This isn't just Deja vu. We have quite literally been here before, in fact, we've been here so many times that you can practically set your watch to the proceeding order of events. We start with a tragedy, some pissed-off lonely kid puts down his smartphone and picks up a gun, somebody gets shot, sometimes a politician, sometimes some other species of media personality, but usually it ends up just being a room full of other lonely kids with smartphones.
After a lot of frantic finger pointing by the media personalities left standing, it usually becomes clear that the shooter wasn't actually directly concerned with any of their silly partisan squabbles and this is when everyone with a camera and a microphone falls back on one of the default boogeymen they like to project on the blank canvas of young ghosts.
The left, or what passes for it these days at least, usually goes with a far from unfounded but woefully oversimplified take on guns and suggests that America is somehow just one police state provision away from controlling an ocean of semi-automatic firepower the size of the Atlantic Ocean.
The right, or what passes for it these days at least, typically does one worse and trots out whatever monster-of-the-week they happen to be crucifying at the moment; border hoppers, crypto-gender benders, the overly or underly medicated neurodivergent... Some convenient category of 'other' to distract from the fact that the killers are usually basically their own sons, cis het white dudes unsatisfied with the privileges of their post-colonial caste ranking.
And then of course, the sainted centrist calls for calm, for all of these scapegoating players in America's increasingly unhinged political circus to just come together in Babylonian brotherhood and sing us all back to sleep with another harmonic chorus of bipartisan kumbaya.
Somehow, the centrist always seems to piss me off the most.
While it is painfully obvious to anyone with half a brain still attached to a functioning conscience that both sides of this country's manufactured tribal divide are exploiting these tragedies just to score points and rile up their captive constituencies, the notion that the solution to American nihilism is bringing all these jackals together for another war-on-something is even worse. It's worse because Washington isn't the panacea painted so stoically by the centrist. Washington is the real fucking problem here and somebody needs to say it.
While Republicans and Democrats warble hysterically over a growing trend in overtly politically motivated acts of violence, the actual statistics present a slightly different portrait. The Cato Institute puts the number of people murdered in politically motivated terrorist attacks in the US at 3,597 since 1975 but only 79 of these killings have occurred since 2020. Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Institute puts the number of people killed in any form of mass public shooting at 1,723 since 1966.
Yet strangely, both of those categories of headline dominating slaughter only include acts of violence committed by civilians. They do not include the inherently political violence committed by government operatives such as police officers who have murdered more than a thousand people every year since 2020 with a total of more than 6,000 bodies in just under five years. In fact, 2024 marks the deadliest year on record for police violence with at least 1,365 killed in twelve months.
The various institutes and think tanks of this nation's ivory tower class also consistently overlook the violence perpetrated by the very people preaching to us about the virtues of red flags and gun control from their premium podcasts and cable news pulpits. Charlie Kirk was shot in the throat amidst a highly publicized but rarely questioned murder spree launched by the man he routinely endorsed to play the role of America's Ceasar. Donald Trump washed his own moneychanger's blood from his pussy-grabbers and cursed the numerous demographics he blamed for the mess right in the middle of the launch of a series of snuff films taken by the US Military over undisclosed sections of the Caribbean Ocean.
Over a period of a few weeks, Donald Trump had at least 17 people murdered extrajudicially in three separate airstrikes on three separate civilian boats before proudly displaying the footage of his war crimes on social media like a teenage mosque shooter. The people killed are accused without evidence of trafficking narcotics, an offense that wouldn't even garner a life sentence in any court of law in the Western Hemisphere, let alone a death sentence. All of this slaughter is part of an open attempt to affect regime change in the nation of Venezuela, whose current president, Nicholas Maduro, has a $50 million dollar bounty placed on his head by an administration that expects us all to forfeit even more of our civil rights to prevent future assassinations of assholes who aren't on their hit list.
And the centrists want us to be calm... Well, let me just gently reassure the centrists that I am completely calm when I politely suggest that you go fuck yourself with the sharp end of your own goddamn hypocrisy.
Once again, your average active shooter is a pissed-off lonely kid who feels powerless and totally unseen in a dystopian house of digital mirrors. Who is more seen and who has more power than the President of the United States of America? And how does this man solve his problems? With drone strikes and tomahawk missiles and genocide and mass deportation... With murder. With 'political' violence. And where is the centrist amidst all this carnage? Why, he's voting for the latest billion-dollar defense bill and calling for calm from those who he hasn't personally sanctioned to be mass shooters.
In our current era of blood and debt, we don't need calm and we sure as shit don't need unity, at least not of the bipartisan variety. Anger is actually a perfectly appropriate response to being governed by dueling parties of thieves and killers, but we need to direct this anger where it belongs, against the state without preference to pointless partisan divisions, and we need to carefully temper this anger, so we are not merely feeding into the state's game of highly publicized tension and paranoia.
The truth is, our nation's centrists don't really care about political violence; they're just pissed off that private citizens want to home in on their action, and for once, I agree with them. We can do better. You are never going to smash the state by fighting it like a state. In the best-case scenario, you merely replace them and become precisely what you hate. The most common scenario however ends with a bunch of good radicals dead or in prison while the state scores points with the normies over the ashes of another Reichstag Fire.
The reality is that Washington and its corporate media apparatus are existentially toxic. Engaging these institutions in any way, including in combat, will simply result in the further spread of this toxicity. With that being said, we should all take heart in the fact that an empire built on a toxic waste dump is fundamentally unsustainable. The rot will inevitably spread to the brain. The leviathan will die from the cancer that defines its existence. The professionally politically violent will lash out against each other without anyone left but other goats to scape. The Donald Trumps and James Comeys of this toxic nation will take turns throwing each other in and out of prison and rent different genres of hooligan to storm their increasingly impoverished capitol until China comes to repossess it.
The radicals: the pissed and the lonely, the border hoppers and deplorables and unmedicated gender benders need to drop out, cease and desist, detox... Remove yourself from the toxic waste, find some other lonely misfits, and use your totally justified disgust with this deeply sick society to fuel yourselves into building something better that doesn't require its vulture-like attention to exist. Build a commune. Build a farm. Build a fire and dance around it naked. Stop voting. Stop watching the news. Turn off that funhouse mirror you keep in your pocket. And for Cthulhu's sake, stop killing other poor people. The state doesn't need your help with that chore so stop adding to their towering mound of bodies.
In other words, own your anger and let the centrists starve without your attention. This world is too sacred to waste on something as empty as politics. Choose anarchy instead.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* Someone to Die for by Belly
* Raining Blood by Tori Amos
* Afraid of Heights by Boygenius
* Shove by L7
* And the Same by Fugazi
* (I Blame) Society by Titus Andronicus
* Angel of Death by Slayer
* Lose You by Bully
* Cross Your Heart by Momma
* Black Boys on Mopeds by Sinead O'Connor
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