Towards a Post-Colonial Illegalism: When Cartels Become Terrorists, Gangsters Become Revolutionaries

 "Every society has the criminals it deserves."

-Emma Goldman

The reign of Richard Nixon was a heavy chapter in the history of the American Empire. The entire world seemed to be on the brink of explosion and Babylon was far from an exception to the rule. The petty privileges granted by a handful of Civil Rights Acts had failed miserably to the quench the ghetto's thirst for a far more radical brand of racial justice as tenements blazed from sea to shining sea. As if one revolutionary class weren't enough for Washington to contend with, other lumpenproles and even a few wealthy white kids were joining in on the fracas, which was increasingly beginning to take on all the witchy markings of a youth uprising against the blind fascism of the sainted Greatest Generation. 

The only place where this fascism appeared to be marginally more heinous than it was in the projects of America's inner cities was in the jungles of Indochina where what had originally been branded as a simple civil war was rapidly expanding into a regional bloodbath that threatened to drag America's already fragile economy and even more fragile global reputation down into the trenches with it.

Dick Nixon actually ran for Imperator in Chief on a campaign promising to end that war but chose to open another front at home instead. So, he took LBJ's racist War on Crime and J. Edgar Hoover's even more racist war on "subversives" and mixed himself a lethal Molotov cocktail that he called the War on Drugs. The result continues to be the greatest expansion of the police state since the invention of the panopticon. 

The prison population on the eve of Tricky Dick's 1972 declaration of war stood at 196,441. It now stands at over 1.25 million with millions more, mostly people of color residing on the condemned battle fields of Black Power, existing under some form of carceral supervision that essentially amounts to a legal caste stripped of virtually every privilege promised them by the Civil Rights Movement. Nixon didn't do shit to end Vietnam, but he did keep his Violent Majority distracted while it raged and expanded Jim Crow all the way to the Canadian border in the process. 

The comparisons between that pill-popping Quaker mutant and Donald Trump are seemingly endless and have been explored to the point of cliche but the most frightening parallel should be the fact that Trump seems to believe that he can distract a nation exhausted by America's myriad forever wars overseas by expanding the one Nixon started within our own borders to staggeringly fascist proportions and he might be right. 

After a presidential campaign in which he simultaneously ran on peace with honor and launching drone strikes in Tijuana, Trump is attempting to marry the War on Drugs and the War on Terror by declaring drug dealers to be terrorists and using wartime legislation to unilaterally kidnap them and ship them off to massive third world prison plantations.

In a single executive order this February, five criminal organizations were designated as "foreign terrorists" including two street gangs, Tren de Aragua and MS-13. Regardless of how you or I may feel about these last two organizations it is absolutely pivotal for us to keep in mind the fact that these are massive, loosely affiliated organizations with thousands of members within in our own borders, many of them American citizens. 

To put it bluntly, if you get high in most of the cities in this country, you are now essentially complicit in what Trump has declared to be terrorism. Our fearless orange duce has already used the Alien Enemies Act to deport "terrorists" to the massive Salvadoran jungle gulag known as CECOT and he is now openly toying with the idea of possibly sending incarcerated American citizens there as well. Meanwhile, any Supreme Court justice uppity enough to mutter the words "due process?" gets accused of pampering heavily tattooed terrorists and put on the ICE shitlist. 

If you are already a declared enemy of the state like me then you have probably been spending a lot of time between spliffs asking "what the fuck do we do?" lately. Donald Trump has out-Dicked Nixon and turned-on a nation of well-intentioned isolationists to a grade of fascism more lethal than Blue Magic and fentanyl combined. Naturally, being the post-left Yippie lunatic that I am, my proposed solution is the most politically incorrect scag on the market. 

I say we reach out to Tren de Aragua and MS-13 so we can radicalize these gangbangers against our shared enemy before we all end up sharing a cage in hell together.

I'm not saying that these organizations aren't abhorrent and grotesque in their own right, but they are also far too vast to be comprised entirely of machete wielding baby killers and if Donald Trump is right about anything it is that there is a very fine line between arbitrary labels like 'criminal' and 'terrorist.' I am simply suggesting that the fine line between those labels and 'revolutionary' are equally fluid and you only have to go back as far as Nixon to prove it.

The most fearsome adversary to Nixon's Silent Majority were the cocky, leather-clad revolutionaries of the Black Panther Party, an organization that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI described as the "greatest threat to the internal security of the country", and their most brilliantly dangerous members were all certified bangers before they trained their sights on the state.

Bunchy Carter was a successful inner city stick-up artist in South Central LA before being radicalized by the teachings of Malcolm X during a stretch for armed robbery at Soledad. When he got out, he wasted little time starting up the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party and used his street hewn organizational skills to sling food to hungry children instead of slinging dope to their parents. The result was the massively successful Free Breakfast for Children program which not only fed thousands but also proved that the ghetto was more than capable of taking care of their own better than any federal government ever could.

The result was also the biggest influx in new members that the Panthers had ever seen. By April of '68, Carter's chapter was recruiting 50 to 100 members a week. It's little wonder that Hoover's feds zeroed in on the Breakfast Program as a greater threat to their authority than M1 carbines and Maui Wowie, describing the crowd-sourced mutual aid program as a danger that "represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and as such is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP." And meanwhile over in Chicago another young Panther was upping the ante even further into the revolutionary stratosphere.

Fred Hampton, chair of the Panther's Illinois chapter was busy brokering non-aggression pacts between some of the most lethal gangs in the country and turning them on to the greater opportunities presented by revolution. His solution to confronting the fascist bipartisan pig state in charge of Chicago was uniting the cities most marginalized communities into what he marketed as a "Rainbow Coalition" which included not only the Black Panthers but the Latinx Young Lords and even the Confederate flag clad Appalachian refugees of the Young Patriots Organization.

Both of the above operations began as street gangs not unlike Tren de Aragua and MS-13 but decided to commit their skills to civil rights instead of senseless bloodshed. The Rainbow Coalition quickly went nationwide, joining forces with every renegade sect from the dope smoking hippies of the White Panther Party to the pissed off reservation dogs of the American Indian Movement.

Sadly, the Feds caught up with Bunchy Carter and Fred Hampton at peak of their brilliance and fury. Both of them were dead before the end of Nixon's first year in power, victims of the FBI's Cointelpro Program which would ultimately dismantle the Panthers and their Rainbow Coalition as well. But I still believe that this model of resistance remains our greatest hope of smashing the state and I believe that the sheer size and ingenuity of organizations like Tren de Aragua and MS-13 are precisely what we need to make this strategy a success the second time around.

Tren de Aragua began as a meager prison gang in 2014 but have successfully exploited the American facilitated collapse of Venezuela's federal government to expand their numbers to 5,000 across 8 countries. By the time Nicholas Maduro sent 11,000 soldiers to raid Tocoran Prison in 2023, Tren de Aragua had turned the penitentiary into a goddam outlaw resort, complete with a nightclub, a swimming pool, and a fucking petting zoo.

MS-13 began as an even more meager organization, set up to protect Salvadoran refugees from America's genocidal proxy war in that country from Mexican bangers in South LA. Then, after hardening themselves in the same SoCal ganglands that produced Bunchy Carter, these cholos basically took Central America back from the Mexican Cartels single-handedly after their members were deported back to the old country. Their numbers now stand somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 globally with 10,000 in the US alone. 

While I'm sure that anarchists like me have a lot to teach these bangers, I'm even more certain that we have a hell of a lot more to learn from them. About organization. About loyalty. About branding and outreach. And perhaps above all else, about economics. Afterall, what is the black market, but the last truly free market left untouched by state regulation? And what is a criminal but an opportunistic refugee from a fixed post-colonial economy?

Around the turn of the century there was another oft forgotten revolutionary movement in Europe known as Illegalism. Bandits turned on to the individualist anarchism of Max Stirner decided to embrace criminality as a revolutionary lifestyle in resistance to a deeply corrupt world order. Perhaps what we need now in this hybrid era of Nixonian Trumpism is a revolutionary hybrid marriage of our own, between Fred Hampton and Max Stirner, between the Black Panthers and the Bonnot Gang.

A distinctly post-colonial school of iIlegalism building an international Rainbow Coalition of noble dope slingers and free market guerrillas using the black market to deliver the final blow to an empire that has been in decline since at least 1969.

Or maybe I've just read too many banned books. Either way, what else do we have to lose but our chains?

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Paper Planes by M.I.A.

* Roots Bloody Roots by Sepultura

* Henry, Come On by Lana Del Rey

* My War by Black Flag

* Straight Oughta Compton by NWA

* Stop Whispering by Radiohead

* Los Angeles by X

* Zero by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs

* First in the Gang to Die by Morrissey

* Lexicon Devil by the Germs

* New Pollution by Beck

The Inspiringly Insatiable Rage of Ansar Allah

 I've often mocked the hyperbole trafficked by the Trump alarmists in the mainstream media, but even I can't deny that the first few months of Donald Trump's second run in the White House have been terrifying and the most terrifying thing about them is just how successful they've been. After spending a calamitous first term carrying on his life's work as a well-publicized serial failure, the Donald has returned to the scene of the crime with a cabal of technofascists and Christian Zionists who appear to be slightly more adept at taking potshots at what's left of democracy in this country then they are at shooting each other in the foot.

In a glutinous binge of executive overreach, they have kidnapped hairdressers for having suspicious tattoos and sent them to third world dungeons in direct and almost flamboyant defiance of court orders. They have used similar powers to declare war on students who use the First Amendment to offend MAGA megadonors in the Israel First lobby. And they have manipulated the levers of world trade to turn the globalized economy into a weapon of fiscal terrorism to keep America's foreign flunkies in line.

They have pushed the limits of centralized power in a collapsing empire to the brink, and they have done so to resounding ovations from the peanut gallery. Even with Trump's reckless trade war hobbling checkbooks across the country like James Caan in Misery, the vacuous cult of personality known as Donald J. Trump remains stronger than the dollar, with most polls showing this cut-rate Ceasar's approval ratings hovering close to fifty percent and for much of the last few months these numbers were actually record breakingly high.

Middle Americans seem to be so psyched to get shit done after four years with a vegetable for a president that they don't seem to be particularly concerned by what that shit is or how likely it is to blow back in their fucking faces when Trump's new and improved Deathstar is handed over to someone willing to turn its lasers on rural white trash in Trumplandia. These people seem to have totally forgotten that Reagan's escalation of the War on Crime supplied Janet Reno with the tanks used at Waco.

As a genderqueer anti-Zionist in the Appalachian foothills of Gummo Country, I've born witness to this strangely popular reign of terror firsthand. My tiny rural Queer community has been badly battered by Trump's openly genocidal avalanche of executive orders commanding the federal government to deny our existence and target our children in their compulsory school system. I have found-family receiving death threats in middle school while their classmates' cycle in and out of other juvenile carceral systems for the crime of failed suicide pacts that aren't likely to fail a second time.

Hope is in short supply for Trump's chosen scapegoats and what's left of the Democratic Party isn't particularly interested in the plight of trans kids, undocumented labor, and members of the BDS Movement. They made that pretty damn clear when they chose the Cheney's over us during their last campaign. But some people are still giving our dayglow duce well-deserved angina, and I refuse to deny being thrilled by this simply because of political correctness.

He doesn't seem to have realized it quite yet, but Donald Trump has driven directly into a brick wall in Yemen. After Benjamin Netanyahu tore up his short-lived ceasefire with Hamas and escalated his genocide in Gaza with a total blockade and Donald Trump joined him to announce his intentions to build condos on the rubble, the Houthi rebels also known as Ansar Allah announced their intentions to restart their own guerrilla blockade against Israeli shipping in the Red Sea unless the Nakba stops. 

President Trump, who had already redeclared these men to be terrorists in one of his noxious executive orders, didn't even wait for the first drone to take off before beginning a merciless bombing campaign against largely civilian targets in Yemen. Heavy airstrikes have been going on daily since and a heavy civilian death toll has come with them, but all signs of victory remain elusive at best.

While Trump and his minions belched proudly of the "incredible success" of their war crimes, hundreds of thousands of Yemeni citizens have been seen taking to the streets of Sadaa to publicly celebrate their defiance of empire. Meanwhile, the Houthis have actually expanded their maritime attacks to once again include American targets while the Pentagon has quietly warned Congress of the "limited success" of Trump's bombing campaign which is expected to cost taxpayers over $1 billion dollars in the near future.

If anything, the Houthis only seem to become more defiant with each proceeding escalation. However, it should be understood that this is the unshakable courage of the living dead, of a people launching rockets from a crypt where the soil is still loose from freshly dug graves. The reason that Yemen does not fear Donald Trump is because they have already survived the very worst he has to offer, and they have nothing left to lose but rusty chains.

Ansar Allah began as a grassroots spiritual movement, emerging from Yemen's northern Saad Province in the early 2000s. Led by a former parliamentarian and religious scholar named Hussein al-Houthi, they remained a largely peaceful coalition of peasant tribal militias working to revive the Zaydi school of Shia Islam indigenous to the region and combat the corruption of American and Saudi influence on their homeland until the western-backed dictatorship of Ali Abdullah Saleh made the fatal mistake of attempting to disarm them. 

A scuffle ensued, followed by a crackdown which turned into a full-blown insurgency in 2004 after an attempt to arrest al-Houthi resulted in his death. His brother, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi took his place and embraced a distinctly Third World ideology that seemed to have as much in common with the Zapatistas as it did the Mullahs. Unsurprisingly, the Houthis played a major role in the Arab Spring when it came around to Sadaa in 2011, which resulted in Saleh finally stepping down after decades in power. But when his replacement who also happened to be his vice president, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, shockingly failed to make any real reforms, the Houthis chucked him out in a largely bloodless uprising in 2014.

This is when Hadi's Saudi sponsors stepped up their on-again-off-again attacks on their impoverished neighbors and America began to directly assist them with intelligence, arial refueling, and advance munitions. Obama drew first blood, but Donald Trump turned it into a driving rain of downright genocidal proportions. Between the years of 2015 and 2022, America and its proxies dumped literal tons of lethal hardware on the nation in the worst carpet bombing since Cambodia while enforcing a crippling blockade. 

Over 377,000 were killed, most of them civilians, while another 4 million were internally displaced and the entire nation was pushed to the brink of starvation. But the Houthi rebels didn't blink. They routed every jihadist mercenary we sent in on the ground and came out of a holocaust with the battle-hardened capability to confront their attackers after they retreated and started another bloodbath in Gaza.

Donald Trump and nearly every other swamp monster on the Beltway tries to blame all of this misfortune on Iran, but their own intelligence has admitted this to be bullshit, revealing that not only is the majority of Ansar Allah's fleet of tin can drones quite literally made of garbage in domestic workshops but that the Ayatollah had actually commanded their supposed proxies in Yemen to leave Hadi in power. The Houthi's message to him was the same as their message to Trump; fuck you, we won't do what you tell us.

I have little doubt that these bearded Moslem badmen probably wouldn't even know what to do with a genderfuck anarchist like me, but you don't have to be a Zaydi to be inspired by the brazen tenacity of their resistance, you just have to be someone who has been stomped on by the same jackboots. The Houthis have succeeded in surviving the very worst that Trump has to offer while making fools of their tormentors because they have taken that old maxim of 'think globally, act locally' to the next level.

The territory they govern is far from substantial, but it includes the Bab-el-Mandeb, the southern gateway to the Red Sea, and when the men who killed their children began killing the children of other men in Gaza, they used little more than a squadron of RC planes to cripple international trade until a ceasefire was finally pushed through, turning the tables and blockading the blockaders. Now, they're at it again and I'm all for it.

If Zaydi sheepherders can grab this wicked empire by the balls than why not rural Queers or undocumented workers or pissed-off college kids? Why not all of us? I hear the call of agora again, the awesome roar of counter-economics as a weapon greater than bombs. Undocumented immigrants could smuggle hormone blockers over the border with genderfluid coyotes teaching them how to shift their gender presentation to throw off ICE. The BDS Movement could expand their targets to anyone profiting off the subjugation of Yemen while they use the dark web to purchase enough Houthi khat to make the stimulant a staple of every campus rave and Pride parade.

My people are getting hammered by an administration that openly seeks our erasure, but I refuse to play the victim begging callous breeders in the DNC for scraps. I'd rather die like a Houthi on my feet than live like a Democrat on my knees. No more fucking around. It's time to fight back and that means hitting the only part of Uncle Sam with a pulse, his wallet.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Rusty Cage by Soundgarden

* Waiting Room by Fugazi

* Reign in Blood by Tori Amos

* I Am the Black Wizards by Emperor

* It's a Mirror by Perfume Genius

* Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine 

* The Stand by the Alarm

* A Drug Against War by KMFDM

* Rise Above by Black Flag

Greenland Deserves Solidarity, Too

Something very strange has happened to American colonialism. Somewhere between the shock-and-awe of Dubya's New American Century and the explosive verbal dysentery of Orange-Sphincter-Bad, Uncle Sam's mask of sanity got cracked. Naturally, the neocons and neolibs will blame it all on Trump but the election and reelection of such an openly debauched hooligan would never be possible in a functioning empire. That would be like blaming Caligula alone for Rome's demise just because he stopped drawing the blinds before the orgies. The rot here clearly runs much deeper than 2024. Any nation that responds to a recession by reigniting the Cold War was already on its way down whether the fools calling audibles from their ivory towers realized it yet or not.

With that being said, the reign of Trump II is clearly defined by what I can only describe as a sort of imperial cognitive decline. Donald Trump has done more damage to this wretched empire's ill-deserved standing on the international stage in the first few months of his second term through his bombastic social media decrees and his deranged slurry of executive orders than Al-Qaeda, covid, Walmart, and American Idol sewn together. We are retaking the Panama Canal and renaming it the Gaza Gulch. We are declaring trade wars against anyone in the neighborhood who refuses to dig a flaming border moat. And we are preparing to add Denmark to the Axis of Evil if they refuse to sell us Greenland like a used Toyota.

As absurd as all this sounds and is, it does appear to be a part of a coherent if desperate late-stage capitalist gamble on restructuring American supremacy in an era of virtually unprecedented collapse. The Trump mafia has largely called it quits on our decades long crusade to obliterate the Eurasian land bridge with dueling forever wars in the graveyards of Ancient Babylon and the former Soviet Union in favor of betting the entire house on a final showdown with China. But first, we have to shore up our resources with a return to the gunboat diplomacy of the Monroe Doctrine. Basically, putting America first means strengthening our presence across the entirety of the Americas and that includes expanding our hemispheric hegemony to the rapidly thawing European colony of Greenland. 

This cheesy eighties action flick style throwdown may be a savage farce, but a farce shouldn't be confused with a joke, and nobody is laughing in Nuuk. This is an autonomous Inuit island nation that has been struggling gallantly for centuries against brutal European colonialism and just as the violence of climate change has unlocked the long frozen economic resources that may afford them the ability to slip the leash, every gangster with a cheap smile and a tailored suit is showing up at their doorstep with a stainless steel briefcase full of cash in one hand and a loaded Uzi in the other.

Cue JD Vance and the Second Lady for a splashy photo-op. Just days after Donald Trump refused to rule out the use of military force to kidnap 57,000 people in the name of national security, these two fine young Republicans, duded up like models for the LL Beam winter catalogue, show up with camera crews and cellophane smiles to make nice with the natives. The natives smelled them coming before their private jets could land. Every single door that the White House knocked on in the capital of Nuuk slammed shut the moment they heard the name Trump. The wealthiest empire on earth couldn't find a single native family or business willing to be seen on film with these yuppie pit vipers. So, the Second Couple ended up having to slum it over at the US military's barren Pltuffik Space Bace and play benevolent pilgrim on the set of The Thing.

This kind of pandering white savior bullshit is nothing new to Greenland. They have been dealing with the passive aggressive cruelty of Western Civilization going back to the 16th century when the then ascendent Danish Kingdom colonized the island shortly after Christian jihadist mercenaries arrived to convert the heathen Inuit fisherman who migrated there from Canada in the 12th century. What transpired over the next 300 years was a story all too familiar to the darker nations of the global south like Palestine. A story of genocide, apartheid, cultural erasure, and ecological exploitation. And it's a story that all too frequently included the United States as a less than silent partner.

The first major mining operation in Greenland was launched by Denmark and those fine folks over at Oresund Chemical Industries in the tiny village of Ivittuut in 1854. Danish workers were shipped in directly to the mine to extract a rare mineral known as cryolite, which was used to smelt aluminum. 400 billion Kroners of revenue was ripped from the earth by the time the mine closed in 1987 and one of their top customers was the United States Military who used this magic dirt to produce fighter jets for their own imperial adventures while also making sure to keep this useful Arctic territory under their thumb.

This effort graduated to a military occupation in 1940 after a rival white supremacist named Adolf Hitler took Denmark in his Blitzkrieg rampage across Europe. The Allied Forces, led by Great Britain and the United States, swooped in to occupy Copenhagen's Atlantic colonies in the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland. 6,000 troops were sent to occupy the latter which at the time contained a native population of about 20,000. FDR declared Greenland to be a part of America's expanding "defense" sphere of influence in 1941. His nuke dropping toady, Harry Truman would offer to buy the Island from Denmark just like Trump for $100 million dollars in 1946. The Danes would politely decline but they had no reservations about the United States turning the colony into a radioactive NATO playground.

America unilaterally expanded their sacred right to conduct widespread military operations on the Island with the 1951 Defense of Greenland Act and opened Thule Air Base the same year after forcefully evicting the local Inuit population from the site. Thule would become the depleted uranium tip of America's spear in our nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. It wouldn't be revealed until the 90s that the US had stashed doomsday devices at the base with the Danes full consent, in spite of that Nordic socialist nation's publicly anti-nuke stance. This is because Denmark's progressive secular democracy had far more important things to worry about than world peace, namely the brutal Danification of Greenland's native population.

Denmark used the awesome power of a centralized nanny state to fund major urbanization projects on the island, forcing rural Inuit communities into massive public housing blocks and compulsory public schools where they were forced to abandon their traditional subsistence lifestyles for something more modern. Inuit children were systematically removed from their families and placed into foster homes in Denmark for further indoctrination, but the Danish state didn't stop at killing the Indian, they targeted the child as well, fitting Greenlandic girls as young as 12 with intra-uterine devices, often without their knowledge and consent, leading to the sterilization of 35% of native women of child bearing age by 1970.

None of these grotesque efforts of forced assimilation managed to stifle the Greenlandic people's desire for liberation though. As the anti-colonialist movement of the Third World reached oppressed people in the heart of Babylon, inspiring uprisings from Watts to Stonewall, opposition to Danish rule and a desire for the revival of Inuit Power swelled in Greenland. The island managed to achieve home rule over domestic affairs in 1979 and used this power to withdraw from the neo-colonial monstrosity known as the European Union in 1985. Home rule was expanded further in a 2009 self-government agreement that granted the former colony control over its own mineral resources as well as the right to be consulted on NATO military maneuvers. But total independence has been affectively stymied by a 5 billion Kroner block grant from Denmark that still essentially keeps the lights on on the island.

In the ultimate sick twist of irony, the environmental rape perpetrated by Western Civilization and their numerous industrial complexes has given the island access to mineral riches long trapped beneath the glacial ices that could afford it the resources it needs to unshackle itself from Danish subjugation but as the Trump Administration's increasingly belligerent behavior proves, this still leaves Greenland at a treacherous crossroads, one not dissimilar to that faced by many newly decolonized Third World nations. On one hand, you have the quite openly rapacious advances of western powers in decline of which Trump is not alone. France has responded to Trump's nationalist caterwauling by raising the prospect of sending French troops to defend "EU territory", despite Greenland's clear rebuke against being unilaterally deemed European.

On the other hand, you have China and the ascendant economic powers of the BRICS coalition. As tempting as embracing this anti-western front against dollar supremacy may seem on the surface, it would sadly likely amount to little more than switching pimps. China is now the world's biggest creditor nation and BRICS looks a little bit more like a loan shark cartel dressed up in radical chic with each passing imperial creep state like Saudi Arabia and the UAE that it adds to the fold.

Greenland's best hope would be to go the way of their ancestors with a diverse tribal coalition that creates autonomy through sheer decentralized numbers, something similar to what the recently liberated Third World attempted during the last cold war with the Non-Aligned Movement, only this time avoiding the pitfalls of the Westphalian nation state by refusing to comply with global constructs of central authority like the UN and the World Bank. This would mean embracing a form of monetary diversity that would include the use of cryptocurrencies and admitting nations without traditional borders like Chiapas, Cheran, Hezbollah, and Ansar Allah.

We have been slamming our fucking brains out against the western-style nation state for thousands of years now and its greatest achievements aside from climate change and nuclear bombs are global peace treaties that recognize kingdoms run by trust fund cadavers before the people they enslave and the miracle of modern medicine that allows them to shove eugenics machinery into children. Maybe we should all try governing a little bit more like the Innuits before modern liberal democracy boils us all alive in our own glacial juices and maybe this begins with us all showing the same level of solidarity to Greenland that we do Palestine.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Song that influenced this post

* Security of the First World by Public Enemy

* Human Behavior by Bjork

* Under My Thumb by the Rolling Stones

* Raping a Slave by Swans

* Karma Police by Radiohead

* World Peace is None of Your Business by Morrissey

* Burning Too by Fugazi

* Rape Me by Nirvana

* Hyperballad by Bjork

* The Payback by James Brown

Trump's Fascist Immigration Regime Will Fuck You Too, Gringo

 It's a debate that has been raging between left and right libertarians for Kali knows how long; that age old question of just how libertarian are borders? Naturally, being a Situationist-cum-Agorist, the answer seems pretty fucking obvious to me, and it can be best delivered by another question. What the fuck does chucking people in jail for crossing invisible lines have to do with liberty? The entire premise just feels dizzyingly arbitrary to me, not to mention just plain mean, like a game of red-light-green-light with German shepherds and concentration camps.

However, in today's toxic climate of big government overreach and partisan color blindness, it is also becoming increasingly obvious to me that leaning on empathy towards the 'other' as a debate tactic isn't working very well and it may not have too either. That's because, in the age of Trump, it doesn't take a bleeding heart to realize that a strong border means weaker civil liberties for everyone. In fact, in the long run, American citizens may even stand to have as much to lose as the undocumented.

After winning an election with a downright shocking amount of support from self-proclaimed libertarians, Donald Trump is openly and flagrantly using our nation's fascistic immigration police state to banish green card holders who speak ill of his Zionist masters. 

Miriam Adelson, billionaire widow of Ashkenazi supremacist casino cancer, Sheldon Adelson, has been the single largest financier for all three of Trump's presidential campaigns, dumping a reported $600 million dollars into that pussy-grabbing rapist's coffers since 2016. Now, she and others like her are delivering the administration they paid for lists of student activists speaking out against their genocide in the Gaza Strip and Donald Trump is dutifully using the hammer of the state to crush them like glass.

This may have begun with Mahmoud Khalil, the green card holding student activist and husband of a pregnant American citizen, shipped off by ICE to a private prison in Louisiana without being accused of a single crime, but it is rapidly expanding into something far more monstrous. 

Trump's border gestapo are now invading campuses across the country while they use AI-assisted reviews of social media accounts to detect and deport any student Visa holder engaging in what is vaguely deemed to be "pro-terrorism" speech. And just like that, Mahmoud has been joined in the barracks by Rasha Alaweih, Rumeya Ozturk, Yunseo Chung, Rajar Khan Suri, and Lequa Kurdia, and the list continues to grow.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has proudly announced that he has personally intervened to cancel the Visas of more than 300 students over campus activism, referring to them as "lunatics" in a recent press conference. But it's OK folks, because these aren't people, they're only immigrants, so, there's nothing to see here. 

The only problem with that logic is that human rights are either universal or they are meaningless, and the Bill of Rights provides no exceptions to this rule. In fact, there is zero language in the Constitution referencing citizens or non-citizens at all when it comes to free speech and habeas corpus. That's because the whole point of these documents, however flawed they and their authors may be, wasn't to protect certain kinds of citizens with certain kinds of rights but to protect all of us from the dangers of irreversible government power.

The Trump Administration is actually supporting depriving activists like Mahmoud Khalil of basic human rights with the excuse that the anticipated impact of their free expression "would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States." These creeps are openly using military justifications to liquidate basic democratic principles, and this is far from the only place where this is being done either. This is also the same administration using innocuous war powers to ship people by the hundreds off to foreign gulags without spending so much as an hour in court.

I speak of course of Donald Trump's revival of the Alien Enemies Act to declare war on a Venezuelan street gang called Tren de Aragua. Passed in 1798 in anticipation of a potential conflict with France, this act grants the Executive Office broad sweeping powers to detain and deport non-citizens during wartime. 

Trump has decided to exploit this already dangerously vague and rarely used law by essentially changing the definition of wartime, claiming this gang is part of some cockamamy conspiracy to conduct "irregular warfare" within the United States in concert with their sworn enemies back home in the Madura regime. 238 men have been shipped off to Nayib Bukele's drug war banana republic in El Salvador based on evidence as trivial as football tattoos and happening to be in the same car as a motherfucker who has them.

"But what does this have to do with American citizens?" the ethically retarded dregs of the Mises Caucus will brey like goats at a funeral moon. Well, the last two times this sick law was used thousands of legal immigrants were rounded up and tossed in concentration camps, first by progressive nazi Woodrow Wilson during the First World War, then by progressive nazi FDR during the Second, and that time the Alien Enemies Act was only the beginning. 

After sweeping up tens of thousands of German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants, Roosevelt went after citizens too, using the AEA as the legal basis for Executive Order 9066 which saw over 120,000 Japanese Americans sent to camps in the desert on the whims of a single despotic regime with a rapacious war lust.

Like I said, rights either mean everything or they mean nothing, and the Trump Administration couldn't make it clearer how little they give a shit about human rights based purely by the company they keep. Warden Bukele, the aforementioned dictator Trump has paid six million dollars to disappear over 200 men in El Salvador's swollen prison system, oversees a massive penitentiary known as CECOT or the Center for Confinement of Terrorism as part of his bloody civil war with MS-13. 

This is a veritable city behind bars with a capacity of over 40,000 from which no prisoner has ever left alive, and the Shawshank sheriff who runs this mega-gulag is Donald Trump's numero uno partner in the war on crime, a man who has publicly announced opening his prisons to any prisoner across the globe for the right price. Marco Rubio himself has loudly praised Bukele's offer to house American citizens, all while Trump pushes to combine the War on Drugs with the War on Terror in order to sic Seal Team 6 on the Cartels.

I really shouldn't have to tell anyone that all of this sick shit is a bad recipe for a level of despotism the likes of which this country has never seen before, especially not libertarians radicalized by the excesses of America's various forever wars. What we are looking at here is the very real possibility of the American Government making CECOT the new GITMO and expanding war powers into a continental dragnet that could easily include any pro-Palestine bro lighting up a doobie in the quad of your local junior college. 

There is quite literally no other word in the English language for this militant absurdity but fascism and the most absurd thing about it is that our orange Fuhrer was given a mandate to do all of this by hordes of so-called libertarians based on an immigration crisis that occurred during times of unprecedented border security.

Funding for our border police state has been increasing pretty consistently for over forty years now and it continued to increase under Joe Biden who spent over $8 billion dollars more on border and immigration enforcement than Trump did during his first term. Meanwhile, during this same age of total border war, the population of undocumented immigrants has more than doubled in this country and that trend too continued under Trump who saw border apprehensions double during his first term while got-aways increased every fucking year.

The only thing we have to show from all of these military industrial shenanigans besides debt is a Rio Grande lined with defective Israeli surveillance towers and a border army armed to the fangs with battle tanks and a jurisdiction that includes two thirds of US territory, and this is where my latest diatribe comes full circle.

So, you wanna keep brown people off your front lawn? I could tell you to go fuck yourself all day long and a part of me would really enjoy that, but perhaps it would be a little more productive for me to point out that you're already fucking yourselves senseless. 

Policing human movement on a massive scale has proven to be about as affective as policing the use of narcotics. You don't have to love crystal meth to recognize that the War on Drugs has failed to do anything but grow government to Godzilla size proportions and you don't even have to be a decent human being to recognize that the war at the border is just another fascist ankle grab with the word 'blowback' stamped all over it.

You just have to be a goddamn libertarian in more than name only. You think you can handle that, gringo? Because they'll be coming for your ass next week if we don't draw the line today.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Cult of Personality by Living Colour

* Only Shallow by My Bloody Valentine

* Personal Jesus by Johnny Cash

* Into Dust by Mazzy Star

* Under a Funeral Moon by Darkthrone

* I Love You, I'm Sorry by Gracie Abrams

* Danny Nedelko by IDLES

* Runaways by the Killers

* See No Evil by Television

* Americon Czar by Brujeria