We Need a Thousand Tiny Revolutions to Combat American Fascism

 In case you haven't noticed, the world is a pretty fucked up place right now and America kind of has everything to do with it. From the rapid advance of climate carnage to the blatant mass starvation of the children of the Gaza Strip, all roads leading straight to hell also lead straight back to Washington. While much of this is hardly new, there does seem to be a new and aggressively pervasive heir of downright flamboyant nihilism powering America's ancient criminal enterprise to reach even deeper depths of depravity while the whole world watches and waits in vain for the old mandarins of world order to provide them with the kind of convenient excuses that used to allow them to look the other way.

To put the diagnosis succinctly, America seems to have given up on its centuries-old MO of at least pretending to be the good guys at a time when its crimes are reaching new levels of downright apocalyptic desperation and some of us aren't taking it well.

The left blames this on Trump and they are at least half right. Trump is an openly psychopathic man-child with a Jonestown-grade cult of personality and a barely veiled contempt for any kind of democracy but once again this isn't exactly new. 

Trump has always been an unspeakable human being with a Svengali-like pull on Middle Ameria, but in spite of all the breathless hysteria from the neocons he dislodged, his first reign of terror really didn't amount to much more than a rabid orangutan with a machine gun being let loose in the Oval Office. Truth be told, he often inadvertently ended up doing more harm to the American war machine than he did to his marginalized targets the first time around. But this all changed in 2024 when Elon Musk decided to endorse the Kool-Aid.

Now, Orange Man Bad has the corporate sponsorship of Silicon Valley which has recognized his brand of pseudo-iconoclastic fascism as the perfect vehicle for their nightmarish dream of bringing Manifest Destiny to the stars with the power of hyperconnectivity and artificial intelligence.

Thus, MAGA now has the institutional greenlight to turn its various pet vehicular rampages into frighteningly affective public policy just so long as they toss the tech bros the keys to the Pentagon. The Jesus freaks get to use the public school system to terrorize trans children back into the closet. The border industrial complex gets to expand their private Sudetenland on the Rio Grande to every campus in the country. And the Israel First lobby gets their final solution in the Gaza Strip. 

Meanwhile, every single body supposedly built to create the illusion of checks and balances for liberal democracy has been exposed to be little more than a totally feckless theatre troupe in black judge's gowns. The Supreme Court and the Hague can balk like roosters until the sun explodes, their powers are totally meaningless to an unhinged strongman with a posse of oligarchs with deeper pockets than most small countries.

If you find this opening rant to be depressing as shit, then welcome to my world. Being a genderqueer anarchist in Appalachian tetanus country was shitty enough back when the feds were content to simply look the other way while teachers, priests, wardens, and cops battered my people. Now that their long raging war against weird folks has been given the official stamp of approval by every office and social media giant in the land, the local thugs don't even attempt to conceal the genocidal intentions behind their abuse anymore.

"Gender ideology" has been publicly declared to be a pandemic, and the proscribed cure is to kill the tranny and save the child. The result isn't just my nephew being deluged by death threats while their friends cycle in and out local mental wards after failed suicide attempts, it's my own mental health taking a savage beating every other time the news is on.

I have PTSD and DID as the direct result of being mercilessly abused by teachers and priests in preschool and then indoctrinated for another decade into believing that I was the fucking pervert just because I was born with the wrong set of junk. Having a confessed sex criminal in the White House accusing me of grooming while he sends in the feds to literally govern other kids' genitalia is enough to make me switch personalities six times before breakfast. So yeah, I'm kind of a fucking mess here and I'm not alone. 

If you are undocumented, Muslim, or just happen to possess a functioning uterus in this country you're probably feeling the heat of MAGA's newly besotted marriage with technofascism right now and you're probably feeling it in a very personal way. And like me, you are probably overwhelmed, and you have every fucking right to be but there are two things that you should know about your totally justified psychosis, two things that I frequently have to remind myself when I become tempted to swallow my own tongue.

The first is that you are not alone. A bit cliche I know, but still totally valid. The second is that you are not crazy. In fact, you are actually being overwhelmed by design. The state and its various institutions have long conspired to cripple all of us with a pervasive sense of learned helplessness. It is routinely drilled into our skulls from a very young age that we are not in control and we require authoritarian institutions just to function. Our entire compulsory school system is defined by this kind of subservient grooming; being berated to stand in a straight line just to use the bathroom and then graded on the experience. It's child abuse and it works. It even effects the mindset of many of the principled radicals in this country.

Every communist, socialist, and anarchist on the internet is searching for the big solution to the Trump problem, whether it be the next October Uprising or some new red messiah to lead them to the promised land, but all of these desperate desperados are still locked into the same logic pushed on them by their high school civics teachers. You must either conspire with lesser evils within the existing system or replace it entirely with another massive goddamn system. 

These notions not only encourage people to compromise their conscience in the name of conformity, but they also encourage anyone who doesn't have the stomach to whore themselves out to resort to the dreamy complacency of utopian someday-ism. 'Someday, the proletariat will reach a miraculous mass awakening, and the workers' paradise will begin..."

It's OK. I've fallen victim to this line of thinking myself. I spent over half a decade as an agoraphobic shut-in waiting on some mythical Che Guevara to save me from myself. I ultimately had to come to the conclusion that massive problems, be they overthrowing the government or just stepping outside of the house, don't require massive solutions. Quite the contrary, massive solutions tend to either cripple us beneath the weight of their enterprise or simply replace one big problem with another. The solution isn't all or nothing, it's somewhere in between.

I think that the brilliant counter-cultural anti-intellectual, Paul Goodman, put it best when he said; "Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won and you had the kind of society you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now! Whatever you would do then, do it now. When you run up against obstacles, people or things that won't let you live that way, then begin to think about how to get over or around or under that obstacle, or how to push it out of the way, and your politics will be concrete and practical."

So, I'm working with a local non-profit bookstore to start up a radical Queer youth group, a space for kids like me to have a say and feel safe for a couple hours a week, in fact, the first meeting is this week. My rural found family is also building a functioning homestead that will hopefully allow all of us to become less dependent on big business and big government. It is all a work in progress and I'm sure we'll keep stumbling all the way to the finish line, but the dream is to create something not dissimilar to our radically conservative Amish neighbors, a sort of archipelago of agrarian Queer autonomous communities that can co-exist with the "English world" while remaining fiercely independent of its more toxic influences.

We aren't the only ones fighting back small to win big either. The two most affective foes of the Trump junta thus far have been the anti-ICE 'Know Your Rights' movement and Yemen's Houthi rebels. Both have confronted big fascism with shoestring arsenals and have successfully provoked MAGA inc. into wasting billions of dollars on well publicized and humiliating tactical failures. ICE is chasing their tails in Chicago while well-trained rapid response networks police their every move and Donald Trump has called it quits on his bombardment of Yemen even while the Houthis expand their blockade against his genocide in Gaza.

This is how we win, dearest motherfuckers. This is how we defeat an empire defined by globalism and pompous universal "values." Not with one big revolution but with a thousand tiny revolutions that can dismantle the Death Star one piece at a time and build cooperative green trailer parks from the scrap metal. We can take this bitch if each one of us throws a punch at a different pressure point at the same time. They won't even know what hit them. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* The National Anthem by Radiohead

* Thumbtack by Blondshell

* Suffragette City by David Bowie

* Dare by Samia

* Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden

* Elderberry Wine by Wednesday

* Loaded by Primal Scream  

* Chase the Devil by Max Romeo & the Upsetters

Meet the New Pope, Same as the Last Pope (...and the Last Pope)

 Ana Maria was a nine-year-old girl from a little town called Chiclayo, Peru in 2007 when the Catholic Church robbed her of her childhood. She didn't even see it coming. A beloved friar known popularly as Father Lute at the church she was raised in had arranged to accompany her on a mission to another parish. Her parents and teachers told her this was a great honor, and all the other little girls and boys were jealous. She would get to stay overnight in a different town at a different parish with the full and undivided attention of one of the most beloved and well-respected men in her community. She couldn't possibly say no even if she wanted to.

But the moment that Ana Maria and Father Lute were alone in a faraway place, things very rapidly became strange and frightening. The parish facilities they were staying at only had one bed and Father Lute insisted that they share it. Ana Maria felt deeply uncomfortable with this arrangement but what could she do? How could she say no? She had trouble sleeping next to this grown man who everyone she knew held in such high regard but before she could drift off, he was all over her, hugging her, kissing her, caressing her, putting his great big hands all over her tiny defenseless body. This time Ana Maria tried to say no, she tried over and over again, but the beloved Father Lute didn't care. It was like the man had transformed into an insatiable beast in that bed the moment the lights were off.

Ana Maria wanted to believe that it was all just a bad dream, but it wasn't, and it kept happening. Father Lute arranged for more overnight visits to more faraway parishes for the two of them and they always seemed to have only one bed to share. Sometimes another local friar came too. Ana Maria didn't know what to do. She felt like dying but everyone around her just kept reminding her of what a great honor it was to be the focus of such interest from such a distinguished man of the cloth, so she kept quiet while Father Lute kept his hands all over her childhood. Eventually, finally, the missions ended but the nightmares didn't. No bed that Ana Maria slept in felt safe. Years went by before she finally broke her silence. She told her two sisters about the strange trips with Father Lute and to her shock her sisters confessed that they too had been preyed upon by the same man of God in the exact same fashion, all between the tender ages of 10 and 14.

Ana Maria was furious. This man who the community had trusted completely with its children was a monster and he needed to be stopped. The friar had since gone on to become a popular parish priest in Chiclayo, with access to God knows how many more innocent and trusting young boys and girls just like Ana and her sisters. So, the three contacted Chiclayo's Bishop by phone in 2020 to confess. But the Bishop refused to even meet with them in person for two years, using the Pandemic as an excuse. When the sisters finally met with the most powerful Catholic in their diocese, he insisted that there was very little that the Church could do for them and suggested that they seek out the civil authorities instead. When the sisters continued to demand an investigation within the Church they still loved, the Bishop relented reluctantly and sent them to something he had just established called a "listening center" where Church officials heard their stories and opened an official investigation.

At first, Ana Maria and her sisters were hopeful. Father Lute had been removed from his parish very quickly even though officials announced his departure as being for health reasons. But as the months went by without any follow up from Chruch officials, the sisters lost their patience. 8 months after they had lodged an official complaint with their Bishop, the three sisters finally took his original advice and reached out to civil authorities only to be shocked when local prosecutors closed the case due to the statute of limitations having expired years ago, something any local Bishop would certainly have known but by that time the local Bishop was long gone.

Bishop Robert Prevost had been plucked from tiny Chiclayo, Peru by Pope Francis himself in 2023 and sent to Rome where he was made a Cardinal and appointed to the prestigious and highly influential Dicastery for Bishops. A number of other strange things happened that year affecting Ana Maria and the people of Chiclayo, and all roads seemed to lead back to Rome. The bishop selected to replace Prevost discovered that Father Lute, also known as Father Eluterio Vasquez Gonzales, was still celebrating mass in a nearby parish and when confronted on the accusations against him the priest made little attempt to deny the abuse, quickly making a full confession.

By this time his case had finally made its way to Rome just in time for Prevost to take his new position of power in the Vatican. Strangely, the case was very quickly closed in spite of the fact that the accused had now confessed to being guilty. Even stranger, the basis for the closure of the case was the decision made by civil prosecutors not to pursue it even though Canonical investigations are supposedly completely independent of civil ones and aren't commanded by the same statutes of limitations which were the only reasons the civil case did not proceed. Something very strange had happened, and it wasn't hard to connect the dots once the dust had settled.

The Bishop of Chiclayo had clearly lied to Ana Maria and her sisters, encouraging them to take their case to a place where he knew it would meet a dead end. When they chose the Canonical route instead, it appears that the bishop created his own dead end with his newfound influence over the various kangaroo courts of the Vatican. In case you haven't guessed, this bishop is now the Pope. Early this month, a church already ruptured by an international sex abuse scandal that reaches across oceans and continents chose to make Cardinal Robert Prevost 'Pope Leo XIV' and the shadowy case of Ana Maria and her sisters is far from the only stain on his cassock.

Prevost is a lifelong member of the Order of Saint Augustine, eventually serving as the head of this organization for decades, first in the United States and then internationally. The Augustinians are notorious among survivors of Catholic abuse like me for being one of the most stubbornly backward sects in Catholicism when it comes to transparency and reform, and the Chicago born Pope Leo's Midwest Augustinians are among the worst of the worst, only creating a publicly available list for what it deems to be credibly accused offenders amongst its ranks last year and only doing so under immense public pressure after one of their priests, Reverand Richard McGrath, the longtime principal of Providence Catholic High School in New Lenox, Illinois, was accused of raping minors and trading in child pornography.

However, amazingly, McGrath is still not on that fucking list because somehow even he doesn't meet the Augustinian standards for guilt even though he was more than guilty enough for them to settle out of court for $2 million dollars when one of McGrath's many victims sued the Order in 2017. A large portion of Father McGrath's crime spree occurred during Pope Leo's leadership of this chapter of the Augustinians, a reign that also saw Leo house another accused pedophile priest named Father James Ray at a South Side monastery down the street from a Catholic elementary school without so much as even informing the school or the public. McGrath would later be housed at this exact same monastery after he was accused, only by this time that monastery was literally across the street from a preschool and this is where this shit gets personal for me.   

Back in the nineties I was taken from a Catholic preschool in Central Pennsylvania by a travelling priest like Lute, Ray, and McGrath. I never caught that strangers name, but he and another priest savagely raped me in the rectory down the street. I was five years old, and I still have flashbacks where I'm choking on parts of their bodies. My abuse occurred under the leadership of Pope John Paul who we now know moved at least three priests accused of molestation to different parishes while he was still known as Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Krakow, in the 1970s. This was right around the time that his successor, a man who died with the name Pope Benedict XVI, was moving around his own pedophile priests as Joseph Ratzinger, Archbishop of Munich.

Pope Francis appears to have been busier protecting generals than priests while he was still Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina, but that didn't stop him from appointing Cardinal George Pell, an Australian holy man already soaked in cover-up charges, to be his "anti-corruption czar" and it also didn't stop Francis from defending that bastard either after he was accused of taking part in the abuse himself by multiple parties.

Every decade or so, another one of these gawdy creeps drops dead in his gold jewelry and different wings of what's left of the Catholic Church take turns cheering or booing his replacement, but every single Pope going back at least half a century has been proven guilty of taking part in enabling a wholesale child sex ring that they all continue to insist is some kind of religion.

I wrote this rant, another fucking rant about another fucking Pope with a long and absurdly well-recorded history of putting predators before children, because I want to know, I sincerely need to know, as one of those broken children, when is it enough? How many childhoods do you people need to cannibalize, how many Ana Maria's do you need to crucify before you put down the goddamn rosary and recognize that the Vatican is not a church, it is a criminal organization, and there is no ideology that will cure this crypt of shattered innocence from being a mafia.

Jesus Christ himself would burn that city to the fucking ground and he would do it with the former Bishop of Chiclayo still inside.

Peace, Rage, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Fait Acompli by Curve

* Event of a Fire by Blondshell

* Quiet Room by Babes in Toyland

* Hey Jupiter by Tori Amos

* The Hand That Feeds by Nine Inch Nails

* Dicknail by Hole

* Thumbtack by Blondshell

* Stellate by Samia

* Handsome and Gretel by Babes in Toyland

* Savage Good Boy by Japanese Breakfast

RFK Jr.'s War on Neurodiversity is a War on Individualism

The Trump Administration really seems to have a thing for genocide, and I don't believe this statement to be hyperbolic even if it is a tad theatrical. Whether they're launching nationwide dragnets to preserve the racial purity of the endangered American factory, militarizing the Rio Grande, or openly conspiring with Benjamin Netanyahu to hollow out the Gaza Strip for luxury condominiums, the second MAGA junta seems to be defined by grand and expansive schemes to erase problematic populations with massive government programs.

This drive towards demographic hygiene in the name of national revival extends towards Trump's domestic social programs as well, with executive orders explicitly defining transgender people to be little more than a contrived ideology and calling for that ideology to be eradicated by eliminating the presence of inconvenient non-persons like me from the public sphere.

The fact that a political movement built on a foundation of demonizing refugees and Muslims would evolve into a cabal that seems to find a final solution to every problem they manufacture isn't exactly new or even all that surprising but that doesn't make it any less revolting, especially when you find yourself existing at the cross section of multiple genocides. On that note, apparently, it's just my lucky day, because the latest target of Trump's conspiracy to make America pure again is the neurodivergent and he's backing a thinly veiled approach to eugenics to erase us.

Cue Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; professional imbecile, craven opportunist, and somehow Secretary of Health and Human Services. This morally derelict nepo baby has fashioned a career out of two things, squatting beneath the squandered vestige of his family name and demonizing autism as a scourge against suburbia. It was really only a matter of time before he used his position in Trump's new cabinet to turn his hobby into a jihad and apparently that time is now. This April, in tandem with the CDC's latest inconclusive report on childhood autism rates, Kennedy launched a series of ambitious proposals to fix his pet crisis once and for all.

After chopping up a few poultry observations from the latest report and mixing them up with a hodgepodge of mischaracterized data from other more outdated studies, Kennedy painted a portrait of a community which includes most of the members of my own found family that bares absolutely zero resemblance to reality. Once he was done pulling numbers out of his ass to suggest a scientific basis for his wholesale character assassination, Kennedy drew his violin and sang a sad song about autism, describing the phenomenon as an "individual tragedy" that "destroys families" before painting a picture of the people I love that renders them to the status of useless, otherized, husks draining an otherwise productive society of its resources.

RFK Jr., a junky trust fund baby who has never contributed anything of value to society in his entire life other than the screeching sound of his own overprivileged existence, declared that most autistic people will "never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date..." They'll never use their bootlegging connections to rig an election, they'll never have the leader of a foreign proxy state executed, they'll never drown their latest mistress in a luxury car, beat a teenager to death with a golf club, or shoot heroin in a limousine... You get the picture; they'll never be a fucking Kennedy.

But never fear, a white knight from Camelot is here to rid us all of this horrid affliction faster than you can say fraud. Kennedy has announced a bold mission to cure what he describes as a "preventable disease" over summer vacation, stating "By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we will be able to eliminate those exposures."

Let me just rip the needle off the record right now and set a few things straight. The first and most important one being that there is no goddamn "autism epidemic." Whole governments and international medical bodies have already dumped billions of dollars and decades of time into identifying the causes of autism and this is what the data finds; while autism rates have risen dramatically since 2000, all the available evidence suggests that these numbers are simply the result of the increased awareness that comes with broadening diagnostic criteria and making early childhood screening routine.

RFK Jr., who has spent years blaming vaccines for the frightening rise of weird people, has labeled this commonsense data interpretation an "ideology of epidemic denial" and has claimed that he had never met an autistic person in his youth. I actually don't deny the second slur but that's likely because autistic people were just labeled as "retards" back then and left to languish in a Thorazine coma in the kind of maximum-security government asylums the Kennedy Dynasty kept up and running with the taxes they never had to pay.

An American Academy of Pediatrics study in 2021 actually found that 60% of people diagnosed with autism have an IQ in the average range or higher and a 2017 PubMed study found that 61% of people on the spectrum are employed. This is because autism is not a disease or even necessarily a disability. It is a vast spectrum of complex neurological differences that effect the way the people who experience them experience the world around them in multiple ways, most of them non-debilitating. In other words, autistic people just aren't "normal" and that terrifies WASPy  little one percenters like RFK Jr. and his suburban fan club of pearl-clutching, new age, Karens.

Autisitic people, much like Queer people, are simply biologically driven to reject the status quo and considering how fucked up our genocidal status quo is, we could use a lot more of them.

Don't get me wrong, there is definitely an epidemic going on here, but it is an epidemic of neurodivergence, a rapidly expanding umbrella community that includes all of the pieces of the puzzle that pricks like the Kennedys couldn't jam into the homogenized purgatory of western civilization. This is a radical epidemic of neurological outsiders racked with stultifying diagnoses like autism, ADHD, dyslexia, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and OCD. An epidemic which overlaps significantly and uncoincidentally with the parallel epidemic of transgenderism which also boldly questions the core assumptions of a deeply polluted society.

I am a proud part of both of these epidemics, only I prefer to think of them as a revolution. My own neurodivergence takes the form of multiple personalities or what is commonly diagnosed as dissociative identity disorder. I had to develop this "disorder" as a survival mechanism against the trauma I experienced at the hands of the Catholic Church. The only way for me to exist as an individual in a space so fundamentally unsafe, especially for a transgender child, was to evolve into five separate individuals.

I do not believe that autism is fundamentally dissimilar. We are all hostages of a rapacious capitalist superstructure that demands total conformity to an order that is literally destroying the planet. The only way to truly be an individual in such a deeply sick environment is to be fucking crazy and when people like Kennedy talk about "curing" us they are really talking about erasing us, regardless of whether they do it with prostate medication or genome editing. 

This ploy may be patently fascistic but the most infuriating thing for a plural genderfuck bumpkin like me is that there isn't even anything particularly conservative about it. In fact, there is nothing particularly conservative about any of MAGA's genocidal policies, all of which smack of the kind of belligerent, right wing, social engineering that defined big government progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The kind of cosmopolitan psychopaths who forcibly sterilized over 70,000 Americans, turned public schools into prisons, and started a World War just to revitalize American greatness.

This is also the same line of uber statist thinking that inspired the Nazis to take it one step further, and Donald Trump doesn't strike me as the kind of man afraid to take that next bold step into the abyss of the recycling bin of human history.

Ironically or not, neurodivergent people are actually our greatest hope against this threat. We are already the product of an over-regimented society, the battle-hardened casualties of the stultifying social engineering of big business, big government, and big religion, of compulsory schooling, constant surveillance, and abusive psychiatry.

Most of the people I love fall somewhere on the wilder side of this spectrum of neurological outlaws and the biggest problem that most of us grapple with is the trauma that comes with growing up weird in a conformist society. But we are all survivors. Neurodivergence is evolution through radical individualism and the bigger the MAGA state becomes, the more neurodivergent individualists will evolve out of surviving it.

In other words, keep governing us, normies. You're only building an army too strange to tame.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* California Uber Alles by Dead Kennedys

* Kill the Poor by Dead Kennedys

* Hop with the Jetset by Dead Kennedys

* Terminal Preppie by Dead Kennedys

* Well Paid Scientist by Dead Kennedys

* A Child and His Lawnmower by Dead Kennedys

* Drug Me by Dead Kennedys

* Bleed for Me by Dead Kennedys

* Forward to Death by Dead Kennedys

* I Kill Children by Dead Kennedys

Pope Francis was a Fraud, and the Vatican is Still a Cesspool

 Another Pope has dropped dead, only this time it's the left who seems to be all busted up over it. Don't get me wrong, I guess I get it. On the surface, Francis did seem like a pretty woke dude. He certainly said all the right things about capitalism, climate change, Israeli apartheid, and the like. If you simply read his headlines over the last decade, he actually comes across as a more consistent leftist than anyone still shilling for the Democratic Party. But there is a very big difference between talk and action, especially when you're running a church whose sins extend to the Dark Ages and include complicity in multiple genocides, and it doesn't take a particularly deep dive beneath the headlines to recognize that Pope Francis was very much a part of that tradition. In fact, the saddest fact about his death is that if you're morning this motherfucker right now, the grift worked.

Not that you need to crucify yourself for this mistake with another fresh helping of Catholic guilt. Even by Vatican standards Francis was a master showman, posing as a humble ascete while operating a parochial empire spangled by more pilfered jewels than a Liberace theme park. I hate to admit it, but the bastard almost had me going for a minute there too with his whole Yoda in charge of the Death Star routine, and I'm a genderqueer anarchist who was molested by two priests before I was old enough to spell my own name correctly. 

And that's the thing; the really sick and really mean thing. All of us wanted to believe the Church could become magic again. The Vatican knew this, and Pope Francis was selected specifically to tell us what we wanted to hear while his friends continued to literally rape and pillage the faithful with reckless abandon.

The painful truth that we all need to swallow is that Pope Francis was not some kind of egalitarian maverick savior figure. If that were true, he wouldn't have been handpicked to begin with by the exact same right-wing creeps who put Benedict in power less than a decade earlier. Pope Francis was more of a kind of spiritual custodian put in place to mop up the mess of a blasphemous temple drowning in the cesspool of its own sins. Think of him as a kind of Catholic Obama, sent to polish the image of a toxic brand while doing everything in his power to strengthen its lethal capabilities.

In order to even come close to understanding such a vexing creature, it is important that we remember exactly who Francis was before he was Francis and exactly where the church was when he was selected to play the part. Before the Papacy came calling Francis was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit cardinal relatively unheard of outside of his native Argentina, but inside Argentina this man's reputation was very different than what it would very rapidly become on the world stage. Bergoglio was a leading figure in the Argentine Church during a very Catholic junta's Dirty War on left wing dissent that would see some 30,000 people vanish without a trace by the early eighties, many of them priests and lay workers.

The good Cardinal would claim that he was actually secretly playing both sides of the fence, providing fascist dictators with the holy veneer they relied upon to maintain power while clandestinely working to free their prisoners. We may never know for sure, but many victims of the junta continue to accuse Francis of playing an active role in its crimes at a time when Pope John Paul had very publicly devoted himself to routing the left-wing contagion of Liberation Theology from the Church.

Either way, Bergoglio's rebirth as Pope Francis came at a time when the Catholic Church was collapsing beneath the weight of its own towering rap sheet. Back in 2013, the Church's involvement in a massive conspiracy to protect the sexual predators deeply imbedded among its ranks just kept expanding with every filthy new detail that seeped from the cracks of the Vatican walls. The then current Pope Benedict's role as John Paul's point man at the top of the cover-up had just recently been exposed, as had his involvement in protecting pedophiles closer to the bottom during his tour as Archbishop of Munich. He would become the first pope to step down from his perch of power since Gregory XII retired in 1415 to end a civil war within the Church.

Much like Obama, the newly leftist Pope Francis hit the ground apologizing to a world walking away from an empire in flames. In fact, Francis never really stopped apologizing and with the scandal still growing as more and more of the Catholic Church's victims came out of the closets we had been locked in, he had plenty to apologize for. 

When an investigation in France revealed that an estimated 330,000 children had been systematically abused by over 3,000 priests over a period of 70 years, Pope Francis apologized. When a grand jury exposed a similar conspiracy across six dioceses in my home state of Pennsylvania, Pope Francis apologized. When a trip to Ireland, home to nearly 15,000 victims, not to mention a veritable gulag archipelago of despotic orphanages, industrial schools, and laundries, nearly resulted in a riot, you better fucking believe that Francis apologized.

But what the hell did Francis actually do? What concrete actions did this humble emperor actually take to prove that he and his newly woke church where actually remorseful? The truth is, not much. When Francis came to power in 2013, he made a very big show of setting up a panel of experts to advise him on how to tackle the crisis. It took them six years just to reconvene for the Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church in 2019 and the only real concrete measure to come out of this much vaunted shindig was a single decree ordering all priests and nuns to report abuse and cover-ups to Church authorities with zero orders to report them to anyone outside of the Church.

That's it. Nothing else. An order to report abuse back to a leadership that has already been publicly exposed to be guilty of engaging in it. In what universe is this an acceptable response to the largest child sex ring in recorded history? Even in America's horrid compulsory public school system the accused are removed until an outside investigation can prove them innocent. As we speak there are thousands of clergy accused of abuse still serving in parishes and schools across the globe while the Vatican performs their own investigations with zero oversight and zero transparency. If Francis were anything but a sweet-talking crook with a borderline personality, then he would order a zero-tolerance policy removing offenders and their handlers immediately.

But the sins of Pope Francis don't end with empty apologies. They include his long history of publicly defending the clearly guilty. This includes Francis' close personal friend, Argentine Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, who Francis openly sided with after being accused of sexual misconduct before falling conveniently silent when he was found guilty at trial. This includes Francis' very outspoken defense of Chilean Bishop Juan Barres, accused of actually being present during the abuse of minors and failing to report it. Francis not only called the accusations "slander", but he refused to even send the Vatican's top expert on sexual abuse to investigate until a massive public backlash that included some of his own cardinals forced him to make an about-face and reluctantly declare that he had "misjudged" the situation.

And then there was Cardinal George Pell, Francis' own anti-corruption czar, handpicked after years of swirling accusations of abuse and cover-up in Australia where the man had served as Archbishop of both Melbourne and Sydney. Pell would ultimately be imprisoned for 13 months in 2019 for abusing minors and was only released when Judges decided that his accusers' testimonies were not enough to legally prove his guilt. These accusers never recanted their accusations and Francis never retracted his support for the accused, giving Pell safe haven in the Vatican both during his investigation and after his release. The Pope even imparted the final blessing at this creep's funeral in St. Peter's Basilica in 2023, just six years after Australia's Royal Commission released a report proving that men like Pell presided over at least 4,444 incidents of child sex abuse between 1950 and 2010. I use the word "proving" because every single act was reported to church authorities and zero action was taken.

As I write these words, I am livid, not just with Francis and the empire of child rapists that he spent the last decade trying to revamp as a socialist love-in, but at the droves of leftists who have piled up on the streets, ten people deep, to kiss this man's casket because he said something charming about human rights. Who fucking cares? I was one of the children raped by the kind of men Francis died defending and I went to the far left for shelter when I had no place left to go. I went to a movement supposedly devoted to the protection and empowerment of the powerless against the powerful. There is absolutely no excuse for eulogizing this man without acknowledging the well recorded fact that he was a fucking monster and there is quite simply no excuse for the continued existence of the Catholic Church.

We all know what this institution represents. It's not like their graveyard of innocents is a secret. This is an ancient imperial cabal that hijacked Christianity and turned it into a bulletproof mask of sanity for every genocidal butcher from Constantine to Ronald Reagan. These are the people behind the Crusades, the Inquisition, Ante Pavelic, and General Franco. These motherfuckers hid Hitler's gold, set up ratlines that freed his most heinous henchmen, and blessed the Latin American death squads they trained.

I remain a Christian of sorts as well as an anarchist, albeit a decidedly post-left one. I continue to pray to the Virgin Mary as I explore other feminine energies among the Celtic traditions of Wicca and Druidry. I also continue to draw strength from Catholic iconoclasts like Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, Ivan Illich, and Jacques Ellul among more obnoxious apostates like Max Stirner, Michel Foucault, and Mikhail Bakunin. But we can no longer afford to actively fool ourselves into venerating a church defined by evil or a fraud defined by covering it up.

 At a certain point, we have to burn the church to save the cross. A thousand years of this shit is long enough. We must do as Jesus did and turn over the tables in the temple of emptiness, and that includes the ones occupied by corpses like Francis.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs Influenced by this Post

* Crucify by Tori Amos

* Family Man by Nitzer Ebb

* Wake Up by Arcade Fire

* What About Us by Ministry

* War by Sinead O'Conner

* Sin by Nine Inch Nails

* Bad Catholics by the Menzingers

* Suffer the Children by the Smiths

* Hurt by Johnny Cash