Radically Confronting America's Federal Gang War Will Require Civilian Militias

 America is in the grips of an epic gang war the likes of which it has never seen before. Masked and heavily armed thugs stock the streets of some of America's biggest cities with total impunity, thousands of them, tossing houses door to door, dragging unarmed civilians screaming from their vehicles before shoving them into unmarked vans, lighting up anyone who dares to resist and straight up murdering people on camera before sauntering off from the scene of the crime like swaggering cowboys and daring shocked bystanders to do something about it...

The gangs I'm talking about are not the Crips or the Bloods or MS-13. The gangs I'm talking about are far worse. They have many names, but they all carry badges that afford them the full protection of Babylon and a monopoly on the use of force. Most of them go by just three letters; FBI, ATF, DEA, ICE... These gangs I speak of are the gangs of the Federal Government and their reign of terror is paid for by the hard-earned tax dollars pilfered from your pockets by their brethren in the IRS.

This gang war didn't begin with Donald Trump but under Donald Trump it has reached new levels of unparallelled depravity, becoming a sort of traveling crime wave ravaging one city after another on the whims of a petulant manchild desperately trying to throw the people who voted for him off the stink of his own private crime wave of sexual predation. However, this is not a partisan problem, it is a government problem, and it is of downright existential importance that people understand the simple fact that every gang is essentially indistinguishable from a standing army and vice versa. Be they Crip or fed, they are all organizations comprised of professional soldiers who have turned violence into an industry.

There is no difference, morally speaking, from the mob kidnapping you for refusing to kick up to the local protection racket and the feds dragging you out in cuffs for refusing to kick up to their latest war. Well, there is one difference and the difference is that fucking badge. That shiny little piece of bling that tells you that this gang operates with the protection of the state, itself little more than a convoluted construct defined by its seemingly mythical ability to sanction acts of violent disorder in the hallowed name of 'Law and Order.' We as citizens (a fancy word for victims) have all been carefully groomed in that state's compulsory school system to divide criminal organizations up into two distinct classes: those who commit crime and those who use fighting crime as an excuse to commit crime.

The tragically inevitable end result is what we now bear witness to in Milwaukee. The end result is the heinous monstrosity that is ICE under Trump. Invented in the wake of 9/11 as a paramilitary arm of the newly minted Department of Homeland Security, tasked with shaking down migrants in the name of a terrorist attack committed by legal green card-carrying office drones, Donald Trump has used the mechanisms afforded to him by the federal government to turn this gang into his own private army. 

After tripling their budget with $75 billion dollars from his One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump had his plastic surgery disaster of a Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, more than double ICE's manpower from 10,000 to 22, 000 by luring in morbidly obese incels with a slick social media campaign and then cutting their required training from 13 weeks to only 6. Just ad constant praise and adulation from the GOP and the Executive Branch, and MAGA now has their answer to Mao's Red Guard. A curb stomping battalion of keystone killers that answers to one man and one man alone. 

The only problem or at least the biggest problem with this conspiracy, at least as far as the faithful out in Trump Country are concerned, is that the Commander in Chief promised them the mass expulsion of millions of scary brown cholos to justify mugging their lifesavings to arm about 12,000 barely literate trolls to the fucking teeth, and that horde of alien invaders quite literally does not exist.

The border collapsed under Biden thanks largely to the refugee storm caused by the Molotov cocktail of Covid 19 and centuries American imperialism but that daughtering old northern Dixiecrat threw people out about as quickly as they came in, turning the Rio Grande into a chaotic revolving door. Naturally, Trump counted every single recorded crossing as a separate migrant, but it is now a well-known fact that many migrants crossed that border multiple times in the last several years and very few of them were actually the hardened gangbangers and cat-devouring mental patients Trump painted them as. Or, to put it in gangster terminology, this whole thing was another fucking shakedown.

On top of that shit sundae, violent crime was actually lower than it had been since 1969 when Trump took office and the migration rate was already slowing down. But Trump's fan club paid to see a purge of epic proportions. They also paid to see the Epstein Files and have become increasingly unruly as it has become increasingly impossible to deny that their bronze Duce was at least as guilty as Bill Clinton of Mossad facilitated pedophilia. 

So, Trump began shipping his army of poorly trained thugs into whichever Democrat-led city happened to be in the Fox News headlines this week and when more protestors than migrants began showing up, those thugs started shooting white lesbians in the face and then accusing them of terrorism for obstructing their bullets.

The most obvious solution to this crime wave is both the most woke and the most conservative. Defund the goddamn police state. Conservatives have been rendered into hapless bootlickers by years of blatantly racist 'Back the Blue' propaganda, but once you remind them a couple times that we don't just mean Derek Chauvin but the entire federal syndicate, including the fine folks who torched Waco and shot Randy Weaver's trad wife with a baby in her arms, I have a funny feeling that they might just come around to the obvious conclusion that small government means no more baby killers with shiny new badges.

With that being said, the state will never get behind this kind of blunt force common sense regardless of popular support for the simple reason that the state depends on the gangs of the federal government to exist. The moment people realize that they can walk safely into a Walmart and buy a loaf of bread without MWraps cruising the parking lots is the moment they stop paying taxes, and from there it is not a long drive to the realization that every standing army is just another gang which is the moment people stop signing up to shakedown peasants in the Middle East. And just like that, the whole fucking deck of cards comes crashing down.

So then, how does one go about fighting a war on federal gangs without the federal government? Well, how did the Minutemen do it in the 1770s? The less repugnant Founding Fathers confronted a shockingly similar crime wave launched by a gang known as the Redcoats with well-armed, volunteer militias and the Black Panthers did the same thing again in sixties and seventies while confronting their enemies in blue. The Panthers even used former street level gangbangers to do it. In fact, Fred Hampton even convinced entire street gangs like the Black Stone Rangers to convert their forces to non-profit banging in order to aid his Chicago chapter of the Panthers in policing the police.

While it remains debatable whether or not our slave-raping Founding Fathers gave a flying fuck about actual individual gun rights, they clearly intended for the Second Amendment to create a civilian movement capable of preventing the rise of professional armies. This all fell to shit however when they began stealing more and more territory. This is also pretty close to where the Panthers fell into the FBI's COINTELPRO trap as well. Their militia quite simply got too big while remaining centralized under the same formerly local leadership back in California.

But Fred Hampton had the right idea with his Rainbow Coalition in Chicago. Every hood in the city had its own street gang so every hood needed its own militia committed to protecting that turf in a fashion divorced from the profit motive. Instead of running it all back through Oakland, Hampton created a coalition of dozens of local neighborhood militias capable of strength through diversity and that included a diversity of tactics. 

Renee Good did everything right, holding thugs accountable by tracking and recording their behavior, but I can't help but to wonder if Jonathan Ross would have been so quick to pull his piece on an unarmed civilian if there were a few good Vatos or Latin Queens on the next corner practicing open carry.

We need both, what I've referred to as the Armalite and the iPhone, in order to reign those cowards in and take our country back from the fascist abyss of federal gang warfare one neighborhood at a time. 

Let's just hope it's not too late. 

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Police Truck by Dead Kennedys

* That's When I Reach for My Revolver by Mission of Burma

* Born to Die by MDC

* Happiness in Slavery by Nine Inch Nails

* Blind Justice by the Business

* Rebel Without a Pause by Public Enemy

* Dicks Hate the Police by the Dicks

* Pressure Drop by Toots & the Maytals

* Yesterdays Heroes by the 4-Skins

* Fight for Your Life by the Casualties

The Donroe Doctrine is a Recipe for Two, Three... Many Iraqs

 It all went off without a hitch. Donald Trump's huge, beautiful, helicopter coup of 2026. After two years of bungling pretty much everything from tariffs to the Epstein cover-up, our dayglow Caesar rolled the dice in Venezuela, and he appears to have pulled off a high-octane putsch straight out of a cheesy 80s action flick. After cutting the power to Caracas, over 200 US troops launched a fast and furious assault, riding in on a fleet of more than 150 aircraft and bombing scores of Venezuelan military facilities and air defense positions before Delta Force unleashed a Scarface-style full frontal assault on President Nicholas Madura's compound, wiping out his entire security detail before whisking the strongman and his wife away in a Blackhawk in the blink of an eye.

By the time the smoke settled, Caracas was in ashes, at least 100 people lay dead, and the President of Venezuela was locked up in a steel cell in Brooklyn, awaiting prosecution on a laundry list of charges ranging from drug trafficking to esoteric early 20th century American firearms violations.

It all went off without a hitch alright. The perfect war crime. The problem however, aside from the fact that all of this is totally fucking illegal in every court of law on the planet, is that we've seen this blockbuster before and it doesn't end the way it begins. Afterall, the Second Iraq War went off without a hitch too, until it didn't and then it was too late.

George W. Bush's brazen crusade to rid the world of Saddam Hussein had more than a few things in common with Donald Trump's triumphant conquest of the Cartel of the Suns. Both were blatantly unconstitutional adventures that sought to effortlessly hijack embargo decimated oil industries using almost obviously fictional conspiracies to justify the heist. Just like Maduro has his shadowy international drug cartel, Saddam had his equally fabricated arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And just like Donald Trump had his hitch-less helicopter coup, Dubya had his camera-ready campaign of "shock and awe" that tore through Bagdad like a bullet through an oil drum.

In fact, just six weeks into his Babylonian adventure, George W. Bush was landing a fighter jet on the USS Abraham Lincoln and announcing that all "major combat operations in Iraq (had) ended" before a massive banner reading "Mission Accomplished!" It was a sparkling spectacle of high-powered American jingoism straight out of a Michael Bay movie. It was also a severely premature imperial victory lap that would become the casket that the entire Bush dynasty's reputation would be buried in.

The Iraq War would drag on for another 8 years with more than 4,500 US troops giving their lives for a campaign that would pave the Highway of Death for the rise of the Islamic State and the Axis of Resistance. All of which was part of a much larger but equally catastrophic scheme by neocon Sith lords like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to conquer the entire Middle East with America's still flailing War on Terror. The Results abroad would be the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War and somewhere between 4.5 and 4.7 million dead.

The results at home would be devastating in their own cruelly karmic way. The results at home would be the destruction of the neocon movement as anything but a universally despised bipartisan backroom cabal and the rise of Donald Trump, who ran multiple shockingly successful campaigns on being the solution to the neocon curse even while loading both of his cabinets with those same bloodied but unashamed scions of endless warfare.

Now, Trump has his own Iraq going in Venezuela and he isn't nearly as shy about his intentions to suck that milkshake dry of its oil reserves. While the Department of Justice is busy trying to manufacture a criminal case against the nation's rightful President, Donald Trump has openly announced that he has no intentions of even holding a sham election in the country before he gets his grubby little pussy grabbers on all that oil. After threatening a second wave of attacks if Venezuela's post-Maduro interim government resists his advances, Donald Trump announced a massive nation building project in Venezuela that would involve sending in US troops to secure the nation's natural resources and sticking US oil companies with the bill.

After meeting with a coterie of oil tycoons at the White House last week, Trump revealed his $100 billion-dollar 18-month plan to rebuild Venezuela into America's own private gas station, boasting that the captive nation would be "turning over" somewhere between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil to the United States and that "that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States."

Meanwhile, Generalissimo Trump's increasingly caudillo-like regime has made it blatantly clear that just like Iraq was part of a much larger imperial campaign in the Middle East, Venezuela will merely be the first domino to fall in a much larger campaign by the United States to reestablish its dominance over the Western Hemisphere. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spent the first Sunday after kidnapping another world leader on the cable news talk show circuit announcing that Cuba would be next as Trump simultaneously renewed his threats to annex Greenland from their current colonists in Copenhagen and refused to rule out the use of military force in doing so.

All of this is part of what has become known as the "Donroe Doctrine", a 21rst century plot to reignite 19th century style gunboat diplomacy and sell it to the isolationists of MAGA as a kind of Imperialism Lite, but in reality, this is all nothing more than neoconservativism in retreat. After failing miserably to remake the Middle East in Ronald Reagan's image, large sections of the American imperial elite have reluctantly thrown their weight behind bringing the troops back west to consolidate their holdings in the long-neglected Americas in preparation for the final showdown with their real target, China.

Trump wants to do this by removing China's biggest western allies in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. He wants to do this by using the War on Drugs to increase America's military presence in the newly gas-rich nation of Mexico. He wants to do this by retaking the Panama Canal and Greenland. And he wants to do this by turning the United States into a fully militarized and automated police state by joining the War on Drugs and the War on Terror in an unholy marriage of domestic drone strikes and offshore prison colonies.

That's the new American nightmare at least, but it all hinges upon Donald Trump maintaining a war weary base by selling the Donroe Doctrine as a kinder, gentler, neocon hand, and all of this hinges upon Venezuela. While removing Maduro from the picture may have been a snap, so was removing Saddam. The problem comes with the inevitable occupation and the longer a military occupation lasts, the bloodier it gets. Dubya's plans for Iraq weren't done in by any state but rather the forces loosed across the desert plains by the dissolution of a state, and his biggest obstacle wasn't the Baathists, but their longtime Shia rivals united under a Saddam-era opposition figure named Muqtada al-Sadr.

Venezuela could be a recipe for something far worse. This is a nation twice the size of Iraq with half of that terrain covered in dense jungle. A nation with a 1,378-mile border with Colombia defined by longstanding issues with smuggling, undocumented migration, and general ungovernableness. Even if Maduro's interim government folds like a deck of cards, Venezuela is still teeming with Colectivos, a loosely organized but heavily armed collection of motorcycle riding paramilitaries organized around barrio councils that predate Hugo Chavez and number as high as 8,000, operating in 16 of Venezuela's 23 states.

You also have Venezuela's 4.5 million strong Bolivarian Militias now activated by a deposed leader, not to mention somewhere in the ballpark of 20,000 armed guerillas just across that porous border with Colombia, most of them unemployed and impoverished since the 2016 peace deal Venezuela helped broker there. And all just a three-day train ride away from the Rio Grande.

This is the real reason why the Donald isn't so quick to shove a Washington snitch like Maria Machado into the presidential palace. He's gaming on making another one of his infamous scumfuck deals with the same military brass he calls a cartel in hopes that they can convince the lower ranks to put down their gats while he siphons off the gas supply. It's a big fucking gamble and he better pray it pays off because otherwise he has painted his ass into a corner with more than just Venezuelan crude. Latin America is one big Molotov cocktail that's been ready to blow since the Conquistadors lit it to fire the rise the First World with the fuel of the Third and I'm not the first lunatic to eyeball that flame with a flicker of rambunctious hope either.

Way back in 1967, Latin America's native guerrilla laureate, Che Guevara, penned an essay calling on revolutionary movements across the Global South to "create two, three... many Vietnams." as part of a recklessly passionate fever dream about swarming Pax Americana's outer colonies with Vietcong style guerrilla campaigns that would stretch the Empire's recourses across a vast theater of territory in order to precipitate the kind of global collapse that brought the Romans to their knees.

Che would launch his failed Bolivian Campaign later that year, a quixotic conspiracy to foment this revolution amidst the colliding borders of Latin America's heartland that would ultimately end in Che's death at the barrel of a CIA pistol. But Che's spirit never left that wild country. In fact, his ghost spread to every corner of Latin America, inspiring generations of disgruntled anti-imperialists from FARC and Hugo Chavez to the Zapatistas and Oscar Zeta Acosta.

Now, Donald Trump wants to bring the War on Terror home to this flaming bush of ghosts. What could possibly go wrong? 

Then again, she said with a devilish grin, what could go right? 

Cartels, Colectivos, street gangs, refugees, militias, pacifists with iPhones, white women in SUVs, Black boys on mopeds, transgender antifascists, mouthy Muslim women and anti-Zionist Jews, all lumped into the same category of "terrorist" by a modern-day Caligula on a bender... Maybe, just maybe, we should all just come together and change that category back to "freedom fighter" so we can turn this American nightmare into two, three... many Iraqs.

I know, I know, I'm a fucking whack job, I've heard. But at this point, what do we have to lose another ton of chains?

Dream the dangerous dream, dearest motherfuckers. Dream the dangerous dream.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Firestarter by the Prodigy

* Rockin' in the Free World by Neil Young

* Kerosene by Big Black

* Song for Zula by Phosphorescent

* The Money Will Roll Right In by Fang

* Cochise by Audioslave

* Anaconda by the Melvins

* Burning by Fugazi

* Floyd the Barber by Nirvana

* New Pollution by Beck

Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Epstein, and Moral Relativism in An Age of Lesser Evils

 Two events from my bleak rural Pennsylvania childhood have scarred my soul more than any others, fundamentally defining my entire outlook both psychologically and philosophically. The first event was very personal but became very political and the second was very political but became very personal. Over the decades the two have overlapped and intertwined in more ways than I can possibly count.

The first event was being violently sexually abused at the age of five by a pair of Catholic priests. These men weren't strangers with candy in a white panel van. They were divinely chosen representatives of the small-town diocese where I would spend the remainder of my childhood. I blacked out a lot of the trauma for most of my life just to survive it, but I spent the next decade after the abuse at a school and in a church that facilitated and covered up my abuse. I also spent what was left of my youth listening to literally every adult I knew from my teachers to my parents' making excuses for the kind of men who violated me.

While I suppressed and denied my trauma for decades, the same people who openly shamed me for being Queer and neurodivergent greeted the child sex abuse scandal that rocked their precious church to its foundation in the early 2000s with an endless campaign of excuses and obfuscation. According to these pillars of my community, it was just a few bad priests and what are a few measly broken childhoods in the context of centuries of charity and high moral piety. After all, the Church was the real victim here, singled out by an unjust world that only they could hold accountable.

As nauseating as all this high-handed moral hypocrisy was, especially coming from a legion of brazenly bigoted bullies who trafficked fervently in the biblical binary chicanery of 'good' and 'evil', it wasn't enough to break through the wall of dissociation I had built between myself and the outside world in the wake of my abuse. It would take a war to do that. 

Ten years after I was molested by holy sadists in white collars, the United States made the unilateral decision to invade Iraq a second time based on lies that seemed almost absurdly obvious to an emotionally numb 8th grade closet case but no one else. Every adult I knew at that church was totally on board with this imperial crusade for oil and they all seemed to despise me for finding myself disgusted by their willful hubris. I didn't know much about politics at the time. All I knew was that every time I turned on the news, I found myself making eye contact with another emotionally numb child being dragged from the rubble with a look of horror on their face that felt jarringly familiar. A look that screamed 'why' without a voice to scream it with.

I went looking for answers that I knew my textbooks wouldn't provide me with and I stumbled over the truth in the writings of a plain-spoken old MIT professor named Noam Chomsky. I read a number of his books at a very impressionable age, but none had a bigger impact on me than 'What Uncle Sam Really Wants.' With an excruciatingly detailed and exhaustingly well researched exploration into the vile sex crimes committed by American armed, funded, trained, and led death squads in Central America, I finally found an adult willing to cut the bullshit and tell me 'why.'

America, just like the Catholic Church, decimated and abused the innocent quite simply because they could. Every reason they supplied to the public was nothing more than another empty excuse for the perversion of naked power. 

The government, my government, didn't give a flying fuck about fighting communism. In fact, they supported it when it suited them in Cambodia just to destabilize Vietnam. And they didn't give a flying fuck about democracy either. Every state they propped up went a mile out of its way to evaporate basic civil liberties in a vat of CIA supplied acid. Uncle Sam, much like the Pope, only cared about power and cruelty was quite simply the most effective way to achieve this.

In other words, there was no excuse.

It was a harsh lesson to teach a pissed-off teenager, but it was also the only lesson that passed the smell test with her because I was already intimately familiar with the savagery that pious adults were capable of when they could convince themselves that they were armed with moral superiority. Lying and cheating and raping and killing could all be justified by the fact that they knew without a shadow of a doubt that they were on the right side, whether it be on the right side of 'democracy' or the right side of 'God.'

In many ways, Noam Chomsky taught me what I already knew by simply helping me to unlearn the excuses that power used to get away with it.

Needless to say, with all this considered, I was more than a little disgusted to discover Noam Chomsky in the Epstein Files. It wasn't exactly a secret that he had interactions with that billionaire sex fiend, but the depth and nature of those interactions were exposed by the House Oversight Committee to be far more intimate and disturbing than anything I had imagined. Years of what Chomsky himself is quoted as describing as a valued friendship, all occurring well after Epstein's crimes and his shocking ability to get away with them had become public knowledge.

The thing that sickened me the most about these revelations though were the excuses made by Chomsky's diehard supporters on the intellectual left because they largely mirrored the excuses that I have been hearing for my entire life in defense of the predator class.

"After all, what are a few pictures and a single friendship with a known rapist compared to Professor Chomsky's long career as an otherwise spotless crusader against unchecked power? Are you really going to throw that all away over a single scandal?"

And the answer is no. Noam Chomsky's writings on the dangers of state power remain indispensable, as does his service to the crusade to give voice to the voiceless, but none of this, not the professor's brilliance or his past, supplies him with an excuse for doing far more than just canoodling with a very powerful man who acquired his power through trafficking the voiceless to the powerful.

In 2018, Jeffrey Epstein's sweetheart deal with the Southern District of Florida that allowed him to evade a federal investigation into child sexual slavery in exchange for pleading guilty to state prostitution charges was finally given mainstream exposure by the Miami Herald. 

Jeffrey Epstein's response to this rapidly tightening noose, as revealed through his emails and text messages at the time, was to try to produce a documentary on himself that would present him in a more favorable light. One of those text messages stated simply, "Spoke to Chomsky. He's all in." Another message from Epstein claimed that he was flying to meet with Chomsky on May,12, 2019, less than two months before the new charges dropped.

2018 was also the year that Noam Chomsky received a transfer of $270,000 from Epstein linked accounts. According to Chomsky this was all very innocent. Jeffrey Epstein was simply helping the professor "rearrange" funds related to his late ex-wife's estate and none of this directly involved Epstein's money. The only problem here is the problem that faces every rich and powerful figure who has chosen to engage Jeffrey Epstein for supposedly innocent economic services.

Jeffrey Epstein is a convicted sex offender who isn't even licensed as a stockbroker or a financial advisor which makes him a pretty absurd choice for assistance with such supposedly routine but largescale financial transactions, especially for someone as brilliant and well-connected as Noam Chomsky.

I can't tell you why Noam Chomsky chose to engage with a creature like Jeffrey Epstein or how he could allow his good name to be used by such an obvious fiend in a desperate attempt to rehabilitate his public image and apparently Chomsky can't either. A stroke in 2023 has allegedly rendered him beyond reproach. What I can tell you is that a great deal of Chomsky's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein appeared to have to do with the access Epstein could provide to powerful people (and clients) like former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who could further the professor's research or possibly even some of his loftier political goals.

I can also tell you that Professor Chomsky has a long history of publicly justifying the lesser evilism of endorsing monsters like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton in the name of defending us all from supposedly more dangerous monsters like Donald Trump which I strongly believe is precisely the kind of short-sighted moral relativism that actually allowed an open fascist like Trump to access the White House in the first place, now that his "left wing" opponents are to the right of Richard Nixon.

One more history lesson.

In 1971, a young Noam Chomsky engaged in a now infamous debate with iconoclastic French post-modern philosopher Michel Foucault over the existence of moral relativism. Chomsky argued against the concept, claiming that fundamental moral principles rooted in human nature defined what conduct society perceives as good or evil. Foucault argued that it was in fact 'regimes of power' that defined a society's morality.

While I have found my own personal ideology drifting towards increasingly Foucaultian post-left waters in recent years, I would still argue that both were right. Human beings are indeed imbued with a natural sense of right and wrong, but structures of power erected since the Agricultural Revolution by misguided men in search of 'progress' have grown massive enough to distort this natural moral compass and even manufacture the consent of the masses against it.

These are the kind of power structures that allow good parents to defend pedophile priests over their own children in the name of God. The kind of power structures that allow good citizens to defend despotism in the name of democracy. And, tragically, these appear to be the kind of power structures that can convince even brilliant men that colluding with evil can serve some higher good in the name of lesser evils.

These power structures like power itself exist for the simple reason that they can, that it is easier for good people to forfeit critical thinking to such schemes because it is easier to accept the inevitability of progress than it is to accept that evil is something that even good people can do without trying. But we must try. We must all do the hard work of confronting evil every single day, everywhere that it exists, including in our own mirrors, because all it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to accept that a lesser version can save them from it.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* See No Evil by Television

* Cornflake Girl by Tori Amos

* Down by the Water by PJ Harvey

* Wardance by Killing Joke

* Triptych by Samia

* Melissa by Merciful Fate

* Human Cannonball by Butthole Surfers

* 100% by Sonic Youth

* Requiem by Killing Joke

* Atmosphere by Joy Division

Dreaming of a Queer Amish Hezbollah or: Revolution as Therapy in Apocalyptic Times

 

“Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!”

-Paul Goodman

It feels like I've been bringing in the New Year every year for several years running now with the shocked observation that somehow, by some sort of Satanic miracle, this last year has been even more bombastically fucked up than the last and I'm more than a little tempted to repeat the refrain again as I look back at the wreckage of 2025 from the brink of 2026. In fact, I'm pretty sure I can actually see all the way back to 2023 from here and I still can't believe I survived it all. 

That was right around the time I became a woman and the whole fucking world seemed to lose its proverbial shit simultaneously. Don't get me wrong, I have been losing my mind for about as long as America has been losing its soul, but that was the year when it all finally boiled over into one big hot mess of overlapping personal and political trauma.

At a time when an unexpectantly ascendant GOP was pushing transphobic legislation to new heights of downright genocidal malice and Israel's Christian Zionist facilitated atrocities in the Holy Land provoked the blood drenched blowback of October 7th, I began to remember way too much, way too soon as my long-awaited gender transition reached its hormonal peak.  

I began to remember all the atrocities that the Christian Zionists at my rural Catholic diocese committed against my young body while I first arrived at the baffling realization that somehow God had gotten my gender wrong. I remembered receiving a graphic lesson on how a "man conducts himself" in the boys' room from a traveling priest with my preschool teacher's complete approval. I remembered coming to the horrifying conclusion that all the devout adults around me were in on it. And I remembered literally blacking out in that preschool bathroom after realizing that I could no longer recognize my own face in the mirror. 

Emotional flashbacks became visual flashbacks, and visual flashbacks became painfully physical while every YouTube video that played in between was scarred by footage of the butchered infants Israel decided should suffer for its post-colonial sins.

By 2024, I had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, Donald Trump had been re-elected president and somehow it all just kept getting worse. Being five really pissed off lesbians in one skull actually made a hell of a lot of sense to me considering all the repressed trauma I had just tripped over on my way to Armageddon. What didn't make sense was the level of bigotry I faced from my own damn community because of my unexpected multiplicity. 

When Donald Trump took the GOP jihad on "gender ideology" to the Executive Office, suddenly all the white suburban trans moms and their Karen-cum-allies couldn't afford to risk losing their precious corporate sponsorships for the Pride parade by being associated with someone as terminally Queer as me. They very politely told me in fifty shades of microaggression to keep my diagnosis in the closet and just like that, all my woke "friends" turned Catholic while my country got fascist.

Somewhat needless to say, 2025 was another year on fire. Donald Trump declared the holocaust in Gaza to be peace once Hamas stopped shooting back and then declared "transgenderism" to be a violent terrorist ideology in a failed attempt to throw his own base off of the mounting stench of his Vatican-grade sex crimes. On top of all that carnage, I got gaslit out of the last LGBTQ non-profit I had been volunteering at for the apparently mortal sin of demanding to be heard while neurodivergent and found myself forced to rebuild all my supports from scratch. 

So, for the third year in a row I got burned pretty fucking bad. Shit, I got scorched. But I'm not writing this screed from the burn ward looking for sympathy. Quite the contrary, I wrote this post because the most shocking thing about this year is that the ashes of despair were not the strongest thing I tasted on my lips this New Year's Eve.

This gutter fucked carcass of an imperial dystopia definitely requires a goddamn revolution in this the year of our lord Charlie Kirk, twenty-hundred-and-twenty-six, yet looking back on the last twelve months, I actually feel a strange twinge of what I can only describe as hope for the next twelve months ahead. That's because, on the advice of my four alters and our tireless trauma therapist, I have finally stopped begging for revolution and begun living it.

After years of lusting after some distant mythic critical mass uniting the world in one colossal struggle against tyranny, I finally began to truly embrace the lessons I've been learning from more libertarian modes of resistance like agorism and panarchy, and shifted my focus towards building community resources focused on making my people less dependent on toxic institutions of power in the present.

I started small. I started a support group for rural Queer youth at a local non-profit bookstore just around the corner from the rectory where I was raped. As small as this step was, it actually felt like way too much until it didn't. After all, I am literally the most batshit Queer person I know, in fact I'm about five of them. How the hell could I run a goddamn youth group? 

But I did it and it made my existence worth clinging to this year. I provided a small space where neurodivergent Queer kids in a backwoods hick town could feel safe enough to shoot the shit and trash their parents and now, they're organizing and building resources of their own while I'm organizing a second support group, and I'm learning how to shoot, and I'm helping my found family build a homestead, and just like the trauma, it is all fucking connected.

I would still love nothing better than to overthrow the American government in a blazing ball of genderfuck fury but that isn't the only way to fight a revolution, and it probably isn't even the most effective way to do so in this day and age either. That's where free market guerrilla warfare kicks in.

Agorism is a political philosophy developed by a little-known libertarian burn-out named Samuel Edward Konkin III that advocates destroying the government by engaging in modes of counter-economics that essentially make every market a black market by replacing state facilitated capitalism with an unregulated ecosystem of barter, subsistence production and mutual aid which simultaneously make communities like mine more autonomous and virtually untaxable. 

Panarchy is a system of governance proposing an infinite constellation of diverse, co-existing, and largely non-territorial governments that individuals can chose to join or leave at will the same way they would a church or a cellphone provider, creating a network of overlapping tribal nations not unlike those once indigenous to the pre-Christian world. 

With those philosophies in mind, I have developed a loose long-term goal to liberate my people, the rural Queer subaltern betrayed by Pride inc., that builds on the baby steps I have begun taking this year.

It all starts by simply gathering my community and creating a level of local tribal consciousness. From there we build a tapestry of interconnected communities that foster increasing levels of self-sufficiency. Through my local organizing, I have recently discovered that my found family isn't the only brood of Queers homesteading in the rust covered foothills of Appalachia. We are part of a growing community of Queer farmers who have no interest in being herded into gay ghettos.

Individually, we are islands isolated in the storm of late capitalist collapse, but collectively we could become an archipelago of communal stability, pooling resources and sharing knowledge. Prepping ourselves the way right-wing survivalists do while organizing ourselves the way the Queer community always has in times of crisis, as a kind of extended underground family.

From here we drop out and withdraw our consent to be governed by outsiders. As the American Nightmare continues to implode beneath the weight of empire, we further delegitimize their waning grip on power by simply refusing to engage with their system at all. We stop voting in their elections and we stop paying their taxes and we organize armed civilians into democratically operated militias capable of replacing law enforcement and making it painful for the feds if they insist on taking our resources by force. We don't fire the first shot, but we stand our ground and hope that our defiant existence inspires others to do the same.

The ideal would be a sort of Queer Amish Hezbollah. A loose confederation of autonomous agrarian communes sustaining a network of small business', schools, farms, clinics and markets along with a stateless, parallel, horizontally organized government capable of providing welfare and security amidst economic upheaval. A counterculture with an army, co-existing with thousands of others. Maybe it sounds crazy and maybe it is, but I prefer to think of it as neurodivergent, and I've seen other nuts make it work too.

There are Amish farms in my county that literally go back centuries. Those people maintain a lifestyle straight out of Little House on the goddamn Prairie, but they continue to thrive both socially and economically because they have found a way to coexist with the "English World" while maintaining their own culture of autonomy and their own totally voluntary institutions.

Now, my tribe is probably a bit too ethnically diverse to be able to get away with that like pacifists but if we organize ourselves around a well-armed civilian paramilitary force, we will have the means to defend what's ours by simply making the cost of taking it too high. 

While their recent collapse makes it clear that they are far from a perfect model, Hezbollah began much like the Panthers did, as an organization devoted to defending Lebanon's marginalized Shia community, and ended up building grassroots financial institutions that remain more stable than Beirut's, even after years of bombardment and international sanctions. Hezbollah has been affectively decapitated but Israel continues to bomb their banks because a strong militia built an even stronger community.

Maybe this is all a bit of a jump, especially from a small-town youth group, but it's also a goal that I can work on right here and right now. A kind of revolutionary therapy that builds a sense of aspirational community during what continues to appear to be increasingly unstable times.

More importantly, it is something that I would quite literally die old doing even if it was dammed to fail because it is something I do for love, not just for my people but for the person I become when I fight for them and that is something far more sustainable than any kind of dogmatic ism or complex guerrilla praxis.

That's the struggle and that's how 2025 ended up being the best fucked up year of my life. So, bring on your goddamn apocalypse and I'll face it with my youth group. I've got a lot of work to do but I'm just getting started.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana

* Kind of Girl by MUNA

* Ever by Flipper

* Suffragette City by David Bowie

* Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill

* Sanctified by Nine Inch Nails

* Son of a Gun by the Vaselines

* Dicknail by Hole

* Man Size by PJ Harvey

* Hand in My Pocket by Alannis Morrissette

* The Future by Leonard Cohen