The Border is a Ponzi Scheme

 There is something happening at the border, and it's fucked up. These are the only two things that the loudest of the yammering heads on either side of America's partisan divide seem to agree on when it comes to immigration and they're probably the only two things about this issue that either side actually gets right. There are millions of people flowing back and forth over that invisible line in the desert as part of a tumultuous tide of violence and exploitation that seems to be beyond anyone's comprehension, let alone control. This much is hard for anyone with functioning eyes and/or ears to deny. The rest of the popular narrative however is generally comprised of one of two fictions. There is the liberal fiction that these folks are just clambering for the milk of American exceptionalism and old Joe Biden is just doin his damnedest to let em on in. And then there is the slightly meaner but no less delusional conservative fiction that Biden is in league with the ghost of Joseph Stalin to open the borders so he can replace white cultural conservatives with slightly darker cultural conservatives.

Please allow me to do what I do best and rip the fucking Band-Aid off of this infected wound right now. First off, these people aren't rushing the ramparts of the world's biggest police state because they're just jonesing for our superior brand name of freedom. They are fleeing for their fucking lives from the flaming shitholes that our superior brand name of freedom has reduced their homelands into after we failed to outsource it by the barrel of an M-60. The top four nationalities currently seeking refuge at the southern border are Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians. The first three in that bunch were actually doing relatively fine by post-colonial standards until we chained their countries up in strangling economic sanctions and kicked them into the bottomless well of human misery that tends to come with that sort of economic terrorism and Haiti has been fucked over so many times by Uncle Sam that we all lost count about a century ago. These people are refugees of American violence flocking to the land where all their wealth is being horded by a bunch of lazy fucking gringos with sharing issues.

As for the big bad open border, it's being policed by a larger and more heavily armed squadron of crypto-fascist boot boys than ever before. Even before the Democrats all hopped aboard the border hysteria express, Biden had approved of a $97.3 billion budget for the Department of Homeland Security's fiscal year of 2023, the largest budget in that Orwellian apparatus' putrid history. This includes a combined $26 billion dollars for border protection and immigration alone, which is once again the highest sum in human history, burying Donald Trump's mighty wall in the fucking sand. The jagged little reality that neither species of partisan Washington sewer mutant can seem to swallow is that the border is not open, it has simply collapsed beneath the weight of an insatiably massive police state that both parties have consistently conspired with their shared corporate overlords to construct.  

Like all of America's forever wars, the border war is an ongoing multi-administrative affair passed down from generation to generation, from Democrat to Republican to Dempublican to Republicrat. This carefully manufactured crisis began under Clinton in an attempt to make sure that the supposedly free trade of NAFTA only went one way. From that point on, the differences in how each successive administration fought this jihad were largely cosmetic in nature but they generally followed a downward trend of becoming more and more totalitarian with each changing of the guard. Bush transformed this war into a matter of national security in the wake of attacks that could have been easily avoided if our intelligence monstrosity wasn't too busy hassling Latin American freedom fighters to guard base camp from a few well-known Saudi whack-jobs with green cards and box cutters, but it was actually our sweet-talking humanitarian wunderkind Barack Obama who really kicked the shit into high gear with gulags and mass deportations on a downright Soviet scale.

Donald Trump simply took what Obama had quietly erected and swung it around over his head like a coked-out berserker slathered in virgin calf's blood. He definitely ramped up the cruelty and turned what had been a largely covert war into a blatant act of terrorism by advertising it like a goddamn monster truck rally. But every single weapon at that raving orange supremacist's disposal was provided to him gift-wrapped by the same bleeding-heart liberals who wagged their fingers at the bad man and consoled his victims before the cameras with warm blankets, hot cocoa and Sarah McGlocklin jams. 

And all of these deadly weapons have remained in use long after the bad man went away, however, I will concede that Biden should be given credit for stepping up a program to phase out the horsewhips and cattle prods with more high-tech solutions to improve American border savagery. Joe didn't tear down Donald's silly Great Wall of Atzlan, he simply increased funding on efforts to bring it into the age of Philip K. Dick with a virtual wall of autonomous surveillance towers, armored robot dogs and low-flying Predator drones. Oh, that wet-brained motherfucker didn't come up with this Brave New World, but he and his Department of Homeland Security maestro Alejandro Mayorkas were the first psychopaths sick enough to sell it to the public as a more safe, sane and humane alternative to flaming moats and machine gun turrets. They also stepped-up long-standing efforts to both privatize the border and affectively outsource it farther south to darker quisling rump states like Mexico.

This brings us to the Biden Administration's latest pseudo-humanitarian hustle, labeled the Safe Third Country Policy because apparently Alzheimer's isn't a post-irony condition. While both Joe's grumbling critics and groveling supporters focus on that old bastard's plan to allow 30,000 asylum seekers in the country each month from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti, they also both conveniently avoid the devil in the details. The only asylum seekers allowed in the country will be those with the substantial financial resources and first world computer literacy to be able to do so from their embattled third world countries currently under siege by American imperial designs. This affectively counts out everyone but the wealthiest classes most likely to be collaborators in America's failed regime change schemes as well as the kind of doctors and engineers those countries desperately need to function. Add to this the fact that Biden is also using this decidedly conditional benevolent gift to lay cover fire for his plans to purge as many impoverished refugees as he excepts, enshrining Trump's most dystopian border policies into law in the process, and you get a vastly different picture than the political cartoon being painted by both sides of the partisan Peso. 

However, all of these details still don't change the inconvenient fact that all of this effort, the decades of military machinery, the jackbooted shock troops and Skynet-grade technology, haven't done a goddamn thing to slow the relentless tide of desperate people crossing these trillion-dollar trenches. That's probably because none of this shit was actually designed to keep poor people out of this country. It was designed to control poor people inside of it and make powerful people very rich. The unavoidable solution to this confounding equation is that much like other forms of prohibition, the prohibition of human movement on a massive scale is a very profitable failure and the border as we know it is affectively a massive Ponzi scheme.

Whereas in your typical Ponzi scheme, a fraudster pays existing investors with the funds of new investors while promising high returns and pocketing the money instead, the border Ponzi scheme promises last year's immigrants protection from next year's immigrants but actually just invests this money in a fascistic police state that only benefits the fraudsters pulling its strings. All of this is part of the fastest growing international cartel on the planet, a sinister cabal known as the Border Industrial Complex which is set to reach a value higher than the combined GDP of the entire third world by the time we reach the apocalypse. In an age of collapse, these blood-sucking weasels have cornered the market on an industry committed to defending the besieged Westphalian nation state from the human blowback of its own putrid existence during the final stages of the Kali Yuga.

It is indeed a hideously spectacular scam, and everyone seems to have fallen for it. But like all scams, it is damned to failure by the insatiable hubris of the sociopaths running it. Any boundary defined by a construct larger than the community it supposedly serves is simply too artificial to be sustained indefinitely. Every tribe has some right to define their own boundaries, but this includes the right for me and my tribe to defend ourselves from the real fucking predators of a fanged deep state that none of us actually voted for. It should also include the right for me to invite whoever the hell I want over to dinner, regardless of which fanged deep state claims the soil on their boots. 

As for the desert wilderness that stretches beyond the reach of Ozymandias, no-man's-land is anybody's land and I wish anybody who passes it peacefully nothing but luck in protecting their own tribe. After all, we were all nomads once before we found a space to call our own. There but before the grace of Kali go I.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

*  I'm Set Free by the Velvet Underground

*  Circle the Drain by Soccer Mommy

* Tugboat by Galaxie 500

* So Far Gone by Weird Nightmare

* All the Rage Back Home by Interpol

* Rocket by Smashing Pumpkins

* I'm Beginning to See the Light by the Velvet Underground

* Emma's House by the Field Mice

* Heaven by the Walkmen 

* Oh, Sweet Nuthin by the Velvet Underground

Volodzymandias: US Aid is Turning Ukraine into Another Israel

 

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Volodzymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias", 2023 edition

Americans in general aren't exactly a bunch renowned for their global solidarity but they really do seem to legitimately give a fuck about the besieged people of Ukraine. As a lifelong anti-imperialist who has spent the raw end of a lifetime trying to convince these same motherfuckers that Palestinians and Iraqis are people too, the temptation to roll my eyes at this sudden outpouring of empathy for the one population on the business end of a bomb that doesn't have "Made in America" stamped on the side of it is understandably high. 

But I think this instinct is a mistake, both tactically and morally. People getting bombed are people getting bombed, regardless of what color cowboy hat the despot throwing the switch is wearing. The truth is that your average clueless American normie gives a fuck about Ukraine because it's the one place being bombed where CNN keeps the cameras rolling. People should give a fuck about Ukraine for the same reasons they should give a fuck about Palestine. Telling them not to does nothing to promote the suffering of other victims of international violence. What productive anti-imperialists should be doing instead is asking these bleeding-heart blue-and-yellow flag wavers, what happens when the bombs stop dropping?

No one on any side of any aisle seems to be asking this question. What becomes of the valiant martyr state of Ukraine if the war ends tomorrow? What will the result of western efforts in that nation be when the Russians finally pack up their jackboots and fuck off back to Moscow? The answer isn't pretty, but it is pretty clear if you read carefully between recent headlines. Congress has just recently approved another $3 billion arms package for Ukraine just in time for Orthodox Christmas. This latest deficit multiplying bundle includes 50 heavily armored Bradley fighting vehicles complete with 500 TOW missiles and a battery of America's deadliest Patriot missiles. That puts the price tag on America's aid for the current regime in Kiev at just over $112 billion during the last ten months alone. This is almost twice as much as Russia's entire military budget for 2021.

Volodymyr Zelensky, Time magazines man of the year and the fearless leader in charge of what has swiftly become one of the developing world's most colossal arsenals, brought in the holidays himself by signing a new bill into law that expands his government's censorship powers to print and online journalism. This after he already nationalized the country's broadcast media in 2022 with his "Unified Information Policy" that forcibly combined all of Ukraine's news channels into a single state-run 24-hour propaganda mill dubbed "United News." But Zelensky didn't limit his holiday revelry to Orwellian censorship. He also revoked the citizenship of 13 Orthodox priests for belonging to a sect accused of being a Russian front despite the fact that they cut all ties with that nation in the wake of last year's invasion and have consistently denounced the Kremlin's so-called special military operation since.

So, basically what Ukraine will inevitably be left with after fending off the rapacious advances of a violent autocratic gangster like Vladimir Putin is a nation armed to the fucking teeth and run by a violent autocratic gangster that marches a little more like Putin with each passing Patriot missile. If people in this country legitimately give a fuck about the Ukrainian people, and I want to believe that they do, then they need to put down the fucking Kool-Aid and recognize the fact that Volodymyr Zelensky himself has become an existential threat to whatever freedoms his people have left and America's support for his regime is what made that comedian a monster.

Volodymyr Zelensky began his meteoric rise to international fame as the star of a hit TV show about a pissed-off schoolteacher who unexpectedly becomes the president of Ukraine on the strength of a viral classroom rant against his nation's corrupt elites and that's essentially how he was packaged to the Ukrainian electorate during the 2019 presidential election. After suffering under the yoke of the same clique of hoods and neo-fascists that America put in power with the 2014 Maidan coup for half a decade, the Ukrainian people desperately wanted a change. 

But more than anything they wanted an end to the gruesome civil war in the nation's eastern Donbass region that had already seen over 14,000 mostly ethnic Russian civilians killed and hundreds of thousands more displaced. The lion share of this dirty work was performed by private death squads with swastikas on their uniforms who had been integrated into their nation's newly American micro-managed National Guard after proving a willingness to joyfully slaughter their own former countrymen in the name of the master race.

Zelensky ran on a campaign to reign these savage berserkers in and hold them accountable with the Minsk Agreement that promised the Donbass autonomy and he won this campaign in a landslide victory that included the overwhelming support of his nation's understandably bitter Russian speaking community. The only problem is that the Zelensky campaign's number one doner was a boorish billionaire oligarch named Igor Kolomoisky who had also bankrolled some of the same bloodthirsty neo-Nazi militias that Zelensky was elected to squash, including the notorious Azov Battalion.  

When the new president confronted his master's army in the occupied Donbass village of Zolote with a well-publicized attempt to get these racist gangsters to disarm, Zelensky was torn to shreds by Kolomoisky's phalanx of private news stations and even members of his own government openly joked about having him murdered. His poll numbers quickly plummeted and stayed on the basement floor even after he bravely called out his other masters in Washington for trying to provoke a war with the Russians on his border who had grown impatient with the new president's broken promises to rehabilitate the Minsk Agreement and end the incessant shelling of ethnic Russian civilians. 

Few people in his current western fan club know that Volodymyr Zelensky was actually one of the least popular men in his nation before Vladimir Putin turned him into an overnight superstar with his reckless invasion and even fewer people seem to know that his lack of popularity stemmed largely from his inability to fulfill his promises for peace while also pleasing the violent men who financed his rise to power.

This all changed very quickly last February. Putin's invasion was met with an unexpected amount of resistance from Ukraine's disgruntled Russian-speaking population who it turned out appreciated the Kremlin's violent meddling about as much as they did Washington's. Meanwhile, the once locally despised and internationally unknown President Zelensky was treated to a high-powered corporate media make-over that rapidly built a global cult of personality around the myth of the Jedi who stood up to Darth Putin. 

Volodymyr Zelensky's early attempts at negotiating a peaceful solution to this mess, largely built around the same Minsk Agreement that both he and his assigned nemesis actually agreed was basic common sense, were strongly discouraged by the same jerks who wagged NATO membership over his head in a provocative game of imperial keep-away. Thus, any hope of this bloodbath ending in its infancy seemed to crumble beneath the shadows of the growing egos of two men manipulated by Washington into fighting it to the last man, woman and child. 

It's hard to say what kind of leader Volodymyr Zelensky might have become if Vladimir Putin hadn't taken NATOs bait and invaded a nation rigged up like the farmhouse in Straw Dogs but it's equally hard to deny that with each passing day that this pointless war continues to rage, this one-time reformer leads a little bit more like the autocrat the West urges him fight to a nuclear stand-off. Just like Putin, Zelensky has banned any meaningful opposition to his increasingly dictatorial rule while playing the victim card like a riverboat gambler, and just like Putin, he has also totally abandoned the diplomacy he once advocated in the form of the Minsk Agreement in favor of a Quixotic jihad to return regions to his nation that clearly want as little to do with him as the rest of the country does with the other despot in this proxy pissing match.

With all of these hideous things considered, it should come as little surprise that Volodymyr Zelensky's new geopolitical role model isn't Paris, London or even Washington but the apartheid Mecha of Tel Aviv. Zelensky has openly called for Ukraine to become a "Big Israel" while waxing fascistic about a brave new nation in which the armed forces maintain a permanent presence in every facet of civilian life, raving that in "all institutions, supermarkets, cinemas, there will be people with weapons." In a society like this, war becomes a way of life. Israel can only justify this increasingly oppressive style of existence long after their own Arab neighbors gave up on resisting it by inventing a mythical fifth column of permanent enemies in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Even when Putin leaves, and he will leave, the ethnic Russians of the Donbass will remain, and no one will be left to save them, or the people kept in a state of perpetual martial law justified by their lingering existence.

This is Ukraine's future if the Military Industrial Complex has its way. This is what the billions in American tax dollars are really going to fund. Not salvation for the Ukrainian people. Not peace or democracy. The money of the hard-working Americans who have finally decided to give a fuck about a bombed population will go to building the Ukrainian people a prison in the shape of a nation with an increasingly unhinged autocrat playing the role of warden. The best thing that Americans can do for Ukraine, perhaps the only thing left for Americans to do for Ukraine, is to demand that our so-called representatives in Washington stop funding this tragedy and hope that the equally besieged people of both Kiev and Donetsk recognize that they are both victims of one tormentor with two heads known as the war state.

Fuck Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. If you truly care about the people of Ukraine who have been tormented by both of these bastards, then you'll stop turning Ukraine into another Israel by turning the latter despot into Volodzymandias.

Peace, Love and Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Cult of Personality by Living Colour

* Celebrity Skin by Hole

* The Last of the Famous International Playboys by Morrissey

* Not by Big Thief

* TV Eye by the Stooges

* Posing for Bondage by Japanese Breakfast

* Surrender by Cheap Trick

* Natural One by the Folk Implosion

* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins

* Goodbye Stranger by Supertramp

Max Stirner as a Girl: How a Bunch of PC Brats Balkanized Identity Politics and Why You Should Too

I may be the queerest anarchist between Fire Island and the Salton Sea, but I've never had a great deal of patience for the current fad of political correctness that seems to be all the rage with the other Queers of my generation and younger. At times this makes me feel like a 34-year-old grandmama lecturing young sprites about the glory days when drag shows weren't G-rated and poppers only cost a nickel. At other times it makes me feel like a seasick sailor on a ship of fools, trying to convince my people to care more about canceling FOSTA-SESTA than Dave Chappelle. I love my people. I would be dead without them, but identity politics in this country have been commodified by that gruesome little conglomeration of breeders known as big government/big business and rendered into a toxic distraction from truly revolutionary politics. 

This all began after a glorious cabal of wild faggots and pissed-off brown people turned straight kids on to the magic of revolution in the sixties and pulled the plug on the holocaust in Vietnam. Back then, identity politics were lethal. Every minority had been radicalized by the example of Black Power into a feral pack of heavily armed anti-colonialists hellbent on replacing the United States with a Rainbow Coalition of stateless nations. But then the feds killed Fred Hampton, Jesse Jackson assimilated his outlaw confederation into the Democratic Party and the next thing you know, they're flying rainbow flags at Langley and using the vocabulary of radical feminism to justify exterminating half the Muslim world with drone strikes and sanctions. Identity politics have been affectively colonized by an obnoxious yuppie cult that prioritizes good table manners over anything remotely revolutionary. 

The only thing more reactionary than political correctness however is the melodramatic hissy fit against it coming from supposedly rational adults on both the left and the right who have become convinced that teeny bopper wokeism is the new white supremacy. I shouldn't have to say this out loud, but nobody has ever been lynched for using the wrong pronouns. The kneejerk tendency of straight white cis men to play the victim card every time they're even minorly inconvenienced by liberal overreach makes it at least as hard to have a rational conversation with them as it does with well-intentioned hipsters who hyperventilate every time I call Joe Biden a fucking cunt.

The reality is that the woke kids get it right about most of the big picture shit. The American school of perpetual imperialism is defined by a form of pervasive and systematic white supremacy that either assimilates or annihilates everything and everyone that exists contrary to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant values of collective subjugation and absolute conformity. Notions like gender and race aren't static facts but social constructs invented to control the various tribes who resist this conspiracy and more often than not to turn us against each other. Conservatives don't seem to get that just because the master class has adopted a few of us minorities as pets doesn't mean that the rest of us aren't the first people to taste their wrath and most liberals seem to fail to realize that these constructed identities are worthless shackles unless we take them back and define them based on the radical individual liberty for which they once stood after we reclaimed them in the awesome name of freak power.

I say most liberals because this is the one place where the youngest generation of woke Queer kids really hits it out of the fucking park and puts grouchy politically incorrect grandmamas like me in our place. The anti-PC alarmists are constantly going off about the radical proliferation of new gender identities but I for the life of me can't think of a better example of using identity politics as a lethal weapon for radical individualism. Queer kids create ten new gender identities a day, pick three and then reject them all and start over tomorrow. It's absolute fucking chaos and it totally turns me on, though it's not as new as the youngins or their cranky parents may think.

Genderfluid, genderflux, bigender, agender, polygender, neutrois, pangender, androflux, antigender. This dizzying Kaleidescope of crowdsourced IDs may be relatively new but before a nasty clique of Romans hijacked Christianity and turned it into an excuse to turn gender into a binary tiered chauvinistic class system, we had identities like nadicchi, chukchi, wakawahine, bangala, hijra, mahu, muxe, bakia, fa'afafine and khanith. Every tribe had their own diverse school of Queerness with its own regional variants. More than 150 Native American tribes alone had third genders, and many had as many as five. But this wasn't just an Indian thing. Ancient Jewish rabbinical legal writings designate the existence of six genders and the existence of transgender priestesses has been recorded in ancient Mesopotamia, Symaria, Assyria and Babylonia going back to the Paleolithic Era. 

All of this jibes perfectly with what we know about the animal kingdom which contains thousands of species of snakes, lizards, fish and birds who routinely and often quite fluidly portray behavior inconsistent with their reproductive ascribed sex as a means of survival. Back in pagan times, survival was defined by diverse tight-nit communities. Today, the very survival of humanity itself is being threatened by a corrosive globalist society that is attempting to use the drag of identity politics to dress up conformity into its white Anglo-Saxon Protestant order in the clothing of inclusion. They achieve this evil trick by turning individuality itself into just another collection of capitalist lifestyle choices. 

I honestly believe that the recent rise in gender chaos amongst young Queers is an instinctive and evolutionary attempt to defend individuality against this toxic trap of homogeny by demanding that all identities, even those that are literally fifteen minutes old, are considered as valid as any other. By doing so, these kids have once again found a way to make identity politics ungovernable. They have affectively turned these new genders into what that old German anarchist wizard Max Stirner would refer to as Unions of Egoists or totally voluntary and spontaneous associations of individuals drawn together by nothing but mutual interests for only as long as those interests remain mutual. 

It's a common misconception, even among many anarchists, that Mr. Stirner and his Egoists were all just a bunch of anti-humanist nihilists, but this is only true if you consider the society they were committed to burning down to be in the service of humanity. Stirner, much like other controversial secular shaman like Ted Kaczynski and John Zerzan, saw the sickness before the storm and called on individuals to reject all systems contrary to their nature and only accept unions based on the interests of their survival as free radicals instead. What Max Stirner was essentially advocating for was a totally voluntary school of socialism based on mutual aid and I believe that the current trend of gender chaos invoked by these wee woke youngsters not only follows in this proud and deeply misunderstood tradition of radically individualist egalitarianism, but it also offers us all a wild new alternative to shallow liberal identity politics. 

What if every identity followed this fantastically erratic pattern? What if other modern social constructs like race, age or even sanity became fluid too? How would Fox News demonize the great brown menace if Latinos suddenly exploded into Mayans, Aztecs, Chicanos, Tejanos, Chicanoflux and Nicaraguan-Neutrois? Even better, what would become of white supremacy if European Americans began to voluntarily reject the poison privilege of identifying with the master class in favor of identities based on something other than conquest? What if honkies suddenly became Rednecks, Irish Catholics, Celtic Revivalists, Cajun Americans, Hillbillies, Anglo-Fluid, Greco-Slavic Orthodox or just old school Italians, Poles or Jews? All committed to fighting the same WASP conspiracy that assimilated them into becoming agents of a global capitalist rape culture. The same culture that continues to crush Queers and people of color everyday while carefully minding its manners for the cameras.

This has long been my Queerest psychosexual fantasy. A hopped up panarchist fever dream about a nation of minorities too Balkanized to assimilate into any politically correct hivemind. A thousand voluntary tribes engaged in a thousand voluntary revolutions against one enemy before multiplying into a million. It would be pure fucking chaos and it could be beautiful. Imagine it, dearest motherfuckers, Max Stirner as a girl!

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influence this post

* Venus as a Boy by Bjork

* Imagine by John Lennon

* Danny Nedelko by IDLES

* Oh! You Pretty Things by David Bowie

* Townie by Mitski

* Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell

* Country House by Blur

* Shitty Ballet by Bleached

* Been a Son by Nirvana

* Personality Crisis by New York Dolls

 

Ten People Who Actually Didn't Suck in 2022

 2022 sucked. That's how I usually introduce this annual list of people who miraculously didn't, and I wouldn't be totally off base to do so again. 2022 was a year as chock full of horrors as any other year you might expect to survive during this dark age of Cthulhu. After all, this year was decimated on every conceivable front by a grotesque imperial proxy war in Ukraine that seems frighteningly likely to end in a thermonuclear third world war. On a far more intimate front, gender outlaws like myself have never faced such well-publicized vitriol, with the partisan industrial complex using us as their go-to props for their latest midterm election circus.

I get called groomer six times a day with mushroom clouds blooming on the horizon. For all intents and purposes, it really is the end of the world as I know it. So, why then do I feel strangely fine? Could it be the estrogen finally coursing through my veins after 34 years of testosterone poisoning? Or maybe something that my therapist suggested about rewiring my grim brain in the positive finally clicked. I don't know. But for whatever reason, 2022 was a heinously apocalyptic year that didn't quite suck and here's at least ten reasons why.

Richard Fierro & Thomas James- 2022 was a year that found my tribe under near constant attack, both figuratively and literally and it didn't get much more literal than the recent massacre at Club Q in Colorado Springs that stole five beautifully freaky people from us too soon and grievously wounded dozens more. But it could have been much worse, and it would have been much worse if it wasn't for the aggressive mutual aid of a tribe under attack. Richard Fierro was an ally and an Army veteran of multiple stupid wars who was at Club Q that night with his family to support his daughter's friend performing in the drag show. Thomas James was a US Navy Petty Officer celebrating another day of Queer survival during the Kali Yuga with the family he had found. 

When faced with a heavily armed beast in their midst, these two men and countless nameless others reacted automatically by throwing themselves before the bullets. By the time the cops finally managed to show up, my people had already subdued this beast and beaten him to a bloody pulp. The cops should have stayed home. We didn't need them. We never have and we never will, because, as Thomas eloquently put it from his hospital bed, "When you come out of the closet, come out swinging." In the eternal words of Oscar Wilde, people have gone to heaven for far less.

Roger Waters- I'm not really a Pink Floyd fan. truth be told, I lost all interest in the band after their madcap ringleader Syd Barret took his experiments solo before vanishing altogether. I'm even less of a fan of celebrity activists. Neoliberal saints like Bono and Angelina Jolie just use poor people as another stage to masturbate their insatiable egos on and I can't help but notice that they've only gotten richer and more powerful by hitching their names to obnoxiously newsworthy causes. This is precisely what makes a character like Roger Waters so inspiring. Waters didn't set out to be an activist. He never showed up at Live Aid or rocked the vote. But one year, a few Palestinian fans convinced the rock star to visit the West Bank Wall before a scheduled concert in Tel Aviv. What Roger saw changed him. He canceled the stadium performance and chose to play to a far smaller crowd at the Arab Israeli commune of Neve Shalom instead and he never looked back. 

Since then, Waters has gone out of his way to isolate himself from his bourgeoise industry by becoming the highest profile spokesman for ending Israeli apartheid and this stance has cost him millions if not billions of dollars in the process as he's been tarred by that apartheid state's international lobby as an anti-Semite for standing up for the rights of the only Semites still facing an imminent genocide in Palestine. And Waters hasn't stopped there. After a year of celebrities posing for photo-ops with Volodymyr Zelensky and pledging their undying allegiance to peace by supporting a new Cold War, Rogers stood virtually alone in condemning the violence on both sides and calling for an unconditional ceasefire. The result was as predictable as it was depressing. More canceled shows and more mainstream venom. But somebody has to sing "Give Peace A Chance" and thank Kali that there is still at least one rock star who lives by the lyrics he sings. 

Omali Yeshitela- This may come as a shock to some of you, but Black Power isn't dead and the feds who brought you such Motown hits as Cointelpro remain as committed as ever to stomping it out like an ebony flamed campfire. They made this abundantly clear this July when the FBI launched a series of multi-state raids against the Uhuru Movement and their political arm, the African People's Socialist Party that together form the oldest existing Black Power Movement in the country. Several members were arrested, including the movement's founder and spiritual leader, Omali Yeshitella, whose been scrapping with these cunts since J. Edna wore kitten heels. Their crime was simply maintaining an open and constitutionally protected relationship with a Russian anti-globalist activist accused of having ties to the Russian government. People who condemn Uhuru out of hand for simply maintaining relations with a government you or I may disapprove of are missing the whole point of stateless third world nationalist movements like the one built by men like John Africa, Omali and Malcolm X. 

Marginalized people seeking autonomy from the colonialist states that oppress them should have every right to engage in diplomacy with any nation that may help them gain the recognition they require to ensure their very survival and if the government succeeds in criminalizing these relationships through draconian measures like the Foreign Agents Registration Act, it won't just be Yeshitela's ass on the line. It will be any socialist organization that works in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, any Shiite Twelver Mosque in contact with state sanctioned imams in Tehran, any charity sending aid through Lebanon that might pass through Hezbollah territory. What Omali Yeshitela and his comrades are standing defiantly against isn't a war on Russian influence, it's a war on international solidarity. Omali spoke for every stepped-on tribe living under the boot of this colonialist empire, including my own, when he stood on the courtroom steps and roared, "Don't tell us that we can't have friends that you don't like!" Well, Uhuru has friends like me and I'm one bitch who knows how to throw a punch in kitten heels better than any chickenhawk closet queen.

Chase Oliver- 2022 was the year I officially gave up on electoral politics. I never held on to any dizzy schoolgirl delusion that my vote was ever good for anything more lethal than a protest ballot but as this year's midterms quickly devolved into a downright violent turf war between warring tribes of peasants carrying the portraits of virtually identical oligarchs, it became disturbingly clear to me that the process itself has become a weapon of mass distraction designed to divide the poor against themselves. However, there was one candidacy that I couldn't help but admire. In the most expensive senate contest in the country which pit two confirmed wife beaters against each other in South Carolina, a plucky, pro-gun, anti-cop, gay trekkie named Chase Oliver triggered a run-off as a Libertarian candidate armed with little more than $8,000 dollars and a second-hand Toyota Corolla. By Chase's own admission, he didn't have any intention of winning, he simply wanted to expose how fucked America's electoral system really is and this brazen act of democratic monkeywrenching earned him the hatred of both sides of the two-party cartel and a special place in one non-voting Queer anarchist's heart. 

Pamela Adlon- I had to say goodbye to a family very close to my heart this year. For five seasons, Sam Fox and her daughters Max, Frankie and Duke, along with her seemingly indestructible elderly English mother, Phil, gave us a place at the table of a charmingly dysfunctional matriarchy with Pamela Adlon's FX dramedy Better Things. Based loosely on Pamela's own experiences as a defiantly single mother with a B-list Hollywood career circling the drain, I don't think words can accurately convey what this show has meant to me. I discovered it late at night during the early hours of the pandemic while grappling with suicidal ideation and a flurry of emotional flashbacks revealing a cryptic lifelong struggle with suppressed childhood trauma and Complex PTSD. 

All three of Sam's daughters felt like broken reflections of some piece of my childhood that I had buried alive beneath the floorboards of my subconscious, but none more so than Sam's rebellious genderqueer middle child, Frankie, who steadfastly refused to embrace any single gender label and forced her begrudgingly supportive but frequently vexed mother to love her regardless on Frankie's terms and no one else's. This is a message America still refuses to learn. Your children are beyond your command. If you truly love them, you must relinquish control and let them show you the way, their way. I can only thank Pamela for being big enough to step back and let wildflowers grow in her garden while allowing us all to share in the bittersweet experience. It may have saved my life.

Sophia Allison- The last decade has seen a veritable renaissance in the long-lost art of guitar driven indie rock and it is a movement overwhelmingly led by young Queer women and all the better for it. Mitski, St. Vincent and Phoebe Bridgers have all released refreshingly volatile masterpieces that stand shoulder to shoulder with anything created by Connor Oberst or Kurt Cobain, but 2022 was Sophie Allison's year to blaze through like a runaway comet. Less than two years after her brilliant sophomore album, Color Theory, Sophia, who performs under the moniker of Soccer Mommy, somehow managed to outdo herself with the year's best album, Sometimes, Forever, which saw the 23-year-old artist pull off the seemingly impossible feat of creating a work of art that was simultaneously more accessible and more experimental than anything else on college radio. 

What's even more impressive is that she also managed to use this unlikely combination of abstract industrial noise and intoxicating Top 40 melody to convey a harrowing portrait of another young woman in a state of evolution, liberating herself from the turmoil of childhood trauma, not by rejecting her loneliness and anxiety but by embracing it and coexisting with the chemical imbalances that make her a dynamo of pure weapons grade empathy and courageous intimacy. Lyrics like "You know I'll take you as you are, as long as you do me" come across like a battle cry for a generation defined by malaise but not consigned to becoming a casualty of it.

Malik Diamond- Have you ever wondered what John Zerzan would sound like if he were raised to be an urban shaman by the Wu Tang Clan? Yeah, me neither, but I thank a host of heathen deities every day that I found out when I met Malik Diamond. An impossibly versatile Swiss Army Man, Malik has been a force to be reckoned with in the Bay Area's underground hip hop community for years, putting out a steady stream of albums, books, zines and comics as well as coaching the next generation of anarcho-gangstas in everything from Kung Fu to hip hop history. But I know Malik as the second weirdest motherfucker on CounterPunch. His fluid, stream of consciousness essays on the everyday terrors of being an Afro-Indian half-breed who talks to trees in a rapidly gentrifying metropolis are both instantly relatable to a genderfreak hillbilly extraterrestrial like me and unlike anything else I've ever had the pleasure of reading. 

The left likes to pat itself on the back for its commitment to diversity but diversity isn't about checking quotas with different shades of people that agree with you, it's about Muslim drag queens, undocumented egoists and schizophrenic sewar hermits. It's about people who bring radically unique perspectives to the table that couldn't be provided by any other human on the planet. And it's this spicey weirdo gumbo of socio-political chaos that builds the empathy we all need to survive the collapse of a civilization designed to assimilate us into its beige monolith. People like my comrade Malik don't just make revolution possible, they make it dangerously fun. And I love him like a brother from another mother for it and you should too if you know what's good for you.

Penny Logue & Bonnie Nelson- I've long had a dream that has haunted the darker corners of my skull. A dream of vast wide-open spaces without a single concrete monstrosity in sight. A dream of a space where people too Queer to be smashed into any theme park's corporate alphabet can simply exist, wild and free. Free from labels. Free from passing. Free from abusive cops and gladhanding politicians and hate mongering talking heads. A land free from the debasing moral architecture and constant surveillance of the metropolitan cis world or its carefully segregated gay ghettos. And, quite frankly, a place with guns. Lots of guns. AR-15's and WASR-10's and Ruger Mini-14's. All bedazzled with rhinestones and carried in the manicured hands of people far too fucking rare and beautiful and freaky and colorful to conform to any single gender marker on a bathroom door. In 2022, I discovered that this place of my dreams already exists in the form of the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch, a heavily armed genderfuck compound in the dark heart of Southern Colorado QAnon Country.

A couple of fellow rural transgender anarchists named Penny Logue and Bonnie Nelson started up this alpaca ranch back in 2018 in an attempt to provide freaks like us with a much needed refuge from the hostile slumlords and record shattering trans murder rates of the big tolerant cities, and over the last four years they have created a magnet for other Queer casualties of the modern world seeking to get back in touch with the pagan soil from which we all once bloomed, by any means necessary. But this real-life fairy tale didn't just speak to me because of some impossible dream. It spoke to me for the same reason that 2022 itself miraculously didn't suck even among the carnage of collapse. It spoke to me because this year that dream became a reality for me as well in my own terrifying little corner of Central Pennsylvania QAnon Country. 2022 was the year I found my family. A handful of Queer hillbillies like me who want nothing more than to raise animals and shoot guns in the holler and be left the fuck alone by the straight world around it.

This is the revolution that I've been fighting for my entire life, and I don't even have to kill a single breeder to achieve it. All I have to do is build the world I want now out of the scraps of the old and be prepared to defend it from the toxicity of the outside world. My community and others like Penny and Bonnie's may be far from utopia but we're done waiting for some biblical showdown to make it a reality. 2022 was the year I realized that each and every one of us makes our own goddamn reality. So let the cities burn and let the fag bashers pass their stupid fucking laws. I know a little place in the country where I can ride out the apocalypse and I know it's not the only one.

Happy 2023, dearest motherfuckers. Bring on the Armageddon. We've got nothing left to lose and nirvana left to gain.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH   

Because Polygamists Are Queer People Too, Goddammit

 Nicky, why can't you just smile and join the pride parade? I must hear this refrain at least ten times a day from people both inside and out of my community. With all the progress, with all the popular approval, why can't I just be one of those happy Queers you see on TV? Why must I insist on being such a fucking bummer? And sometimes I wish it was that easy too. That I could just put on a pair of heels and embrace the simple pleasures of mainstream inclusion. The only problem is that I know way too much about the history of Western Civilization to pretend that progress isn't a fucking trap.

I can't pretend that the globalized corporate culture that defines the collective West isn't a moral desert defined by commercialism, conformity and assimilation. I can't pretend that this culture isn't the direct descendant of the White Anglo-Saxon Puritan culture that wiped out the pagan tribes who once revered my people for what made us unique, and I can't pretend that being Queer isn't defined by our long history of resistance to this culture and that allowing ourselves to be absorbed into it would be tantamount to genocide.

Every right that these people have given us has been rigged. We have the right to state protection from bigotry as long as we consent to recognizing the authority of an institution that violates the rights of more Queer people than every Bible Belt fag basher combined in the form of the Prison Industrial Complex. We have the right to serve openly in the straight man's army as long as we consent to the wholesale slaughter of other marginalized people that defines its very existence. And of course, there is the most sacred right that a Queer person could possibly ask for, what every little trans girl dreams about, the right to marriage.

This was the right on full display just a few weeks ago when Joe Biden officially signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law. A bipartisan smash hit, this law codified federal recognition of same sex marriage as well as interracial marriage after the Supreme Court reminded us all of the unpleasant fact that the Founding Fathers were a bunch of sexist bigots like them with the overturning of Roe V. Wade. 

Once again, I can't pretend to be impressed by this thing called marriage. I'm an anarchist for Stirner's sake. The state's approval of who I love and how I love them is about as meaningful to me as receiving the blessing of the Mafia. But I have nothing against the institution in and of itself and consenting adults should have every right to enjoy it. Kali knows the weird shit that turns me on isn't every Queer's cup of tea. But there was something that just wasn't quite right about this picture.

The sight of all these shiny, happy, camera-friendly Queers whooping it up on the White House lawn as Cindy Lauper belted out the hits couldn't erase the fact that many of the Beltway ghouls who invited them to the party, including our hero Joe Biden, had long and economically fruitful careers defined by fucking us over with sickeningly bigoted laws like DOMA and FOSTA-SESTA. I mean, after decades of drowning us in pigs' blood, the cool kids invite us to a party in our honor and this doesn't seem weird to you? 

I know, I know, Nicky is such a fucking downer. I've heard. But I can't seriously be the only faggot asking, 'what's the catch?' here. The answer to this million-dollar question can actually be found in the fine print of the bill itself. The Respect for Marriage Act codifies any marriage between two people into federal law. It also explicitly forbids the recognition of polygamy in no uncertain terms. In other words, our marriage rights come at the expense of someone else's.

Who cares about a bunch of dusty old Mormon bumpkins, right? Well, you should if you have any respect at all for the cultural institution of Queerness. After all, what is a Queer person? A sexual and/or gender minority whose existence runs against the grain of the Anglo-Saxon Puritan order. And what is a polygamist? Say it with me now, people- a sexual and/or gender minority whose existence runs against the grain of the Anglo-Saxon Puritan order. Polygamy is a form of polyamory, love between multiple partners, that is as Queer as any lifestyle you're likely to find at your local fetish ball. 

The fact that your average American polygamist is a Fundamentalist Mormon fag basher shouldn't matter anymore than the fact that your average radical feminist lesbian thinks that I'm a male chauvinist pig for having a prick under my dress. They are still our people whether they realize it or not and we can't pretend to support marriage equality while we throw other consenting adults under the state's bus.

America has been at war with polygamy for as long as it's been at war with every other form of Queer love and the Mormons have been savagely persecuted for generations for once daring to recognize it. In 1838, the governor of Missouri chased them from their original homeland on the threat of extermination in what can only be accurately described as an act of Queer ethnic cleansing. A few years later, their founder Joseph Smith was lynched by an angry mob in Illinois and the Mormons escaped the Midwest to the deserts of the Great Salt Lake in search of a safe space where they could simply exist in peace.

Polygamy was officially banned by the federal government with the Edmund's Act in 1862. When a few brave Mormons challenged this law as a clear violation of their constitutional freedom of religion in 1878, the Supreme Court upheld the law in the Court's first decision to limit religious freedom with reasoning that is sadly still sited to this day. This reasoning included the justices referring to the practice of plural marriage as "odious" and claims that it offends polite society that should sound strangely familiar to all ears. It seems that constitutional rights like religious liberty are only sacred when the people practicing them conform to the puritanical confines of our slave raping Founding Fathers. Who knew?

The Mormons attempted to peacefully secede and established their own sovereign communities in what is now largely modern-day Utah, but the United States government just wouldn't let them be. President Buchanan invaded the Deseret with 2,500 soldiers to put down the "Mormon Rebellion" and forcibly confiscate church land. This persecution only received a brief reprieve during the Civil War but Abraham Lincoln's bloody suspension of Habeas Corpus to keep the Union whole made it violently clear that secession was another institution that the American government was willing to kill to suppress. In 1890, the Church of Latter-Day Saints finally bowed to pressure and traded one of the founding principles of their faith in exchange for the safety of mainstream inclusion. 

 But all this carnage was about much more than just one guy shacking up with two wives. Much like with all Queer rights, the government's animus had a lot more to do with social cohesion than anything else. Early Mormon society was far from utopian, but it was defined by a form of pious collectivism that placed the community before the state and every straight man's favorite fetish, capitalism. 

Families were larger and more powerful than any one government institution and women and children generally enjoyed more independence than the lesser captives of most 19th century monogamous communities. Any degeneration from sexual and gender mores poses a direct challenge to the carefully constructed western class system that evolved out of the rise of patriarchy during the agricultural revolution. This is why Queer people of all kinds are only ever left with two choices, conformity or persecution. 

The Church of Latter-Day Saints chose conformity and lost a society that was nearly entirely autonomous from the wickedness of the western world that now ravages the streets of Salt Lake City with crime and addiction. The Mormons who chose to embrace this assimilation embraced the federal government that killed their ancestors as a divinely inspired institution while the few who chose to resist were chased by this divine institution into the shadows where they could be easily poached by rapacious creeps like Warren Jeffs. 

Polygamy remains a felony on the books in all fifty states. Refugees whose ancestors have practiced this form of family values since long before Joseph Smith wore short pants are denied citizenship and deported. Families continue to be forcefully separated and shattered by the federal government in routine raids on polygamist compounds. These people cling to their faith because everyone but God has forgotten them. Speaking as a genderfuck outcast who spent the better part of her childhood at the mercy of Catholic creeps not unlike Warren Jeffs, I can't help but to believe that my community owes these people a little better than this. Hell, we owe it to ourselves too, because polygamists are Queer people too, goddammit and if we don't look out for each other, no one will. Certainly not Joe Biden.

The problem with mainstream inclusion is that it always comes at the price of the persecution of those who wish to live their lives outside of the confines of mainstream society. State sanctioned marriage comes with benefits that should belong to all of us by birth right, regardless of how many people we love or how we choose to love them. If Queer people abandon our rebellious principles for this conformist sacrament, it won't just be at the expense of a bunch of forgotten pioneers, it will be at the expense of our own sacred identity as renegades against puritanical conformity. Call me a fucking bummer ten times a day, but I would rather die like an odious apostate than dance on their graves for a White House photo-op any day of the week.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* God Only Knows by the Beach Boys

* Gigantic by the Pixies

* Rebel Rebel by David Bowie

* Laura by Bat for Lashes

* We Oh We by the Hidden Cameras

* Lonely Planet Boy by New York Dolls

* Y Control by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

* Gloria by Patti Smith

* Townie by Mitski

* Today by Smashing Pumpkins

* Fallout by Yo La Tengo

* Awoo by the Hidden Cameras

Nicky Battles the Progressive Killer Robots

 America has become a downright surreal place during the twilight hours of our imperial decline. We can't seem to finish one potentially apocalyptic cold war before starting another and the lesser evilism of our sham elections has reduced us to a pack of peasants bickering over which geriatric rapist should pretend to push us around for the next four years. But it doesn't get much more batshit bizarre than the perverse dystopian spectacle of the most progressive city in America sicking an army of killer robots on the homeless.

I really do wish I was being hyperbolic with that last line. I wish hyperbole was even possible anymore. But in their ongoing efforts to clear the streets of unwashed vagrants, San Francisco, the city that gave us the Summer of Love and the butt of every corny right-wing joke for well over half a century, has officially approved the use of robots equipped for deadly force against its own citizenry.

In a vote of 8-3, San Francisco city supervisors approved this perverse "deadly force option" while consoling the Tesla driving Apple executives who have colonized that once freaky city and elected a ten-headed jackass to govern it that this new cyberpunk death squad would only be used in potentially life-threatening circumstances. But considering the San Francisco Police Department's less than stellar track record for human rights and that America's finest can and do regularly characterize an absurdly wide variety of shit as being potentially life threatening to justify their hyper-homicidal urges, these promises hardly inspire anything even remotely resembling hope. 

Sadly, this is in no way, shape or form an anomaly. Across the country, the most progressive cities west of Amsterdam have all become the least equal places on earth to live in and have chosen to cleanse their tree lined streets of the homeless casualties of this twisted irony with a uniquely passive aggressive war on crime. California's dear leader, Gavin Newsom has set the standard by sanctioning a statewide rampage of armed sweeps against tent cities while smiling beatifically for the cameras like a used car salesman and telling the watching world that it would be downright "uncompassionate" to allow these communities to exist unmolested by state intervention.

He's used this same strange brand of cuddly authoritarian logic before to justify the creation of so called "Care Courts" allowing third parties, including law enforcement, to petition judges to order the treatment of those deemed by the state to be mentally ill on the threat of a conservatorship that would affectively remove their right to be considered a human being. Over on the other left coast in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams has similarly ordered his thugs in blue to institute a new regime of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, once again, all in the name of social hygiene and compassionate grooming.

There is nothing particularly unusual about the continued growth of America's insatiable police state but when this long march towards total tyranny is accompanied not by Trumpian dog whistle racism but the comforting social justice bromides of gentle people with flowers in their hair it begins to feel like the whole goddamn country has already been involuntarily institutionalized by a smiling master class of lute strumming Nurse Ratchets. It's fucking creepy but this is American progressivism, and it always has been. Sit down around the fire my children, it's time Auntie Nicky finally told you the whole truth and nothing but about modern liberalism, the western world's answer to Santa Claus. 

Progressivism is generally seen by both its supporters and its detractors alike as the use of big government to further the cause of America's downtrodden classes from on high and that is how this movement generally markets itself, but the reality is that progressivism has always been defined by the far more sinister goal of radically expanding the state into every facet of private life in order to affect a regime of top-down social engineering that purifies western civilization of its radical discontents or as stalwart progressive Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once referred to us, "those who sap the strength of the state for those lesser sacrifices." 

 This may sound strange considering its current secular humanist posture, but the original Progressive Movement actually has its roots in the 19th century Protestant fundamentalist revival known as the Second Great Awakening, which preached that the return of Christ could only be brought about through the creation of a benevolent utopia within the gears of American power. These cranky Jesus freaks sought to achieve this goal through a deluge of government reforms which would gradually mutate into a secular jihad to save the American race from disintegration in the tumultuous years of gilded excess and working-class upheaval that followed the Civil War.

These puritanical reforms included closing the borders to filthy Catholic mongrels like my Irish ancestors who threatened the centralized cohesion of a truly United States of America with their private schools and mystical heathen ways. When this inevitably failed, they created that liberal cornerstone known as the compulsory public school system to "Christianize" the Papists into being deserving of the poison privilege of whiteness. 

The Progressives may have dropped a lot of the Jesus talk for more godless appeals to the necessity for state sanctioned conformity, but their message has remained uniquely puritanical in tone and their mission has remained a conspiracy to rapidly expand the powers of the state in order to create the ideal society as defined by the guidelines of White Anglo Saxon Protestant values. 

Women were to be protected in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the nation even if this meant forced sterilization under the guise of reproductive health. The women folk were also afforded suffrage in order to increase the White Protestant vote against the unassimilated Catholic hordes who were expected to keep their own women home. Alcohol was prohibited in order to keep the working-class men efficient by protecting them from the evils of their own free will. Child labor was abolished so that the minds of the nation's youth could be carefully molded by state institutions that would create a more civil and obedient work force for the future. And the outrageous greed of the robber barons was reined in by replacing their widely despised private monopolies with more orderly federal cartels.

But the most important mission of the early Progressives and arguably their greatest triumph was the domestication of the downright revolutionary threat posed by America's Labor Movement. This was achieved under the cloak of reform by carefully integrating the nation's largest and most influential unions into the federal government in order to create a grand partnership between big business and big government that would expand American industrial greatness from sea to shining sea and beyond. This fusion of private and public elites is known as corporatism and it is no mere coincidence that it ended up forming the foundation for the Progressive Movements European cousin, fascism.

Adolf Hitler was strongly influenced by the Eugenicists of the Progressive Era and FDR's famed Brain Trust was teeming with Mussolini fanboys. That's because fascism and progressivism are both defined by a common mission to preserve pristine western values through a counter-revolutionary regime of populist flavored state-run capitalism. 

FDR achieved this feat where Fuhrers failed with the New Deal, a massive corporatist Trojan Horse which offered the anarchists and Marxists of the Labor Movement a series of concessions like paid leave and the five-day work week in exchange for having their organizations effectively defanged and integrated into a federally regulated economic conglomeration. Factory workers rejoiced and reaped the rewards of upward mobility in the short run but in the long run it was these very progressive reforms that would serve them up like a pudding to a program of rapid globalization that would have been impossible without this consolidation of private and public power. It was a brilliant trap. I'm sure Hitler kicks himself in hell every day for not coming up with it first.

I strongly suspect that this kind of big picture treachery remains the primary mission of today's progressive movement with their march towards tolerance and inclusion. In the sixties and seventies, a New Left resistance to progressive conformity reared its ferocious head in the form of a new revolutionary class comprising largely of the outcasts that Margaret Singer failed to abort. Black Power and Queer Liberation ended the Vietnam War, trashed the gender binary and taught a generation of straight white kids how to shoot straight. 

So, the progressives went to work assimilating us the same way that they did with the once equally ferocious Labor Movement of the Old Left, by offering Queer freaks like me party favors like marriage equality and hate crime legislation that only serve to build the same state we bloodied our knuckles to smash at Stonewall before those pigfuckers can integrate us into it. But some of us aren't buying it, some of us still refuse to play their rigged game and this is when those benevolent authoritarians in the Progressive Movement show their true colors again and get mean like they did back in 1899.

I've said it before, and I'll be killed by wild robots saying it five more times before breakfast. If America still has a revolutionary class, then it's the lumpenproletariat, a growing caste of pathologically ungovernable people who find themselves incapable of existing inside the rotting Jacko lantern of Western Civilization. These people, my people, have found themselves with little other choice but to reject this empire of conformity by joining the ranks of the unemployed and the unhoused. The progressive solution to this biting anti-assimilationist question is to classify people like me as mentally defective with hyper-statist contraptions like Care Courts and FOSTA-SESTA so they can forcibly institutionalize us and throw us away into the bottomless dustbin of the Prison Industrial Complex.

There is no more room to mince words, dearest motherfuckers. The Progressive Movement is, was and always will be a stealth tool for white supremacy. It is not a coincidence that homeless people and sex workers are overwhelmingly Queer and/or people of color. We are the wretched mongrels who refuse to be house pets and we will be destroyed by our so-called progressive allies if we don't learn to bite the hand that feeds hard and reject the state in its entirety. We must form communal ties based on mutual aid and direct democracy too strong for their death machines to break or assimilate. This may very well be our last stand, but I for one would much rather die a rabid faggot tomorrow than live one day as another vanilla cog in the progressive hivemind.

So, bring on the killer robots you progressive cunts. I came here to do two things, kick ass and eat lipstick, and I'm all out of lipstick. You wanna get nuts? Let's get nuts.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by the Flaming Lips

* Rock N Roll N*gger by Patti Smith

* We Appreciate Power by Grimes featuring Hana

* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails 

* Man Sized by PJ Harvey

* Only Acting by Kero Kero Bonita

* Hardline by Julien Baker

* Savage Good Boy by Japanese Breakfast

* Bring the Noise by Public Enemy

* Turn It On by the Flaming Lips

The Kremlin's Cold War with the Modern World Has Become a Russian Tragedy

"Russia is the least statelike, the most anarchistic land in the world. And the Russian people is the most apolitical of peoples, never having managed to set its land right."

-Nikolai Berdyaev

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

-Friedrich Nietzsche

 I despise all wars, especially those of the initiatory variety. I'm not exactly a pacifist but I am a very strong believer that there is never a good reason to throw the first punch. With that being said, when it comes to understanding warfare, it is of the utmost importance to understand the so-called enemy, especially when you exist within the walls of an empire that thrives on assigning them daily like math homework. Sometimes this means struggling to comprehend what can bring even the most honorable of people to throw that first punch that initiates a war.

Imbeciles on the right have long condemned this form of politically incorrect critical thinking as sympathizing with terrorists and dictators but sadly, increasingly, once wise people on the left have joined these imbeciles in rejecting the hard work of asking 'how the hell did it come to this?' When I was first initiated into the antiwar movement as a pissed-off teenage dirtbag, I was enlightened by left-wing firebrands like William Blum and Ward Churchill who dared to put themselves in the uncomfortable shoes of the men who hijacked four planes on September 11th to initiate a holy war. 

They weren't justifying such clearly despicable violence; they were attempting to provide context on how it became inevitable. Now, whenever I attempt to do the same thing by comprehending the equally despicable actions of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, I get accused of being an apologist for authoritarianism and, all too often, the person hurling this insult at me is a fellow self-described anarchist.

The most frustrating thing about this is that the motives that inspired the unspeakable acts of barbarism on 9/11 are actually shockingly similar to the ones that convinced Russia to commit the unspeakable act of invading their own brothers and sisters in Ukraine. Islamic fundamentalists don't hate the West's freedom any more than Moscow does. What they hate is the decadence we obnoxiously flaunt as the world's indispensable empire and our insistence on pushing this morally bankrupt culture down their throats at the expense of the traditions that they hold dear. 

I may disagree strongly with both of these people's values regarding my sexuality and my gender identity but I'm not going to sit here in posh first world judgement and pretend that these people aren't 100% right to fear the modern world when that modern world has brought us all nothing but pain and misery with the Westphalian nation state and global capitalism. The truth is that what inspires Pashtuns to join the Taliban is precisely what inspired a Queer pagan anarchist like me to join the antiwar movement. I don't want to see my people assimilated into a soulless empire any more than they do. And this is also precisely what drives your average Russian, who once raped and pillaged the Pashtuns, to support a decadent neoliberal ass wipe like Vladimir Putin in raping and pillaging Ukraine.

Russian culture is one that is uniquely defined by its deep and almost mystic reverence for its own history. Your average Russian does not live in 2022 alone. They live among the Pagan Rus of 922 and the Orthodox Old Believers of 1322 and the Bolshevik jihadists of 1922. The Russian soul exists in a museum in which time is not linear but rather a seamless continuum. This existence stands in direct opposition to a world that has long since lost any use for history. 

A world defined by a mutated interpretation of progress that valorizes an endless and often mindless push forward into the abyss of monolithic global universalism and endless technological expansion. The Russian soul looks upon the modern world with its paved forests and stadium temple marketplaces with horror and sees the western imperial forces pushing it towards their borders with righteous fury. It is this fury that has been the driving force behind most Russian aggression towards the outside world, whether justified or not. 

This includes the supposedly modernist Russian Revolution. What ultimately convinced the devout serfs to back the godless Bolsheviks in their putsch against the Tsar was the Tsar's embrace of modern globalism at its baptism by blood during the First World War in which the Russian people were demanded to forfeit the lives of their children on the altar of some western global order that was totally alien to them. Your average Russian didn't give a flying fuck about internationalism or dialectical materialism. They were revolting against the imperial schemes of modern warfare and the spiritually bankrupt specter of capitalism that possessed it.

This honorable spirit of resistance to the demonic forces of progress defines Russian Orthodox culture but it also transcends and predates it. It is the spirit of the lonesome heathen who first tamed those wild steppes. It is the spirit of the village resistance to the Mongol Hordes and the Nazi Stormtroopers. And tragically, it is also the spirit that was abused to build a state and an empire that stood in utter contradiction to these values. The same spirit that serves Vladimir Putin in his suicidal conspiracy to build a new one on the graves of his own people.

Outsiders have conspired to destroy the Russian people for centuries specifically because they are a people so resistant to conquest who have had the misfortune of building this culture on the most strategically valuable piece of real estate on the planet, the land bridge that unites Europe and Asia. For this sin, the Russian people have rarely known a day in which they weren't under threat of foreign subjugation, and it was this existential fear that inspired the Russian people to build a state in the first place. For centuries, the majority of the Russian people existed in insular communal farming villages divided amongst city states known as Uzeyds. These city states were ruled by a hereditary line of princes though the majority of this royalty's subjects existed far beyond their reach and their rule was largely symbolic in nature. 

It is this age of pastoral isolation that most defines the Russian national character. A rugged spirit that embraces the hardships and toil of farm life in order to embrace a deeper spiritual freedom that only exists in the shadows cast by tight nit families around a roaring fire or tribes performing ancient pagan rites in reverence to Orthodox saints in the torchlight. A stateless existence shattered by the Mongol Yoke who ravaged this sacred countryside for centuries and burned many of these villages to the ground.

The first organized Russian state which would eventually give birth to the venal reign of the Tsars was built to resist this conquest but many of its institutions were actually modeled after the Mongol Yoke and would ultimately corrupt the Russian way of life with its roads and cities and centralization of power into fewer and fewer hands. 

This state would ultimately hijack the Russian Orthodox Church and purge it of much of its Slavic pagan character in order to bring it into uniformity with Greece. This state would also give rise to Peter the Great who would finally bring an end to the conquest of the Khans only to build an equally bloodthirsty empire of his own to take its place. This empire was sold to the Russian people as a fortress for their nation's greatness but as it expanded in all directions, so did the Russian spirit until it was warped and torn beyond recognition.

Peter may have made Russia a world power to be reckoned with, but he did so at the expense of everything that made Russia unique. In order to compete with his rival European contemporaries, Peter forcefully westernized Russia into a modern European superstate. He enacted harsh social reforms that required the Russian people to embrace Franco-Germanic cultural traditions and he built a massive gilded city called St. Petersburgh modeled on the decadent palaces of Paris and Vienna to serve as his new empire's capitol. 

But like all empires, Russia grew too big to sustain its own autonomy and then it grew some more. The growing addictions to western excess by Russia's shrinking master class would ultimately lead to both constant war and towering debt. Meanwhile, the serfs became slaves in all but name, creating a perfect playground for western capital to expand its toxic Industrial Revolution. By the First World War, Britain, France and America essentially owned the Tsars like toy poodles and ran most of the factories and railroads that polluted what Trotsky once called the "pristine roadlessness" of the Russian countryside.

Disgusted by the shameless prostitution of their vain leaders, the Russians revolted but tragically only embraced different forms of western statism that continued to find them subjugated and divorced from the spiritual world that defined their own uniquely Slavic vision of liberty. The Soviet Union collapsed after the Carter Administration fooled them into attempting to enslave their fellow stateless traditionalists in Afghanistan and the west circled in to pick the bones.

After being savagely ravaged by Boris Yeltsin's shock capitalism and encircled by an ever-expanding NATO empire bent on nothing short of world domination, Vladimir Putin was able to unite the Russian people in their darkest hour with allusions to Russian nationalism, but Putin himself is the product of the very excesses he has pledged to fight. Yeltsin's boy wonder may have overthrown the old drunk and his fat rich entourage of pig fucking oligarchs, but he has only replaced them with his own entourage of fat rich pig fucking oligarchs who continue to shock the Russian poor with the soulless neoliberal gutter capitalism Putin picked up from the visiting Wall Street elites of the Clinton era.

The west is undeniably a threat to the Russian people. It is a threat to all people. But the only force that poses an even graver threat to the Russian soul than the Atlantic empire is a man like Putin who seeks only to replace them in the region. Russia's limited resources pretty much guarantee that Putin's insane plot to fight western imperialism with western-style imperialism will only lead him to the same fate as Tsars, only this time he will be inviting the offspring of the Mongol Yoke in Beijing back to carry the weight of his imperial predilections.

The fastest way to destroy a culture is to try to export it by becoming an empire. You cannot conquer another man's land without sacrificing your own land's soul in the process. The best hope for the Russian people to resist western imperialism is to reject its manifestations within the motherland along with the state that birthed it.

Russia's greatness lies not on the battlefields of Europe but in the windswept plains and birch tree forests that inspired men like Peter Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy to seek the kingdom of heaven within. It is this culture, a culture of asceticism and mercy, a culture of Cossack drifters and solitary dreamers, that continues to inspire those of us who resist assimilation into a modern world starved of reverence for the beauty of the old one. Russia must once again become too wild for princes to tame and invite the world to join her around the fire. Then and only then will the conquest end. 

Peace, Love, and Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Atmosphere by Joy Division 

*  Golden Hair by Slowdive

*  Human Behavior by Bjork

* Teenage Dirtbag by Phoebe Bridgers

*  Tommy Gun by the Clash

*  Hey Joe by Jimi Hendricks

*  Heads Will Roll by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

*  Jane Says by Jane's Addiction 

* War Dance by Killing Joke

* Heroes by David Bowie

* Look On Down from the Bridge by Mazzy Star

* Us by Regina Spektor