A Tale of Two Peace Summits (and No Goddamn Peace)

 Lights! Cameras! Action! The scene is a heavily hyped but quickly slapped together peace summit in the late summer of this year of our lord Satan 2025. The setting is Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, some relic of the last cold war's apocalypse culture on the desolate outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska. Our leading men are one Donald J. Trump, a dayglow corporate-welfare rapist who somehow failed his way to the top of an empire too big to fail without a goddamn apocalypse, and Vladimir Putin, a cold-blooded KGB thug who spent the post-Soviet years breaking legs for neoliberal oligarchs before reinventing himself as some kind of quasi-fascist heartthrob for self-loathing, alt-right, closet queens to toss off to between podcasts.

There was a red carpet, a long walk beneath soaring war machines and towering mountain vistas, and a carriage ride in a luxury vehicle designed to withstand the advances of even the angriest of villagers which whisked the two war criminals away to a secluded and presumably candlelit location where the waiting public was promised that no man would leave unmaimed without signing off on a ceasefire to the long raging proxy apocalypse in Ukraine.

The two lovers surfaced hours later, beaming before a live audience of politico paparazzo for a post-coital press conference. Both men, who collectively lounge on more nuclear hardware than the rest of the planet combined and multiplied ten times, took turns lavishing each other's egos with increasingly flirtatious displays of affection bordering on the downright homoerotic. The typically ice-cold Vladimir Putin showed off his sensitive side, paying special attention to his rodeo clown paramour's "precious" devotion to world peace and Donald Trump boasted proudly that he has long had a very special relationship with 'President Putin' before girlishly correcting himself by referring to the strongman simply as 'Vladimir.'

The two psychopaths both appeared to agree that something magical had transpired that day beneath the Northern Lights but then they both unceremoniously fucked off to their own blood-speckled corners of the world stage without their hotly anticipated ceasefire or even a second date on the calendar.

In spite of all the lovey-dovey talk and breathless self-adulation, the war kept raging in Ukraine with half the country under an air raid alert while Volodymyr Zelensky launched swarms of NATO drones deep into the Rostov and Bryansk regions of Russia. None of this stopped the gnashing heads of the liberal media from ripping their hair out and screaming 'Neville Chamberlain!' at the top of their lungs over the mere shadow of a suggestion that maybe dumping more weapons of mass destruction into this death hole isn't the most prudent way to avoid World War III but as far as I could tell, none of the deadly peace that terrifies such imbeciles so much was actually transpiring. Just two foul Caesars sending each other kissy face emojis while they continued to murder each other's children.   

'What the fuck just happened here?' I found myself asking the blue screen of a merciless television set. But before I could receive an answer, another hastily slapped together peace summit erupted in Washington three days later. Volodymyr Zelensky, fresh from his latest photo shoot with GQ, practically stormed the White House flanked by a dream team of western oligarchs, including British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emanuel Macron and German Chancelor Friedrich Merz, in a united front of NATO solidarity. But the moment these humanitarian crusaders for liberal order found themselves in the same room with Donald Trump, a public make-out session commenced that made the Brokeback bromance in Alaska look tame by comparison.

Each and every NATO superfreak on the scene took turns backing that thing up on Donald Trump's stubby little ego, including Zelensky who had practically been thrown out of the Oval Office by the seat of his pants during his last visit. The freak fest ended in smiles and handshakes and a triumphant announcement by the blushing Donald that Putin had agreed to yet another summit, this time with Zelensky invited to join the menage a troi of peace. 

But, once again, something was seriously off about this powwow. While Donald Trump took another victory lap and NATO breathed a sigh of sweet relief, I couldn't help noticing that nothing concrete had actually come out of this long weekend of long-winded summitry. For all the flowery talk of peace still percolating from both of these dueling love-ins, the war was still raging and, in some ways largely neglected by the western media, it had actually gotten worse.

Between blowing kisses across the room to each other, Trump, Starmer and Macron all kept talking about the kind of 'security guarantees' for Ukraine from NATO nations that Russia has repeatedly made clear were a red line for them. All three of these world leaders even suggested that the deployment of European troops on the ground in Ukraine was on the table. The Russians didn't miss these details either. Their Foreign Ministry called the demands a "sharp escalation" that was "categorically unacceptable to Russia." And this wasn't the only detail that made any notion of either one of these summits having anything to do with peace highly suspect.

Just days before Trump's klondike soiree with Putin in Alaska, Germany announced that it was purchasing $500 million dollars of American military hardware for Ukraine. All part of a NATO bait-and-switch scheme to funnel US weapons to the battle front through European third parties while Trump feigns non-interventionism. The name of this scam is the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List or PURI initiative. Other Eurocrats have already pledged a total of $1.5 billion dollars to this growing arsenal and Volodymyr Zelensky made an offer to buy $90 billion dollars of American death machines through this European back channel during the second so-called peace summit.

If you are confused upon exhaustion by all these bizarre backroom hijinks then step in line, grab a brown paper bag to breath into, and put your head between your knees while I attempt to unwrap this for you. Donald Trump spent most of this last summer actually ratcheting up the war in Ukraine, sending an increasingly unpopular Zelensky regime deadlier and deadlier toys and giving Putin strict deadlines for unconditional ceasefire and then drastically reducing the deadlines without explanation. But Donald Trump also spent most of this last summer losing his base over his attempts to bury his 15-year relationship with billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein as his overall approval ratings hit rock bottom.

So, Donald Trump did what his old buddy Bill Clinton used to do whenever his sexual predations began to clutter the headlines; he created a highly publicized foreign policy diversion. Bill usually bombed baby formula factories or news stations, but Trump needed to distract an audience that has grown a tad more weary of war crimes, so he set up a shameless but feckless lovefest with his neoliberal rivals' favorite boogeyman, Vladimir Putin, who has his own PR demons to slay, to essentially bait his critics into changing the subject to one he could win his base back with, namely being decried as a 'Putin puppet' for merely hinting at the possibility of detente.

However, Trump picked a hell of a time to play this game. Volodymyr Zelensky's own poll numbers are dropping, and Russia is slowly but steadily taking the Donbass back, village by village. Trump's flirtations with isolationism have never amounted to much more than fishing for another offer he couldn't refuse So, NATO did for Trump what Trump did for Putin; they rolled out the red carpet and greased his fragile ego with sultry gestures and suggestive dialogue, and by the time they were done they had handily transformed a phony photo-op for peace-starved MAGA cretins into another thinly veiled covert arms race.

This is what 'peace' looks like on a planet stalked by bankrupt cannibal empires. Behind every door on every stage is another desperate shakedown with rapidly disintegrating superpowers wrestling each other over which hill to die on. Sadly, this is nothing new for Ukraine which has a long tragic history of hosting these kinds of imperial death matches, whether it's the Ottomans and the Czars or the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. The only good new here is that these wild steppes are usually where it ends before it begins again.

Let's just hope that there's something left standing after the next peace summit.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Peace Sells by Megadeth

* Charm You by Samia

* Game Shows Touch Our Lives by the Mountain Goats

* If You Should Try and Kiss Her by Dressy Bessy

* Hotel Yorba by the White Stripes

* Who Do You Love by George Thorogood & the Destroyers

* Superman by REM

* Just Like Henry by Dressy Bessy

* International Small Arms Traffic Blues by the Mountain Goats

* The Denial Twist by the White Stripes

* I Knew it, I Know it by Gracie Abrams

* El Scorcho by Weezer

Someone Needs to Stop Israel but It Won't Be the West

 It is getting harder and harder for me to cover the endless holocaust in Gaza. I am not an objective journalist. In fact I reject the very notion of objective journalism as inherently problematic and at times downright toxic. I take shit personally and any attempt to pretend otherwise would merely be an act of deception on my part. I prefer being upfront, defining the problem from my perspective, and then openly seeking solutions while admitting that I am just one voice in what I dearly hope will become a much larger dialogue. I truly believe the conversation on Palestine could benefit a great deal from more international observers taking this approach but this conversation has also become downright excruciating as the Second Nakba just continues to accelerate while the whole world watches screaming from the sidelines.

I don't feel like there is any need to convince the world that what is happening in the Gaza Strip is unspeakably evil anymore. The body count has literally become impossible to keep up with as Israel has taken to killing close to and often far more than 100 civilians a day. The level of depravity being displayed on live television by the IDF and their American conspirators is beyond disgusting. 

Donald Trump's Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has monopolized what little aid still occurs in the region and turned it into another tool for genocide; setting up a handful of sites on the Strip and distributing food to the desperate masses for just minutes a day in order to create stampedes through active warzones which the IDF then uses like turkey shoots. Thousands of starving men, women and children have been machine gunned in mass and this isn't just a dirty secret anymore. There is literally hours of footage online clearly showing uniformed Israeli soldiers opening fire into crowds of visually emaciated people until their clips run dry.

I am beyond appalled. I am furious and I am not alone. Public animosity against Israel has never been higher across the western world. Even conservatives are beginning to break with Zionism as their favorite ally in the Middle East fires American-made tank shells into crowded Catholic churches and tars any priest uppity enough to say "knock it off" as an antisemite. This burgeoning groundswell of popular disgust has led many western governments to speak out for the first time against the increasingly genocidal scourge of the Zionism they once celebrated but Israel just keeps getting bolder and bolder in their sadism. This is because talk is cheap, and money speaks louder than bombs.

Foreign ministers from 25 western nations released a joint statement this July condemning Israel for its "inhuman killing of civilians" and demanding a ceasefire. This included a separate joint statement made by the leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Canada, threatening to take absurdly vague "concrete action" if Benjamin Netanyahu doesn't call off his latest offensive against starving children. Israel responded by letting a few more aid trucks over the border. Amnesty International responded by condemning this toothless PR stunt and rightfully declaring that it was "outrageous and morally reprehensible" that the leaders of the so-called "free world" had taken "nearly 80 days of broadcast starvation and cruelty amidst genocide to exert pressure on Israel."

But I'm afraid that it's actually far worse than that. Emmanuel Macron's France appears to have at least temporarily cut off its shipments of arms to Israel but the UK and Canada don't appear to have even touched the tap. Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney's predecessor and fellow Liberal Party power broker, Justin Trudeau, authorized military exports to Israel as late as January of last year and approved of at least $21 million in new licenses for military exports (mostly bombs) still arriving as we speak. As for the land of Lady George and roses, 15% of the components for Israel's growing arsenal of F-35 fighter jets are still made by British companies to blow up Arab boys on mopeds.

Donald Trump's liberal foils across the western world can cry a river of crocodile tears but until they react to a genocide they have all been facilitating for generations with an actual arms embargo they are every bit as guilty as Orange-Man-Bad and are at least ten times as hypocritical.

For nearly 80 years now the world has been sold the same snake-oil sales pitch from every western globalist institution from the UN and the World Bank to NATO and the EU; that these vaunted institutions of liberal guilt are the only thing keeping the world safe and free from the wrath of another Hitler. Well, hear he is, in fact here's two of them. Both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are openly and unapologetically carrying out the most overt and unabashed genocide since the Third Reich and the "free world" can't be bothered to commit themselves to anything more severe than telling them to keep it down while white people are watching.

This horror show has proven once and for all that the "international community" is a sick hoax. These people bombed the shit out of Yugoslavia and Libya for committing genocide without even requiring evidence. Now, a Frankenstein monster that they built is literally executing infants before a live studio audience and these humanitarian interventionists can't be bothered to even cut the beast out of their trade deals without months of handwringing and bureaucratic horseshit. And the only reason they're even pretending to give a fuck is because Jewish college kids are throwing their bodies beneath the treads of their tanks while Christian Zionists call them antisemites.

The BDS Movement and organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace have really gone to the mat for Palestine over the last couple years and they have probably achieved more in the way of agitprop than any international antiwar movement since Vietnam. Sadly, it's not enough. Don't get me wrong, the kids need to keep it up but they also need to recognize that the western governments that they are lobbying are as evil as they are toothless. They also need to recognize that at this point the only thing likely to stop Israel from literally erasing Gaza from the map is a full-blown military intervention.

Even if any western nation were willing to commit such heresy, it wouldn't be affective at achieving anything but switching occupiers. The only military interventions that carry the local cache necessary for long-term success are those performed by next door neighbors. This is what finally ended the Cambodian Genocide. Vietnam sent in troops still licking their wounds from American napalm and sent Pol Pot running deep into the jungle where Reagan coddled him until he died a broken old crook in a hut. The only problem is that the United States has either overthrown or bought off everyone who Israel isn't currently bombing but this is where BDS comes in.

Egypt and Jordan both have a few things in common. They both share substantial borders with Palestinian territories, with Egypt to the east of Gaza and Jordan to the west of the West Bank. They both have substantial populations of Palestinian refugees, with over half of Jordan's population being of at least partial Palestinian decent and over 150,000 Gazan refugees languishing in Egypt. They are also both governed by despotic sluts to Pax Americana. The United States has had Egypt on a retainer of $1.4 billion dollars in annual military aid since the 1979 Camp David Accords in which Anwar Sedat and the various toadies who followed him essentially agreed to police the Gazan border for Israel for the price of an arsenal. Jordan has similarly received over $87 billion in US foreign aid since 1946 to look the other way while the West Bank shrinks.

These are both dictatorships with populations that are being violently suppressed as we speak for demanding they act in defense of their Palestinian brothers and sisters. What I'm suggesting is that the international movement built around freeing Palestine shift their weight behind local Arab protestors demanding real action. This means launching protests at Egyptian and Jordanian embassies across the planet, boycotting these nations substantial exports to the west, most of which are textiles and apparel, and going after any company that arms these regimes. The people of Egypt have already overthrown one American quisling and Jordan's massive Palestinian population has been protesting their abuse at the hands of the Heshemite Monarchy for generations.

A simple magnifying glass could easily set off a powder keg in both of these nations and Trump is actively using this fact for leverage in an attempt to convince Jordan and Egypt to contain the refugees he and Netanyahu are attempting to expel. I'm simply calling on the Free Gaza Movement to use their own style of grassroots leverage to compel the opposite. Make them open the borders, not just to anyone and everyone delivering aid but to any off-duty soldier or member of the Palestinian diaspora with a Kalashnikov willing to join what has become a fight against genocide. 

What is the US going to do? Further destabilize two allies in regions thick with Muslim Brotherhood resistance movements. Go for it asshole, see what that leads to. As for Bibi, that motherfucker is running out of fronts to contain. The Axis of Resistance has already given him two, three, many Vietnams to fight, why not help the rest of the neighborhood to give him a few more while the fire's hot?

Israel has surrounded themselves with well-earned and well-armed enemies. If people in the west really want to end this genocide, then we should seriously consider using our activism to further empower them because they may be Gaza's only hope.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Playlist: Songs that Influenced This Post

* Angel of Death by Slayer

* Black Boys on Mopeds by Sinead O'Connor

* Provisional by Fugazi

* Hate My Way by Throwing Muses

* Sugar by System of a Down

* Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

* Ever by Flipper

* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails

* Kerosene by Big Black

 

Trump's Shadow War in Somalia is a War on Tribal Democracy

 Donald Trump's frequent attempts to dress himself in the drag of a peace candidate have always been a cabaret made possible by the Democrats' open-mouthed embrace of humanitarian colonialism. It's real easy to score the role of Charles Lindberg in the school play when the other side insists on dragging the Cheney's to the Sady Hawkin's dance. However, if the Donald has achieved anything but literal homicide during the first months of his second term it has been laying the myth of his non-interventionism to waste once and for all, albeit often with literal homicide. 

Trump has somehow made the blatant genocide in Gaza even more blatantly genocidal, largely just by embracing it openly and daring the pussies of the "free world" to do anything about it but scoff and pout. As if playing ringmaster to histories most well-publicized holocaust weren't bad enough, Trump also decided to shatter the faith of his few remaining isolationist supporters by starting another bullshit war in the Middle East based on obvious lies regarding weapons of mass destruction with his far from over "ten-day war" with Iran. He's even gone back on every white dude's least favorite war in Ukraine, shipping Zelensky the hard stuff after making him dance for it in the Oval Office on live television.

The whole damn map is lighting up with fires lit in the name of MAGA and each inferno seems to be spreading rapidly, closer and closer to the Donald's favorite nemesis in China. During a rampage of this size and magnitude it is all too easy for entire atrocities to go completely unnoticed and sadly that usually means someone is getting murdered in Africa while the cameras are turned elsewhere. 

Even beyond issues of basic journalistic equity, this is a crying shame because one of the most fascinating conflicts unfolding as we speak is Trump's adopted shadow war in Somalia and the detail that makes this raging tiff truly fascinating is the fact that this is a dirty little war that big bad America appears to be losing and losing badly.

2025 has found Donald Trump overseeing another in a long line of offensives in the embattled east African nation, attempting to root out the militant Islamists of Al-Shabaab along with their tiny ISIS-affiliated offshoot in a cloud acrid black smoke. The US has launched at least 55 airstrikes in the country this year so far, setting the stage for the Donald to decimate his own annual record of 63 set back during his first term in 2019 and the war this time isn't just restricted to a trigger-happy air campaign. 

AFRICOM, the US's answer to NATO on the Dark Continent, has launched at least one ground raid in Somalia's northeastern Puntland region in the last month. All while Washington and its various western lackeys' foot the bill for Africans from other nations to die in Somalia as part of the African Union's AUSSUM mission with reports of as many as 20 Ugandans killed in another recent spat with Al-Shabaab.

Billions of dollars are being dumped into this campaign to save Somalia's centralized federal government, and all that cash seems to have done little more than provide kindling for a wildfire rapidly closing in on Mogadishu and Washington's puppet president there, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. 

Just a week before AFRICOM's ground raid, Somalia's American armed and trained military collapsed like a cheap lawn chair in the face of an Al-Shabaab counteroffensive which practically gutted southern and central Somalia of our goons. In a matter of months these rugged Islamic guerrillas have regained 90% of the territory the Somalian Military managed to take during their last offensive in 2022 and 2023, and the reasons that offensive succeeded are the reasons this year's offensive is flailing.

Sheik Mohamud led the previous offensive in name only with AFRICOM having next to nothing to do with its success. The territory taken from Al-Shabaab was largely taken by a coalition of local Somalian militias known as the Macawiisleey and these boys weren't motivated by the lofty ambitions of some nebulous global war on terror. They were members of local clans who were pissed off about the high taxes Al-Shabaab had been racking their cattle herders with and they got revenge by helping the feds take back around 200 villages in a matter of months, but Sheik Mohamud forgot which peasants buttered his side of the toast.

The progress of the 2022-23 offensive collapsed along with Sheik Mohamud's support from the clans who won it. The man had been badly managing this coalition from the start, cutting out respected clan leaders and picking favorites based on protecting his own precarious position in power over any kind of coherent military strategy. The last straw however seemed to come in the form of Sheik Mohamud's push for a "One Man, One Vote" presidential election which would effectively cut out the previous system of allowing clan elders to choose lawmakers in favor of universal suffrage. 

On the surface this makes Sheik Mohamud look like a quixotic crusader for liberal democracy struggling to free his nation from the backwards clan system and that is certainly the way his western sponsors are painting this picture but the picture they're painting conveniently neglects to consider the context of the continent's colonial history.

Africa in the 21rst century is chock full of western backed "democracies" which exist only to the degree that the word 'democracy' has become synonymous on the continent with cheap gangsters in western suits with European bank accounts. The reign of Hassan Sheik Mohamud itself has been one defined by rampant corruption, censorship and nepotism, and his "democratic reforms" serve largely just to increase the federal government's power over local governments. He pushed similar "reforms" to the Somalian constitution which have led the regions of Jabaland and Puntland to secede from the federal system altogether, leading to more violent clashes, between the Somalian Army and Jubaland's local forces.

All of this seems to baffle western observers and some of Trump's own officials in the Pentagon have even been toying with the notion of abandoning the notoriously unpopular federal government altogether and falling back to throw their support behind the autonomous region of Puntland as a sort of AFRICOM Alamo on the horn of Africa. Such heresy appears to have been dashed by Trump's Christian-jihadist Svengali, Sebastian Gorka, who prefers any policy with the highest Muslim body count, but even Trump's more "realist" officials miss the fucking point here.

Somalians are not rejecting the presidency or even democracy itself, they are rejecting the Westphalian Nation State; a distinctly European form of government defined by strict borders and a total monopoly on the use of force held by a centralized government and their standing army. No African has ever consented to this colonialist construct and that construct doesn't become a democracy just because you allow a captive population to choose from a carefully curated selection of western puppets. This essentially just amounts to picking which dictator gets to sell your daughter into prostitution to the World Bank.

Somalians are backing the clans, as they always have, because they represent a far more African and a far more democratic form of governance than anything recognized by the UN. Somalia's ancient clan system is largely governed by the Xeer legal system, a highly decentralized and regionally autonomous network of courts overseen by community elders based largely on oral traditions that predate both Islamic and civil law. It is a largely voluntary network of conflict resolution in which communities choose their own judges to settle disputes through reconciliation, negotiation and compromise over police state posturing and carceral justice.

Somalia has been invaded and occupied by a wide variety of assholes- the Portuguese, the Ottomans, the British, fascists, communists and capitalists- but time and time again, the people of Somalia have always returned to the Xeer system because the Xeer system is a system of distinctly African democracy, and this is what terrifies the west, because African democracy is basically just indigenous anarchism, which has a sticky tendency of being hard to regulate from another continent.

With this in mind, it's little wonder that the closest thing Somalia has seen to peace in centuries was during the Islamic Courts Union that governed large portions of the nation between western interventions from the mid-nineties to the mid-2000s, because this system succeeded largely due to the fact that the Union left governance up to the clans and the Xeer legal system. 

The CIA attempted and failed to squash the Union with a literal Warlord Coalition in 2006, but this only empowered the Courts to take Mogadishu, so the US used their puppets in Ethiopia to invade the nation later that year with these forces then occupying Somalia until they left in 2009 before being invited back by our good friend Hassan Sheik Mohamud whenever he began to lose control of the grift, but he never really had control to begin with.

Al-Shabaab formed from a breakaway faction of the Islamic Court's military wing and served as the primary form of popular resistance during the Ethiopian occupation. Their adoption of jihadism is largely a cosmetic ploy to curry favor with the wealthy Middle Eastern donor class. Their relative popularity however is based largely on their radical cache as a remnant of the still popular Islamic Courts. 

This cache has allowed them to control more of the Somalian economy than the federal government and has also afforded them the ability to do as Hezbollah and the Taliban once did and form a sort of counter-state, providing far more popular services than the central government. The problem is that Al-Shabaab has gotten too big for their own good and have begun to behave just like any other state, robbing penniless farmers in the name of taxation and massacring any village who puts up half a fight.

The Macawiisleey offensive proved that the clans still governed by Xeer are more than capable of taking out the trash themselves, but Donald Trump isn't interested in fighting terrorism. He is interested in fighting China who has recently supplanted the US and the EU as Africa's main trading and investment partner. Somalia is of particular importance because of its strategic position on the Red Sea. With Yemen already lost to the dueling counter-state of the Houthis, Pax Americana is going to need another set of gallows from which to strangle Eurasian trade running through the Suez Canal.

The good news here is that this is a war that Donald Trump is already losing. The bad news is that Donald Trump has been losing for a living for his entire life because he is part of the ruling class in a liberal democracy that seems to be dedicated to awarding losers until it goes broke. Somalia will survive the way they always have, by the skin of their teeth with their clans and their culture and a form of governance built on cooperation rather than occupation. In the long run, it's actually the Americans who are fucked as we circle the drain with one morally and financially bankrupt bullshit war after another. 

But hey, maybe the Macawiisleey will loan us a cow after Rome stops burning.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* List of Demands by Saul Williams

* Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival

* People of the Sun by Rage Against the Machine

* I'm a African by Dead Prez

* Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush

* When the Revolution Comes by the Last Poets

* I Against I by Bad Brains

* Chase the Devil by Max Romeo

* Salvation by Rancid

* Pressure Drop by the Maytals

Jeffrey Epstein is a Mirror of American Power

 This rant is devoted in loving memory to Virginia Giuffre, a woman who died speaking the truth about powerful men.

I lost my virginity in preschool. I don't know a worse way to start a post. Unfortunately, I also don't know a more appropriate way to start this one so, buckle up. I was a five-year-old girl trapped in a scary body that didn't fit my gender identity, and they were two Catholic priests who saw my existential turmoil as an opportunity for a good time. People keep telling me it gets better. Maybe they're right but I just keep telling them to go fuck themselves because I don't see how. It happened thirty years ago, and I still can't cross a church without risking a nervous breakdown. The hardest part of this ordeal however isn't the post-traumatic stress or the dissociative identities or the crippling flashbacks or the late-night crying fits. It's knowing that the priests who raped me did it simply because they could.

This is the number one thing that most people consistently fail to comprehend about sexual abuse. Sex has very little if anything to do with it. It is all about power. People who rape are chasing a far more heinous thrill than an orgasm. They're chasing the god-like feeling that comes from invading another human being like a third world country and the people who rape children are the ones who realize that these are the people who can be dominated and decimated the most easily and the most completely. Sexual abuse in this country is shockingly common, and your average perp isn't a pervert or even a sociopath. They are quite simply allowed. 

Western culture is defined by violent conquest and towering social hierarchies. So, it really isn't all that shocking that nearly every western social hierarchy seems to become a den of rampant child abuse. Where I live, in central Pennsylvania, this hideous truth exists all around me. While the Catholic Church turned nearly every diocese in the state into a glorified hunting ground for pedophile priests, Penn State University afforded this exact same luxury to assistant coach Jerry Sandusky in exchange for a few winning football seasons. In both of these cases, the actual predators were relatively few in number, but the conspirators are still all around us; parishioners and bureaucrats, trustees and monsignors, a million little people choosing to defer to their prescribed betters and looking the other way.

Basically, an immense amount of power in a small number of hands affords a select few the ability to destroy lives recreationally while an obedient society enables them to do so. There is a term for this phenomenon, and it's called rape culture. This often talked about but rarely understood notion is far more than just a feminist trope; it is a toxic byproduct of post-colonialism and the moral rot it fosters. This culture of casual depravity affects everyone, but its impact on marginalized communities is downright systemic. The largest categories for sexual marginalization in this country and most countries are women and children with the numbers quadrupling every time you add another adjective like Black or Queer.

This is why feminism cannot be divorced from anti-colonialism or youth rights, and this is why the cross section of all of these movements pretty much defines my existence. This is also why I am an anarchist of the Foucaultian post-left variety. Every institution of power must be confronted and dismantled, from the prison to the school. And this is why the Epstein Files should not be rendered to the frivolity of partisan politics. 

I see this case as an extension of the MeToo Movement. Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, and Bill Clinton belong to the same culture of recreational power violence as Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. This is a problem so much vaster than the antiquated left-right paradigm and yet we are allowing Democrats and Republicans, two elitist tribes riddled with predatory oligarchs, to control and naturally trivialize the Epstein narrative the same way they did with MeToo.

Republicans, at least until very recently, have told us that Jeffry Epstein was just one part of some vast liberal conspiracy that proves that anyone who isn't a virulent Christian nationalist is some kind of craven, George Soros saluting, pedophile choking the purity out of their brazenly objectified children. That narrative seems to now be on pause for the party leadership who have somehow overlooked the fact that the man they've built their flagging brand around is a former Democrat who spent the better part of fifteen years practically attached at the hip to Jeffrey Epstein. So, now the GOP is in the impossible position of having to decide how to avoid pissing off QAnon and the sexual-predator-in-chief those imbeciles deified without realizing that he was the 'big bad' in the one conspiracy theory they trafficked in with a grain of truth to it.

Meanwhile, the Democrats seem to be juggling similarly conflicting narratives. The first being that Donald Trump is the goddamn Devil; a man beast of unprecedented evil who is guilty of everything he's accused of. Much like QAnon's fixation with powerful pedophiles, this narrative has a kernel of truth to it that isn't so easy to dislodge from your teeth. The other narrative however is that everything shouted by right wing imbeciles on the internet is automatically a conspiracy theory that should be rejected completely as a matter of practice. This leaves Democrats torn between hopping aboard the same bus as Marjory Taylor Greene to score points with independents or impressing their bougie donor class by rolling their eyes and scoffing theatrically at the notion that Jeffrey Epstein is anything but another right-wing boogeyman.

What gets lost in this partisan shit-slinging competition is the goddamn victims. The hundreds of girls Jeffrey Epstein abused and trafficked to his friends are being manipulated all over again and often by the same people who manipulated them in the first place; rendered into faceless props for powerful people to posture on top of. It's sickening and to people like me it's actually pretty fucking triggering but just because various flanks of America's decomposing oligarchy have turned this spectacle into a circus doesn't mean that it doesn't matter. It means that we need to turn off the goddamn television, put down the iPhone and take a long hard look at what we know.

What we know about Jeffrey Epstein is that this was a man with virtually zero marketable skills beyond his strange ability to influence powerful people, an academically unremarkable college dropout who somehow went from perving on students at an elite academy he wasn't even qualified to teach at to being a billionaire financier to the stars. We also know that Jeffrey Epstein ran a vast underage sex trafficking ring procuring somewhere in the ballpark of 1,000 underage girls for a host of wealthy clients in Manhattan and Palm Beach between the years of 1994 and 2004 and in all likelihood much earlier and much later than that.

We know these things because federal prosecutors have told us as much and the victims have told us the rest. Yet somehow, this motherfucker had to be caught twice because the first time he got busted in 2006, he was inexplicably awarded a plea deal by a South Florida attorney and future Trump staffer named Alexander Acosta who allowed Epstein to serve a 13-month sentence for a 13-year crime in a luxury wing of a county prison that he paid to have built himself. It then took another fucking decade to shut down the still very much operational criminal empire of a listed sex offender and even then, out of the hundreds of clients the Federal Government admits that Epstein courted, not one has ever been prosecuted or even officially named.

What we know about our current president, one Donald J. Trump is that this is a man who has been accused of a wide variety of sexual predations dating back to the 1970s by over two dozen women. This has included multiple accusations of sexual assault and at least two counts of rape, one made by Trump's first wife in her 1989 divorce deposition was only retracted years later when she found herself in a lucrative business engagement with her ex-husband and the other, our current president was found liable for in a court of law. Donald now denies these crimes, but he has also bragged about them; being caught on tape bosting pompously about walking in on changing teenage beauty contestants and his god-like ability to grab women by the pussy.

We also know that Donald Trump had a very well-documented friendship with Jeffrey Epstein that lasted for fifteen years, nearly all of which coincided with Epstein's federally confirmed criminal conspiracy. Trump's name appears on the flight logs for a private jet Epstein was known to use as a flying brothel in spite of the fact that Trump already owned a private jet of his own. Epstein was also a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago where he and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell acquired a number of their underage victims who were working part-time jobs for Trump's resort. Epstein even introduced Trump to his current wife and at least one of his confirmed victims.

I can also tell you what I know about sexual predators both from firsthand experience and years of trauma therapy. I know that they frequently work in pairs. That they have an uncanny ability to be able to scope out one of their own just as easily as they can spot a victim unlikely to speak out or unlikely to be heard. I know that they get a twisted kick out of each other's depravity like worked up squash partners with each one upping the ante to outdo the other. I know that their filthy secrets and their ability to keep them are a major part of the game. And I know that they nest in positions of institutional power like jungle snakes in high trees, not just because they like the view but because these hierarchical institutions appreciate the services such serpents provide.

Everyone should know what I know because it is the only way to make it stop. It's the only way that it ever 'gets better.' This is why what we need now isn't more grand juries and oversight committees and special councils and excuses for powerful people to flex their partisan muscles. What we need now is total transparency. Release all of the files with only the victim's names redacted and release them directly to the public so America can know exactly what power looks like with no clothes on.

Jeffrey Epstein is not just a partisan boogeyman; he is something far more grotesque. He is a mirror of American power. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Someone to Die for by Belly

* Bad Mouth by Fugazi

* Violet by Hole

* Tryptic by Samia

* Suggestion by Fugazi

* Teenage Whore by Hole

* Stellate by Samia

* T&A by Blondshell

* Hate My Way by Throwing Muses

* Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle by Nirvana

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

No Use Crying Over Spilt ICE: Gang on Gang Violence in a Post-Democratic Era

 What is the definition of a gang? I would generally argue that this word is a contrived label used by rich people to describe any group of poor people organized around using force to acquire wealth like rich people without a state to hide behind. However, an even better definition may ironically come from United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement who describes a gang on their website as "An association of three or more individuals whose members collectively identify themselves by adopting a group identity, which they use to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation." I say "ironically", in fact quite painfully so, because these self-righteous pig fuckers, better known as ICE, seem to have essentially described themselves to a T.

Since its inception as a part of Dubya's post-9/11 Orwellian Department of Homeland Security, ICE has grown into an association of 21,000 or more people who have adopted the group identity of a heavily armed and well-organized squad of militant kidnappers for hire. If an administration, be they Democrat or Republican, requires the decimation of a large civilian population then ICE will provide their services for a hefty sum of pilfered tax dollars and what these services essentially amount to is what can probably best be described as human trafficking on an industrial scale. Or what historians once referred to as a pogrom.

So, why are we so shocked when what is by their own definition a gang encounters gangland violence? The news has recently been teaming with a stream of breathless stories about organized and not-so-organized attacks on ICE like the poorly botched ambush on a detention center in Alvarado, Texas that left one police officer injured and ten hooligans in custody on attempted murder charges. According to Big Brother this is all part of an unprecedented spree with the Department of Homeland Security reporting that attacks on their immigration agents have risen by 700% in the last six months.

Republicans blame Democrats, claiming that their often-empty-handed rhetoric inflames such mayhem, but Democrats seem to be equally aghast over this wave of attacks on ICE, bemoaning the tragedy of radicalism gone too far and they're not totally wrong about this but they are grossly overthinking the phenomenon. ICE is a notorious gang of lecherous body-snatchers that preys on desperate people for a paycheck and some of these people are fighting back. That's it. Basically, what 2pac would call thug life. It's not wrong, it's not right, but it really shouldn't be that shocking either and neither should the fact that such acts of criminal blowback are increasing to unprecedented levels considering that the government has recently bumped up their payments to ICE under the condition that they accelerate their long raging war on human movement to an unprecedented level of barbarism and cruelty.

After another Trump regime failed miserably to deliver on another campaign promise to purge Middle America of a mythical shadow army of border hopping Hannibal Lecters, those shucksters did what they always do in such scenarios and sicked their favorite immigration gang lords on blueberry farms and Home Depot parking lots to shore up the numbers with anyone browner than Marco Rubio who fudged their paperwork, and when that failed they fudged the goddamn paperwork for them. 

In order to meet his own insane quota of detaining 3,000 migrants a day, Trump has arbitrarily revoked long standing protections for federally recognized refugees and unilaterally terminated temporary protection status, essentially rendering well over a million legal immigrants illegal overnight. As if that wasn't criminal enough, the Donald is also pushing to gut the 8th Amendment by affectively outlawing bond hearings for millions of immigrants awaiting court hearings, damming these largely nonviolent offenders of invisible lines to years in glorified concentration camps. 

So, if you really want to blame any politician for the rise of violence against the border gestapo then blame Donald Trump for turning thugs into goddamn terrorists. He might as well have painted "shoot me" on their backs in Spanish. But don't you dare cry for ICE. Last time I checked "just following orders" doesn't fly in any legitimate court of law and these gangsters didn't start getting cruel under Trump. If any president turned Frankenstein into Godzilla, it was Barack Obama who still holds the title belt for Deporter in Chief and ICE continued to operate the draconian detention facilities Obama gifted to Trump under his former VP Joe Biden. The worst of these cross-partisan concentration camps are without a doubt the ones that have housed tens of thousands of children and become notorious dens of child sexual abuse with thousands of allegations against ICE pedophiles still pending.

The GOP and their belching Cassandras on Fox and Friends like to go off on tearjerking tangents about child trafficking enabled by Democratic policies and, once again, they're not wrong, but they conveniently leave out the fact that the worst predators are their heroes in ICE, and every time a Republican slithers into office their budget for prowling the schoolyards for supple brown flesh goes through the fucking roof. And this is the only thing that really makes ICE exceptional among thieves; their membership in a bipartisan cartel known as the Westphalian Mafia aka the State- a colossal constellation of mercenaries, pencil pushers, kidnappers, lobbyists, thugs, and killers who have affectively maintained a monopoly on the use of criminal behavior in the west through a mix of high concept propaganda and sheer blunt force.

The only factor that makes pretty much every federal government agency any different than the Crips or the Bloods is a massive standing army and a compulsory school system that grooms all of us from childhood into believing that this criminal enterprise somehow amounts to some form of democracy. They can dress their mafia up in all the judge's robes and laughably non-binding amendments they want, what all of this really amounts to at the end of the day is "You've got a pretty nice community there. It would be a real shame if something nasty happened to it... then again, if you just kicked up a few bucks of your paycheck every week, our boys in shiny badges could keep it real nice for you."

This isn't to say that I think we should all go out and shoot up the nearest ICE hideout. Aside from the fact that we would all be stooping to their level by fighting like another state (which is the quickest way to replace it with another one), this strategy simply isn't affective. Every time some wannabe-revolutionary caps one of those glorified pimps, the news turns him into some kind of fucking martyr for law and order, and congress passes another law giving them even more power. These motherfuckers need to be taken down hard but taking down a criminal enterprise of that size and magnitude requires more brains than brawn.

The people who have been the most affective at achieving this goal in the era of Trump have actually been the undocumented communities themselves who have developed intricate networks of communication and evasion over their decades of essentially stateless existence. This has affectively afforded them the ability to collectively police the thugs who call themselves police. Chicago's sanctuary movement, which has its roots in the movement to protect the refugees of Reagan's Central American death squads during the 80s, affectively crippled Trump 2's initial inaugural kidnapping spree and LA's La Raza-radicalized immigrant communities who used an appropriately diversified array of tactics ranging from basic neighborhood outreach to flamethrowing direct action, frightened Trump badly enough to call in the heavy gangbangers in the National Guard and the Marines.

This is what we need on a much broader scale across the entire country; a highly organized but heavily decentralized coalition of communities organized around fighting the many crimes of a state on a rampage. I'm talking about establishing volunteer rapid response networks stationed outside of every courthouse, police station, and federal agency in the country and alerting their communities of the comings and goings of every gangbanger with a badge. 

This means policing the DEA attempting to lock up peaceful people for trading illegal plants on the free market. This means alerting sex workers of raids attempting to govern their god given bodily autonomy by force. And this means doing what the Panthers did before Cointelpro and sending two brothers to every police showdown in a marginalized neighborhood, one with a megaphone and a stack of law books to educate the block on their rights and one with a loaded shotgun sending a simple message to the thugs that we will defend those rights by any means necessary, only this time we'll add a cameraman so the bangers know that the whole world will be watching who fires the first shot this time, live across multiple platforms. 

It's time to stop crying over spilt ICE and crack down on the real criminals in this country. It's time to launch a war on the war on crime and we don't need to fight like a state to do this. We just need a thousand communities quietly roaring "Enough!"

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced This Post

* What's Fair by Blondshell

* Iron Man by Black Sabbath

* Milk by Samia

* Police Truck by Dead Kennedys

* Hit 'Em Up by 2Pac

* Wild in the Streets by Circle Jerks

* Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne

* How I Could Just Kill a Man by Cypress Hill

* Los Angeles by X

* Rise Above by Black Flag

Go Back to Europe, Honky: Counter-Nativist Solutions to America's 'White' Power Question

 This may be politically incorrect, but we need to face the fact that we are a nation under siege. America has been invaded by an insatiable alien swarm that has engulfed this nation like a human inferno. Breeding, multiplying, spreading diseases like a crime spree and crime like a disease, decimating rich and brilliant cultures, and draining the entire continent of its precious natural resources.... 

America as we once knew it is on the brink of oblivion and if there remains any hope left of saving it in any meaningful way, we have to address this invasion and the people in Washington who conspired to make it succeed for their own wicked Machiavellian designs. This conspiracy didn't start with Joe Biden, but God knows that his entire family played their part in making it a horrifying success. 

After all, they were a part of the swarm.

You see dearest motherfuckers, America has been throttled for centuries by a demographic warping invasion of desperate outsiders manipulated by a globalist power elite but I'm not talking about the latest busload of Salvadoran fry cooks. America as we know it is little more than a massive encampment for a cultureless mongrel horde known as white people. We all fucking know this. Your jaded transgender niece brings it up every Thanksgiving, but nobody talks about it. Not really. 

What we now call America once hosted a millennium of diverse indigenous cultures that have been all but wiped out by an army of blue-eyed devils dressed in designer polo shirts. 10 million Indians lived here when the Europeans crash landed on Turtle Island. By 1900 that population had been reduced to under 300,000 people. Many of them were just straight-up slaughtered. Others died from starvation, disease, or mass suicide by addiction to a wide variety of different poisons introduced to them by their occupiers.

Now those people, "my people", are bitching about losing their cultural heritage to another alien swarm and we're all supposed to pretend like that "invasion" is the only farce in the conversation. What cultural heritage? You mean 'white' cultural heritage? What the fuck is that? Seriously. You mean what Europeans turned Christianity into? A convoluted list of excuses for role crazy adults to beat and shame their children into behaving like show dogs. Or maybe you just mean "European culture"; this insane notion that another complicated and diverse continent can be reduced to a single identity based largely on badly plagiarized Semitic spiritual practices. So, now we're destroying two continents in the name of American whiteness....

Let's just cut the shit right now before I die from sarcasm poisoning. In spite of what certain imbeciles on the internet might tell you, there is no such thing as "white culture." On the contrary, whiteness is a cultural vacuum, a colonial construct that can largely be reduced to a beige "us" to the equally vacant "them." 

A globalist cabal of European imperialists discovered a continent they hadn't raped yet and decided to steal it. In order to do so they needed a massive and compliant population of slaves. So many slaves. Too many slaves. When these slaves became unruly and began to revolt, they were divided into two color-coded castes: Black and white. The Blacks became the permanent slave class and were stripped of their languages, spirituality, and culture, while white people were granted certain country club privileges and were also stripped of their languages, spirituality, and culture.

In order to keep up the farce of the master race, whiteness needed to expand. What was once just Anguloid Protestant cultists became anyone pale enough to pass for one so long as they ditched their ancestral culture and assimilated. The result is that we are now a population of "white people" with little to no ancestral connection to Anglo-Saxon culture. The imperial globalist cabal has attempted to fill this void with capitalism, with the trivial opium of processed food, mind-numbing pharmaceuticals, Hollywood blockbusters, and reality television. 

So, now we are a master race of empty, directionless, consumers unless we are being riled up to protect our billboard culture from the next wave of dark people or police the unruly Blacks who somehow invented an enticingly wicked counterculture of anti-colonialist rebel rousing which occasionally encourages white people to fuck backwards and burn things.

At the very worst, today's aliens are copycats, another desperate raft of peasants fleeing for their lives to the relative security and economic promise beneath the bright lights of Babylon. In the liberal-progressive version of American mythology, these people will work hard, endure struggles, but ultimately rise up to the challenge and become an integral part of America's diverse cultural landscape. It almost pains me to break it to them, but this is just another bullshit fever dream of a culturally vacant master race. I know because my people were the Salvadoran fry cooks once.

My ancestors fled English-facilitated genocide in Ireland by the hundreds-of-thousands in the mid-nineteenth century. When the Irish Catholics got here, we were considered to be a mongrel race of backwards heathens threatening the precious vestige of white culture. They called us white n*ggers and stuffed us into cramped ghettos. They built whole parties and MAGA-style movements around tormenting, containing, and destroying us. But at the end of the day there were just too goddamn many of us to destroy, so the white mobs had to settle for containment. 

They stuck us in their armies and made us kill other Catholic peasants so they could steal chunks of Mexico. They stuck us in their public schools and groomed us into behaving like proper cosmopolitan Protestant conformists. They stuck us in the Democratic Party so their northern city slickers could look woke while advocating segregation. And at the end of the day, we became white people. 

This is the other side of immigration. Immigration, or at least mass immigration, destroys cultures. It destroys the cultures of the immigrants, most of whom are fleeing the imperial violence of the same globalist elites who invented whiteness to the only place where they won't drop their bombs: the verdant suburbs of Babylon, where they are systematically hazed and then indoctrinated into the melting pot of America's Wonder Bread oblivion culture. 

The only thing the liberal-progressives have really changed in this white power narrative is replacing White Jesus with JFK: the great white mick. This is why America is simultaneously the wealthiest place on earth and the sickest place on earth. We have literally everything and yet our children are waiting in line for AR-15s so they can shoot up the nearest shopping mall and trend for fifteen seconds on Tik Tok. To put it simply, America has become a land where every culture comes to die.

People really shouldn't fucking come here but at least the latest batch climbing the borders can trace their blood back to the people we tried to erase from the "New World." Your average Salvadoran fry cook shares more DNA with Geronimo than Columbus and their version of Jesus is as dark-skinned and heathen-coded as the original. This is why when people at the county fair here in Pennsyltucky tell me that the beaners are taking over, I find it hard not to smile sinisterly and tell them 'Ain't Karma a bitch.' But that still leaves a few decent "white people" with the witching question of 'What do we do now?'

In a really strange way, I got off easy. My parents may be plastic paddies, but I was born too Queer to assimilate. After a rather hellish childhood being violently ostracized by my fellow pale faces, I found my tribe of heathen faggots; a creole race of multicultural rejects who were taught how to survive white oblivion by escaped slaves like Marsha P. Johnson and Miss Major with a counterculture built around resistance to colonialist constructs like the gender binary and compulsory heterosexuality. As for the rest of you honkies, I can think of at least two options to save your souls during the age of collapse.

The first is to take your own damn advice and go back where you came from. Why the fuck not? It kept Stokely Carmicheal alive longer than Cointelpro. Most of you will probably drown building border walls on the Titanic but maybe a handful of you can return to the old country and rekindle some of what whiteness robbed from you. The Irish countryside has never fully recovered from the Famine and Hibernia could use a few good post-papists to finally kick the British out. Pick whatever slice of Europe feels like home and fight for it against the wages of homogenized European white power represented by the likes NATO and the European Union.

The other option is the option ex-slaves and gender outlaws took and that's to assimilate to America's pre-colonialist culture by building or joining new tribal orders committed to razing Babylon once and for all. This is how the Seminoles became a race. They began as a class of exiles in the swamps of Florida; a strange gumbo of Creek refugees, free Africans and escaped slaves who built a culture of kinship emphasizing community amongst individuals and outlaws. The Iroquois Confederacy was a similarly diverse and stateless consensus democracy made up of Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas.

So, why not a Redneck Confederacy made up of bikers, Cajuns, moonshiners, hill folk, and snake charmers or a Guido Confederacy of Gambinos, greasers, goodfellas, strippers, and body builders? Tribalism can be a force for liberty so long as it's fundamentally regional and built in contradiction to the kind of puritanical global universalism represented by both whiteness and its passive aggressive cousin neoliberalism. Maybe if we're lucky the Indians we failed to kill will take mercy on some of us ex-honkies and show us how to live on their land with dignity in apocalyptic times.

I know, I know, it's a crazy fucking idea but America has always been a crazy fucking place. Maybe after we finally ditch Babylon and all its white colonial baggage, we can get back to some Mad Max version of that wilderness and learn to fucking breath again. Either way, I'd sooner die trying than hold up at the mall defending white culture from the Dawn of the Dead.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Modern Leper by Julien Baker

* Terminal Preppie by Dead Kennedys

* Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry

* Provisional by Fugazi

* Pay To Cum by Bad Brains

* Bad Catholics by the Menzingers

* Rock N Roll N*gger by Patti Smith

* People of the Sun by Rage Against the Machine

* Guerrillas in tha Mist by Da Lench Mob

* Wild Wild Life by Talking Heads

It's Time for the Left to Embrace Small Government Again

 Donald Trump is on a rampage and the colossal pistons of America's federal government machine seem to be his new favorite battering rams. Every problem, perceived or contrived, seems to require a bigger and bigger government solution. Things get a little lively at the border? Proclaim unsanctioned human movement to be a military invasion and send in the National Guard. Some locals get pissed about this bullshit in LA? Send in more fucking troops without even consulting local authorities. Too many trans kids? Fuck it, send the National Guard into the bathrooms for full cavity searches. Too many autistic kids? Proclaim their existence to be a national health crisis and put a Kennedy in charge of it....

....Liquidate the 14th Amendment, declare Jehovah's Witnesses to be "Alien Enemies", reignite the arms race and send it into outer space, annex Nova Scotia, put pedophiles in charge of Title 9, dust off a few more 300-year-old war powers and throw a North Korean-style military parade...

Governing is hard so use a fucking hammer. The national debt may continue to skyrocket but who needs fiscal responsibility when the power of White Christ compels you!

After forty years of wheeling and dealing and lobbying in the church place, the Evangelicals have finally finished their hostile takeover of the right in this country with a philandering orange Trojan horse and conservatism, in any meaningful sense of the word is their first casualty. Whereas the glutinous missile hockers in the old GOP used to at least pay lip service to notions of states' rights and fiscal responsibility, the Dutch elm disease infecting the Tree of Liberty known as Christian nationalism openly celebrates the use of sweeping executive powers to fortify our toxic union beneath a narrow interpretation of a million-year-old compilation of Middle Eastern fairy tales and even the Supreme Court seems to be in on the grift.

This may be a very right-wing problem but the left in this country have long sown the seeds for this infestation by building a state designed for imperialism to the size of a small planet. In fact, I would argue that MAGA and the Christian Nationalists behind it bare far more of a resemblance to America's turn-of-the-century coastal progressives than any school of actual conservatism and this isn't some kind of sick coincidence. 

Early American progressivism was strongly informed by the puritanical pietism of the Protestant Reformation that sought to fuse church and state into a divine instrument to purify society of its sins. The progressives simply secularized this system of social engineering and used it to fuse big business, big government and big labor into a single bureaucratic Cthulhu. Once this massive overhaul was done, fascism became as easy to achieve as stacking the courts and rigging elections. 

We saw a frighteningly similar narrative unfold in post-imperial Germany a few decades later. The Nazis, themselves fellow right-wing social engineers inspired by Protestant pietism and American progressivism, didn't take power, they were handed it on a silver platter by a bunch of assholes who called themselves social democrats. After selling out Red Rosa and the Spartacist Uprising, Germany's Social Democratic Party (or SPD) created the Weimar Republic for their right-wing co-conspirators in the Freikorps to hide behind. 

This massive welfare cabaret included a spiffy new constitution which afforded the nation's president the ability to take measures without the consent of the Reichstag by using a provision known as Article 48. The SPD used these emergency decrees liking fucking crazy to consolidate their power only to have it used against them by Adolf Hitler to establish the Third Reich.

This is the danger inherent to any form of big government. The state is a tool designed to give a select few the power to do things that your average citizen would be jailed for doing, whether this means robbing the poor at gunpoint to build a bridge or throwing them into concentration camps for refusing to kick up their taxes. Regardless of what the intentions are of those who erect such systems, sooner or later, they will all be abused because they quite simply afford far too much power to far too few people.

And thus, the statist left has set the stage for another era of fascist plunder which may be why nobody really takes them seriously as a means to resist it. Germany's Social Democrats were the first people sent to the camps and even their own voters didn't get particularly shaken up by this turn of events because the SPD basically built them. But the statist left isn't the only left. It isn't even the first left.

Every wave of revolutionary upheaval that has ever rocked this nation has been led by men and women who considered themselves to be socialists but rejected the states' monopoly on grotesque behavior. 

The Abolitionist Movement was led by free market socialists like Lysander Spooner, William Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau, the latter's ideas on self-reliance and social ecology would also inform much of the modern-day environmental movement. The Women's Movement was led by female anarchists like Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons, who would set the stage for feminism. And nearly every labor right this nation has ever enjoyed was achieved through blood, sweat and gunpowder by syndicalists like those in the International Workers of the World.

Every single one of these movements was defined by decentralization, self-governance and militant opposition to both big government bureaucracy and the capitalist hierarchy this inevitably fosters (and vice versa) but sadly every single one of these movements was also done in by state infiltration. 

Abe Lincoln turned the Abolitionist Movement into a bloody excuse to consolidate power in the hands of the Northern industrial elites who simply replaced chattel slavery with wage slavery. The Women's Movement was hijacked by progressive bats like Margaret Sanger who quickly converted it into a vehicle for compulsory temperance and population control. And the seemingly endless revolutionary potential of the Labor Movement was murdered by FDR's Mussolini-inspired New Deal which neutered wildcats into mobbed-up union fat cats.

But decentralization still remains the greatest defense against centralized authoritarianism in this country and it doesn't get much more centralized or authoritarian than the Donald's Satanic union of millenarian Jesus freaks, Zionist genocide junkies and Silicon Valley Übermenschen and some people on the left, including some people on the statist left, seem to have recognized the power of weaponized localism though few have taken it nearly far enough to reach its logical conclusions.

School choice is being used to protect young people from having their bodies policed by compulsory gender fascism with the creation of Queer-affirming public charter schools like Magic City in Alabama and the Uplift Education Network in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, but no system of schooling can truly be safe from authoritarianism unless they liberate themselves from the restraints of tax dollars and enforced curriculums. Paul Goodman had the right idea with the Free School Movement that sought to establish truly autonomous schools led by the consensus of the student body.

Community hospitals and free clinics are building underground railroads leading trans kids and those plagued by unwanted pregnancies to cities and localities that have established themselves as healthcare sanctuaries, but these well-intentioned professionals remain bound by a healthcare system centralized and policed by the blood and butter welfare state. As that state continues to be infiltrated and commandeered by Christian jihadists, these providers would be wise to embrace the kind of liberated grey market counter-economics envisioned by Samuel Edward Konkin III in order to defend their patients with the shield of agoraism. 

Last but not least, sanctuary states of every kind remain the best defense for those being governed by a national regime they never consented to, but those governments must do more than just refuse to comply with fascism, they must actively obstruct it, and this must mean that the forbidden fruit of secession should at the very least remain on the table as a viable bargaining chip if not an outright solution to a nation clearly too big to fail without a goddamn apocalypse. 

None other than one of America's leading abolitionists, Lysander Spooner, advocated nothing less, observing that the Constitution itself had no lasting authority as anything more than a contract between consenting parties and that any Supreme Court that does not keep its part of the contract must be seen as totally invalid.

Socialism works, it's just not compatible with any state that can't fit into your wallet. With the tools of the liberal-progressive welfare state being rapidly converted into weapons by an increasingly desperate and zealous police state, the left's only hope is to convert every village into a fortress against tyranny because the only way to take care of these fuckers is to take care of each other first and there is no state substitute for community. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced This Post

* Where Eagle Dare by the Misfits

* Soon by My Bloody Valentine

* No Front Teeth by Perfume Genius

* Tuesday's Gone by Lynyrd Skynyrd

* Bad Mouth by Fugazi

* Lasting Friend by Samia

* Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers

* Bullet with Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins

* Karma Police by Radiohead

* Wreck by Neko Case

* Last Caress by the Misfits

An Anarchist Appeal to the Disgruntled Deplorable

 

"Ooh, that smell

Can't you smell that smell?

Ooh, that smell

The smell of death surrounds you"

'Ooh That Smell' by Lynyrd Skynyrd

I may be a hedonistic, post-left, genderfuck, heathen but I'm also a fiercely localist, small town agrarian, Appalachian Luddite and this weird contrarian dichotomy has afforded me an almost absurdly diverse following that has long included creatures that most would consider to be far right. Even aside from my writing, this isn't exactly uncharted territory for me. I grew up in what is now considered to be Trump Country, and I still live and organize in that country as an openly Queer anarchist. This kind of backwoods coexistence can be downright dangerous at times, but it is also a means of survival for any decadent weirdo who deeply hates the city.

I have had to learn how to build bridges with other poor people who hate me, and I have struggled to carry on this tradition into my online existence, communicating on social media with the kind of people that most leftists would sooner doxx than friend. Think what you must about these practices, but they have afforded me a window into the more populist oriented fringes of the right that most people to the left of Ruby Ridge lack and one thing that I can say on this weird authority is that a significant portion of the MAGA movement is rapidly approaching their breaking point with Donald Trump.

Trump has always courted segments of the alt-right along with a spattering of paleocons and quasi-libertarians but his almost unimaginable comeback in 2024 largely depended on them. Biden and Kamala did most of the heavy lifting schmoozing with the Cheney's while facilitating brazenly genocidal policies in Gaza, but Trump was affectively carried across the finish line foisted upon the shoulders of edgelord brociopaths like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk only to flip the switch the moment he crossed the White House lawn to full tilt neocon mode. 

I think Trump assumed what most New Yorkers do about the typical audience for such cretins, that these people are all just a bunch of braindead amoral garbage who would follow any authoritarian messiah straight to fucking hell and I have to admit, after a decade of this MAGA horseshit, I was beginning to suspect the same thing. But even deplorables draw lines in the sand and Trump seems to have crossed a lot of them in just a matter of months.

He is dumping trillions of dollars onto the deficit with the pork barrel monstrosity of his Big Beautiful Bill. He is shredding habeas corpus to have any green card holder who bad mouths Israel chucked out of the country. He is engaging in neocon style military adventures in the Middle East on behalf of foreign Zionist welfare scroungers. He is working closely with the terminal yuppies of Silicon Valley to build massive online databases designed to keep tabs on the bowel movements of every American citizen seamlessly across multiple federal agencies. And some of MAGA's most influential influencers are in an uproar.

Elon Musk was essentially tossed out of the Trump Administration amidst reports of his speed-addled tirades in the Oval Office leading to literal fist fights with elderly staffers. Tucker Carlson led a barnstorming multimedia campaign to denounce Trump's collaboration with Benjamin Netanyahu's blood feud against the Mullahs in Iran and fellow MAGA lunatics like Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene actually took Tucker's side when their orange god publicly scolded him for his disloyalty. Trump has similarly made enemies on the Hill, like Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Thomas Massie, who have pushed back against his blatant warmongering and big spending and faced childishly personal attacks for doing so.

However, perhaps the most fascinating fight that has erupted within the MAGA movement lately is naturally the one getting the least amount of mainstream coverage. Recent leaks to the New York Times have exposed the full scale of Trump's collaboration with billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, a big tech analytics company that has long worked with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE to track immigrants and "suspected terrorists" using AI-assisted facial recognition technology. During Trump's second reign this relationship has expanded rapidly, with Palantir receiving $113 million in federal contracts since November alone, not including a $795 million contract with the Department of Defense.

The latest leaks seem to confirm long circulating rumors that this same kind of dystopian technology which is supposed to be reserved for shifty-eyed brown folk is being considered for use against the rest of us by even broader sweeping outfits like the Social Security Administration, the Department of Education, and the IRS with talks of a single federal database to include information on every American citizen including their tax filings, medical claims, bank accounts, and student debt.

The reaction from MAGA supporters and influencers on social media has been explosive. Loudmouth imbeciles like the Hodgetwins and Nick Fuentes are calling MAGA a giant psyop. The Patriot Voice, with over 158,000 followers on X seemed to sum up the uproar in a single tweet, posting "I didn't flip on Trump, TRUMP FLIPPED ON US". And my own online interactions with the right have been equally caustic and eye opening.

While I maintain contact with a wide variety of political outsiders, my message has generally remained the same. I have been decrying Donald Trump as a fraudulent corporate welfare queen and a shameless Christo Zionist gimp from the beginning, but my right-wing followers aren't arguing with me anymore. They're cheering me on and asking me to take my vitriol even further. I have had people on Facebook literally apologize to me for voting for Trump. I have even convinced several hardcore transphobes that Trump's latest executive orders against families with transgender children have gone way too far and put every family's private medical decisions at risk.

The conclusion that more and more America First conservatives seem to be arriving at is that Donald Trump is becoming just another globalist neocon. The reality that I have been trying to force feed these people for years however is that this really isn't a recent transition. Donald Trump has always been a craven opportunist with intimate connections to the very swamp he has long railed against. It just took him sewing the various chunks of the federal government together into one big Lovecraftian Death Star suit to finally knock the fucking blinders off.

Until 2011, Donald Trump had actually given out more money to Democrats than he had Republicans and the Republicans that he had cut the biggest checks to were neocon war junkies like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and various members of the Bush Dynasty. He was close personal friends with both the Clintons and Jeffrey Epstein, logging in frequent flyer miles on the Air Lolita even though, like Bill and Hill, he already owned his own private jet. 

In spite of the 2016 makeover in which he seemed to be trying to reinvent himself as a sort of Pat Buchanan with dick jokes, the Donald drug this same circus of neocon Washington insiders into his first administration, awarding top positions in his junta to well-known war pigs like John Bolton, Elliot Abrahams, Nadia Schawlow, Mike Pompeo, and Nikki Haley, not to mention giving the VP slot to a shiny, Christo Zionist, closet dandy named Mike Pence.

The proceeding four years actually played out pretty predictably, the populist right just spent too much time bickering with the "Resistance" over Russiagate and facemasks to notice. In fact, the three big crises that defined Joe Biden's one term abortion as well as Trump's comeback campaign to save us all from its afterbirth was pretty much all the inevitable fruit of blatantly neocon policies carried out during Trump's first four years. 

October 7th was the inevitable result of Trump's decision to openly endorse Bibi Netanyahu's unprecedented expansion into the West Bank. Russia's invasion of Ukraine was the inevitable result of Trump's provocative joint military exercises with the Ukrainian Navy in the Black Sea. And the massive collapse of Babylon's border police state was at least in part an inevitable result of Trump's aggressive attempts at regime change in Venezuela.

This isn't to say that Trump is a neocon perse. He's really more of an ideological rent boy, selling space in his puckered asshole to the highest bidder, and in Washington the highest bidder tends to be whoever can unload the most missiles. This may be why Trump's new and improved second administration still includes neocon heavy hitters like Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik, but it also includes a suspicious amount of big tech bros connected to aforementioned PayPal founder and technofascist billionaire Peter Thiel.

This includes venture capitalist David Sacks in the new position of White House AI and Crypto Czar, former Palantir software engineer Clark Minor as Chief Information Officer of the Department of Health and Human Services, Colin Carrol, who went directly from the board of a Thiel connected drone factory known as Anduril to the Chief of Staff at the Department of Defense, and until recently, Elon Musk, who used DOGE as a cover to replace federal employees with automated software.

In the age of artificial intelligence and space colonization, these are the new neocons and the rabid MAGA loyalists are for once perfectly rational in being terrified of the power their favorite demagogue has awarded them but as I always say, every existential crisis is ripe with opportunities for those of us dangerous enough to tread on the wild side. 

Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and a lot of other leading MAGA monsters are fucking frauds, the willingness of these preppy city slickers to go back and beg the Donald for forgiveness should make this crystal clear, but there are a lot of decent if desperate people who have stupidly supported Trump for all the right reasons. Many of them were the same people who exiled the neocons back to the Democratic Party for a decade and threatened to put a legitimate isolationist like Ron Paul in the White House before his son sold out on the campaign trail and handed Trump his thunder

These are the disgruntled deplorables who I reach out to on my blog, the antiwar Marines, the isolationist family farmers, the sovereign citizen gun nuts, and the boogaloo militia bros. You and I may disagree with many of these people on borders and culture war bullshit but all of them are potential anarchists who see the devil in big government and big business. I reach out to these people for the same reason I reach out to Bernie's equally deluded fan club, because they are pissed-off poor people like me who deserve better than the morally bankrupt cult of personality that they've been bamboozled into investing in.

I also reach out to these people because I have honestly come to believe that all free people are now at war with an enemy more sinister than any we have ever encountered in this country before and those of you who accuse me of some kind ideological treason for my attempts to reach out to those betrayed by the false promises of MAGA clearly underestimate the danger of this enemy.

You see dearest motherfuckers, there is another Peter Thiel acolyte in Trump's White House, a Silicon Valley huckster who has successfully passed himself off as one of us, a Christo Zionist Never Trumper who managed to reinvent himself as a MAGA superstar just in time for the midterms, a man carefully groomed and mentored by Thiel, a man whose bestselling memoir was buoyed by his master's blurb, a man whose first venture capitalist firm was bankrolled by Thiel and whose run for Senate received a donation of $15 million from that fucker, literally making it the single largest donation ever made to a single candidate, a man who was introduced to Donald Trump by this same silicon Svengali who would also go on to lobby the Donald to make him his second VP in 2024.

A man named JD Vance. A slick-talking chameleon with all of Trump's pseudo-populist flare and none of his self-defeating pathological neuroses. Peter Thiel's man in the White House. A new kind of neocon for an era of artificial intelligence and space colonization.

We're going to need a bigger coalition to crush this parasite, and we can't afford to be picky when it comes to recruiting fellow peasants with pitchforks and torches. So, I'll say it one more time with zero apologies, from the trailer park to the barrio, it's time to lose the partisan bullshit and tear this motherfucker down.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* No Teeth by Perfume Genius

* War Pigs by Black Sabbath

* White Minority by Black Flag

* Our Town by Iris DeMent

* Kerosene by Big Black

* Big City by Merle Haggard

* Hug of Thunder by Broken Social Scene

* Holiday Song by the Pixies

* Territorial Pissings by Nirvana

* Highway Patrolman by Dar Williams

* Ooh That Smell by Lynyrd Skynyrd

Iran's Anti-Modern Revolution Still Terrifies the West

 After spending the last year killing pretty much everybody else in the Middle East, Israel and their less than silent partners back in Washington finally zeroed in on their 'big bad' in Tehran this June. All of this is hardly surprising nor is the fact that the orange lunatic in the White House has been complicit in pretty much every single move the IDF has made. Regardless of what Donald Trump may try to tell his increasingly suspicious MAGA supporters, his involvement in this bloodbath did not begin and end with the 14 bunker busters he violated the Constitution by dropping on three Iranian nuclear sites. Israel's temporarily aborted attempt at regime change by bombardment was performed completely in tandem with the Trump regime from start to finish.

Trump shipped Israel the 300 Hellfire missiles used in the strikes three days before they began. He deliberately lulled Iran into a false state of security by scheduling the latest round of peace talks regarding Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program for the weekend when the attacks were secretly scheduled to begin. He quite openly aided and abetted the proceeding attacks by providing Israel with the intelligence they needed to hit their targets which included the now badly wounded Ali Shamkhani, who was the Ayatollah's handpicked point man in the ongoing peace talks. He even provided the IDF with cover fire by using the US military to shoot down Iranian missiles and drones.

Trump also engaged in a downright absurdist campaign to convince the more consistently isolationist members of his MAGA base that neocon-style regime-change on behalf of a secular war junkie like Bibi Netanyahu somehow amounts to putting America first. It didn't work. MAGA flipped and Trump chickened out. Don't get me wrong, it isn't over yet, but the Trump regime appears to be attempting to change the narrative to one in which their direct intervention somehow ended a massacre which they clearly engineered from the beginning.

However, perhaps the most astounding thing about this whole bloody charade is actually how restrained big bad Iran has been throughout the ordeal. They have made it perfectly clear through public communiques that they rightly consider this entire adventure to be an American attack on Iranian soil, one that targeted some of the nation's leading military figures, and yet their only response to the men standing behind the Zionist minotaur was a glorified fireworks display over a US base in Qatar followed almost immediately by a peace deal which Israel blatantly violated before the ink had even dried on the treaty. 

All of this and more begs the question what exactly is so goddamn scary about this allegedly rogue state? And why is their very existence so offensive as to inspire such treachery and downright reckless animosity on the part of the wealthiest nation on earth?

When you scratch the surface of the Zionist propaganda, Iran actually looks downright boring compared to their head-chopping Salafi neighbors. While Saudi Arabia can directly finance throwing commercial airliners into Manhattan's skyline like tomahawks without so much as a yawn of resignation from America's warmonger class, Iran mostly resigns itself to furnishing regional militias with cheap rockets and drones. Even their support for Hamas pales in comparison to the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Qatar who actually houses much of their leadership, but Israel isn't blowing Doha apart and America is literally protecting them with boots on the ground.

Iran's supposed nuclear weapons program only deepens my argument. All available intelligence suggests that Iran shelved whatever militant nuclear ambitions they once had back in 2003 when the US dispatched their most unpredictable rival in the region, Saddam Hussein. A decision the Ayatollah Khamenei himself even sealed with a public fatwa against even pursuing weapons of mass destruction. 

Of course, none of this stopped Netanyahu from spending the last twenty years declaring that the Mullahs were just twenty minutes away from an atom bomb and none of that stopped Iran from continuing to jump through their ass to prove otherwise. This endless game of atomic chicken ultimately led the Iranian government to sign on to the JCPOA in 2015. A UN brokered peace deal in which Iran agreed to an unprecedented level of international oversight on their civilian nuclear energy program in exchange for sanctions relief that never actually materialized.

The Mullahs only raised their enrichment levels after Donald Trump unilaterally violated this deal during his first term with more sanctions in spite of Iran being in full compliance and they only continued to do so when the other nations in the P5+1 along with the Biden Administration refused to make any attempt to return to the peace table. Even then, Iran never came close to weapons grade enrichment, and they continue to beg America, a nation clearly committed to their destruction, to return to a treaty regime which even they acknowledge the US is likely just using as an excuse to spy on a totally legal program between bombings.

So, I ask once more with theatric flare, who is afraid of the big bad wolf? What exactly is so goddamn scary about the so-called Islamic Republic? Some will point out their colorful objections to the existence of a Zionist state in Palestine, but these are largely rhetorical at best, after all they haven't lifted a finger in defense of the hundreds of thousands of Gazans still being obliterated as we speak. 

Others will point to Iran's strategic location atop a sea of oil at the threshold of the Eurasian Century and I don't doubt that this is a factor. It certainly is prime real estate but the price of buying the Mullahs off is far cheaper than blowing them up and they can just as easily be made customers of Raytheon as they could be made unwilling recipients of their ordinances. No, there is something far more complex at play here, something far bigger than oil or nuclear bombs.

Call it a theory but I believe that the grotesque reality is that it isn't even Iran that is dangerous to the west, it's their revolution and the so-called proxies that this unique uprising continues to inspire long after the Mullahs sold out.

In 1979, Iran was one of the wealthiest and most westernized nations in the Middle East. They had been one of the largest recipients of US military aid for decades and their ancient monarchy of over two millennia was the subject of a CIA driven campaign of secular modernization that every American journalist seemed certain would deliver the Muslim world to capitalism with the irresistible allure of Coca-Cola and miniskirts. And then a strange coalition of communist and Islamist student movements smashed it all to bits with zero outside influence from the equally shocked Soviet bloc in favor of something entirely indigenous.

The Islamic Revolution wasn't simply a rejection of American imperialism; it was a rejection of Western Civilization itself along with all the false promises of liberal democracy and the Enlightenment which never really amounted to much more than a smokescreen for cultural subjugation in the Third World. But the Iranians weren't simply rejecting modernity for the sake of contrarian animosity; they were trying to redefine themselves outside of its polluted influence. 

Before Khomeini hijacked the nation amidst the unprecedented upheaval, the leading ideologue of the Islamic Revolution was a left-wing Shiite named Ali Shariati who preached what he referred to as "Red Shiism," a kind of Islamic liberation theology that actually rejected idolatrous clerical hierarchies in favor of a populist "salvation of the masses" and preached that the malign influence of western colonialism had actually upended Islam's traditional place at the forefront of human rights and kept the Muslim world from developing their own unique school of women's liberation not defined by materialist sexuality. 

Shariati died before the revolution could be betrayed but his influence would continue to define the ideas of the more radical leaders of Iran's Revolutionary Guard like the Fatah-trained Gaddafiite, Mohammad Montazeri, and the Che Guevara inspired Mostafa Chamran, who were inspired by Shariati's notion of the "solidarity of the oppressed" to build an "Islamic International" united against capitalism, Zionism and Wahhabism that would eventually develop into what would become known as the Axis of Resistance, a rag-tag coalition of rogue states and non-state actors that would eventually lead to the rise of the Shia militia.

As much as the west would like to paint these bearded badmen as braindead Iranian proxies, the facts on the ground do not support this narrative. In fact, while Iran has drifted farther and farther into the abyss of a corrupt and moneyed Islamic bureaucracy, movements like the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Iraq's Sadrists seem to have moved in the opposite direction, establishing functioning parallel governments in direct contradiction to Iranian financed nation-states. These stateless societies bare far more resemblance to the pre-western tribal orders that once defined the region than Iran's weird Westphalian theocracy. Muqtada al-Sadr, a populist cleric who actually studied under the Ayatollah, has become one of Iraq's most outspoken critics of Iran's influence over Bagdad and the Houthi rebels overthrew their own government after Iran had directly ordered them to stand down.

This is what the west really fears, and it is way bigger than Iran. The west is terrified of something adjacent to the kind of Islamic anarchism that nearly succeeded in Somalia with the Islamic Courts System, only this time written too large to contain. Iran is just a corrupt nation with just enough revolutionary malcontents amongst its dwindling hardliners to keep the kind of militias who will outlive them armed without carrying the moral or financial authority to govern them. After all, who is the only force that has even dared to hold Israel, and their globalist sponsors responsible for their genocidal sins? While the fat Mullahs cut deals for dinner scraps with the Great Satan, the starving rebels of Ansar Allah expand their blockade on Zionist shipping while Trump refuses to bomb them anymore as long as they leave his loot alone on the high seas.

The ironic thing is that if Trump and Bibi ever do achieve their dream of regime change in Iran, they would likely only succeed in bringing the revolution back home again. Iran still maintains a volunteer militia left over from the Iran-Iraq War known as the Basij. 25 million reserves from Iran's bucolic tribal heartland, many with battle experience in Syria among the Axis of Resistance. Without an Ayatollah to inspire them where do you think these angry young men will turn, to some Pahlavi exile quisling or to a new generation of Red Shiism not beholden to any nation state?

The shit could get wild before it gets interesting so stay tuned to your TV sets while the lion corners the tamer, one drone at a time.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Ex-Lion Tamer by Wire

* War Dance by Killing Joke

* Blank Generation by Richard Hell & the Voidoids

* My War by Black Flag

* Nothing but Flowers by Talking Heads

* Sonic Reducer by Dead Boys

* See No Evil by Television

* Let's Start a War by Fear

* June Guitar by Alex G

* Kill Your Television by Ned's Atomic Dustbin