For the Love of Gaza, Bring Back the Students So They Can Bring the War Home Again

 I was born and raised in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, a small-town cowering in the shadow of a vast college metropolis known simply as State College and I fucking hate State College. I hate State College because nine months out of the year State College is the home of Penn State University, a massive tax funded corporation that floods my otherwise bucolic corner of nowhere with an ocean of football rape culture and the faceless swarm of brats standing in line to go into debt just to be a part of it. 

Needless to say, as a recovering agoraphobic with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, I generally count the minutes until June when these alcoholic tourists finally fuck off for a few months so I can actually drive to my therapist's office without having flashbacks in the heat of a goddam traffic jam. But this year, I find myself in a strange new predicament. For the first time in my life, I find myself begging Kali goddess of destruction to bring those brats back.

What the hell could inspire such seemingly contradictory behavior, you ask? Perhaps yet another mental illness? Yes, a global pandemic known as holocaust, but for once I'm not the one inflicted by this demented disorder, the political establishment of the western world is. You see, there is a genocide raging across the Gaza Strip and while the racist apartheid state of Israel may be providing the shock troops on the ground wiping an impoverished population from the face of the planet, it is the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union that make this savage final solution possible.

America alone has delivered nearly 30,000 bombs to Israel since the tragic blowback of October 7 gave them the greenlight to kill. The official body count delivered by that arsenal stands at a staggering 40,000+, over 16,000 of them children. That is 2% of Gaza's entire population. However, medical experts at The Lancet believe that the miasma of indirect devastation that comes with this level of total war likely puts the death toll somewhere between 149,000 and 598,000, the latter would place around 15% of Gazan's underground, easily making this bloodbath one of the most devastating genocides of the last century. 

So, what do all these grim statistics have to do with Penn State University? The only reason why half the people in this country even knows that this massacre is occurring is because of the holy fucking hell that campus brats across the country have raged over it. Last spring, universities from sea to shining sea became virtual battlegrounds as legions of college students put down their bongs to take to the streets and demand that these institutions cut their ties to genocide. They occupied large swaths of property that their tuitions maintain with encampments on at least 75 campuses across the country and this movement quickly spilled out into the streets with students haunting Democrats and Republicans alike at every possible public appearance and campaign stop with heckling catcalls and profane accusations.

The Democrats responded by working in tandem with universities and local police to suffocate this uprising in its cradle. The Biden Administration has even quietly admitted to coordinating and overseeing the ensuing crackdowns that turned these campuses into open air prisons flooded with heavily armed gestapo in riot gear, flogging and gassing peaceful protestors before dragging them off to jail. Over 2,000 students were arrested across the country in a massive sweep against free speech. It didn't work. More protestors came. The Republicans responded by calling to bring in the National Guard and soldiers with rifles were spotted at several campus events in the Midwest, just a stone's throw away from the killing fields of Kent State.

As if the violence wasn't enough, these kids were also dragged through the mud by every corporate news hole from the New York Times to Fox News who slurred them as terrorists and antisemites. But they just kept coming. These pissed-off kids were joined by legions of equally pissed-off Muslims and together this unlikely coalition boldly threatened to deprive the Democrats of the pivotal swing state of Michigan with over 100,000 of them voting uncommitted during the party's one-candidate primary. 

Soon the same Democrats who were siccing the pigs on these kids just weeks earlier began paying lip service to the notion of a ceasefire even while the weapons continued to flow to Tel Aviv. Something wonderful had happened. The system learned to fear their children's wrath again. Then the bell rang, and class was dismissed but the genocide just kept on burning.

If anything, it's only gotten worse. While the pressure from Michigan undoubtedly helped force an increasingly decrepit Genocide Joe from office, Kamala Harris has changed nothing but the brand image. That Bay Area prison warden may be skulking around to kiss Bibi's ring behind closed doors but she's still passing that butcher checks with one hand while wagging a virtue signaling finger with the other. Thus, this August brought more gift-wrapped hardware and killing sprees to the Holy Land. The administration that Kamala still actively serves in approved a $20 billion dollar arms deal to Israel that included 50 F-15 fighter jets while Netanyahu used their existing fleet to bomb no fewer than 13 shelters, including 9 schools in 8 days. 

Even worse, Israel and its sponsors seem to be signaling their intentions to expand the massacre across the region to every corner of the map where people have dared to stand with the Palestinian people. While increasingly targeting civilian infrastructure in South Lebanon, Israel has also taken to assassinating possible negotiators in Iran and firebombing oil facilities in Yemen. For their part, America is surrounding their mad dog proxy with an armada of battleships that now includes both the USS Abraham and the USS Theodore Roosevelt. The message here is clear. With no cantankerous students upsetting the elites at their universities there is simply no reason for these imperial arsonists not to turn up the heat.

The Democrats are hoping that their kids will cool off by fall while they sell Kamala on TikTok as some kind of breath of fresh air in the gas chamber. It is my sincere hope that these kids come back as pissed-off as I am and resist falling victim to the delusions of electoral democracy in a failed empire. Even if they weren't rigged, an election has never ended a war in this country, but students have when they've tossed over the ballot box and stuck to the streets where real democracy happens.

Richard Nixon won the biggest landslide in electoral history in 1972 against George McGovern, the only real pacifist the Democratic Party has ever nominated. But within a year, the troops were home from Vietnam and Nixon was out of office because the campus protests had spread to military bases and lead to widescale mutinies and acts of sabotage. The Pentagon folded out of fear of losing control over their own soldiers and an already paranoid and pill-popping Nixon collapsed beneath the pressure.

This is what we need now to end the slaughter in Gaza, and I believe that the brilliantly obnoxious student agitators of the BDS Movement and Jewish Voice for Peace have what it takes if they're willing to take this motherfucker to the next level. 

This means increasing the occupations, openly boycotting the elections, doxing corporate warmongers on campus, and generally making America unlivable for the people who profit off of genocide. I also hope that this movement doesn't stop with Gaza, that these kids make the same demands for America's other victims in places like Yemen, Syria, West Papua, Haiti, and the Donbas, and that every student with a conscience in this country becomes another monkey-wrench in the gears of the rusty battleship we call empire.

I still fucking hate Penn State and the shadow it casts over my tiny hillbilly sanctuary. But I will bomb through the crowded campus streets of State College with my face buried in a brown paper bag and my fist raised high above my Ford Taurus if it means siccing these kids on the war machine. I will embrace my agoraphobia like a dangerous lifestyle choice if it means spreading the fear to the powerful. Kali help me, but for the love of Gaza, bring back the students so they can bring the war home again where it belongs.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* U-Mass by the Pixies

* Wild in the Streets by Circle Jerks

* Bloodletting by Concrete Blonde

* 21 by Samia

* Young Americans by David Bowie

* What's Fair by Blondshell

* Monkeywrench by Foo Fighters

* Teenagers by My Chemical Romance

* Down On the Street by the Stooges

* Rockstar by Hole

* Panic by the Smiths

Kamala is Still a Cop

We came pretty damn close to losing the finest democracy that slaves can build this election cycle but all the woke folk seem to be enjoying a collective sigh of relief as the better angels of our nature slowly unclench their sphincters. 

The second reign of the Orange Duce appeared to be a forgone conclusion when the DNC's insane conspiracy to defeat him with a barely reanimated Dixiecrat went up in smoke at the first debate after FrankenBiden's head fell off on live television. Things only went from bad to worse when some incel with an AR shot off the Donald's ear and that sociopathic showmen galvanized the remaining incel vote by immediately grabbing his crotch and pounding his chest for the cameras like Conan the Barbarian.

In this hallucinogenic minefield of a late capitalist presidential election circus, not only did Donald Trump's biblical reascension seem likely, it was looking downright inevitable, and while very little of this batshit pageantry managed to move my jaded genderfuck heart more than an inch in any one direction, a lot of my girlfriends, both trans and cis, were getting pretty bummed. 

But never fear fellow marginalized people, Kamala the caramel avenger is here to save us all from Satan's powers, and the MAGA maniacs are running scared. With her carefully choreographed stadium tour of star-studded blowouts complete with dance marathons and teleprompter recitations of Hopelandish gobbledygook, Kamala Harris seems to be selling herself as a Barack Obama style messiah and the public appears to be just desperate enough to get fooled again.

The Republicans, for their part, seem to be reprising their circa-2008 roles as well, dusting off Tea Party era tropes about crazed Black Marxists queering your kids with open borders and free healthcare. These pea-brained hummunculoids don't seem to grasp the fact that these tired hysterics just play directly into the Democratic party's hands by creating the illusion that Kamala is something different enough from the mainstream to make old white guys shit their Depends. 

Needless to say, my girlfriends are sold, leaving me once again in the treacherous position of having to slap some goddamn sense into them, and please believe me when I tell you that this hurts me far worse than it hurts you.

You see, sweet babies, Kamala Harris is neither an inspirational angel of mercy in very mean times nor a wild-eyed Black lesbian communist. To be perfectly honest with you, the latter actually sounds a lot more like the kind of chick I could split a spliff with, but both of these narratives are equally bogus, and it really doesn't take a tenured professor of political science to tell you who the real Kamala Harris is. 

The sharper kids in Black Lives Matter actually put it best during that woman's last presidential run in 2020. Kamala is a cop. She may have spent one term in the Senate as a squishy feel-good progressive and one primary kissing up to a country still reeling from the George Floyd Uprisings, but Officer Harris spent thirty years as a loyal power broker for the prison industrial complex and that record speaks for itself.

Starting as an intern for the Almeda County DA in the late eighties and working her way up the ladder of California's heinously corrupt police state to serve lengthy tours as both the District Attorney of San Francisco and Attorney General of California, Kamala's jacket reads like something Popeye Doyle would jack off to between hate crimes. Even back then, Kamala would campaign as some kind of progressive but the moment she successfully suckered the hippies into voting for her again she would trample over every campaign promise she made and start cracking skulls. 

Rhetoric aside, Kamala Harris worked her frosty ass off turning the Golden State into a racist gulag archipelago. She never once failed to fight ferociously for stiffer sentences, heftier bail requirements and longer prison terms, all too often for rinky-dink offenses like petty theft, panhandling, prostitution, graffiti, vagrancy, loitering and especially non-violent drug offenses.

She oversaw California's notoriously racist three strikes law, instituted mandatory minimums for misdemeanor gun charges, worked to shutter drug courts and defended the sanctity of the gas chamber. All of these putrid positions disproportionately crushed Black and brown people, but Harris seemed to display a particular zeal for harassing children and Queer folk, and I cannot pretend, as a genderqueer survivor of institutional child abuse, that this record doesn't hurt me the most, especially since I spend so much goddamn time explaining to people I love why I despise their new fucking savior even more than the tranny-bashing hicks do.

School is hell when you're different and California's massive industrial school system is notorious for being no exception to this rule. This is the real reason why the state has a motherfucker of a time keeping kids from skipping class. As both a DA and an AG, Kamala Harris went out of her way to use the police state to fix this problem, first with a $450,000 anti-truancy initiative in San Francisco launched with then-mayor Gavin Newsom and then with a statewide program that literally made it a criminal misdemeanor just to be the parent of a truant child. 

Mind you, California defines a truant as any child more than thirty minutes late to class without an approved excuse on more than two occasions. Based on personal experience, I am going to take a wild guess that an outsized portion of California's truants are probably trans kids dodging bullies, but in the Golden State, Kamala Harris was the ultimate bully, a mean girl with a badge and an army of child wrangling gestapo at her disposal.

Harris further targeted her state's Queer community with her long running jihad against sex workers. She often bills herself as a reformer by advocating for policies that target johns and pimps over prostitutes, but these policies are little more than a bait-and-switch and Kamala made this painfully clear when she opposed San Francisco's efforts to decriminalize sex work despite the fact that they received the full support of her own party and most of her constituency. Instead, District Attorney Harris stepped up the heat by increasing police raids on her city's massage parlors and ramping up stings on immigrant communities in a blatant fit of racial profiling against the Bay Area's Asian community.

Kamala Harris would also lead the charge on using the boogeyman of human trafficking to suck the federal government into her crusade with legally redundant legislation that led to nearly zero prosecutions for trafficking but fed legions of mostly Black and brown transwomen to the prison industrial complex for the mortal sin of trading sex for survival. And once these women found themselves trapped behind Kamala's walls, what few rights they maintained on the outside evaporated.

Few cases make this harsh truth and the despotic shape of Kamala's true character more revoltingly clear than that of Michelle Norsworthy, a transwoman incarcerated in California State Prison who sued the state for denying her access to medically necessary surgical treatment. Not only did Kamala-the-ally defend the state's denial of treatment but she continued to appeal decisions in Norsworthy's favor even after she became increasingly suicidal, even suggesting callously in a brief that she should just seek therapy instead.

This is the real Kamala Harris, a duplicitous, double speaking, snake who speaks fluent progressive and then uses any influence she can grasp to juice the police state that made her a millionaire, and she continued this twisted MO well into her tenure as the most liberal senator in Washington. Kamala was a leading force behind FOSTA-SESTA, a gargantuan prison industrial boondoggle that made it a felony to simply advertise sex work online. She also further pulverized Queer kids as a vocal supporter of the Kids Online Safety Act, which empowered tech giants to silence online speech deemed to be too adult for anyone under 18.

Long story short, this woman is nothing less than a menace to civil liberties in this country but neither side will call her out on it because the truth is an inconvenience to both of their delusional narratives. 

The Democrats are terrified that their voters will figure out that they're still the same fucking racists they were when Joe Biden was still vital enough to commit sexual assault. They only use identity politics to protect their precious police state from the only thing about Donald Trump that truly threatens them and that's poor management. 

The Republicans on the other hand seem to be afraid that Kamala might do what Obama did and prove to be a far more affective white supremacist than any of the white boys in the locker room. After all, the only reason Orange-Man-Bad was able to lock up all those brown children was because a Black man built the camps.

What else can I say. We live in a hideous country, a white power war machine that grinds Queer bodies of every color into mulch. In 2024, this increasingly cantankerous machine really only has two choices to market its horrors to the masses. It can either double down on the evil with openly despotic gangsters like Donald Trump or it can conceal its true nature by putting compliant minorities in charge of the podium and nothing else. Either way, the results are the same and I refuse to be complicit.

If this makes me a bummer at the Pride parade, then so be it but I will not sit silently by while my culture is hijacked by cackling quislings in savior drag. Kamala is still a fucking cop, and a cop will never be an ally to any individual.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35 by Bob Dylan

* Big Empty by Stone Temple Pilots

* I Wanna Be Your Dog by the Stooges

* Game Shows Change Our Lives by the Mountain Goats

* I Shot the Sherriff by Bob Marley & the Wailers

* Never Let Me Down Again by Depeche Mode

* Chosen to Deserve by Wednesday

* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails

* Your Dog by Soccer Mommy

* The Captain by Kasey Chambers

Hillbilly Minstrel: JD Vance is a Redneck Uncle Tom

 I come from a part of the country where people have become accustomed to getting played by elitist outsiders with name brand suitcases packed full of empty promises. Somewhere between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, where the Rust Belt fades into Amish Country, you'll find my bitter heart surrounded by junked cars and haunted steeples. Gummo Country, I often half-jokingly refer to it as, after Harmony Korine's modern Vuadville arthouse masterpiece. Not exactly the easiest place to grow up stuck between genders but I don't think I could breathe anywhere else.

Say what you will about my neighbors, I often do, but much like me, they are a people accustomed to getting fucked over and tired of putting up with the experience. These are the people who lost their jobs to NAFTA, lost their sons to bullshit wars in the Middle East, and lost pretty much everything else to Oxycontin. This is MAGA country, but these people didn't vote for Donald Trump because they're racist or sexist or xenophobic.

These people don't vote for Republicans or Democrats. In fact, they don't really vote for anyone at all. They vote against whichever Beltway rapist was the last one to fuck them up the ass without even spitting on their dick and Trump was just shrewd enough to get this. In 2016, that Wall Street con artist won over the Rust Belt by taking a ball bat to both of the partisan dynasties that fattened themselves more than most off of pillaging the holler, first the Bush Cartel in the primaries and then the Clintons under the big top.

Don't get me wrong, many of my neighbors are hardcore bigots but they're not fascists and they're not imbeciles. They were well aware that Trump is a belligerent bologna salesman, but they cast their vote for that cunt like casting a brick through the White House window. You see, dearest motherfuckers, for Gummo Country, voting Trump was an act of revenge. But the results were more or less the same old song. The jobs didn't come back from China, the Middle East kept on burning, and opioid addiction continued to provide the holler with its only growth industry aside from the local penitentiaries that it feeds.

But Donald Trump is a repeat offender who knows a good con when he sees one. Being seen seeing the forgotten Americans in these hills allowed him to hotwire the Electoral College once before and now he seems to think he can pull off this grift just one more time with a little help from "one of us" in his VP slot.

If you ask either side of the partisan divide who JD Vance is, political gripes aside, they are both likely to tell you the same story. The story of the son of Appalachian junkies who pulled himself up by the bootstraps and made something of his life, rising above the mud to become an inspiration to hillbillies and rednecks everywhere. A war hero and bestselling author turned working class populist crusader, storming the Senate and putting America, our America, first. There is just one problem with this narrative but it's a pretty big one. It's about 90% bullshit.

JD Vance is actually a middle-class Midwestern suburbanite raised by Appalachian grandparents on the outskirts of Cincinatti. His parents were dicks but his interactions with actual hillbillies growing up seem to be limited to random urchins he bumped into during part time jobs on the bad side of town. Vance spent his time in the Marines avoiding any real combat as a glorified PR rep for the public affairs section of the Aircraft Wing where he likely picked up the bullshitting skills that he would polish as the editor of the prestigious Yale Law Journal.

Vance wrote his bestselling tearjerker, Hillbilly Elegy, on the suggestion of one of his professors, Amy Chua, who used her fame as the bestselling child abuse apologist behind Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother to get her pupil the New York Times Review of Books treatment right out of the gates. By the time Hillbilly Elegy hit the shelves, Vance was already living the high life in San Francisco, working as a corporate lawyer for Big Tech goons like AOL's Steve Case and PayPal's Peter Thiel.

The latter oligarch would bankroll JD's 2022 Senate campaign to the tune of $13 million dollars, and it was during this telltale campaign that Vance shed his previous visage as a neocon Never Trumper like a serpent and embraced his new drag as a MAGA GI Joe, promising to put America first and use the full weight of the Federal Government to annihilate the scourge of transgenderism. Too put a long, gross story short; JD Vance is no Hillbilly hero. At best he's a Redneck Uncle Tom, using his questionable heritage to fill his pockets with taxpayer dollars while he grows the government to lethal levels on culture war bullshit and shifts military industrial fun bucks from Ukraine to Israel.

Donald Trump picked JD Vance for his wingman for the same reason that Joe Biden picked another fraudulent representative of a fucked-over underclass for his VP. It's a diversity hire that crassly tokenizes a marginalized section of the electoral map that another Northeastern country club racist needs to win. But much like Kamala the Cop, JD Vance's most heinous crime isn't simply pandering to poor people, it's actively stoking the bigotry that keeps them desperate enough to vote for thuggish clowns like Trump.

Hillbilly Elegy, the book that made JD Vance a darling of the same liberal media that he now pretends to hate, is not a memoir about overcoming adversity. It is an openly elitist attack on the kind of people that I grew up with and Vance didn't. Vance uses his deadbeat parents like hillbilly scarecrows and blames the woes of systemic disenfranchisement not on Wall Street poachers or Washington warmongers but on the very culture of the impoverished themselves, deriding rural rebellion against elitism as the "regressive" byproduct of a Celtic heritage that treats "poverty as the family tradition." 

JD's suggested solution to our backwards backwoods ways is to escape our "socially isolated" environment and join the more mainstream conservative class of Ivy League corporate creeps who rob us blind with big government handouts in the city.

After all, it worked for JD Vance. Hillbilly Elegy became a bestseller among upper-class liberal literati during the election season of 2016 for a reason. Every bougie, pearl-clutching, Beltway insider was looking for some way to explain how the Bush's and Clinton's lost control of their dupes in cousin-fucker country to a reality television shock jock and JD was their man, an Appalachian pedigreed deplorable-whisperer who could tell elitist fuckups from Bill Kristol to Wolf Blitzer that it wasn't their fault that their abused pet electorate bit them. We were just born rabid.

And maybe he's right. I may have spent my teens cursing redneck jocks for bashing me, but I stayed in this corner of the country for a reason. For all the bigotry that my neighbors all-too-often fall prey to, these people are still my people, and their culture makes sense to a genderfuck anarchist like me because it is one defined by resistance to mainstream American society. Whether you want to call them rednecks, hillbillies, or trailer trash, your average lower class rural white person hates war, taxes, sobriety, cops, and wage slavery every bit as much as your average unassimilated Queer or inner-city person of color. In fact, your average lower class rural white person isn't really that white at all.

Most of our ancestors came to this country fleeing ethnic violence from the Celtic regions of the British Isles to work the farms and mines of Anglo-Saxon Protestants who considered us to be about as despicable as the Black folk toiling beside us. White wasn't even a thing in this country until Celtic paupers and Black servants rose up together against our shared oppressors during Bacon's Rebellion. Even then, most of us had to earn our white privilege the same way JD Vance earned his way into Washington, by assimilating to polite WASP culture and proving ourselves capable of slaughtering darker poor people.

I for one say enough with this melting pot bullshit. I am sick and tired of seeing my neighbors vilified as deplorables by racist frauds like Vance only to be manipulated into bashing their queerer cousins whenever the master class needs their votes. These elitist scum fucks don't represent hillbilly culture any more than Kamala Harris represents Black culture or Pete Buttigieg represents Queer culture. 

Hillbilly culture is a counterculture built in resistance to colonialist homogeny. These are the people who joined the slaves in seceding from the Confederacy to form West Virginia. These are the people who joined their fellow coalminers across the color lines to take on the National Guard during the Battle of Blair Mountain. These are the people who helped Fred Hampton's Black Panthers build the original Rainbow Coalition as members of the Young Patriot's Organization.

These are my neighbors and as a proud pink trash panarchist, I know firsthand that the only way to take on first world oppression is by joining third world resistance. Consider this hit piece against a shameless impostor to be an open invitation to a riot. You know where I live.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Tuesday's Gone by Lynyrd Skynyrd

* Chosen to Deserve by Wednesday

* Serving Time in the Middle of Nowhere by Eyehategod

* Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival

* Marry Me by Drive-By Truckers

* Rebels by Tom Petty

* Problem With It by Plains

* Dragonaut by Sleep

* Fooled Around and Fell in Love by Elvin Bishop

* Never Been Wrong by Waxahatchee

* Quarry by Wednesday

* Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other by Orville Peck & Willie Nelson

Every American President Should Be Prosecuted

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The Hypocrisy of Condemning Political Violence in a Violent Empire

 Some kid took a shot at an ex-president the other week and apparently, we're all supposed to feel bad about it. The same news jackals who cobbled together half a career on pretending to be outraged every time Donald Trump tweets something racist are now pretending to be concerned that someone would even dare to shave that fascist baboon's ear with one those AR death machines they usually love to howl about. Why, even rival politicians, just finished telling packed churches full of old Black ladies that Trump is on the cusp of reanimating the corpse of Andrew Jackson if they fail to vote for a demented dinosaur who used to shoot pool with him, automatically switched gears and called for calm.

All I can say to these censorious theatrics from the fear mongering class is you can all kiss my fat, Queer, Irish ass. A man does not cease to be a dick the moment the chickens come home to roost. Don't get me wrong, I don't advocate firing fucking rifles into crowds of people, and I think it's tragic that some decent seeming people got shot just for attending a rally, but I am not about to watch my language just because a baby killing rapist has made himself a magnet for the bullets he sells.

I honestly don't even get why this is so fucking shocking. The only shocking thing is that it didn't happen sooner. Aside from the fact that Donald Trump is an overprivileged loudmouth who goes out of his way to jam his tiny orange pecker into the eye of anybody with their arms tied behind their back, the man was an American president and the last time I checked, that was still a criminal title. 

If you don't fucking believe me then just ask Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Brazil, Greece, Chile or any of the other 40+ governments that ours has overthrown over the last 80 years. Or maybe you should go ask the ghost of Patrice Lumumba or Salvador Allende, who were actually successfully murdered with American presidential approval just for being fairly elected in a third world democracy. And this ain't just some ancient history lesson either. 

On any given day, the American war machine slaughters entire families in Somalia with glorified toy planes, trains fascist goons in the Donbass to lob ATACMs at tourists in Crimea, sends truckloads of tank shells to verified hospital bombers in Israel, teaches Kenyan police officers how to hook jumper cables up to peaceful protestor's junk, facilitates sanctions on starving earthquake survivors in Afghanistan, and illegally occupies Syria's oilfields so they can't rebuild schools that ISIS leveled with our rocket launchers. 

And every single one of these crimes and a thousand more comes with the stamped approval of the highest office on earth, the Presidency of the United States of America. So, when I tell you that any motherfucker who has ever held that office is a goddamn mafia don, I am not being hyperbolic or engaging in inflammatory rhetoric. If anything, I'm underselling the danger and Donald Trump spent four years engaging in that institutional danger with all the hopped-up giddiness of a crackhead on Christmas. 

This is a man who took Barack Obama's drone strike arcade and somehow buried that previous war-criminal-in-chief's high score in one term. We'll never have the exact number of civilians killed because that orange bastard also made the death toll a state secret but in just four years the Trump White House openly declared 205 drone strikes in Yemen, 196 strikes in Somalia, and broke the twenty-year record in Afghanistan two years in a row, with 7,362 bombs dropped in 2018 and 7,423 in 2019.

This murder spree included a drone strike in the Khost province in 2019 that wiped out an entire family on their way home from the maternity ward and another massacre the same year in Nangarhar that killed 30 farmworkers and injured 40 more. So, when does that sick bastard kiss their helmets and comfort their widows and orphans? And when does the media who only shuts up about Trump when he's killing children or being killed by them call for a pause on demonizing the Taliban or the Houthi rebels?

Let's also not forget that Donald Trump is an assassin in his own right and one with much better aim than Thomas Crooks. This is the man who had Iran's top general, Qasem Soleimani, wacked in an extrajudicial execution along with 9 others at a busy international airport in Bagdad and he still brags about it at every fucking rally. He was probably warming up to make jokes about the leaders he's assassinated when Crooks Reservoir Dogged his ear. So, what makes this ex-president any different than his own would-be killer?

The ex-president is all powerful. America's despots and murderers are the most powerful despots and murderers on the planet and that makes them special. That makes them above the law or even serious moral scrutiny and even a mass media apparatus that despises Donald Trump for soiling this illusion of omnipotence with his shameless decorum is committed to protecting the sanctity of his untouchable status in order to preserve the power it represents. 

This is why, even after whacking the leaders of his own client states in the Dominican Republic and South Vietnam, the Fourth Estate insisted that we all get traumatized when someone popped off JFK. This is why, after a summer packed full of racist police riots, the political class only really lost their shit when a bunch of diabetic boomers tore up the Capitol Building on January 6.

The sanctity of American power must be preserved at all costs. Otherwise, who would pay those idolatrous scions of the self-proclaimed free press in speedboats to lick boots? They might be forced to slum it with their brethren in the North Korean news corps instead. 

So, a killer shooting another killer and a gang launching a riot at another gang's clubhouse have to be rendered unspeakably shocking. Otherwise, people might use their God given common sense to recognize that the only thing that makes powerful people any different than the rest of us is that powerful people have constructed a propaganda empire designed to fool us into believing that the rules don't apply to them.

But they do, and if petty psychopaths like Mr. Crooks or Lee Harvey Oswald or that QAnon Shamen serve any real purpose it's that they remind us that every mammal is made of meat and every building can be burned down. If the masses were left alone by the propagandists to figure this out for themselves, truly shocking things might occur. The most heavily armed nation on the planet might all aim their AR-15s at Washington at once and demand their money back. The nation's swelling homeless population might just decide to crash at the White House and keep it.

Even worse, the next time some draft-dodging pussy in presidential robes demands that some kid from the sticks go kill other poor people in some far away country, that GI might tell him to go fuck himself and wouldn't that just be so goddamn offensive?

So, I'll say it again, just one more time, so even the censors in the cheap seats can hear me loud and clear; Every American president is a killer and every killer lives and dies by the same sword. If saying this out loud makes me so damn dangerous then why don't you just fucking shoot me. Or maybe you're just not presidential enough to be that big of a hypocrite yet.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

* This Charming Man by the Smiths

* Hate My Way by Throwing Muses

* Lawyers, Guns & Money by Warren Zevon

* Charmless Man by Blur

* Dot Dash by Wire

* Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival

* 21 by Samia

* God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols

* Public Image by Public Image Ltd.

Rethinking Antifascism in an Age of Constitutional Despotism

 America is supposed to be the greatest democracy on earth, right? I know this because we have at least fifty goddamn holidays a year shouting it at us from the night sky in burning lights. Still, I feel compelled to ask, because it only took five unelected judges to declare our president to be infallible and his Executive Office to be above the law. 

I speak of course about the first attempted criminal prosecution of an American president for his actions in office, in which the Supreme Court largely sided with one Donald J. Trump along partisan lines by declaring that the President of these great United States of America enjoys near absolute immunity for any crime which he or she deems to be an "official act." 

In the dissent to this absurd ruling, liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor summed up the likely results of the decision quite succinctly. "When "the President" uses his official power in any way, under the majority's reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy's Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organize a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune."

The conservative justices balked like braying gulls at high tide over the supposed hyperbole of this dissent but if anything, it doesn't go far enough. While Trump V. United States certainly makes it frighteningly clear that the White House is essentially a despotic device, this can only be construed as a revelation to someone who spends two thirds of the year hibernating two miles up their own asshole. 

In fact, it was actually under Donald Trump's much-beloved predecessor, Barack Obama, that the Executive Office was first officially awarded the authority to murder American citizens by decree through a shadowy drone strike program which has already been used to kill thousands of innocent civilians across the globe.

And when this extrajudicial assembly line of despotic slaughter was finally brought before a federal judge in 2016 by the ACLU in a lawsuit on behalf of three slain Americans, one of them a 16-year-old boy, the judge openly admitted that Obama likely violated the due process of a child but threw out the case anyway, spouting off about the sanctity of national security and executive power.

This is an absurdly despicable opinion which Mrs. Sotomayor herself apparently shares as she chose to defend herself from charges of hyperbole by fellow lifetime members of her unelected judicial junta by protesting that Trump was not "doing it like President Obama... to protect the country from terrorism, he's doing it for personal gain." 

This sick moral logic actually cuts right to the dark heart of liberal Trump hysteria. People like Sonya Sotomayor and her fellow dissenting judges aren't really frightened at all by the gross power wielded by the Executive Office, a power they all know and acknowledge is a matter of life and death. They are simply offended that an oafish lout like Donald Trump doesn't bother to shield his despotism with lofty peons to national security and the greater good.

This is because America has long been a fascist state that uses a scalped constitution like Buffalo Bill's "woman suit" to conceal its nasty bits, and this ghastly practice is far from unusual. While America certainly tucks its despotism with all the poise and skill of a world class drag queen, it is far from the first fascist state to use liberal democracy to facilitate its rise to absolute power. It's actually a pretty standard procedure in this trade and you can look no further than Nazi Germany for the blueprint.

After the November Revolution brought down the German Empire during the waning hours of the First World War, its military elites in the Freikorps and their bourgeoise industrialist patrons made a deal with the supposed liberal progressives in the Social Democratic Party to form a constitutional democracy provided that these Social Democrats sold out their more radical comrades and allowed the same elites they raged against to retain their status and power behind a more politically correct facade.   

For a while it worked, with the so-called Weimar Republic enjoying what at least held all the trappings of a very socially tolerant secular society. But the seeds of the Third Reich were sown right into the Republic's constitution which afforded its own executive office with the right to override the Reichstag through emergency decree with its infamous Article 48. 

The nation's first president, a Social Democrat named Friedrich Ebert, made regular use of this democratic device for despotism to keep the rabble in line, as did his predecessors, including Paul Von Hindenburg, whose presidency the SPD backed in the name of national unity and who paved the road to the Holocaust with democratic pavement by appointing Adolf Hitler as his chancellor. And how did young Hitler justify his proceeding attempted takeover of Europe? With a call for national security of course after the Reichstag burned down during his own little January 6.

None of this is coincidental nor anomalous. Nearly every fascist state is midwifed by a liberal democracy because both are little more than the playthings of the same greedy elites attempting to hoodwink the powerless while they rob them stupid. 

The one thing that the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany all had in common was that they all shared the exact same nest of conniving oligarchs running the show behind the curtains. Monied creeps who simply shifted the excuses to maintain their grip on power with different parties and ideologies. In fact, many of these vermin even helped the United States to "rebuild" the Europe they blew to bits as part of the newly liberal government of West Germany.

All of this is part of a cyclical process of degenerative statism that often begins with some kind of divinely inspired monarchy, matures into a more secular republic, and then embraces an openly militant call to despotism as its public begins to catch on to the charade, often before simply repeating the cycle all over again. 

The communists often refer to the fascistic stage of this process as "late capitalism" and their analysis of its liberal roots remains right on the money, but these Marxist historians also typically fail to recognize that state communism is merely another part of the same cruel process. After all, didn't Czarist Russia become a social democracy before the Bolsheviks crashed in to preserve the order by declaring the Comintern to be the new aristocracy until it was time for Stalin to play Further?

This isn't to say that fascism isn't a problem. Fascism is an existential threat to basic human dignity, but it will never be stopped until we address the fact that it is merely the inevitable end result of the state itself, a system defined by giving a single sainted class a monopoly on the use of force. Once that precedent is set with standing armies and "national security," fascism essentially becomes a forgone conclusion. Therefore, the only way to truly confront the fascist menace is to confront the state itself, specifically the police state, and the only thing that committed antifascists really need to do to achieve this goal is to maintain their tactics while shifting their focus.

Targeting hooligans like the Proud Boys or even just one single wannabe Further like Donald Trump is little more than an act of treating the symptoms of a much larger disease and it often actually only tends to provide that disease with more opportunities to justify its own existence by offering its aid in fighting its own symptoms. This is how you get a career white supremacist like Joe Biden running to save us all from Satan's power while beefing up the same police state that Trump sicked on peaceful protestors, only this time in the name of preventing MAGA extremism.

Antifascists should be infiltrating, sabotaging, and doxing the police state itself along with its corporate sponsors and their role models should be post-modern cyber revolutionaries like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, who have risked their lives to expose the guts of the fascist machine, as well as hacktivist sets like Anonymous who have actively sabotaged it. This can even be taken a step further by taking a page from counter economic pioneers like Ross Albricht, who gave us a sample of a viable alternative to corporate state subsistence with the black markets of his new Silk Road.

Despotism at its most cerebral is a very creative beast that will require equally creative solutions to destroy it. Covert fascists like Justice Sotomayor are actually far smarter than their conservative counterparts to conceal their despotism behind a veneer of liberal democracy but the power will always belong to the people who are just creative enough to realize that they are only as powerless as they believe they are. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* People Have the Power by Patti Smith

* Power to the People by John Lennon

* Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols

* Big Wheel by Samia

* Funny You Should Ask by the Front Bottoms

* The Bends by Radiohead

* White Riot by The Clash

* The Crying Game by Boy George

* Where is My Mind by the Pixies

* Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth

A Message to "Libertarians" Backing a Baby Killer to Spite Trans Kids

 It all began with a brazen and reckless pre-dawn raid in the desert wilds of Yemen. Seal Team 6 hit the ground shooting on the dusty streets of Yakla after lighting the village up with Reaper drones. The peasants put up a fight, one Seal was killed and two were wounded, but it was little use. By the time the sun rose on Yakla that morning it was strewn with body parts and smoldering in ashes. Among the dead were some 30 civilians including 8 women and 7 children, with the youngest slain by American heroes at the lethal age of 3 years old. 

But one victim of this onslaught stood out among the others. An 8-year-old American citizen named Nora al-Awlaki was the third member of her immediate family killed on military orders issued from on high with White House executive authority. Nora's father was the notorious Islamic propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, and in 2011 both he and her 16-year-old half-brother had been extrajudicially assassinated by drone strike within a week of one another under the orders of then-President Barack Obama.

Little Nora's own execution came under the orders of one Donald J. Trump however, at the end of that man's first week in the Oval Office in early January of 2017. She bled to death in agony in her mother's arms over a period of two hours while that knuckle-dragging fiend-in-chief gorged himself on Big Macs and Diet Cokes. Her last words were, "Don't cry, mama, I'm fine." 

And just like that, after less than one week in office, Donald Trump graduated from a sleezy, rapacious, corporate welfare queen to a full-blown baby killer. But anyone foolish enough to be shocked didn't have to dig deep to find that this brazenly cruel war crime was merely another campaign promise fulfilled. "The other thing with terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families." He had boasted vainly on the campaign trail. Mission accomplished.

But President Trump wasn't done killing babies in Yemen. In fact, he was just getting started. As Gulf State lobbyists carefully messaged his son-in-law's prostate, the Donald accelerated his predecessor's already genocidal proxy war on the poorest nation in the Arab Peninsula. With a little help from Trump's golf buddies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, he and Obama slaughtered 377,000 people by the end of Donald's first term in office. 60% of these people died from starvation and disease made possible by a US facilitated blockade and more than half of the dead were children under the age of five. Now this orange baby killer is back and he's calling to take Genocide Joe's own proxy war on the children of Gaza to new levels of unapologetic cruelty. 

Biden has already aided and abetted the hyper-Zionist government of Bibi Netanyahu in committing what might just barely surpass the massacre in Yemen as the most heinous act of genocide of the 21rst century. The official death count stands at nearly 40,000 in just under a year, with 15,000 of those bodies belonging to children but the Lancet has recently projected those numbers to be closer to 186,000 dead, and this apparently isn't heinous enough for Donald Trump. In fact, he has actually accused Genocide Joe of being a "bad Palestinian" and has promised to help his old cronies in Israel to "finish the job."

And somehow, this is the man that many members of the leadership of the Libertarian Party, my party, are lining up to offer their support too. The only thing more bizarre than a bunch of so-called anarchists and minarchists backing a man who quadrupled the deficit to put undocumented children in concentration camps is that they actually have a solidly non-interventionist candidate on the ballot, a 38-year-old gay antiwar activist named Chase Oliver. 

But according to the Mises Caucus who now runs the party, Oliver is too "woke" for libertarian consumption. Some of this is just sour grapes. After allowing Donald Trump to turn their biennial Libertarian National Convention in DC into a MAGA circus by awarding him the keynote speaking slot, the Mises Caucus managed to secure the Party Chair for another term for Angela Mcardle but failed to get their candidate, Michael Rectenwald, the party's presidential nomination.

However, poor losers aside, I find it a bit hard to ignore the fact that most of the people publicly rejecting Oliver's candidacy, often in favor of tacitly backing Trump, list the man's support for respecting the rights of parents with transgender children to make their own medical decisions first and foremost among his unforgivably "woke" sins.

This includes both the Montana and Colorado state Libertarian Parties who have declared that they will not even put Oliver's name on the ballot. Idaho is contemplating doing the same and Chairwoman Mcardle appears to be right there with them. In a post-convention video address, the head of my party's national leadership appeared in a clown nose before a rainbow backdrop and proceeded to faun over a man who spent more tax dollars than nearly any other president in history like a lovesick fangirl. 

"Donald Trump says he's going to put a Libertarian in a cabinet position. He came out and spoke to us. He said he's a libertarian. He has basically endorsed us." Mcardle gushed shamelessly before making her loyalties crystal clear. "And so, in return, I endorse Chase Oliver as the best way to beat Joe Biden. Get in loser, we are stopping Biden. That's what I think this campaign is about."

Speaking as a genderqueer libertarian antiwar activist, I dearly wish that any of this trash was shocking to me, and it probably should be. The GOP has been on a big government jihad against trans kids for years now, violating every civil liberty imaginable to erase them from existence. But the Mises Caucus and their leadership in the Libertarian Party have made their feelings about my community very clear. 

After skuttling an attempt to add support for the civil liberties of trans people to the party's platform earlier this year, a leaked internal party memo labeled "transgenderism" as a Cultural Marxist conspiracy that needs to be thwarted and sadly this line of bullshit jibes perfectly with many of the Mises Caucus' ideological torch bearers like Rectenwald and Mcardle who spout baseless conspiracy theories about puberty blockers chemically castrating children.

Please allow me to rip the needle from the record right now. Puberty blockers have been used safely for decades to treat precocious puberty in cis children. The Mayo Clinic has found them to cause little to no permanent physical changes, but studies have consistently shown them to reduce suicidality in one of the most vulnerable populations of young people in this country by as much as 73% and I'm not even asking you fucking people to grow up and support a medical treatment proven to be effective in saving lives. I am merely asking that my party stand by its goddamn word and support the right for Queer kids and their families to exist without having the jackboot of the state stepping on our throats.

I am asking you to keep the government out of our schools where they are banning books and policing public bathrooms. I am asking you to keep the government out of our doctor's offices where some states are trying to interfere with the medical decisions of individuals well into their twenties. And I am asking you to keep the government off our streets where states like Florida and Tennessee want to use anti-drag laws to penalize any gender performance that they deem to be "male and female impersonation." But more than anything, I want you to put shutting down the war machine that mangles other people's children like little Nora al-Awlaki before your culture war bullshit and this is what the Mises Caucus itself was supposed to be all about. 

Formed in 2017 in revulsion to the Libertarian Party putting a known neocon warmonger named Bill Weld up for VP on the 2016 ticket, Mises was supposed to be a revival of the anti-imperialist values of anarchists like Murray Rothbard who founded this party. I have good friends and loyal allies in this caucus, fellow radicals who share my revulsion for compulsory schooling and my support for secession, both of which I view as indispensable tools for Queer liberation. 

But over the last few years I have seen this caucus polluted by the braindead talking points of Christian Zionist globalists and this is the other objective of the GOP's war on trans, to use cultural prejudices to hoodwink well-intentioned isolationist populists into supporting big government, baby killing scum like Donald Trump.

Sadly, it appears to have worked and this is why this post should not be misconstrued as an endorsement for Chase Oliver or any other candidate. A decade ago, I would have been happy to endorse this fatherfucker for the same reasons that I would have been happy to endorse Ron Paul or Eugene Debs for that matter. Because I would have wanted the most unapologetically antiwar candidate to have the loudest microphone that I could throw them. But in 2024, American presidential elections aren't even affective for protest votes. The process itself has become a device for dividing oppressed people of every stripe against each other.

Before the GOP's war on woke, I had no problem building alliances among even the most culturally conservative libertarians. Now, my own party treats me like a fucking pedophile because I want to keep other trans girls from getting molested in men's bathrooms like I was, and because I need to stop my government from killing any more children, whether their name is Nora al-Awlaki or Nex Bennedict.

If this is what democracy looks like, then I am done with fucking democracy and the morons it plays like one of Donald Trump's cheap casino games. 

You people can vote for whoever the fuck you want but don't you dare go calling your appeasement for genocide at home and abroad libertarian or I'll kick your fucking ass.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* (I'm) Screwed by Titus Andronicus

* See No Evil by Television

* All I Do by Bully

* Lexicon Devil by the Germs

* Someone Tell the Boys by Samia

* Blank Generation by Richard Hell & the Voivods

* Fatal Flaw by Titus Andronicus

* My War by Black Flag

* Bored by Waxahatchee

* The Mess Inside by the Mountain Goats