Borders are a Weapon of Mass Destruction

 The more things change the more they stay the same. The only place where that seems more true than Washington is at the border. Obama and Biden built the camps. Trump filled the camps. And Biden is building more as thousands of desperate people are racing to overcrowd them. After another election season of empty Democratic promises, we were all told that things would be different now. Joe Biden had somehow miraculously evolved in his old age into a kinder, gentler, racist neoliberal sack of shit. Wokeness was supposed to be a symptom of his dementia. But as the migrants came, one promise after another fell to shit. 72 hour detentions swelled to 177 and counting. Closing the private prison pipeline included everything but ICE's notorious private immigration detention centers. And Trump era concentration camps like Corizo Springs opened back up for business. Even now, we're told reforms are on their way. But we were told this back when it counted and now we're being told this again as the number of refugees rises and FEMA moves to reenact Hurricane Katrina at a sports venue near you.

They call this a crisis at the border, but the border is the crisis. Ever since Bill Clinton moved to militarize this countries massive federally centralized border back in 1994, we've been violating migrant rights as if it were a competitive sport. Building bigger and bigger prisons and meaner and meaner posses of Border Patrol thugs who's authority stretched deeper and deeper into the heartland. All for a senseless war on the crime of crossing an invisible line scribbled by conquistadors and other assorted savages in the desert centuries ago. Borders, especially big borders, are nothing but another excuse to give the state unspeakable powers to do unspeakable things to desperate people. Fuck all of them. They all make me fucking sick. 

My violent allergy to borders is more than just a side affect of my anarchism. It runs in my veins as an Irish Catholic daughter of renegade stock. There was a time when this awful country at least had relatively open borders. When they welcomed your poor, your tired, your sick.... My ancestors were all of the above, fleeing for their lives from an English enforced starvation genocide straight out of Madeline Albright's wet dream journal called the Irish Potato Famine. In fact, if it wasn't for the lax border politics of 19th Century America, there is a very real possibility that I wouldn't even exist to bitch at you today. Millions more would have starved in the Crown's final solution to their long Irish problem. So Morrigan help me, this issue is more than a little personal. Just add a history of child abuse and stir and you get one pissed off tranny who sees herself in the thousand yard stare of every hungry five year old confined in one of Mr. Biden's fabulous decorated new cages. I get sick headaches just writing about it. But my Irish heritage includes another very different border crisis that I believe shines a light on not only the famines, but the bitter sweet policies that saved us from them, and the very nature of mass immigration laws themselves.

The Kingdom's putsch to liquidate Irish Catholics may have reached its gruesome apex in the 1800's but it began to take its hideous shape centuries earlier in the 1600's, when England began to flood Northern Ireland with desperate farmers from the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England. They pit us against our Celtic brethren, survivors of English brutality themselves, by stripping all Catholics of their land rights and awarding huge swaths of property to the Anglican planters in what became known as the Plantation of Ulster. America, always the attentive royal sibling, largely mimicked this sick genocide-by-other-poor-people when they offered many of the same Scotch-Irish refugees similar promises of free land and bounty as long as they agreed to help wipe out the Indians of the Wild West. Ironically, many of today's loudest white border warriors are Scotch-Irish descendants blubbering about being victims of a brown wave sent to erase whiteness. It might actually be a clever conspiracy theory if our current borders were anything resembling open.

My point here is that borders and immigration have and will always be weapons against the poor on both sides of the invisible lines as long as they are controlled by huge centralized states with huge centralized ambitions. The only reason why my ancestors were let in alongside our regional tormentors was that this state needed us to tame the West before the railroads could rip through our homesteads like border walls do to ranches today. And the only reason why thousands of desperate people are still flocking to our borders in throngs faster than we can abuse them is because of one big lie told by two big parties for two very different reasons. The lie that the Democrats have ever been for open borders was perpetuated by Republicans to terrify white people into voting against them, and it was also gently peddled by Democrats so they could secure the Latino vote. The current crisis at the border is just blowback from the same imperial games these scumfucks have been playing for centuries, and we are all just pawns on their haunted chessboard. 

So how do we fight the scourge of big borders aside from the pipe dream of overthrowing the state itself. The best tactic I've seen lately that could potentially affect an essentially open border scenario comes from the rise in sanctuary politics. Whole states have embraced decentralized resistance to federal tyranny in the name of protecting everything from migrants to dope smokers and gun nuts. Why stop at the states? I say we create our own chessboard of sanctuary cities, towns, and counties. Many border communities have far more economic stock across the Rio Grande than they do with racist city-slickers in Dallas or Phoenix. I say we decentralize the borders and the immigration system in general. That way we can give migrants a road map to the communities that welcome them and give those afraid of radical change an opportunity to be proven wrong by economic competition. Worst comes to worst, border control becomes as cheap and simple as sending a few people on a bus to the next town over. The result would not only effectively disintegrate the border as we know it along with the thugs who profit from its police state, it would disintegrate the authority of the federal government itself and foster a pan-secession of a vast cluster of microstates too small to really fuck with anybody.

The second political martial art that could be used against American border fascism is a bit more radical and unorthodox. Undocument everyone. It's a tactic taken up by libertarian Sovereign Citizens across the country and its wide scale proliferation could erase borders as we know them by making them totally obsolete. It's not the easiest solution but if more Americans, regardless of status, rejected any and all forms of federal documentation, from birth certificates to the draft, this nation would be utterly powerless to prevent free movement and association, and it would encourage many on the anti-immigrant right to form a pact with migrants in order to get Uncle Sam off both of their backs. No documents, no taxes, no borders. Think about it. It could be a beautiful thing.

And so could America. We've all been tossed into this colonialist mess based on one scheme or another, but you can't turn back time so we might as well make the best of a beautiful mess. My people left a lot on their way to becoming Americans, but we gained the opportunity to take part in a massive experiment in extreme individualism. The one shred of the American Dream worth preserving is the dream of coming to this suburban desert wasteland and becoming whatever the fuck you want. Go ahead and start up that nudist polygamist commune between the Joshua trees. The Salvadorans are too busy unionizing in the avocado groves to stop you and their tattooed sons might just be able to show you how to aim that Kalashnikov when the tax man comes calling. That's my America. Can you dig it, dearest motherfuckers. I can. But not without burning those goddamn nooses you call borders.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Ode to My Family by the Cranberries

*  Rockin' in the Free World by Neil Young

*  Fourth of July by X

*  Paper planes by MIA

*  It's OK by Dead Moon

*  Declare Independence by Bjork

*  Gallipoli by Beirut

*  What About Us by Ministry

*  White Minority by Black Flag

*  Toyota Man by Neon Indian

*  Rebels by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers  

Confessions of a Domestic Extremist

 Who is Nicky Reid? If some random suit on the street asked you that question, what would your answer be? Aside from a pussy crushing genderfuck fox and the baddest fucking blogger alive, of coarse. Your answer would likely be something along the lines of a proud part of the problem, a rebel rouser, a degenerate, a devil's advocate, a crowd exciter, a provocateur, a contrarian, a riot inducer.... Nicky Reid is an anarchist with zero respect for order or the status quo. Nicky Reid is an unabashed enemy of the state who spreads discontent online like digital milk. Nicky Reid is a flag burning anti-American bitch who breaks bread with Boogaloo Bois, defends Hezbollah, and lionizes the Black Panther Party. Nicky Reid is a cop hating prison abolitionist who openly promotes armed insurrection. Nicky Reid is an anti-government revolutionary who frequently and consistently advocates for the overthrow of the United States Government, and nearly every other government for that matter. Nicky Reid is a domestic extremist, and she needs to be stopped. 

Guilty as charged, but I also happen to be a hell of a lot of other equally important things as well. I'm a devout Christopagan who believes in the sanctity of all human life. I'm a strict civil libertarian who firmly supports the Non-Aggression Principle which preaches that no truly righteous person should ever throw the first punch. I'm also an agoraphobic cripple on disability who doesn't even own a gun (yet), volunteers at a local AIDS resource center, and takes care of my aging mother who suffers from worse chronic pain than I do. But none of those details matter once you've slapped someone with a broad and dehumanizing label like 'domestic extremist,' and that's precisely the point.

Overseas, in parts of the world the news rarely covers like the supposedly under covered scourge of American extremism, in places like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, carrying such a label makes you a disposable target of the War on Terror. Someone who openly peddles radicalism and/or associates with known radicals like me gets drone striked or whisked away to some black site in the Indian Ocean to be tortured with waterboarding and jumper cables on their junk. This is the fruit of the bipartisan Patriot Act and the entirety of our current political establishment is fighting like hell to spread the love and change the domestic rules of engagement to give declared enemies of the state such as myself the same rights as any foreigner labeled the same way. It's really quite woke when you think about it. To the corporate duopoly, Third World lives not mattering isn't fair. No lives should matter beneath the iron heel of the war state.

But this shit doesn't begin on January 6, when the same feds pushing for unlimited power and resources chose not to inform the Capitol Police of an impending riot that could expand their own wallets. The American Empire has been advocating bringing the war home well before Biden reached the White House. Way back in the 90's, our daughtering commander in chief advocated using international anti-terror laws against American citizens with the original Patriot Act in the wake of another suspiciously avoidable attack in Oklahoma City, and none other than Donald Trump's Attorney General, Bill Barr, announced the creation of a nation wide task force to combat anti-government extremists like Antifa and Boogaloo in the wake of the unprecedented uprisings last summer. This is what empires do when they begin to lose control of their own populaces during forever wartime. They take what they do best on foreign soil and apply it to their own people. This is why every empire inevitably ends in a dictatorship. The banana republic always comes home to die.

They're going to tell you a lot of things about people like me. Some of them will be true. Most wont. They will tell you that they need these powers specifically to fight the most odious of offenders, neo-Nazis and violent Salafists, when any asshole with a scoreboard can tell you that domestic extremists like me have a far more consistent track record of fighting such elements than a government that more often than not actively fosters their existence. Go to a Proud Boy rally and try throwing a wrench in any given direction without hitting an informant. And name me one chapter of Al-Qaeda who hasn't spent time on the CIA's dime. They will go after these paper tigers first, specifically so they can lump antifascists like me in with them. It's a tail as old as totalitarianism. First they came for the Oath Keepers but you said nothing because you didn't want to be seen defending assholes.

I know people will say I'm just going off the rails again and I can just hear the eyes rolling like railroad drunks. "You're just being paranoid, Nicky." Yeah, no fucking shit. If you bothered to pick up a history book not sponsored by Time-Life you would be too. I'm scared of what my government will do with expanded anti-terror powers because I'm scared of what they've already done without them. Lets not forget that the FBI itself was founded as a violent "anti-communist" aka fascist organization by an open bigot named J. Edgar Hoover. Lets not forget that every anti-terror crisis over the last century has been used as an excuse to persecute the radical left and our comrades in the libertarian right. Lets not forget the state sanctioned murders of Malcolm X, Mark Clark, Fred Hampton, Bunchy Carter, and Filiberto Ojeda Rios. Lets not forget the totally illegal imprisonment of Leonard Peltier, Geronimo Pratt, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange. Lets not forget MOVE, Waco, and Rainbow Farm. Lets not forget that this countries last great fight against domestic extremism in the late 90's and early 2000's was used largely as an excuse to persecute radical environmentalists and anarcho-primitivists by handing out life sentences for torching SUV's.

This thing is a trap. Our government has been committed to crushing brown people and their domestic extremist allies from the beginning. Giving an institution defined by racism the powers of god to fight racism is completely batshit insane. Our government has more than enough tools already to prevent racist violence and they almost always choose not to use them because they don't fucking care. Fascism is no threat to its ideological heirs in liberal democracy. What is a threat is working class solidarity across racial and political lines of the kind advocated by the better chapters of Antifa and Boogaloo and online domestic extremists like me. Give this government any gun you like and they will put us in the crosshairs. I pray to god that I'm being paranoid, but as the late Kurt Cobain once sang, just because you're paranoid, don't mean their not after you.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Territorial Pissings by Nirvana

*  What About Us by Ministry

*  The Prisoner by Iron Maiden

*  Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins

*  The Suburbs by Arcade Fire

*  The Bends by Radiohead

*  Margin Walker by Fugazi

*  Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger

*  Paranoid by Black Sabbath

Imperial Suicide by Taliban

 Sometimes I have this dream. A terrible dream. A dream about a war. It begins like any other war, with a big country attacking a weaker one. An empire chases an army of starving ghosts into a deep dark mountainous hole of caverns and catacombs. Victory for the empire seems all but assured. The bombs drop and poor people die as rich people cheer and shake hands over cigars and brandy. But then something strange happens. Something strangely wonderful. The war doesn't end, and the empire begins to lose. They throw more and more resources into this bottomless black hole; men, women, bombs, money; but it all just disappears into the darkness. Soon other nations are joining in on the war effort with their own men, women, bombs, and money. 

But nothing changes. If anything, that hole just grows deeper. Soon every powerful state in the world has been sucked into this vacuum and no one can remember why or how to get out. The citizens of these nations, every nation, begin to become painfully aware, not just of the utter madness of this war, but the madness of every war and the madness of every state that must fight them to retain the legitimacy of their stranglehold over their own people. Revolution breaks out across the globe and the empire becomes unmoored and simply evaporates down the deep dark abyss in the mountains that they never should have stepped foot in. I have this wonderful terrible dream a lot lately. Sometimes I wake up screaming. Other times, I wake up cheering.

I wake up to 2021. I wake up to Joe Biden inching ever closer to undoing the only positive accomplishment of the failed Trump regime; a last minute attempt to pull every last American soldier from our deep dark hole in Afghanistan. Almost twenty years into this mess and the elites in both the mainstream press and the military industrial complex seem to be totally oblivious to the fact that they are following in Gorbachev and Alexander the Great's footsteps to another imperial suicide in the Hindu Kush. Suicide by Taliban. As the May 1rst deadline for the Trump peace deal rapidly approaches, all the momentum seems to be moving towards doom, and not just for the American Empire. Our first world flunkies from Germany to France to NATO are all already pledging their support for mass suicide. They seem utterly convinced that they are just one drone strike away from taming the Pashtun beast and curing its wilderness with the decadent elixir of liberal democracy. They are all so fucked. Then why am I not happy.

Many an anti-imperialist curmudgeon, from Bakunin to Lenin, has cheered on imperial suicide by total war as a strategy to achieve a global revolutionary outcome. Che Guevara famously attempted to lure the US into an unwinnable war in the dark Bolivian heart of Latin America with the intention of creating two, three, many Vietnams to crush her. As a resolute collapsitarian panarchist, I share very similar Quixotic dreams. I believe with all my bleeding heart that the fate illustrated in my dreams above is a dark inevitability with a silver lining. 

Every empire collapses. Conquest is simply unsustainable. And when an empire collapses we are presented with a great vacuum that can be filled with any dream big enough and tenacious enough to fill it. The great American suicide will create the greatest vacuum the world has ever seen, like the fall of ten Romes, and I intend to do everything within my feeble powers as an online provocateur to fill that vacuum with my dream of a thousand stateless societies stretching as far as the eye can see. A revolution of synergistic diversity that leaves everyone with a stateless dream within their reach and the opportunity to achieve it peacefully. It is a vision I look to with inspiration like the rising sun, but still, I cannot bring myself to cheer on the Afghan nightmare, even if it is inevitable.

It is the privilege of western revolutionaries to view the world at a safe distance. This isn't a privilege the peasantry of the darker nations share and this is why I reject internationalism even in the defense of my dreams of a vast localist revolution. The biggest mistake any revolutionary can ever make is falling for the twisted fable that the ends justify the means when, in the harsh light of reality, the means create their own ends. War is evil and stupid and it must always be opposed unless it is fought purely in self-defense. The only people left who have a right to fight a war in Afghanistan are the Taliban, and that is an end created by interventionist means. It is an end created by the fact that this whole damn war could have been avoided if people had only minded their own goddamn business. 

If Kabul's young communist government had only left their reforms to the people who welcomed them in the cities, they wouldn't have created the grounds for ancient traditionalist tribes to fight their revolution. If the US had just left this squabble between rival peasant societies be, they wouldn't have turned a small tribal resistance into an international conspiracy of Wahhabist mercenaries known as the Mujahedeen. If the Soviets had just focused on not subjugating the Muslims within their own borders, they wouldn't have been sucked into an American trap to drain them of their already dwindling resources. If the US hadn't created this diabolical trap in the first place, we would have never unleashed the demons of Islamic jihadism on the world. No Osama, no Taliban, no Al-Qaeda, no 9/11, no ISIS, no mountains upon mountains of broken brown bodies. All of this mayhem and cruelty could have been avoided if we had all simply had the moral fortitude to mind our own goddamn business. And this is what peace is really all about, doing moral arithmetic to avoid a future of carnage.

I have to follow the math and devote myself to advocating for an end to America's war in the bottomless black hole of empires because what I know about history has taught me what comes of those who put the means first. I will not see my revolution crippled and gut-shot by cowards in the Bolivian bush. But Mr. Biden and his friends in Europe should be forewarned, if they do indeed go ahead with their imperial suicide by Taliban, the wild eyed anarchists who creep along the weed lines of their carefully manicured lawns will be waiting, and my non-interventionist ass may very well be among them. Choose your next move wisely. 

Pleasant dreams, dearest motherfuckers.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics

*  Man Size by PJ Harvey

*  Persephone by Cocteau Twins

*  War Pigs by Black Sabbath

*  Golden Hair by Slowdive

*  My War by Black Flag

*  Double Dare by Bauhaus

*  Release the Bats by the Birthday Party

*  Ever by Flipper

*  All Apologies by Nirvana

*  Kim's Watermelon Gun by Flaming Lips 

Late Winter Riot Flicks for the Coming Summer Uprising

 If this isn't the winter of our discontent then John Steinbeck can die twice writing shitty novels in an igloo of frozen dicks. This winter has been a toxic cloud of ice fog belched from the bowels of Satan's vagina. If it hasn't been continent spanning blizzards, its been exotic and sexy new strains of Covid and vaccines that always seem to be just a week away from making my Lyme disease twerk just so I can eat a stack of goddamn pancakes again without worrying about murdering my ancient carcinogenic parents. I clearly don't take enough meds for this shit and I take enough pills to choke Elvis. It's in pre-apocalyptic times like these that you have to cling to the little things just to keep your friends Smith and Wesson out of your mouth. Kittens, springtime, and riots. Oh, the beautiful riots. That was the only thing that got me through 2020. That righteous summer of rage. And I have the sneaking suspicion that we're in for another one.

That's because the 2020 Summer Uprisings were bigger than George Floyd and the institutional racism that lynched him. It was about a whole damn nation pushed to the brink by a daughtering old police state that can lock up half of New Africa but can't manage a goddamn virus. This nation needed to vent fire and it felt good, even to cripples like me who were too damn sick, even before Covid, to join in the festivities. We could shake our canes from our prison cells and shout 'give em holy hell' from behind the bars, and holy hell they did indeed give. So that's why in these loathsome last days of Winter 2021, this veteran agoraphobic couch potato has picked ten movies to prep you for the next uprising. Most are about social upheaval in one shape or form. Some are merely about the factors that create this discord. All are must see cinema for anyone getting through the night with a brick in their hand. Enjoy!

La Haine by Mathieu Kassovitz (1995)-  "Its about society in free fall." La Haine (French for 'Hate') may be the greatest riot movie since The Battle of Algiers because it deals so intimately with what inspires just such an uprising. In stark black and white, La Haine follows three young men through twenty hours between a riot started by the racially charged police murder of a friend and another shocking act of violence that will inevitably inspire the exact same results to repeat themselves all over again. The sense of nihilism is thicker than smog as these lifelong friends struggle not just to escape the ghetto but to escape a fate that seems as inevitable as the sun rising. In spite of the glib humor I use to cope with these issues, an uprising of any kind is nothing to take lightly. It all too often leads to a cycle of pointless violence if it isn't held with the proper perspective on social justice. "Hatred breeds hatred" as Hubert says. Be careful not to fall into this trap and remember always that the abyss stares back.

If.... by Lindsay Anderson (1968)-  There is no way in hell a movie like this could ever be be released today, but goddammit if we don't need it. Lindsay Anderson's avant garde tour de force about an armed insurrection at a fascistic English boarding school didn't just make the fabulously cavalier Malcolm McDowell a star, it inspired directors from Stanley Kubrick to Martin Scorsese to make cinema dangerous again. And for those justifiably squeamish about a film that ends in a downright triumphant school shooting, just remember that only priests and generals were harmed during the making of this picture. If that doesn't make you feel better than your childhood was probably not quite abusive enough to appreciate the jet black irony of teenage rebellion.

 Tangerine by Sean Baker (2015)-  44 trans people were murdered in 2020 alone, that we know of. Most were sex workers of color just trying to get by in a society that gives gender outlaws few other resources to live authentically. But in our FOSTA-SESTA universe of TERFs and SWERFs, it's important to remember that these are more than just statistics, they're people, and the sun shines on the stroll too. Shot completely with iPhones, Tangerine gives us a day in the life of two transgender sex workers who survive largely off the subsistence of each other's strength. Sean Baker may have directed but co-stars Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor made this movie something warm enough to take home with you. One of the things that engaged a skeptical tranny like me into supporting a mass movement like Black Live Matter was their outreach to and solidarity with trans women of every color, creating a level of lethal Black-Queer synergy not seen since the heyday of ACT UP. Movies like this give me hope for movements like that.

The Battle of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo (1966)-  The abominable, the classic, the greatest movie on popular revolt ever committed to film. Gillo Pontecorvo's cinema verite masterpiece on the Algerian Revolution still feels as vivid and gritty as it ever has. That's because it is a movie about revolutionaries by revolutionaries for revolutionaries. Many of its stars were Algerian amateurs acting out the events they survived themselves first hand. The result is provocatively powerful and shockingly intimate. There are zero attempts to sugar coat this story. Heinous acts committed by both sides are given thorough attention from bombings to torture, but you'd have to be Marine La Pen not to know who the good guys are here, and the good guys often die while the message lives forever. No pain, no gain.

Over the Edge by Jonathan Kaplan (1979)-  This may or may not be shocking to the adults in the room but the kids are not alright. During any police state, they always get the full brunt of the truncheon and 2021 ain't no exception. Hanging themselves after hours of Zoom hell and having a bunch of patronizing adults politicizing their struggle without ever handing them the fucking microphone. Jonathan Kaplan's tragically forgotten cult classic is the ultimate youth in revolt film for any era but it feels truer now than ever before. After the adults of a stagnant planned community in suburban California shut down their rec center and have one of their own shot by the police in cold blood, the kids get revenge by locking their bitch guardians into the school they imprison them in five days a week and burn the town to the ground as they watch in horror. It's terrifying. Its beautiful. Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone.

One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest by Milos Forman (1975)-  Milos Forman and Jack Nichelson's masterpiece is still as hilarious as it is harrowing nearly fifty years later. That's because, as the film vividly illustrates, crazy people are simply people too complicated for totalitarian societies like western capitalism to comprehend. So they lock us up and they pump us full of drugs and they patronize the mess they make us into to make themselves feel better while we die inside. This is the dark underbelly of 'believe the science.' What maverick thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich tried to warn us about. When society goes all in on despotism, even the doctors become evil tyrants. Now please stand by while Nurse Ratched prepares your vaccination.

The Warriors by Walter Hill (1979)-  If The Battle of Algiers is the Citizen Kane of social upheavel cinema, then The Warriors is certainly The Wizard of Oz. An epic journey through the street fighting post-apocalyptic Emerald City of late seventies New York. More importantly however is the message of the movies first martyr, the Fred Hampton-esque Cyrus, who brings together the cities many gangs to inform them that united they outnumber their cities most heinous street gang in blue, eight to one. Then proto-Proud Boy, Luther, shoots the brilliant bastard because he "likes doing things like that." The message here should be crystal clear. Whether we are Antifa, BLM, or Boogaloo, we all came to take our streets back. Only together can we succeed. But we gotta stop popping each other off over stupid shit. Cyrus was right, it really is all out there waiting for someone to take it. Can you dig it, suckas?

Do the Right Thing by Spike Lee (1989)-  I know, I know, it's a little obvious, but no movie before or since Spike Lee's incendiary classic has caught the caged racial tribalism of urban America with such momentum. The saddest thing is how routine the storyline has become over the last few years alone. How many Radio Raheem's have we had to bury since George Floyd? How many Sal's Pizza Parlors have had to be torched just to get most of country to temporarily give a damn. But the movie is also the perfect discourse on proper riot etiquette. The moment Sal justified Raheem's lynching, the will of the entire community can be seen on Mookie's face as he carries the trash can to the window. It's the same look he has stopping the crowd from spreading the rage to the innocent Korean grocers across the street. It's a look of pain. It's a look of social responsibility. Sometimes revolt is about putting down the trash can and choosing not to start the fire. 

The Night Porter by Liliana Cavani (1974)-  This erotic thriller about the taboo love affair between a former SS Agent and his ex concentration camp prisoner may feel like an inappropriate fit for this list or any other for that matter, but trust me when I tell you that in the post-Trump era, it's dead on the money. The main characters are caught up in a world that wants to forget the twisted connection they can't seem to escape, much like the mainstream media would love to have us forget the twisted love affair they continue to fan with Donald Trump. Promoting and lambasting. Creating monsters at the Capitol just to have them publicly destroyed. When you attempt to bury your past just because it's painful to look at, that past festers into something truly perverse. And look there's another child detention center. We cant escape ourselves. We can only confront the night porter in the mirror. 

Carlos by Olivier Assayas (2010)-  While not technically a movie, Olivier Assayas' mini series about seventies terrorist extraordinaire Carlos the Jackal is the finest display of radical chic ever caught on film. Edgar Remirez is at once both mesmerizing and terrifying as the enigmatic title character. No other performance has quite captured both the promise and existential moral dilemma of the modern day revolutionary. Does simply carrying a loaded gun make one a man of action or just another pawn in a larger imperial chess game? While Carlos basks in the glories of his radical heyday, he doesn't leave us like Che, a reckless hero with guns blazing. He leaves us like all too many a modern street fighting man, a bloated and greedy mercenary who turned the struggle into a money pit that became his prison cell. The lesson is to fight the good fight but be careful not to let the good fight fight you because there is nothing honorable about fighting simply for the sake of fighting. The cause must always come first, by any means necessary. Sometimes that means setting the streets on fire, and sometimes that means putting the lighter down. Let your heart speak loudest and the choice becomes clearer. Carlos raised some righteous hell, but he lost his heart somewhere along the way.

Keep fighting that good fight, dearest motherfuckers, and I'll keep shaking that cane from behind my computer screen. We're all in this riot together.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Honor Black Lives by Ending Racist Wars

 Is it just me or has Black History Month become kind of a gross corporate circus lately? Just another banal commercial grab bag of Hallmark moments to peddle the superiority of the American experience. I feel like shit saying it out loud but I can't be the first asshole to notice this. You know there's something seriously wrong when poet laureates are subtly peddling Black consciousness for the war machine beneath wailing fighter jets at the goddamn Super Bowl. Where in the Black Christ is Colin Kaepernick when you need him? What's next, a new Freedom Ride at Disneyland sponsored by Lockheed Martin? Please tell me I'm not the only one? This cannot be Doctor King's dream.

The stars of this new corporate Blackanalia, naturally, are the monarchs of the New Black Renaissance, Barack and Michelle Obama, because nothing says racial justice like looking glamorous while getting away with war crimes. The new dream is apparently being woke enough to pass mediocre healthcare reform between murdering teenagers of color in Yemen with drone strikes. I need to sit down. No, I need to stand up.

All of this wouldn't feel so goddamn personal to me if it didn't all feel so goddamn familiar. I may be but a pale-faced faggot but I've witnessed this same damn shit as a Queer person with what those same corporate scumfucks have done to Pride Month. A holiday that began with my people kicking the Queer Christ out of a bunch of roll crazy pigs has been reduced to a photo-op for gangsters like Kamala Harris to pose in front of and cover up the stench of the Prison Industrial Complex on her breath. Maybe this is unfair, but I think all marginalized people, all the ones I know anyway, look to Black Power for guidance and inspiration, like a beautiful Afroed older sister to teach us how to crack wise and beat the man. It fucking hurts to see this badass domesticated into something of value to the people we fight.

I've heard it argued that this kind of banal assimilation is proof that identity movements like Black and Queer rights have lost their lethality and no longer pose a threat to the status quo. To this I respectfully say fuck you. If anything it's the opposite. The American death machine wouldn't dump so much cash and air time into filing down our teeth if the civil rights movement didn't pose a threat to their sick way of life. The only thing more expensive than a full tilt appropriation campaign of this magnitude is a literal war and they literally already tried that. Assimilation is what white devils do when genocide fails. It's why they built Christian schools in every Indian reservation, right next to the liquor stores. If you can't annihilate, assimilate. Turn the savages into good capitalist soldiers just educated enough to know their place as mascots for the home team.

They don't target marginalized people simply because they hate us. They target Black, Brown, and Queer folks because the American Civil Rights Movement has always been deeply intertwined with the Global Anti-Imperialist Movement, especially in the case of Americanized Africans. The biggest mistake this empire ever made was taking a chunk of its conquests in the Dark Continent home with them. Slavery affectively had the potential blowback of bringing the war home, and we've seen that war explode from Harper's Ferry to Kenosha, and they have too. That's why the one chapter of Black History that you will never hear from the status quo is the chapter about this countries proud Black antiwar movement that stretches from W. E. B. Du Bois to Ajamu Baraka, and this history includes all of the biggest names in the narrative of the Black struggle.

In December 1963, Malcolm X gave another fiery sermon in Harlem, proclaiming that "White America is doomed! Death and devastating destruction hang at this very moment in the skies over America." Just as Vietnam began to heat up. After his sermon, a journalist famously asked Malcolm about his opinion on the recent assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Malcolm had been instructed by the Nation of Islam not to touch this subject with a ten foot pole but Malcolm was never much for taking orders or passing on opportunities for enlightenment. He responded curtly but eloquently, "Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never made me sad; they only made me glad." 

The entirety of the white status quo lost their proverbial shit. Even Elijah Mohamed had Malcolm censured and stripped of his position, spelling out the end of Malcolm's tumultuous relationship with the Nation of Islam. But too few people took the time to contemplate the true meaning behind Brother Malcom's harsh words of wisdom. He wasn't gloating but simply stating a fact that leaders who reek racial violence abroad invite violent blowback at home. Kennedy had sent the chickens to do his bidding in the Bay of Pigs and the Gulf of Tonkin, and once he realized the horror of what he had loosed upon the world, those very same chickens returned home to ensure he couldn't undue that horror.

The American Government and their rats in the Nation got the message loud and clear. Over the next two years Malcolm dodged multiple attempts on his life. He was nearly done in after being poisoned in Egypt during a global goodwill tour to sow solidarity among fellow Third World anti-colonialists. Not long after his recovery, his home was firebombed, and not long after that, Malcom was shotgunnned to death by rogue Black Muslims during his final sermon in Harlem. Brother Malcolm got too loud. "All the king's horses and all the king's men haven't enabled them to put North and South Vietnam together again." He said. "You can't understand what is going on in Mississippi if you don't know what's going on in the Congo." He said. Malcolm clearly couldn't be assimilated.

Two years later, his supposed nemesis Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech Malcolm would have been proud of at the nearby Riverside Church. The speech was called "Beyond Vietnam- a time to break silence," and in it the beloved civil rights pacifist forcefully proclaimed, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death!" The speech made the shocking argument that America was, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," and that Vietnam was merely a symptom of the same death machine he faced off with in Selma. Exactly one year later to the day, Dr. King was assassinated by a sniper. The crime was pinned on a petty criminal with familial ties to the White Power Movement. King's family has never been convinced. Apparently Martin too had become to loud to assimilate, at least in life.

The greatest tragedy of the current campaign to assimilate Black Power is its successful attempts to assimilate historical figures like Brother Malcolm and Dr. King and to render them harmless props by stripping them of their historical significance as leading anti-imperialists. This can't stand and all Americans shouldn't stand for it. I believe these great men, like many other great leaders of color, died defying the American war machine. The greatest way for us to honor them and to honor Black History Month is to turn it into an anti-imperialist holiday. Can you imagine Malcolm and Martin's response if they had been alive to see this country wage a dozen Vietnams at once, from Venezuela to Afghanistan. That must be our response. We must never forget the fallen heroes of the Black movement to end American imperialism and we must honor all Black lives by fighting against these racist wars.

I did what I do best, dearest motherfuckers. I sweared about it on the internet. Now it's your move.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Gil Scott-Heron

*  Walk Like a Panther by Algiers

*  List of Demands by Saul Williams

*  I Against I by Bad Brains

*  People Get Ready by Curtis Mayfield & the Impressions

*  Keep On Knocking by Death

*  Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy

*  Lights Out by Santigold

*  Pressure Drop by Toots & the Maytals

*  Hip Hop by Dead Prez

*  Hey Joe by Jimi Hendricks

Should Iran Even Take Us Back?

 Its been nearly a month since the villagers chased off Orange Man Bad with pitchforks and torches and most of my liberal friends in group therapy have sunk into that warm bath of post election honeymoon euphoria. The more human side of my fractured brain envies their bliss. After all, don't they deserve it? Don't all of us? But I'm a lifelong anti-imperialist and I've seen too many third world sneak attacks not to be this goddamn jaded. While the liberal-progressive world sleeps, I'm left here waiting for the first bombs to drop, and I've got plenty of reasons to be vigilant.

Donald Trump may have been a B-movie monster but Joe Biden's jacket makes him look like a goddamn pacifist. With over half a century of enthusiastically engaging in every illegal war that ever crossed his desk, I would count myself lucky that the twisted old fuck appears to be deep in the throws of full blown dementia if he hadn't picked a young neoliberal death squad to run his cabinet. Aside from the Obama era Tarantino post-feminists in black aka Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Victoria 'fuck the EU' Nuland, Biden's bloodthirsty grey-care advisors also include lesser known monsters like Director of Intelligence Avril Haines and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who have had their fingers in every other corpse going back to the Clinton years. These kids are the architects of the Clintonian school of Humanitarian Intervention aka Smart Power, Hillary's neocolonialist gift to the third world.

Humanitarian Intervention is essentially neoconservatism in an NPR tote bag. It's warmongering carefully packaged and sold to peace loving liberals as human rights. It usually involves funding some token oppressed minority like, say, the Albanians of Kosovo, highlighting and all too often exaggerating crimes committed against them by the target, and then selling war crimes to the international community as the only cure for more war crimes. It's the school of imperialist meddling hip in most European nations who've outworn their stay as colonialist rapists, even among their own citizens, and it is with this school of thoughtful, PR savvy, skullduggery that Biden's foreign policy can be predicted to likely be a series of politically correct nightmares like the obliteration of Libya.

Never the less, recently, even pissed off jerks like me have been presented with reasons for hope with Biden's calls for peace, love, and diplomacy in Yemen and Iran, and there is some legitimate reasons for optimism, but also way too many reasons for skepticism. Every peace song Biden seems to sing is more riddled with hidden meanings, contradictions, and frightening metaphors than Highway 61 Revisited. Call me a bastard (I prefer to self-identify as a bitch), call me whatever the fuck you like, but I'm not buying it and those poor motherfuckers in Yemen and Iran shouldn't either. Sadly, most of them are too desperate for skepticism. It's a white privilege that tends to go out of style when you're forced to eat your own shoes just to keep from starving to death. 

On the surface, Yemen looks like an obvious win and in many ways it is. After 5 years of American sponsored onslaught, those beautiful bearded crusaders known as Houthi rebels have held their ground like Tet and fought our rented Wahhabi monster army to a smoldering standstill. In just such a scenario a peace deal isn't so much heroic on our part as it is a no-brainer. The Saudis and the UAE failed miserably to achieve anything but grossing a bunch of white people out by bombing kindergarteners with white phosphorous and starving whatever was left writhing. Of coarse Biden wants peace. Only a braying jackass like Trump would see anything but diplomacy as a way to save face on the international stage. But Biden's trumpeted commitment to peace in Yemen is a labyrinth of smoke and mirrors once you scrape that surface.

The old goat calls for an end to American support for all "offensive operations" and "relevant arms sales." But who gets to define what constitutes 'offensive' and 'relevant?' The 'allies' Biden promised to protect in Riyadh in the very next sentence? According to those jackals, the entire genocide is an act of defense against Iranian proxies, a lude conspiracy theory that Biden himself continues to uphold even as he reviews the Houthi freedom fighters heinous terrorist designation. Biden also continues to pledge military support to defend Riyadh from the neighbors they torment. But this would be impossible without selling those bastards the exact same toys they use to slaughter peasants in Yemen.

What's really going on here is an attempt by the US to save face while changing virtually nothing substantial about their policy in Yemen. This is Clintonian Smart Power 101. Bill and Hill went out of their way to get international approval for their massacres in Kosovo and Libya and ended up with bloodbaths every bit as gruesome as Iraq and, well, Iraq, with less than half the blowback from bleeding hearts like mine. It just goes to show, if you ask nicely and use the right words, white liberals will feel safe while you annihilate more brown people.

 The holocaust in Yemen has done more to galvanize the long dormant antiwar left across the West than any tragedy since Abu Ghraib. Biden's Angels know that a key part of any successful crime is getting away with it. So they are dressing themselves up in the robes of diplomacy while virtually nothing stops the Saudis from going forward with their forever crusade. They aren't changing the story, they're just changing the cover on the same damn book, and a lot of this, if not most of this, has to do with softening up Iran by selling a love tap against their enemies in Riyadh as a spanking so we can pretend they're playing fair. But Washington doesn't do fair.

This leads me to that colossal word forest that has become the Biden Administration's peace deal with Iran. We've been told since the Donald childishly violated the JCPOA back in 2017 that the Dems would bring it back to compliance on day one. But since Biden's nomination as the Democratic nominee, we've been blitzed by mind bending doublespeak. Biden wants peace but he doesn't. He's open to conversation but not until Iran returns to a deal he technically continues to violate every second in power he refuses to make the the first step. What the fuck do these people want?

Any sane imperialist would make peace with Iran and tell Saudi Arabia and Israel to fuck off. Iran is a moderate stable young nation that has gone out of its way to please it's Yankee tormentors. They've aided and abetted every one of our insane interventions in the region going back to the original Gulf War, and we've thanked them with nothing but spit and treachery. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia arms every one of our jihadist enemies from the Maghreb to the Philippines, including the 9/11 hijackers, and we throw these dustland barbarians a fucking parade. No one supports more factions of Al-Qaeda than Riyadh, and no one has done more to crush them than Tehran. Their entire foreign policy is whacking jihadists like arcade moles and they've gotten pretty goddamn good at it. So why don't we just make up with these fuckers already?

The answer is pretty fucking gross. In my opinion, America will never truly respect and support Iran precisely because they are a moderate theocratic democracy built on the bedrock of a popular anti-imperialist revolution that explicitly rejected Western Capitalism in favor of something more indigenous. Tehran has morals, you and I may disagree with them, but they clearly have a moral compass that overpowers any state's natural thirst for greed or they wouldn't keep making these stupid goddamn peace deals with a country who has made ripping them up a competitive sport. Ask any gangster and they will tell you that there is nothing more dangerous than a criminal partner with morals because morals get messy. America likes butcher factories like Saudi Arabia and the UAE precisely because they have no moral compass. We can work with that. We have worked with that. The only country who has done more business with Al-Qaeda than Arabia is America because instability is good for our business of international domination, and Iran is just way too stable to be trusted. 

The dirty secret of Obama's peace deal with Iran is that it was designed to be violated by us and no one else. We asked everything from Iran up front and offered them nothing but empty promises. Otherwise a single moron like Trump wouldn't have been able to just pull the fucking plug so easily. The JCPOA was put in place to control Iran's right to a peaceful nuclear program and anything Biden sells them will be worse. It may sound harsh, but Trump violating that deal may have been a gift in disguise. Since then, Iran has proven its own capabilities to responsibly create nuclear products for themselves and their neighbors from the high road of a country that's been thrice fucked by a sinking empire. 

Iran has also faced starvation sanctions during the height of a plague. But if America is capable of such repeated hypocrisy and cruelty, especially with a nest of treacherous Clintonians in the cockpit, you better believe they will do it again. My advice to Iran is to ditch my homeland and look east to an empire not yet strong enough to meddle in your affairs. My advice to America, my home, my country tis of thee, is to fuck off and mind your own continent before you run out of gas in a really pissed off neighborhood. Just a piece of wisdom from one of your own native anti-imperialist bitches. Take it home with you.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Desolation Row by Bob Dylan

*  Crash by Nilufer Yanya

*  Star Spangled Banner by Black Lips

*  Plump by Hole

*  Candy Sam by Ty Segall

*  The Denial Twist by the White Stripes

*  Crash by the Primitives

*  Fight Song by the Flaming Lips

*  Here It Comes by the Brian Jonestown Massacre

*  Smile Like You Mean It by the Killers

*  Chick Habit by April March

*  Long Time Ago by Concrete Blonde

A Kinky Cure for a Cruel World

 Valentine's Day is a bitch for the weirdos and trust me dearest motherfuckers, they don't come much weirder than me. I've long fancied myself a hopeless romantic with a heavy emphasis on the hopeless angle, but lets face it, I'm a freak; a pervert, a sicko, a degenerate. I don't have a fetish. My whole goddam sexuality is one ginormous fucking fetish and it always has been. Before my gender transition, when I refused to accept that I wasn't a man, I was a hardcore submissive, what shrinks would classify as a masochist. My sexuality was governed by the idea of being manhandled by a woman a third of my size; being pushed, slapped, shoved, tied up, and generally punished for being born into the wrong gender. Climax usually came for me after having a woman with the body I desired in ways I was terrified to admit step and sit on my face and piss in my mouth. Ain't love grand?

As I began to transition into the woman I've always really been however, my perversions transformed too. I became a dominant, the big bad bitch in control of someone cisgender's beautiful female body. I wanted complete control of the women I loved, if only in the bedroom. This made me feel despicable, and sometimes it still does. As a transgender feminist, I adore women. I revere them as the ultimate archetype of anarchist resistance to a backwards society. A flaming star in the shape of the girl who bleeds strength through unfiltered vulnerability. What kind of sick fucking bastard would want to cage and tame something so pure? What in Kali's name is wrong with me?

That's society talking. The two headed beast of psychiatry and organized religion which has not only carefully trained us to believe that all but the most regimented forms of procreation are pure sickness, but that they can only be cured through their authoritarian regimes. I spent a decade being stepped on by the Catholic Church and pissed on by the DSM. These giants of totalitarian dominance taught me from an unspeakably young age that my body was a disease only they could cure. I took thousands of cold showers trying to scrub my body clean and cried myself to sleep believing that these feelings, the ones the priests and psychiatrists taught me to feel, doomed me to an eternity in hell. Is it really any wonder that my budding young sexuality developed into a flower with a crooked and thorny stem? Jesus may or may not want me for his sunbeam, but it was his idiot followers who made me a pervert.

And as far as perversions go, mine are far from cruel. Over the last few years I've explored my sick desires among other adults who practice them consensually. I may be a femme domme but it turns out that I'm far from a sadist. What I thirst for from a companion is someone who I can consensually bind and care for. Once I have possession of the proverbial whip, I'm much more interested in carefully nurturing my submissive with the benevolent authority I once childishly sought from the institutions that battered and abused my trust. I'd much sooner gently bathe and dress my submissive than manhandle them the way I once wished to be. I want desperately to be better to them than I've been to myself. Apparently I fall into a category of service dominant known as the mommy domme. It's not about incest, not even symbolically. It's about taking someone's complete and total faith in you as a caregiver and rewarding it with unconditional love, and the occasional spanking.

The thing the vanilla world can't seem to comprehend about BDSM is that it's all about correcting institutional power imbalances. The relationships I cultivate seek to confront my abusive childhood by becoming the authority figure that psychiatry and organized religion drove me to mythologize and fetishize. By exploring these feelings openly and reserving them strictly to consensual contracts among consenting adults in the confines of my own boudoir, I am avoiding the need to play them out in far more malignant rolls in the outside world. I no longer dream of being Lenin on the battlefield because I can be Lenin in the bedroom. And this is what BDSM has to offer to society at large, extinguishing what Wilhelm Reich referred to as the totalitarian personality. 

One of the namesakes of Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, and Masochism is a wildly misunderstood revolutionary named the Marquis de Sade, who spent most of his life in prison for advocating sexual perversion as a cure for political perversion. De Sade too was once a man enamored with revolutionary violence until he witnessed firsthand the horrors it could lead to, even among the most honorable men, with Robespierre and the Terror that followed the French Revolution. His solution to such carnal decadence was the whorehouse. Contrary to popular belief, de Sade had great reverence for strong women and the strongest of them all were the sex workers willing to play dominant or submissive in order to serve as a sort of proletarian therapy, avoiding the authoritarian trap of bourgeoise psychiatric subjugation with the panarchist democracy of contracts and safe words. 

Imagine a world where bankers crushed rotten fruit between their toes instead of maverick investors. Imagine a world where police got to put on a uniform and be large and in charge without violating anything but a taut and willing buttocks. Even better, imagine a world where a "suspect" can turn the tables and teach the master cop what it's like to be the one in handcuffs on the other side of the badge. Imagine people hiring someone to rule their bedroom instead of voting for someone to rule the world. Imagine a world where masters and slaves and gods and subjects only exist in the theatre of the boudoir where such power trips belong. That's what I want you to do with your dirty little imaginations this Valentine's Day, dearest motherfuckers. Would this whorehouse democracy cure every woe? Probably not. But it quite literally beats the tits off rotting away in the confessional booth or on the therapist's couch.

I may be a pervert, dearest motherfuckers, but I'm not the only one. Maybe someday you can join us and the world can be a hell of a lot more fun..

Peace, Love, Submission, & Dominance- Mistress Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Imagine by John Lennon

*  Master and Servant by Depeche Mode

*  Hood by Perfume Genius

*  Venus in Furs by the Velvet Underground

*  Fast Slow Disco by St. Vincent

*  Jesus Don't Want Me for His Sunbeam by the Vaselines

*  Strange Love by Depeche Mode

*  Just Like Honey by the Jesus and Mary Chain

*  I Bet on Losing Dogs by Mitski

*  Mousetrap by Some Velvet Sidewalk

*  Some Kinda Love by the Velvet Underground