Tracing the Imperial Contagion of Terrorism from 9/11 to Gaza

 I still remember it like it was last week. The images from that day in early September 2001 have been seared into the walls of my skull like antique photographs of garish gothic tableaus, a procession of haunted images forming some sort of post-modern version of the Stations of the Cross that ends in the crucifixion of my adolescent sense of American greatness. 

I remember the fear in my sixth-grade history teacher's eyes when she told us that planes had struck skyscrapers in Manhattan. I remember the abrupt silence that consumed that typically boisterous classroom of twelve-year-old chatterboxes like a deafmute plague. I remember coming home to that same fear and silence in my own living room with only the incessant ramblings of panicked cable news analysts to fill the din with drivel. I remember my mother standing outside on the front porch and watching the sky as if it were raining commercial airliners. And I remember those towers, igniting like god size matches, spewing a seemingly impossible amount of ash into the atmosphere, and bowing slowly to the earth on my TV screen, over and over and over again. 

I also remember the hysterical climate of insanity that followed 9/11 and, in many ways, has never ceased. Powerful men calmly explaining that this awesome spectacle of human savagery must be met not with contemplation or reflection but with even greater human savagery. My parents and my teachers and my priests and all the other fine Christians tasked with governing my adolescent spirituality falling in line behind a doctrine of blind vengeance against a broad and vague enemy made up of impoverished people living in the shadows of their biblical fairy tales. The late-night footage of buildings exploding in downtown Bagdad playing on a loop while I sat watching in simmering anguish, knowing that each fantastic fireball brought with it some other confused kid's own 9/11, another young skull seared with horrific cave drawings that commanded that they be met with violence. 

I've been thinking about these things a lot lately since the massacres of the Al-Aqsa Flood and the carpet bombings launched against the entire populace of Gaza in response. The comparisons between the current horrors in the Holy Land and the ongoing and interconnected horrors of 9/11 and the War on Terror are so despicably eerie to me that they are almost too much to consume without physically retching on the details. In both cases, a privileged society has been visited by the specters of their past sins only to choose to repeat them and in both cases these societies collective detachment from anything even resembling logic seems almost absurdly absolute.

The terrorist attacks on September 11th were carefully choreographed reenactments of America's own terrorist attacks on city centers across the Middle East over the decades, specifically the ones perpetrated upon Bagdad which had first been turned into a body strewn Hollywood movie set by the father of then-President George W. Bush at the end of the Cold War in order to usher in a "New World Order" of American supremacy. 

The attacks themselves were perpetrated by a couple dozen off-Washington performers assembled and trained by men who had themselves been assembled and trained by the United States to turn Afghanistan into a mountainous booby-trap for the Soviet Union to be lured into twenty years earlier. Upon achieving this mission, these freedom fighters known as the Mujahideen mutated into the terrorists of Al-Qaeda and bit the hand that fed them in order to lure their former master's into that same mountain death trap. Amazingly, it worked, and the New World Order is now on life support as it staggers through the chicken wire snares of twenty years of failed Middle Eastern massacres.

Similarly, the recent attacks on Southern Israeli settlements were carefully choreographed reenactments of the Zionist massacres that emptied them of their indigenous Palestinian populations in the late forties. The Nakba that those savaged kibbutzim were built on was a swarm attack launched by militant Ashkenazi supremacists who indiscriminately slaughtered entire tribes and declared the results to be a state. Much like with 9/11, the reenactors were angry young men assembled and trained by angry young men assembled and trained by their targets. 

Hamas was a two-bit Muslim Brotherhood offshoot who could barely even shoot straight before the Israelis began funding them in the early eighties with the intention of creating a monstrous counterweight to the far more moderate secular leftist Palestinian resistance movements in vogue at the time. The result was the construction of a merciless golem which has killed more Israeli civilians than every faction of the PLO combined. But Hamas has only flourished over the decades thanks to a generation of new recruits midwifed by decades of Israeli state terrorism, terrorism that has seen more than half of the Gaza Strip's impoverished population grow to something resembling adulthood under a crippling blockade and repeated aerial bombardments that have resulted in the slaughter of nearly 8,000 Palestinian civilians in the last twenty years alone.

And now Israel has met their sadistic cry of anguish with more bombs, more orphans, more dead children, more tiny 9/11s, and an insane plot to invade the fortified ghettos of Gaza and empty them of their indignant prisoners once and for all. Considering history, how do you think this story will end? Why don't we ask the people of Afghanistan? Why don't we ask the people of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia? Why don't we ask the 4.7 million gravestones that stand in attention across the Muslim world to salute the Great War on Terror? Why don't we ask the amputated husks who dug their graves and now haunt the streets of towns like Altoona, Pennsylvania and Youngstown, Ohio that look a little more like Bagdad with each passing recession?

Terrorism, whether it be performed by the state or its copycats, is not an act of warfare. It is an act of propaganda, a perverse artform designed to provoke an emotional response from a populace in order to override their access to basic human logic. The result is the creation of a sort of economy of trauma that trades in acts of violence, with each passing exchange becoming increasingly heinous and unhinged from reality. This ecosystem of terror is detrimental to nearly everyone and everything that it touches and thus is typically only performed by one of two groups of people, the Dammed and the Untouchables.

The Untouchables are the mandarins of the war machine, an industrial complex of psychopathic state capitalists who profit from the proliferation of constant violence regardless of who wins the wars or who digs the graves. The Dammed are those who already live in a state of constant violence and have nothing left to lose. As the forever wars of the monied Untouchable class expand to every corner of the globe, the ranks of the Dammed swell and increasingly include not only the victims of these wars but the veterans used to perpetrate them as well as the victims of war reenactors like Hamas and Al-Qaeda. Eventually, the Untouchables will find themselves surrounded and will be engulfed by the self-sustaining industry of violence that they have profited from. But where will that leave the rest of us? Drowning in a cesspool of human misery.

This has to stop, and it is we the dammed and soon-to-be dammed who have to make it stop. We don't make it stop by laying down our arms while the Untouchable class continues there slaughter regardless of resistance. We make it stop by refusing fight like a state and fighting the state itself instead. Every dead body smoldering in the Holy Land as we speak, be they Jew or Arab, is a casualty of the colonialist Westphalian nation state injected into the Levant by foreign interlopers. There was no Israel or Hamas before the diversity of that traditionally stateless society was forcibly united beneath one single universal order or another. Humans were not designed to live this way and they certainly weren't designed to die this way.

We must all refuse to take part in this horrific masquerade. We must refuse to fight beneath the banner of any standing army, and we must refuse to fire a single bullet unless it is fired in the defense of our own communities and right now all of our communities need to be defended from the terrorist machinery of the Untouchable class who are calling on us to repeat history once again with more endless war. 

These are the heinous fiends who must be brought down but they will never be brought down by invasions and interventions that only perpetuate the imperial contagion that has ravaged the globe from Ground Zero to Gaza. They must instead be brought down by revolutions. A thousand local uprisings launched across the globe to restore sanity and diversity to a stateless world. What this means is that it is the Jews who must smash Israel, the Palestinians who must smash Hamas, and the Americans who must finish off the New World Order once and for all. For only when each of us does our part to smash the state will any of us ever know lasting peace.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Losing My Religion by REM

* Last Caress by the Misfits

* Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd

* Son of a Gun by the Vaselines

* Jesus, etc. by Wilco

* Tommy Gun by the Clash

* Buildings by Regina Spektor

* Someone to Die for by Belly

* My Body is Made of Crushed Little Stars by Mitski

* Wild Horses by the Sundays

* War Pigs by Black Sabbath

* What About Us by Ministry

We Are All Buffalo Bill: Embracing the Revolutionary Monstrosity of the Third Gender

 She's putting on her lipstick in the mirror while the music blares. There are knives by the blush and a loaded .357 Magnum next to the rouge. She's applying eyeliner as her victim's screams grow louder than the bassline. She turns up "Goodbye Horses" to drown them out. There are moths on the multicolored spools of fabric. There are skulls on their wings. There is a thorn tattooed on her side and rings shaped like serpents on her fingers. Her powerful shoulders flex as she works her antique sewing machine like a lave, sewing the flesh of her victims into something that will conceal those muscles. The screams grow louder but not oud enough. She's dancing before a blinking camcorder now, bathed in a woman suit constructed of 'real girls' with her other thorn tucked between her thighs. Now she's gingerly prying a pupa from its cocoon and caressing its newly formed wings. A terrifyingly deep voice escapes from those lipstick smeared lips. "So powerful..."

This was my introduction to Jame Gumb, better known as Buffalo Bill, the genderfuck villainess of Jonathan Deme's brilliant 1991 horror masterpiece, Silence of the Lambs. This was also the frighteningly feral image of androgyny that generations of genderqueer kids like me grew up with, and it hurt. The fact that I also happen to be a lifelong horror buff who adores this movie along with the 1988 Thomas Harris novel of the same name that it was based on didn't exactly soften the blow. While both Demme and Harris attempt to go to great lengths to have FBI Agent Clarice Starling and Doctor Hannibal Lecter explain that "Billy is not a real transexual... He thinks he is, he tries to be, he's tried to be a lot of things, I expect." these hollow words from the cisgender peanut gallery do even less to soften that blow. Regardless of how the professional class in the psychiatric-police state chooses to label her, Billy clearly identifies her desire for femininity as a strength and it is her androgyny, her refusal to play by traditional gender norms that makes her monstrous to the audience.

The conclusion that many kids like me were forced to come to was that our own inability to play by those rules, a predilection which we shared with one of cinema's greatest villains, marked us for the same fate that she embraced like a spider to a fly. Our identities could only result in unspeakable acts of barely human savagery. Ted Levine took up permanent residence in our mirrors and this isn't exactly an ideal foundation for adolescent self-esteem. More than a few of us chose to break the mirror and use its tainted shards to carve up our flesh like one of Billy's humps. Painful memories like these are part of the reason why even bitter anti-assimilationist radicals like me rejoice in the fact that at least today kids have access to enough information on their identities to give them some assemblance of hope that not fitting into either of the government approved genders doesn't have to result in a violent death in the basement.

But hope can be a dangerous thing, especially for a community that remains at least as marginalized as we are half-heartedly celebrated. While Walt Disney may decorate his parades with Pride flags that represent more identities than I can count, his conglomerate, along with other supposedly woke Fortune 500 giants like Goldman Sachs and Shell Oil continue to sling millions of dollars to the same politicians and lobbies that openly seek to strangle young gender outlaws with police state legislation before their arms are even strong enough to put up a fight. If anything, inclusion into mainstream civility has only made these muscles weaker. Many young trans people have been lulled into a state of learned passivity, being taught that their only hope for survival rests exclusively on the shoulders of an alliance between big government and even bigger business. Meanwhile, this exact same alliance pushes our prescribed foes to embrace them as the only force that can contain Queers like me before we can convert their kids.

Like most culture wars, the current gender war is little more than an excuse to keep both sides of the fight reliant on the same systems of power that exploit us both. However, since my community remains and will likely always be a minority, we are the ones with the most to lose and we are the ones most likely to lose it. The statistics on this fact are painfully clear. Trans people are more than four times as likely to be the victims of violent crime than we are to be the perpetrators. And it is with this fact in mind that I suggest the unthinkable. Perhaps Buffalo Bill isn't such a horrendous role model after all. 

Not because of the crimes that she commits against innocent women who are just as likely to find themselves exploited by the same chauvinistic culture that drove Billy to seek shelter in the confines of her basement lair, but because she represents everything that terrifies the bigots and in this fear resides power. Jame Gumb was a child of systemic abuse denied her right to transition by a corrupt, gatekeeping, medical establishment who told her that she was too broken to be female, too "savage" to be a "real transexual." So Gumb became something else, something too strange to be filed away in the DSM. Jame became Billy, a monster too powerful to be ignored. God help me but I can relate.

Growing up I was raised to believe that my body was a commodity that everyone had a right to put their hands on but me. My body belonged to my parents, my body belonged to the church, my body belonged to the schools and the cruel adults who ran them like indoctrination camps. I had no idea what the hell I was other than powerless. I was carefully groomed to assume gender roles that felt totally alien to me and I was groomed even further to believe that these alien feelings made me broken and irredeemable. There were no genderqueer people on popular sitcoms back then. There were only villains. 

Creatures like Marilyn Manson, Sinead O'Connor and Dennis Rodman who embraced their roles as pop cultural monsters with a charismatic zeal that terrified my abusers and empowered me to finally stand up to them. I could put on my black lipstick like warpaint and chant rhymes about the "beautiful people" and suddenly I was the one with the power to make big people feel small. Years before I had ever even heard of words like genderqueer or genderfuck, I embraced my otherness and weaponized it against conformity. These acts of guerrilla theater may have led my conservative Catholic school to accuse a 14-year-old pacifist of plotting a school massacre, but they may have also saved my life.

This is a radical strategy that has not been unheard of among gender outlaws throughout history though much of this history has been conveniently erased. During the halcyon days of pre-Christian pagan Europe, it was not uncommon to find public acts of crossdressing practiced freely at festivals, rituals and carnivals as a means to create a temporary escape from the crippling social obligations and hierarchies of agrarian civilization. These acts of ecstatic chaos were embraced as a way of life by heathen third gender sects like the Scythian shaman of the Enarei and the Roman priestesses known as the Galli. The Catholic Church did its damnedest to reign these outlaws in and constructed strict binary gender roles as a means of governing diverse societies beneath a single universal order but genderfuck remained a potent tactic for rebellion used to strike terror into the hearts of the governed for centuries.

Renegades from the hills of France to the moors of Scotland dawned women's clothing during raids and riots against the scions of church and state, from the Luddite Rebellions and the Ribbonmen to the Rebecca Riots and the Whiteboys. This proud peasant tradition also includes the fearsome Molly Maguires who carried their acts of genderqueer upheaval across the pond to my home state of Pennsylvania after the Potatoe Famine drove them from Ireland to coal country.

It is my conviction that we must revive this tradition of self-identifying as a threat and adopt rebellious third genders over assimilationist tropes. Trans people have tried playing nice with the straight world and where has it gotten us? With a dozen milquetoast TV shows streaming and more torches and pitchforks aimed at our throats than ever before. The reality is that the things about the trans community that terrify polite society most are precisely what makes us strong. We are ungovernable perverts that defy categorization. We are self-made monsters that require no man's permission to mutate and evolve into shapes and shades unseen by Christian civilization. We are dangerously free, and you and your children could be too, because liberation is a contagion that corrodes all conformity in its wake. 

We are all Buffalo Bill, and you are right to fear us because you don't know what pain is.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Goodbye Horses by Lazurus Q

* The Beautiful People by Marilyn Manson

* Collect by Torres

* Venus in Furs by the Velvet Underground

* Queen by Perfume Genius

* The Emperor's New Clothes by Sinead O'Connor

* Victim of Love by Erasure

* You're Pretty Face is Going to Hell by the Stooges

* Genesis by Grimes

* Army of Me by Bjork

This post is devoted in loving memory to all the nameless bastards of Gaza who have been erased for embracing the monstrous roles assigned to them by small men with big toys. I grieve for all of them because every monster is born innocent. 

The Last Planet on the Left: Climate Change as Rape Revenge

 There is a creature stalking the human race, a colossal ferocious beast with tentacles that lash every last corner of the globe, a pitiless monster the likes of which mankind has never encountered, and this thing is out for blood. Its methods are as brutal as they are efficient. Its weapons are as deadly as they are diverse. It will reduce entire villages to ash with blazing infernos and it will drown entire islands in the deep blue sea. It will erase ancient agrarian civilizations in the blink of an eye and engulf once fertile bioregions in billowing waves of towering sand dunes. 

This thing is coming after our most precious resources. It's targeting our food and our water and our children too. It's pitting us against each other, tribe against tribe, race against race, nation against nation, watching us rip each other to bits just for its own sick sadistic pleasure. Some people swear that it doesn't even exist, that it's some kind of boogeyman too ghastly to possibly be real, but then it gets them too. Others have gathered vast armies and built sweeping industries to hunt it down and reign it in. But nothing seems to work. Our deadliest weapons and most advanced technologies seem totally impotent in the shadow of this colossus, and it only seems to grow more merciless by the hour. What have we done to deserve this fate; we beg in our final hour. The beast just laughs and reminds us that we know exactly what we've done and that this is exactly what we deserve for our sins.

This creature has many names, myths passed down through the ages between wisemen, poets and heretics. Armageddon. Kali Yuga. Judgement Day. Ozymandias. The Second Coming. The Decline of the West. Most know it today by the title of climate change and despite what some of my fellow libertarians may tell you, this is indeed a very real monster stalking the human race, but the human race is anything but an innocent victim. All of these colorful monikers and metaphors are really little more than elaborate ways for mankind to disassociate itself from the fact that this creature is just the planet itself, Mother Earth, and that deadly bitch is out to spill the blood of her own children because we have spent centuries violating and debasing her for our own carnal pleasures.

We have dumped 365 million tons of carbon dioxide into her atmosphere just so we can drive glorified tanks from our gated suburban plantations to bullshit office jobs in half-empty cities and another 180 million tons has been added to the heap just so we can mow down forests to expand the sprawl. All of this garbage, this commercial ejaculate, has changed the very composition of the atmosphere itself and rendered our oceans into bottomless pits of acid that promise to corrode every last coral reef by the end of the century. 

Mother Earth is pissed, she is on a rampage, and as unpleasant as it may be to say out loud, we the species who have ravaged her probably deserve to die for our crimes. Climate change is a horror story alright, but if you're looking for cinematic allegories to our current existential predicament, you're going to have to look for something a little darker than your average monster movie or slasher flick. If climate change has a genre, then it is that of the much-reviled rape revenge picture. 

Made infamous by Wes Craven's 1972 debut shocker, The Last House on the Left, the oeuvre typically gets labeled as exploitation cinema and some of it may very well be, but Last House on the Left is one ugly parable deserving of far more respect than that label carries. The story of a group of sadists who rape and murder two teenage girls only to find themselves at the mercy of one of their victim's vengeful parents, Last House on the Left was actually a brutal statement about a nation who had willingly engaged in a genocidal war in Southeast Asia but was somehow mystified by the fact that their global campaign of ultraviolence had followed them back home in the form race riots and serial killings.

Few people seemed to get the message then and few people seem to get the message now. As Malcolm X astutely observed in the wake of the Kennedy Assassination, the chickens always come home to roost, and this time humanities preference for ignorance could very well lead to its own extinction. Even the liberal establishment's highly publicized global crusade to combat climate change amounts to little more than an arrogant and feckless gesture by a cabal of deranged ecological sex criminals. Solar farms, wind turbines and electric cars aren't solutions to this rampage. They are shallow attempts to pay off our terrestrial victim with trinkets of silence so we can continue on with our debauched modern lifestyles and this bribery will only be met by more violence. 

There exists no form of green energy on the planet that can adequately sustain our globalist, fossil-fueled superstate, our freeways and metropolises and world trade deals. That is because oil itself is not the problem, we are. This rapacious crime spree that defiled the planet began long before the automobile which has become its perpetrator's weapon of choice. It began with the Agricultural Revolution. This is when human beings first began to take more from the earth than what we gave back so we could take more and more and more.

Before this point in history, mankind had lived in relative harmony with the planet that sustained us, respecting her boundaries, seeking consent from her soil, and living within our means in a world without race, property, rigid gender roles or organized violence. But then human beings decided to take advantage of a healthy relationship and invented civilization to justify its predation. This is the kind of heinous mistake that only a rapist could make and Mother Earth's brutal campaign to avenge herself will not cease until mankind forfeits the cruel invention of modern progress and repents. 

This doesn't mean going green. This means going small. Drastically reducing our global presence by dismantling our entire multinational corporate infrastructure and returning to some form of sustainable village life. A world without highways. A world without skyscrapers or jumbo jets. A world without standing armies or the Westphalian nation state. Anything less will be met with nothing in the way of mercy, nor should it be. Unlike the murderous parents of Last House on the Left, our planet is not merely out for revenge. She is out for survival and if human beings refuse to cease living a lifestyle defined by an ecological rape culture, we will be erased.

This is the ugliest truth about climate change, the fact that it might be necessary to keep humanity from obliterating everything of beauty in its wake. With that being said, I am not a misanthropist. I happen to believe in the inherent goodness of mankind as exemplified by Peter Kropotkin in his magnum opus, Mutual Aid. Humanity only evolved to the level of intelligence that we have achieved by working together in harmony with nature. I believe that our choice to abandon that path is what has led us down the dark twisting road to the last planet on the left in an era of devolution that has led us to play the real monsters in our own horror movie. 

But I do not believe that it is too late, at least not for all of us. Our best hope as a species is to independently disengage with these systems designed for violation entirely and prepare our individual communities to withstand the earth's wrath against those who won't. This means dropping out of our rapacious economy with a self-sustaining network of autonomous communes and homesteads. This means abandoning government and replacing it with culture. A stateless counterculture of mutual aid, localism, voluntaryism, peace and perseverance. In other words, we don't need a Green New Deal, we need an Amish New Deal.

But more than anything, we must make peace with the creature stalking us and except responsibility for the fact that it was we who made its wrath inevitable. If not, we can expect nothing less than getting exactly what we deserve while we tell ourselves over and over again that it's only an apocalypse, it's only an apocalypse, it's only an apocalypse... while the credits slowly roll into the black abyss.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Untogether by Belly

* Asking for It by Hole

* Me and a Gun by Tori Amos

* Polly by Nirvana

* Ever by Flipper

* I Know the End by Phoebe Bridgers

* Suggestion by Fugazi

* Laughing With by Regina Spektor

* My War by Black Flag

* I'm Allowed by Buffalo Tom

 

The War on Trans is a War on Liberty

 There are some very powerful people who want you to hate me, and they will tell you some very terrible things to convince you that I am your enemy and most of these things have to do with my admittedly unconventional gender identity. The anti-trans movement will tell you that my gender identity is a mental illness that poses an existential threat to the very fabric of a functioning society. They will tell you that my gender identity is a totalitarian ideology cooked up by crypto-Marxist Ivy League wonks to enslave Christians under some genderless new world order. They will even tell you that my gender identity is a perverted conspiracy to sexualize your children and groom them into compliant victims. 

They will tell you pretty much anything except the fact that my gender identity is a heartfelt expression of my own individuality and when their smear campaign against me fails the multibillion-dollar machine behind the anti-trans movement will begin telling you terrible things about other people who are even more marginalized than I am to keep you scared of them becoming empowered too. In fact, they've already gotten started.

Every other talking point these people regurgitate seems to be a hymn to protecting children from my kind but what does the anti-trans movement really have to say about their favorite age demographic? Their propaganda paints young people as innocent, feeble-minded, dupes who lack anything in the way of agency. They would have you believe that your own children are too stupid to tell you who they are and that they should have zero expectation of privacy or free expression. 

These people don't just want any notion of the very existence of people like me to be removed from schools and public spaces, they want to transform these commons into a hyper-vigilante police state that carefully governs the conversations and behavior of young people and urges public officials to report on their movements to legal guardians like the Stasi. Basically, according to the supposed libertarians of the anti-trans movement, your civil rights do not exist until your 18th birthday and maybe not even then.

The latest target of the war on trans is the mentally disabled, in particular those who happen to find themselves on the autism spectrum. It's actually quite the turn if you think about it. Suddenly, these braying hate-mongers care very deeply about degenerate groomers like me, they just believe that we're all retarded whack-jobs getting played by big pharma. Their proof, if you can call it that, is the fact that a lot of trans people seem to be nuts. Fair enough, they're not totally wrong about this. Rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation do run pretty high among trans people but they're high for a reason. Trans people struggle to cope because we live in a society that demonizes anyone who doesn't fit into a very confining script and refuses to perform the roles assigned to us before we're even old enough to say, 'shut the fuck up.' 

As for autism, the prevalence of this "condition" in the overall trans community is not particularly well known but it is elevated among people actually seeking care for gender dysphoria for the simple reason that these people are more likely to receive a diagnosis. With that being said, having personally known plenty of people on the spectrum, both inside and out of the trans community, a correlation between the two would not be particularly shocking to me. Your average autistic person isn't even nuts, they're just someone wired to be incapable of falling for the bullshit of pointless social norms like the gender binary. This is an admirable trait that autistic people happen to share with children which I believe is the real reason why the very powerful people behind the anti-trans movement want them both to be singled out to be sufficiently governed. 

Much like the transgender phenomena itself, there is nothing particularly new about the anti-trans movement. These charlatans may paint themselves as a grassroots coalition of concerned parents fighting big government intrusion into Christian family life, but this is all just smoke. The anti-trans movement is actually just the latest crusade of the Christian Right. All of the big names pushing the most draconian legislation along with the barely literate talking points that drive it home are agents of the same millionaire moneychangers behind such social engineering projects as the PMRC and Satanic Panic. In fact, the two biggest anti-trans lobbies, the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council, are both little more than front groups for Focus on the Family, an organization founded by Jerry Fallwell's heir apparent, James Dobson. 

These people don't give a fuck about free speech or civil liberties. They aren't looking to reign in state power, they want to hijack it for their own jihad to turn America into an Evangelical Saudi Arabia. Trans people like me are simply their latest scapegoat. But their willingness to demonize and control other ungovernable populations in the name of religious liberty should tip you off to their true agenda and that agenda has less to do with pronouns and hormones than it does with social control.

Regardless of how you may feel about my gender identity, powerful people have always felt threatened by the culture of individual liberty that it represents. This is why Christian statists have been suppressing the existence of third genders since they hijacked the Bible and turned it into a weapon for the same empire that murdered Jesus. If something as fundamental as biology cannot be governed then nothing can. My gender is just a loose thread that threatens to unravel the entire tapestry of social constructs that powerful people like James Dobson have long relied on to keep poor people divided against each other while he walks off with their wallets.

The mainstream trans movement often pushes back against the notion of gender as a choice because it belittles the fact that most of us didn't choose this, but I think this is a mistake and it's one that betrays what defines us as a people. Gender isn't a choice, but shouldn't it be? Shouldn't everything be? This is what the Christian Right is so terrified of, and I say we give it to them with both barrels by embracing voluntaryism as the only philosophy truly compatible with radical Queer culture. But first let me tell you a few things that the powerful don't want you to know about me.

They don't want you to know that I am an individual that can't be stuffed into anyone's box. They don't want you to know that I am a lifelong anarchist and a registered Libertarian who actually believes in the small government that they secretly fear. They don't want you to know that am a devout Christo Pagan who follows the traditions of the early Celtic church that still held third genders like mine as sacred. They don't want you to know that I am a survivor of real child abuse and that this experience informs my opposition to the very existence of any compulsory school system. They don't want you to know that I was groomed by the Christian Right for eleven years in the Catholic Church and that I lose sleep over the fact that adults are still afforded the right to break children just because they can. They don't want you to know that I actually support your right to hate me, to say terrible things about me, and even to teach your children to hate themselves, just so long as you leave the law off of their bodies and afford them the right to think for themselves without being policed by the state.

More than anything though, the anti-trans movement doesn't want you to know that I am more like you than the statist fanatics who run their con job will ever be, and they don't want you to know that if they can eviscerate my rights, and the rights of children and disabled people and any other individual, then they can eviscerate your rights too. Hate me if you want. That's your right. I just thought you should know.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Been a Son by Nirvana

* Here by Soccer Mommy

* Plump by Hole

* Salt in the Wound by boygenius

* Criminal by Fiona Apple

* Divine Hammer by the Breeders

* Kool Thing by Sonic Youth

* Free to Decide by the Cranberries

The Lesser of Two Evils is a Democracy for Psychopaths

 Donald Trump has to be stopped. The man is a menace to democracy with an insatiable appetite for debauchery, a geriatric career gangster with a rap sheet longer than his Freudian phallic tie. The bastard has left a gruesome trail of mutilated corpses in shallow graves from Atlantic City to Jerusalem and has grievously molested nearly as many institutions as he has teenage sex workers with his greasy little orange pussy grabbers. His crimes have all been absurdly well publicized and flamboyantly brazen, yet somehow all the available polls seem to indicate that this Hammer House monster of a political supervillain could very well take the White House back with a vengeance again in 2024. The mind boggles at such madness. How? How could any sane human being possibly justify voting for such an unapologetically revolting sewer mutant? 

The answer is actually pretty simple, because Joe Biden has to be stopped. After all isn't he also a geriatric career gangster with an insatiable appetite for debauchery? Pretty much every mortal sin that Donald Trump has ever committed, Joe Biden has committed at least twice. The man is a barely veiled racist sexual predator and serial plagiarist who has built a seemingly endless career pushing Black children in front of armored police trucks before posing for selfies with Bono and telling a crowded Baptist church that he was the first white member of the Jackson Five. 

And now that crusty old bitch has added full-blown dementia to his routine. This is why the Democrats store him in a warehouse freezer in Delaware for most of the year and only cart him out when the wreckage of his administration needs to be publicly surveyed in order to prevent an all-out riot. The reasonably dire need to stop a creature like Donald Trump is the only reason why a creature like Joe Biden is even in the White House and the equally reasonably dire need to stop Joe Biden is simultaneously making Donald Trump's seemingly unthinkable return to the scene of the crime a very real possibility.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is American democracy in 2024 and everybody is doing it. While polls show the two grabbiest perverts in the convalescent home neck in neck in their crawl to the White House, they also show a country horrified by these options with CNN finding more people who despise both of these candidates than anybody who actually likes either one of them. This is the rotten fruit of the lesser of two evils, that despicably American fetish shoved down ever bored teenager's throat by jingoistic civics teachers since Jefferson was in nipple clamps.

"There are only two monsters to choose from and you have to vote for whichever one nauseates you the least, otherwise you forfeit the right to bitch about getting raped by one of them at your local drinking hole for the next four years." Fuck you, Mr. Fitzgerald, stop living in my skull. This is the twisted reasoning that has led us to a contest between the two most hated and depraved plutocrats since the last two war criminals who ran for Duce and Americans are beginning to resemble what they vote for.

In every living room, bar, and hair salon across the country you will find perfectly decent working-class human beings mounting passionate defenses for increasingly heinous crimes in the name of American democracy. You will find loving stay-at-home moms defending Donald Trump's attempts to shred the votes of other loving stay-at-home moms because Joe Biden had his flunkies in the media kick sand over the latest escapades of his crackhead son. You will hear hippie peaceniks justify Biden sending cluster munitions to Ukraine because Trump sold worse to the Saudis. This is sick and it just keeps getting worse. The lesser of two evils is nothing more than a mask of sanity to place on the face of an insatiable imperial beast, the kind of moral parlor trick that serves as the cornerstone for any psychopath and that is precisely the path that Americans have chosen. 

We are a country of descent people living comfortably in a spacious ranch house in the suburbs of the first world but there are bodies rotting in the basement and they have been there for a very long time. The imperial killer who built this house for us has done a masterful job of keeping its occupants detached from the crimes committed in our name across the globe but the chickens always come home to roost and the killers we sanction with our votes are increasingly bringing their work home with them, behaving like the dictators they sponsor in the third world while we all smile politely and wash the blood from our dishes before shouting "Everything's fine!" over the screams and power tools. We are living in a horror movie. We aren't the victims in this story yet, but we will be shortly if we don't find a way to flip the script and retake our dignity.

Had they stuck to politics, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy would have had a running shot at winning this game by 2028. After all, Ted was a handsome and charming Rockefeller Republican who worked as an assistant to the chairman of the Wahington state Republican Party and Gacy was a successful Chicago businessman whose work for the local Democratic Party earned him an audience with then First Lady Rosalyn Carter. So, which is the lesser evil? I'm fucking serious here, this is the system, isn't it? If it's Bundy vs Gacy 2028 then which is the responsible choice for American democracy? Bundy is great on taxes but pretty vile on women's lib but hey, at least he's straight and most of his victims are over the age of consent and somebody has to stop that killer clown.

Do you feel sick yet? Are you ashamed of yourself? Good, that's a start. It's a sign that you still have a functioning conscience but mark my words, you won't for long if we continue to use democracy as an excuse to avoid the uncomfortable fact that America is a fundamentally evil institution, one built on genocide and slavery, one that exports mass murder and fascism to every corner of the globe, and both parties are in on it. The candidates are irrelevant. They all serve the same masters, but they are getting worse because America is getting worse, and America is getting worse for the simple reason that evil is not sustainable. Human beings are not designed to live in an amoral cesspool indefinitely. We all crack eventually beneath the weight of our sins.

So, what do we do? Who do we vote for? Here's a radical idea, how about no one? This is a rigged system, and we all know it, so, let's stop justifying its increasingly demented existence by refusing to participate in it. Even if some knight in white shining armor from a third party managed to jump the barricade, what difference would it make? You could put Eugene goddamn Debbs in charge of a slaughterhouse, and it would still be a fucking slaughterhouse. So, let's boycott the slaughterhouse and demand something better as loudly as humanly possible. Let's protest the debates. Let's hold sit-ins outside the polling stations and demand direct referendums on the war in Ukraine and the runaway police state instead of ferrying these responsibilities out to known psychopaths.

Or just simply stop engaging the American government at all. Use your campaign donations to buy a patch of dirt in the sticks and start your own goddamn government. Turn the nearest abandoned box store into a squat and turn that squat into a commune. Do what the real hippies and the Amish did, drop out of a sickening system and start living like human beings again. But whatever you do, stop making excuses for people that we all know are evil just because the other guy sickens you more. That kind of relationship is abusive and believe it or not, you deserve better than to be governed by a democracy of psychopaths. We all do.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* The Future by Leonard Cohen

* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

* Soul to Squeeze by Red Hot Chili Peppers

* Evil by Interpol

* People II: The Reckoning by Andrew Jackson Jihad

* Sin by Nine Inch Nails

* The House That Dripped Blood by the Mountain Goats

* Won't Get Fooled Again by the Who

* The Ballad of Jim Jones by the Brian Jonestown Massacre

* Like Dylan In the Movies by Belle & Sebastian

Revo: Portrait of an Unrepentant All-American Junkie

 "...You made me forget myself, I thought I was someone else, someone good..."

-Lou Reed, American

Hey, have I ever told you guys about my friend Revo, the pansexual recovering everything-addict with a thousand lives and at least twice as many stories? There are so many, it's almost hard to know where to start. There's the time Revo stole his dealer's car with his dealer's girlfriend in it and trashed them both. Or how about the time that Revo got court martialed on terrorism charges after he threatened to blow up the Army base he was stationed at when they refused to serve him a Big Mac at the commissary during a bad acid trip? Or what about the time that an entire gang opened fire on Revo's shitty Toyota during a drug burn and the only one who caught a bullet was one of the stick-up artists? Then there's the time Revo crashed on the couch of a county sheriff in the Deep South for a whole month before that motherfucker even realized that he was harboring a wanted Army deserter. And the time that Revo's deadbeat dad faked his own death for the second time and only told his favorite bastard that he was still alive on Father's Day. Or the time that Revo woke up in a mental institution after a bender only to discover that his wife put him there so she could shack-up with his best friend. 

That's my buddy Revo, the all-American super junkie who will fuck anything that moves with an eight ball up their ass and that's probably the version of him that both he and America wants you to see. The dangerous and insatiable menace to society covered from head to toe in a shadowy camouflage of prison ink and track marks. Revo isn't even his real name, it's a nickname picked up in the joint that's short for Repeat Violent Offender. Naturally, the two of us got on from day one like a house on fire. Afterall, both of us are lifelong misfits who turned to anarchism after every other form of social arson failed to sooth the rage that we share for the society that discarded us like trash. Playing the role of the villain can feel like a safe place when you spend your life running and that's the other side of Revo that very few people ever see. My buddy Revo was born Justin Pomeroy and Justin has just as many stories.

These stories just happen to be a lot less glamorous and a lot harder to tell with that cocky meth-head grin that makes Revo come across like an extra in a pirate film. The story of a sensitive effeminate kid raised by wolves in family clothing. The story of a little boy who was sold for drugs by his own mother and molested more times than he could count before he was old enough to even know what sex was. The story of a child bounced from foster home to foster home to juvenile detention center until he was too institutionalized to see straight. A white trash scale from a busted-up town who ended up in the Army because he didn't know any other way out of the holler. A crack shot marksman who watched nearly every brother in his platoon get blown to bits killing other poor people in Iraq. A disgraced veteran who turned back to his childhood friend heroin to make the screams stop before moving on to crystal meth and doing a decade in prison for killing a man who tried to kill him during a drug burn.

These are the stories about Revo that few people ever hear, not because Revo isn't willing to tell them but because most people can't be bothered to listen. Justin is Revo and Revo is an unrepentant veteran of the War on Drugs with all the scars to prove it, but he is also so much more than that. He is a gifted artist who hands out tattoos like party favors and writes songs that burn holes through your soul. He is one of the funniest and most resourceful people that I've ever met, and I am proud to tell anyone who'll listen that I love that twisted fucking bastard like a brother. My brother just happens to have an addiction to obliterating himself in nearly every single way imaginable and it breaks my heart that we live in a country that seems to agree that this is the hellish fate that he deserves.

All of these politicians wax philosophic and cry crocodile tears over the innocent victims of America's opioid crisis, but that notion is a contrived fiction pimped out for campaign dollars. There are no innocent victims of the opioid crisis because the War on Drugs has made them all guilty. Your average dealer and indeed your average repeat violent offender is your average junkie, and your average junkie is a child abused by the same system that both parties are currently engaged in using addiction to justify putting on life support.

The Republicans are the worst, calling for people like Revo to be shot in the streets as enemy combatants of the cartels, but the Democrats aren't much better. For every dollar they promise to spend on Narcan there is another ten that they want to hurl to the bevy of industrial complexes that take kids like Justin and convert them into menacing super predators like Revo and I'm not just talking about the armies, prisons and cops. I'm talking about the blatantly abusive compulsory schools and so-called child welfare programs like the foster care system that feed them with fresh recruits of broken and institutionalized little bodies every fucking day. And way too many of these bodies are Queer for that to just be a coincidence.

Nearly every study on the subject shows that Queer kids like me and Justin experience far higher rates of physical, sexual and emotional abuse then our heterosexual playmates. We are also more than twice as likely to experience foster care placement where the Supreme Court has decided that we should be many more times as likely to face violence, exploitation, discrimination and neglect as a price for the religious liberties of parental slavedrivers. From here many of my fellow Queer child abuse survivors like Revo graduate to other beloved American institutions of systemic violence like the military where their rage and boredom are mined and weaponized to kill even more broken kids until they too break beneath the weight of the trauma and get emptied out into the streets with nothing but a prescription to numb the nightmares and an endless procession of gladhanding assholes thanking them for their service before calling the cops to have them carted off the streets.

I wish I could tell you that there is a cure for addiction just like I wish I could tell you that my buddy Revo isn't going to return to the needle again, but fairytales are for politicians, and I refuse to traffic in those kinds of narcotics just to make myself feel better. What I can tell you is that the government has never done a goddamn thing for people like Revo other than to give them more reasons to use. I can also tell you that Revo stopped using narcotics for eight months straight after joining my little Queer anarchist tribe of broken toys because we are the first family that he has ever had that hasn't demanded his sobriety in exchange for our support. We've all been hurt too many times ourselves to pretend like we have any right to judge him that way. But we also love him too goddamn much to give up on him and let him believe all the bullshit institutions that convinced a scared child that he was too broken to exist without poison in his veins. And together we carry this weight so no one has to carry it alone.

This is the only real defense that any of us have against the state, its trauma, and the addictions that they feed, and that defense is called community, any group of people more committed to each other's mutual aid than any other ideology or institution. If you really want to help a junkie, then start by remembering that addicts are just human beings doing what they feel they have to do to get by and maybe try throwing some empathy their way before pushing a bunch of laws that just make them somebody else's problem. Just a few thoughts from an unrepentant misfit who happens to love an all-American junkie. 

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Fall Back Down by Rancid

* In the Garage by Weezer

* Like a Friend by Pulp

* My Way by Sid Vicious

* If I Ever Leave This World Alive by Flogging Molly

* Joiner by Blondshell

* I Am Trying to Break Your Heart by Wilco

* Doll Parts by Hole

* Hardline by Julien Baker

* Pictures of Success by Rilo Kiley

* You Can't Put Your Arm Around a Memory by Johnny Thunders

* See a Little Light by Bob Mould

* Perfect Day by Lou Reed

The Long Shadow of Yevgeny Prigozhin's Ghost or: How the New Cold War Became Another Slave War

 And just like that, they declared the Devil dead. After a meteoric career that found him playing the role of the bane of quite literally everyone's existence, Yevgeny Prigozhin: Russian super mercenary was annihilated in a death straight out of an eighties action flick. Burnt beyond recognition in a fiery plane crash with nine of his goons just north of Moscow in the rural Tvor Oblast.

Much like the rest of Yevgeny Prigozhin's biography, his demise seemed downright improbable but that doesn't mean it isn't true. A Soviet gangster-turned hotdog vendor who had climbed his way to the top of Yeltsin's crony capitalist dystopia to spin a catering empire into a globetrotting crypto-fascist death squad, Yevgeny the Terrible burst into flames as one of the most universally despised men on the planet. A real-life supervillain whose fearsome Wagner Group nearly single-handedly turned the tide of Putin's hopeless jihad to conquer Ukraine only to bite the hand that fed him caviar and human flesh by launching a mutiny against the Kremlin that ended as quickly and as weirdly as it had begun. But then in a poof of smoke, he was gone.

My first response was 'Bullshit!' There had to be a different angle here. The whole thing just didn't add up to me. On the two-month anniversary of his highly publicized and humiliating 24-hour uprising against Putin's rule, a career killer, all-but marked for death, gets on board a private jet headed straight for enemy territory with his fucking name on the charter. I'm just not buying it. 

How do we even know if this motherfucker is really dead? The paranoid side of me is thinking that Nosferatu is living it up on a steady diet of Johnnie Walker and brown-brown down in some Sub-Saharan outback, playing warlord to a bunch of teenage dope fiends in Toyota technicals. And I tend to trust the paranoid side of me. That bitch has a pretty tight record. 

But the rest of the world seems strangely content to just except the Devil's mysterious death at face value and move on. After making a few mincingly maudlin remarks designed to cream the panties of his tankie war-blogger fan-club, Putin publicly washed his hands like Pontius Pilate and disappeared back into his hole in the Kremlin. For his part, Putin's dilapidated Yankee counterpart, Joe Biden, basically just grumbled 'Putin did it" and declared the whole thing to be a "sideshow" before cautioning us all not to get too distracted from the big picture of blowing Ukraine to bits.  

Regardless of Prigozhin's true fate, both sides of an increasingly paranoid proxy war in Eastern Europe seem to be in complete agreeance that there is nothing to see here, and this fact fascinates me more than any conspiracy theory. Usually, the moneychangers in the war rooms of Babylon jump on any narrative that makes Vladimir Putin look like Ra's al Ghul with ICBMs and their doppelgangers in the Kremlin generally aren't too far behind them, declaring every body that shows up on their doorstep to be an American false flag operation. So why not this time? Why is the burnt offering of Prigozhin's presumed corpse the only smoldering heap that these creeps refuse to poke with a stick? 

If I were a gambling gal, I would hedge my bets on the possibility that this has something to do with the fact that what old Yevgeny represents is actually a whole lot more terrifying to a world at war than anything he actually was. Contrary to popular lore, the Wagner Group were a relatively insignificant horde of neo-Nazi hitmen for the lion's share of their putrid existence, but world wars have a tendency to make mountains out of mutants. 

Founded by Prigozhin following the 2014 NATO coup in Ukraine as a way for Moscow oligarchs to hijack legitimate popular dissent among ethnic Russians in the Donbass, Wagner evolved into a cruel posse of career sadists tasked with carrying out the dirty work that even a wanna-be despot like Vladimir Putin couldn't afford on his rap sheet. This all changed in 2022 when the Kremlin once again used the plight of the Donbass as an excuse for imperial plunder. This is when Putin opened the gates of his gulags to Prigozhin and Wagner transformed overnight into a formidable army of modern-day gladiators. 

Between February and December of 2022, western intelligence sources estimate that Wagner's ranks swelled from just several thousand to nearly 50,000 with the majority of the new recruits being Russian convicts offered the opportunity to fight for their freedom. To these men, Putin's "special operation" in Ukraine wasn't about denazification or national chauvinism, it was about their own liberation from one of the most heinous prison systems on earth and they fought like starving lions to receive it. 

But Mother Russia never had any intention of living up to their end of the bargain. To the Kremlin, Wagner's new recruits were nothing but expendable sacks of meat to be chucked into NATO's woodchipper. Tens of thousands of these desperate convicts were eviscerated in waves in Bakhmut alone and even after they actually managed to win that holocaust, they found themselves under attack from the regular Russian infantry who they were ordered to hand the territory back over to.

This isn't to say that Prigozhin was some kind of Spartacus, he just played one online to keep his men in toe, bragging about his own checkered past as a convict and playing the part of the rebel warlord for the camera phones. During a period of near universal consensus on the omnipotence of Putin's military brilliance among the Russian intelligentsia, Yevgeny stood virtually alone in provocatively thumbing his nose at the Czar with social media posts trashing his Kremlin sponsors. 

I'm of the opinion that this performance only became real when Prigozhin's star grew too bright and brazen for his master's comfort. He had to be reined in, but Comrade Spartacus was having too much fun to stop. The last straw came when the generals ordered Prigozhin to hand over his private army to the regular command structure before he was done playing the bad motherfucker.

This is when Prigozhin decided to launch his mutiny, a high octane hissy fit that saw an army of heavily tattooed war slaves take a major Russian army town like Rostov-on-Don with shocking ease before being met in the streets by local civilians like heroes. It turns out that Prigozhin's populist schtick sold big with the rest of the Russian population as well. A population who clearly hates NATO but hates their own nation's military industrial complex even more. And why shouldn't they? After all, Yevgeny's Heroes weren't the only indentured servants coming home in pine boxes. 800,000 Russian citizens have been conscripted against their will in this war and over 200,000 of them have died for the vanity of the same elites whom that former hot dog vendor dared to piss on.

Even after Comrade Spartacus was bought off in some strange deal brokered by Belarussian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, the specter of a renegade army of motley slaves bringing a former superpower to its knees remained toxic to forces far greater than the Kremlin. Joe Biden and his handlers have little interest in highlighting Putin's cantankerous slave army because they themselves are currently lording over one of their own in the nation NATO loves to burn with Raytheon matches. 

The official number of Ukraine's conscripts remains a tightly guarded secret, but Volodymyr Zelensky has sealed off his borders to all men between the ages of 18 and 60 and has declared his own dirty war against a growing tide of Ukrainians trying to escape an endless fucking war that makes less and less sense to the average prole with each passing hour.

In the beginning, Ukrainian conscripts were simply tasked with defending their own cities and these poorly trained civilians kicked ass for the same reason the gulag refugees in Wagner did, they were literally fighting for their own freedom. But after Putin's army retreated back to the Donbass, these victorious freedom fighters were sent to die in someone else's city. 

Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 largely on the strength of his promise to uphold the Minsk Agreement that was supposed to end NATO's war on the Donbass by granting that region the nominal autonomy they deserve. Now, after declaring martial law and being fed a steady diet of American tax dollars, Zelensky has declared his intention to fight forever to conquer that same damn territory and the Ukrainian people are calling bullshit by deserting in droves. 

Biden and Putin don't want anyone paying close attention to this because it all highlights the fact that neither side of this stupid fucking war is actually interested in fighting it anymore and they would both prefer that Yevgeny Prigozhin simply evaporate like a hot fart in a stiff wind because alive or dead he is a terrifying reminder that any army of slaves is just one mutiny away from a revolution. 

The antiwar war movements in both the east and the west need to approach ending this holocaust like abolitionists because whether they are convicts or conscripts or just desperate teenagers from dead-end towns, your average standing army is comprised largely of what any sane anarchist should recognize as a slave. The best hope we have to end this war and all wars is to encourage the slaves on every side to revolt the same way we did with the GI Movement that sabotaged the Vietnam War in a beautiful wave of officer fraggings and mass desertions.

Yevgeny Prigozhin may or may not be dead, but abolition lives on in the throat of every soldier shouting "Sir! No sir!" to a bullshit war with zero winners outside of the fucking yacht club and that's a mutiny we should all get in on.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* All Along the Watchtower by the Jimi Hendrix Experience

* I'll Believe in Anything by Wolf Parade

* Wardance by Killing Joke

* White Collar Boy by Belle & Sebastian

* Can't You Hear Me Knocking by the Rolling Stones

* El President by Drugstore featuring Thom Yorke

* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

* This is Why We Fight by the Decembrists

* We've Gotta Get Out of This Place by the Animals

* Atmosphere by Joy Division