Jeffrey Epstein is a Mirror of American Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Someone to Die for by Belly

* Bad Mouth by Fugazi

* Violet by Hole

* Tryptic by Samia

* Suggestion by Fugazi

* Teenage Whore by Hole

* Stellate by Samia

* T&A by Blondshell

* Hate My Way by Throwing Muses

* Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle by Nirvana

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced This Post

* What's Fair by Blondshell

* Iron Man by Black Sabbath

* Milk by Samia

* Police Truck by Dead Kennedys

* Hit 'Em Up by 2Pac

* Wild in the Streets by Circle Jerks

* Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne

* How I Could Just Kill a Man by Cypress Hill

* Los Angeles by X

* Rise Above by Black Flag

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

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

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

After all, they were a part of the swarm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Modern Leper by Julien Baker

* Terminal Preppie by Dead Kennedys

* Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry

* Provisional by Fugazi

* Pay To Cum by Bad Brains

* Bad Catholics by the Menzingers

* Rock N Roll N*gger by Patti Smith

* People of the Sun by Rage Against the Machine

* Guerrillas in tha Mist by Da Lench Mob

* Wild Wild Life by Talking Heads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced This Post

* Where Eagle Dare by the Misfits

* Soon by My Bloody Valentine

* No Front Teeth by Perfume Genius

* Tuesday's Gone by Lynyrd Skynyrd

* Bad Mouth by Fugazi

* Lasting Friend by Samia

* Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers

* Bullet with Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins

* Karma Police by Radiohead

* Wreck by Neko Case

* Last Caress by the Misfits

An Anarchist Appeal to the Disgruntled Deplorable

 

"Ooh, that smell

Can't you smell that smell?

Ooh, that smell

The smell of death surrounds you"

'Ooh That Smell' by Lynyrd Skynyrd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* No Teeth by Perfume Genius

* War Pigs by Black Sabbath

* White Minority by Black Flag

* Our Town by Iris DeMent

* Kerosene by Big Black

* Big City by Merle Haggard

* Hug of Thunder by Broken Social Scene

* Holiday Song by the Pixies

* Territorial Pissings by Nirvana

* Highway Patrolman by Dar Williams

* Ooh That Smell by Lynyrd Skynyrd

Iran's Anti-Modern Revolution Still Terrifies the West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Ex-Lion Tamer by Wire

* War Dance by Killing Joke

* Blank Generation by Richard Hell & the Voidoids

* My War by Black Flag

* Nothing but Flowers by Talking Heads

* Sonic Reducer by Dead Boys

* See No Evil by Television

* Let's Start a War by Fear

* June Guitar by Alex G

* Kill Your Television by Ned's Atomic Dustbin

Youth Rights Are Queer Rights

 2025 has been a hard year to be Queer in this necrotic empire but it has been a downright horrific year to be a Queer kid and tragically, in many ways, it has never been harder to be transgender under 18. While past generations like mine spent decades languishing in the shadows of cramped closets with no place else to hide, the latest generation of gender outlaws has quite heroically liberated themselves through the power of chat rooms and message boards only to find themselves playing the unwitting role of the latest scapegoats for the professional hatemongers of the Christian Right. These same merchants of misery invested in MAGA back when it was still a sideshow stunt. Now that stunt has both the momentum of a populist uprising and the corporate sponsorship of the zillionaire tech bro class and smashing "transgenderism" in the cradle seems to be their favorite side hustle.

The laws just keep coming and they just keep getting worse. Since 2020, every new year has broken records with the sheer volume of anti-trans legislation, with the number of bills restricting transgender rights more than tripling between 2022 and 2023 alone. 2025 is no exception. The year isn't even halfway through and a record breaking 923 bills have already been pushed forward with 88 at the federal level. Most of these bills are likely to die on the vine but 54 have already passed, adding to the rapidly growing matrix of police state provisions harassing Queer youth wherever they dare to exist.

As much as 40% of trans youth between the ages of 13-17, or roughly 100,000 patients, now live in states restricting gender affirming care, including 6 states where providers face felony charges just for treating trans kids with the same puberty blockers still handed out to cis girls suffering from their own version of precocious puberty. This is being done in spite or perhaps even because of the fact that this treatment has been proven repeatedly to reduce suicidality among trans youth exponentially.

Trump has joined in on this anti-scientific campaign of medical apartheid with an executive order broadly declaring any form of medical care for minors suffering from gender dysphoria to be abuse and prohibiting federal funding to any institution providing this care, leading at least seven clinics to shutter their youth services in states where they are still fully legal. Trans kids across the country have been confronted with the horror of being abruptly taken off a drug that gave them their life back. 

Many families with suicidal children have been forced to travel hours or even days out of state and pay tens of thousands of dollars a month out of pocket if they're lucky enough not to live in one of the 8 states that have passed purposely vague "aiding and abetting" provisions to their anti-trans legislation, restricting even out of state care. There is simply no point to such petty fascism beyond garden variety cruelty and six-ninths of the Supreme Court seems to be cool with it, couching state interference in family healthcare decisions as conservatism in this brave new world.

But the doctor's office isn't the only space being turned into a warzone targeting young Queer bodies. In many ways ground zero has been the public school system which is increasingly beginning to resemble an East German police state in which a faceless network of adult bureaucrats is given the right to carefully inspect every cavity of the student body to insure proper gender conformity. 28 states prohibit transgender youth from participating in school sports. 19 restrict bathroom access in K through 12 schools. Another 19 censor open discussions on Queer topics and 8 mandate that school officials out their students to their parents.

Various LGBTQ rights and civil rights organizations are mounting legal battles against what should be clear to anyone with eyes are grotesque violations against fundamental human rights like privacy, free speech and bodily autonomy. A growing number of states, cities, counties and other localities are similarly trying to combat this wave of legislative harassment by declaring their schools and doctors' offices to be sanctuaries for Queer youth. I welcome all of this, but I still can't help but to recognize that these liberal reformers are missing the point. The only reason that any of these laws are affective is because individuals cease to have rights in this country beneath the age of 18.

In no place is this sad fact more horrifically obvious than it is in the American compulsory school system which was designed for the express purpose of policing young people and assimilating them into obedient citizens. The bans on trans girls engaging in girls' sports or using girls' bathrooms in particular highlights this fact. These laws are totally unenforceable unless adult administrators carefully police the bodies of young girls by surveilling even their most personal activities and carefully inspecting their bodies with invasive screening exercises that would amount to abuse even if they aren't inevitably exploited by opportunistic sexual predators. These obscene violations are only possible because adults are already afforded full access to their students every move and bodily function with children carefully groomed from a young age not to object.

A similarly oppressive atmosphere has been cultivated in the American doctor's office. While many states rightfully observe the age when young people are capable of making choices regarding their mental health to fall somewhere between the ages of 12 and 14, nearly every state refuses to extend this same right to privacy and personal agency in regard to medical procedures for anyone beneath the age of 18. This essentially creates an environment where the human body of certain citizens is left almost entirely up to the mercy of other citizens based largely on a totally arbitrary number on a government document. 

I shouldn't have to tell you that the number one source of child abuse in this country and worldwide are the legal guardians of said children. So, why then do I have to tell anyone that allowing such people or any people unrestricted access to the medical decisions of young citizens essentially amounts to affording science the opportunity to facilitate this abuse?  

Children are individuals with a constantly evolving capacity to assert their own bodily autonomy. Any system that fails to recognize their agency as individuals, including the Supreme Court, is abusive under any circumstances and should be leveled, not replaced by an equally abusive system with more woke intentions. This is especially true in the case of marginalized communities such as mine who already exist at the mercy of a state apparatus designed to oppress us. Queer children will never be safe in cis hetero institutions unless all children are granted the same rights as any other sovereign individual.

This means ending the glorified indentured servitude of the compulsory school system. This means replacing that heavily centralized twelve-year police state with some form of radical school choice that includes public schools based on mutual aid and the Sudbury method of curriculum free and directly democratic education. This means granting all children the basic human right of being able to choose their own education, their own informed medical decisions, and even their own parental guardians. This means all adults, even the "woke" ones, releasing the grip on their egos and assuming their proper roles as guides and caretakers, not gods and masters. And this means that any civil rights movement should be considered a farce unless they commit themselves to universal youth rights because human rights begin at birth.

Youth rights must become Black rights. Youth rights must become women's rights. And today more than ever, youth rights must become Queer rights, for without youth rights Queer people may cease to exist outside of the prison of those cramped closets of yesteryear. We've fought too goddamn hard to go back now and I say it's high time we taught our kids how to throw a brick like a Queer.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Song that Inspired this Post

* All the Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople

* Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana

* School's Out by Alice Cooper

* Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth

* Changes by David Bowie

* Sheila Take a Bow by the Smiths

* Hang On to Your Ego by Frank Black

* Awful by Hole

* Children of the Revolution by T. Rex

* Teen Age Riot by Sonic Youth

Why I Can't Celebrate Pride This Year

 If you've read more than a few of my rants, then you are probably already painfully aware that I am a Queer person and that I take this identity pretty seriously, some of you may even be forgiven for saying annoyingly so. However, you have to understand that I really didn't choose this shit, at least not all of it. I didn't choose to be born into a body that makes me physically Ill. I didn't choose to have a gender identity so complicated that I need a goddamn Venn diagram just to explain it. And I sure as fuck didn't choose to have to deal with all of this shit in a conservative Catholic diocese loaded to the gills with pedophile priests and fire-breathing conformist imbeciles.

What I did choose was to fight back, to maintain my mutant otherness and take pride in it. I chose to be an anti-puritanical individualist in league with other biologically bizarre people who would rather fight than fit in and this is what makes me Queer. I am a neurodiverse genderqueer lesbian, and Queer anarchism is the martial art that I practice to defend this existence. Queer is my culture, Queer is my tribe, Queer saved my life and it will probably save it a few more times before sundown. With all that being said, just because I am very proud of my people doesn't mean that they don't occasionally piss me off and it is this dichotomy that has long led me to have a very uneasy relationship with Pride Month.

What began as the revolutionary celebration of a riot waged by an irate mob of largely Black and brown gender outlaws against the police state has slowly transformed into a Disneyfied and heavily policed parade replete with soulless corporate sponsors and opportunistic Democrats. In fact, the entire month has become one big vanilla cash grab for monster machines like Blackrock and Raytheon who drape themselves in rainbows and get their pictures taken with weird people to throw us all off the scent of the latest war crime they manufactured in some dead-end corner of the third world. Crucify me twice for being presumptuous but something tells me that this was not what Marsha P. Johnson had in mind when she picked up that first brick.

On the other hand, I have found-family that includes actual Queer children, and I have long sucked up my bitter discontent just to see their faces light up like Molotov cocktails when it becomes theatrically undeniable that they are not the only ones. If I had even the slightest idea of that fact when I was their age it might have saved me from decades of therapy and a lifetime of suicidal ideation. So, every June I pick up the youngins and make the hour-long trek to the nearest college town to plug my nose while I uncomfortably coexist with pink capitalism, that is until this year.

In 2025 I can't do this anymore and it's not because I'm afraid of the bullseye that Donald Trump has put on every rainbow within shooting distance of the nearest federal building. It is because of the lengths that I have seen Pride organizations go to keep the straight corporate sponsors that MAGA is scaring away. I had a front row seat to this grotesque display of Queer servitude this year and I have seen firsthand how the Pride parade is now running over the Queer kids that they're supposed to be saving.

The return of Trump to the White House has been pretty harsh for most Queer people but it has been downright traumatizing for anyone growing up trans as well as those of us who still carry the scars from growing up trans. During Trumps first couple of campaigns, he largely left culture war bullshit on the back burner, preferring a xenophobic populist schtick instead. But by 2024 this was running a little thin, largely because Trump had already exposed himself to the rural isolationist set as just another fellatious cuck for the Israel Lobby.

So, Donny did what Republicans have always done to win back the trailer park; he doubled down on bashing the Queers next door. In 2024, Trump essentially ran on a promise to eradicate the toxic ideology of "transgenderism" from the face of the planet by handing over the sledgehammer of the federal government to the Zionist gangsters in the Christian Right and it didn't take him long to make good on that promise once he was back in the Oval Office, with a slew of executive orders directing the compulsory school system to police the biology of their captive student body.

Throughout this horrific election circus, I had been volunteering for one of the largest LGBTQ non-profits in the state, one largely responsible for throwing the annual Pride events in my region. I won't use their name because I still know a few good people over there who still provide a few good services, which is actually what led an anti-assimilationist Queer anarchist like me to work for such an organization in the first place. 

By mid 2024, I had already spent months pushing these people to provide more rural communities like mine with the kind of youth groups they run in the college towns. We had gotten a grant, hired a facilitator, and I had personally found an off-campus location willing to host the program, but months went by without further action. I was told repeatedly to be patient while this organization ran galas and fundraisers for their next parade, and I tried hoping that maybe just a sliver of that money would go to my kids. Then Trump got elected in a landslide, and I lost my patience.

I also lost all contact with my boss, who seemed to have locked herself in her office on November 6 and never got off the phone. I harassed her and her board members with a storm of emails first asking and then begging for a simple face-to-face meeting with anyone who could tell me why we couldn't pull the trigger on a rural youth group even with a loaded gun in our hands. We had the cash, we had the location, we had a licensed facilitator, I even offered to drive the kids of my little backwoods tribe to the spot myself, but nobody seemed to have fifteen minutes to put it all together. It didn't make any goddamn sense until I discovered that my boss had been spending every waking minute since Trump's reelection on the phone with corporate sponsors, trying to convince them to keep their floats in the parade.

I was livid but I was still determined to get some kind of support system in place for my kids who were receiving death threats and had friends in and out of the psych ward after failed suicide pacts. I tried to track down the actual facilitator who I was told was attempting to hold this youth group at the local non-profit bookstore I had gotten them in touch with. It turned out that they weren't there, they weren't even showing up, they were just cashing the checks and going home, and no one had even noticed. When I brought this to the attention of my boss's boss, the chairman of the board for this organization, they fired the scam artist, replaced them with an old white straight woman, and informed me that they didn't even want me alone with the kids because of my diagnosed neurodivergence.

They managed to get enough money to throw their fucking parade this year, but the rural youth group remains a shell, a single poorly paid breeder with no youth to bore. I left the big non-profit to volunteer at the bookstore so I could at least still make the group happen even if I wasn't allowed to be an official part of it, but they moved the group to another closed location after getting too many questions from me and the bookstore that they refused to answer. 

I am now attempting to run my own youth group out of the same location with zero budget, but my adult transgender support group, one run by my former employers at the big non-profit, very recently and very suddenly decided that after seven years with me as a member they no longer want me to bring up my multiple personalities out of fear that my neurodivergence might somehow be spooking away new members. So, now I'm left trying to build yet another support group from scratch at a time when I have never felt more abandoned by my own community.

This is what Pride has become. LGBTQ groups across the country who used to throw a little parade once a year and then actually fucking help people have converted themselves into veritable parade industrial complexes, spending the entire year raising money for a parade so they can raise more money for the next parade. In the process, they end up spending more time trying to shmooze with big corporations run by cishet billionaires then they do with the young people who have always defined our movement, leading them to become completely out of touch with their own community, one which is becoming increasingly brown, radical and neurodivergent while those corporations begin to bail because they see bigger dollar signs with MAGA than they do with LGBTQ.

I can't be a part of this. I won't be a part of this. I refuse to hold the IV while a handful of old neurotypical white cis lesbians facilitate the suicide of a movement that saved my life while they chase parade floats. I really do hate to rain on the parade, but I will not be taking part in any corporate Pride events this year or any other year but that doesn't mean that there isn't a silver lining to this storm cloud. 

Across the country, while corporations are pulling out of Pride parades left and right, activists are stepping up to take their place, using grassroots funding while shifting focus from celebration to confrontation. In other words, the weird people will inherit Pride after all.

I am proud to say that the non-profit I currently organize with is a part of this trend and I fully intend to take part in any march against the police state that doesn't conflict with my youth group just so long as the only corporate float is a flaming Venmo.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Kind of Girl by Muna

* You're One by Imperial Teen

* Dicks Hate the Police by the Dicks

* Slip Away by Perfume Genius

* In Bloom by Nirvana

* Satanist by Boygenius

* America's So Straight by MDC

* The Walker by Christine & the Queens

* You Know You're Right by Nirvana

* True Blue by Boygenius

Why Gaza Matters to Trans Liberation

 The Genocide Convention defines genocide as an intentional effort to completely or partially destroy a group based on its nationality, ethnicity or religion. Merriam-Webster defines genocide as the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.

Regardless of which definition you use it has become pretty much impossible for any mildly rational human being to deny that what Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip right now with America's full approval and careful guidance is a genocide. Even many of the leaders engaged in the new Nakba seem to have a hard time denying their blatantly genocidal ambitions and the numbers don't lie.

After 19 months of relentless slaughter, the ongoing holocaust in Gaza stands perilously tall as the most well-publicized and unapologetic genocide in modern history. Over 53,000 corpses have been counted at hospitals and morgues with estimates for the real number of the dead reaching well into the hundreds-of-thousands. This includes over 200 journalists and over 400 international aid workers. Another 120,000 have been wounded and over one million people out of a population of 2.1 million have been displaced at least once with many wearily traveling from refugee camp to refugee camp only to be bombed out over and over again.

The entire region has been reduced to rubble with over 60% of all buildings that once stood in Gaza now demolished. Mosques, schools, hospitals, bakeries; no target is off limits with every cradle apparently concealing another secret Hamas installation beneath its shadow. As if bunker busters and scatter bombs weren't already enough, since March 2 of this year, this already desperate hellscape has also been under a total blockade. No food. No water. No children. Around 60 of which have starved to death and another 70,000 are currently at risk of acute malnutrition.

The statistics alone leave little room for interpretation. These numbers and the harrowing smartphone footage from the ground that came with them exposed the lies beneath the veneer of the Biden-Harris administration's cheesy humanitarian rhetoric and in all likelihood cost the Democrats what should have been another easy election win against a blatant lunatic. However, their replacement in the Oval Office has taken this evil one step further by making absolutely zero attempt to mask his own genocidal intentions and his Israeli masters never really did to begin with.

Former Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant once famously boasted "We are fighting human animals and are acting accordingly." President Isaac Herzog stated "It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it's absolutely not true." And Israel's Heritage Minister, a charming individual named Amical Eliyahu who has repeatedly called for dropping nuclear bombs on Gaza, summed up his position succinctly with "They need to starve."

These comments were all made during a time when then-President Joe Biden was wagging his finger at his own Zionist proxy gestapo with one hand while handing them one fat juicy check after another with the other, but now his successor seems to have adopted the same rhetoric as the killers, totally erasing any manufactured line that once separated the two.

"I think I'd be proud to have the United States have it, take it, make it a freedom zone... Gaza is a nasty place. It's been that way for years. I think it should become a free zone, you know, freedom, I call it a freedom zone." There you have it, Donald Trump, an American president, openly calling for a final solution and where the hell is the glorious "free world" to stop it? Where are the humanitarian interventionists of the EU and the UN? Shouldn't they be bombing Washington D.C. right now the way they did Belgrade over far less evidence? 

And where are all those fearsome strongmen of the Middle East, your Erdogans and al-Sisis and shieks and crown princes? Men more than willing to slaughter their own people over a social media slight are suddenly as timid as newborn fawns while their sugar daddy back in Mar-a-Lago throws Arab infants into a woodchipper on live television. Sadly, only the dispossessed cry for the dispossessed and I can't stop crying.

But there is more than one way to perform a genocide, there is more than one way to erase an entire class of human beings, and Donald Trump's zest for open annihilation isn't limited to the Gaza Strip. He and his Republican minions have been carrying out another very different kind of final solution right here in the United States, one directed explicitly against my own people in the transgender community. While we aren't being starved and shot in the streets, we are being forcibly removed from them while laws are being written to deny our existence and prevent us from having any presence in public life.

Since 2020, every new year has brought a new record for state bills attempting to roll back transgender rights with the ACLU tracking 575 in 2025 already so far, and while most of these bills fail to pass the courts, more and more do, and they are becoming increasingly extreme. 19 states now ban transgender people from using bathrooms that match their gender identity in a variety of government owned buildings including ones existing in public places like schools, parks and libraries. Utah and Florida have taken policing the bodily functions of its citizenry one step further by making bathroom transgressions a misdemeanor punishable by jail time.

40% of trans youth in this country now live in states that restrict access to pretty basic gender affirming care with six states now threatening medical providers with felonies for simply using totally reversible methods that every major medical body on earth recommends. Methods statistically proven through decades of research to reduce the rampantly high suicide rate among trans youth.

What's even more disturbing is the Tennessee ban on "drag performances" which affectively makes it illegal for anyone deemed to be a "male or female impersonator" to be present on public property or anywhere where people under the age of 18 could be present. Florida, Montana and Texas have all passed similar laws that are currently tied up in the courts. The effect of such laws would be to essentially penalize the public existence of a clearly visible and historically continuous cultural group, and the aim of these laws has been made explicit by our current president with both his rhetoric and his executive orders.

Donald Trump has so far launched six executive orders targeting trans existence but his first still remains his most telling. In his order "defending women from gender ideology extremism and fostering biological truth to the federal government" our shameless leader federally mandates that the government only recognize two genders determined exclusively by sex assigned at birth. He also explicitly denies the existence of transgender, intersex, and gender diverse people, reducing us on paper to an extremist ideology to be confronted and eliminated. The states are following suit, with 15 now defining sex based on severely rudimentary interpretations of reproductive anatomy. I don't know where we go from here, but I have a feeling it involves federal databases and registries.

People on both the left and the right seem to find the notion of trans solidarity with Palestine to be silly simply because certain Muslims despise us. Not only does this fail to capture the cultural diversity that exists both in Palestine and Islam, but it also relegates human rights to the realm of only protecting people you agree with, and this mindset is precisely what allows genocide to continue to be a thriving industry in an era supposedly defined by humanitarian universalism.

Should a pagan shiksa like me have said nothing while the Nazis loaded up trains to Auschwitz simply because certain Orthodox Jews find me to be a despicable pervert? I suspect some transgender Germans did exactly that only to find themselves dying in the same camps and for the same damn reasons. Both Jews and trannies didn't fit into the Third Reich and both Gazans and trannies don't fit into the Fourth.

Those seeking trans liberation and those seeking Palestinian liberation don't just share an enemy. We share a cause and that cause isn't tolerance or Sharia Law, it's an opposition to conquest and empire in any form. Genocide is by definition a tool of colonialism and so is the gender binary that compulsory heterosexuality was built around. Before western colonization, every pre-Christian tribe from Dublin to Damascus had its own regional variants of third genders and a few of these colonized cultures still do, including devout Muslim cultures like those in Oman who have the Khanith and those in South Asia who have the Hijra.

This is why the Queer liberation movement that formed around the fires of Stonewall was explicitly anti-colonialist in nature and this is why it is quite literally existential that we become so once more. Because only the dispossessed cry for the dispossessed and only united in struggle can that collective wail become a war cry. Never again means never again and never again means unconditional solidarity.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* No Children by the Mountain Goats

* Afterlife by Alex G

* Violent Times by St. Vincent

* Doesn't Remind Me of Anything by Audioslave

* It's a Mirror by Perfume Genius

* And the Same by Fugazi

* Hey Jupiter by Tori Amos

* Violence by Grimes

* List of Demands by Saul Williams

* We're In This Together by Nine Inch Nails

What "Mental Illness" Has Taught Me About Anarchism

 Everywhere you turn lately somebody seems to be talking about the importance of mental health; online adds, television commercials, celebrities, politicians and a lot of other shit that generally makes me want to shake cocktails with the stuff beneath the kitchen sink are all gently reaching out and telling me that it's ok to be fucking crazy. In fact, last month was widely celebrated as Mental Health Awareness Month, and this all sounds just charming but the voices in my head still feel compelled to ask just what exactly we are being made aware of. 

As kind and understanding as all these corporate sponsored allies' sound, they all seem to be part of a chorus singing the same narrative and that narrative generally goes that if you're sad you're sick and if you're sick there is no shame in seeking help from any federally vetted agent of America's Byzantinesque healthcare establishment. There are a number of problems with this narrative, the chief one amongst them being that it relies almost entirely on the biological illness model of mental health; the contrived but commonly accepted notion that any form of mental distress or neurodivergence is the result of some kind of chemical imbalance.

The reality is that this generally assumed notion is largely unsupported by any real substantial and verifiable evidence. This isn't to say that mental illness is necessarily a myth, it's just not a fucking illness, it's more of a response to trauma and some of us seem to be more traumatized than others. The biggest commonalities among the chronically distressed appear to be poverty and various forms of institutional disenfranchisement. Poverty alone has been shown by numerous statistics to be a direct pipeline to the asylum with individuals beneath the poverty line being eight times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than more affluent patients.

And we see these same trends accelerate even further among nearly every other variety of marginalized community as well. People of color are pretty consistently shown to have alarmingly high rates of depression, women are often diagnosed and drugged twice as often as men, and Queer people have substantially higher rates of suicidality than straight folks, with almost half of all consulted trans people such as myself reporting to have attempted to commit suicide in their lifetime. Just add the institutional abuse sustained for simply being autistic or otherwise neurodivergent and we've pretty much covered the entire mental ward.

The reasons behind this demographic epidemic really shouldn't be that hard to conjure and they have nothing to do with illness. To put it succinctly, it is fucking traumatizing to be anything but a wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dude in a world run by wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dudes and when said wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dudes make all the rules, anyone else who pushes back or even just gets bummed out is deemed sick and usually by the same institutions that we are being encouraged by MTV and YouTube to seek help from which (Surprise! Surprise!) are pretty much all run by wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dudes.

Somehow, none of the supposedly woke mass media campaigns for "Mental Health Awareness" talk about any of this shit. There is also zero effort to address the fact that the biggest comorbidity across all of these demographics of diagnosed Americans is being a survivor of sexual violence which every demographic listed above experiences at far higher rates because rape culture is a direct byproduct of marginalized existence under a post-colonial hierarchy. 

And of course, there is no effort whatsoever to address patients' rights or the fact that many of the institutions we are being welcomed to seek help from are actually a major source of the trauma they deem to be an illness, with admission to impatient mental health facilities being directly associated not only with increased rates of trauma and suicide but with rampant rates of sexual abuse as well. (I have personally known two close friends who have been raped inpatient.)

Then there is the biggest taboo in the mental health conversation; the very uncomfortable question of 'what if we're not the sick ones here?' What if civilization itself, with all of its trauma inducing institutions, vapid celebrity culture, and increasingly invasive modes of technology, is the illness and the people they all insist are sick are actually the cure? 

Speaking personally, as a lifelong anarchist, I can honestly say that my latest diagnosis, known as otherwise specified dissociative identity disorder, has taught me more about anarchism than any two Russian or German philosophers combined.

I spent most of my life in a fog, drifting aimlessly from one diagnosis to the next and from one medication to the next with shrink after shrink coming up with one excuse after another as to why I was so damn dysfunctional. It wasn't until I arrived at my own conclusion that my assigned gender identity felt like a prison sentence that shit finally started to come together. After coming out I increasingly began to exhibit all the symptoms typically associated with complex PTSD. This seemed to accelerate rapidly with my gender transition, during which a storm of vivid flashbacks revealed that sexual abuse at the hands of the church I grew up in forced me to suppress my gender identity at a very young age as a means of survival.

The result of repressing such a huge part of who I was at such a young age was the compartmentalization of the self into multiple identities and realizing this long-buried truth resulted in these identities abruptly coming to the surface. So, when Nicholas became Nicolette, Nicolette also became Agnes, Max, Ophelia, and Mona. Naturally, this has been an overwhelming experience with many, many, many, many complications. My identity became something too complex for any single personality to govern, so we became a collective. Then something really strange happened. My life began to make sense.

Every single day is a team effort, and every single alter has a role to perform in this effort. Agnes, the five-year-old who kept the abuse a secret and never forgot is our emotional base as well as the source of our sometimes-overwhelming empathy. It's very easy to dismiss her outbursts as tantrums but she has an unfiltered capability for comprehending our emotions without intellectual pretention. Max is the manager, the whip smart teenage prick who seems to be strangely immune to most of our more irrational impulses and paranoia. Ophelia is the nonverbal personification of our long tryst with disassociation who has the almost uncanny ability to calm us without ever uttering a word. And Mona is our merciless protector, tempered by decades of suppressed rage.

No one is in charge and any attempt by any single alter to take charge ultimately only results in more chaos. Order can only be achieved through decentralized consensus, and this takes a level of meditation that gets downright psychedelic. To an outside observer it probably looks like stereotypical insanity; one weird bitch engaged in lengthy conversation with herself, but this has afforded me the ability to be far more aware of the surrounding universe than I was when I passed for sane. Instead of just walking into seemingly random bouts of depression or anxiety, Agnes sees the triggers, Max coaches us through disarming them, Ophelia keeps us calm, and Mona kicks in if we encounter danger while we manage the situation.

There is nothing crazed or insane about this. Much like real anarchism, it is actually an extremely organized means of self-governance and it's one that would be totally impossible without every single member of the collective being motivated primarily by their own unique needs. The closest that any sane philosopher has come to explaining this kind of distinctly individualist collectivism is Max Stirner with his 'Union of Egoists' in which the system fails to become a truly functioning collective the moment that any member decides to put the others' needs before their own. Though, even this falls short of truly comprehending the fact that at its core true individualism is an act of collective love.

In my inner collective we are all in this because we love each other as much as we love ourselves, but we recognize that the only way to truly love and support each other is to give each member of the collective the room to define themselves through their own will to be unique. Call it emo-egoism or perhaps an inverted union of egoists but one thing that it certainly is not is mayhem and chaos and neither is anarchism, another system deemed mad by the institutions it renders irrelevant.

You see dearest motherfuckers, my dissociative identities are not a disorder, they are a pathological defense mechanism developed to defend my individual agency from institutional trauma, and I believe this to be essentially true of most so-called mental illness' which can be better described as forms of pathological post-traumatic survivalism or perhaps even a means of individualist evolution. I also don't believe that it is a mere coincidence that the population of these evolved egoists has exploded at a time when our trauma inducing civilization is on the brink of self-destruction.

With all these things considered, this system's sudden concern with 'mental health awareness' strikes me as a last-ditch effort by an abusive shepherd to convince his wayward flock to voluntarily subjugate themselves back at the barn but it isn't working. The barn is on fire, and we can all see the flames.

Call me ill all you want but I'm not the one who needs help. I don't fear the collapse of your precious "civil" society and its various forms of abusive governance. I have already developed the means to govern myself and you can too. All you have to do is stop listening to the gods and masters they've prescribed for you and start listening to the voices in your head.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* In My Head by Black Flag

* Madness by Muse

* Happy by Mitski

* Lithium by Nirvana

* The Crazy Girl by Black Flag

* North Poles by Samia

* The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

* Paranoid by Black Sabbath

* My Body is Made of Crushed Little Stars by Mitski