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