Why I Can't Celebrate Pride This Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Kind of Girl by Muna

* You're One by Imperial Teen

* Dicks Hate the Police by the Dicks

* Slip Away by Perfume Genius

* In Bloom by Nirvana

* Satanist by Boygenius

* America's So Straight by MDC

* The Walker by Christine & the Queens

* You Know You're Right by Nirvana

* True Blue by Boygenius

Why Gaza Matters to Trans Liberation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* No Children by the Mountain Goats

* Afterlife by Alex G

* Violent Times by St. Vincent

* Doesn't Remind Me of Anything by Audioslave

* It's a Mirror by Perfume Genius

* And the Same by Fugazi

* Hey Jupiter by Tori Amos

* Violence by Grimes

* List of Demands by Saul Williams

* We're In This Together by Nine Inch Nails

What "Mental Illness" Has Taught Me About Anarchism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* In My Head by Black Flag

* Madness by Muse

* Happy by Mitski

* Lithium by Nirvana

* The Crazy Girl by Black Flag

* North Poles by Samia

* The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

* Paranoid by Black Sabbath

* My Body is Made of Crushed Little Stars by Mitski

We Need a Thousand Tiny Revolutions to Combat American Fascism

 In case you haven't noticed, the world is a pretty fucked up place right now and America kind of has everything to do with it. From the rapid advance of climate carnage to the blatant mass starvation of the children of the Gaza Strip, all roads leading straight to hell also lead straight back to Washington. While much of this is hardly new, there does seem to be a new and aggressively pervasive heir of downright flamboyant nihilism powering America's ancient criminal enterprise to reach even deeper depths of depravity while the whole world watches and waits in vain for the old mandarins of world order to provide them with the kind of convenient excuses that used to allow them to look the other way.

To put the diagnosis succinctly, America seems to have given up on its centuries-old MO of at least pretending to be the good guys at a time when its crimes are reaching new levels of downright apocalyptic desperation and some of us aren't taking it well.

The left blames this on Trump and they are at least half right. Trump is an openly psychopathic man-child with a Jonestown-grade cult of personality and a barely veiled contempt for any kind of democracy but once again this isn't exactly new. 

Trump has always been an unspeakable human being with a Svengali-like pull on Middle Ameria, but in spite of all the breathless hysteria from the neocons he dislodged, his first reign of terror really didn't amount to much more than a rabid orangutan with a machine gun being let loose in the Oval Office. Truth be told, he often inadvertently ended up doing more harm to the American war machine than he did to his marginalized targets the first time around. But this all changed in 2024 when Elon Musk decided to endorse the Kool-Aid.

Now, Orange Man Bad has the corporate sponsorship of Silicon Valley which has recognized his brand of pseudo-iconoclastic fascism as the perfect vehicle for their nightmarish dream of bringing Manifest Destiny to the stars with the power of hyperconnectivity and artificial intelligence.

Thus, MAGA now has the institutional greenlight to turn its various pet vehicular rampages into frighteningly affective public policy just so long as they toss the tech bros the keys to the Pentagon. The Jesus freaks get to use the public school system to terrorize trans children back into the closet. The border industrial complex gets to expand their private Sudetenland on the Rio Grande to every campus in the country. And the Israel First lobby gets their final solution in the Gaza Strip. 

Meanwhile, every single body supposedly built to create the illusion of checks and balances for liberal democracy has been exposed to be little more than a totally feckless theatre troupe in black judge's gowns. The Supreme Court and the Hague can balk like roosters until the sun explodes, their powers are totally meaningless to an unhinged strongman with a posse of oligarchs with deeper pockets than most small countries.

If you find this opening rant to be depressing as shit, then welcome to my world. Being a genderqueer anarchist in Appalachian tetanus country was shitty enough back when the feds were content to simply look the other way while teachers, priests, wardens, and cops battered my people. Now that their long raging war against weird folks has been given the official stamp of approval by every office and social media giant in the land, the local thugs don't even attempt to conceal the genocidal intentions behind their abuse anymore.

"Gender ideology" has been publicly declared to be a pandemic, and the proscribed cure is to kill the tranny and save the child. The result isn't just my nephew being deluged by death threats while their friends cycle in and out local mental wards after failed suicide attempts, it's my own mental health taking a savage beating every other time the news is on.

I have PTSD and DID as the direct result of being mercilessly abused by teachers and priests in preschool and then indoctrinated for another decade into believing that I was the fucking pervert just because I was born with the wrong set of junk. Having a confessed sex criminal in the White House accusing me of grooming while he sends in the feds to literally govern other kids' genitalia is enough to make me switch personalities six times before breakfast. So yeah, I'm kind of a fucking mess here and I'm not alone. 

If you are undocumented, Muslim, or just happen to possess a functioning uterus in this country you're probably feeling the heat of MAGA's newly besotted marriage with technofascism right now and you're probably feeling it in a very personal way. And like me, you are probably overwhelmed, and you have every fucking right to be but there are two things that you should know about your totally justified psychosis, two things that I frequently have to remind myself when I become tempted to swallow my own tongue.

The first is that you are not alone. A bit cliche I know, but still totally valid. The second is that you are not crazy. In fact, you are actually being overwhelmed by design. The state and its various institutions have long conspired to cripple all of us with a pervasive sense of learned helplessness. It is routinely drilled into our skulls from a very young age that we are not in control and we require authoritarian institutions just to function. Our entire compulsory school system is defined by this kind of subservient grooming; being berated to stand in a straight line just to use the bathroom and then graded on the experience. It's child abuse and it works. It even effects the mindset of many of the principled radicals in this country.

Every communist, socialist, and anarchist on the internet is searching for the big solution to the Trump problem, whether it be the next October Uprising or some new red messiah to lead them to the promised land, but all of these desperate desperados are still locked into the same logic pushed on them by their high school civics teachers. You must either conspire with lesser evils within the existing system or replace it entirely with another massive goddamn system. 

These notions not only encourage people to compromise their conscience in the name of conformity, but they also encourage anyone who doesn't have the stomach to whore themselves out to resort to the dreamy complacency of utopian someday-ism. 'Someday, the proletariat will reach a miraculous mass awakening, and the workers' paradise will begin..."

It's OK. I've fallen victim to this line of thinking myself. I spent over half a decade as an agoraphobic shut-in waiting on some mythical Che Guevara to save me from myself. I ultimately had to come to the conclusion that massive problems, be they overthrowing the government or just stepping outside of the house, don't require massive solutions. Quite the contrary, massive solutions tend to either cripple us beneath the weight of their enterprise or simply replace one big problem with another. The solution isn't all or nothing, it's somewhere in between.

I think that the brilliant counter-cultural anti-intellectual, Paul Goodman, put it best when he said; "Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won and you had the kind of society you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now! Whatever you would do then, do it now. When you run up against obstacles, people or things that won't let you live that way, then begin to think about how to get over or around or under that obstacle, or how to push it out of the way, and your politics will be concrete and practical."

So, I'm working with a local non-profit bookstore to start up a radical Queer youth group, a space for kids like me to have a say and feel safe for a couple hours a week, in fact, the first meeting is this week. My rural found family is also building a functioning homestead that will hopefully allow all of us to become less dependent on big business and big government. It is all a work in progress and I'm sure we'll keep stumbling all the way to the finish line, but the dream is to create something not dissimilar to our radically conservative Amish neighbors, a sort of archipelago of agrarian Queer autonomous communities that can co-exist with the "English world" while remaining fiercely independent of its more toxic influences.

We aren't the only ones fighting back small to win big either. The two most affective foes of the Trump junta thus far have been the anti-ICE 'Know Your Rights' movement and Yemen's Houthi rebels. Both have confronted big fascism with shoestring arsenals and have successfully provoked MAGA inc. into wasting billions of dollars on well publicized and humiliating tactical failures. ICE is chasing their tails in Chicago while well-trained rapid response networks police their every move and Donald Trump has called it quits on his bombardment of Yemen even while the Houthis expand their blockade against his genocide in Gaza.

This is how we win, dearest motherfuckers. This is how we defeat an empire defined by globalism and pompous universal "values." Not with one big revolution but with a thousand tiny revolutions that can dismantle the Death Star one piece at a time and build cooperative green trailer parks from the scrap metal. We can take this bitch if each one of us throws a punch at a different pressure point at the same time. They won't even know what hit them. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* The National Anthem by Radiohead

* Thumbtack by Blondshell

* Suffragette City by David Bowie

* Dare by Samia

* Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden

* Elderberry Wine by Wednesday

* Loaded by Primal Scream  

* Chase the Devil by Max Romeo & the Upsetters

Meet the New Pope, Same as the Last Pope (...and the Last Pope)

 Ana Maria was a nine-year-old girl from a little town called Chiclayo, Peru in 2007 when the Catholic Church robbed her of her childhood. She didn't even see it coming. A beloved friar known popularly as Father Lute at the church she was raised in had arranged to accompany her on a mission to another parish. Her parents and teachers told her this was a great honor, and all the other little girls and boys were jealous. She would get to stay overnight in a different town at a different parish with the full and undivided attention of one of the most beloved and well-respected men in her community. She couldn't possibly say no even if she wanted to.

But the moment that Ana Maria and Father Lute were alone in a faraway place, things very rapidly became strange and frightening. The parish facilities they were staying at only had one bed and Father Lute insisted that they share it. Ana Maria felt deeply uncomfortable with this arrangement but what could she do? How could she say no? She had trouble sleeping next to this grown man who everyone she knew held in such high regard but before she could drift off, he was all over her, hugging her, kissing her, caressing her, putting his great big hands all over her tiny defenseless body. This time Ana Maria tried to say no, she tried over and over again, but the beloved Father Lute didn't care. It was like the man had transformed into an insatiable beast in that bed the moment the lights were off.

Ana Maria wanted to believe that it was all just a bad dream, but it wasn't, and it kept happening. Father Lute arranged for more overnight visits to more faraway parishes for the two of them and they always seemed to have only one bed to share. Sometimes another local friar came too. Ana Maria didn't know what to do. She felt like dying but everyone around her just kept reminding her of what a great honor it was to be the focus of such interest from such a distinguished man of the cloth, so she kept quiet while Father Lute kept his hands all over her childhood. Eventually, finally, the missions ended but the nightmares didn't. No bed that Ana Maria slept in felt safe. Years went by before she finally broke her silence. She told her two sisters about the strange trips with Father Lute and to her shock her sisters confessed that they too had been preyed upon by the same man of God in the exact same fashion, all between the tender ages of 10 and 14.

Ana Maria was furious. This man who the community had trusted completely with its children was a monster and he needed to be stopped. The friar had since gone on to become a popular parish priest in Chiclayo, with access to God knows how many more innocent and trusting young boys and girls just like Ana and her sisters. So, the three contacted Chiclayo's Bishop by phone in 2020 to confess. But the Bishop refused to even meet with them in person for two years, using the Pandemic as an excuse. When the sisters finally met with the most powerful Catholic in their diocese, he insisted that there was very little that the Church could do for them and suggested that they seek out the civil authorities instead. When the sisters continued to demand an investigation within the Church they still loved, the Bishop relented reluctantly and sent them to something he had just established called a "listening center" where Church officials heard their stories and opened an official investigation.

At first, Ana Maria and her sisters were hopeful. Father Lute had been removed from his parish very quickly even though officials announced his departure as being for health reasons. But as the months went by without any follow up from Chruch officials, the sisters lost their patience. 8 months after they had lodged an official complaint with their Bishop, the three sisters finally took his original advice and reached out to civil authorities only to be shocked when local prosecutors closed the case due to the statute of limitations having expired years ago, something any local Bishop would certainly have known but by that time the local Bishop was long gone.

Bishop Robert Prevost had been plucked from tiny Chiclayo, Peru by Pope Francis himself in 2023 and sent to Rome where he was made a Cardinal and appointed to the prestigious and highly influential Dicastery for Bishops. A number of other strange things happened that year affecting Ana Maria and the people of Chiclayo, and all roads seemed to lead back to Rome. The bishop selected to replace Prevost discovered that Father Lute, also known as Father Eluterio Vasquez Gonzales, was still celebrating mass in a nearby parish and when confronted on the accusations against him the priest made little attempt to deny the abuse, quickly making a full confession.

By this time his case had finally made its way to Rome just in time for Prevost to take his new position of power in the Vatican. Strangely, the case was very quickly closed in spite of the fact that the accused had now confessed to being guilty. Even stranger, the basis for the closure of the case was the decision made by civil prosecutors not to pursue it even though Canonical investigations are supposedly completely independent of civil ones and aren't commanded by the same statutes of limitations which were the only reasons the civil case did not proceed. Something very strange had happened, and it wasn't hard to connect the dots once the dust had settled.

The Bishop of Chiclayo had clearly lied to Ana Maria and her sisters, encouraging them to take their case to a place where he knew it would meet a dead end. When they chose the Canonical route instead, it appears that the bishop created his own dead end with his newfound influence over the various kangaroo courts of the Vatican. In case you haven't guessed, this bishop is now the Pope. Early this month, a church already ruptured by an international sex abuse scandal that reaches across oceans and continents chose to make Cardinal Robert Prevost 'Pope Leo XIV' and the shadowy case of Ana Maria and her sisters is far from the only stain on his cassock.

Prevost is a lifelong member of the Order of Saint Augustine, eventually serving as the head of this organization for decades, first in the United States and then internationally. The Augustinians are notorious among survivors of Catholic abuse like me for being one of the most stubbornly backward sects in Catholicism when it comes to transparency and reform, and the Chicago born Pope Leo's Midwest Augustinians are among the worst of the worst, only creating a publicly available list for what it deems to be credibly accused offenders amongst its ranks last year and only doing so under immense public pressure after one of their priests, Reverand Richard McGrath, the longtime principal of Providence Catholic High School in New Lenox, Illinois, was accused of raping minors and trading in child pornography.

However, amazingly, McGrath is still not on that fucking list because somehow even he doesn't meet the Augustinian standards for guilt even though he was more than guilty enough for them to settle out of court for $2 million dollars when one of McGrath's many victims sued the Order in 2017. A large portion of Father McGrath's crime spree occurred during Pope Leo's leadership of this chapter of the Augustinians, a reign that also saw Leo house another accused pedophile priest named Father James Ray at a South Side monastery down the street from a Catholic elementary school without so much as even informing the school or the public. McGrath would later be housed at this exact same monastery after he was accused, only by this time that monastery was literally across the street from a preschool and this is where this shit gets personal for me.   

Back in the nineties I was taken from a Catholic preschool in Central Pennsylvania by a travelling priest like Lute, Ray, and McGrath. I never caught that strangers name, but he and another priest savagely raped me in the rectory down the street. I was five years old, and I still have flashbacks where I'm choking on parts of their bodies. My abuse occurred under the leadership of Pope John Paul who we now know moved at least three priests accused of molestation to different parishes while he was still known as Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Krakow, in the 1970s. This was right around the time that his successor, a man who died with the name Pope Benedict XVI, was moving around his own pedophile priests as Joseph Ratzinger, Archbishop of Munich.

Pope Francis appears to have been busier protecting generals than priests while he was still Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina, but that didn't stop him from appointing Cardinal George Pell, an Australian holy man already soaked in cover-up charges, to be his "anti-corruption czar" and it also didn't stop Francis from defending that bastard either after he was accused of taking part in the abuse himself by multiple parties.

Every decade or so, another one of these gawdy creeps drops dead in his gold jewelry and different wings of what's left of the Catholic Church take turns cheering or booing his replacement, but every single Pope going back at least half a century has been proven guilty of taking part in enabling a wholesale child sex ring that they all continue to insist is some kind of religion.

I wrote this rant, another fucking rant about another fucking Pope with a long and absurdly well-recorded history of putting predators before children, because I want to know, I sincerely need to know, as one of those broken children, when is it enough? How many childhoods do you people need to cannibalize, how many Ana Maria's do you need to crucify before you put down the goddamn rosary and recognize that the Vatican is not a church, it is a criminal organization, and there is no ideology that will cure this crypt of shattered innocence from being a mafia.

Jesus Christ himself would burn that city to the fucking ground and he would do it with the former Bishop of Chiclayo still inside.

Peace, Rage, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Fait Acompli by Curve

* Event of a Fire by Blondshell

* Quiet Room by Babes in Toyland

* Hey Jupiter by Tori Amos

* The Hand That Feeds by Nine Inch Nails

* Dicknail by Hole

* Thumbtack by Blondshell

* Stellate by Samia

* Handsome and Gretel by Babes in Toyland

* Savage Good Boy by Japanese Breakfast

RFK Jr.'s War on Neurodiversity is a War on Individualism

The Trump Administration really seems to have a thing for genocide, and I don't believe this statement to be hyperbolic even if it is a tad theatrical. Whether they're launching nationwide dragnets to preserve the racial purity of the endangered American factory, militarizing the Rio Grande, or openly conspiring with Benjamin Netanyahu to hollow out the Gaza Strip for luxury condominiums, the second MAGA junta seems to be defined by grand and expansive schemes to erase problematic populations with massive government programs.

This drive towards demographic hygiene in the name of national revival extends towards Trump's domestic social programs as well, with executive orders explicitly defining transgender people to be little more than a contrived ideology and calling for that ideology to be eradicated by eliminating the presence of inconvenient non-persons like me from the public sphere.

The fact that a political movement built on a foundation of demonizing refugees and Muslims would evolve into a cabal that seems to find a final solution to every problem they manufacture isn't exactly new or even all that surprising but that doesn't make it any less revolting, especially when you find yourself existing at the cross section of multiple genocides. On that note, apparently, it's just my lucky day, because the latest target of Trump's conspiracy to make America pure again is the neurodivergent and he's backing a thinly veiled approach to eugenics to erase us.

Cue Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; professional imbecile, craven opportunist, and somehow Secretary of Health and Human Services. This morally derelict nepo baby has fashioned a career out of two things, squatting beneath the squandered vestige of his family name and demonizing autism as a scourge against suburbia. It was really only a matter of time before he used his position in Trump's new cabinet to turn his hobby into a jihad and apparently that time is now. This April, in tandem with the CDC's latest inconclusive report on childhood autism rates, Kennedy launched a series of ambitious proposals to fix his pet crisis once and for all.

After chopping up a few poultry observations from the latest report and mixing them up with a hodgepodge of mischaracterized data from other more outdated studies, Kennedy painted a portrait of a community which includes most of the members of my own found family that bares absolutely zero resemblance to reality. Once he was done pulling numbers out of his ass to suggest a scientific basis for his wholesale character assassination, Kennedy drew his violin and sang a sad song about autism, describing the phenomenon as an "individual tragedy" that "destroys families" before painting a picture of the people I love that renders them to the status of useless, otherized, husks draining an otherwise productive society of its resources.

RFK Jr., a junky trust fund baby who has never contributed anything of value to society in his entire life other than the screeching sound of his own overprivileged existence, declared that most autistic people will "never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date..." They'll never use their bootlegging connections to rig an election, they'll never have the leader of a foreign proxy state executed, they'll never drown their latest mistress in a luxury car, beat a teenager to death with a golf club, or shoot heroin in a limousine... You get the picture; they'll never be a fucking Kennedy.

But never fear, a white knight from Camelot is here to rid us all of this horrid affliction faster than you can say fraud. Kennedy has announced a bold mission to cure what he describes as a "preventable disease" over summer vacation, stating "By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we will be able to eliminate those exposures."

Let me just rip the needle off the record right now and set a few things straight. The first and most important one being that there is no goddamn "autism epidemic." Whole governments and international medical bodies have already dumped billions of dollars and decades of time into identifying the causes of autism and this is what the data finds; while autism rates have risen dramatically since 2000, all the available evidence suggests that these numbers are simply the result of the increased awareness that comes with broadening diagnostic criteria and making early childhood screening routine.

RFK Jr., who has spent years blaming vaccines for the frightening rise of weird people, has labeled this commonsense data interpretation an "ideology of epidemic denial" and has claimed that he had never met an autistic person in his youth. I actually don't deny the second slur but that's likely because autistic people were just labeled as "retards" back then and left to languish in a Thorazine coma in the kind of maximum-security government asylums the Kennedy Dynasty kept up and running with the taxes they never had to pay.

An American Academy of Pediatrics study in 2021 actually found that 60% of people diagnosed with autism have an IQ in the average range or higher and a 2017 PubMed study found that 61% of people on the spectrum are employed. This is because autism is not a disease or even necessarily a disability. It is a vast spectrum of complex neurological differences that effect the way the people who experience them experience the world around them in multiple ways, most of them non-debilitating. In other words, autistic people just aren't "normal" and that terrifies WASPy  little one percenters like RFK Jr. and his suburban fan club of pearl-clutching, new age, Karens.

Autisitic people, much like Queer people, are simply biologically driven to reject the status quo and considering how fucked up our genocidal status quo is, we could use a lot more of them.

Don't get me wrong, there is definitely an epidemic going on here, but it is an epidemic of neurodivergence, a rapidly expanding umbrella community that includes all of the pieces of the puzzle that pricks like the Kennedys couldn't jam into the homogenized purgatory of western civilization. This is a radical epidemic of neurological outsiders racked with stultifying diagnoses like autism, ADHD, dyslexia, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and OCD. An epidemic which overlaps significantly and uncoincidentally with the parallel epidemic of transgenderism which also boldly questions the core assumptions of a deeply polluted society.

I am a proud part of both of these epidemics, only I prefer to think of them as a revolution. My own neurodivergence takes the form of multiple personalities or what is commonly diagnosed as dissociative identity disorder. I had to develop this "disorder" as a survival mechanism against the trauma I experienced at the hands of the Catholic Church. The only way for me to exist as an individual in a space so fundamentally unsafe, especially for a transgender child, was to evolve into five separate individuals.

I do not believe that autism is fundamentally dissimilar. We are all hostages of a rapacious capitalist superstructure that demands total conformity to an order that is literally destroying the planet. The only way to truly be an individual in such a deeply sick environment is to be fucking crazy and when people like Kennedy talk about "curing" us they are really talking about erasing us, regardless of whether they do it with prostate medication or genome editing. 

This ploy may be patently fascistic but the most infuriating thing for a plural genderfuck bumpkin like me is that there isn't even anything particularly conservative about it. In fact, there is nothing particularly conservative about any of MAGA's genocidal policies, all of which smack of the kind of belligerent, right wing, social engineering that defined big government progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The kind of cosmopolitan psychopaths who forcibly sterilized over 70,000 Americans, turned public schools into prisons, and started a World War just to revitalize American greatness.

This is also the same line of uber statist thinking that inspired the Nazis to take it one step further, and Donald Trump doesn't strike me as the kind of man afraid to take that next bold step into the abyss of the recycling bin of human history.

Ironically or not, neurodivergent people are actually our greatest hope against this threat. We are already the product of an over-regimented society, the battle-hardened casualties of the stultifying social engineering of big business, big government, and big religion, of compulsory schooling, constant surveillance, and abusive psychiatry.

Most of the people I love fall somewhere on the wilder side of this spectrum of neurological outlaws and the biggest problem that most of us grapple with is the trauma that comes with growing up weird in a conformist society. But we are all survivors. Neurodivergence is evolution through radical individualism and the bigger the MAGA state becomes, the more neurodivergent individualists will evolve out of surviving it.

In other words, keep governing us, normies. You're only building an army too strange to tame.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* California Uber Alles by Dead Kennedys

* Kill the Poor by Dead Kennedys

* Hop with the Jetset by Dead Kennedys

* Terminal Preppie by Dead Kennedys

* Well Paid Scientist by Dead Kennedys

* A Child and His Lawnmower by Dead Kennedys

* Drug Me by Dead Kennedys

* Bleed for Me by Dead Kennedys

* Forward to Death by Dead Kennedys

* I Kill Children by Dead Kennedys

Pope Francis was a Fraud, and the Vatican is Still a Cesspool

 Another Pope has dropped dead, only this time it's the left who seems to be all busted up over it. Don't get me wrong, I guess I get it. On the surface, Francis did seem like a pretty woke dude. He certainly said all the right things about capitalism, climate change, Israeli apartheid, and the like. If you simply read his headlines over the last decade, he actually comes across as a more consistent leftist than anyone still shilling for the Democratic Party. But there is a very big difference between talk and action, especially when you're running a church whose sins extend to the Dark Ages and include complicity in multiple genocides, and it doesn't take a particularly deep dive beneath the headlines to recognize that Pope Francis was very much a part of that tradition. In fact, the saddest fact about his death is that if you're morning this motherfucker right now, the grift worked.

Not that you need to crucify yourself for this mistake with another fresh helping of Catholic guilt. Even by Vatican standards Francis was a master showman, posing as a humble ascete while operating a parochial empire spangled by more pilfered jewels than a Liberace theme park. I hate to admit it, but the bastard almost had me going for a minute there too with his whole Yoda in charge of the Death Star routine, and I'm a genderqueer anarchist who was molested by two priests before I was old enough to spell my own name correctly. 

And that's the thing; the really sick and really mean thing. All of us wanted to believe the Church could become magic again. The Vatican knew this, and Pope Francis was selected specifically to tell us what we wanted to hear while his friends continued to literally rape and pillage the faithful with reckless abandon.

The painful truth that we all need to swallow is that Pope Francis was not some kind of egalitarian maverick savior figure. If that were true, he wouldn't have been handpicked to begin with by the exact same right-wing creeps who put Benedict in power less than a decade earlier. Pope Francis was more of a kind of spiritual custodian put in place to mop up the mess of a blasphemous temple drowning in the cesspool of its own sins. Think of him as a kind of Catholic Obama, sent to polish the image of a toxic brand while doing everything in his power to strengthen its lethal capabilities.

In order to even come close to understanding such a vexing creature, it is important that we remember exactly who Francis was before he was Francis and exactly where the church was when he was selected to play the part. Before the Papacy came calling Francis was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit cardinal relatively unheard of outside of his native Argentina, but inside Argentina this man's reputation was very different than what it would very rapidly become on the world stage. Bergoglio was a leading figure in the Argentine Church during a very Catholic junta's Dirty War on left wing dissent that would see some 30,000 people vanish without a trace by the early eighties, many of them priests and lay workers.

The good Cardinal would claim that he was actually secretly playing both sides of the fence, providing fascist dictators with the holy veneer they relied upon to maintain power while clandestinely working to free their prisoners. We may never know for sure, but many victims of the junta continue to accuse Francis of playing an active role in its crimes at a time when Pope John Paul had very publicly devoted himself to routing the left-wing contagion of Liberation Theology from the Church.

Either way, Bergoglio's rebirth as Pope Francis came at a time when the Catholic Church was collapsing beneath the weight of its own towering rap sheet. Back in 2013, the Church's involvement in a massive conspiracy to protect the sexual predators deeply imbedded among its ranks just kept expanding with every filthy new detail that seeped from the cracks of the Vatican walls. The then current Pope Benedict's role as John Paul's point man at the top of the cover-up had just recently been exposed, as had his involvement in protecting pedophiles closer to the bottom during his tour as Archbishop of Munich. He would become the first pope to step down from his perch of power since Gregory XII retired in 1415 to end a civil war within the Church.

Much like Obama, the newly leftist Pope Francis hit the ground apologizing to a world walking away from an empire in flames. In fact, Francis never really stopped apologizing and with the scandal still growing as more and more of the Catholic Church's victims came out of the closets we had been locked in, he had plenty to apologize for. 

When an investigation in France revealed that an estimated 330,000 children had been systematically abused by over 3,000 priests over a period of 70 years, Pope Francis apologized. When a grand jury exposed a similar conspiracy across six dioceses in my home state of Pennsylvania, Pope Francis apologized. When a trip to Ireland, home to nearly 15,000 victims, not to mention a veritable gulag archipelago of despotic orphanages, industrial schools, and laundries, nearly resulted in a riot, you better fucking believe that Francis apologized.

But what the hell did Francis actually do? What concrete actions did this humble emperor actually take to prove that he and his newly woke church where actually remorseful? The truth is, not much. When Francis came to power in 2013, he made a very big show of setting up a panel of experts to advise him on how to tackle the crisis. It took them six years just to reconvene for the Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church in 2019 and the only real concrete measure to come out of this much vaunted shindig was a single decree ordering all priests and nuns to report abuse and cover-ups to Church authorities with zero orders to report them to anyone outside of the Church.

That's it. Nothing else. An order to report abuse back to a leadership that has already been publicly exposed to be guilty of engaging in it. In what universe is this an acceptable response to the largest child sex ring in recorded history? Even in America's horrid compulsory public school system the accused are removed until an outside investigation can prove them innocent. As we speak there are thousands of clergy accused of abuse still serving in parishes and schools across the globe while the Vatican performs their own investigations with zero oversight and zero transparency. If Francis were anything but a sweet-talking crook with a borderline personality, then he would order a zero-tolerance policy removing offenders and their handlers immediately.

But the sins of Pope Francis don't end with empty apologies. They include his long history of publicly defending the clearly guilty. This includes Francis' close personal friend, Argentine Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, who Francis openly sided with after being accused of sexual misconduct before falling conveniently silent when he was found guilty at trial. This includes Francis' very outspoken defense of Chilean Bishop Juan Barres, accused of actually being present during the abuse of minors and failing to report it. Francis not only called the accusations "slander", but he refused to even send the Vatican's top expert on sexual abuse to investigate until a massive public backlash that included some of his own cardinals forced him to make an about-face and reluctantly declare that he had "misjudged" the situation.

And then there was Cardinal George Pell, Francis' own anti-corruption czar, handpicked after years of swirling accusations of abuse and cover-up in Australia where the man had served as Archbishop of both Melbourne and Sydney. Pell would ultimately be imprisoned for 13 months in 2019 for abusing minors and was only released when Judges decided that his accusers' testimonies were not enough to legally prove his guilt. These accusers never recanted their accusations and Francis never retracted his support for the accused, giving Pell safe haven in the Vatican both during his investigation and after his release. The Pope even imparted the final blessing at this creep's funeral in St. Peter's Basilica in 2023, just six years after Australia's Royal Commission released a report proving that men like Pell presided over at least 4,444 incidents of child sex abuse between 1950 and 2010. I use the word "proving" because every single act was reported to church authorities and zero action was taken.

As I write these words, I am livid, not just with Francis and the empire of child rapists that he spent the last decade trying to revamp as a socialist love-in, but at the droves of leftists who have piled up on the streets, ten people deep, to kiss this man's casket because he said something charming about human rights. Who fucking cares? I was one of the children raped by the kind of men Francis died defending and I went to the far left for shelter when I had no place left to go. I went to a movement supposedly devoted to the protection and empowerment of the powerless against the powerful. There is absolutely no excuse for eulogizing this man without acknowledging the well recorded fact that he was a fucking monster and there is quite simply no excuse for the continued existence of the Catholic Church.

We all know what this institution represents. It's not like their graveyard of innocents is a secret. This is an ancient imperial cabal that hijacked Christianity and turned it into a bulletproof mask of sanity for every genocidal butcher from Constantine to Ronald Reagan. These are the people behind the Crusades, the Inquisition, Ante Pavelic, and General Franco. These motherfuckers hid Hitler's gold, set up ratlines that freed his most heinous henchmen, and blessed the Latin American death squads they trained.

I remain a Christian of sorts as well as an anarchist, albeit a decidedly post-left one. I continue to pray to the Virgin Mary as I explore other feminine energies among the Celtic traditions of Wicca and Druidry. I also continue to draw strength from Catholic iconoclasts like Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, Ivan Illich, and Jacques Ellul among more obnoxious apostates like Max Stirner, Michel Foucault, and Mikhail Bakunin. But we can no longer afford to actively fool ourselves into venerating a church defined by evil or a fraud defined by covering it up.

 At a certain point, we have to burn the church to save the cross. A thousand years of this shit is long enough. We must do as Jesus did and turn over the tables in the temple of emptiness, and that includes the ones occupied by corpses like Francis.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs Influenced by this Post

* Crucify by Tori Amos

* Family Man by Nitzer Ebb

* Wake Up by Arcade Fire

* What About Us by Ministry

* War by Sinead O'Conner

* Sin by Nine Inch Nails

* Bad Catholics by the Menzingers

* Suffer the Children by the Smiths

* Hurt by Johnny Cash