“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!”
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
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