Confronting the Bigotry of Mental "illness" from a Queer Perspective

 Speaking from the precarious perspective of an obnoxiously androgynous genderqueer person both online and in the very rural real world, I'm not exactly a stranger to bigotry. Aside from the fact that getting called a monster in the supermarket is pretty much a side effect of taking Estradiol in Trump country, these people have been treating me like a sentient timebomb long before any of us had a nasty word for it. I've felt fundamentally toxic from an obscenely young age. My body has always felt weird and dangerous, and it always seemed to give off a smell that freaked out all the adults around me just before it spread to their children. It took a really long time just for me to put a finger on what exactly the fucking problem was but when I did it didn't exactly boost my popularity among the local townspeople.

On the other hand, by the time I was getting published as an out genderfuck personality I was already getting ran off the road by testosterone drunk lunkheads in pick-up trucks so, I was kind of beyond the point of words like 'tranny' and 'pervert' hurting my feelings in the comment section. Truth be told, as exhausting as it still is trying to get people to take my work seriously without smearing my make-up, there is a very twisted part of me that kind of enjoys the challenge. I've also learned to take a certain degree of pride in freaking out the neighborhood every time I take a walk around the block. I had honestly come to believe that I had seen the very worst of societies prejudices against the fundamentally strange and lived to write about it. Then I went crazy.

My official break with the sane world went off like a howitzer right around this time last year but in many ways, this wave of traumagenic neurodivergence was as long in the making as my burgeoning Queerness, likely because the two have always been tightly intertwined. I've struggled with a myriad of different maladies going back to early grade school. They came with all kinds of therapist approved labels like depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive this and attention deficit that, but their seemed to be a major fundamental shift when the simple notion occurred to me that I didn't have to be male. In many ways rejecting my diagnosed gender identity felt like taking off a strait jacket that I didn't even know I had been wearing for my entire life. A lot of my old phobias and anxieties simply fell apart but something far more terrifying seemed to take their place.

As I arrived at the conclusion that in spite of my obnoxious androgyny, I was indeed a female, I began suffering from all the symptoms typically associated with the kind of complex post-traumatic stress disorder associated with children of severe abuse even though I had no memory of any inciting incident profound enough to justify these reactions. My various therapists all seemed to agree that perhaps I was better off not remembering whatever I had apparently blacked out, so, I tried my best to make my peace with the unknown and move on with my gender transition. The first six months I spent on estrogen were quite possibly the happiest of my life but the moment my hormone levels reached the female range in the late fall of 2023, my world caught fire. 

The flashbacks I had been suffering from went from purely emotional to viscerally visual. I attempted to use parts work therapy to deal with this mayhem, but the parts started talking back and none of them had more to say than the wounded inner child I named Agnes. I began experiencing my flashbacks from her perspective and after I did, I would often feel like that violated little girl for hours at a time. Soon I became too much for my found family or even my therapists to handle and their rejection only fueled my descent into madness. However, through this maelstrom, slowly a coherent narrative began to take shape and amidst a three-ring circus fire of vivid flashbacks, epileptic style seizures, and multiple personalities, I remembered everything like it happened yesterday.

I remembered being horrified by my own body when I was barely old enough to walk. I remembered struggling to beg the adults around me for help but only being able to express these terrifying feelings by acting out. I remembered my preschool teacher beating me naked in the bathroom for these fits and a pair of Catholic priests taking advantage of them so they could molest and rape me. I remembered nearly choking to death on parts of their bodies in the process. And I remembered erasing myself and taking on the disguise of a meek and timid Catholic boy just to make it all stop. I remembered everything and it was almost too much to bear.

This is how I developed what is typically known as dissociative identity disorder. Early childhood abuse shattered my sense of self like a broken mirror, and I had to develop multiple distinct and autonomous personalities just to compartmentalize the horror into pieces that could share the load. Most of these personalities have likely been with me for most of my life but they remained stealth until I did the one thing that I believed I was being raped for doing and that was refusing to be a boy. As mind-bendingly terrifying as it was to realize all of this, especially in such a short span of time, my life finally made sense to me, it just took five of me to fully comprehend it. 

Aside from Nicky, there is Agnes, the five-year-old girl who carries most of the trauma as well as most of my empathy. There is Ophelia, a seven-year-old girl without a face who represents the state of extreme disassociation I experienced after the abuse. There is Max, an androgynous 14-year-old smartass with the soul of an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor, who helps manage the rest of us. And Mona, a heavily armed bulldyke in corpse paint who protects us and seems to personify both my rage and my fear of that rage hurting everyone around me.

I tend to experience "the girls", as I've taken to calling them, as projections that I can communicate with around me unless I get really triggered, then one of the girls, most frequently Agnes, takes control of the body and I become a helpless observer. As crazy as all this might sound, embracing this strange reality has allowed me to finally take control of my life. My endless list of neuroses finally makes sense and the tiny sisterhood in my head has taught me how to truly love myself for the first time in my life. Existing as five dykes in one skull gets complicated and downright exhausting at times but it has allowed me to take back my narrative and finally move forward from my treacherously murky childhood. 

This is because, in spite of the DSM label of "disorder" and all the baggage that comes with it, what I experience isn't an illness, it is a form of neurodiversity not unlike autism. Such an extreme amount of trauma at such an early developmental stage forced my brain to organize itself differently from the normal factory setting. I experience the same reality as everybody else, I just digest the information differently. Me and the girls have formed something of an internal collective to manage this and I'm quite proud of the progress that we've made together. However, what I was unprepared to deal with was the level of bigotry that we have faced because of our unorthodox existence.

I have been disrespected and disregarded more times in the last year as a result of my very public neurodiversity than I have been in the last seven years since I came out of the closet. Both in person and online, I am quite regularly belittled, talked down to, mocked, and cast aside. My numerous enemies have been given a golden ticket, a free pass to guaranteed supremacy, because nobody has to take a lunatic with four girls in her head seriously. But the worst bigotry that I have experienced has shockingly come from my own people in the so-called LGBT community.

I had volunteered for one of the most reputable LGBT rights organizations in the state of Pennsylvania for over a year when Trump took office for a second time and began lobbing hateful executive orders at trans kids like flaming lawn darts. For months I had been working to organize some kind of youth outreach program for the rural areas of the county where me and my tribe live, and this organization has been promising to help. Me and my girls have done our damnedest to be patient but when January became February, and I found out that these people were too busy to help the most fragile members of our community because they were preoccupied with securing sponsors for this year's Pride parade, I lost my patience and began demanding some fucking action. 

After wrapping my knuckles bloody on every door with a faggot behind it, I finally managed to get a meeting with the head of the board of this organization only to have that vile woman inform me to my face that she didn't feel safe allowing someone with my "condition" alone with the children that she was too busy with confetti to lift a finger for. And just like that, I became too Queer to be LGBT because I'm "mentally ill."

But what the fuck is mental illness but another word for Queer? At the end of the day, aren't we all just one big, disorganized tribe of freaks biologically compelled to obstruct the status quo? In fact, it wasn't all that long ago that Queer people were considered crazy by the same therapeutic state that has labeled my existence to be an illness. Members of the Gay Liberation Movement worked very hard to have every letter of LGBT removed from the DSM but what we should have done was burn that normie bible and declare all forms of neurodivergence to be expressions of Queer individuality. Instead, we left our comrades at the asylum behind in the name of assimilation and opened up a Pandora's Box that afforded an old white lesbian the ability to call me trash with a rainbow flag on her lapel.

Well, fuck her and fuck the rest of those pink capitalist conformists in the LGBT industrial complex, with their corporate sponsored parades and their bougie galas. Sylvia Rivera wouldn't recognize them as part of her tribe if they passed her poppers in the ladies' room and neither do I. So, let's just get the record straight right here, right now, I am not LGBT, I am Queer, and my queerness includes four little assholes with cunts who live inside my head. I am as proud of being a lunatic as I am of being a tranny or a dyke because all of these "disorders" are really just symptoms of the same disease. A diagnosis that reads that I am not normal and that the normal aren't safe anywhere I dare to sashay.

So, color me guilty as charged and stay the hell out of my way, me and the voices in my head have our own hell to raise.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Shadowboxer by Fiona Apple

* Personality Crisis by New York Dolls

* Sacrilege by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs

* Crazy by Patsy Kline

* Hood by Perfume Genius

* All I Do by Bully

* Nervous Breakdown by Black Flag

* Soft Sounds from Another Planet by Japanese Breakfast

* Paranoid by Black Sabbath

* Carry Me Home by Mitski

Kiss My Ass, I'm Irish: Celtic Pride Against White Supremacy

 White supremacy remains a very potent weapon for the powerful in this country and I don't think that the far left should stand alone in confronting it. Many of my more libertarian readers tend to cringe at such notions and I can't completely blame them. Sadly, there are a good number of self-proclaimed leftists who use combatting white supremacy as an excuse for building up the state, but this doesn't change the fact that traditionally white supremacy has been a far more lethal excuse to do the exact same thing, and it still is. 

It's not even that the powerful in this country are necessarily racist, many are but for the most part bigotry is just an easy way to manipulate poor people into forfeiting their agency to authoritarian structures in the name of combatting other poor people.

Donald Trump's current war at the border is probably the best example of this in progress. The economy is shit and Americans in general are getting fucked left and right in every hole that bleeds. In a sane world, Wall Street welfare queens like Donald Trump and Elon Musk would be the focus of their rage. Instead, these same vile gangsters have hoodwinked half the country into getting behind an insane conspiracy to quadruple the size of the federal police state so they can sic gestapo on itinerate border hoppers who we're told are destroying this country with a massive crime wave that quite simply does not exist.

After surging during the economic shitstorm of the Pandemic, violent crime rates in this country have largely dropped back to where they were in 2019 and there is zero evidence that increased immigration at the time had anything to do with sparking that temporary bump. Quite the contrary, violent crime appears to have spiked across the Western Hemisphere because of the Pandemic, hitting hardest in the most impoverished nations of Central America and provoking many of their people to flee to safer sections of the map. All available statistics actually suggest that not only are undocumented immigrants less likely to commit violent crime than natives, but they are also more likely to be the victims of it too.

Sadly, none of these inconvenient facts stopped Donald Trump from using the potent imagery of increasingly dark vagrants spilling across the Rio Grande to get elected by wide margins of my fellow libertarians. However, I don't take this shit so personally simply because my post-left anarchist inclinations have driven me to adopt increasingly libertarian tactics to combat the white power state. 

I tend to take this shit a little more personally than your average libertarian honkey, especially around Saint Patrick's Day, because I am a historically literate nerd of Irish Catholic ancestry, and I am well aware of the fact that my people were the original wetbacks in this country before we assimilated beneath a banner of white supremacy.

You wouldn't think it by looking at a South Philly Trump rally, but Irish people weren't even considered white when we first stepped foot on American soil. After centuries of violent colonial rule under the British Empire, my ancestors left their homeland in the mid 19th century to escape a blight that English authorities deliberately manipulated into a genocidal famine. About a million of us died and millions more flooded America's shores aboard floating coffins, starving and riddled with disease, and when we got here, we faced a lot of the same perils faced by Hondurans and Guatemalans today. 

We were subjected to alarmist tabloid headlines and baseless conspiracy theories. We were herded into squalid tenements and targeted by violent mobs. And we were singled out for the simple fact that there was just too damn many of us to assimilate into America's cultural purgatory of Anglo-Saxon conformity all at once.  In fact, an entire political party was built on this hysteria; the so-called American Party, better known as the Know Nothings, who waged a holy war on Irish Catholics both literally and electorally beneath the banner of "Americans must rule America!" 

This proto-MAGA sect swept the country in the mid 1850s, electing over 100 congressmen as well as mayors in major cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. They eventually even took the White House with our 19th president, Millard Filmore, being a former Know Nothing. During this time, these pseudo-populist despots passed egregiously anti-democratic laws that mandated teaching the King James Bible in public schools and barred naturalized citizens from voting unless they had spent at least 21 years in the country. 

They also literally murdered people, especially at the ballot box, like they did at the Bloody Monday Riots of 1855 in Louisville, Kentucky, when Catholic homes were burnt to the ground and as many as 100 Irish people were killed in cold blood while thousands more were left with little choice but to flee the city for their lives. 

So, what the fuck happened then? How did my people go from being called "white niggers" and digging ditches in the ghettoes alongside our darker counterparts to being a major part of the same system that was once devoted to expelling us from its shores by any means necessary? Well, we did the same thing that the Italians and the Jews did; we got busy being white. We achieved this dubious goal in a number of ways but most of them essentially amounted to us convincing our masters that we could be trusted to do their bidding for them. 

We murdered our fellow Catholics during the Mexican American War when 40% of the United States Army was made up of immigrants. We rose up the ranks of the New England chapters of the Democratic Party by becoming the loudest advocates for chattel slavery north of the Mason-Dixon Line. And we dutifully savaged the next influx of American refugees, leading violent race riots against Chinese railway workers accused of stealing our jobs.

So, now Irish Catholics can stand proud as white people but was it really worth it? What did we as a people really gain from this Faustian bargain beyond a slightly lower rank on the police state's shitlist? The right to identify with the same globalist Anglo-Saxon monoculture that kept our people in chains for centuries and continues to divide our ancestral homeland? 

For this we forfeited a proud culture of Celtic pride built around agrarian peasant resistance to colonial rule. We sacrificed everything that made us Irish just to conform to a crass commercial culture that still fundamentally hates us, that paints us as drunkards and mooks and turns our sacred holidays like Saint Patrick's Day into an excuse for Protestant frat boys to binge themselves sick on green beer and vomit into plastic leprechaun hats.

This is the other side of whiteness that the left often forgets to acknowledge. The first ethnicities that the master race erased were actually the European peasant cultures that they reduced to a single color. There is no such thing as white culture. This is nothing but a purposely vague conglomeration of secular universalist Protestant hogwash that essentially amounts to little more than kneejerk conformity and an evangelical devotion to institutional power. 

That and the constantly evolving demonization of the "other" which is basically just any outgroup that fails to comply with its own erasure and generally makes the world too diverse to govern. That used to be us, and as far as I'm concerned it still should be.

We were all minorities once, a million little tribes scattered to four corners of the wind. This only became a problem when a few powerful people decided that just one city state full of servants wasn't enough to satiate their power lust and decided to build empires spanning many tribes so they could play God with the poor people in the next village too. From this rapidly expanding cesspool came America and from America came the concept of the white race, invented by the same imperialists who sacked Ireland so they could sack Virginia too. 

During the early days of American colonialism there was no black or white. Slaves and servants came in a wide variety of colors and their status could evolve through subordination to the current puritanical traditions favored at the time by the royals back home in London. It wasn't even totally unheard of to find slaveowners of African descent provided that they said their prayers and paid their taxes.

Then a wealthy landowner by the name of Nathaniel Bacon decided that he was tired of kicking up his fortune to the Virginia colonial elites and formed a militia made up predominantly of European indentured servants and African slaves to overthrow the government. Bacon's Rebellion quickly got out of hand however and became something of a multicultural populist referendum on life under empire. The uprising was suppressed relatively quickly but not before Bacon's unruly slave army had succeeded in burning Jamestown to the ground. 

The planter class got scared and sought to divide the peasantry against each other. They did this by inventing whiteness as an ethnic concept. And just like that, all Europeans were spared the whip while those Africans deemed Black were reduced to a permanent slave caste.

But not every European embraced assimilation. Some of us wanted to remain ungovernable. And some of us were even insulted at the very notion of becoming complicit in reducing other human beings to property. This included a handful of Irish Catholic conscripts during the Mexican American War who deserted their posts to join the Mexican Army in resisting the Protestant expansion of chattel slavery in Texas. These unruly Micks ended up forming a ferocious artillery unit known appropriately as Saint Patrick's Battalion and while many were captured and executed as traitors, they didn't die white servants of American imperialism, they died free, and they died Irish.

I may be but a genderfuck heretic, but this is what I celebrate on Saint Patrick's Day, a culture of proud peasant renegades who stood with the oppressed not just because it's the honorable thing to do but because it's the only way to break free from the shallow culture of our ancestral oppressors. So, if you're truly as proud of being Irish as I am then you'll join me in standing with the latest class of wetbacks and spit your ill-gotten whiteness back in the face of the Know Nothings of the GOP.

The only thing great about America is all the weird little tribes who resist it. So, you motherfuckers can keep your white power and kiss my ass, because I'm not white, I'm Irish.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* This is a Rebel Song by Sinead O'Connor

* November Spawned a Monster by Morrissey

* The Parting Glass by the Pogues

* My Heart is in Ireland by the Wolfe Tones

* Tommy Gun by the Clash

* Home Again Garden Grove by the Mountain Goats

* Fire on Babylon by Sinead O'Connor

* Free the People by the Dubliners

* What's Left of the Flag by Flogging Molly

Ukraine Deserves Better Than Trump and Zelensky

 It was the imperial bitch fest heard round the world. Two of Babylon's finest Frankenstein monsters dueling it out on live tv over a mythic peace deal that neither creature seemed to prioritize over their respective egos. In one corner of the Oval Office, we had Volodymyr Zelensky, sulking and rolling his eyes in an ill-fitting black muscle shirt like a sullen teen caught masturbating in the family gym. In the other corner, we had Donald Trump and his almost deliriously sycophantic toady, JD Vance, taking turns blowing each other for saving the world. 

It was supposed to be a photo-op, a press conference celebrating a supposedly agreed upon deal for Ukraine to fork over half of their embattled nation's rare mineral rights as a thank you to the United States for talking them in and out of World War 3. How this strange colonial tax was supposed to lead to lasting peace is beyond me, but Zelensky clearly wasn't interested in bootlicking for the cameras that day.

He came out swinging with a barely coherent diatribe about the evils of diplomacy that included the usual CNN approved revisionist history of Putin's invasion that carefully deleted all the NATO provocations that inspired it. Donald Trump and his Wall Street rent boy responded exactly the way Zelensky probably hoped they would, by lecturing the Ukrainian strongman like the help caught pocketing the silver, browbeating another world leader for over ten minutes for disrespecting his imperial masters with the inconvenience of a dissenting opinion and just generally making complete and total asses of themselves.

By the time this embarrassing shitshow was finally over, Volodymyr Zelensky was being hurled out of the White House like a common hooligan and Donald Trump was badmouthing him on social media like a scorned middle school debutante. Apparently, this is American diplomacy in 2025. Somehow, I'm less than shocked that I'm less than shocked.

The really fucked up thing here is that the ceasefire itself was actually a really good idea for everyone regardless of how the war in Ukraine started. Its continuation in perpetuity solves nothing for the legions of young conscripts dying daily on both sides over a quarter mile of bloody trenches and bombed out ruins. Donald Trump ended up leaving this episode stinking like a soiled conquistador with Tourette's syndrome but most of his criticisms of Volodymyr Zelensky were more true than false.

This handsome kid isn't the Joan of Arc of liberal democracy that the progressive universe sells him as. He is an increasingly authoritarian kleptocrat who hasn't just held off elections indefinitely under martial law but has banned most of his nation's formidable opposition parties and essentially nationalized Ukraine's media under a single heavily censored government conglomeration. The real reason this asshole is allergic to the peace table is that he knows that without a war and the torrential slush fund of dissent crushing weaponry that comes with it he won't last a week before being overthrown by his own goddamn generals.  

But peace was never the real motivation here. It very rarely is with Trump. As if his demand for a bounty of shiny things weren't suspect enough, Trump made this fact even more obscenely clear right in the middle of his screaming match with Zelensky when he jumped from warning about the dangers of World War 3 to bragging about initiating it by sending Ukraine Javelin missiles at a time when even Barack Obama felt this was going too far. These were the first offensive weapons shipped to Kiev, $47 million dollars of them to be exact, and it wasn't the only assistance Trump provided to provoking the war he suddenly wants to end either.

The Donald also dutifully approved the continued build-up of NATO forces on Russia's borders started by Obama after his Maiden coup led to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. This included the Cuban-Missile-style Navy patrols on the Black Sea using battleships capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Trump spent 82 days off Russia's shores in 2020 alone, provocatively buzzing Sevastopol's Black Sea Fleet like a teenage greaser playing chicken with doomsday.

Trump further highlighted his less than peaceful motives in this region by endorsing the UK's recent insane suggestion of putting British troops on the ground in Ukraine and has even flirted with the possibility of sending in US troops as well to secure his precious goddamn minerals which is what he's really after here. Donald Trump may put on a big show of aping like Pat Buchanan with dick jokes, but his foul-mouthed isolationism usually amounts to little more than a hustle. The fucker is basically just against any war that he can't personally profit from, and Trump's ties aren't made in sweatshops in Kharkiv.

What Trump really wants to do is to strip Ukraine of the copper wiring before he shifts the American Empire towards consolidating its flagging control over the Western Hemisphere with a new Monroe Doctrine on Drug-War steroids then launching his own world war against Russia's sponsors in China.

His Fox approved Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, has said as much: "Stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe... the US is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, reorganizing the reality of scarcity and making the resourcing trade-offs."

But not all of the Donald's fellow imperialists agree. Many are heavily invested in turning the war in Ukraine into an endless gauntlet of grotesque horrors simply so they can justify handing forklifts full of American tax dollars over to their friends in Raytheon while they keep churning out more toys that blow up the moment they land on Ukrainian soil. 

Volodymyr Zelensky has become the figure head of this deeply sick set, a sexy Semitic action figure regurgitating neoliberal talking points in roguish broken English while he sells one generation of Ukrainians after another into forced military prostitution. The man has become a monster but unlike Trump he didn't start out that way.

The biggest lie Donald Trump barked at Zelensky was the absurd notion that he started this war. Russia didn't even start this war, America did. We started it by promising Ukraine NATO membership in 2008 before using romper-stomping skinheads to overthrow the country's democratically elected government in 2014. This is when the Donbass, whose citizens had overwhelmingly voted for that government, seceded and the US encouraged their puppets in Kiev to launch a glorified race war to root out the regions ethnic Russians with a driving rain of indiscriminate artillery fire.

Zelensky was actually elected specifically on the promise to end this madness by granting the Donbass autonomy and reigning in the neo-Nazi battalions reenacting Operation Barbarossa on Russia's borders. Zelensky would chicken out on the frontlines of this civil war before Russia invaded but returned to reason during negotiations held by Israel and Turkey in Istanbul a few months into that disastrous imperial excursion.

Volodymyr had essentially signed off on the outline of an agreement that would have seen Russia withdraw back to the Donbass in exchange for Ukraine's neutrality. It was the United States and the United Kingdom that convinced him to rip it up. Trump's old buddy, then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson actually travelled to Kiev in person during these talks in April 2022 to tell Zelensky himself that he couldn't expect western support if he signed on to the ceasefire, but he would receive an endless allowance of Atlantic artillery if he kept the war burning indefinitely.  

The result was Zelensky taking the momentum from his victory against Putin's initial invasion of Ukraine and investing it into his own invasion of the same regions in the Donbass that he was elected to let go of, and the result of this insane crusade within a crusade was the seemingly impossible feat of Russia successfully annexing nearly every other Russian speaking region of Ukraine over the last two years, the same regions that ferociously resisted Russia's initial rapacious advances and helped Zelensky, a man they overwhelmingly voted for, to humiliate the nearly undefeated Putin the Terrible without a single goddamn ATACMS. 

Now the entirety of those border-fluid bloodlands face certain conquest regardless of who wins, or which deal does or doesn't get signed. If Donald Trump's heavily televised flogging of Volodymyr Zelensky doesn't convince the Ukrainian people that NATO is a glorified protection racket on a good day, then I don't know what will. It's also increasingly impossible to ignore the fact that regardless of his initial intentions, the longer Zelensky rules the more like Putin he becomes. So, how can peace be a solution when it's being decided by such despicable despots?

This isn't to say that all is lost for Ukraine and the Donbass, but I believe that the quickest way out of World War 3 might actually be the kind of mutinies that helped bring an end to World War 1. People forget that the Bolsheviks came to power on a promise to end Russia's involvement in that imperial shitshow and that the German Empire was dissolved almost simultaneously by a conspiracy of "soldier's councils" formed to resist their own officers. Both of these bold campaigns would end tragically in capitulation and another world war, but Ukraine was always the last region to fall in line.

These are the Wild Steppes after all. The home of the Zaporizhian Sich, a stateless polity of renegade Cossack mercenaries and escaped serfs who challenged the authority of every other state in the neighborhood for centuries and ruled like honorable thieves on the high seas of an ungovernable wasteland. So why should world wars be the only chapters of history to repeat themselves?

Both Ukraine and the Donbass deserve better than to be the follies of a nest of lecherous hoodlums wrestling over borders and minerals. My only advice as a shit-talking armchair anarchist is to stop shooting each other and turn your guns against the real enemies in the wheelhouse. Kill the captain, save the ship. The Sich lives when the bitch dies, and we all know who the bitch is.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Rebels by Drive-By Truckers

* Cochise by Audioslave

* Queen Bitch by David Bowie

* Cult of Personality by Living Colour

* Trash by New York Dolls

* Where Did You Sleep Last Night by Nirvana

* Courtesans by the Magnetic Fields

* Bad Mouth by Fugazi

* The Bitch is Back by Elton John

* You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do What You're Told) by the White Stripes

The Un-Banality of MAGA: Trump is Not Unprecedented, He's Just Obnoxious

 Before I begin my latest act of contrarian journalistic blasphemy, I feel morally obligated to observe the basic fact that Donald J. Trump is a completely grotesque piece of human filth. Unspoken ethical obligations aside, I do know this fact to be existentially true. America's current Commander in Chief is a pathologically heinous human being and the evidence to this fact is quite overwhelming. The Donald himself barely even tries to conceal it. In fact, he often seems to be downright proud of his Gotham-grade villainy.

This is a man who took his daddy's slumlord kingdom and turned it into a multibillion-dollar empire by defrauding entire zip codes with corporate welfare schemes that left South Jersey in the shadows of a colossal graveyard of gawdy gutted casinos. This is a literal serial rapist with over two-dozen accusers who was also a known confederate of Jeffrey Epstein during the peak of his own nefarious career as a child sex trafficker to the stars. And this is man whose almost demonically derelict pathology extends far beyond ancient history; it informs his leadership as a modern-day Caligula who has merely taken his kinks and made them public policy.

The man wantonly threatens a global economy still reeling from the pandemic he oversaw during his last reign of terror with a massive trade war unless every other nation agrees to aid and abed his insane conspiracy to ethnically cleanse the Rio Grande and turn the War on Drugs into the new frontier of the War on Terror. He is threatening to recolonize the Panama Canal, buy Greenland from Denmark like an Arctic slave plantation, and pave over Gaza while children still writhe in the rubble.

You would have to be ethically anesthetized not to detest such an obviously loathsome beast but the only thing more horrifying than this pathological trainwreck's still buoyant popularity is the fact that he actually isn't all that unusual among his fellow elites who seem to only begrudgingly tolerate his existence when they aren't using their dying news empires to openly declare him to be the reincarnation of Gilles de Rais.

We all seem to forget that Donald is in fact one of them, the gilded class of American aristocracy that floats effortlessly back and forth through the revolving doors of big business and big government. This is largely because both Trump and his ilk of swampland predators have quite a bit invested in the notion of him being exceptional. But he's not. 

After all, the Donald was old friends with Bill Clinton at a time when he too was an active sexual predator and a frequent flyer on their co-conspirator Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express. The upper echelon of both parties is riddled with tax cheats and inside traders, some of whom are afforded the unquestioned status of respected elder statesmen like Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi while they rifle through our wallets like dope sick junk fiends. And critically acclaimed presidents with virtually untarnished reputations have been proven guilty of all manner of diplomatic gangsterism.

Barack Obama, the man generally held in esteem by the legacy media as a sort of sainted anti-Trump, had democracies in Honduras and Ukraine overthrown over relatively minor disagreements on how their leaders should pay the rent and the only reason that Donald Trump even has a graveyard to build condos on in Gaza is because Barack's VP, Joe Biden, filled it with corpses by bankrolling Bibi's final solution.

So, yes dearest motherfuckers, Donald Trump is guilty as shit, but he is guilty as shit of the exact same fucking shit that nobody could be bothered to give a shit about until his dayglow ass was the one sitting on the toilet. The only thing that makes Donald Trump any different from the rest of these thugs is that he has the nerve to be proud of the sick fucking things that they all do.

While the Kennedy's tactfully pay for another abortion for the help in one of the more shadowy neighborhoods of Camelot, Trump boasts bombastically about their shared ability to "grab them by the pussy." While the Bush's and the Clinton's lean on their NATO tricks to kick up the rent in the backrooms of Brussels, Trump shakes them down in front of a live audience like Paulie Walnuts bathed in bronzer. And while America's mandarins have been carefully prepping the Gaza Strip for fumigation for nearly a century while pretending to sue for peace, Trump announces plans for a Holocaust memorial theme park by the Levantine Sea before the blood has even dried on the beach.

The only thing really unprecedented about Donald Trump is his total lack of shame. He is the one overprivileged despotic asshole who is actually proud of being an overprivileged despotic asshole. Sadly, this cocky bravado is also what seems to convince an electorate despondent after decades of empty promises and cheesy pick-up lines to believe that Donald Trump is some kind of Beltway outsider even though he once bankrolled most of his supposed rivals.

This is also the only reason that certain classes of Donald's fellow elites despise him. They don't oppose his sickening behavior; they oppose his refusal to keep it behind closed doors like the rest of them. The last thing that a bunch of greedy imperialists want is to advertise to the world exactly how the sausage is made but at the end of the day, doesn't the world deserve to know? Shouldn't the people of Egypt and Ukraine know exactly what they're selling their souls to put in their stomachs?

This is the one silver lining on the toxic smog belching from Donald Trump's smokestacks and the results are occurring in real time as we speak. Europe's leaders are openly discussing cutting ties with Washington and courting their own more regional spheres of influence rather than delegitimizing their own slippery grip on power by licking an irate imbecile's boot. America has never been more openly despised by the typically compliant quislings on its borders and the Middle East is more united than ever over their opposition to a more public Nakba than what they have become accustomed too. This is how empires die but this is also how democracy degenerates into open authoritarianism. 

My argument here isn't that Donald Trump is not the new Hitler; it's that his opposition in the Democratic Party are the new Social Democrats too. People forget that Adolf Hitler wasn't all that special either. Germany had long been an empire defined by cruelty and authoritarianism. The first concentration camps were actually built in Namibia during the 19th century to cure that German colony of the tribes most resistant to its rule. 

Hitler's own rise to power was paved by his rivals in Weimar Germany's Social Democratic Party who decimated the plutocracy of the Reichstag with emergency orders like Article 48 that allowed the Chancelor to rule without consent. This device was used to restore order after Hitler's 1923 Beer Hall Putsch only to be used by the Devil himself a decade later to declare himself Further.

When it's all said and done, fascism is little more than the state without shame. It comes about when empires like America and Germany run out of excuses for their vile existence and are left with nothing more inspiring to resort to than exploiting the gross sense of entitlement they have cultivated in their long-suffering subjects along with more naked displays of longstanding repulsive behavior that tend to impress a population still clinging to a toxic relationship with its leaders.

Donald Trump may not be any less vile than his predecessors but much like with Hitler, the popular mandate given to his open venality could be one thing that pushes him to take it one step further into the abyss. However, it must be understood that this fate is only the end result of the sanctified state anointed by his predecessors and still trafficked as a panacea by his rivals. When we fail to recognize that Donald Trump is merely one of them with less table manners, we make his return or the return of another like him inevitable. 

We have to recognize that the state itself is the problem and that its existence in any form is one defined by violence and barbarism. Otherwise, this cycle of "legitimate" authority followed by "illegitimate" authority will only continue until there is nothing left to rule but graveyards dug next to a rising sea.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* The Hand That Feeds by Nine Inch Nails

* Frankenstein by New York Dolls

* Shitty Ballet by Bleached

* Sweet 69 by Babes in Toyland

* Joiner by Blondshell

* All Hail Me by Veruca Salt

* Shadowboxer by Fiona Apple

* Revenge by Ministry

* Bad Boy by New York Dolls

* Up the Wolves by the Mountain Goats

This post is devoted in loving memory to David Johanson and Michelle Trachtenberg. Two odd souls who made this odd soul feel a little less odd. 

It's Time for the Left to Take Another Look at Secession

 There is a mad beast loose in the White House again; a lecherous, creamsicle colored, publicity whore, scantily clad in peeling bronzer and a shrill shock of combed over ginger squirrel pelt. A nasty, petulant brat trapped inside the decomposing carcass of a serial rapist who thinks that being president makes him a Caesar rather than an unwashed mouthpiece for a floundering empire. He has been here before and his last scattershot crime spree ended with him barely escaping the wreckage in unprecedented disgrace while his shriveling fan club threw a violent hissy fit on Capitol Hill. 

The only reason this thing called Trump's triumphant return to the scene of the crime is even possible is because the imbeciles who replaced him were too busy facilitating a genocide in Gaza to even begin to clean up his mess. So, now Nero is out, and Caligula is back in but this time that soiled lunatic has gathered a posse; an odd hit squad of Christian Nationalists and technofascists who seem to be committed to using the shockingly resilient cult of personality known as MAGA like a populist-colored wrecking ball rather than simply trying to tame it like Trump's last administration of neocon zookeepers.

The results have been something of a gas chamber of hot air, but they have also been swift, successful, and overwhelming. This time around, the new and improved Donald Trump has been slightly more busy papering the walls of the Oval Office with executive orders than barking about the size of his penis on social media. A lot of this barely literate deluge of proclamations amounts to little more than a fleet of paper airplanes thrown to give Americans the impression that their government has reversed the trajectory of a sinking ship but sadly, some of the targets are fragile enough to be wounded quite severely, even by a fleet of flaming propaganda. 

The most obvious examples are the undocumented and the youngest members of my own little tribe of gender outlaws. This is because these people already have next to zero rights in this country because that's the value both parties place on refugees and children. Both castes are essentially just glorified indentured servants in the land of the free, toiling beneath the weight of competing industrial complexes on factory farms and compulsory schools. 

So, even a mentally derelict corporate hype man like Donald Trump, kept around to slop the hogs with obscene gestures of imperial chauvinism while Elon Musk guts the Titanic, carries enough weight to crush them for exercise. ICE has already picked up where they left off four years ago, raiding maternity wards in search of the ghosts of MS-13 while the Department of Justice busies itself launching investigations into children's reading rooms and gender-neutral pronouns.

For once, the left in this country seems to have the right idea on how to handle this kind of federally mandated bullying with sanctuary laws and lawsuits. As an unrepentant libertarian localist, I support this kind of small government destabilization even when I'm not the target. By all means, throw everything you can get your fucking hands on into the guts of the machine and encourage every form of local government not to comply with the department of anything. Think local and sabotage nationally. 

Twelve states have already declared themselves to be transgender sanctuaries and another eleven along with the District of Colombia have some policy in place to limit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. I totally dig the spirit of decentralization going on here but sadly, it falls short of the kind of obstruction necessary to prevent the federal government from behaving like gestapo on steroids. That's because sanctuary laws don't actually render federal legislation inoperative. They merely bar local resources from assisting their acts of executive terrorism.

Considering the amount of tax dollars that both parties already supply the federal pig state with, the most these sanctuary laws can even hope to achieve is slowing down fascism. Any real results would require a dirty little word called nullification; a state's rights gimmick that allows local governments to obstruct federal officials from attempting to apply laws that their communities refuse to recognize.

Most modern leftists reject such acts of local civil disobedience out of hand because of their history of being advocated by bigots looking to stymy integration but I would actually dare to take it a step further and advocate for outright secession as a fundamental civil right for any community that finds their values being crucified on the cross of big government. 

I don't deny the risk of such legislation falling into the hands of assholes but that is a risk that any form of democratic governance faces, making the risk far more existential coming from a centralized federal conglomerate which is precisely what Abraham Lincoln turned the Union into the moment he razed habeas corpus in the name of consolidation.

The first Republican president may have succeeded in replacing chattel slavery with its industrial wage-based cousin, but he also set the stage for the kind untrammeled federal expansion that streamlined America's transformation into a global empire and a booming gulag archipelago. 

Ironically, if it wasn't for racists like Abraham Lincoln, racists like Strom Thurmond would have probably remained regional threats at best, but instead, the Union ended up supplying such Confederate creatures with the infrastructure necessary to take Jim Crow federal with the War on Drugs and the prison industrial complex. However, small government can cut both ways too.

The sharper Founding Fathers never intended the Union to be anything more than a strategic alliance among the Colonies. This is what the original Constitution, known as the Articles of Confederation, was designed for before the coastal merchant class organized a glorified coup with the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention of 1787 thus transforming a cluster of easily disposable feudal states into an oligarchy capable of staggering imperial ambitions. 

Before this, nullification had actually been successfully used by Northern Colonial abolitionists to resist the Fugitive Slave Act and many of these early American leftists rightly supported succeeding from any Union morally bankrupt enough to include slave states. 

As for the Confederacy made possible by the racist language and reckless centralization of this nation's second Constitution, I have long held the unpopular belief that if that nest of genocidal serpents were allowed to secede during the declining economic climate for chattel slavery of the mid-nineteenth century, that this would have likely only made a slave revolt capable of achieving the kind of independence secured by Toussaint Louverture's Black Jacobins in Haiti inevitable in Dixie and on a much larger scale. And just which side do you think that this Freeman's Republic would have taken during the Indian Wars that won the west for white power?

All things considered, it really is little wonder that historically subjugated minorities have traditionally been the leftists most likely to back secession and I'm not just talking about Marcus Garvey. 

After the Civil Rights Movement failed to achieve anything in the way of Black Power, a coalition of some of that movement's brightest renegades, including Malcolm's widow, Betty Shabazz, outlaw Panther, H. Rap Brown, and counterpunching play write, Amiri Baraka, gathered amongst the ashes of 1968 Detroit and formed the Republic of New Afrika. A movement which sought to establish a Black majority nation in the region of the South that already contained a Black majority by holding a referendum allowing the progeny of slaves to determine whether or not they wished to remain citizens of a nation that forced itself upon their ancestors.

American Indian Movement veteran Russell Means had a similar notion with his 2007 proposal for the Republic of the Lakota which would have been based on the national borders promised by the United State Government in the Treaty of Fort Laramie and while he received little support from the corrupt governments of the reservations currently occupying that land, Russell was not speaking alone. His voice was one of many in the still growing Land Back Movement that seeks to reestablish indigenous sovereignty over colonized territories from Aztlan to the Kingdom of Hawaii.

This is what I seek for my people too, a Queer nation in which a multi-ethnic race defined by our shared culture of decadent heathen resistance to Anglo-Saxon Protestant assimilation never has to rely on another vanilla technocracy for safety and dignity ever again. 

However, as an anarchist I also refuse to resort to Westphalian style nationalism to achieve this dream. I'm much more impressed by my fellow rural minorities in the Amish community who have managed to establish a successful communal society that can coexist with the "English" without borders while still maintaining autonomy both economically and culturally.

The only way to achieve this goal on a massive scale without empowering racists is by establishing pan-secession as a basic human right afforded to every community, no matter how small. This way if Mormon Utah succeeds from the United States, then a Queer city state in Salt Lake could just as easily secede from the Deseret as a four-bedroom Lesbian separatist commune could secede from Salt Lake.

There is indeed a mad beast loose in the White House again but the only reason that hideous thing is anything more powerful than a verbally incontinent houseguest of a racist country club is because the governed have forfeited our consent to a cartel of states united by the mistakes of dead breeders. I for one wish to formally renounce my consent to this government or any other not defined by voluntary membership. 

Consider this post an article of secession. Let's just hope it's not the last. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Goo Goo Muck by the Cramps

* I Know a Place by MUNA

* Behind the Wheel by Depeche Mode

* American Nightmare by the Misfits

* Plump by Hole

* Not Too Soon by Throwing Muses

* Two Times by Blondshell

* Home by Now by MUNA

* Provisional by Fugazi

* Declare Independence by Bjork

Martin's Dream Has Become Malcolm's Nightmare

 Dr. Martin Luther King had a dream, and it sounded pretty fucking sweet on the radio. Even a bitter post-everything anarchist like me gets a little choked up listening to the good doctor's Sermon on the Mount at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Martin had a dream about America living up to its word and redeeming itself after centuries of barbarism by opening its doors and letting everybody in. A dream in which his own children wouldn't be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character and all Americans would work together, play together, struggle together, go to jail together. A dream about inclusion that invited everyone to take part in the American Dream.

You could actually argue that America has kind of achieved this goal at least on the surface. In fact, America seems to have made Martin Luther King a major part of their whole sales pitch and the entire month of February is pretty much devoted to making this argument in the form of Black History Month. For 28 days a year, we are all reminded by a host of corporate sponsors that after just three civil rights acts and a few dead heroes America has become a place with Black celebrities, Black billionaires, Black CEOs, senators, generals and Supreme Court judges. We've even had a Black president. In what other indispensable empire could such things be possible?

If this all sounds a little too good to be true, then join the club and get ready to sit through a very short month of appalled guilt trips delivered by straight white dudes in dashikis. To be perfectly clear, I myself am what you might call a honky. In fact, I'm what many would likely refer to as a redneck. But I'm also a neurodivergent transwoman in the thick of Trump Country and I know when I'm being sold a bill of goods. The harsh reality that only a handful of politically incorrect people of color seem to even be willing to touch is that Martin's dream, at least the version sold at Walmart for 9.95, is tragically skin deep and quite nightmarish just beneath the surface.

In 1968, LBJ ordered a study to be done on racial disparity in America after Dr. King's assassination nearly triggered a nationwide revolution across the country's ghettos. The result was the Kerner Commission and what this commission found was a nation wracked by generations of institutional apartheid and a Black community in particular struggling to survive under third world conditions in the wealthiest nation on earth. The most tragic fact made clear by the Kerner Commission however didn't actually surface until half a century after it was published.

In 2025, some 57 years after LBJ passed this nation's last civil rights act while the ghettoes were still burning, study after study shows that racial inequality in this country is virtually unchanged from the one in the yellowed pages of the Kerner Commission and in some places, it has actually gotten worse. The earnings gap remains the same, the wealth gap remains the same, the disparity between Black and white homeownership remains the same, and four generations after desegregation, America's cities are more segregated than ever before.

"But how could this be...?" a frantic white woman cries out in the distance, "We killed Jim Crow!" Perhaps, but the War on Drugs brought him back by turning America's prison system into the most effective tool for white supremacy that the world has ever seen. In 1968, the American prison population was 188,000. Today, it stands at just over two million with another three million people living under some form of judicial supervision which renders convicted felons bereft of nearly every right guaranteed them by the civil rights acts of the 1960s, including the right to vote.

This population is made up overwhelmingly of people of color convicted of non-violent drug offenses and this isn't just some cruel coincidence. It was a deliberate conspiracy conjured up by failed segregationists like Senator Strom Thurmond who used the manufactured panic over America's poverty driven drug habits to turn the federal government they once opposed in the name of state's rights into the kind of white power behemoth that would make the Klan downright irrelevant.

But it wasn't cross-burning goons in white hoods who drove the final nail in this coffin, it was LBJ's Democrats. Men like former President Joe Biden, who Thurmond carefully groomed to take his place as hangman of the Senate Judiciary Committe, and former President Bill Clinton who together passed the largest crime bill in American history in 1994. A legal monstrosity that more than doubled the prison population within a decade with 60 new death penalties, 90 enhanced penalties, 100,000 new cops, and 125,000 new state prison cells. As late as 2007, then Senator Joe Biden described this bill as his proudest achievement. A year later he would serve as Vice President to America's first Black Commander in Chief.

Yes, a handful of the Black bourgeoisie like President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris have reached the pinnacle of American power, but they have only done so by taking part in the violence as token members of a police state still defined by white supremacy. 

So, now we have Dr. King's children not being judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their body count. We have Black prosecutors lynching Black children as adults, Black senators arming the Klan in blue with fucking battle tanks, Black generals reducing entire city blocks to cinders in Black countries like Somalia, Black Supreme Court justices giving it all the rubber stamp of "constitutionality", and Black billionaires taking their cut of the blood money.

This was always the inherent flaw in Martin Luther King's dream. America is an existentially imperial enterprise built on genocide, conquest, and slavery. There was never anything here worth redeeming and including Black people or any other minority into this conspiracy could only succeed in making them complicit at best. Malcolm X, the unofficial villain of Tyler Perry's Black History Month, tried to warn us that this dream could only end in a nightmare, and he did it from the cheap seats of the Lincoln Memorial.

Brother Malcolm took part in Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington, the one that ended with the speech that would make Dr. King immortal, but he would leave the Mall disparaging the entire inspirational happening as the "Farce on Washington." That's because Malcolm came to take part in what the March's organizers had originally intended to be a massive act of revolutionary civil disobedience, an occupation of the nation's capital that would cripple its ability to rule until its demands were met. 

However, after meeting with the Kennedy Administration, more moderate civil rights leaders like Dr. King made a deal with Camelot; they would carefully coordinate the march with the administration straight down to the signs caried and speeches given and even agree to a designated curfew if Kennedy agreed to pass a watered-down Civil Rights Act.

Malcolm X and many other fellow marchers were disgusted by this Faustian bargain. They accused King of selling out the Movement to the very people it was supposed to be fighting against, and they were right. JFK used the PR he milked from his photo-ops with the Civil Rights Movement to afford himself the moral cache that allowed him to drop napalm on the third world while still appearing to be a progressive.  

Malcolm and the Black Power Movement that formed by his gravesite saw the oppressed people of this nation as a part of a greater third world struggle for liberation against western imperialism that still rages to this day and while the official dogma of Black History Month struggles to paint this movement as the bitter fruit of Martin Luther King's rivals, the good doctor himself would come to admit that they were right.

In the years following the March on Washington and leading up to his untimely demise, Dr. King became increasingly radical in the face of an empire that he had come to realize had little intention of following through on its promises. King condemned America as the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet, declared his solidarity with the Vietcong struggling to liberate their own people by any means necessary in Vietnam, and condemned modern capitalism for being a morally bankrupt fetish totally incompatible with Christian values. 

In fact, during the time of MLK's assassination he was actually plotting another march on Washington known as the Poor People's Campaign that was intended to be more in line with the original's pre-modified goal of a revolutionary national occupation.

King's assassination, like Malcolm's, remains shrouded in the smoke of Cointelpro and J. Edgar Hoover's relentless jihad against civil rights but sadly it proved to be just as convenient for the American Empire as his rebirth as the patron saint of Black History Month did. America's cultural elites have chosen to empathize MLK's more assimilationist early teachings while essentially deleting the fact that he spent the last years of his life defying them with open contempt. The result of this whitewash isn't just the weird rise of the Black white supremacists that such touchy-feely liberals love, it is the rise of more flatulent hate mongers like Donald Trump who they love to hate.

Twenty percent of Black voters kicked up to the Donald in 2024. That's more Black votes than any Republican candidate has received in fifty years going to the most openly racist Republican candidate in fifty years and why not. Wasn't it you white liberals who convinced them that voting for a career white supremacist like Joe Biden was kosher in trying times? Don't get so pissed off just because they took your advice twice.

Nevertheless, with all that vitriol being left in the bucket, I still insist that Black history matters to a Queer hick like me for the same reason that Black Power matters to a Queer hick like me. Even with all the fanfare afforded to the whitewashed mythology of the Civil Rights Movement by the still very white establishment, these same condescending cunts remain more invested than ever in keeping the Black population of this country as incarcerated as humanly possible and that is because no population has ever proven more impossible to assimilate into the American nightmare than the Black population and this is a testament to a proud culture of resistance that leads all the way back to Africa.

A culture of slave revolts and rock n roll. A culture of Black Panthers and gangsta rap. A culture of prison riots, graffiti, lowrider cars and black-market Sour Diesel. A culture defined by being fundamentally ungovernable. In their own ways, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King both embodied this uniquely American outlaw culture, and it is a culture that inspired faggots like me to pick up a brick at Stonewall.

The dream is over. Time to wake up and let the revolution begin.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Cult of Personality by Living Colour

* Hip Hop by Dead Prez

* I Against I by Bad Brains

* List of Demands by Saul Williams

* Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry

* Express Yourself by NWA

* Rock N Roll N*ggar by Patti Smith

* Hey Joe by Jimmi Hendrix

* Who We Be by DMX

* It's a Mirror by Perfume Genius

A Girl Named Nicholas: How Individualist "Gender Ideology" Actually Keeps Kids Safe

 (TRIGGER WARNING: The following story includes detailed descriptions of childhood sexual abuse.)

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Nicholas, or at least that is what her parents named her. She wasn't exactly sure just what she was, but she knew from a very young age that she wasn't a boy. Her big brother was a boy and every time that her parents insisted that she be like him she became furious. The little girl didn't know how to tell her parents how wrong they were with words so she showed them in every other way that she could. Anytime her parents told her that "if you want to be like your big brother" you'll do this, she responded by doing the polar opposite.

Her big brother ate his fruits and vegetables, so the little girl refused to even touch another fruit or vegetable. Her big brother drank his juice from a sippy cup, so the little girl refused to drink anything but water even though juice was her favorite drink. Still, somehow, the little girl's parents were not getting the message, but when it came to potty training, things went too far fast. Suddenly, people were policing parts of the little girl's body that she found terrifying and confusing and then telling her to just behave like her big brother. Even worse, they demanded that she comply so they could send her away to the same Catholic school that was making her brother such a well behaved 'big boy.'

The little girl didn't know what to do so she did what she had always done and refused to comply, but her parents seemed to simply ignore her protests, cleaning up her messes and sending her away to that scary preschool anyway. This went on for nearly two years until the little girl's mother finally realized that her 'accidents' were deliberate and reacted to this discovery with violence for the first and only time in the little girl's childhood. Not long after this incident, the little girl's preschool teacher did the same but took it much further, dragging her by the arm to the bathroom that she refused to use, stripping her naked from her shoulders to her ankles and beating her with her bare hands.

Before the little girl could even figure out what had gone wrong, a Catholic priest visiting the church next door to the school observed her misbehavior and saw an opportunity. The young man in the white collar offered his expert guidance to the clearly frustrated preschool teacher. She was more than happy for the help and seemed to have no problem with this grown man taking a young child into the bathroom alone to show her exactly how a man is supposed to behave. What he did was molest the child. He put his hands and his mouth all over her body and made it do frightening things. The little girl was horrified but every other adult was allowed to put their hands on her body so why not this this man of God? How could she possibly say no?

Incredibly, things got worse. One day the visiting priest stopped by the preschool playground and with the approval of the little girl's teacher took her down the street to visit the rectory where he was staying. He fixed her a sandwich in the kitchen and then sent her upstairs to the bedroom. The moment the little girl entered that room she knew something was horribly wrong. Another man, a priest from her church was already in there naked. The visiting priest came into the room behind her, sat down on the bed in front of her, and removed his pants. The little girl knew right then and there exactly what these two men of God wanted her to do because one of them had already done it to her. She cried and begged the men not to make her do those things. She promised to be good. She promised to behave like her big brother.

The priests literally laughed in her face. The visiting clergyman joked to the other about how much the little girl had enjoyed what he did to her, about how big he manipulated the scary parts of her body into becoming. The little girl just kept sobbing and begging until the two priests lost their patience. One of them grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her mouth onto the other. She choked. She couldn't breathe. She thought that she was going to die. When the first priest had finally finished, he attempted to pass the gagging child to the other, but the little girl threw up before he could. The priests got mad. They looked at their soiled victim like a broken toy who had just ruined their good time. 

The visiting priest who had started it all leaned in close and told the little girl, "Look what a big mess you just made. Your parents and your teacher would be very angry if they knew what a big mess you just made." The little girl believed the man of God but all she could do was cry and beg to see her mommy until the priest told her that if she didn't calm down and clean herself up that they wouldn't let her go home, that she would never go home again. As scary as the little girl's parents had become, the things they did to her body out of frustration were far less horrifying than the things those men did to her body for fun. She finally decided to behave however she was told to behave.

After cleaning the child up a bit, the visiting priest returned her to her preschool and informed her teacher that she had made another mess in the rectory. The preschool teacher said nothing. She only looked at the petrified five-year-old as if she were some kind of diseased animal, perverting a house of God with her biology. She sent the little girl to the bathroom where she had been beaten and molested to continue to clean herself up before she could go home.

The little girl was terrified. She saw very little difference between what the priests had done and what her teacher and her mother had done. She didn't understand the difference between the ways those people touched her. She only knew that every single adult in her life was putting their hands on her frightening body in increasingly frightening ways. She believed that this was just what all adults did to children when they didn't behave, and all the adults seemed to want her to become a different species upon the threat of rape. The little girl couldn't handle the terrifying confusion of her reality. She looked into the bathroom mirror and didn't recognize the image staring back at her. She had no place left to hide. She had no choice but to make herself disappear.

I was that little girl, and I spent decades after being savagely abused by the church my parents held in such high regard in a fog. The first decade was spent at that same school surrounded by the people who broke me. I had no choice but to black it all out. I behaved like a boy, but I didn't feel it. I didn't feel much of anything. I would watch the other girls playing on the playground or chatting on their way to the girl's room where they seemed to feel so safe, and I desperately wanted to be a part of this but something deep inside told me that those feelings were dangerous, and the church seemed to validate these fears with its teachings on compulsory heterosexuality and proper gender behavior.

It wasn't until I finally rejected all this shit and began my ongoing gender transition that these horrific memories began to rush back to me in an avalanche of vivid flashbacks, violent seizures, and dissociative identities. I need people to know this horrific story and I need them to know every last gruesome detail of it because I wasn't just a victim of systemic childhood sexual abuse. I was a victim of spiritual abuse and the dangerous ignorance that it fosters. My parents had no idea that I was transgender because they had no idea what transgender even was. They just believed that I was a stubborn child who refused to obey. The only people who seemed to realize exactly how confused and terrified I was were those predatory priests and they used this terrifying confusion and the ignorance that afforded it to their full advantage.

Sadly, this isn't a rare case. It is a well-known fact that Queer children are far more likely to be victims of abuse because these are the children most likely to be too scared and ashamed of their own bodies to tell. It is also a well recorded fact that early childhood sexual education that includes just simply acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ people reduces the rate of this abuse exponentially and this is precisely what the Christian Right wants erased from the public square. This basic level of biological awareness that could save a child from the horrific trauma that I still struggle with every day is the "extreme gender ideology" that President Donald Trump condemns in his pompous executive orders. But he and his masters are the ones pushing an extremist gender ideology.

These people want to erase Queer children. They want to return to a world of make-believe where those kids don't exist, but they do and so did I. I had no idea what gender was, I didn't even know that 'transgender' was a thing. The only thing I knew was that I wasn't a boy and that I was terrified. If I had simply known that I wasn't the only person on the planet with these feelings, if my parents simply knew that early childhood gender dysphoria was a legitimate phenomenon, and if I had only been taught that my body was my body, and that no adult had the right to define it but me, I might have had the tools I needed to defend myself.

We need to provide our children with unfettered access to every kind of information and give them the critical thinking skills to assess this information for themselves. We need to get the government out of libraries and off the internet and we need to keep religion out of the government. We don't need curriculums or courses or helicopter parents trying to define what this or that pronoun means. We need to provide children with the resources they need to determine their own goddamn identities and then we need to shut the fuck up and listen when they tell us who they are. This isn't a gender ideology; it's an individual ideology and it is exactly as extreme as it needs to be to keep kids safe.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Candy Says by the Velvet Underground

* The Suburbs by Arcade Fire

* Life On Mars by David Bowie

* Shake It Out by Florence + the Machine

* Polly by Nirvana

* Bruised Violet by Babes in Toyland

* Sour Breath by Julien Baker

* Asking for It by Hole

* Tourniquet by Marilyn Manson

* Stellate by Samia

* Been a Son by Nirvana

* Something I Can Never Have by Nine Inch Nails

In the Age of Trump, All Queer People Should Be Anarchists

 Well, it's official dearest motherfuckers, according to the President of the United States I don't fucking exist and neither does anyone else who falls outside of that country club rapist's definition of male and female. I had my suspicions; people do seem to struggle to look me in the eye at the Cracker Barrel but thank God we have an Executive Office with the power to finally set the record straight.

I speak of course of Donald Trump's absurd executive order "Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the Federal Government" and as ludicrous as this document may be, quite literally defining something as biologically complicated as gender to be defined by what junk one doctor reports seeing on your birth certificate, it is still essentially a genocidal document designed to legally erase an entire population of people and it carries just enough authority to hurt the most vulnerable members of the already existentially vulnerable transgender community.

Aside from defining our very existence to be little more than a contrived conspiracy against the fabric of Western Civilization, President Trump's sweepingly vague executive decree also directs all federal prisons, jails, shelters, and juvenile facilities to be segregated based on some asshole's definition of sex. 

One in six transgender people find themselves a hostage of the prison industrial complex at some point during our lifetime, usually for engaging in the victimless crime of survival sex, and we are already 13 times more likely than cisgender prisoners to be sexually assaulted by fellow inmates or staff. This order doesn't so much change that harsh reality as it enshrines it into federal policy and emboldens the wardens of America's gulag archipelago to act with explicit malice.

Trump's executive order also promises to expand this institutional violence to the compulsory school system that so often serves as a pipeline to America's prisons by directing the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to take a break from kicking Muslims so they can bar transgender people from government funded single sex facilities that align with our gender identity.

This means that every school K-12 that excepts a dime of federal aid runs the risk of incurring the wrath of their landlord unless they carefully police the genitalia of the children in their charge and effectively deprive trans children of the basic human right of using the bathroom unless they are willing to run the risk of facing the same fate of Nex Bennedict or worse.

All of this comes at a time when transgender people like me are already finding ourselves under assault by quite literally every single branch of the American Government. 

Half the states in the country have laws banning transgender children from access to treatment that every major medical body on the planet agrees is virtually harmless and potentially lifesaving and, based on recent hearings, the Supreme Court looks primed to allow such draconian attempts to police the private medical decisions of families and individuals, in spite of the fact that they clearly violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

As if that weren't despotic enough, the House of Representatives has recently succeeded in passing a national law regulating gender in student sports that also conceals a far more heinous provision to amend federal law to define sex on similar grounds as Trump's pompous executive order. 

And I can just hear the queens at my local fag bar now, bitching me out over their cocktails, "This is why you should have voted bitch! This is why you should have voted!" I hate to break it to you girls but I'm still not taking a bite out of that poison apple. 

Who the fuck was I supposed to vote for? Kamala? That police state TERF in rainbow clothing. The same one who chucked transwomen into men's prisons as an attorney general and then deprived them of basic medical care. 

Was she the one who was going to save me? Well, then what stopped her and the rest her crooked administration from doing so over the last four years? What did any of those fucking Democrats do to prevent this? Quite the contrary, that party has long contributed to making these kinds of executive pogroms possible.

Executive orders are largely toothless proclamations made by presidents trying to appear less feckless amidst the deep state. Just look at all the meaningless crap Biden passed on student debt. The only thing that can give these glorified decrees fangs is the one thing the president does have direct authority over and that is the various departments of this country's police state, and nobody has done more to overfund and centralize that phalanx of bureaucratic fascisti than the Democratic Party.  

It was Kamala's rapidly disintegrating boss, Joe Biden, who helped then-President Bill Clinton pass his massive crime bill in 1994 that paved the way for the disproportionate mass incarceration of my people and turned the prison industry in this country into a multibillion-dollar corporate juggernaut. Within a decade of passing that atrocity, the incarcerated population of this country more than doubled and put China to shame as the largest human zoo on earth.

This ain't just ancient history either. In 2018, then-Senator Kamala Harris was one of the numerous Democratic sponsors of SESTA-FOSTA, a monstrously bloated bill that affectively criminalized any attempt by sex workers or their allies to organize online in a blatant bipartisan assault on internet freedom and the First Amendment that it depends on. 

And even more recently, it was the Biden-Harris Administration that fed the police state another $350 billion dollars as part of their massive covid slush fund which also pushed another $170 billion to the public school system without any strings attached, lining the pockets of some of the most blatantly transphobic school boards in the country.

I have seen the damage of this legislation firsthand in my own little corner of the rust belt. I volunteered at an AIDS resource center whose outreach programs providing contraceptives to at-risk sex workers were affectively crippled by SESTA-FOSTA and my local LGBTQ center was devastated by the covid lockdowns. 

None of us saw a single red cent from Biden's wallet, but the police force that shot a friend of mine dead for the crime of being neurodivergent while Black and the Catholic Church that literally tried to rape me straight in preschool both got their cut. Funny how that works out, don't you think?

When are Queer people going to get it, the government is not our fucking ally. The state has never recognized our existence as anything but mascots or cannon fodder, so why do we continue to recognize the legitimacy of the state? 

The people I love do it because they're scared. I'm not sure that I've ever met another transgender person who hasn't been horrifically traumatized, bullied, and humiliated, usually as children in the Democrats' sacred compulsory school system. So, when we hear bible thumping lunatics calling for us to be prosecuted like sex criminals, we get triggered, and when Democrats like Kamala and Biden put down the whip just long enough to pet us, it's hard not to be tempted by the devil we know.

This is a textbook abusive relationship, and we all know it. One arm of the state beats us while the other offers us shelter but they both serve the same industrial complexes. 

If the shockingly unthinkable resurrection of Donald Trump proves anything it's that the Democratic Party is about as worthless as the German Social Democrats who made the rise of Hitler inevitable by canoodling with the Freikorps while feigning tolerance for the weird people, and if that ugly chapter of democratic history should prove anything to Queer people it's that all of us should be anarchists right now.

But exactly what is a Queer Anarchist, you ask? I'll tell you but not before I tell you what the words 'Queer' and 'Anarchist' really mean. 

Queer is a counterculture of people biologically driven to live in resistance to Anglo-Saxon Puritan values and all of the secular forms of cultural conformity they inspired. While most of us are gender outlaws and sexual minorities, simply being LGBT does not make one Queer. It is resistance to mainstream assimilation that achieves that title.

An Anarchist is an individual or collective opposed to the state or any other authority defined by a monopoly on the use of force. Therefore, a Queer Anarchist is any Queer anti-assimilationist who puts tribe before authority and recognizes that the state is the authority that poses the biggest threat to this tribe. 

We as a tribe must resist Trump, and we must do it with every fiber of our collective being, but this resistance will prove just as pointless as our resistance to that man's last term if we fail once again to recognize that it is only the existence of the state itself that makes such a stupid and petty clown this dangerous. 

As long as the state exists no marginalized tribe of committed anti-conformists will ever be truly liberated. So, let's finish the job Stonewall started before it's too late.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Life On Mars by David Bowie

* Good Times by Twin Shadow

* Beginning to See the Light by the Velvet Underground

* Describe by Perfume Genius

* He Hit Me by Hole

* T & A by Blondshell

* Bruised Violet by Babes in Toyland

* Triptych by Samia 

* Y Control by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

* Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division

It's a Mad Max World for Us: Post Apocalyptic Daydreams in an Age of Dystopian Crisis

 This may or may not be the literal Armageddon but just peeking through the shades I can tell you that it's looking pretty goddamn apocalyptic to me. As I write this acidic screed, the only square mile of the continental United States that isn't frozen solid by a polar vortex the size of God's asshole is literally in flames. Deny the violence of science all you want but it doesn't take a charlatan like Al Gore to know which way the wind blows, and our rapidly mutating climate isn't even the most immediate threat posed to humanity at this apocalyptic moment.

In fact, there are almost too many Cthulhus to count. While greenhouse gasses bake the ice caps, NATO and Putin continue to play nuclear footsie in Ukraine as the Chinese Communist Party and the wizards of Wall Street race to put artificial intelligence in charge of it all even while they openly admit that this sick gambit runs the risk of provoking human extinction before the stock market crashes.

Fuck Armageddon, mankind will be lucky to make to next Tuesday while we split ourselves into equally hideous political parties to bicker over the remote. I'm honestly not sure if I can save these assholes and trying is making me want to throw myself into the fire. It's at times like these that I actually find myself begging for an apocalypse. It's at times like these that I can't seem help but to fantasize about living in a Mad Max America. In fact, I can almost smell the diesel fumes now....

Waking up whenever the daylight calls my name through the drapes of a bulletproof yurt, I'll hit the vacant desert plains of Central Pennsylvania in a heavily modified, rust-rod, El Camino technical with my leather clad horde of genderfuck lesbian barbarians to scavenge the radiated ruins of suburbia for coffee and gunpowder....

With a Buck knife in my teeth and a sawed-off M1 Carbine strapped to my thigh, I'll scale the facade of an abandoned football stadium strangled by vines and hunt white tailed buck with a crossbow between the charred rush hour carcasses on Interstate 80 from a defiled billboard....

I'll cook raw flesh on a bayonet over a flaming television set while the blistering riffs of an all-Stooges mixtape crackle over a ghetto blaster and my dreadlock laden coven of heathen sisters howl for Loki at a moon populated by the corpses of billionaires who failed to escape their demons on luxury rocket ships....

Maybe this all sounds a bit sick to you, and it probably is. I often have to remind myself to contain my glee over such notions of post-apocalyptic bliss in public. It only seems to feed the narrative popular amongst more industrial inclined leftists that post-civ anprim types like me are little more than recklessly misanthropic romantics turning the cinematic specters of George Miller's Max Rokitansky and Imperator Furiosa into something akin to Rousseau's noble savage. And I will own up to the fact that my lust for dieselpunk daydreams isn't exactly the most constructive response to an era of unprecedented societal collapse, but I won't apologize either.

These fantasies aren't merely the realm of radical minds anymore. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a growing multibillion dollar industry and I'm not just talking about the Mad Max franchise. Legions of otherwise vanilla office slaves binge themselves sick on countless hours of survivalist videogames and an endless procession of streaming zombie apocalypse spin-offs. Meanwhile, larping city slickers escape to the sticks just so they can haul up in luxury bunkers and take turns shooting each other up to a blister pocked bliss with high-powered paintball guns.

If this is a sickness, then it's a pandemic but it's a plague that makes perfect fucking sense when you consider the fact that we are already living amidst the kind of towering dystopian architecture that George Orwell and Aldous Huxley once shilled out as science fiction.

Your average American lives under a state of constant stimulation and constant surveillance. When they aren't struggling to pay off the debts of bourgeois degrees with borderline third world wages in the boiling kitchen dungeons of your neighborhood casual dining franchise, they are burning through their meager wages on clickbait smartphone crack like Candy Crush and being hounded to buy more shit that no one needs by fifteen adds at once. 

All while the Meta-NSA panopticon keeps careful tabs on every bowel movement that you feel compelled by unknown forces to report on social media and murders Somalian peasants with flying robots for choosing Allah over Pepsi-Cola.

THIS is your precious civilization. This is what 500 years of western enlightenment has brought us too. Morbidly obese voluntary enslavement at the barrel of a drone. And all it cost us was our tribes, our villages, our gods, our dignity, and our fucking ecosystem. But I'm the sicko because I'd rather shoot cannibals in the face at the end of the world than vote for backstabbing social democrats and unionizing my cell block at the nearest cubicle colony? Kiss my Unabomber reading faggot ass.

We need to face a few very harsh facts here. The first is that everyone is sick in our post-modern dystopia because we have all been raised on the toxic terrain of a deeply sick society. You smoke crack and I horde ammunition but we're all doing desperate shit to get by in a desperate situation. With that being said, the hardest fact that we need to face here is that, for better or worse, civilization as we know it is fucked, and the damage is likely irreversible.

 Even if by some miracle all the nation states of the world joined hands, buried their nuclear stockpiles, ended their various cold wars, and agreed to "go green" immediately, the sheer amount of infrastructure it would take to transform a colossal, fossil-fueled, global juggernaut like ours into one powered exclusively by renewable energy would require enough pollution and plunder to finish the job gasoline started in the process.

Society itself is the problem. Our entire civilization was designed for the sole purpose of endless expansion. You can pass all the Green New Deals you want, even the ones that aren't colossal scams will merely be shoveling shit against the tide.

This isn't to say that we should all just throw up our hands and go quietly into that good night. We should work like hell to do the only thing that can possibly curtail the damage of global capitalism and that's downsize; decentralize, secede, drop out, rebuild locally autonomous village communities divorced from the restraints of big business and big government. 

But we should also prepare for the worst because it's already here and there are worse teachers than Max Rokitansky to learn these lessons from.

The titular character of the first Mad Max film that began George Miller and Byron Kennedy's five-part apocalyptic opus in 1979 started out much like my critics, trying to work within the system to govern an increasingly ungovernable society on the verge of collapse. 

Max attempted to achieve this quixotic goal as a skull-cracking highway patrolman, but the more skulls he cracked, the less human he became until he found himself virtually indistinguishable from the highway savages he hunted. The resulting violence cost him his family and his humanity. So, Max left everything but the violence behind him and escaped in his battle-scarred Pursuit Special Cruiser to the desert abyss that stared back.

For the rest of the series Max essentially plays the role of the consummate egoist loner sketched out in the works of individualist anarchists like Max Stirner and Ernst Junger. His interactions with other survivors, often various kinds of tribal collectives, begin as solitary exchanges governed exclusively by self-interest, protection for petrol, but Max repeatedly discovers that even the strongest lone egoist cannot survive without forming longer lasting unions with those of seemingly divergent values and lifestyles based on the evolutionary principle of mutual aid.

These experiences don't exactly transform Max into a model communalist, but he learns to do as Stirner suggested in his 19th century masterwork, The Ego and Its Own, with his concept of the Union of Egoists. He builds temporary, voluntary, and non-systematic associations that exist only as long as all parties involved are willing to cooperate, and through this process Max, the other Max, rediscovers the humanity that fighting to keep a polluted society cohesive stripped him of.

However, this school of post-industrial egoism is far from the only approach to stateless survival presented in the franchise and speaking personally, as a genderqueer anarcho-feminist as well as a survivor of systemic sexual violence, the story of Imperator Furiosa told in the last two films of the series is one that resonates very deeply with me. 

After being robbed of a childhood amidst her matriarchal tribe by sadistic marauders who saw her gender as little more than currency in an apocalyptic landscape, Furiosa must conceal her gender and assimilate to a lifestyle of rape and pillage in order to survive. She only finds an opportunity for redemption when she attempts to help the marital sex slaves of her master, Immortan Joe, to escape to "the green place of many mothers" of her childhood.

However, when Furiosa discovers her utopia polluted beyond repair it is Max the masculine egoist who convinces her that salvation lies in her forming a union of many kinds of prisoners, including Joe's own conscripts, to retake the resources that their collective labor created back at the fortress from which they escaped.

The lesson here, as I see it, is that in an age of collapsing superstructures designed by disintegrating majorities, a tribal minority like mine can only survive unassimilated not only by binding ourselves together in a common subculture of resistance but by collaborating with other struggling subcultures of resistance and encouraging those still devoted to patriarchal master races to do the same.

I can't tell you how the next movie ends. I can only tell you that the odds of it ending harmoniously are not in our favor, but that doesn't mean that there is no hope. It simply means that our best hope rests in the survival of the small amidst the wreckage of the big. 

If Furiosa can do that with one arm chained to God's jawbone, then the very least I can do is die dreaming while civilization's useful idiots roll their eyes.

Devoted in loving memory to David Lynch (1946-2025) who left in a cloud of smoke with the flames still burning....

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs for an apocalyptic mixtape

* This Magic Moment by Lou Reed

* Search & Destroy by the Stooges

* We Will Fall by the Stooges

* Down on the Street by the Stooges

* Success by Iggy Pop

* Raw Power by the Stooges

* No Fun by the Stooges

* TV Eye by the Stooges

* The Passenger by Iggy Pop

* Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell by the Stooges

The Politics of Violence and the Violence of the Political

 Some sharp white dude with a nifty haircut once observed that those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable. Then some other white dude with a nifty haircut blew his brains all over Dealey Plaza with a cheap, Italian, mail-order rifle. In case you haven't guessed, the first quotable white dude was President John F. Kennedy, his far less quotable killer was an angry little man named Lee Harvey Oswald and regardless of what your pet theory on their last tango in Dallas may be, it's pretty hard to deny that it had something to do with the ultraviolence that defined Kennedy's first and only term in office. 

No matter how badly Oliver Stone may want JFK to be Mark Twain with a bigger dick that doesn't change the uncomfortable truth that between poetic soliloquys and boozy sexual escapades, the king of Camelot was little more than a garden variety terrorist, having elected officials whacked and firebombing rice paddies to the last day of his presidency. 

This was the man who followed up the fantastic and nearly apocalyptic failures of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis with Operation Mongoose, an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks on Cuba's civilian infrastructure by CIA trained fascist bandidos. oil refineries were bombed, railroads were sabotaged, and innocent people were slaughtered in cold blood.

So, even if you want to believe that there were Cuban exiles on the Grassy Knoll to deflower a generation of milquetoast liberal dreamers, who do you think loaded them up on ludes and Carcanos? Malcolm X called it best when he nonchalantly described Kennedy's demise as chickens coming home to roost. Then he got shot too.

Sixty some years later and America still hasn't learned a goddamn thing about the karmic political violence that decapitated Camelot. In fact, political violence is higher now than it's been since the Days of Rage that followed the JFK assassination, and the tide just keeps swelling higher and higher. 

We barely survived a frantically chaotic presidential election season which saw not one, but two serious attempts made on the front runner's life when he wasn't busy organizing lynch mobs to stock mythic Haitian cat eaters only to see the new year kicked off by not one, but two terrorist acts, both committed by men trained to kill like Oswald by the United States Government. 

At 3:15 AM on January 1rst, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 13-year veteran of the US Army welcomed in the New Year by crashing a pickup truck with an ISIS decal into the packed crowds of New Orlean's French Quarter, killing 14 and injuring 35 before he could be shot dead by police. Just six hours later, an active-duty Green Beret named Matthew Livelsberger parked a Tesla Cybertruck loaded with fireworks at the front entrance of Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas and shot himself while detonating his rented vehicle, injuring 7 in the process.

The media on both sides of the aisle seems to be utterly perplexed by this carnage even while they replay the footage in slow-motion to "Oh Yeah" by Yello. The gnashing heads of Snuff TV are quick as silver to blame it on the far-right, the far-left, and their rivals on social media but they've all conveniently forgotten the words of John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X. 

When powerful people make peaceful change impossible while spreading violent change across the world it is only a matter of time before those chickens come home to roost.

All of the violent acts listed above were inspired by a vast array of motives. The only conspiracy connecting them all is that they were all launched against perceived representatives of the most violent empire on the planet. For a nation actively stoking the flames of a full-blown holocaust in Gaza and a possible apocalypse in Ukraine to expect anything less than violence is really nothing short of absurd.

This is the same kind of almost mystical, dewy-eyed, double-standard that the Westphalian nation state tried to apply to the kings and emperors of Old Europe with the specter of monarchism and it worked for a while. Killers were kings and kings were gods until gods started getting killed by their own irate subjects. Empress Elisabeth in 1898, King Umberto in 1900, King Carlos I and Crown Prince Luis Filipe in 1908. It was all oh so very shocking but not nearly as shocking as the October Uprising that shattered Czarist Russia into a thousand shards in 1917. 

Violent change made inevitable.

What exactly is terrorism? What constitutes "political" violence? We're told that it is an act of violence perpetrated with an explicitly political motive. Well, then what about the tax resistor being thrown in prison for refusing to feed the war machine his pocket change? What about the Black man shot dead in cold blood for failing to genuflect to the kings in blue? 

549 Americans were killed in the United States between 9/11 and 2019 during designated terrorist attacks, all during an era in which we were commanded by outrage over political violence to fight a violent War in Terror. Those deaths were the tragic fallout of the state that this forever war grew. So, were the 1,164 civilians murdered during fatal police shootings in 2023 alone but where is their outrage? Where is their war on terror?

This level of downright dizzying injustice cannot be silenced and stifled by the legacy media anymore. Even while the Supreme Court shrugs at banning TikTok and pigfucking oligarchs like Elon Musk buy off Twitter, there are simply too many camera phones for them to govern. We have all become digital witnesses to police stranglings and hospital bombings, and the more the elites attempt to pretend that it's all just not happening or it simply doesn't matter, the less legitimacy they can afford to clothe their naked greed and hubris with.

In a "free world" like this, with a global corporate state apparatus that is this omnipresent and inescapable, the rage becomes like fumes and every act of violence becomes political. Smash and grabs become acts of revenge against the mass gentrification of box stores. Workplace shootings become one-man uprisings against cubicle despotism. And every spark threatens to ignite a Bolshevik size prairie fire amidst the busted ovens of a failed technostate.

We can't pretend that any of this is shocking anymore without being complicit and I refuse to join the gasping class in their breathless chorus of virtue signaling awe, but I won't advocate carnage either even if I do understand it. Not only is it gruesome and dehumanizing even for the perpetrator who has reduced themself to fighting like a state, but it isn't particularly affective either.

Firing three bullets into a CEO feels fantastic but so what? Then what? What changes when we simply remove a single cog from the machine? And what did the Bolsheviks really achieve with their bloodbath beyond merely replacing one massive death machine with another?

The state itself is the source of the mass violence of the political and it cannot be replaced; it must be disengaged. A real war on terror would be a grassroots movement of citizens who refuse to pay taxes, refuse to buy their goods from corporate thieves, refuse to invest in banks or elections. 

A growing collection of autonomous communities who only trade, share, and barter between others who refuse to validate any institution which benefits from the systematic monopolization of the use of force. A counterculture of counter governments rendering the violent authority of the state irrelevant once and for all.

And when the state comes to defend terrorism against the peaceful, and it will come, then and only then do we fire back while the whole world is watching. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins

* Digital Witness by St. Vincent

* Jesus Built My Hotrod by Ministry

* We Appreciate Power by Grimes

* A Drug Against War by KMFDM

* Behind the Wheel by Depeche Mode

* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails

* Karma Police by Radiohead

* Kerosene by Big Black

* Zombie by the Cranberries