Celebrate the Holidays like Jesus and Flip Off Your Local Church

“No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.”

-Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity

I have plenty of reasons to be pissed off at Jesus this Christmas. Not that I didn't have plenty of reasons to be pissed at Jesus last Christmas but over the years I just seem to collect more and more wounds inflicted on me in the name of Christ. As if spending decades in the closet of a backwoods Catholic church weren't enough, I seem to just keep vomiting up repressed memories of the lewd things the priests did to my body in that blackhole between their lessons on all the reasons my gender identity was going to send me straight to hell.

In order to survive this level of trauma at such a young age, I had to segregate my consciousness into five distinct dissociative identities to keep the secrets I couldn't tell even to myself. Thus, most of my alters are still children and always will be, so when another powerful sexual predator like Donald Trump declares "gender ideology" to be a symptom of terrorism and commands the fine people who torched the children at Waco to stomp it out, I get to experience this resurrection of Christian nationalism from the perspective of a freshly raped five-year-old trans girl.

So yes, dearest motherfuckers, I do indeed have many reasons to be pissed off, and I am not above lashing out. I use Norwegian Black Metal songs like lullabies to put my youngest alters to bed and I cannot drive past a church of any denomination without holding one finger high above my head. But I'm not pissed at Jesus, I'm pissed at Christians, and something tells me that Jesus would be too.

Christ is an ancient figure steeped in mythology and lore. There are thousands of interpretations of the motherfucker and what he represented. I can't pretend that my interpretations are any more or less legit than the next bitch with an ax to grind but I can tell you that I spent 11 years being indoctrinated in a parochial school and I spent another twenty studying scripture and the often-esoteric history that informs and frequently censors it in an attempt to unlearn that abuse. 

I have studied the Gospels, including the Gnostic ones, and I have poured over what ancient Islamic and Judaic texts have to say about Christ as well, not to mention the debates of a host of secular historians, linguists and philosophers on the matter.

So, the following is my own mythology, constructed from many sources over many years, and I stand by it as absolute chaos magick. Make of that what you will.

Jesus Christ was a shaggy-haired anarchist troubadour, a traveling mystical heretic delivering muckraking rants against the rich and the pious. Far from what the revisionists in Rome would have you believe, Jesus was a disgruntled Jew who despised the Old Testament and the gangsters who spewed it. Christ was hostile to pretty much all authority; banks, kings, empires... But he despised no seat of power more than "Moses' seat" in the temples of ancient Roman Judea. 

He went from town to town, passing right by these so-called houses of God and the pompous bigots who frequented them and then headed straight for the local red-light districts to rally whores, lepers and eunuchs against them. Christ taught these people that God was a divine spark within them and that they didn't require holy men to access enlightenment.

Jesus also spent plenty of time trashing those holy men. Referring to them variously as snakes, hypocrites, blind guides and play-actors. Accusing them of slamming the door to the Kingdom of Heaven in people's faces and devouring widow's houses while they sat on Moses' seat counting their gold. The only time Christ even stepped foot in a church, he flipped the fuck out, turning over tables and chasing moneychangers into the streets as he condemned their temple as a den of robbers. 

It's hard to imagine the fury that the stadium churches of today's millionaire Zionist Evangelicals would inspire in this mystic wildcard, but I imagine it would likely put the teenage church burning Satanists of the Norwegian Black Metal scene to shame. This is the Jesus I know and, in this light, even the wholesome fable of the first Christmas takes on a far more rambunctious flicker.  

After getting knocked up by an angel, Mary and her terrestrial side-piece Joseph fled Galilee on the orders of a census that was set to increase their taxes to the Roman imperial rump state of Judea. When King Harrod, the quisling in charge of this glorified colony, learned that holy men were traveling to Bethlehem to visit a newborn who might someday challenge his monopoly on power, he sent his own Waco death squad out to kill every male under two in the metropolitan area. Luckily, the Family Christ managed to dodge the pigs and go underground in Egypt until Harrod finally kicked and the heat died down. Then Young Jesus started kicking kings for kicks and the shit got real again...

Is any of this shit true? Who fucking knows. What I do know is that the Gospels served as an inspiration for heretics, peasants and revolutionaries long before they were hijacked by the same tyrants who likely had Jesus killed with a little help from the Pharisees that he spent his short life flipping off. Believe it or not, as a battered, raped and tormented closet case, it was actually Christian revolutionaries that gave me the strength to defend myself against the church and they continue to inform my radical contrarian ideology to this day.

I owe everything to proud Christian heretics like Jaques Ellul, Dorothy Day, Ivan Illich, Peter Maurin and Nikolai Berdyaev, and in the darkest days of my life, I have increasingly turned to the more Gnostic side of Christian mysticism, finding the strength to be the woman the Christians continue to conspire against me becoming through the divine feminine spirit of Sophia and the holy women defined by it; Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Saint Brigitte and most of all, the Virgin Mary.

Faith isn't about what you can prove or what you can preach, it is about inner knowledge, gnosis, a personal kinship with the divine and how that inspires you to live or in my case survive. The church has declared war on me through another empire that uses a bad interpretation of the Bible to justify its conspiracy for global dominance and I have never felt closer to Christ in despising these cunts. In fact, I would argue that this current union of church and state is an excellent candidate for the Beast described in the Book of Revelations.

After all.... "The first beast comes up from the sea... it is given authority and power over every tribe, every people, every tongue, and every nation." Or as Jaques Ellul put it, "All who dwell on earth worship it."

How is this not the Christian nationalist church of Pax Americana during the age of artificial intelligence and Donald Trump? Wasn't it the American Empire that first came from the sea with its battleships and gunboat diplomacy? Isn't it the state-bastardized version of Christianity that first sought global hegemony over every pagan tribe, every people, every tongue, and every nation? Can you honestly think of a better candidate for Antichrist than JD Vance, a Silicon Valley technofascist masquerading as a homespun Christian populist bumpkin?

It all fits like a noose around my neck but I'm not afraid to go down swinging. After all, the power of Jesus Christ Heretic compels me.

So, during this holiday season, with Judea in ashes and the poor man's pedophile Constantine languishing in the White House, I invite you to celebrate the birth of Christ the way he lived his life, by flipping off every church you pass and spitting in the eye of the powerful.

Mery fucking Christmas, dearest motherfuckers, and a happy intifada.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* I Have Forgiven Jesus by Morrissey

* The Pagan Winter by Darkthrone

* God by Tori Amos

* Leave Me in Hell by Venom

* Jesus Don't Want Me for His Sunbeam by Nirvana

* I am the Black Wizards by Emperor

* Jennifer's Body by Hole

* Crucify by Tori Amos

* Mary by Big Thief

* Pure Fucking Armageddon by Mayhem

The Mainstream Left Will Never Represent the Lumpenproletariat

 I've gone through this scenario a million fucking times before and it always seems to play out the same way. I meet some vanilla white progressive ally who feels my pain. You know the type; the non-profit industrial complex is crawling with them. The granola bro in vegan Chucks with a Bernie bumper sticker on his Prius just below a sticker for the latest Dempublican to cheat him out of another primary. The squeaky-clean Karen with the porcelain smile, surgically attached to an NPR tote bag full of positive affirmations and gluten-free cookies. They always start out super understanding. They have a lot of friends like me. They use all the right pronouns without missing a beat. But the moment shit gets complicated, that mask of wokeness slips and they start politely suggesting that I should just shut the fuck up and let my so-called allies carry my burden for me.

When I call them out for this micro-aggressive bullshit, they gaslight the shit out of me and tell me I'm getting "emotional" and that they "respect my feelings" but I didn't hear what I know I heard and I should just calm down. This is around the time when it dawns on me; it is way more goddamn important for these people to look woke than to be woke and that includes never having to apologize to people like me. This is also around the time when I have to step outside just to keep myself from proving them right by losing my fucking shit while they remain permanently Xanax calm. Fucking white people, right?

Here's the thing, I am fucking white people, at least according to the current census data definition of that label. But I'm also a very out-genderqueer person with five-alarm neurodiversity (five personalities and counting!) in a rural white community that has never exactly welcomed my existence. I grew up with white people; kids who repeatedly reminded me that I would never be one of them and adults who seemed convinced that I was dangerous because from a very young age there was something distinctly 'other' about me. This treatment continues to this day and it's exhausting, feeling like you are constantly under the surveillance of hateful eyes, holding your breath every time you pass a police car, and then having straight white people offer you help just to turn on you when your otherness becomes inconvenient to their hobby of playing savior with tranny lunatics like me. 

I don't equate my experience with that of people of color, especially considering that Queer neurodivergent people of color are basically statistically born dead. However, I can't afford to ignore the fact that many of the straight Black and brown people I know are the only neurotypical straight people who seem to even understand what I'm talking about when I'm talking about shit like this. I've known Black people from Dixie who have literally moved back to the South because at least there the racists don't pretend to be your friend which is the same reason why I avoid organizing in the suburbs. So many of us are just sick and tired of the passive-aggressive culture of the mainstream left. That's because all of us are members of the lumpenproletariat and the leaders of the mainstream left in this country are not. 

The lumpenproletariat is the outsider class, spit on even by Marx who referred to us as "social scum" and the "refuse of all classes." The term literally means "rag proletariat" and it includes all the poor people outside of the more traditional working class, the beggars, cripples, criminals, prostitutes, ex-cons and mental patients. The unemployed and the unemployable. The downwardly mobile. A genderfuck basket case eking out a meager existence on disability while cycling in and out of non-profits just to keep the demons at bay. Marx and Engels shit on all of us for lacking "class consciousness" but in reality, we are just poor people they can't unionize and govern beneath their leadership.

This prejudice is baked into the mainstream left across the west. The Social Democratic Party of Germany that set the pace for many progressives and social democrats across the globe during the late 19th and early 20th century made wide use of the term lumpenproletariat as a slur designed to exclude the "non-respectable poor" from those deemed worthy of proletariat status and create a more "desirable" working class. As the 20th century marched on and the SPD found themselves leading post-Imperial Germany, they came to view the lumpen as a biological threat to the health of a truly progressive society and much of the west followed suit with their asylums, reform schools, clinics, and other devices of social hygiene, much of which would also set the table for the Nazis.

In post-colonial America, the lumpenproletariat has always been overwhelmingly Black, brown, and/or Queer, and this isn't a coincidence. Trauma is the number one side-effect of white supremacy and the neurotypical gender binary, and this trauma keeps the lights on at the offices of the numerous industrial complexes that have kept white power alive and well long after the fall of Jim Crow. The Clinton Democrats, under the tutelage of Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmon, saw to that.

The National Institute of Health has consistently shown that the Black community suffers from the highest rate of PTSD out of any other racial group in this country and most studies generally show that just short of half of all LGBTQ+ identifying people suffer from that same psychic injury which is frequently misdiagnosed as any number of "mental illnesses." All of this seems to pave a road straight to the penitentiary for people who can't afford to be subdued by pharmaceuticals. 

Roughly half of all inmates in this country have been found to be experiencing a "mental health condition" and pretty much all of them have experienced some form of childhood trauma. Uncoincidentally, Black Americans are more than 6 times as likely to be imprisoned than whites with Latinos twice as likely and Queer people right in between at 3 times as likely as straight people with 16% of all trans people having served time.

I've been fortunate enough to dodge prison in the sticks, but this relative privilege came with the constellation prize of being chewed up by a wide variety of for-profit mental health institutions that gave me dozens of diagnoses and God knows how many pills before I finally discovered that the primary source of my ailments was the trauma I suffered as a gender non-conforming child at a Catholic school that essentially served me up like a pudding to pedophile priests so those pillars of white heterosexuality could steer me in the right direction with their cocks.

The left did finally hear the cry of the lumpenproletariat, but it would take Queer thinkers like Michelle Foucault and thinkers of color like Frantz Fanon to articulate our pain in a language straight white people could understand. The latter, a psychiatrist by trade, would largely reinvent the word lumpenproletariat with his landmark manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, in which Fanon studied a number of asylums and discovered mental distress to largely be a symptom of capitalist and post-colonialist exploitation. Doctor Fanon also recognized that those suffering under such conditions were a lot less likely to suffer from colonial class indoctrination and were thus a lot more willing to revolt against the status quo.

This wasn't exactly news to barely closeted Queer anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin and Max Stirner who had long preached way back in the 19th century that those of us in the rag class already represented a kind of actually existing anarchism simply by daring to exist outside the confines of mainstream society. They knew what Frantz and Foucault found out, that we were just crazy enough to kick ass without a manifesto to tell us how to do it and we proved this in spades during the sixties and seventies.

The last time the left brought this country to the brink of revolution it was under the leadership of the Black Power Movement that ignited the imagination of the entire lumpenproletariat by simply passing around the goddamn microphone. No organization embodied this spirit of revolutionary dialogue better than the Black Panther Party who openly courted the urban lumpenproles for support with Huey Newton lionizing this cadre as "street brothers"; an organized paramilitary force of ex-cons and ex-gangbangers turning their arms on the systems of oppression that alienated them from society.  

Dozens of other armed revolutionaries from the gutters of Babylon followed suit, from the fags and dykes of the Gay Liberation Front to the streetwalking gender outlaws of STAR, from the reservation dog soldiers of AIM to the Latino lowriders of the Young Lords who even developed a "Lumpen Organization" within their ranks and captured the mood of the times when they boldly proclaimed "It's a law of revolution that the most oppressed group takes the leadership position."

The climax came when the Illinois chapter of the Panthers, led by a young visionary named Fred Hampton, tried to organize these tribes under a single Rainbow Coalition with the intention of not just confronting the state but replacing it with parallel institutions for community welfare that took the chronically unemployed off the government dole. The government couldn't have this, so they shot Fred Hampton. They shot Bunchy Carter, they shot Malcolm X, and they locked up Huey and Bobby Seale, and they framed Leonard Peltier and Geronimo Pratt, and they let an entire generation of Black Queer and Black and Queer revolutionaries die of AIDS.

Then the universities took over, and the big labor unions marched back in with the Democrats on speed dial along with a host of moneyed non-profits organized from the top down like corporations. All of these institutions, all of them, are overwhelmingly led by elderly straight white men and even their diversity programs are largely devices of gatekeeping and tokenization that only afford the most assimilated minorities, aka the least lumpen minorities, access to positions of power. And thus, I find myself getting gaslit and disenfranchised by cis-passing white transwomen who run DEI programs at fucking Raytheon (sadly, a true story.)

We the unwashed lumpenproletariat need to rediscover our voice. We need to get the fucking microphone back. Cointelpro stole it from us and I'm sick and tired of barrowing the DNC's in exchange for another slice of my pride.

The problem on the mainstream left today is almost identical to the problem on the right. They are both run by old white cis het men for old white cis het men. The only difference is that the right admits it while the left just uses minorities like human shields while they kill Muslims with drones and organize the global bourgeoisie beneath decaying relics of progressive internationalism like the EU and the UN. Well, no more. No more Weimar allies buttering us up with petty privileges while the Nazis gather their guns.

We need our own goddamn guns, our own clinics, our own schools, our own parties and organizations run from the bottom up by our own people. Paler Queer folk and neurodivergent trailer trash also need to abandon what's left of our white privilege and throw in our lot with our true comrades, with street brothers and reservation dog soldiers, in the name of lumpen power. The poor need to become a storm over the white pride parade of the two-party oligarchy. The lumpenproletariat must come together again like a rainbow fist and smash the pigfucker state once and for all.

Maybe then I can play nice with bougie vanilla leftists but I'm not making any promises.

Peace, Rage, & Solidarity- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Sunday Morning by the Velvet Underground

* I Against I by Bad Brains

* Down to Be Wrong by HAIM

* Rich Daddy by the Dicks

* Easier Said by Sunflower Bean

* Retard Girl by Hole

* Braille by Regina Spektor

* List of Demands by Saul Williams

* Wolf Like Me by TV On the Radio

* Drunk Walk Home by Mitski

You Can Put America First by Destroying MAGA: A Message for a Post-Trump Isolationist Movement

 "What transforms this world is... Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed."

Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavillion

As someone who lives in Trump Country but frequently moves in left-wing circles online, I have heard a lot of nasty things about Trump supporters and plenty of them are true. I didn't exactly have a great time growing up Queer in a town where boys are raised to believe that manhood is defined by torturing kids like me. Rural Pennsylvania can certainly be a cruel place to the strange little creatures. 

So yes, my neighbors can be pig-headed, short-sighted, close-minded, assholes who lash out at people they choose to know nothing about, but they're also a few other things that grab far fewer headlines. My neighbors are also hard-working, outsourced, war weary, poor folk, acutely aware of the fact that they have been getting played for generations by a system rigged against them by Wall Street and much of their petty prejudices are mirrored by some of their city slicking liberal critics who take about as much time to comprehend country people as country people do to understand trans kids and Somalian immigrants.

It's easy to be terrified of a boogeyman you've never met before, and Republicans aren't the only monster's adept at playing this game. For decades now Democrats have used the specter of the redneck deplorable to scare Queer folk and people of color into voting for slightly more passive aggressive white supremacists like Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, but their caricature of rural monstrosity is only a fraction of the story at best. What most MSDNC shitlibs leave out of their grotesque portraits of rust belt, white trash, MAGA folk is the fact that most of these people were actually motivated to vote for Donald Trump largely as a reckless act of vengeance against the two-party system.

In 2016, the GOP was pushing another Bush, the Democrats were pushing another Clinton, and both teams were equally horrified by the scatological antics of a foul-mouthed, dayglow ginger, rodeo clown who seemed more committed to the LOLs than he did to any coherent ideology. The people of my native Pennsyltucky had spent the worst part of the last twenty-something years losing everything to a Clinton or a Bush administration. They had their factories sold out from under them by shitty trade deals and their kids sent to die in wars that never seemed to end or add up. To put a long diatribe short, regardless of how I feel about the people I grew up with, they worked hard and paid their taxes to a couple of parties who fucked them until they couldn't walk straight in the name of globalism.

Trump was one of the few candidates to actually address this fact and he did so while horrifying the media that helped the Bush and Clinton dynasties to get away with it. Most of the people I knew who voted for Trump in 2016 did it to get even. That doesn't make voting for a race-baiting serial rapist acceptable, but it does make it somewhat understandable to a transgender feminist who has watched both of these parties take turns feeding my people one lie after another while feeding one abused sex worker after another to the prison industrial complex. Shit like that made me crazy enough to route for Putin as a badly closeted communist. So, I get how easily oppression can lead to temporary insanity.

The trouble with MAGA was that the insanity stuck. Trump's first four years in power should have shot the illusion that he was some kind of isolationist in bronze armor to shit. The bastard ripped up the JCPOA, sold Ukraine the offensive weaponry that convinced Putin to invade, gave Israel the green light to rape and pillage Jerusalem, and facilitated a Saudi genocide in Yemen. Not to mention that he stacked his cabinet to the gills with neocon vampires like Mike Pompeo, Eliot Abrams and John Bolton.

But the mainstream media didn't really cover any of this. They mostly just stuck to the narrative that Donald Trump was some kind of dangerous, Putin appeasing, NATO stomping, old right nationalist to which your average MAGA supporter responded by doubling down on their support for a man who could have easily been exposed as just another cold-blooded swamp monster if the news wasn't too busy defending cold-blooded swamp monsters to do so. 

Biden won in a coma in 2020 largely thanks to COVID and then graciously took the blame for Trump's blowback by doing nothing to stop it. The JCPOA remained in tatters, Russia invaded a nation Trump armed to the teeth, and Hamas went on a rampage that Trump's servitude to the Israel Lobby inspired. Then the Democrats made it worse when they ignored their base and ran Kamala as some kind of Zionist Oprah posing with the Cheney's while Trump scored points with all the young bros on the blogosphere.

The Democrats and the Republicans pretty much tripped over each other to make Trump's reanimation possible and in 2025, their mess has become a menace worth being hysterical over. Donald Trump has always been his own worst enemy. The man's pathological ego has always been the stuff that psycho killers and dictators are made of. However, his erratic mood swings and gawdy lack of anything resembling class have always kept him from acquiring the kind of establishment gravitas necessary to make him dangerous to anyone but migrants and Muslims. 

That all changed during the last election when Elon Musk and a host of other Silicon Valley billionaires decided to hedge their bets on a wild card in a gamble to put a man in the White House impulsive enough to let them replace the old military industrial complex with Artificial Intelligence. The bet paid off and now Trump finally has the corporate sponsorship to play Hitler for real this time.

Perhaps the only good news here is that it turns out that some of Trump's supporters really did want to put America first and are finally displaying a little buyer's remorse and it's about fucking time. No sane human being could possibly consider that psychopath to be an actual conservative while he micromanages the liquidation of the Gaza Strip and uses borders and cartels as an excuse to shred what's left of the Constitution and hand the Federal Government over to Palantir. The man being outed as a pedophile didn't exactly help either. I guess even neo-Nazis have a red line.

In recent weeks the fallout has become downright torrential with even Marjorie Taylor Greene turning on her beloved Übermensch over the Epstein files before cowering in a corner at the spectacle of her own unexpected chivalry. But it's Venezuela that looks primed to be the tipping point. 

With Little Marco whispering sweet nothings in his ear, Donald Trump has followed the neocon playbook every step of the way on this one. Making up phony threats to national security with totally fabricated cartels. Changing the dictionary to define America's addiction to hard drugs and cheap labor as a license for total war. Bypassing Congress, the Constitution and international law to unilaterally demand regime change at the barrel of a cannon. It's all there and America sees it. 70% of those polled across party lines in a recent CBS News poll oppose military action in Venezuela.

Republican Senator Rand Paul probably summed it up best when he said: "If he invades Venezuela or gives more money to Ukraine, his movement will dissolve." Such a fabulously catastrophic outcome should be approached as an opportunity to all those who truly seek to dissolve Donald Trump and the evil empire for which he stands in a vat of molten lava. MAGA has become an increasingly sick cult of braindead foot soldiers devoted to a Big Mac gagging Caligula, but the America First Movement that developed in the run-off of this panic factory has some legitimately descent values to stand by. 

My neighbors are right to disdain globalism, forever wars and the deep state. They are correct in observing that all of these imperial vices rob the homeland to rape the third world. But they are going to need to purge themselves of more than just Trump to forge a truly affective revolutionary movement.

While paleolibertarians likes Rand Paul and Thomas Massie are laying down the groundwork for a post-Trump America First Movement that could easily become the kind of gateway drug to anarchism that Rand's father's movement proved to be in the wake of Bush, opportunistic trolls like Tucker Carlson are taking things in a far darker direction, glorifying oligarchs like Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin while pushing uncut antisemitism and backing unrepentant neo-Nazi parasites like Nick Fuentes.

This is why anti-fascism needs to be injected into any form of Isolationism to keep it from mutating into national chauvinism. The brilliant Japanese isolationist Yukio Mishima correctly observed that the death of the Japanese nation came with the birth of the Japanese Empire, that foreign entanglements like initiatory war disintegrate the integrity of any truly benevolent culture. He should have taken it one step further and recognized that unchecked power itself is defined by the disintegration of everything that stands in its way, including the people it is supposed to put first.

It's not too late for my neighbors to learn this lesson but someone has to be willing to deliver it to them without burning them at the stake. That means weird people like me agreeing to drop our own prejudices and preconceived notions at the door as long as my neighbors are willing to meet me halfway by doing the same.

Color me a contrarian, but this is one genderfuck anarchist willing to give it a shot. How about you?

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* All the Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople

* Joiner by Blondshell

* Mamma Tried by Merle Haggard

* In Bloom by Nirvana

* Down to be Wrong by HAIM

* Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

* Liar by Rollins Band

* Goodbye Stranger by Supertramp

* Working Class Hero by John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band

* All My Life by Foo Fighters

It's Time to Make America Truly Tribal Again

 Way back in the 1700s there was this fucked up little place called Florida, or at least that's what the Spaniards called it. The original natives of the region had multiple different names for this untamable swampland but most of them were wiped out by slaughter and disease from the Conquistadors who declared the wild mess, Florida. They didn't last long though. In fact, those butchers only managed to build and populate a few colonialist missions before their glorious Catholic empire collapsed in the tall grass surrounding them and, in spite of such efforts, most of Florida remained a verdant wilderness teeming with all kinds of shit that freaked white people the fuck out- snakes, alligators, mosquitos, humidity... 

But there was one tribe of Indians just wild enough to call this no-man's-land home.

The colonialists called them the Seminole, which was believed to be derived from the Spanish word "cimerones", meaning "untamed" or "runaway." It had originally been used as a pejorative for Native Americans who rejected mission life and Roman Catholicism in order to flee and live "wild" in the snake infested forests. But this wasn't just any tribe. The Seminole were a nation of refugees, the product of ethnogenesis, a collection of different disparate ethnicities joining together to create a new one. 

Most of their original members were renegades and outcasts exiled from existing tribes, most significantly the Muscogee Creeks of what is now called Georgia and Alabama but also Choctaw, Yamasee, Yuchi and eventually free Africans, escaped slaves and even a few disenfranchised white colonialists. They all came together in the wilderness to live free, and they thrived where white men feared to tread, building an identity over the centuries defined by their collective refusal to be governed by any force but nature.

They organized themselves into autonomous, self-governing, villages called Italwa that cooperated for mutual defense and built a thriving trade network on the largely abandoned ruins of the Spanish Empire. It was their diversity that set them apart though and made them far more independent than the other local Creek based tribes. It was also this diversity that would eventually make them a target of another burgeoning empire known as the United States of America.

By the 19th Century, the Seminoles had accepted so many escaped slaves from nearby plantations that these darker skinned refugees formed their own distinct band dedicated to preserving their own unique culture under Seminole protection while also enjoying the right to bear arms. They called them Black Seminoles, and they quickly established an alliance between wild Indians and escaped slaves that threatened the monopoly on force held by white Southern planters with a growing network of underground railroads. 

In other words, the Seminole had to go and thus began the Seminole Wars.

Three conflicts were fought between the years of 1816 and 1858. The first was also America's first major military intervention on foreign soil lead by a sadistic General named Andrew Jackson for the express purpose of recovering escaped slaves, and it was Andrew Jackson who would lead America into the second and deadliest of those wars about a decade later when he was elected president. For nearly 7 years, less than 2,000 Seminole warriors schooled over 30,000 heavily armed American troops in swampland guerrilla warfare, picking them off like mosquitos in hit-and-run attacks and then disappearing back into the stags like ghosts.

It was the longest, deadliest and most expensive Indian War this empire has ever engaged in. As many as 2,000 American troops died in that filthy black water, a population of corpses that matched the size of the entirety of the Seminoles' armed forces. The Americans only won the war the way Americans have ever won a war, by targeting and starving their adversaries' families and subjecting civilians to genocide in order to force real warriors to surrender.  

However, while most of the Seminoles begrudgingly agreed to flee the land they made their own for the glorified concentration camps of Oklahoma, a few small bands never surrendered, choosing to retreat even deeper into that fucked up little place where they remain unconquered to this day in what has now become known as the Everglades. The Southern planters even attempted to reach out to these bloodied but unbowed renegades in a desperate hunt for allies during the Civil War. The Seminoles told them to fuck off. They remained neutral.

This is one of my favorite stories in the often-depressing pantheon of American history for a number of reasons. As a Queer person, any story about a band of outcasts forging a new identity in resistance to their oppressors is kind of like hyperfocus candy for my distinctly neurodivergent brain. But more than anything, the story of the Seminole Nation is a story that proves that ethnicity or tribal identity is mutable and that bioregionalism is far stronger than traditional Westphalian nationalism. It is historical proof that the American Empire is a mirage built on totally manufactured constructs like race and borders, and that these constructs can be destroyed.

The fatal flaw at the heart of both the left and the right in this country is the nightmare known as the American Dream. A contrived notion that any form of political universalism writ large over such a vast and diverse physical space can ever lead to anything but tyranny regardless of what label you put on it. Perhaps the most devastating label of all is the western concept of race as a biological construct with its deadliest byproduct being that godless religion known as whiteness.  The very notion of white people was invented for the express purpose of homogenizing the entirety of the European diaspora into a single globalized master race.

I guess it kind of worked, at least for a while. America is still the deadliest empire on earth and much of that empire is built upon the bedrock of white supremacy. But just like the Spanish Empire before them, America is rapidly collapsing into the abyss beneath the weight of its own sins, leaving a vast population of 'white people' without any form of ethnic identity other than conquest to cling to. And cling they do, to Proud Boys and Heritage Foundations and vile technofascist juntas. To a very polluted and historically color blind form of tribalism. But we shouldn't let this sickness pollute the word 'tribe' any more than we should let it pervert the word 'God.'

That would be truly tragic because the solution to this problem, of how to free people from being the willing hostages of a thrashing international leviathan as it drowns in its own blood, may actually be to turn to a sort of historical bioregionalism based on the kind of tribalism which has always been natural to this region of the world. This doesn't mean indulging in cultural chauvinism or cultural appropriation. It means doing what the Seminole did and building new nations in contradiction to these things. 

The indigenous people of these so-called Americas are still here and still fighting to define themselves but if any of us are going to live peacefully on this land with them after the inevitable collapse of the empire that failed to extinguish them, we should probably start looking to them for more influence than the host of dead white men still worshipped by both sides of academia.

As noted above, I believe that the best way to do this is by embracing bioregionalism, a philosophy of green localism that calls on societies to organize themselves small around the natural boundaries of bioregions and to actively engage with a process of becoming native to these environments by learning and embracing their ecological and cultural history. This is precisely what the Seminole did in the wilds of colonial Florida, and they did it in a way that didn't involve them forcing their will upon anyone. They built a vibrant new cultural identity by uniting the shards of the many ethnicities that joined beneath their flag and adapting them to the environment that offered them sanctuary. 

The Seminoles were not alone. Many indigenous nations existed in small, decentralized, non-hierarchical, societies long before some white dude declared this anarchism. The Iraquois Confederacy and the Navajo Dine developed complex societies that united many cultures in harmony with nature through cooperation and collective responsibility. Europeans once did too in places like Medieval Iceland and Gaelic Ireland. You can also detect streaks of this stateless spirit among the outliers of post-colonial Euro-American culture such as the Cajuns of the Bayou and the numerous sects of Anabaptists across America's badly scarred heartland.

This is what I seek to achieve with my own community of mostly pale-faced rural Queer folk on the ruins of the Appalachian rust belt. A borderless confederacy of autonomous and anti-colonialist tribal communities built around our shared traditions of multi-ethnic Queerness and anti-authoritarian neurodivergence, fostered by the agrarian traditions of the land we now call home. A series of farms, communes, co-ops and homesteads living off the land with our own network of schools, militias, small businesses and mutual aid societies to sustain us while still living in harmony with whatever other voluntary cultures surround us.

We can't replace the native people who once occupied these hollers, and we wouldn't dare to try. The Shawnee who once called my little corner of Pennsyltucky home suffered a similar fate as many of the Seminoles, being ethnically cleansed by that 19th century Donald Trump, Andrew Jackson, with his genocidal 1830 Indian Removal Act. 

But we can honor the last nations to live off this land sustainably and more importantly we can learn from them. We can do what the Seminole dared to do and forge a new stateless existence in the age of Orange Ozymandias by making America truly tribal again.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Even the Losers by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

* Tribe by Gruntruck

* The Flag by Royal Trux

* The Wrong Year by the Decemberists

* Heroes by David Bowie

* The King of Spain by the Tallest Man on Earth

* The Druid by Sleep

* Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes

* Anaconda by the Melvins

* Territorial Pissings by Nirvana

In the Age of the Epstein Files, True Populists Should Embrace Feminism

 Statistically speaking, you or someone you love has been preyed upon by a man with more power than he deserves. RAINN estimates that 17.7 million American women have been the victims of rape in the United States and the CDC has reported that over half of all women and nearly one third of all men have experienced some form of sexual violence in their lives and that includes the woman writing this article. 

In 1994, at the age of 5, I became one of an estimated 63,000 children subjected to sexual abuse every year, what amounts to one in 9 girls and one in 20 boys. My abusers were Catholic priests in a diocese where this kind of abuse was both rampant and protected by male-dominated institutions of authority. They did it because they could and they could because they were men with power

It is facts like these and the fact that I am a part of them that leave me with very little doubt that our current president is a sexual predator because it is facts like these that lead me to believe his victims; two dozen women painting a vivid portrait of a man who has grabbed and groped whatever and whoever he wanted for the better part of the past sixty years. Donald Trump has even been caught on tape bragging about his modus operandi and laughing about his invincibility.

So, when I learn that this kind of creature spent 15 years palling around with another well documented sexual predator like Jeffrey Epstein who was known to have operated a multibillion-dollar empire trafficking underage girls, I don't feel that assuming that Donald Trump was likely heavily involved qualifies as a conspiracy theory and the entire GOP machine has basically spent the last several months jumping through their collective ass to prove the validity of my educated suspicions.

Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson are now begrudgingly giving Congress the green light to require Trump's own Department of Justice to release its treasure trove of secret files on the Epstein case but only after they pulled out every conceivable stop to prevent this from happening. That includes blocking an incoming Democratic congresswoman likely to vote for the bipartisan effort from representing her constituency for seven weeks and brazenly attempting to bully two of their own congresswomen into changing their support for the bill just days before Trump and Johnson finally caved.

But this is much bigger than Donald Trump and the GOP which is why the Democrats themselves didn't even bother to try to investigate their mortal enemy's conceivably career crushing guilt in the Epstein enterprise during Joe Biden's entire presidency when they controlled every conceivable lever of power that would allow them to do so. 

Likely because former president and DNC power broker Bill Clinton was extremely close with Jeffrey Epstein as well and I have very little doubt in regard to his guilt either for the same reasons that I have little doubt in regard to the guilt of his former friend and financier Donald Trump.

Bill Clinton is also a well recorded sexual predator with numerous accusers, including one who has accused him of rape, two who have accused him of sexual assault and another who has accused him of exposing himself to her without her consent. 

Even the most progressive of Democrats once rolled their eyes at such accusations with none other than Gloria Steinem coming to the then president's defense but Clinton's predatory behavior is far from far-fetched considering the simple fact that he is a powerful man among powerful men and powerful men have an uncanny tendency of collecting such accusations.

In fact, no fewer than eight of America's last twelve presidents have been accused of committing at least one act of sexually predatory behavior with at least half of them appearing to have been serial offenders. 

JFK was accused of sexual assault by White House intern Mimi Alfred and an FBI document from the sixties quotes a nightclub singer accusing the future King of Camelot of attempting to rape her in a hotel room in 1945.

Bob Woodword has mentioned multiple cases of Richard Nixon making unwanted advances on the women in his staff including at least one secretary who was sexually assaulted.

An actress named Selene Walters accused Ronald Reagan of drugging and assaulting her during his Hollywood days in the 1950s and his VP turned successor George HW Bush has been accused of multiple episodes of sexual misconduct including at least one assault that occurred in the Oval Office. 

His son was accused as well and so was Joe Biden who had a long history of making women and young girls visually uncomfortable by putting his hands on them and playing with their hair during televised photo-ops well before Tara Reade went public with accusations of sexual assault remarkably similar to those made against Donald Trump.

I can't tell you that every single one of these accusations is true, but I can tell you that there is far more to be lost than gained by going public as a victim of powerful men which is the reason why many of you have probably never even heard of many of these accusations and it is also likely the reason why a shocking amount of the accusers have ended up dying alone of tragic circumstances just like Virginia Giuffre did. 

I speak of the 16-year-old girl Donald Trump recently accused Jeffrey Epstein of stealing from him like a token, the molested foster child that recently leaked emails from Epstein accuse Trump of spending hours with during the period of her court documented sexual trafficking. After going public with her accusations against Epstein and the scores of powerful men he served, Virginia moved to the other side of the planet, to the Outback outside of Perth, Australia, in a desperate attempt to start over away from the prying eyes of the press only to end up dead of an alleged suicide. 

Powerful men rape and even when they get caught red handed, they tend to get away with it. This is a fact, and it is a fact impervious to partisan bullshit. This is also why everyone should be a feminist, and every feminist should be an anarchist who opposes the patriarchal institutional power represented by the two-party shell game. 

This should include libertarians and even conservatives, and this should also include men who frequently find themselves the victims of the patriarchy as well. For too long feminism has been a boutique fetish of bourgeoise neoliberal hypocrites like Gloria Steinem and Hillary Clinton, but one in every ten rape victims are male and nearly half of all trans people like me have experienced sexual violence in our lives.

Rape isn't something that happens to women, it's something that happens to the victims of powerful men and this often includes children. Nevertheless, 88% of perpetrators of sexual violence are male and sexual violence has far more to do with violence and the power that instructs it than sexuality. 

We live in a nation where 70% of all federal judges are male and one in ten students experience educator sexual misconduct in the compulsory school system before they graduate. We live in a nation where at least 90% of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are male and sexual violence is the second most reported form of police misconduct.

We live in a nation founded by powerful white men who only afforded other powerful white men with the recognition of basic human beings and Thomas Jefferson, arguably the most liberal of these powerful white men, had a proven history of raping his slaves.

If you believe that any of this is a coincidence, then this survivor of patriarchal violence invites you to join those who tar me as a conspiracy theorist in committing the one form of sexual violence I condone. Please, by all means, go fuck yourself and skip the Vaseline. 

However, if you are one of the growing legions of Americans across our manufactured partisan divide who find yourself physically sick over the cowardice and hypocrisy displayed by our sanctimonious two-party plutocracy regarding their own clearly predatory predilections, I seriously suggest that you consider giving feminism a try because no one is safe in a society that excludes anyone from full individual autonomy.

You don't have to be a man to kick the man's ass, but you don't have to be a woman or a leftist either.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Asking for It by Hole

* I Found a Reason by the Velvet Underground

* Dress by PJ Harvey

* Anything That Way by Buffalo Tom

* Snow Song by Adrienne Lenker

* Every Word by Belly

* Sour Breath by Julien Baker

* Waitress by Hop Along

* 23's a Baby by Samia & Blondshell

* Problem with It by Plains

Palestine Doesn't Need Another Oslo: Could Hamas Become the New Fatah?

 It stuck. Donald Trump nailed it. The impossible peace deal that will remake the Middle East in his own gawdy gilded image. After just over two years straight of total war, after billions of dollars of bombs and tens if not hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, the Master of the Deal brokered a truce between Israel and Hamas, and it stuck. Sort of. 

You see, dearest motherfuckers, while the guns of Hamas have largely fallen silent, Israel's genocide against the people of Gaza never actually stopped, not that the document Trump and company signed at Sharm El-Sheikh required this. Under the official letter of the Donald's 20-point agreement, Israel is essentially afforded every right to ethnically cleanse 58% of Gaza's shriveling territory which is now governed by the IDF behind a largely nebulous "Yellow Line" while two million badly battered Palestinians are crammed into the ruins of the lower 42% of their walled ghetto.

Israel is just supposed to stop bombing these tent cities while allowing a few aid trucks to keep their denizens from starving to death on Tik Tok, but the IDF can't even handle that peon to humanitarian colonialism. Those Zionist jackals have been blitzing refugees almost daily since before the ink even dried on Trump's big, beautiful ceasefire, killing hundreds, while opening only two border crossings to a slow trickle of aid.

Israel has violated the shit out of this so-called peace deal. The only thing that's really changed is that Hamas is no longer firing back and that was the real point behind that theatric signing ceremony on the Senai Peninsula. Neither Israel nor Hamas were even present for the shindig at Sharm El-Sheik. The papers were signed by Qatari Emir Sheik Tamin Bin Hamad al Thani and Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan; Hamas' two largest foreign financiers, along with Pharoah Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, who polices Gaza's western borders. The real deal was for those thugs to agree to pressure Hamas into giving up just so long as Israel allows them to share in the profits of the resort Donald Trump plans to build on the graves of 5% of the Strip's Population

If you have a functioning soul, you are probably asking God right now, what the fuck kind of peace is that? Sadly, sickeningly, the only kind Palestine has ever experienced over the last century of Western imperial Nakba. Every single magnificent peace deal that the paler nations have ever celebrated themselves for brokering has been little more than one concession to evil after another and pretty much all of them have amounted to a similar bargain: accept the inevitable Nakba and betray the Palestinian people and you will die rich while they die with nothing.

This is what Egypt agreed to with the much-vaunted 1978 Camp David Accords and Jordan signed up for a similar deal in 1994. America essentially just offered to arm the dictatorships in those countries to the teeth as long as they agreed to use at least some of that arsenal to police Palestine's borders while the IDF continued to ransack the riffraff with reckless abandon. The worst of these deals however was the one signed in Oslo in 1993 because that was the deal that made Palestine's own former liberators complicit in the slaughter.

Yasser Arafat's Fatah picked up the fight where the various dictatorships of the Middle East dropped it by organizing the Palestinian resistance beneath the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), but after decades of fighting, Arafat began to pivot towards peace, appealing to western bleeding hearts by offering the compromise of a Two-State Solution. Oslo was supposed to be his greatest triumph; a well-publicized path to Palestinian statehood approved by Israel's then-Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and overseen by the Donald's old Epstein bro, Bill Clinton. However, the document signed at Oslo was problematic from the start.

While Israel officially recognized Palestine's right to exist and vice versa, the PLO's recognition of their colonizer's sovereignty came at the price of them renouncing their claim to 22% of their territory while leaving Israel able to easily control the rest of it through heavily militarized borders and checkpoints. The state that Fatah was left to govern was the Palestinian Authority and this governance largely amounted to the PA policing their own people on Israel's behalf. Arafat accepted this Faustian bargain over a handful of promises that proved to be totally empty. By the end of the nineties, the number of Israeli settlers illegally occupying the West Bank had nearly doubled. Rabin, for his part, was killed by his own people in 1995 and replaced by his enemies. Sadly, Arafat wasn't far behind.

When the Palestinian people became fed up with Oslo, they launched a grassroots revolt known as the Second Intifada in 2000. When Yasser Arafat refused to use the Palestinian Authority to pacify this revolt, he was made a prisoner of his own armed compound in Ramallah where he was poisoned with radioactive polonium in 2004 and replaced by his rival and likely poisoner, Mahmoud Abbas. With Arafat and his meddlesome conscience finally silenced, Abbas dutifully ended the Intifada and turned the Palestinian Authority into a Stalinist police state, employing the largest security force on earth to savagely suppress dissent while Israel continued to expand its settlements.

Once Palestine's greatest hope and a beacon of resistance that inspired anti-imperialists worldwide, Fatah has become a viper's nest of rich prison wardens acting at the service of their pitiless Zionist masters like a Nazi rump state.

With all that considered, I can't help but to ask myself, is this what's next for Hamas? As an organization they certainly have a shorter distance to fall than Fatah did. Hamas was largely a second-rate offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood before Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud began funneling them money through Egypt and Qatar so as to divide the Palestinian resistance across sectarian lines. However, over the years, Hamas has become a force to be reckoned with, as the Second Intifada flushed them with a generation of young radicals Fatah lost with its capitulations. 

This is why Israel continues to demand that Hamas be disarmed and while they have largely ceased defending their people from the ongoing Nakba, Hamas continues to refuse to give up the gun. But someone will have to police the ceasefire regime Hamas has tacitly agreed to and Trump's 20-point plan is very clear on this point.

The UN Security Council has recently adopted a resolution officially placing Gaza under the control of Donald Trump's East India Company-style colonialist corporate body known as the Board of Peace while authorizing the US Central Command-led International Stabilization Force to demilitarize the wreckage. The US is flooding the region with troops as we speak, including at least 200 on Gaza's border, but this is all supposed to be temporary. In accordance with Trumps 20-point plan, this force is to be phased out and replaced by "a Palestinian technocratic, apolitical, committee of competent Palestinians from the Strip" aka another Palestinian Authority.

While Bibi's Ashkenazi supremacists may just be attempting to use all this as smoke so they can finish their final solution once Western Humanitarians lose interest again, this operation is much bigger than their kosher caviar dreams of a Greater Israel. In fact, this ceasefire is even bigger than Donald Trump's zeppelin sized ego. 

All of this is part of a plan to expand Trump's Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia's doorstep in order to implement the "New Middle East" plan launched by the Biden Administration at the 2023 New Delhi G20 Summit. The plan calls for the establishment of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor in the Israeli port of Haifa; a logistics hub designed to serve as a counterweight to China's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative while drawing India away from BRICS and deeper into Pax Americana's corner in preparation for a final showdown with Eurasia.

This plan also called for a reconstructed Gaza to host a low tax "special economic zone" strikingly similar to the Donald's proposed "Freedom Zone" which would essentially use what's left of Gaza to man sweatshops for spare breadcrumbs. Even if Israel relents to Turkey's offer to send in their own troops, eventually a semi-indigenous colonial police force will need to be constructed, and Hamas has already shown a willingness to violently police its own people amongst the ruins by carrying out executions of members of rival militias, acts of violence that initially received praise from Imperator Trump.

With that being said, Hamas has become much bigger than an organization, if it weren't there would be no one left to disarm at this point. On the contrary, Hamas has essentially maintained their troop levels to pre-October 7th numbers with at least one new recruit for every martyr slain. This means that while Hamas' leadership may remain fat, old and corrupt in the hotel suites of Doha and Ankara, their foot soldiers are starving, young and freshly traumatized.

Once again, a new generation of Nakba survivors will ultimately define the future of intifada. If Oslo proved anything it's that where there is a need for resistance, someone will rise to the occasion to fill it. If Hamas does indeed take the poison apple and becomes the new Fatah, then someone else will become the new Hamas. 

This may be the only silver lining on the dark clouds gathering over the Gaza Strip. Far from futile, resistance is downright inevitable.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Rebels by Drive-By Truckers

* All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix

* Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers

* Thumbtack by Blondshell

* Bulls on Parade by Rage Against the Machine

* Pull My Strings by Dead Kennedys

* Drain You by Nirvana

* Beast of Burden by the Rolling Stones

* Sprinter by Torres

* Teenagers by My Chemical Romance

Cheney Died the Only Dick Who Deserved Donald Trump

 Well, Satan died last week, or at least so I'm told. Speaking personally, I won't sleep easier until I see a body because that neocon fossil should have died centuries ago. I can't help but to feel like the final girl in some cheesy 80s slasher flick, waiting for one last jump-scare after the killer was shot 84 times, set on fire and dropped from a skyscraper. Dick Cheney was the killer, literally and figuratively, and I'll believe that monster has finally left us when I see his open casket lowered into an active volcano.

What else can I say about that putrid creature that I haven't been saying for the last twenty years. Dick Cheney was not a politician; he was one of modern histories most successful psychopaths and I don't believe any of this to be hyperbole. This man made his callous ambitions to rule the world through constant warfare and turn Washington into an omnipotent new Rome violently clear on multiple occasions through multiple administrations. Let's take a quick look at the stats, shall we.

After lurking around the darker corners of the Nixon Administration, Dick first achieved real power under Gerald Ford as his White House Chief of Staff. It was here that he found true love with then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the two budding young sociopaths kicked off their lifelong partnership by out-ghouling the then world champion Washington vampire, Henry Kissinger, who as Secretary of State was attempting to avert a third world war through strategic arms control with the Soviet Union.

Dick and Rummy had a problem with this. The two established a clique of young super hawks with similarly Machiavellian underlings of Senate Armed Services Chairman Henry "Scoop" Jackson like Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams, and together what became known as "Team B" sabotaged Kissinger's attempts at detente and affectively hobbled Soviet-American relations for another generation, but these kids were just getting started. This crew would go on to form the nucleus for what became the Neoconservative Movement, a national socialist cabal devoted to unabashed American global domination by any means necessary.

Cheney would spend most of the 80s as a representative for Wyoming's at-large congressional district where he continued to make every attempt to escalate the ultraviolence of the Cold War, becoming one of the more vocal cheerleaders for Ronald Reagan's numerous genocidal Central American death squads. But Dick wouldn't make his true global ambitions obscenely clear until the Berlin Wall was already crumbling in the twilight of the Soviet-era when George H.W. Bush appointed him Secretary of Defense in the late eighties.

It was from this vaunted cabinet position that Cheney oversaw two of the more grotesque displays of post-Cold War American power against two of America's more defenseless Cold War allies: Noriega's Panama and Saddam's Iraq, with Operation Just Cause and Operation Desert Storm. 

As Jean Baudrillard astutely observed, neither one of these operations was an actual fucking war; rather, they were highly publicized acts of unilateral slaughter committed with the careful collaboration of Washington's useful idiots in the burgeoning 24/7 news media for the purpose of sending the world two messages; Vietnam was a fluke and America' rules the world now. They were right about the second one, but only briefly.

This thinly veiled threat to the global community was articulated further in no uncertain terms with a leaked document known as the DPG or Defense Planning Guidance, which Cheney had Direct Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz draft in the glorious afterglow of their bloodbath in the Gulf. In this document another one of Dick's lifelong neocon flunkies set out a long-term strategy for American global dominance which explicitly advocated Washington primacy over a divided Eurasia so as to deter "potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global scale." 

Wolfowitz also suggested toppling rogue regimes for possessing weapons of mass destruction to do so, a position further driven home when Team B got back together for the now infamous Project for a New American Century.

After spending the second half of the nineties as the CEO for the world's second largest oil service company, Haliburton, Dick was ready to put this plan into practice. As the Vice President for his former employer's born-again dunce of a son, Cheney and his neocons infiltrated the highest echelons of American power and successfully used the totally preventable attacks of September 11th to consolidate America's entire national security apparatus beneath the shadow of the Executive Office, allowing Cheney to acquire more power than any president, let alone vice president, in American history.

And the rest is history. Ugly history. And that history continues to unfurl like the tentacles of Cthulhu to this day. The history of forever wars, of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Gaza and Iran. The history of Abu Ghraib and the Islamic State. The history of warrantless wiretaps, waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, drone strikes and serial regime change. The history of the War on Terror. A heinous era of imperial conquest that by the estimation of Brown University's Cost of War Project has resulted in as many as 4.7 million dead bodies and 38 million refugees in twenty years.

And yet how does America's bleeding hearts on the mainstream left remember this monster? As the courageous compassionate conservative who campaigned for Kamala with his equally loathsome daughter and received a standing ovation when visiting the Capitol on the first anniversary of the January 6 riots. 

Dick Cheney is remembered as a Never Trumper and somehow, it's this absurd farce that I find most revolting. That's because no single human being on the face of the planet, not Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or Lucifer himself, has done more to make the nightmare of Donald Trump downright inevitable.

Every single crime our orange emperor commits, every single atrocity that he continues to get away with, is the direct product of Dick Cheney's relentless forty-year campaign to afford the Executive Office with the powers of a Greek god. 

There were many policies and conspiracies that led us to this black and loathsome place but perhaps none stands alone as more telltale than the simple decision to prosecute the blowback of 9/11 as a war rather than a crime. This was an unprecedented legal innovation that opened Pandora's Box to a world where quite literally anyone can be declared a terrorist, and any atrocity can be justified in the name of national security so long as such decrees are hurled from the Oval Office onto the White House lawn.

So, now Donald Trump has the power to invent his own sick reality as he goes along. A refugee crisis brought on by Cheney's war machine can be declared an "invasion." The sale of soul-numbing narcotics to veterans of Cheney's conquest in the Middle East can be labeled as a campaign of "terrorism." Anyone with a green card caught bad mouthing Israel can be declared a dangerous "extremist." And entire genders can be red flagged as mental illnesses and divorced form their constitutional rights.

Not that Dick Cheney was particularly offended by any of this. I have never actually heard that man or his demonic offspring ever criticize Donald Trump for crushing poor people within the gears of the death star they idiot proofed. Such elites are far more offended by the hissy fit Trump threw at the Capitol and the fact that he has made their precious empire look tacky in front of their bougie colleagues in the EU. 

But isn't this how empires always end, with tragedy repeating itself as tragic comedy?

Didn't the Julio-Claudian Dynasty end with an ego-maniacal imbecile like Emperor Nero shaming his aristocratic contemporaries with his garish amphitheaters, grotesque gladiator spectacles and gosh public displays of autoeroticism as everything the Ceasars built burned around him? 

This may be the sick silver lining on Dick Cheney's long life of crime. It lasted just long enough for his criminal enterprise to humiliate him by becoming the plaything of a sadistic buffoon. This is the New American Century, one drenched in blood and flaked with gold leaf. A new Gilded Age of crippling national debt and irreversible Eurasian supremacy.

Dick Cheney wanted Washington to be the new Rome. Technically, he got what he wanted and died of a broken heart. It couldn't have happened to a nicer monster.

Peace, Love and Antipathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Angel of Death by Slayer

* I'm Not Like Everybody Else by the Kinks

* Search and Destroy by the Stooges

* Master of Puppets by Metallica

* Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones

* Fatal Flaw by Titus Andronicus

* My Plague by Slipknot

* Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears

* Hurt by Nine Inch Nails

You Don't Have to Be a Commie to Stand with Venezuela

 Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was a goddamn commie, and I'm not talking Bernie Sanders here. I'm talking hardcore, blood-red, dyed-in-the-wool, revolutionary Marxism. I was a goddamn tankie and while I quoted Lenin and defended Putin, I tended to look to the Third World for inspiration. For a deeply closeted Queer kid outnumbered by pervy Catholic fundamentalists in hick country, there was something scrumptiously satisfying about other post-Papist outlaws taking on Washington's New Rome just south of the border. I was fascinated with Che Guevara, Salvador Allende and the Castro Brothers, but in the early aughts, Hugo Chavez was my greatest hope.

Everything about that man seemed impossible. He was a trash-talking, pot-bellied, serial David, going off on Goliath over and over and over again and somehow winning every fucking time. While Allende went down in a blaze defending democracy from the pulpit of Marxism and the Castros were forced to reduce Cuba to a floating citadel just to keep the Batista out, Hugo Chavez faced down the guns of American imperialism like Tony Montana and managed to come out of the maelstrom without ever missing an election.

It all should have been over by 2002 when the CIA organized another one of its spectacular Latin American coup d'etats. A phony protest movement was organized, high-ranking military officers had Chavez kidnapped and absconded to an unknown location, some corporate gangster named Pedro Carmena was arbitrarily installed as president, the National Assembly and Supreme Court were dissolved, and then-President George W. Bush recognized the whole farce as democracy. This is usually where the story ends and I've read that tragic story more times than I can count, from Augustus Sandino to Jacobo Arbenz. But then the Bolivarian Revolution flipped the script.

Hundreds of thousands of irate Venezuelans poured into the streets like a flash flood, many from the most impoverished favelas in the country, swarming the national palace and demanding their democracy back. When Uncle Sam rented thugs to open fire on these people, the people stood their ground and fired back. The lower ranks of the Venezuelan Army, staffed largely by denizens of those same barrios, were inspired to do the unthinkable. They turned their guns on their commanding officers and brought Chavez back from the dead. And just like that, what had started out as a carefully orchestrated American putsch had resulted in a spontaneous anti-American uprising. Uncle Sam was humiliated, Venezuela was galvanized, and I was officially in love with the Bolivarian Revolution.

Babylon kept on trying but their attempts just kept on backfiring in the most spectacular ways. When Wall Street manufactured an economic crisis by colluding with the fat cats running Venezuela's various state-owned industries in a lockout that froze oil production for two months straight, the workers toiling beneath them formed democratic councils and brought those resources back closer to the people that lived on top of them than they had ever been. When the National Endowment for Democracy dumped millions of dollars into building up a phony opposition movement, Chavez kicked their asses fair and square in elections that even Jimmy Carter couldn't bring himself to delegitimize and inspired a wave of other left-wing populist fire breathers across Latin America to do the same. 

Soon the CIA had their hands full of democracies to overthrow from Evo Morales in Bolivia to Rafael Correa in Ecuador, from the Kirchners in Argentina to Lula and Dilma in Brazil. It was almost as if Che Guevara and Salvador Allende had birthed two, three, many Vietnams at the ballot box and started a storm too wild for firepower to pacify. Then something truly tragic happened that seemed to turn this entire Pink Tide into a hurricane of disillusionment; Hugo Chavez turned out to be human being after all.

That fantastic human missile crisis died very suddenly and somewhat suspiciously of cancer in 2013 and his successor, then-Vice President Nicholas Maduro, seemed to waste very little time betraying his revolution. He very quickly turned the Bolivarian Republic into a giant bludgeon for him to maintain the power he had practically stumbled into over Hugo's corpse, starting by dismantling the various workers councils, misiones, comunas and collectives that had created the architecture of direct democracy that had served as the backbone of Hugo's revolution and then concentrating their power back into a bureaucratic elite while repressing anyone who stood in this pink oligarchy's way beneath a banner of Dengist-style state socialism.

By 2015, Maduro was ruling the nation largely by decree, by 2017, he was castrating the National Assembly and rewriting the Constitution that Hugo Chavez and millions of other Venezuelans had risked their lives to preserve, and by 2018, the Bolivarian Revolution was dead and I was heartbroken. However, in my disillusioned grief, I was also forced to take a second look at the Revolution altogether, and I was haunted by what I found. While Hugo certainly did appear to do all that he could for the Venezuelan poor, he had also steadfastly relied on many pre-existing state powers to do so and in the process consistently undermined his own revolution's grass roots civilian infrastructure.

The most blatant and egregious example of this was the way Chavez managed Venezuela's state oil company, PDUSA, which was actually a relic of the neoliberal oligarchy that he was elected to confront. This humongous corporate behemoth continues to represent 90% of Venezuela's economy and was largely dependent on Chevron to function before Donald Trump's escalated embargo pushed Maduro to replace them with Chinese capitalist roadsters who now essentially own the nation's economy thanks to $62.5 billion dollars in predatory loans.

But it was actually Hugo who betrayed the workers councils who had saved his ass from the economic crisis of 2003 by colluding with their duplicitous bosses. In return for their cooperation, the Bolivarian Republic retained this same bureaucratic management system once the crisis was averted so long as they agreed to finance massive welfare state programs that kept their workers distracted from the fact that they had basically just proven they didn't even require a state to achieve true economic democracy.

While Chavez publicly rallied support for these autonomous councils, he continued to rely on the exact same top-down system that had long oppressed the Venezuelan people in what appeared to be a foolish attempt to liberate them. Even when this farce managed to temporarily benefit the people it did nothing to change the imbalance of power between them and the elites. At best, this arrangement swapped one raft of oligarchs for another, turning "revolutionary" civil servants into the new bourgeoisie, but mostly it just left a system designed for oppression largely intact and only one strongman away from being turned back into another meat grinder.

Soon, I began to question everything. I looked back at my revisionist history books and began to see this same tragedy repeat itself over and over again, from Lenin shackling the Soviets and building a centralized bureaucratic monstrosity that would ultimately offer Boris Yeltsin the ability to sell the Russian economy off in chunks the size of continents to Chairman Mao laying down the industrial foundation that turned China into the world's largest sweatshop plantation. 

The problem was and has always been the state itself. As long as there is a system in place that offers one class of people a monopoly on the use of force, the government will always be a den for despotism regardless of whether the scam is dressed up in the trappings of socialism, capitalism, democracy or nationalism. Just so long as the sanctity of the state is left intact, the results will always ultimately be the same.

This was the painful revelation that ultimately led a Bolivarian-Guevarist like me to embrace free market anti-capitalism and post-left anarchism, but some things never change, and this includes my solidarity with what's left of the Bolivarian Revolution as it faces down the barrels of total war at the hands of an empire that it had humiliated one too many times.

America's war against the Bolivarian Revolution never changed. In fact, if anything, it has only grown crueler with age. After five major coup attempts and a dozen distinct rounds of sanctions, the United States has affectively crippled what had until fairly recently been a fully functioning economy which has in turn triggered an almost unprecedented economic crisis. 

In 2014, Venezuela's GDP stood shoulder to shoulder with Brazil's at $14,000. By 2024, it was closer to Bangladesh at $3,870. As a result of this medieval style siege accelerated by every single American president from Obama to Trump, 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled for their lives, constituting the single largest displacement in modern history with 25% of the nation's population now living abroad as refugees. Some might argue such mass sadism constitutes a form of genocide; however, this Latin American Nakba is also primed for some serious blowback.

That's because the other thing that hasn't changed for Venezuela is the fire that stokes its poorest citizens to fight back, specifically the lumpenproletariats who make up Maduro's paramilitary Colectivos. While the Bolivarian oligarchy may have turned these civilian street fighters into a glorified Red Guard, they remain largely autonomous in structure, and they are the true heirs to Hugo Chavez because they were also his revolution's founding fathers. 

The Colectivos began as the armed wing of Venezuela's Communal Councils, autonomous favela democracies that trace their roots back to the leftist guerrilla movements of the 1960s. These organizations may have been reduced to Maduro's errand boys in recent years, but the last time America very briefly took control of the streets of Caracas in 2002, it was this same rambunctious squad of Robin Hood gangbangers who took it back with steel pipes and Brazilian off-brand Berettas.

Now, there are dozens of Colectivos operating in 16 of Venezuela's 23 states with numbers as high as 8,000. If Donald Trump is stupid enough to play Iraq with Venezuela, he won't be fighting fat thugs like Maduro; that pig will roll quicker than Saddam; he will be fighting a guerrilla war against the true bastard fathers of Hugo's revolution. The Colectivos will become the Sadrists of the Western Hemisphere, and I will support their fight for the same reason that Murray Rothbard supported the Vietcong. Because sovereignty is sacred and solidarity is bigger than any one ideology.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Wild in the Streets by Circle Jerks

* Here's Where the Story Ends by the Sundays

* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones

* My Hero by Foo Fighters

* Rise Above by Black Flag

* Suffragette City by David Bowie

* Fatal Flaw by Titus Andronicus

* Cochise by Audioslave

* The Mess Inside by the Mountain Goats

A Samhain Message to an Embattled Trans Youth

 Thousands of years ago, on the sacred rock from which my ancestors fled, this season of the year was celebrated as Samhain, an ancient Celtic festival marking the end of the summer harvest and the beginning of the darker months of the year. This was also a time of sacred upheaval and spiritual transformation, when the veil between the material world and the spirit world was thin, allowing lost spirits to return to earth and the normal roles of society to be inverted. At twilight, the craggy hills of the moors were alive with the glow of massive bonfires set by peasants embracing the darkness in drag. 

Eventually, this became what is now known as Halloween and it is really little wonder considering those roots that what became known as Halloween became less commonly known among my people as "Queer Christmas." 

Chaos reigns, the young govern the streets after dark and social transgressions typically demonized are set free to be flaunted flamboyantly by the light of the moon. All of which is beautiful enough in its own right, but this season is so much more than that for a person like me who considers their gender identity to be an integral part of their spiritual journey.

I am a Celtic Christian Pagan who reveres the Virgin Mary as a representative of the Tripple Goddess found throughout ancient matriarchal societies. I also pray to the Morrigana, three sister goddesses of ancient Celtic lore typically associated with battle but also with transformation and necessary change.

While there exists little direct evidence of third genders in ancient Celtic society and little direct evidence of much else of these tribes in general, considering that this was one of many sacred oral traditions wiped out by the tyranny of the churches who used the cross as a weapon for conquest and homogeny, the surviving myths of Celtic heathenry are rife with the same narratives of spiritual gender fluidity that defined many neighboring pagan cultures where the history of revered third genders remains very tangible.

My own embrace of a gender identity that refused to be governed by the limitations of the material world triggered the unlocking of decades of repressed trauma at the hands of the Catholic Church, who replaced the Celtic Druids of my ancestral homeland, along with multiple identities representing the young girls these men failed to silence.

Since becoming a woman divided among five personalities, my relationship with Mary and the Morrigana has become quite direct. They speak to me in words too sacred for language and they have a lot to say about the times we live in. Much like the months of the year ushered in by Samhain, these are days of darkness. America's carcinogenic roots of colonialism and white supremacy are strangling the few illusions of democracy that we once held dear. Soldiers stock the streets of America's crumbling metropolises while genocide of all kinds has become an open part of public policy.

These forces of unconcealed darkness have decided to make a point of trying to police the young in particular. Those yet to be initiated into their cult of conformity and murder, especially today's Queer youth who they never seem to stop writing laws against. Literally thousands of laws seeking to render the existence of young gender outlaws intolerable. 

An estimated 40% of trans youth between the ages of 13 and 17 live in states with severe restrictions on healthcare that simply allows them to postpone puberty with fewer known side effects than antidepressants. Dozens of states have turned the already carceral compulsory school system in this country into biological apartheid regimes in which adult public servants are granted the ability to police genitalia in bathrooms and locker rooms to insure the purity of their constructed gender binary.

This is all very personal to me, not just because I carry the scars from a transgender childhood but because a culture of survivalism informs the very existence of my modern tribe. In Queer culture if you are an open trans person who has lived passed the age of thirty without being broken or assimilated, you are considered to be an elder and I mean this quite literally. Out of all the activism that I have engaged myself in with organizing Queer resistance in my conservative rural environment, working with young people, specifically Queer and trans youth, is by far the most rewarding.

When you are part of such a small and marginalized minority, surrounded by people who couldn't possibly comprehend your very existence if they tried, having just a few people in your life who have been there and survived, listening and sharing, can literally be a lifeline.

The sheer amount of destruction I did to myself in a world where there wasn't even a word for the way I felt other than 'strange', or 'pervert' is irreversible. Suicide was a viable option on more than one occasion during this bleak existence. So, now when trans youth come to me for advice, I am both humbled and obliged, and the advice that I have to give them during this sacred season of Samhain is to show your teeth and remain ungovernable.

The people currently running this desperate nation are terrified of you and they should be. These are people who define their existence by defining other people's existence and you are living a lifestyle that defies basic bureaucratic categorization. The most basic principle of centralized government is the tyranny of paperwork, systems upon systems of filing, compiling, defining, categorizing... Reducing humanity into a series of boxes to check on a scantron and the first box is always 'male or female.'

You have exploded this system simply by crossing out the word 'or.' Your average Queer youth in the age of Trump changes their gender identity with the color of their hair and consults their friends online for advice before even thinking about addressing the tyranny of the clinic. They have decided to find themselves publicly and without apology, and their numbers are rising.

In 2023, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that about 3.3% of high school students identify openly as trans or non-binary and another 2.2% are questioning their government arranged gender designation. Considering how little teens talk to the goddamn CDC, I don't think I'm being presumptuous for assuming these numbers merely represent the tip of the iceberg. Pew has found that 5.1% of adults younger than 30 openly identify as trans or non-binary compared to just 1.6% of those between 30 and 49 and 0.3% of those 50 or older.

The hyper-statists of the Christian Right look at these numbers and shutter. They will tell you and any other asshole who will listen that this is all part of some "Cultural Marxist" wave of behavioral decadence that poses an existential threat to Western Civilization, and I actually agree with them on the second part.

After growing bored with Marx myself by my mid-twenties, an old Queer sage named William Burroughs turned me on to a quirky German historical philosopher named Oswald Spengler, best known for his epic treatise Decline of the West. While Spengler is frequently name-dropped by trolls on the right, based on my own studies, I suspect very few of them have actually done their homework. The central point of 'Decline' is that all cultures are essentially living organisms that tend to exist in lifespans of about 2000 years and that the final stage of a culture is the sterile stasis of civilization.

Based on his studies on other past empires from the Romans to the Aztecs, Spengler believed the West to be in the twilight of its existence which is an era typically defined by decadence.

However, Spengler didn't define decadence in terms of sexual perversion or debauchery. He defined this symptom of cultural collapse as being far more defined by the overly rational urban materialist, lost in an overpopulated desert of money and things with no connection to any real spiritual roots but only shallow replicants, like stadium churches and television preachers. Spengler also rejected the notion of culture being defined by blood and soil, stating that its true definition comes from the intimacy experienced between people with a shared history, values and vision of the future.

By Spenglerian definitions, it isn't today's trans youth who are the decadents. These children are rejecting the material world to follow the dictates of their souls and leaving today's temples of emptiness in favor of a spirituality defined by gnosis or personal experience. All of this puts them in line with the values of ancient paganism represented by Samhain as well as movements like Black Power, Aztlan and other forms of indigenous revivalism. 

It is our enemies in the Christian Right, with their bourgeoise fantasies of Zionist conquest and white picket fences who are the true decadents and that is why their civilization is dammed to irrevocable decline.

In this time of darkness, with the veil between the spirit world and our universe thinning by the second, I can only tell the youngest members of my culture that they are the ones who carry the light of our ancestors. They are part of a sacred revival that can provide the survivors of Western Civilization with a rare opportunity to start again and possibly even avoid the cycle of destruction represented by the soulless nation state and the fragile empires they aspire to become.

Wake up children. Samhain is upon us. It's time to stop dreaming and start truly living again. Let the fire burn brightly behind you and may it illuminate your path forward.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH  

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Wake Up by Arcade Fire

* All Tomorrows Parties by the Velvet Underground

* Gobbledygook by Sigur Ros

* What About Us by Ministry

* Dance Yourself Clean by LCD Soundsystem

* Dusted by Belly

* Serve the People by Handsome Furs

* Irish Heart, English Blood by Morrissey

* Roots Bloody Roots by Sepultura

* Describe by Perfume Genius

A False and Toxic Peace Spreads Across the Middle East from the West

 Oh, how lucky we are to live in an era of such huge and beautiful peace. An age in which the free and not-so-free world alike can join hands in brotherhood around that shining dumpster fire on the hill and welcome in the dawn of a new Middle East. Or at least this is the impression you might get from watching one of Donald Trump's diplomatic pep-rallies, which have taken on all the pomp and circumstance of a wet t-shirt contest in Fort Lauderdale.

In fact, during the Donald's latest televised love-in, hosted by Egyptian dictator Pharoah Abdul Fattah al-Sisi at what appeared to be a Best Western banquet hall in the Sinai resort city of Sham El-Sheikh, MAGA and friends even gathered around for photo-ops with a monstrous shrine in the shape of the words "PEACE 2025" to celebrate the latest flickering ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. All part of a shindig Trump proclaimed took 3,000 years to accomplish, before adding triumphantly, "And it's going to hold up."

However, this ceasefire is indeed different, and it isn't just Trump and a few of his Middle Eastern quislings masquerading as strongmen saying so. This time it was also Trump's bitter neoliberal rivals in the decidedly western "international community" who flocked down to Egypt in their private jets to celebrate Trump's glorious "dawn of a new age of peace in the Middle East." 

More than 20 world leaders joined America's answer to Caligula at this live signing ceremony on the Red Sea, including French President Emanuel Macron, German Chancelor Friedrich Merz and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, all taking turns shaking each other's hands and schmoozing with despots like Sisi, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Qatari Emir Tamin bin Hamad Al Thani while Trump signed a suspiciously esoteric document and waxed philosophical about his own omnipotence.

"This is the day that people across this region and around the world have been working, striving, hoping and praying for... Nobody thought this could happen. With the historic agreement we have just signed, those prayers of millions have finally been answered."

Yeah, that turned out to be another flaming sack of shit at Abraham's front door. 

Sure, some hostages were exchanged, but the IDF never actually stopped shooting. At least 80 Palestinians were killed in the first week of the ceasefire alone. As of the writing of this rant, Trump has his pissant yuppie-Zionist son-in-law over in the Holy Land with JD Vance and Steve Witkoff attempting to preserve the facade of a ceasefire there but, whether this thing breaks apart into open battle or just continues to meander on in name only like that sick joke we strong-armed Lebanon into signing in November, calling this deal anything with the word peace in it is a false and toxic farce that anyone who isn't literally starving to death should be ashamed of celebrating.

That deal that Hamas signed up for under the threat of genocide puts what's left of the Gaza Strip under the control of a colonialist "Board of Peace" led by the western conquistadors who micromanaged the bloodbath from a safe distance, with Donald Trump at the top of the pyramid. Under the agreement, this board grants Israel the status of a permanent occupation force that controls Gaza's borders and indefinitely occupies 58% of their current existing territory. 

There is zero recognition of Palestine's sovereignty in any shape or form, zero rights granted to any of the Palestinian people still left standing in the Strip, and zero pathway to statehood, not to mention that this thing is so riddled with loopholes that it essentially affords Israel the ability to resume their massacre on full blast at will if they should ever decide to actually pause it.

To put it bluntly, this wasn't a peace deal; it was an attempt to cover up an ongoing genocide by dressing the tombstones of the killing fields in shiny yellow ribbons, and Trump's supposed opponents in the EU and on the mainstream liberal media backed it because they are all just as complicit in this heinous slaughter as the man they pretend to oppose in front of the cameras. While the US is by far the largest financier of Benjamin Netanyahu's crusade against impoverished infants, kicking up $22 billion in military aid to his regime since October 2023, the rest of the "free" world did their part too.

The F-35 Fighter Jet, Israel's hammer of choice for crushing hospitals, couldn't even get off the ground without components licensed by the United Kingdom, and both France and Germany supplied hundreds of millions of Euros in rockets, bombs, missiles and other military equipment over the last two years. 

Meanwhile, supposed Muslim strongmen more than carried their share of the burden for their Christian Zionist masters. Turkey's Sultan Erdogan sat on his hands and hissed while shipping gas to the Zionist enemy through his grubby middlemen in Azerbaijan while Sisi's Egypt took it one step further and continued to help Israel maintain its famine inducing blockade by policing Gaza's borders with tanks aimed at peaceful protestors.

All of you motherfuckers are guilty. The Nakba has become a genocide facilitated by nearly the entire so-called international community and the various propaganda outlets that cover their collective ass. The only reason why the genocidal class of the multinational one percent even bothers with the mere illusion of peace is because it is the only thing that keeps the masses anesthetized to the fact that they are governed by monsters and these masses were coming dangerously close to recognizing this fact over their shared disgust for the holocaust in the Holy Land.

Polls have shown disapproval ratings in regard to the once sacred cow of Israel hovering well over 60% in Germany, France and the UK among others, and an August poll by the Brookings Institution put support from the American electorate for an immediate ceasefire at 84%. Even Israelis are sick of this shit with massive protests being led by the family members of the hostages and Netanyahu's disapproval rating being measured as high as 62% by August.

This sadly vain motivation for a feigned ceasefire was rendered pornographically clear when Donald Trump popped by the Knesset just hours before his international peace happening in Egypt to beg Israel's ruling elites to grant Bibi a pardon for his mountain of mafia-grade corruption charges. 

But this thing has grown into something far more dangerous than the erasure of a few million people in the desert. There is an international storm brewing here and it doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The same aforementioned polls by Brookings showed opposition to the war in Gaza in the United States growing at nearly the same pace as the opposition to the Vietnam War did in the 1960s. 

The result of that canyon sized gap between public opinion and public policy fostered an antiwar movement big enough to sustain its own counterculture which very briefly but very brazenly ran totally divergent to western imperial values and nearly brought Babylon to its knees when it spread to the ranks of the military. And that was during a time of unprecedented economic growth for the American Empire. 

Now, in 2025, the American Century is dead as disco and no twisted Ceasar is ever going to make it great again. The only thing the elites can do is keep the masses relatively passive while they pick their own temples clean for jewels. America's national debt continues to soar while a cannibalistic cartel of Christian Zionist conmen repeatedly reward each other with no-bid contracts to build space weapons and the drones that think. This is why the opposition to Israel's American facilitated genocide has grown across party lines with Trump's youngest supporters increasingly embracing the talking points of left-wing anti-Zionists.

This is also why this antiwar movement needs to continue regardless of whether or not Israel manages to buy off Hamas the way they did Fatah. Israel is not a nation. It is an international colonialist project designed to win the East the same way Manifest Destiny won the West. With genocide. The slaughter doesn't stop until Israel does, but this isn't some 3,000-year Faustian enigma. Jews, Christians and Muslims coexisted relatively peacefully in Palestine for most of recorded history until Europe showed up with its fakakta borders and absurd Westphalian nation states.

Real peace can be achieved in the Middle East in the next 3,000 hours, but not until false peace is exposed, toxic peace is rejected, and every state is delegitimized, including the ones who started this Zionist storm in the first place back west.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced This Post

* Burning Down the House by Talking Heads

* Every Word by Belly

* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

* Time to Pretend by MGMT

* All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix

* Caught a Light Sneeze by Tori Amos

* Cheree by Suicide

* Congratulations by MGMT

* Everything That Happens Will Happen Today by David Byne & Brian Eno

* Anything That Way by Buffalo Tom