"Kids These Days": Ending the American Tradition of Demonizing the Young

 

"History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened."

-Hunter S. Thompson

Kids these days, right? With their raucous campus meltdowns and their Maoist TikTok propaganda and their weird designer pronouns and their K-pop trap-hop gibber music. A motherfucker can't even tell a good 'dumb pollack' joke anymore without getting digitally lynched by a posse of iPhone wielding stoners with pink pubic hair and thrice pierced genitalia. I mean what in Archie Bunker's name is this world coming to? These kids think they run the goddamn universe now, that they can just cancel wars like TV shows, customize their own gender like ordering a pizza, never ever get any kind of real job, and save the world from the old just by being obnoxiously young... And you know what? They are absolutely fucking right.

No matter how bitter, old, and jaded you may get, it is always of the utmost importance to maintain a functioning bullshit detector, so you know exactly when one of the myriads of morally broke power systems is trying to buffalo you, and the moment that anyone with any institutional gravitas begins to gripe about 'kids these days' that buffalo bullshit detector should go berserk because it usually means that said 'kids' have stumbled over some long concealed existential truth and now run the risk of using their collective energy for something dangerous for a change.

And when pretty much everybody starts shouting 'kids these days' at the top of their lungs it usually means that the kids have taken the truth to the next level and that the status quo is likely preparing to cull their own young for the unforgivable sin of the calling adults out on their bullshit. But for what it's worth, after taking a good look around, even a bitter old, jaded bitch like me has to acknowledge that there is plenty of bullshit to call out here.

Don't get me wrong, I've had my own gripes with 'kids these days.' You've probably read them right here. I may be an unrepentant genderfuck feminazi, but I also happen to like my 'dumb pollack' jokes and I legitimately believe that those goddamn flickering idiot boxes you call smartphones are worse than crystal meth. However, right here, right now, in this perilous age of proxy holocausts and AI facilitated environmental devastation, these fucking kids on my lawn are right on the money where it counts.

These are the same kids who were manipulated by the Democratic Party into believing that you can buy hope and change at the ballot box from a career white supremacist as long as his running mate is the first intersex Samoan to prosecute minors on the moon. The ones who were sucked dry of any kind of a future by the debt-lords of the corporate campus industrial complex who sent their tuition checks directly to fucking Israel and Ukraine while they burned holes in the ozone layer with their private jets. And for all this shit and more, these kids are done. They are done with voting for the lesser of two rapists. They are done working dead-end jobs for shit pay. They are done being imprisoned by gender norms and sexual mores that are somehow both coldly modern and completely outdated. They are done with all of it and, naturally, the adults are pissed.

Every other asshole over thirty seems to be convinced that the 'kids these days' are just ripping up the fabric of western society for the lulz, but if any of them chugged enough Geritol to remember before breakfast they would realize that pretty much all of this supposedly shockingly unprecedented shit has happened before and for most of the same reasons. 

Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, there was another generation who got fed up with being hoodwinked by racist liberal do-gooders who passed civil rights laws with one hand and sent the National Guard into the ghetto with the other. They called these kids hippies, and they too hijacked the diploma mills that mugged them to protest their collusion with genocide in the third world. They too rejected the empty promises of the 'American Dream' in favor of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. They too questioned the logic of institutional forgone conclusions like gender roles and sexual piety. 

And if memory serves me correctly, these crazy fucking 'kids these days' came so close to provoking a full-blown revolution that 'the man' fired the president, repealed the draft, and pulled troops out of Indochina just to force the wave to break before it reached the Pentagon. But whatever happened to those crazy kids? Kids crazy enough to believe that they could save the world just by refusing to play by its rules. Kids just crazy enough to make it possible. Where did all those beautiful flower children go to?

They went to Washington and Wall Street and became the adults who spit on their own children for not standing in a straight line. The hippies of the sixties and seventies were carefully lured into the clutches of the Democratic Party where they were coaxed into selling out their individuality for totems of 'equity and inclusion' like state sanctioned same-sex monogamy and serial killers of color in the Oval Office. I would dearly love to tell you dearest motherfuckers that this cruel fate was merely a case of twisted irony but it's not. This is how the system works and if we don't do something drastic it's just going to keep working this way until this planet can't even support another generation to piss its parents off.

Institutional ageism is the original sin of state sanctioned bigotry, and it is a necessarily obligatory one for the simple reason that the state is an unnatural habitat that children have to be groomed into accepting as inevitable. We are all born free, screaming bloody naked for freedom. It is the system, a tight network of corporate conglomerates and federal institutions, that transforms unruly kids into compliant citizens with their schools and their churches and their pharmaceuticals and their network television propaganda. We are all told as teenagers that our youthful rebellion is merely a phase not worthy of careful consideration but this rebellion is in fact a natural reaction to human beings maturing to the point of no longer being able to deny that they are essentially slaves to the system before it can finish brainwashing them.

The last defense of the status quo is a sort of generational assimilation. After being mauled for a while by truncheon swinging cops, the adults ply the unruly holdouts of youthful rebellion with designer drugs and consumer technology and empty trinkets of inclusion like watered down civil rights legislation and a more humanitarian approach to imperial intervention, and once the kids are locked into this plush prison lifestyle, the system sicks them on the next generation for threatening their new position at the bottom of the totem pole.

We have to break this cycle, not just because it's sick but because the planet simply can't survive another round of it. The American Empire may be on the brink of collapse, but these adults have gone crazy with 'inclusion', and they seem more than willing to bring us all down with the ship in a final avalanche of climate terrorism and driving nuclear ordinances. As wild as it may sound, these 'kids these days' may be our only hope and the only way we are going to save them from being assimilated by those goddamn smartphones is to fucking listen to them, give them a seat at the table, and consider the very real possibility that they may actually be wiser than us for the simple fact that they are less indoctrinated.

This doesn't mean that they're always right. They really should knock it off with the iPhones and political correctness. But every generation should be encouraged to challenge the last one, to piss us off and question what we think we know. This is how we raise anarchists instead of citizens and this is how we raise the high-water mark just above the Pentagon's throat.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Satanist by Boygenius

* My Generation by the Who

* Bastards of the Young by the Replacements

* All Born Screaming by St. Vincent

* Doubt by Slow Pulp

* Blank Generation by Richard Hell & the Voivods

* Adult Diversion by Alvvays

* Oh! You Pretty Things by David Bowie

* Salad by Blondshell

* Just Like Kids by Hinds

Edgelords and Snowflakes: Searching for a Radical Libertarian Movement in an Age of Liberal Hysteria

 "Libertarianism is a people's movement and a liberation movement. it seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people may voluntarily associate, dis-associate and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to idiosyncrasies. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status."

-Karl Hess

"As far as I’m concerned, ‘liberal’ is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privilege, then they are ‘liberal’. But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler."

-Assata Shakur

I didn't exactly go looking to become a libertarian. I spent most of my life as a very pissed off Marxist looking to get even with a system that seemed to crush the weak just for kicks. Being trans in rural Pennsylvania during the nineties, I had no fucking idea I was trans. I didn't even know what that word meant. All I knew is that I was different, and I didn't want to be normal. Normal people ran the schools that molested me, the prisons they were modeled on, and the wars that kept everyone around me too distracted and stupid to care. So, I looked to third world outsiders like Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Frantz Fanon for advice and that advice seemed to fit until I finally found out what trans was.

Discovering my Queer tribal heritage changed everything. I still hated the schools, prisons, and wars, but now I was part of a minority that traced its roots back to pagan third gender antiquity and I wasn't particularly interested in giving my long-lost heritage up for some kind of mono-class struggle that painted the entire rainbow the same shade of red. I began to understand what Mikhail Bakunin was talking about when he waxed philosophic about the tyranny of the "people's stick."

So, I turned to anarchism, but I was shocked and a bit revolted to discover that so-called free market anarchists like Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, and Samuel Edward Konkin III made the most sense to a freak like me. Radical libertarianism, with its focus on strictly voluntary societies and absolute local autonomy felt like the most viable option for a minority who actually wanted to remain a minority without being crushed by the majority. Voluntaryism felt like Malcolm X for weird people, and it felt good.

Ironically, my devotion to Queer autonomy seemed to put me at odds with a lot of leftists who claimed to be my allies, with the culture war they fought in my name forming the widest ideological divide. I felt like I was more than sufficiently "woke" but it also felt illogical for me to empower the state to enforce my beliefs on others, especially when this same state always seems to find new excuses to use its powers against minorities like mine. 

So, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of defending the rights of QAnon vaxxers and gay bashing bakers in the name of liberty because liberty is either for everybody or nobody and I clocked in more than enough hours during my childhood as nobody to ever be willing to risk that fate again. Besides, when it all came down to it, the so-called leftists who put the most stock into actually enforcing their hip wokeness seemed to be just another bunch of straight white liberals talking out of their ass to justify giving fangs to a system designed by straight white liberal ass-talkers, for straight white liberal ass-talkers.

Unsurprisingly, this take has been met with great enthusiasm by many libertarians tired of being called bigots just for being consistent and I was tempted to believe that maybe, just maybe, this radical genderfuck heretic had found a second place where she could belong among them. Sadly, it didn't take long for me to be disappointed, and nothing has made it more painfully obvious that I was wrong about the modern American libertarian movement than their response to the current uprisings on campuses across the country demanding an end to American facilitated genocide in Gaza.

These are predominantly peaceful protestors occupying public property to protest their tuition being used to sell bombs to an openly fascist state and they are getting mauled by local cops in combat drag under the directives of the Department of Homeland Security, all in the name of social order and protecting the feelings of pompous rich kids who can't tell the difference between opposing apartheid and antisemitism. 

If there was ever an obvious cause for libertarians to get behind it's this one. But somehow ninety percent of the noise coming from the libertarian movement on our government's open war on college dissent amounts to excuses in defense of the universities. Apparently, since these occupations are occurring on university property then universities have every right to govern it with fire as they see fit. My only question is what fucking planet do you people live on? Because it clearly isn't in this galaxy and the drugs there must be fantastic.

Your average state university is a glorified Ponzi scheme kept thriving by the federally facilitated shakedown of its student's debt. Everything these corporatist institutions own is the product of theft and is thus legally classified as public property. Students aka the public are using that property peacefully to oppose state facilitated mass murder and you're seriously going to sit there and call yourself a libertarian while making excuses for government agents who open fire on them with tear gas and rubber bullets?

What we are seeing on campus is the very worst of what big government has to offer and naturally, it's sock puppets on the Hill want to make it much worse. The House has already passed the so-called Antisemitism Awareness Act, which essentially makes the use of any speech critical of a single foreign government an act of discrimination that a university can be penalized for failing to silence. There are also laws being thrown around Washington suggesting that protestors be deported, placed on no-fly lists, or even shipped straight to the killing fields of Gaza, and where is the libertarian outrage?

After years of these people rightfully raging against the machine in defense of the rights of vaccine conspiracy theorists and fag-bashing comedians, the only ones who have anything to say about this tax assisted gestapo cosplay are either my friends on the fringe of the movement (you know who you are) or the people tacitly defending the powerful. Meanwhile, the Libertarian Party website continues to excuse the holocaust in Gaza because "Hamas is using civilians as human shields" while recognizing "Israel's right to defend itself against Hamas aggression." As a member of the Pennsylvania Libertarian Party, I'm disgusted, but as a Queer anarchist, I am not particularly shocked.

I'm not particularly shocked for two reasons. The first is that these self-proclaimed libertarians have displayed their cowardice before very recently by failing to mount any meaningful opposition to the GOP's war on trans people like me. Over 550 anti-trans bills have been pushed in 42 states in 2024 already, breaking records for the fourth consecutive year in a row before it's even halfway over. 330 of these bills remain active and they advocate using the full weight of the government to do pretty much whatever the fuck they want. 

They advocate prohibiting any form of public gender expression that local judges deem to be "male or female impersonation", they advocate charging librarians with misdemeanors for providing minors with materials that certain Baptists deem harmful, they advocate carefully regulating classroom discussions and forcing administrators to violate student privacy rights by requiring them to out their pupils to their parents, they advocate banning the use of gender affirming healthcare supported by every major medical association on earth for minors and even some adults... and this list literally goes on for miles.

All of this big government social engineering is done in the name of "antiwoke" and most of it has provoked nary a yawn from libertarians. That is because your average libertarian now considers themselves to be antiwoke and your average antiwoke libertarian is really just a different species of white liberal ass-talker. I call it liberalism with an Austrian accent and it's the other reason why the movement's collective decision to sell out the campus free Palestine protests fails to shock me. 

Over the last several years the Libertarian Party has been subject to a civil war. On one side is the party's jaundiced and moribund old guard who have devoted most of their attention to failing to win elections by running flunked Republican dope smokers like Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, and on the other side is the insurgent Mises Caucus, whose answer to the rise of Republican Lite is to court alt-right shocktavists with edgy memes and politically incorrect humor.

The result is a party full of snowflakes and edgelords, either too scared to piss off Never Trumpers still diluted by the influence of the Israel lobby or too busy trying to look tough to MAGA folk by telling naughty jokes about minorities. Neither side has the fucking balls for ideological consistency and all of these pussies are missing out on the opportunity to turn-on minorities like mine who are fleeing what passes for the left in this country in droves for letting us down with their own liberal bullshit.

What we really need is a truly radical libertarian movement divorced from Randian propertarianism and based on the principles that the original libertarian movement was founded on. Both Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner were rabid abolitionists who considered themselves to be socialists as well as free market individualists. Murray Rothbard was a member of the Peace and Freedom Party before he sold out to the Buchanan wing of the GOP and Karl Hess died a goddamn Wobbly.

This movement has never had a thing to do with white liberal ass-talkers, regardless of whether they call their statist social engineering schemes woke or antiwoke. It is about building a truly voluntary society where everyone is a minority, and every minority has power. It is about a stateless community that puts the individual before the tyranny of schools, prisons, and wars because that's what we all deserve. 

I may be a genderqueer, post-left, social justice apostate but that still makes me at least twice the fucking libertarian as any Zionist snowflake or Mises edgelord and I want my fucking movement back. Please, please, please fucking tell me that I'm not the only one.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding by Elvis Costello

* You Learn by Alanis Morrissette

* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins

* Anything But Me by MUNA

* Guerrilla Radio by Rage Against the Machine

* I've Been Tired by the Pixies

* Best of You by Foo Fighters

* Tell Em by Sleigh Bells

* You're So Vain by Carly Simon

* Freedom by Rage Against the Machine

The Road to a Stateless Axis of Resistance

 "Modernity is one of the most delicate and vital issues confronting us, the people of non-European countries and Islamic Societies. A more important issue is the relationship between an imposed modernization and genuine civilization. We must discover if modernity as is claimed is a synonym for being civilized, or if it is an altogether different issue and social phenomenon having no relation to civilization at all. Unfortunately, modernity has been imposed on us, the non-European nations, in the guise of civilization."

-Ali Shariati

"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write."

-Michel Foucault

The American Empire has really fucked up and they have fucked up pretty predictably, in a way that so many empires before it have fucked up that it's downright cliche. America, in its infinite exceptionalism, has bitten off way more than it can chew on the world stage and created a downright formidable alliance devoted to its destruction in the process. I speak now of the Axis of Resistance, a loosely affiliated, ragtag coalition of rogue states and militias who, after decades of crushing western Frankenstein monsters like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, have finally trained their sites on America's original Middle Eastern terrorists in Israel. At first glimpse it may appear that Babylon and their Zionist proxies are winning this war, what with the mountain of dead children reaching the clouds above Gaza, but I implore you to look again.

While Israel horrifies a world with too many smartphones to ignore the Nakba anymore, Houthi rebels have launched over 60 attacks against imperial shipping in the Red Sea, the Islamic Resistance of Iraq has launched over 150 airstrikes against American bases across the Middle East, Hezbollah has made the northern region of Israel virtually uninhabitable with their own artillery barrage, and Iran has joined the melee by throwing over 300 rockets and drones into Israel's Iron Dome, all while all of the above remain under heavy sanctions and military siege by the United States and its western partners. 

The material results of this unprecedented onslaught are far less relevant than the propaganda that these deeds has delivered to a watching world and that propaganda tells us all that the power of the American Empire is worthless in the face of a few pissed off peasants with homemade drones and nothing left to lose. And while these renegades rage, those of us in the west who have stumbled over our conscience in the coverage of the slaughter in Gaza rage with them, creating the most formidable antiwar movement any empire has seen in decades.

Even if Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden manage to succeed in ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip, the damage to American prestige and its malignant influence over the Islamic world may be irreversible. Israel, Babylon's bloody jewel in the desert, could very well become Uncle Sam's Waterloo and it won't be China or Russia dancing over his grave either. Those overworked wannabe superpowers are far too busy policing their own increasingly rambunctious and ungovernably massive populations. 

No, the true victors of this third-world third world war will be the militias, modern day reflections of the ancient tribes that once roamed these deserts freely before some WASP in beige short pants drew a bunch of lines all over them. We really should have seen this coming. Even before America gave those militias a crash course in three-dimensional warfare with the War on Terror, all the pieces of this set match were already firmly in place, but somehow Michel Foucault seemed to be the only white man who knew the chessboard.

You see, Iran is not the primary source of the Axis of Resistance's momentum. If that were true, their own republic wouldn't be as corrupt and toothless as any of their neighbors. While Iran has actually done very little in response to Israel's mounting atrocities, the Shia militias who are supposedly their proxies have set a thousand raging dumpster fires across the region, often while the Mullahs begged them to tone it down. That's because the Houthis and the Popular Mobilization Forces don't actually answer to Iran. 

They answer to the Islamic Revolution, a popular uprising against a wealthy and decadent western monarchy that succeeded with zero backing from any foreign world power thanks to an eclectic united front of young anti-imperialists galvanized against the spiritual emptiness of the colonial Enlightenment. This was the original Axis of Resistance, a weird coalition of communist college students and Shia clerics who looked not to Moscow or Beijing for influence, but inward towards their region's own tribal traditions that strove for solidarity through diversity. 

Tehran was never meant to be the final destination of this strangely old revolution. The more radical founding fathers of the Iranian Islamic Guards like the Fatah-trained Mohammad Montazeri and the Fidel Castro influenced Mostafa Chamran strove to form an "Islamic International" against capitalism, Zionism, and Wahabism, drawing on Ali Shariati and the Ayatollah Khomeini's notion of the "solidarity of the oppressed." 

But an impoverished nation like Iran, crippled by mounting international sanctions and sabotage, never would have been able to sustain this wild dream without the help of a meddlesome American empire constantly crashing into their backyard and changing the property lines. There would be no Sadrists without Saddam Hussein's American backed rampage against the Shia tribesmen of modern Mesopotamia. There would be no Hezbollah without the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon. There would be no Islamic Resistance in Iraq without the War on Terror.

And as this Axis of Resistance to western imperial chaos stretched and grew increasingly diverse, the Iranian government's influence over its actions and ambitions began to wane. The Sadrists lashed out openly against the Mullahs' influence over Bagdad, the Houthi rebels overthrew a dictatorship that Tehran still wanted to groom in Sanaa, and Hezbollah refused to bow to the Mullahs' corrupt quislings in Beirut. 

The Axis of Resistance may not be a traditionally anarchist arrangement, it has always been an uneasy alliance of rogue states like Iran and Syria and non-state actors like the Houthis and Hezbollah, but the fascinating thing about this arrangement is that the longer the American war machine overstays its welcome in the region, the more rogue these non-state actors seem to become, to the point where the supposed proxies are beginning to overpower the influence of their funders back in Tehran.

Both Hezbollah and the Sadrists have formed fully functioning parallel governments to the states that Iran props up within their nation's borders and the populations that they serve have rallied around these stateless alternatives to central governance, forming thriving, diverse, and autonomous communities while the states they reject rot. This same strategy of crowdsourced Islamic rebellion has proven equally successful in the new war on Zionist terrorism as well. Poorly armed militias from Hodeida to Fallujah have gone rogue to cripple international maritime trade and pin down illegal American troop movements while Washington fails miserably to stop them. Just look to the Red Sea if you don't believe men.

After bombing Houthi targets in Yemen over 148 times since January, Joe Biden has thrown up his hands and openly admitted defeat. Tim Lenderking, Biden's special envoy to Yemen, announced in early April that the administration was open to "diplomatic solutions" including ending certain sanctions and recognizing the legitimacy of the Houthi government. The Houthis thought about it for a couple of weeks and then started shooting again, even expanding their targets to the Indian Ocean while informing condescending jackals like Biden and Lenderking that they weren't interested in engaging their humanitarian blackmail.

Western anti-imperialists can learn a lot from this Axis of Resistance and at the risk of once again being declared a heretic by my fellow anarchists, maybe we should even consider swallowing our ideological puritan pride and fucking join them. After all, wasn't it a broad and diverse coalition of third world states and first world stateless actors that nearly turned the movement against the Vietnam War into an international revolution? You will never defeat a massive conglomerate of oppression like the American Empire with a single ideology. Foucault, himself a proudly decadent Queer anarchist heretic, recognized this fact and was roundly ridiculed by his fellow comrades on the left for suggesting that Islam could be a viable force against imperialism that should be taken seriously. But shouldn't it be? 

What we really need now is to make the Axis of Resistance increasingly stateless by increasing the involvement of a diverse array of stateless actors across the globe, from street fighting anarchists like antifa and the black blocks to modern day militias like the Boogaloo Boys and Black Guns Matter. From third world liberation movements like the EZLN and the YPG to first world black market entrepreneurs like the Hell's Angels and the Latin Kings.

The dream is not simply to create a stateless international coalition against empire, but to create a thousand stateless tribes that can peacefully coexist with radically divergent neighbors regardless of the empire's existence. Once we render this superpower and all superpowers irrelevant, ending their reign of terror will be as simple as blowing them away like the dead seeds of a dandelion. And the Mullahs will   evaporate into the ether right along with them.

35,000 dead Gazans is enough. It's time for the stateless left in the west to step down from their soapboxes and look east again for inspiration. Let's end this Nakba and the next one by smashing the state that subsists on such carnage once and for all and let's make weird and dangerous friends doing it.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Stop Whispering by Radiohead

* Rock the Kasbah by the Clash

* Joiner by Blondshell

* Ahead by Wire

* Cannonball by the Breeders

* Rill Rill by Sleigh Bells

* Public Image by Public Image Ltd

* Elevate Me by the Pixies

* Bad Penny by Big Black

* Slow Dog by Belly

* Atmosphere by Joy Division

This post is dedicated in loving memory to Steve Albini, an artist who understood the power of terrorizing the powerful on a budget. Godspeed you brilliant bastard. We'll keep the radio blaring for you while you're out.

The Free Palestine Movement Could Finally Make the American Left Dangerous Again

 I grew up in the American far left and I'm really not exaggerating when I tell you that the movement saved my life. I discovered libertarian socialism and its various stateless sub species at an age when I was feeling increasingly endangered as the last genderqueer kid on earth in the thick of rural Pennsylvania's conservative Catholic pedophile country. I felt about as hopelessly 'other' as it gets until I discovered the Bush-era antiwar movement and began scraping the history books for other otherized voices like mine. 

I found them buried about a mile beneath the bullshit in the lost chapter on another antiwar movement, the very distinctly 'other' antiwar movement of the sixties and seventies. Boldly countercultural voices like those of Michel Foucault, Fred Hampton, Paul Goodman, Huey Newton, Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Russell Means gave me something to believe in when I didn't even believe in myself. The fight against American imperialism at the bloody birth of the New American Century gave me a place to belong and a jihad to devote myself to long before I discovered that I wasn't in fact the last genderqueer kid on earth, and I will remain grateful for this gift unto my dying breath.

But over the last several years I have found what passes for the left in this country, even the "far left", to be disturbingly unrecognizable. I have seen an increasing willingness by so-called social anarchists to embrace downright authoritarian statism as the solution to nearly every social ill. I have seen seemingly lucid libertarian socialists galvanized behind the DNC's elderly trojan horse, Bernie Sanders, and his chickenshit saplings in the Squad. I have seen these same so-called leftists lionize neoliberal darlings like the White Helmets and Volodymyr Zelensky while making excuses for sending bombs to their friends in Al-Nusra and the Azov Battalion. Meanwhile, I have seen more consistently antiwar voices, including my own, silenced, canceled, and removed from supposedly left-wing platforms. 

I've been left with little other choice but to gasp in horror as the left that once inspired a weird teenager not to slit her wrists seems to have mutated into a censorious cult of Herbert Humphrey-style softcore social democrats willing to nail Rosa Luxemburg to the cross themselves as long as the Freikorps purge Trump from their ranks and hang a rainbow flag over the caskets of less compliant former comrades.

This grotesquely strange display of downright counterrevolutionary behavior has led me down some very strange roads in search of allies against empire. I've taken to self-identifying as a post-left anarchist and devoting myself entirely to the typically right libertarian principle of bottom unity while reaching out to other ideological heretics like so-called anarcho-capitalists, boogaloo boys, pan-Islamic nationalists, and heathen radical traditionalists. Meanwhile, I've also struggled to build a more tribal Queer identity that defies the left-right paradigm entirely and harkens back to a more primitive communal pagan consciousness. 

But at the end of the day, my heart will always bleed left. I will always be that same pissed-off Yippie anarcho-transfeminist that the Catholic Church failed to gag, and this is why I look to YouTube footage of the anti-Zionist swarms now engulfing college campuses from coast to coast with a level of cautious hope that my broken bleeding heart hasn't experienced in years.

Some call this the Free Palestine Movement, others call them Anti-Israel, but regardless of the labels, these kids have laid siege to hundreds of campuses across the country and across the globe, building nearly 80 encampments in the US alone in less than three weeks. They are jamming up traffic. They are occupying buildings. They are literally ruining parades by supergluing their bodies to the fucking blacktop. They are shutting down the Golden Gate Bridge. They are trolling Joe Biden on the campaign trail at every corner with jeers of "Genocide Joe!" They are relentless, furious, shameless, and absolutely fucking obnoxious and I couldn't love them more if they were my own goddamn children. 

All of this chaos is being raised not on behalf of some woke cause celebre, but on behalf of the most marginalized people on the planet, the 34,000+ Palestinians slaughtered in cold blood with American weapons by every liberal's favorite racist apartheid state in Israel. And the lives of millions more hang in the balance as Benjamin Netanyahu attempts to starve the Gaza Strip into submission in an open plot to push those Arab refugees into the desert wastelands of the Sinai Peninsula.

The only reason why any politician or media personality is even paying lip service to the notion of a ceasefire to this holocaust is because these beautiful obnoxious brats have gotten up in their fucking faces and refused to behave until the adults in the room address the mass grave of bodies decomposing in the backyard. They have burned every bridge, crossed every Rubicon, and crushed the toes of every institution of power within stomping distance and the system is stomping back with every jackboot they can shove their bloody feet into.

Every single newspaper and network from left to right has baselessly slandered these kids as antisemites with both parties joining the synergistic corporate chorus of condemnation. The universities who rely on their student's debt to turn a profit have teamed up with local police forces taking their marching orders directly from the Department of Homeland Security to brutally evict this anti-Zionist question by any means necessary. Batons, pepper spray, tear gas, flashbang grenades, rubber bullets, armored vehicles, everything south of cluster munitions seems to be on the table and I'm sure Tom Cotton is working on that.

Sadly, this story just seems to grow more sinister by the hour with each passing detail. In Ohio and Indiana, snipers have been photographed on the rooves of campus buildings with high-powered rifles trained on unarmed students and in Denver, CBS Colorado has reported that the state's National Guard are already among the law enforcement presence, which is precisely what GOP chickenhawks like House Speaker Mike Johnson are quite openly calling for, a repeat of Kent State.

Democrats and their neocon allies however seem to prefer a more federal final solution. Joe Biden, a man whose own political rap sheet would make a grand wizard shout "goddamn!" like a Black Baptist in a white whorehouse, is calling to "aggressively implement the first ever national strategy to counter antisemitism" which would include "the full force of the federal government" to crack down on dangerous speech which that old bitch tells us has "no place on college campuses." 

Meanwhile, a bipartisan effort in the House of Representatives is being waged to send government "antisemitism monitors" to every college campus funded by the federal government as part of their College Oversight and Legal Updates Mandating Bias Investigation and Accountability or COLUMBIA Act, which would essentially turn the Department of Education into a veritable police force in charge of stamping out anything certain racists like Joe Biden and Mike Johnson deem antisemitic.

This may all sound terrifying, but it is also the fruit of a job well done. We haven't seen so many institutions of power gang up on teenagers like this since the age of the freaks who inspired me to spit in the Pope's eye. What these kids need now is us, the scary veteran extremists who the news loves to label as outside actors, but what we really are is a sort of campus counter-police force, elders with guns and skills. We need to join these brave kids, listen to what they have to teach us and pay it forward with black blocks and AR toting militias. The left is finally coming back around again to a grade of anti-imperialism that even the Squad can't seem to assimilate, and we should take this opportunity to welcome them home with loaded arms.

And to some of my new allies outside of the left who will bitch that the campus Free Palestine Movement is little more than a different strain of identity politics; I say so the fuck what. The culture war may have corrupted the antiwar movement, but the culture itself was never really the problem, the emphasis was. The truth is that it was the culture warriors of the Black Power Movement who radicalized the antiwar movement into something Nixon needed tin soldiers to put down and both the Chicano and Gay Liberation Movements were defined by their own indigenous oppositions to imperialism. 

This is what the radical left really needs right now to become truly radical again, not politics, but a culture defined by resistance to colonialism. This is what turned me on and turned me dangerous because it made the fight for peace in far-off places deeply personal. To put another long rant short: if we can convince Generation Z that smashing the American Empire is woke, then Babylon is officially fucked. Maybe that's a big 'if' but what else do we have to lose but bodies at this point?

We've got the momentum, freaky people, so let's make it fucking happen. Let's finally make the American left dangerous again.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Free Radicals by the Flaming Radicals

* For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield

* The Beautiful Ones by Suede

* All Born Screaming by St. Vincent

* Instant Karma by John Lennon

* Only by Nine Inch Nails

* I've Been Tired by the Pixies

* Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan

* Riot Rhythm by Sleigh Bells

* Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

Embracing the Possibilities of a Second Golden Age of Piracy

"Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant--the waves of time leave washed up behind themselves only dry memories of a closed & petrified past."

-Hakim Bey

"What others see as chaos, a pirate sees as the perfect storm for growth and transformation."

-Edward Teach aka Blackbeard

In case you haven't noticed, things have been getting pretty lively on the high seas lately and all available indications seem to point to them getting much livelier long before slack tide sets in. After months of Houthi rebel attacks on international shipping linked to Israel and its western backers in the Red Sea, Iran has decided to get in on the action to avenge their comrades killed by an IDF airstrike on their Damascus consulate.  

While the headlines may focus on Iran's largely symbolic drone swarm into the bug zapper of the Iron Dome, the Islamic Republic kicked off this theatrical display of vengeance by launching a daylight raid on a Portuguese-flagged container vessel called the MSC Aries 50 miles off the coast of the UAE near the Strait of Hormuz. The ship, owned by Zionist billionaire and former Israeli Air Force intelligence officer, Eyal Ofer, was boarded by commandos of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp in a well-choreographed and conveniently filmed raid that involved the heavily armed men repelling on the deck from an idling chopper. 

A visually stunning spectacle of propaganda of the deed uncannily similar to the Houthi rebel assault on the Galaxy Leader in November which also began in an MI-17 and ended with the nautical toy of another Israeli oligarch named Abraham Ungur being absconded to Hodeida where it has been turned into a sort of revolutionary chic tourist attraction. 

The western intelligentsia will point to these similarities and announce them to be proof that those dastardly Houthi rebels are little more than IRGC agents doing the bidding of the Mullahs. I would actually argue the opposite. It is a well-known if poorly reported fact that in spite of the largely rhetorical support from the Ayatollah, the Houthi rebels have a long and illustrious history of going rogue and disobeying what little advice they receive from Tehran. This included calls to stand down on overthrowing a government in Sanaa that Iran was still attempting to make inroads with.

The Houthis launched their daring maritime spree on Israeli linked vessels during a time in which the rest of the leadership of the Muslim world seemed content to just sit on their hands as the Zionist State carried out the most brazen genocide of the twenty-first century. The result of the Houthi's degeneracy wasn't just a blow to international trade, it was boosting an internationally unrecognized militia to a place of ideological leadership on the world stage, and when Iran found itself in desperate need of a propaganda win of their own, they took a page from their alleged proxies' playbook by launching a largely bloodless drone barrage kicked off by an act of melodramatic modern-day piracy.

The Mullahs aren't the only swashbucklers getting in on the action either. After nearly a decade off from their last tare, the pirates of Somalia have been using the distraction of international naval forces up north to get back into the game, seizing at least two cargo ships and a dozen commercial fishing vessels in the last few months. In other words, the chaos is spreading like oil on water and the corporate overlords back home in Babylon are besides themselves. The very fabric of globalism seems to be under siege and every Navy on earth appears to be at the mercy of what essentially amounts to a bunch of toothless peasants with old fishing boats and nothing left to lose. 

I would be a liar if I didn't confess that I get off on this kind of karma. I mean, the specter of the Jolly Roger is literally mocking the glorious "rules-based order" of the Yankee maritime death machine as ancient history repeats itself. But could the world really be on the cusp of another Golden Age of Piracy? Perhaps, but perhaps we should consult the tea leaves of history before getting too carried away with ourselves.

The era frequently referred to by historians as the Golden Age of Piracy occurred between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when stateless bands of outlaws challenged the monopoly on force maintained by the Westphalian Nation State on the high seas. While most of these pirates were far more motivated by profit than the ideologues of the Axis of Resistance, the factors contributing to this era of lawlessness should ring strikingly familiar to anyone paying attention to current events.

The original Golden Age of Piracy was largely the product of the first signs of European imperial decline brought on by their own colonial overreach in the New World. Scores of seasoned sailors and privateers were left skilled but unemployed in the wake of the War of Spanish Secession. Meanwhile, the sheer quantity of plundered goods being shipped to-and-fro the colonies was becoming downright ungovernable as the colonies themselves devolved into corrupt rogue states in their own right and Europe's navies were stretched paper thin attempting to contain it all.

Today's pirates may differ somewhat in motivation and tactics but all the other ingredients for another era of lawlessness on the high seas are present and accounted for. Both the Houthis and the Iranians are veterans of America's failed War on Terror, becoming experts in asymmetrical warfare battling Wahhabi jihadists that our nation created just to destroy. Meanwhile, neoliberal globalism has turned every ocean on the planet into a thousand lane highway too jam packed with ill-gotten booty to ever be sustainably policed, and the imperial powerhouse of America's Atlantic cartel is rapidly losing control of increasingly reckless colonies like Israel while our bloated naval forces are busy trying to sabotage Asia's assent to economic dominance with so-called freedom of navigation drills in the South China Sea.

Yes indeed, the pieces for a historical repeat are all there and so are the motivations. Big picture wise, the actions of the Mullahs, the Houthis, and the Somalians can all be seen as a sort of revolt against the machinery of state capitalism motivated by a totally valid thirst for revenge. Today's global economy has absolutely nothing to do with free trade. It is a corrupt and totalitarian system operated from the top down by a conspiracy of multinational conglomerates and nuclear armed navies who have all but invited piracy by conducting their own crime spree on the high seas defined by acts of mass violence and brazen thievery.

Iran and Yemen are both the victims of brutal blockades just like the one being conducted against the Gaza Strip as we speak. These sadistic terrorist campaigns have subjected impoverished populations to gruesome acts of savagery just for attempting to access their own waters for trade and subsistence fishing. Between 2015 and 2022, the Houthi controlled nation of Yemen was bombarded by a genocidal onslaught at the hands of America's proxies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Over 377,000 people were slaughtered and more than half of them died from starvation and disease as a result of a blockade made possible by America's rules-based order. 

Somalia has similarly been decimated both economically and ecologically by the Western Mafia's fixed trade practices which have aloud massive corporate naval behemoths to deplete their fisheries with industrial trawlers and render the remains toxic by treating the Indian Ocean like a giant toilet for their industrial waste. Under these circumstances, it's hard not to see modern piracy as an act of self-defense by a largely unaffiliated coalition of people under siege by a pirate empire in decline and, thank Kali, their tactics appear to be working.

The Houthi campaign off of their embattled coastline has effectively rerouted international trade, forcing no fewer than twelve international shipping conglomerates to suspend transit in the Red Sea entirely and delaying shipping times by up to nine days while raising costs by 15%. This has affectively implemented a tax on the global oligarchy for aiding and abetting the slaughter of over 30,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and America's attempts to bomb the Houthis into submission over it have been an abject failure. 

In case you haven't noticed, I happen to be something of an unapologetic collapsitarian anarchist. This basically means that my entire worldview is defined by searching for revolutionary opportunity in inevitable crisis and I can't help but to get a little bit giddy at the opportunities that a Second Golden Age of Piracy could bring with it. This may all start with rogue states taking potshots at empire but if that empire continues to collapse beneath the barrage of a billion potshots the oceans will be left wide open to a diverse ecosystem of stateless actors of every stripe capable of affecting truly free trade in the only place it has ever existed: the black market. 

Amidst the last Golden Era of Piracy and its latter-day cousin off the Barbary Coast, thriving autonomous communities of proto anarchists emerged in which all genders were equal, most consensual transgressions were forgiven, and merchants were governed only by codes upheld by their suppliers in nautical syndicalist democracies.

Nobody would ever confuse Edward Teach with Mikhail Bakunin any more than you would the Ayatollah with Hakim Bey, but the chaos that men and women like Blackbeard ushered in turned the open seas into a breeding ground for revolutionary opportunities. With Uncle Sam now walking the plank, I see no reason not to hope for a sequel.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* All Born Screaming by St. Vincent

* Firestarter by the Prodigy

* I'm Shipping Up to Boston by Dropkick Murphys

* Justine Go Genesis by Sleigh Bells

* Stand & Deliver by Adam & the Ants

* Time Bomb by Rancid

* Breathe by the Prodigy

* The Beautiful Ones by Suede

* Yesterdays Heroes by the 4-Skins

* Big Time Nothing by St. Vincent

The Last Thing Haiti Needs is Your Liberal Guilt

"We are free today because we are the stronger; we will be slaves again when the government becomes the stronger."

-Toussaint Louverture

"The rich are only defeated when running for their lives."

-C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins

 Dilapidated tent cities packed like plastic tarpaulin sardine cans with starving women and children... Cracked streets strewn with the broken bodies of their husbands and fathers... Azure blue Carribean skies carved up like bad meat with the billowing black plumes of a thousand tire fires... Paradise held hostage by a level of existential desperation rarely seen even in the most impoverished corners of the Western Hemisphere... 

American television sets have been periodically scarred by images like these for years. Images from Haiti, the Blackest place west of Africa. These images are usually delivered in the form of a commercial for some megachurch charity or a bleeding-heart cable news story on a slow day for the latest tabloid election circus. Either way, these images are almost always punctuated by the age-old question of 'when do we...' or the age-old suggestion of 'we need to do...' something. And lately, that 'something' has become desperate enough to mandate multiple exclamation points.

The shit has been hitting the fan in Haiti for centuries, but over the last several months that fan has become a buzz saw and the proverbial shit has become a tidal wave. Heavily armed gangs of Adidas clad youths have launched total war on what passes for a state in this tropical island nation, and they appear to be winning. 

80% of the capitol of Port-au-Prince is currently under the control of a massive and organized coalition of the nation's most notorious street criminals. With countless dead and 362,000 displaced, these third world gangbangers have surrounded the National Palace, encircled both of the capitol's major airports, looted the hospitals, and added thousands more to their ranks by emptying multiple prisons in daring daylight raids.

The nation's standing prime minister, an unelected worm named Ariel Henry, has resigned in exile, and naturally Haiti's patriarchal big brothers in "the West" are just brimming with suggestions on how to save the day and those suggestions are increasingly taking the shape of downright shrill demands for good old fashioned colonial law and order.

For years now Haiti has been the flaming plaything of a United Nations coalition of meddling rape-states known as the "Core Group," a sort of dickish Super Friends, dominated by the United States and further made up of France, Canada, Spain, and Germany along with the EU and the OAS. The latest solution of this mincing cartel of meddling white liberals? Well, more military intervention of course! But this time is different. 

This time those pale genius' have decided to quell the rage of the Black man with their own mercenary army of Black men, a paramilitary force of 1,000 Kenyan military police officers trained by the United States Military and well versed in the art of committing human rights abuses against their own people with a stipend of $300 million in American tax dollars. Once the Core Group has invaded Haiti with this token Black death squad, the plan is to establish a glorified junta known as the Transitional Presidential Council with 9 unelected officials hand plucked from Haiti's despised government and business elites along with one Catholic priest to please the pedophile sector.

If this all sounds despicably familiar, then you have been a bad American and done your homework only to realize that this is pretty much what elitist colonial twats have been committing against these people for centuries. Haiti has been near the top of every white supremacist shitlist since 1804 when Toussaint Louverture led a successful slave revolt and attempted to build a radical Black democracy on the graveyard of Christopher Colombus' opening massacre. For their part, the chattel democracy of the United States of America responded to Haitian independence with decades of crippling blockades and diplomatic isolation, but the worst was yet to come with the advent of Gunboat Diplomacy.

US Marines were deployed to Haiti in 1915 to suppress another popular insurgency and spent the next 19 years of this occupation building the Haitian National Army in their image. This fine institution would go on to become the twisted backbone of a grizzly fascist dictatorship known as the Duvalier Dynasty. For nearly thirty years, between 1957 and 1986, Haiti was a hostage of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son, Jeane-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, who terrorized Louverture's dream with a nightmare gestapo force of American trained psychopaths known as the Tonton Macoute. 

Mutilated bodies were hung from the trees with anyone foolish enough to take them down added to the macabre installation. Mothers were paraded through the streets carrying the severed heads of their own sons. Tens of thousands of men, women, children, infants, anyone, hacked to bits by machetes. All with hefty financial support from that shining beacon on the hill who was never shy about lending the gruesome Duvaliers a few more good men in uniform to quell another popular uprising by a proud and pissed-off people who never learned how to stay down.

But the pissed-off masses finally prevailed anyway with a popular uprising that toppled Baby Doc in 1986. Among the most popular leaders of this movement was a former Catholic Priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who preached a pretty tepid genre of social democracy based on the left-wing Christian school of Liberation Theology. Naturally, Reagan hated the holy man and ordered the CIA to fund rival candidates in every election he ran in. When this campaign of electoral sabotage finally failed, and Aristide was elected president in 1991, the US simply went old school and overthrew him in a fascist coup before spending the next 3 years funding the junta that replaced him in a blatant violation of international sanctions.

Bill Clinton, ever the bleeding heart, sent in the Marines to reinstate Aristide, but only after the battered reformer sold out and agreed to hand his nation over to the IMF. American and Canadian troops spent most of the rest of the nineties occupying Haiti until things seemed to be running our way again. But when Aristide won another presidential election in 2004 with the promise of reigning in the sweatshops of Walt Disney and raising the minimum wage, the US used gangs largely comprised of Tonton Macoute veterans to destabilize Port-au-Prince before kidnapping the uppity president and literally putting the motherfucker on a plain back to Africa.

UN troops were sent in this time to calm the island down, but they ultimately proved to be little more than a different flavor of pig, with a 13-year occupation pock marked by routine acts of sexual savagery and a cholera outbreak that killed nearly 10,000 Haitians. When a devastating earthquake added another quarter million bodies to that mass grave, the US decided to send in more troops of their own and rig more elections, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervening to get a millionaire thug named Michel Martelly elected in 2011 and Barack Obama helping his replacement, Jovenel Moise, to take the Palace in 2016 with a meager 21% voter turnout. The latter quisling's strong-arm tactics would ultimately inspire the beginnings of the current crisis in 2018. 

In 2021, Moise was assassinated in a bewilderingly unsolved assault that involved 28 foreign mercenaries organized in Florida and that just so happened to occur the day after Moise appointed one Ariel Henry prime minister. Henry was then summarily promoted to dictator by the fabulous Core Group, but when this failed to pacify the unrest, Henry was sent to Kenya to sign off on the military police force organized to protect him from his own people only to find himself blocked from returning to his smoldering country and absconded to Puerto Rico where the Secret Service essentially brow beat him into signing over his empire of dirt to another western approved junta.

So, the question stands, what do we, the bleeding hearts of the liberal west, do to save poor Haiti from its seemingly perpetual plight? My only response as a post-left revisionist historian is, haven't you people done enough? Take a fucking hint and just fuck off already. 

Believe it or not, Haiti's best hope may actually come in the form of those terrible gangs the news loves to leer at. While Haiti's gangs have traditionally served as henchmen for the nation's elites, there are signs that these impoverished gladiators are growing tired of their role in this tragedy. They have organized a massive coalition between rival factions, liberated gulags with Radio Shack drones, and announced their intention to resist any foreign occupying force that steps foot on their island.

God help me but this kind of sounds like a modern-day slave revolt to me. So, maybe we should just sit this one out and focus on losing one of our other stupid fucking wars instead. Just a dangerous thought from an uppity white bitch. But either way, the last thing Haiti needs is your liberal guilt.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Holiday In Cambodia by Dead Kennedys

* Colors by Ice-T

* I Against I by Bad Brains

* Wild Wild Life by Talking Heads

* Drain You by Nirvana

* Hurt by Nine Inch Nails

* Waiting Room by Fugazi

* N.W.O by Ministry

* We Care a Lot by Faith No More

* Buffalo Soldier by Bob Marley & the Wailers

 

The Forgotten Legacy of John Sinclair and the White Panther Party

"The revolution has always been in the hands of the very young. The young always inherit the revolution. You can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail the revolution."

-Huey P. Newton

"Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo."

-John Sinclair

 It seems like I'm always the last person to hear the bad news these days however, in my defense, I'm usually fucking drowning in it. We all are I suppose, what with the trials and tribulations of living in the Kali Yuga. But living with PTSD tends to make it all feel aggressively personal. Every bomb that drops on Gaza seems to awaken another monster in my Lovecraftian closet of repressed childhood memories, but somewhere amidst this maelstrom of misery, between the flashbacks and the war crimes, John Sinclair died and even my battered inner child feels the need to pay her respects.

For those of you who don't know that name, that is likely because John Sinclair was the kind of motherfucker who led the kind of life that your history books would rather you forget. John, who died from heart failure this April at 82, was a leading figure in America's other revolution, the one that saw a thriving underground ecosystem of Black Panthers, Street Transvestites, and Students for a Democratic Society taking on the man in the streets of Babylon over the savage injustices of white supremacy and the Vietnam War.

An enterprising young jazz poet and political provocateur, John Sinclair emerged from his native Michigan's underground art scene in the late sixties with an itching desire to join the people of the global third world in smashing the white pig state that he and his pale stoner friends in the jazz scene had grown to despise. Like a lot of other misfits from that era, John was through with being bullied just for being freaky and found impoverished guerrilla agitators of color like Huey Newton, Malcolm X, and Ho Chi Minh to be a hell of a lot more inspiring than anything the honky dinosaurs of the Old Left could conjure.

John was a part of the Detroit Artist's Workshop, which ran a network of communal houses along with a print shop and a performance space, but after years of police raids and drug busts, John decided it was time to up the ante. The breaking point came with the Detroit Riots that led to 43 deaths and nearly burned the Motor City to the ground in 1967. The Workshop proudly displayed a banner declaring "Burn Baby Burn" outside one of their communes and stood virtually alone amongst the white counterculture in declaring the riots to be a justified act of popular resistance against a racist police state.

Upon hearing an interview with Huey Newton in which the head of the Black Panthers suggested that the best thing white kids could do for the revolution was start a White Panther Party in solidarity with the third world, John did just that. Along with his wife Leni and a hippie half-breed named Pun Plamondon, John Sinclair formed the first White Panther Party in the charred ruins of Detroit with a rallying cry calling on the disaffected white youth of America to join the revolution in the name of rock n roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.

Many Black rebels were not amused, but John's rag-tag army of heavily armed long hairs and burn outs proved themselves to be worthy comrades by organizing the white counterculture in support of third world struggle by redistributing bulk foods and Black Panther newsletters to impoverished communities across Detroit and the Bay Area. The White Panthers also raised the noise to downright frightening levels with their pioneering proto-punk band, the MC5, who John Sinclair managed and used like a fifty-megawatt bullhorn to promote the revolution far and wide.  

Naturally, all this agitation against the amoral majority came at a price. John and his White Panthers may have joined their comrades in arms in Fred Hampton's Rainbow Coalition, but they also joined them on J. Edgar Hoover's Cointelpro shitlist. In 1969, Sinclair himself was entrapped by an undercover officer into providing him with a king's ransom of exactly two joints and was sentenced to a decade in prison for his charity. This is when John Sinclair officially became an underground celebrity. After Abbie Hoffman was booed offstage at Woodstock for attempting to bring attention to this injustice, John Lennon and Yoko Ono got involved by organizing their own rally in John Sinclair's defense, bringing everyone from Bobby Seale to Stevie Wonder together at Ann Arbor's Cristler Arena in 1971.

The John Sinclair Freedom Rally drew a sold-out crowd of 15,000 within two hours and John Sinclair's case was overturned within days. But even miracles come at a price. The feds sicked their dogs on John and Yoko and nearly had the couple of bougie dabblers deported for their good deed. As for the freshly vindicated Sinclair, he had already been charged within months of his initial arrest along with his fellow White Panthers, Pun Plamondon and John Forrest on trumped up charges of conspiring to bomb a CIA office. These charges were also dropped after the government admitted to illegally wiretapping the Panthers and John even won a landmark Supreme Court case vindicating the constitutional right to privacy, but all the court cases took their toll, and the Michigan chapters of the White Panther Party closed its doors in 1973.

So, why then should you give a fuck about a bunch of musty old hippies with guns? For the same reason that I do, because the Second American Revolution is unfinished history. Everything that forgotten outlaws like John Sinclair fought for back in 1968 is more valid now than ever before. The war machine continues to rampage across the globe, performing My Lai Massacres by proxy from Bakhmut to Khan Younis, white supremacy remains a thriving multibillion dollar enterprise with the prison industrial complex devouring Black and brown bodies like a Ku Klux Cthulhu with bipartisan support, and it is the youth, the young people of Babylon, who continue to feel the pain of the third world even from a place of relative privilege.

I did. I spent my childhood as a middle-class prisoner of a Catholic school that violated my body and taught me that my gender identity rendered me wicked enough to deserve this trauma. And when I was lonely and hopeless, I would escape the horrors of my existence by pouring over the moldy old magazines in my mother's basement vintage clothing store. This is where I discovered wild creatures like John Sinclair, the MC5, and the White Panther Party, and what they taught me was that I wasn't alone, that my youthful rebellion wasn't just valid, it was valuable because it served as a link to other oppressed people across the globe.

This was the truly brilliant thing about the White Panther Party. They made no attempt to co-opt the struggles of the third world, they simply pointed out the fact that young people were oppressed by the same power system and thus had every right to turn on their teachers and parents. Freaky people like John Sinclair militarized youth culture itself against the state and goddammit, we need this now more than ever. There is a reason that adolescents inherently identify with the 'other', from the ghetto to Gaza, and it has nothing to do with immaturity. Every single person under 18 is a second-class citizen in this country. American children are afforded all the rights and privileges of livestock, and this is why they are abused across the board at a far higher rate than any other demographic.

This has to stop, and John Sinclair gave us a glimpse into a world in which white children were empowered to stop it by embracing their otherness and throwing their lot in with other oppressed people across the globe who in turn taught them how to defend themselves against the adult establishment of the first world by any means necessary.

This is why I feel compelled to take a moment between the flashbacks and the war crimes to honor John Sinclair. He gave my battered inner child a loaded gun. Consider this rant a twenty-one-round solute from a fellow traveler. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* John Sinclair by John Lennon

* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

* Volunteers by Jefferson Airplane

* Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth

* Living for the City by Stevie Wonder

* $20 by boygenius

* Get Together by the Youngbloods

* Coyote, My Little Brother by Mitski

* 1969 by the Stooges

* Rock N Roll Nigger by Patti Smith