trojan horse, Bernie Sanders, and his chickenshit saplings in the Squad. I have seen these same so-called leftists lionize neoliberal darlings like the White Helmets and Volodymyr Zelensky while making excuses for sending bombs to their friends in Al-Nusra and the Azov Battalion. Meanwhile, I have seen more consistently antiwar voices, including my own, silenced, canceled, and removed from supposedly left-wing platforms. 

I've been left with little other choice but to gasp in horror as the left that once inspired a weird teenager not to slit her wrists seems to have mutated into a censorious cult of Herbert Humphrey-style softcore social democrats willing to nail Rosa Luxemburg to the cross themselves as long as the Freikorps purge Trump from their ranks and hang a rainbow flag over the caskets of less compliant former comrades.

This grotesquely strange display of downright counterrevolutionary behavior has led me down some very strange roads in search of allies against empire. I've taken to self-identifying as a post-left anarchist and devoting myself entirely to the typically right libertarian principle of bottom unity while reaching out to other ideological heretics like so-called anarcho-capitalists, boogaloo boys, pan-Islamic nationalists, and heathen radical traditionalists. Meanwhile, I've also struggled to build a more tribal Queer identity that defies the left-right paradigm entirely and harkens back to a more primitive communal pagan consciousness. 

But at the end of the day, my heart will always bleed left. I will always be that same pissed-off Yippie anarcho-transfeminist that the Catholic Church failed to gag, and this is why I look to YouTube footage of the anti-Zionist swarms now engulfing college campuses from coast to coast with a level of cautious hope that my broken bleeding heart hasn't experienced in years.

Some call this the Free Palestine Movement, others call them Anti-Israel, but regardless of the labels, these kids have laid siege to hundreds of campuses across the country and across the globe, building nearly 80 encampments in the US alone in less than three weeks. They are jamming up traffic. They are occupying buildings. They are literally ruining parades by supergluing their bodies to the fucking blacktop. They are shutting down the Golden Gate Bridge. They are trolling Joe Biden on the campaign trail at every corner with jeers of "Genocide Joe!" They are relentless, furious, shameless, and absolutely fucking obnoxious and I couldn't love them more if they were my own goddamn children. 

All of this chaos is being raised not on behalf of some woke cause celebre, but on behalf of the most marginalized people on the planet, the 34,000+ Palestinians slaughtered in cold blood with American weapons by every liberal's favorite racist apartheid state in Israel. And the lives of millions more hang in the balance as Benjamin Netanyahu attempts to starve the Gaza Strip into submission in an open plot to push those Arab refugees into the desert wastelands of the Sinai Peninsula.

The only reason why any politician or media personality is even paying lip service to the notion of a ceasefire to this holocaust is because these beautiful obnoxious brats have gotten up in their fucking faces and refused to behave until the adults in the room address the mass grave of bodies decomposing in the backyard. They have burned every bridge, crossed every Rubicon, and crushed the toes of every institution of power within stomping distance and the system is stomping back with every jackboot they can shove their bloody feet into.

Every single newspaper and network from left to right has baselessly slandered these kids as antisemites with both parties joining the synergistic corporate chorus of condemnation. The universities who rely on their student's debt to turn a profit have teamed up with local police forces taking their marching orders directly from the Department of Homeland Security to brutally evict this anti-Zionist question by any means necessary. Batons, pepper spray, tear gas, flashbang grenades, rubber bullets, armored vehicles, everything south of cluster munitions seems to be on the table and I'm sure Tom Cotton is working on that.

Sadly, this story just seems to grow more sinister by the hour with each passing detail. In Ohio and Indiana, snipers have been photographed on the rooves of campus buildings with high-powered rifles trained on unarmed students and in Denver, CBS Colorado has reported that the state's National Guard are already among the law enforcement presence, which is precisely what GOP chickenhawks like House Speaker Mike Johnson are quite openly calling for, a repeat of Kent State.

Democrats and their neocon allies however seem to prefer a more federal final solution. Joe Biden, a man whose own political rap sheet would make a grand wizard shout "goddamn!" like a Black Baptist in a white whorehouse, is calling to "aggressively implement the first ever national strategy to counter antisemitism" which would include "the full force of the federal government" to crack down on dangerous speech which that old bitch tells us has "no place on college campuses." 

Meanwhile, a bipartisan effort in the House of Representatives is being waged to send government "antisemitism monitors" to every college campus funded by the federal government as part of their College Oversight and Legal Updates Mandating Bias Investigation and Accountability or COLUMBIA Act, which would essentially turn the Department of Education into a veritable police force in charge of stamping out anything certain racists like Joe Biden and Mike Johnson deem antisemitic.

This may all sound terrifying, but it is also the fruit of a job well done. We haven't seen so many institutions of power gang up on teenagers like this since the age of the freaks who inspired me to spit in the Pope's eye. What these kids need now is us, the scary veteran extremists who the news loves to label as outside actors, but what we really are is a sort of campus counter-police force, elders with guns and skills. We need to join these brave kids, listen to what they have to teach us and pay it forward with black blocks and AR toting militias. The left is finally coming back around again to a grade of anti-imperialism that even the Squad can't seem to assimilate, and we should take this opportunity to welcome them home with loaded arms.

And to some of my new allies outside of the left who will bitch that the campus Free Palestine Movement is little more than a different strain of identity politics; I say so the fuck what. The culture war may have corrupted the antiwar movement, but the culture itself was never really the problem, the emphasis was. The truth is that it was the culture warriors of the Black Power Movement who radicalized the antiwar movement into something Nixon needed tin soldiers to put down and both the Chicano and Gay Liberation Movements were defined by their own indigenous oppositions to imperialism. 

This is what the radical left really needs right now to become truly radical again, not politics, but a culture defined by resistance to colonialism. This is what turned me on and turned me dangerous because it made the fight for peace in far-off places deeply personal. To put another long rant short: if we can convince Generation Z that smashing the American Empire is woke, then Babylon is officially fucked. Maybe that's a big 'if' but what else do we have to lose but bodies at this point?

We've got the momentum, freaky people, so let's make it fucking happen. Let's finally make the American left dangerous again.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Free Radicals by the Flaming Radicals

* For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield

* The Beautiful Ones by Suede

* All Born Screaming by St. Vincent

* Instant Karma by John Lennon

* Only by Nine Inch Nails

* I've Been Tired by the Pixies

* Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan

* Riot Rhythm by Sleigh Bells

* Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

Embracing the Possibilities of a Second Golden Age of Piracy

"Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant--the waves of time leave washed up behind themselves only dry memories of a closed & petrified past."

-Hakim Bey

"What others see as chaos, a pirate sees as the perfect storm for growth and transformation."

-Edward Teach aka Blackbeard

In case you haven't noticed, things have been getting pretty lively on the high seas lately and all available indications seem to point to them getting much livelier long before slack tide sets in. After months of Houthi rebel attacks on international shipping linked to Israel and its western backers in the Red Sea, Iran has decided to get in on the action to avenge their comrades killed by an IDF airstrike on their Damascus consulate.  

While the headlines may focus on Iran's largely symbolic drone swarm into the bug zapper of the Iron Dome, the Islamic Republic kicked off this theatrical display of vengeance by launching a daylight raid on a Portuguese-flagged container vessel called the MSC Aries 50 miles off the coast of the UAE near the Strait of Hormuz. The ship, owned by Zionist billionaire and former Israeli Air Force intelligence officer, Eyal Ofer, was boarded by commandos of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp in a well-choreographed and conveniently filmed raid that involved the heavily armed men repelling on the deck from an idling chopper. 

A visually stunning spectacle of propaganda of the deed uncannily similar to the Houthi rebel assault on the Galaxy Leader in November which also began in an MI-17 and ended with the nautical toy of another Israeli oligarch named Abraham Ungur being absconded to Hodeida where it has been turned into a sort of revolutionary chic tourist attraction. 

The western intelligentsia will point to these similarities and announce them to be proof that those dastardly Houthi rebels are little more than IRGC agents doing the bidding of the Mullahs. I would actually argue the opposite. It is a well-known if poorly reported fact that in spite of the largely rhetorical support from the Ayatollah, the Houthi rebels have a long and illustrious history of going rogue and disobeying what little advice they receive from Tehran. This included calls to stand down on overthrowing a government in Sanaa that Iran was still attempting to make inroads with.

The Houthis launched their daring maritime spree on Israeli linked vessels during a time in which the rest of the leadership of the Muslim world seemed content to just sit on their hands as the Zionist State carried out the most brazen genocide of the twenty-first century. The result of the Houthi's degeneracy wasn't just a blow to international trade, it was boosting an internationally unrecognized militia to a place of ideological leadership on the world stage, and when Iran found itself in desperate need of a propaganda win of their own, they took a page from their alleged proxies' playbook by launching a largely bloodless drone barrage kicked off by an act of melodramatic modern-day piracy.

The Mullahs aren't the only swashbucklers getting in on the action either. After nearly a decade off from their last tare, the pirates of Somalia have been using the distraction of international naval forces up north to get back into the game, seizing at least two cargo ships and a dozen commercial fishing vessels in the last few months. In other words, the chaos is spreading like oil on water and the corporate overlords back home in Babylon are besides themselves. The very fabric of globalism seems to be under siege and every Navy on earth appears to be at the mercy of what essentially amounts to a bunch of toothless peasants with old fishing boats and nothing left to lose. 

I would be a liar if I didn't confess that I get off on this kind of karma. I mean, the specter of the Jolly Roger is literally mocking the glorious "rules-based order" of the Yankee maritime death machine as ancient history repeats itself. But could the world really be on the cusp of another Golden Age of Piracy? Perhaps, but perhaps we should consult the tea leaves of history before getting too carried away with ourselves.

The era frequently referred to by historians as the Golden Age of Piracy occurred between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when stateless bands of outlaws challenged the monopoly on force maintained by the Westphalian Nation State on the high seas. While most of these pirates were far more motivated by profit than the ideologues of the Axis of Resistance, the factors contributing to this era of lawlessness should ring strikingly familiar to anyone paying attention to current events.

The original Golden Age of Piracy was largely the product of the first signs of European imperial decline brought on by their own colonial overreach in the New World. Scores of seasoned sailors and privateers were left skilled but unemployed in the wake of the War of Spanish Secession. Meanwhile, the sheer quantity of plundered goods being shipped to-and-fro the colonies was becoming downright ungovernable as the colonies themselves devolved into corrupt rogue states in their own right and Europe's navies were stretched paper thin attempting to contain it all.

Today's pirates may differ somewhat in motivation and tactics but all the other ingredients for another era of lawlessness on the high seas are present and accounted for. Both the Houthis and the Iranians are veterans of America's failed War on Terror, becoming experts in asymmetrical warfare battling Wahhabi jihadists that our nation created just to destroy. Meanwhile, neoliberal globalism has turned every ocean on the planet into a thousand lane highway too jam packed with ill-gotten booty to ever be sustainably policed, and the imperial powerhouse of America's Atlantic cartel is rapidly losing control of increasingly reckless colonies like Israel while our bloated naval forces are busy trying to sabotage Asia's assent to economic dominance with so-called freedom of navigation drills in the South China Sea.

Yes indeed, the pieces for a historical repeat are all there and so are the motivations. Big picture wise, the actions of the Mullahs, the Houthis, and the Somalians can all be seen as a sort of revolt against the machinery of state capitalism motivated by a totally valid thirst for revenge. Today's global economy has absolutely nothing to do with free trade. It is a corrupt and totalitarian system operated from the top down by a conspiracy of multinational conglomerates and nuclear armed navies who have all but invited piracy by conducting their own crime spree on the high seas defined by acts of mass violence and brazen thievery.

Iran and Yemen are both the victims of brutal blockades just like the one being conducted against the Gaza Strip as we speak. These sadistic terrorist campaigns have subjected impoverished populations to gruesome acts of savagery just for attempting to access their own waters for trade and subsistence fishing. Between 2015 and 2022, the Houthi controlled nation of Yemen was bombarded by a genocidal onslaught at the hands of America's proxies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Over 377,000 people were slaughtered and more than half of them died from starvation and disease as a result of a blockade made possible by America's rules-based order. 

Somalia has similarly been decimated both economically and ecologically by the Western Mafia's fixed trade practices which have aloud massive corporate naval behemoths to deplete their fisheries with industrial trawlers and render the remains toxic by treating the Indian Ocean like a giant toilet for their industrial waste. Under these circumstances, it's hard not to see modern piracy as an act of self-defense by a largely unaffiliated coalition of people under siege by a pirate empire in decline and, thank Kali, their tactics appear to be working.

The Houthi campaign off of their embattled coastline has effectively rerouted international trade, forcing no fewer than twelve international shipping conglomerates to suspend transit in the Red Sea entirely and delaying shipping times by up to nine days while raising costs by 15%. This has affectively implemented a tax on the global oligarchy for aiding and abetting the slaughter of over 30,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and America's attempts to bomb the Houthis into submission over it have been an abject failure. 

In case you haven't noticed, I happen to be something of an unapologetic collapsitarian anarchist. This basically means that my entire worldview is defined by searching for revolutionary opportunity in inevitable crisis and I can't help but to get a little bit giddy at the opportunities that a Second Golden Age of Piracy could bring with it. This may all start with rogue states taking potshots at empire but if that empire continues to collapse beneath the barrage of a billion potshots the oceans will be left wide open to a diverse ecosystem of stateless actors of every stripe capable of affecting truly free trade in the only place it has ever existed: the black market. 

Amidst the last Golden Era of Piracy and its latter-day cousin off the Barbary Coast, thriving autonomous communities of proto anarchists emerged in which all genders were equal, most consensual transgressions were forgiven, and merchants were governed only by codes upheld by their suppliers in nautical syndicalist democracies.

Nobody would ever confuse Edward Teach with Mikhail Bakunin any more than you would the Ayatollah with Hakim Bey, but the chaos that men and women like Blackbeard ushered in turned the open seas into a breeding ground for revolutionary opportunities. With Uncle Sam now walking the plank, I see no reason not to hope for a sequel.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* All Born Screaming by St. Vincent

* Firestarter by the Prodigy

* I'm Shipping Up to Boston by Dropkick Murphys

* Justine Go Genesis by Sleigh Bells

* Stand & Deliver by Adam & the Ants

* Time Bomb by Rancid

* Breathe by the Prodigy

* The Beautiful Ones by Suede

* Yesterdays Heroes by the 4-Skins

* Big Time Nothing by St. Vincent

The Last Thing Haiti Needs is Your Liberal Guilt

"We are free today because we are the stronger; we will be slaves again when the government becomes the stronger."

-Toussaint Louverture

"The rich are only defeated when running for their lives."

-C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins

 Dilapidated tent cities packed like plastic tarpaulin sardine cans with starving women and children... Cracked streets strewn with the broken bodies of their husbands and fathers... Azure blue Carribean skies carved up like bad meat with the billowing black plumes of a thousand tire fires... Paradise held hostage by a level of existential desperation rarely seen even in the most impoverished corners of the Western Hemisphere... 

American television sets have been periodically scarred by images like these for years. Images from Haiti, the Blackest place west of Africa. These images are usually delivered in the form of a commercial for some megachurch charity or a bleeding-heart cable news story on a slow day for the latest tabloid election circus. Either way, these images are almost always punctuated by the age-old question of 'when do we...' or the age-old suggestion of 'we need to do...' something. And lately, that 'something' has become desperate enough to mandate multiple exclamation points.

The shit has been hitting the fan in Haiti for centuries, but over the last several months that fan has become a buzz saw and the proverbial shit has become a tidal wave. Heavily armed gangs of Adidas clad youths have launched total war on what passes for a state in this tropical island nation, and they appear to be winning. 

80% of the capitol of Port-au-Prince is currently under the control of a massive and organized coalition of the nation's most notorious street criminals. With countless dead and 362,000 displaced, these third world gangbangers have surrounded the National Palace, encircled both of the capitol's major airports, looted the hospitals, and added thousands more to their ranks by emptying multiple prisons in daring daylight raids.

The nation's standing prime minister, an unelected worm named Ariel Henry, has resigned in exile, and naturally Haiti's patriarchal big brothers in "the West" are just brimming with suggestions on how to save the day and those suggestions are increasingly taking the shape of downright shrill demands for good old fashioned colonial law and order.

For years now Haiti has been the flaming plaything of a United Nations coalition of meddling rape-states known as the "Core Group," a sort of dickish Super Friends, dominated by the United States and further made up of France, Canada, Spain, and Germany along with the EU and the OAS. The latest solution of this mincing cartel of meddling white liberals? Well, more military intervention of course! But this time is different. 

This time those pale genius' have decided to quell the rage of the Black man with their own mercenary army of Black men, a paramilitary force of 1,000 Kenyan military police officers trained by the United States Military and well versed in the art of committing human rights abuses against their own people with a stipend of $300 million in American tax dollars. Once the Core Group has invaded Haiti with this token Black death squad, the plan is to establish a glorified junta known as the Transitional Presidential Council with 9 unelected officials hand plucked from Haiti's despised government and business elites along with one Catholic priest to please the pedophile sector.

If this all sounds despicably familiar, then you have been a bad American and done your homework only to realize that this is pretty much what elitist colonial twats have been committing against these people for centuries. Haiti has been near the top of every white supremacist shitlist since 1804 when Toussaint Louverture led a successful slave revolt and attempted to build a radical Black democracy on the graveyard of Christopher Colombus' opening massacre. For their part, the chattel democracy of the United States of America responded to Haitian independence with decades of crippling blockades and diplomatic isolation, but the worst was yet to come with the advent of Gunboat Diplomacy.

US Marines were deployed to Haiti in 1915 to suppress another popular insurgency and spent the next 19 years of this occupation building the Haitian National Army in their image. This fine institution would go on to become the twisted backbone of a grizzly fascist dictatorship known as the Duvalier Dynasty. For nearly thirty years, between 1957 and 1986, Haiti was a hostage of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son, Jeane-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, who terrorized Louverture's dream with a nightmare gestapo force of American trained psychopaths known as the Tonton Macoute. 

Mutilated bodies were hung from the trees with anyone foolish enough to take them down added to the macabre installation. Mothers were paraded through the streets carrying the severed heads of their own sons. Tens of thousands of men, women, children, infants, anyone, hacked to bits by machetes. All with hefty financial support from that shining beacon on the hill who was never shy about lending the gruesome Duvaliers a few more good men in uniform to quell another popular uprising by a proud and pissed-off people who never learned how to stay down.

But the pissed-off masses finally prevailed anyway with a popular uprising that toppled Baby Doc in 1986. Among the most popular leaders of this movement was a former Catholic Priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who preached a pretty tepid genre of social democracy based on the left-wing Christian school of Liberation Theology. Naturally, Reagan hated the holy man and ordered the CIA to fund rival candidates in every election he ran in. When this campaign of electoral sabotage finally failed, and Aristide was elected president in 1991, the US simply went old school and overthrew him in a fascist coup before spending the next 3 years funding the junta that replaced him in a blatant violation of international sanctions.

Bill Clinton, ever the bleeding heart, sent in the Marines to reinstate Aristide, but only after the battered reformer sold out and agreed to hand his nation over to the IMF. American and Canadian troops spent most of the rest of the nineties occupying Haiti until things seemed to be running our way again. But when Aristide won another presidential election in 2004 with the promise of reigning in the sweatshops of Walt Disney and raising the minimum wage, the US used gangs largely comprised of Tonton Macoute veterans to destabilize Port-au-Prince before kidnapping the uppity president and literally putting the motherfucker on a plain back to Africa.

UN troops were sent in this time to calm the island down, but they ultimately proved to be little more than a different flavor of pig, with a 13-year occupation pock marked by routine acts of sexual savagery and a cholera outbreak that killed nearly 10,000 Haitians. When a devastating earthquake added another quarter million bodies to that mass grave, the US decided to send in more troops of their own and rig more elections, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervening to get a millionaire thug named Michel Martelly elected in 2011 and Barack Obama helping his replacement, Jovenel Moise, to take the Palace in 2016 with a meager 21% voter turnout. The latter quisling's strong-arm tactics would ultimately inspire the beginnings of the current crisis in 2018. 

In 2021, Moise was assassinated in a bewilderingly unsolved assault that involved 28 foreign mercenaries organized in Florida and that just so happened to occur the day after Moise appointed one Ariel Henry prime minister. Henry was then summarily promoted to dictator by the fabulous Core Group, but when this failed to pacify the unrest, Henry was sent to Kenya to sign off on the military police force organized to protect him from his own people only to find himself blocked from returning to his smoldering country and absconded to Puerto Rico where the Secret Service essentially brow beat him into signing over his empire of dirt to another western approved junta.

So, the question stands, what do we, the bleeding hearts of the liberal west, do to save poor Haiti from its seemingly perpetual plight? My only response as a post-left revisionist historian is, haven't you people done enough? Take a fucking hint and just fuck off already. 

Believe it or not, Haiti's best hope may actually come in the form of those terrible gangs the news loves to leer at. While Haiti's gangs have traditionally served as henchmen for the nation's elites, there are signs that these impoverished gladiators are growing tired of their role in this tragedy. They have organized a massive coalition between rival factions, liberated gulags with Radio Shack drones, and announced their intention to resist any foreign occupying force that steps foot on their island.

God help me but this kind of sounds like a modern-day slave revolt to me. So, maybe we should just sit this one out and focus on losing one of our other stupid fucking wars instead. Just a dangerous thought from an uppity white bitch. But either way, the last thing Haiti needs is your liberal guilt.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Holiday In Cambodia by Dead Kennedys

* Colors by Ice-T

* I Against I by Bad Brains

* Wild Wild Life by Talking Heads

* Drain You by Nirvana

* Hurt by Nine Inch Nails

* Waiting Room by Fugazi

* N.W.O by Ministry

* We Care a Lot by Faith No More

* Buffalo Soldier by Bob Marley & the Wailers

 

The Forgotten Legacy of John Sinclair and the White Panther Party

"The revolution has always been in the hands of the very young. The young always inherit the revolution. You can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail the revolution."

-Huey P. Newton

"Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo."

-John Sinclair

 It seems like I'm always the last person to hear the bad news these days however, in my defense, I'm usually fucking drowning in it. We all are I suppose, what with the trials and tribulations of living in the Kali Yuga. But living with PTSD tends to make it all feel aggressively personal. Every bomb that drops on Gaza seems to awaken another monster in my Lovecraftian closet of repressed childhood memories, but somewhere amidst this maelstrom of misery, between the flashbacks and the war crimes, John Sinclair died and even my battered inner child feels the need to pay her respects.

For those of you who don't know that name, that is likely because John Sinclair was the kind of motherfucker who led the kind of life that your history books would rather you forget. John, who died from heart failure this April at 82, was a leading figure in America's other revolution, the one that saw a thriving underground ecosystem of Black Panthers, Street Transvestites, and Students for a Democratic Society taking on the man in the streets of Babylon over the savage injustices of white supremacy and the Vietnam War.

An enterprising young jazz poet and political provocateur, John Sinclair emerged from his native Michigan's underground art scene in the late sixties with an itching desire to join the people of the global third world in smashing the white pig state that he and his pale stoner friends in the jazz scene had grown to despise. Like a lot of other misfits from that era, John was through with being bullied just for being freaky and found impoverished guerrilla agitators of color like Huey Newton, Malcolm X, and Ho Chi Minh to be a hell of a lot more inspiring than anything the honky dinosaurs of the Old Left could conjure.

John was a part of the Detroit Artist's Workshop, which ran a network of communal houses along with a print shop and a performance space, but after years of police raids and drug busts, John decided it was time to up the ante. The breaking point came with the Detroit Riots that led to 43 deaths and nearly burned the Motor City to the ground in 1967. The Workshop proudly displayed a banner declaring "Burn Baby Burn" outside one of their communes and stood virtually alone amongst the white counterculture in declaring the riots to be a justified act of popular resistance against a racist police state.

Upon hearing an interview with Huey Newton in which the head of the Black Panthers suggested that the best thing white kids could do for the revolution was start a White Panther Party in solidarity with the third world, John did just that. Along with his wife Leni and a hippie half-breed named Pun Plamondon, John Sinclair formed the first White Panther Party in the charred ruins of Detroit with a rallying cry calling on the disaffected white youth of America to join the revolution in the name of rock n roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.

Many Black rebels were not amused, but John's rag-tag army of heavily armed long hairs and burn outs proved themselves to be worthy comrades by organizing the white counterculture in support of third world struggle by redistributing bulk foods and Black Panther newsletters to impoverished communities across Detroit and the Bay Area. The White Panthers also raised the noise to downright frightening levels with their pioneering proto-punk band, the MC5, who John Sinclair managed and used like a fifty-megawatt bullhorn to promote the revolution far and wide.  

Naturally, all this agitation against the amoral majority came at a price. John and his White Panthers may have joined their comrades in arms in Fred Hampton's Rainbow Coalition, but they also joined them on J. Edgar Hoover's Cointelpro shitlist. In 1969, Sinclair himself was entrapped by an undercover officer into providing him with a king's ransom of exactly two joints and was sentenced to a decade in prison for his charity. This is when John Sinclair officially became an underground celebrity. After Abbie Hoffman was booed offstage at Woodstock for attempting to bring attention to this injustice, John Lennon and Yoko Ono got involved by organizing their own rally in John Sinclair's defense, bringing everyone from Bobby Seale to Stevie Wonder together at Ann Arbor's Cristler Arena in 1971.

The John Sinclair Freedom Rally drew a sold-out crowd of 15,000 within two hours and John Sinclair's case was overturned within days. But even miracles come at a price. The feds sicked their dogs on John and Yoko and nearly had the couple of bougie dabblers deported for their good deed. As for the freshly vindicated Sinclair, he had already been charged within months of his initial arrest along with his fellow White Panthers, Pun Plamondon and John Forrest on trumped up charges of conspiring to bomb a CIA office. These charges were also dropped after the government admitted to illegally wiretapping the Panthers and John even won a landmark Supreme Court case vindicating the constitutional right to privacy, but all the court cases took their toll, and the Michigan chapters of the White Panther Party closed its doors in 1973.

So, why then should you give a fuck about a bunch of musty old hippies with guns? For the same reason that I do, because the Second American Revolution is unfinished history. Everything that forgotten outlaws like John Sinclair fought for back in 1968 is more valid now than ever before. The war machine continues to rampage across the globe, performing My Lai Massacres by proxy from Bakhmut to Khan Younis, white supremacy remains a thriving multibillion dollar enterprise with the prison industrial complex devouring Black and brown bodies like a Ku Klux Cthulhu with bipartisan support, and it is the youth, the young people of Babylon, who continue to feel the pain of the third world even from a place of relative privilege.

I did. I spent my childhood as a middle-class prisoner of a Catholic school that violated my body and taught me that my gender identity rendered me wicked enough to deserve this trauma. And when I was lonely and hopeless, I would escape the horrors of my existence by pouring over the moldy old magazines in my mother's basement vintage clothing store. This is where I discovered wild creatures like John Sinclair, the MC5, and the White Panther Party, and what they taught me was that I wasn't alone, that my youthful rebellion wasn't just valid, it was valuable because it served as a link to other oppressed people across the globe.

This was the truly brilliant thing about the White Panther Party. They made no attempt to co-opt the struggles of the third world, they simply pointed out the fact that young people were oppressed by the same power system and thus had every right to turn on their teachers and parents. Freaky people like John Sinclair militarized youth culture itself against the state and goddammit, we need this now more than ever. There is a reason that adolescents inherently identify with the 'other', from the ghetto to Gaza, and it has nothing to do with immaturity. Every single person under 18 is a second-class citizen in this country. American children are afforded all the rights and privileges of livestock, and this is why they are abused across the board at a far higher rate than any other demographic.

This has to stop, and John Sinclair gave us a glimpse into a world in which white children were empowered to stop it by embracing their otherness and throwing their lot in with other oppressed people across the globe who in turn taught them how to defend themselves against the adult establishment of the first world by any means necessary.

This is why I feel compelled to take a moment between the flashbacks and the war crimes to honor John Sinclair. He gave my battered inner child a loaded gun. Consider this rant a twenty-one-round solute from a fellow traveler. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* John Sinclair by John Lennon

* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

* Volunteers by Jefferson Airplane

* Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth

* Living for the City by Stevie Wonder

* $20 by boygenius

* Get Together by the Youngbloods

* Coyote, My Little Brother by Mitski

* 1969 by the Stooges

* Rock N Roll Nigger by Patti Smith

My Holy War with the Catholic Church

 “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”

-Mikhail Bakunin

It begins with an unstoppable flood of unbearable images. A child stripped naked beaten in a preschool bathroom. A visiting priest with a sinful smile. Two nude men in a rectory bedroom. An unrecognizable reflection in that same bathroom mirror... Quickly, this nightmarish montage forms a narrative like a terrible bedtime story you've heard a thousand times before for the first time. A story about a little girl trapped inside a scary body whose dysphoria was exploited by sexual predators at a Catholic school so they could have a good time with someone, some thing, too frightened to ever tell. 

This narrative was too much for that little girl to bear, so she blacked it out, she blacked out everything she saw in that mirror, including her gender identity, for decades. Until years of nightmares became an unstoppable flood of unbearable images, and those images formed a narrative of repressed memories that now feed an insatiable thirst for revenge.

This has become my life over the last several months. This waking nightmare has become the new normal. The trauma surrounds me, like living in an active warzone. Everything triggers flashbacks and the flashbacks have become so menacingly jarring that they have begun to trigger seizures. I feel like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, vomiting up secrets and bodily fluids that belong to men sent to save my soul. My life has become a horror movie that no one can bear to watch. 

I have been abandoned by all but my most devoted friends. I have formed multiple personalities that represent the children that the Catholic Church conspired to destroy. One of them is also a five-year-old girl who was passed around by priests until she became physically ill. I spend my nights consoling that child while she screams. Some nights she consoles me. My own therapist now refuses to see me, telling me over the phone like some cheap fling that I require a level of care that she cannot provide.

This has become my life and the only thing that has kept me from taking it is war. That word pounds in my head like a drumbeat. War. War. Over and over again. War. War. War. The moment that I stop shaking and sobbing. War. War. War. That five-year-old girl and her fourteen-year-old protector join the chant like a chorus. War. War. War. This is what keeps me going, the fact that there are still children coming and going from the churches and schools that those vile men combed like a brothel, the fact that those buildings are still standing after thirty years of them tearing me down and burning the pieces.

I want to kill. I want to shoot, stab, hack, and bludgeon. But that isn't enough. Any one act of violence, no matter how justified, would be little more than a senseless indulgence considering the depth of the conspiracy that inspires my rage. Burn one church and there are still thousands more standing. Kill one priest and there are still millions left walking, groping, hunting, lying, escaping.

Revenge is not enough because I am not alone. I am one of legions of broken children who have been mercilessly degraded and discarded by the Catholic Church. The only thing more horrifying than stories like mine are how many of them there are. In the United States alone, more than 11,000 complaints of abuse have been lodged against more than 6,000 Catholic clergy members by the children who survived their sexual degradation. Diocese across the country have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in out of court settlements just to keep them silent and my home state of Pennsylvania has hosted some of the vilest transgressions of this colossal conspiracy. 

The entire Keystone State was turned into a veritable harem. For decades, over 300 predator priests were given free reign over nearly every diocese in the state while the Church leadership compiled detailed records of their crimes and moved these monsters around like game pieces on a map of hell. Cases were reported to bishops and bishops reported them to the Vatican, but the only actions taken by Rome were in defense of the accused and the silence that kept them active. And Pennsylvania is far from the only hunting ground either.

216,000 children in France between 1950 and 2020. 3,677 minors in Germany between 1946 and 2014. Nearly 15,000 underage victims in Ireland between 1970 and 1990. And this doesn't even include the generations of children subjected to the horrors and humiliations of institutionalized corporal punishment, or the emotional abuse of homophobia and transphobia, or the slut shaming of children for even having a sexuality outside of a holy man's fist... or the Magdelene Laundries, or the mother and baby homes, or the dungeon-like orphanages and the illegal adoptions... The Catholic Church is not a religious organization, it is an international misery industrial complex that runs on shattered childhoods, and the responsibility for this monstrosity runs straight to the top of the Vatican. 

At least three consecutive popes have been complicit. In 2001, Pope John Paul II, a man now considered a saint by the Catholic Church, issued a global papal rescript compelling all of the Church's bishops to forward cases of abuse to Rome so that the Vatican could decide the appropriate course of action rather than the public. That same year, a high-ranking Vatican prefect who would go on to become Pope Bennedict in 2005 issued a document mandating that all cases of clerical sex abuse be reported directly to his office where they were to be kept under lock and key. Those files soon numbered in the thousands and were further secured under the Vatican's Crimen Sollicitationis, which required total silence from victims, perpetrators, and witnesses alike under the threat of excommunication.

Pope Francis was supposed to be different, swept into power in 2013 after Bennedict made the unprecedented decision to resign under a cloud of scandals going back to his days as the Archbishop of Munich in the 1980s, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was carefully marketed to the fleeing faithful as a caring reformer. He has reformed nothing. While touring the globe making heartfelt apologies to the victims of his church, the man they now call Francis has also carefully avoided making any formal admission of responsibility on the part of the Vatican so as to avoid ever having to pay a dime in reparations. 

Francis can also be judged by the company he keeps. The man he appointed as his anti-corruption czar and continues to praise in death, Cardinal George Pell, was a convicted pedophile only released from prison because Australia's High Court chose not to believe his victims on acquittal.

Pope Francis is not a reformer; he is a cleaner sent by an evil institution to mop up the scene of the crime and reign in a dwindling flock who is fleeing the church in droves. Pope Francis is proof that what the Vatican requires is not reform but revolution. This is a recognized nation state responsible for centuries of grisly crimes against humanity. An ancient imperial relic that has conspired with dictators, Nazis, mafioso, and death squads, and continues to horde billions of dollars in its bank, including gold picked from the teeth of the gassed Jews at Auschwitz. This monstrosity must be razed to the ground and fed to the woodchippers. But even this fate is not enough.

The only way to possibly call any revolution an act of justice is if this jihad ensures that the crimes that inspired it will never happen again. This is bigger than any one church. This is about a society that grooms its children to be prey by denying them any rights as individuals. There will always be adults that rape children as long as institutions of power afford them that right and childhood itself as we understand it has become one of those institutions. 

We must liberate our children by empowering them with the same rights we afford adults and teach them that their bodies belong to them and no one else, not the state, not the church, not even their parents. We must emancipate childhood and raise proud individuals instead of silent dutiful citizens.

If this is impossible then I will die fighting endlessly for the impossible. I will fight forever because it is the only thing that keeps me from destroying myself beneath the weight of the horror that has become my existence. I must become Che Guevara because it is the only fate keeping me from becoming Charles Whitman. I will not die a statistic. I will rage furiously unto my dying breath until the whole world can hear that five-year-old girl scream. Maybe then she can sleep and so can I.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH, Max, & Agnes

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* My War by Black Flag

* Me and a Gun by Tori Amos

* Cop Car by Mitski

* Jesu Dod by Burzum

* Retard Girl by Hole

* Kerosene by Big Black

* Oblivion by Grimes

* Transylvanian Hunger by Darkthrone

* Comeback Kid by Sleigh Bells

* Something I Can Never Have by Nine Inch Nails

This post is devoted in loving memory to John Sinclair, a tireless revolutionary who put his life and freedom on the line so young people could have a voice loud enough to tell their parents "Fuck you!" with their fists held high.  

Law and Order Is Republicrat for Fascism

 "Force is the midwife of any old society pregnant with a new one."

-Karl Marx

If you watch the news today, you'd think that Americans are living in one big stateless continental crimewave, stretching from sea to shining sea. Even on the crunchy granola liberal networks, every hour carries another newsflash about our nation's perilous decent into utter lawlessness. The undocumented are swarming the border! The homeless are swarming the subways! Wayward gangs of sticky-fingered Black youths are coming to a Target near you! Rape, murder, it's just a kiss away! You can practically hear every white liberal soccer mom in the burbs collectively dropping their morning coffee and screaming, "We never should have defunded the police!" 

Bitch, relax. Take a deep breath and stop watching the fucking 'news-today' because it's at least 90% bullshit on a good day. Don't get me wrong, things are still getting pretty wild down in the streets and they're likely to get even wilder, but nobody had to defund the police for them to get there and practically nobody has. When George Floyd was slowly lynched before a live studio audience and the nation exploded in an appropriately violent uprising the likes of which hadn't been seen since the race riots of 1968, the Democrats were forced to dawn dashikis and take a knee just to keep their target demographic governably passive. Everybody promised police reform, even old racist crooks like Joe Biden, but nobody actually did it. 

During those uprisings, every major city in the country saw these protests met with grossly disproportionate acts of police brutality and every single one of those police forces was being commanded by a Democratic mayor who then spoke eloquently about "reimagining" the police with fresh blood still wet on their jackboots. But these corporate shills didn't so much reimagine the police as they did reimagine their funding. Cities like New York and Minneapolis simply moved the money around in circles without ever affecting police budgets. 

So, why then are the streets getting wild like it's nineteen-seventy-something? Because Americans are having an existential crisis like they did back in nineteen-seventy-something. This nation's last big crime wave peaked somewhere between the early seventies and the early nineties after the American Empire lost the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement failed to cure systemic racism, and Richard Nixon exposed the highest echelons of Babylonian power to be little more than an elaborate organized crime outfit. Long story short, America lost its faith in the system and sadly that faith was what passed for a moral center in this country. So, the shit got wild and here we go again after the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the Pandemic, and two consecutive presidencies defined by Nixonian grade dysfunction.

We've been here before but this time the damage is far worse, and it may be irreversible. But that isn't stopping the mandarins of the two-party system and their devoted courtesans on 'the-news-today' from trying to fix this crisis the way they did with the last one back in nineteen-seventy-something. With our next sham election heating up, Joe Biden is tearing off his dashiki and pulling his white hood back out of the closet and while Trump warms up the MAGA set with promises of Christian Sharia Law and flaming border moats, Genocide Joe is flexing his muscles by attacking common sense reform to the District of Colombia's ancient criminal code and pushing immigration deals that promise to dump napalm into the Rio Grande. Meanwhile, the media is chumming us all with sensational stories of a Mad Max-style dystopia.

It's Law and Order Two: Electric Boogaloo. But here's the rub; nobody is actually asking for a sequel. Even amidst this synergistic propaganda deluge, most major polls show crime trailing behind the shit that causes it, like inflation, recession, and shitty leadership, on the list of demands for both Democrats and Republicans. In other words, average Americans don't want law and order. They would much rather watch the Temple of Emptiness burn like their savings. But American power desperately wants us to want law and order to save their hides from the fire the way they did the last time around.

The great crimewave of nineteen-seventy-something ended for reasons that continue to allude the experts but the powerful still believe that they cured that plague with a crimewave of their own called mass incarceration. The violence never ended, it just got monopolized by the police state. While burglary in the suburbs may have dropped, an entire generation of Black, brown, and Queer people were essentially kidnapped under the auspices of the War on Drugs and Broken Windows before being sold into virtual slavery to a modern-day gulag archipelago that would make Josef Stalin thick with envy.

In 1970, the state and federal prison population stood at 196,441. By 2020, the caged population had swelled to over two million with most of its indentured citizenry locked up for non-violent drug offenses. One out of every three Black males born American today can expect to serve hard time before he dies, along with one in six Latino males. Meanwhile, women have become the fastest growing incarcerated population in the country and Queer folk like me are incarcerated at three times the rate of the general population, with one in six trans people serving time, usually in prisons that don't match our gender identity.

The US now incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth, including China, and dumps $80 billion taxpayer dollars into the coffers of a bustling prison industrial complex every year, but law and order doesn't end at the prison gates. The spree in federal legislation that began with Nixon's War on Drugs and peaked with the Clinton Crime Bill that Joe Biden midwifed back when he still had all his marbles, turned American law enforcement into a colossal army of heavily armored goons with near unlimited power and state-of-the-art battlefield technology. There is a word for this, for the wholesale militarization of every facet of civilian society for the purpose of preserving the glory of a failed state. That word is called fascism, and while it may seem like Donald Trump is the only man running for president who is proud of this slur, both parties are thoroughly invested in the American swastika known as law and order. 

Democrats may use white supremacy and January 6 to spook their rubes, but the result is funding the exact same system that curb stomps migrants and Muslims. Fascism isn't really an ideology, it's just a very ceremonial list of excuses to put a collapsing power on life support by using the state to monopolize an unstoppable crimewave. The harsh reality is that whenever an old system collapses beneath the weight of its crimes, shit gets nuts, the streets get wild, but this is a stupid fucking reason to double down on the same system that brought us here.

This may be a little hard for the soccer moms of suburbia to grasp but the best way to fight crime, all crime, is to teach people that they don't need laws to have order, they just need values. The reason for the wave of violent nihilism washing over the country right now is that generations of Americans have been raised to believe that they need powerful people to define their moral integrity. It's a kind of spiritual learned helplessness invented by a powerful minority to infantilize the majority into a state of moral paralysis and once that powerful minority is exposed, there is nowhere left for the amoral majority to go but down. But just like law and order, this perception is nothing but an illusion. It can be broken. Not by voting or passing more laws but by building self-sufficient, autonomous communities that don't require such silly rituals to be decent human beings.

This is how we win, dearest motherfuckers. This is how we kill American fascism without firing a single shot. Live free and let the tyrants shoot themselves. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

* What About Us by Ministry

* Down in the Streets by the Stooges

* Expressway to Yr. Skull by Sonic Youth

* Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix

* Wave of Mutilation by the Pixies

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

* Get Your Gunn by Marilyn Manson

* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones

Embracing the Divine Madness of Multiplicity as a Spiritual Martial Art

 “Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”

-Carl Gustav Jung

My life has become a profoundly surreal landscape over the last several months and the shit just seems to get weirder and weirder. What began as a simple quest to confront the terrifying emotional flashbacks that seemed to increase in both number and intensity with my gender transition has become a downright psychedelic thrill ride to the third circle of my subconscious that I desperately wish I could get off of. Long story short: I made the fateful decision to stare into the rabbit hole and the rabbit hole devoured me whole like an Old Testament sea monster.

Short story long: After decades of attempting to outrun a past riddled with blank spots, disassociation, and outright amnesia, I decided to stop running and confront my demons headlong in polite conversation. I did this through an unorthodox therapy approach known as parts work in which you are encouraged to actually communicate with the voices in your head rather than trying to medicate them. This task went from complicated to downright mind-bending when two of my voices, a traumatized five-year-old girl named Agnes and a fourteen-year-old androgynous gender outlaw named Max, turned out to be full blown individuals complete with thoughts, opinions, grievances, and parts of their own.

The word for this experience is multiplicity, though most people know of the concept as split personalities, a state in which multiple identities share a single body. This state is experienced in a wide variety of ways by a wide variety of people but for me, Max and Agnes mostly exist outside of my body. I don't hallucinate, but I can see them clearly through my mind's eye down to what close they're wearing today, and I can carry out full conversations with them like I would with anyone else. 

This changes when I become triggered by my PTSD. When this occurs, I find myself becoming Max or Agnes and I find myself experiencing the trauma from their perspective, allowing me to recover memories that I have repressed or experiencing old ones which I had disassociated myself from fully feeling and comprehending the first time around.

In the process I have come to believe that both of these girls represent attempts by me to construct a functioning self during my childhood, attempts that collapsed beneath the weight of overwhelming trauma. Agnes was the little girl who attempted to tell the adults in my life that she was not a boy by acting out. When her attempts to reveal herself were met with violence and rejection, and acts of unspeakable systemic sexual abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church followed, she came to the conclusion that it quite simply was not safe to exist, and she made herself disappear, leading me to disassociate from myself entirely for most of my childhood.

Max came out when puberty coincided with the popular farce known as the War on Terrorism. Without possessing any conscious memory of Agnes, Max saw a world in which all the adults afforded with the ability to control her identity were willfully ignorant and morally depraved, cheering on a bloodbath in the Middle East based on obvious lies while the bodies of innocent children stacked up. Max was pissed. Max discovered anarchism and punk rock and for the first time in my memory, I had a voice that was mine and no one else's. 

But once again, the adults insisted on having the final word, accusing me of being a monster and plotting acts of mass violence against other innocent children. They all agreed, the teachers, the parents, and the priests. They were all talking, deciding how I should be dealt with for my indiscretions. It all felt too terrifyingly familiar to comprehend. Max shielded herself behind the persona of a psychotic antihero and disappeared like Agnes. 

Parts work didn't create these girls. They have always been with me. But it did give them the license to exist and define themselves in ways that those fine folks who raised me in the shadow of the Vatican had denied them. They had stories to tell and someone who was finally willing to listen. So, they became permanent, sentient participants in my existence and as insane as this whole experience has been, it has also been incredibly rewarding in the moments that aren't fiendishly horrifying.

Nicky, Max, and Agnes have formed an internal axis devoted to confronting the people who persecuted us and exacting revolutionary revenge against them accordingly. One has become three and these three share the burden of experiencing a past so atrocious that we had to numb ourselves just to survive it. I feel it all now and sometimes it is way too goddamn much, but I don't have to feel it alone. We all take turns being strong. Agnes is obviously the most fragile but there have been many late nights where that child has held me sobbing and shaking while telling me that she will keep me safe from the bad men in white collars.

I have written about much of this before on this forum because writing is the only way that I know how to deal with the world when it becomes impossibly evil. I fully expected these revelations to be a bridge too far even for the whack jobs and dearest motherfuckers of my audience, but the response has actually been downright shocking to say the least. Not only have I received a flood of messages in support and solidarity with my situation, but I have also had many people share incredibly similar experiences both inside and out of parts work. It turns out that in a world riddled with warmongers and pedophile priests, me and my girls aren't alone. Across the planet there are many other strange little internal family systems fighting the good fight too.

Sadly, not all of the responses that I have received have been so inspiring and the worst have actually come from the last people I would have ever expected to receive them from. A number of people diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder; the only form of multiplicity recognized by the mental health establishment, have viciously accused me of appropriating their sacred illness because my experiences aren't DSM approved. 

Heartbreakingly, this has included people very close to me, people I consider family, and their rejection has pushed me to the brink of suicide. Only those two pissed-off little girls in my head have kicked the razor blade from my reach, telling me that we have too many churches to burn before we sleep.

But once again, me and my girls are not alone. There is a thriving and growing online movement of lonely and traumatized kids seeking to divide their identities into multiple personalities in order to cope with a collapsing civilization indifferent to their technologically driven isolation. A community of spiritual psychonauts who call themselves tulpamancers, taking their name from an ancient Tibetan Buddhist technique of achieving enlightenment through multiplicity. 

Much like me, these tulpamancers have been savagely ridiculed by the diagnosed. But why? Unlike most of these kids, I didn't choose my personalities, unspeakable trauma chose them for me. But so what. These people have found a way to achieve self-love and inner peace without having to suffer through years of medical abuse like I did, and I'm supposed to spit on them for it. Fuck that shit. I'm proud of them. 

Speaking as a Queer person, we have a word for this kind of hopped-up oppression Olympics, and it's called gatekeeping. "You can't be Queer because you're not gay enough, you can't be trans because you're not femme enough, you can't be multiple because you're not dissociative enough..."It's all the same shit and it's one big counterrevolutionary trap. 

Every time a new minority succeeds at liberating themselves from the system that oppresses us, that same system tries to assimilate them into their hivemind by rewarding them with trinkets of tolerance like diagnoses in exchange for their service in stepping on the next minority. This is not the point of any kind of truly authentic liberation movement. The point is freedom. The point is turning all identities into voluntary tools of radical individualism. The point isn't joining the majority, it's destroying it with diversity by teaching everyone how to become an autonomous, self-sufficient minority. A million tribes of a billion individuals with a trillion personalities jamming up the matrix with our anarchic parade.

I have come to embrace what others refer to as my mental illness as a kind of spiritual martial art. A way to defend my individuality from the trauma inflicted upon me by the armies of assimilation, be they churches, schools, prisons, or states. I celebrate my madness as a tool for liberation. An ancient weapon wielded for centuries by prophets, monks, and shaman. And I welcome everyone to join me in this splendid mental illness so we can all celebrate our diversity on the grave of an immoral civilization that has long outlived whatever malignant purpose it once had. Let the voices in our heads join like a quire as the old order crumbles and the new disorder is reborn like a phoenix from the ashes.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH/Max & Agnes

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Schizophrenia by Sonic Youth 

* Crazy by Patsy Cline

* Geek USA by Smashing Pumpkins

* My War by Black Flag

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

* Ladies by Fiona Apple

* The Passenger by Iggy Pop

* Ironic by Alanis Morissette

* Cornflake Girl by Tori Amos

* Doll Parts by Hole

* White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground

* Best of You by Foo Fighters

Free Gaza and Free the Donbas Too!

 I quite frequently use this space to lament the untimely demise of the antiwar movement in this country and to wallow shamelessly in the miseries of what could have been. Those of my readers who have gone on to join the ranks of the loyal followers whom I lovingly describe as my very dearest motherfuckers likely know the sermon by heart at this point. The Gospel of Abbie Hoffman... 

The epic tale about a ragtag coalition of Black militants, angry faggots, dope smoking weirdos, and disgruntled GIs who came together in rage, love, and empathy to end Babylon's savage crusade in Indochina with a wild campaign of monkey-wrenching sabotage, campus arson, and fucking in the streets. For just one shining, impossible moment the weird people won, the empire coward in its corner, and everything seemed possible. But then they fired Nixon, put the draft on ice, and brought the troops home, and the movement collapsed. Or has it?

As down and pissed as I get, every once in a while, this nation, long sedated by a toxic casserole of reality television and high-powered prescription narcotics, shows me signs of discontent with their leader's bloodlust abroad. The truth is that this discontent has actually grown more cantankerous than it has been in decades in recent months. But like pretty much everything else good in this country, it has also been tragically bisected by petty partisan bullshit. 

On the left we have seen a sonic upsurge in unprecedented outrage over the Democratic Party's longtime support for Israel's increasingly genocidal policies towards occupied Palestine. While I have long cracked wise and mean about the complacent hipster brats of the nouveau left, what with their creepy Bernie Sanders fetish and their politically correct distractions, these kids have made me downright proud lately with the pure fury of their empathy for the long-silenced people of the Gaza Strip. They have literally shut down parades, engaged the pigs in fist-swinging riots, and relentlessly heckled that old white bastard in the White House with chants of "Genocide Joe!" Abbie would be proud too.

Meanwhile, on the right, a rising tide of conservative populists have similarly drawn the line over America's bipartisan spending frenzy in Ukraine. While Volodymyr Zelensky uses Putin's illegal invasion as an excuse to betray his promises for peace in the Donbas and sends ranks of the forcefully conscripted people who voted for him bring it to die in the trenches, three out of every four Republicans who support that scumfuck Donald Trump also support peace in Ukraine. And the GOP is playing along by holding up aid in congress in exchange for a more inhumane police state on the border. 

And yet, the same young Democrats who are threatening to ruin Genocide Joe's reelection over the bloodbath in Gaza overwhelmingly support the bloodbath in Ukraine and the MAGA mob furious over being mugged to reignite the Cold War seem to have zero problem dumping their wallets out so Benjamin Netanyahu can drop bunker busters on maternity wards in Rafah. It's total fucking madness and it has me ripping my pink hair out by the roots, screaming at both sides that it's all the exact same goddamn thing.

Palestine and the Donbas are both ethnically diverse but culturally distinct regions that have found themselves gift-wrapped and handed over to nations that they never asked to be a part of in the first place. Palestine had long been a barely governed patch of desert on the outskirts of the Ottoman Empire before the British and the Americans stole it and arbitrarily proclaimed it to be a homeland for European migrants. Similarly, the Donbas had been a region of Russia going back to the 1700s before the Bolsheviks made a unilateral decision to make it a part of their new Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1922 only to have Ukraine take it with them when they unilaterally left the Soviet Union in 1992.

While both Gaza and the Donbas have also had their movements for autonomy largely hijacked by imbeciles and monsters, none of that changes the fact that these are both illegally occupied territories fighting for popular autonomy and the crimes of Hamas and Putin do nothing to sanctify the barbarism that America and its heavily armed proxies have reigned down upon their heads. 

In the far less publicized case of the Donbas, I feel compelled to remind my fellow social justice warlords that these people were subjected to a cruel civil war for over seven years before Putin used them as an excuse to sack Kiev. 

After the Donbas defied Putin's own orders and voted to declare independence from Ukraine in 2014 in protest of a blatant NATO overthrow of a president who they overwhelmingly voted for, the new Yankee puppet regime in Kiev placed these people under a crippling blockade and sent openly neo-fascist ethnic extremists to terrorize them under a driving rain of indiscriminate artillery fire, killing over 14,000 people in the process, most of them ethnic Russians. 

Volodymyr Zelensky was actually elected on a promise to end this Russophobic apartheid nightmare and give the Donbas some degree of autonomy, but after being bullied and bought off by NATO and his own ethnic nationalist infiltrated military, Zelensky went back on his word and recommitted his country to forcefully retaking the Donbas in revenge for that region's desperate support for Putin's invasion.

As you can see, most people on both the left and the right only seem to know one half of the story but most of them have also been lured into this bipolar ignorance by a corrupt partisan circus that has turned even actual fucking warfare into just another theater for the culture war. 

While the Jesus freaks on the right have been bamboozled by their Evangelical megachurches into believing that anything less than total capitulation to Zionist slaughter is antisemitism, the DNC's cable intelligentsia has transformed Vladimir Putin from a corrupt neoliberal opportunist into the ringleader of some kind of international crypto-fascist conspiracy that has grown to include everyone from Donald Trump to Black Lives Matter.

Both sides need to snap out of this zombie fugue state and listen to their consciences because these busted pilot lights are both clearly telling them the same damn thing; it is wrong to rob entire regions of their popular autonomy, whether it be granted by God or Allah, and it is worse to slaughter them in mass just so sick fucking creatures on Capitol Hill can sell more bombs for their masters on Wall Street. 

Both parties overwhelmingly support both of these gruesome spectacles, and they are turning what could easily become a viable antiwar movement against itself while they play its peaceniks for dupes. The only viable solution to this con game is to dump these crooks back in their toxic swamp once and for all and join each other back in the streets to demand an end to this madness.

For the love of Abbie Hoffman, wake up dearest motherfuckers and end the massacres in both Europe and the Middle East. Free Gaza and free the Donbass too!

Rage, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Ramblin' Rose by the MC5

* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins

* Down In the Streets by the Stooges

* Teenage Riot by Sonic Youth

* All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix

* Breed by Nirvana

* Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival

* Touch Me I'm Sick by Mudhoney

* Bulldog Front by Fugazi

Confronting The American School System's Perverted Bathroom Police State

 Nex Benedict was kind of a weird kid. I know because the moment that I first learned who Nex was I also knew that we would have been friends. Like Nex, at 16 I was a pissed off metal head with a weird sense of humor and a bad temper who ferociously defended the few outsiders I could count as friends. I was also an androgynous trans kid at a conservative high school who was no stranger to getting my ass kicked simply because I stubbornly refused to bow down to someone else's conventions and thus much like so many other trans people in this country today, I find myself looking at the details of Nex Bennedict's tragic death and saying, "That could have been me."

For those of you who don't know, Nex was a 16-year-old non-binary student at a suburban Oklahoma high school who was murdered for being a Queer kid in the wrong bathroom in a state that has gone out of its way to make that distinction downright dangerous. Nex, who used he/him pronouns, had been brutally bullied for the past year over his and his friends gender identities before the incident even occurred and after standing up for his friends one last time in the girl's bathroom, he was violently assaulted by three older girls who pinned him down and beat him until he blacked out. The school nurse suggested that Nex undergo further medical examination for obvious head injuries, but the school simply sent him home with a two-week suspension for defending himself instead.

Nex's grandmother and adoptive mother, Sue Bennedict, was reasonably incensed by the school's total nonchalance towards an obvious hate crime and took her battered child to a nearby hospital where she also summoned the local police who informed Sue that if Nex filed charges against his attackers he could be expected to be charged as well just for fighting back. They declined and Nex was released. The next day, Nex Benedict collapsed in his home before being rushed back to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. 

The local police department claims that the autopsy results indicate injuries sustained during the beating did not directly lead to Nex's death, but the exact cause of death remains strangely undetermined a month after the incident occurred and everyone who knows anything about Oklahoma's toxic police culture is calling for an independent investigation. While the Federal Government's Education Department has announced their own investigation, I'm not exactly relieved. Oklahoma has been violating the rights of Queer kids for years and the Federal Government has done exactly jack shit about it.

Oklahoma is one of dozens of states across the Bible Belt that has essentially declared open war on kids who refuse to comply with the gender identity on their birth certificates. This war has included laws barring minors from access to gender affirming care proven over the decades to have fewer side effects than antidepressants. This war has included investigating the few parents actually willing to take their children at their word by affirming their gender identity as child abusers. And this war includes barring kids like Nex Bennedict from access to safe bathrooms. 

Oklahoma is one of 11 states that currently bans students from using bathrooms that don't align with their biological sex and Nex's death is precisely the kind of violence that these policies make inevitable. However, the officials behind these policies remain shamelessly unapologetic for the bloodshed. Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent that helped push through his state's bathroom apartheid bill with support from Governor Keven Stiff has been quoted pontificating over Nex Bennedict's dead body that "There's not multiple genders. There's two. That's how God created us." before vowing to "continue to fight for parents and never back down to the woke mob."

And that's about the size of the problem right there. Shitheads like Walters and the lobbyists of the so-called "Parent's Rights Movement" don't give one fuck about the rights of the kids they pretend to protect. They only care about the right for certain parents to police everyone's kids like cattle so they can segregate the normies from the weird kids who might taint them with the perversion of free expression.

Laws like these are aimed at erasing Queer youth by making their existence too unbearable to sustain outside of the closet without a noose around their necks. But once again there is an even bigger issue at play here that I feel is getting lost in the usual partisan shuffle of the culture wars, a question that no one else but me seems to be asking. Why the hell would anyone afford a bunch of poorly trained and virtually unsupervised adult public servants the right to police their children's basic right to use a goddamn toilet? 

Seriously! Let's stop mincing words right here and put it all on the table. We are talking about segregating children based solely on the contents of their genitalia and carefully policing when, where, and how they shit, piss, and bleed, and somehow, I'm the fucking pervert? This is way bigger than gender. This is about the basic right to bodily autonomy. Why should any child have to use a facility where they feel unsafe? Why should any human being be reduced to the humiliating position of having to beg an authority figure for the "privilege" of being able to relieve themselves?

Labor laws state that employers must allow their workers free and unfettered access to bathroom facilities, so why not children? Children's needs derive from the biology of their bodies, and nothing makes them feel less safe than having those needs systemically disregarded. There is a reason why so many adults suffer from anxiety related to public restrooms and it isn't just trans people.

The excuse typically given for the American school systems perverted bathroom police state is the usual rigamarole about law and order. Kids can't be trusted with basic human rights because of smoking or vaping or whatever the fuck the monster of the week happens to be right now but what this really all comes down to is something far more insidious. 

Like most factors of America's compulsory school system, the notion of bathroom privileges is a tool for social engineering and social control. Using the bathroom is a very basic human need like breathing or eating and basic bodily needs are what drives human behavior. Therefore, the ultimate form of social control is to afford only certain designated authority figures with the ability to sustain those bodily needs.

I feel like I shouldn't have to tell people how sick this is. It is precisely this line of thinking that allows children to be so easily abused by adults and it is precisely this line of thinking that allows individuals to be so easily abused by authoritarian institutions. We are quite literally house broken as kids to be good citizens and the "radical gender ideology" of freaky people like me and rebellious kids like Nex Bennedict is a direct threat to this conspiracy because it returns young people to the notion that it's their goddamn body and no one has the right to define it but them.

I'm proud of this ideology and not just because I am a trans person. I'm proud because I am an anarchist, I'm proud because I am a survivor of child abuse, and I'm proud because the people who abused me were authority figures who used heavily policed school bathrooms to get away with it. This whole system belongs in the shitter and kids have the power to flush it.

The solution to the creepy police state that jumped-up Jesus freaks have turned public bathrooms into isn't more laws and regulations. It's unlearning them and teaching young people to do the same. Every single trans bathroom law on the books is totally unenforceable. The money and manpower that it would take to regulate them would bankrupt the whole damn system. 

Like most laws, their power rests largely in the illusion of control. The kind of illusions they need to drive into children at a tender age with fear and humiliation. But kids can take that power back and they can take it back by simply refusing to comply in mass. If everyone decides collectively to use whatever bathroom they need whenever they need to use it, then the whole system collapses into nothing but a tightly coiled pile of meaningless words and edicts spewed from the incontinent holes of asses like Ryan Walters.

I have to believe that Nex would have gotten a kick out of this kind of revenge. I know I would have at his age.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Bullet with Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins

* Rope by Foo Fighters

* Jennifer's Body by Hole

* Outshined by Soundgarden

* Broken Man by St. Vincent

* Hear You Me by Jimmy Eat World

* Dress by PJ Harvey

* Seether by Veruca Salt

* Best of You by Foo Fighters

* Shove by L7

* Get Your Gunn by Marilyn Manson

* The Prisoner by Iron Maiden

The State of Israel Has No Right to Exist and Neither Does the USA

 The state of Israel has no right to exist. I believe that statement to be a fact based purely on the concept of right and wrong, but just try saying it out loud in any corner of this country and you would think that you'd said it on the streets of Tel Aviv. People who can't even find Israel on a map or properly pronounce the word 'antisemitic' call you out as a fucking racist and they do it with Confederate flags on their belt buckles. But I stand by my opening proclamation, and I challenge any sentient being with common sense to look at the history of Israel carefully and truthfully and tell me that there is absolutely anything legitimate about its existence.

Israel was built on a foundation of colonial piracy. In the bloody wake of World War 1 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a bunch of white men in khakis carved up the Middle East into strategically digestible pieces with the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916. The United Kingdom ended up with a diverse and under-regulated little backwater called Palestine. At the time, the largely Sephardim Jewish community in the Holy Land, known as the Yishuv, was in the single digits percentage wise and had zero ambitions of statehood, nor did your average European Jew. 

But the United Kingdom wanted to tame this stateless region, so they teamed up with a tiny Ashkenazi extremist movement that called themselves Zionists to do it. In 1917, the British issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to establish the British Mandate of Palestine as a national homeland for the Jews. Beginning in 1919, they facilitated a dramatic increase in Zionist immigration and between the years of 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population in the British Mandate ballooned from just 9% to nearly 27%, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians in the process.

However, try as they might, the British and their Zionist lackeys still couldn't seem to convince the majority of the Jewish people to get on board with hijacking somebody else's land based on secular misinterpretations of ancient holy books. This only changed when the openly antisemitic Nazis rose to power, uncoincidentally with the full support of the fascists in the Zionist movement who wrote love letters to Hitler and invited Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem while they used the reign of these cowards to herd somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 European Jews into the Mandate between 1933 and 1936. The Palestinians reacted with a bloody revolt that raged for three years until the British finally managed to crush it in 1939. But the Brits got scared. Fearing that they may lose control of the entire experiment, they attempted to pump the breaks on Jewish immigration until they could restore order.

Their Zionist proxies were not pleased and responded by declaring war on their masters, launching a series of bloody terrorist attacks that peaked with the King David Hotel Bombing which killed 91 people in 1946. With their empire already in shambles and their hands full of blood and guts in South Asia, the British finally handed this colonial hand grenade to their heirs in Washington, who used the horrors of the Holocaust and their new toys in the United Nations to give colonialism a veneer of legitimacy. The UN adopted Resolution 181 in 1947, unilaterally recommending the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. When the Palestinians learned that this deal would virtually cut them off from their coastline between Haifa and Jaffa, they violently rejected it, but the dye was already cast. 

With the so-called "international community's" official support and the Jewish community too shellshocked by genocide to resist another committed in their name, Zionist militias like Irgun and the Stern Gang unleashed a tidal wave of ethnic cleansing on the Holy Land between the years of 1947 and 1949 that would become known as the Nakba or the Catastrophe. 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes and at least 15,000 were slaughtered in more than 70 massacres. By the time the dust settled, 530 villages had been erased from the map and 78% of historic Palestine was officially colonized. The remaining 22% was divided into glorified apartheid townships in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And on this graveyard the state of Israel was born.

Upon hearing this uncensored history lesson, provided you can pry their fingers from their ears long enough to hear it, your average Christian Zionist zombie will usually respond by pointing out the striking similarities between this narrative and America's own hideous colonial origin story and ask with a pithy heir of pomposity; "Does the United States have the right to exist?" And on this point, they are absolutely correct. America, after all, was little more than another British experiment in colonial piracy built on what may very well be the two most devastating acts of genocide in recorded history.

The estimated population of people indigenous to what is now recognized as the United States of America stood somewhere between 8 and 15 million before the original Zionists showed up in 1492. By the 19th Century, most of this nation's north had been emptied out of red flesh by routine massacres and biological warfare and it was decided that the refugees who fled to the southeast would be dealt with in a much more orderly and systematic fashion. 

The white male landowners of Capitol Hill passed their own Nakba with the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and President Andrew Jackson, America's answer to David Ben-Gurion, spent the better part of the next decade forcing an estimated 100,000 Native Americans from 18 tribes to the desolate West Bank of Oklahoma where they would be confined to reservations surrounded by illegal settlers and military installations and left to rot in poverty. By 1900, America's indigenous population dwindled at around 237,000. The math isn't hard to do but the numbers are impossible not to choke on. Several Holocausts went into turning America into the original Israel. This includes the tens of millions of Africans slaughtered in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. 

With these shockingly true horror stories in mind, it's really little wonder why so many Americans are proud and unapologetic Zionists, our nation served as their blueprint. I guess a better question is how it's even possible that so many avowed anti-Zionists on this illegally occupied soil remain proud if annoyingly apologetic Americans. How can any morally dignified human being chant the words "from the nation to the sea..." and then head straight for the ballot box to validate the nation that outsourced the Nakba to Middle East by voting to fill a government that has no more legitimacy than the one in Tel Aviv?

This is why I am an anarchist as well as an anti-Zionist and this is why I proudly stand by the accusation made by so many Zionists that anti-Zionism is synonymous with anti-Americanism. They are absolutely right. The state itself, as it is currently defined, is a European colonialist construct designed for conquest. The notion that such a device could ever be rehabilitated for anything less than heinous is almost hysterically ludicrous and the proof is in the history. 

America's rampage didn't end in Indian Country. Manifest Destiny continues to expand to every corner of the globe with a trail of bodies in its wake to this day. The only reason why the Nakba never ended in the Holy Land is because the Nakba never ended in the Promised Land. Without Washington's full and unconditional support, the current massacre raging in Gaza would grind to a screeching halt. In other words, America doesn't have an Israel problem, the whole fucking planet has an America problem. Israel is just a symptom.

It is high time for American radicals of every political stripe to take off the blinders and recognize that what rests comfortably in Washington is a globalist Yankee Occupied Government that we can no longer afford to legitimize, not with our votes, not with our tax dollars, and certainly not with our petty fucking excuses. The Palestinians will only be free from the river to the sea once we dispatch the beast that resides between sea to shining sea. Because no state has the right to exist, and the ones built on genocide need to go first.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Soul to Squeeze by Red Hot Chili Peppers

* Broken Man by St. Vincent

* Territorial Pissings by Nirvana

* Atom Bomb by Bully

* Testify by Rage Against the Machine

* The Glorious Land by PJ Harvey

* Caught a Light Sneeze by Tori Amos

* Ruined by Adrianne Lenker

* The Land of Rape and Honey by Ministry

* Pretend We're Dead by L7

This post is dedicated in loving memory to Nex Bennedict, a young, non-binary, indigenous person taken too soon from the guts of Indian Country for refusing to go down without a fight. May all those who have seen their light carry their spirit of resistance forward into the darkness. 

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

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

-Fred Hampton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones

* Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday

* Ahead by Wire

* These Boots Are Made for Walking by Nancy Sinatra

* Black Boys on Mopeds by Sinead O'Connor

* Everything Right Now by Arcade Fire

* What Have You Done for Me Lately by Janet Jackson

* Power To the People by John Lennon

* Bored by Waxahatchee

* Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan