David Koresh, We Understand: Warnings from Waco About Today's Police State

 The Branch Davidians were a bunch of weird people who just wanted to be left the fuck alone. The buzzing hivemind of the mainstream maelstrom will scream otherwise on every conceivable platform that they have at their disposal but that really is what Waco all comes down to at the end of the day. As the 30th anniversary of the federal government's deadliest massacre in the post-Manifest Destiny era slowly creeps towards us, every Hollywood producer and their creepy cousin seems to be cashing in on highly stylized excuses for why a bunch of loopy bible thumpers were just begging to be burned alive. "It was a terrible mistake" is a common refrain. But it wasn't. It was something far more sinister and somebody who isn't just another right-wing ideologue needs to fucking say it out loud. Waco was a deliberate act of mass murder perpetrated by a growing police state and there are no excuses for killing children.

It started with a no-knock raid, and it ended in a massacre. In the early mid-nineties, the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had found itself in dire straits with politicians openly discussing slashing their bloated budget and even merging them with another federal office. As if that wasn't bad enough, 60 Minutes was in the production stages of a story covering the ATF's long hidden history of rampant sexual harassment amongst its ranks. The agency badly needed a ratings-friendly PR stunt to validate their continued existence and they hit the jackpot when they stumbled over David Koresh. A sex-crazed gun nut who looked like the lead singer of a heavy metal cover band, Dick Wolf couldn't have cast a better villain himself and David's followers were just kooky enough for the feds to kick around for the cameras while still looking like the good guys again. It was perfect.

The only problem with this made-for-tv narrative was that the Davidians never really hurt anybody. They were a tiny splinter sect of about 100 Seventh Day Adventists prepping for the end times on a desolate compound known as the Mount Carmel Ranch in the scrublands outside of Waco, Texas. They were small-time players on the local gun-show circuit, but they were also generally considered to be harmless eccentrics by the local community, and they had a long history of compliance with local law enforcement to boot. This fact was made painfully obvious to the feds during the early stages of the case against the group for non-violent weapons violations when David Koresh told the ATF's star informant that the federal government was more than welcome to come by the ranch and check on his paperwork and inventory.

The ATF declined the offer. They also declined to arrest Koresh on one of his routine jogs or trips to the local Guitar Center. That's because the ATF wasn't interested in a peaceful resolution. They wanted a high-octane publicity stunt that they could play on repeat like an infomercial devoted to their bottomless budget. This is also why they tipped off the local media and declined to call off their big raid even after they learned that the media had inadvertently leaked the news to Koresh through a local postal worker who also happened to be David's brother-in-law. All the ATF wanted was a blockbuster showdown so they could show the whole country how fucking macho they were. They even held dress rehearsals for the raid with the US Army Special Forces at Fort Hood. But when zero day finally came these swaggering cowboys bit off more than thew could chew.

The initial raid at Waco began at 9 A.M. on February 28, 1993, with National Guard helicopters carrying ATF agents circling the Mount Carmel compound as an attempted diversion from their ground assault. This was launched simultaneously with unmarked pickup trucks hauling covered cattle trailers that concealed another 76 heavily armed agents. A wild hour-long gun battle ensued which only ended when the Davidians held their fire to allow the badly battered ATF cowboys to retreat with their tails between their legs. Once the smoke cleared, two Davidians lay dead and another five, including Koresh, were wounded but not before they claimed 24 ATF casualties, four of them fatal, making February 28th the worst day in the history of federal law enforcement measured by casualties. It was a humiliating blow, not just to the ATF but for the entire police state. Goliath had stepped to David and David rained hell.

There has been a lot of contention over the years as to who exactly fired first with both sides crying wolf, but the front door that the agents claimed the Davidians opened fire on them through and that David Koresh claimed he was holding open when the ATF shot him was mysteriously missing from the wreckage of the compound after the siege along with any trace of illegally modified firearms. What wasn't missing however were the bullet holes in the ceiling of Mount Carmel with splinters of wood punched inward, proving that the ATF had taken to sniping at the Davidians from their military choppers. But regardless of who fired first, the Davidians were as good as dead the moment that they successfully fought off a heavily armed federal raid on live television. The FBI took over and a hotly publicized 51-day siege ensued.

After quibbling over early concessions in the negotiating process, David Koresh allowed 23 of his followers to leave the compound during the first week but the Davidians good faith was only met with all the adults released being immediately arrested and their children being taken into government custody. Further negotiations fell through when the Davidians refused to hand over more of their children to the same gestapo in exchange for the milk that they only needed for those same children. The federal government responded by cutting the power to the compound and blasting a bunch of bullet-riddled millenarians with blinding floodlights and blistering high-decibel loudspeakers rattling their windows with bugle calls, Tibetan chants and Nancy Sinatra singing these boots are made for walking and they're going to walk all over you 24/7.

The media did their part too with their non-stop campaign to demonize David Koresh and his followers as the second coming of Jonestown with absolutely zero criticism whatsoever for the heavy-handed military tactics that federal law enforcement in this country would soon become famous for in the ensuing decades. One of the few people in the media who refused to play ball was Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes who went ahead with his expose on the ATF's dirty laundry and ended the episode by informing his audience that nearly every ATF whistleblower who he had spoken to believed that the initial raid was nothing but a crass and reckless attempt by the agency to improve their tarnished image. In a sick way it worked. The rest of the media had dutifully rallied around these bruised chauvinists and fed the public a steady diet of propaganda informing them that the Davidians had already essentially committed ritual suicide before the second raid had even begun. 

Attorney General Janet Reno signed off on judgement day with accusations of child abuse on the compound that she would later admit were totally baseless. At 6:00 AM on April 19, 1993, the FBI stormed Mount Carmel with battle tanks specifically equipped with giant booms designed to punch massive holes in the compound and pipe in downright dangerous amounts of CS Gas. The feds broadcast messages over their loudspeakers announcing that "this raid is over." By 6:47, field agents began firing deadly 40mm tear gas cannisters known as ferret rounds from grenade launchers into the windows. A total of 389 of these rounds would be fired that day despite the fact that the tanks had already provided more than enough gas to kill an army of elephants. By 12:00 PM a fire had broken out and the FBI began blocking fire trucks from putting out the blaze. Mount Carmel was soon engulfed in flames as the whole world watched. By the end of the day, 76 Davidians were dead, including 27 children and two pregnant women. Most died from smoke inhalation, but twenty bodies were found with gunshot wounds and the feds celebrated their victory by raising an ATF flag over their charred remains. Mission accomplished.

And they couldn't have done it without their willing accomplices in the mainstream media who cried ritual suicide before the wreckage had even ceased smoldering. However, of the nine Davidians who actually managed to escape the blaze alive, not one has ever reported any discussion amongst their late embattled comrades on committing such an extreme act and many have noted that David Koresh himself had strictly forbid suicide of any kind as a mortal sin in keeping with traditional Seventh Day Adventist teachings. Numerous experts, including former FBI agents have testified over the years that aerial forward infrared footage taken by the government during the final siege clearly shows agents firing gunshots into the compound and the Justice Department even seized evidence being withheld by the FBI from their investigations indicating that the use of pyrotechnic rounds on a building pumped full of combustible gasses had in fact been authorized from on high. 

With the exception of a few contrarian renegades like Russell Means, Ramsey Clark and Gore Vidal, nobody to the left of the far-right seemed to really give a shit. Bill Clinton seemed to sum up the pervasive popular opinion when he refused Janet Reno's resignation "because some religious fanatics murdered themselves." Investigations plagued by accusations of corruption and federal infighting all came to the same conclusion that the dead Davidians were asking for it and most of America simply shrugged its shoulders and said, "So what? Who cares about a bunch of dead zealots in hillbilly country?" But then came the tanks of Ferguson and the unmarked federal posses in Portland. Then came Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Freddie Gray.

Nobody wants to connect the dots, but it is all fucking connected. The left didn't give a fuck about Waco because they were just a bunch of creepy Jesus freaks, and the right doesn't care about Black Lives Matter because they are just a bunch of uppity ghetto communists but to the police state, we are all the same goddamn enemy so why shouldn't we all fight back together? Waco was a giant flaming warning about the terrifying capabilities of an unfettered police state in a partisan circus and its victims were far too diverse to fit evenly on the right or the left. People always seem to forget that nearly half of the Branch Davidians slaughtered that day in April were Black. This was a distinctly biracial sect of societal outcasts that the government just figured that they could mow over because they were weird, because they were 'other', and these 'others' were brutally murdered in cold blood before a live studio audience because they had the nerve to defend themselves.

The most powerful image in my mind's eye from the Waco siege was that of a banner unfurled over the facade of Mount Carmal by the wounded but unbowed Davidians that boldly read "Rodney King, we understand!" The forever siege of America's massive tyrannical police state will never end until transgender Stonewall casualties like me are willing to march through the streets of Nashville with signs that boldly read "David Koresh, we understand!" We are all in this siege together because in the gun sights of the powerful, we are all Branch Davidians. It's time we locked arms and started acting like it.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* The Future by Leonard Cohen

* Modern Leper by Julien Baker

* Holiday Song by the Pixies

* John the Revelator by Johnny Cash

* Satanist by boygenius

* I Found a Reason by the Velvet Underground

* To Me It Was by Samia

* Have You Forgotten by Red House Painters

* Jesus Don't Want Me for His Sunbeam by Nirvana

* A More Perfect Union by Titus Andronicus

Girls Don't Kill: Dissecting the Gender of Violence After Nashville

 Another day, another school shooting. It seems to happen every week in this shithole country. Probably because it pretty much literally does. We've had 19 of these goddamn things in the first few months of 2023 alone and scariest thing is how normal it all feels. One massacre bleeds into the next like a rerun of some sick Nikelodean rendition of the Grand Guignol. I've seen this one before and it's on every single channel. The plot is always the same. Another playground turned into a graveyard for tiny shrunken corpses. Another pissed-off kid with a gun trying to tell us something with the only machine loud enough to steal our attention away from the hypnotic spell of the matrix in our phones. Another news cycle devoted to partisan handwringing and vulture's eye footage of the scene of the crime. Just another day in paradise during the Kali Yuga. Only this time it was different. This time that pissed off kid with a gun was trans and the latest episode of America's favorite snuff series was something far worse than just familiar to me. It was painfully intimate. 

Aiden Hall was a 28-year-old transman who returned to a conservative Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee where he had spent a short but undoubtedly painful chapter of his youth to kill three adults and three children before committing suicide-by-cop. No one knows for sure what drove Aiden to commit such an unspeakably cruel act of violence but it's hard not to recognize that it occurred against the backdrop of an unprecedented campaign by conservative lawmakers to erase transgender people or that Tennessee has become this final solution's ground zero. After all, this shooting occurred just days before that state enacted an "anti-drag" law so broad that it essentially affords its cops with the power to regulate gender performance like some kind of Wahabi Christain theocracy. 

Of course, the timing of this horror show wasn't lost on the Christian right and rather than approach it as a teachable lesson on the dangers of mass demonization they have chosen instead to exploit the hell out of it in order to double down on their campaign to eradicate "transgenderism." Aiden Hall didn't become a tragic high-water mark for the volatile blowback that often comes with state sanctioned bigotry. He became the poster child for everything that the Jesus-hates-you set want you to believe about trannies like me. Suddenly, we're not just grooming your children, we're also arming ourselves to the teeth to shoot them in the face while they pray. It was right around this moment in the news cycle that my PTSD caught up with me and I suffered the first of several panic attacks related to this shooting and the twisted campaign by the right to package it as part of the transgender lifestyle.

I have more than a few things in common with Mr. Hall. I spent 11 years at a conservative Catholic school as a closeted Queer child and these weren't exactly the happiest moments of my life. My decade-long sentence at that parochial gulag began with some cis gender adult putting their hands on me in a pre-school bathroom and it ended with those same fine folks accusing me of plotting a school shooting for being a little bit messed-up from the experience. Thoughts of vengeance against my tormentors are not alien to me. In fact, my more committed readers will probably recognize them as a major hallmark of my literary modus operandi. But my target has never been people, not even the ones who personally savaged my childhood. My target has always been the power systems that grant petty adults with the authority to crush kids just for being weird. But that doesn't make it any less painful to have a bunch of those same petty adults accuse my entire tribe of being defined by destroying the voiceless little creatures that I still see broken pieces of myself in every day.

"Transgender Killer Targets Christian School" a New York Post headline read. #Transterrorism scarred social media for days on end while the most watched names in cable news pounced on this story like Joeseph Goebbels after the Reichstag Fire. If you were to take Tucker Carlson's word for it, you would be led to believe that the unprecedented crimes of Aiden Hall were part of some long bloody transgender murder spree. The statistics paint a very different picture. According to the records of the Violence Project, there have been 190 mass shootings resulting in the deaths of four or more people in in America during the last 57 years. Two have been committed by people who openly identify as trans. This includes the Nashville shooting as well as last year's massacre at a gay club in Colorado Springs. But 185 of these killings were committed by red-blooded American cis males like Tucker Carlson. So, if America's favorite pastime even has a gender, then it is decidedly male. 

If I was a petty bitch like Mr. Carlson, I would now take the time to turn this piece into a muckraking harangue against the evils of masculinity itself and I wouldn't have a hard time making my case. After all, 90% of homicides worldwide are committed by men and femicide is as American as the apple pie women get trampled to death for overcooking. But I'm not going to take that route. Truth be told, I may be an outspoken transfeminist with a lifetime of locker room horror stories, but I find no fault with masculinity in and of itself. I think it's an honorable trait in any gender. I've seen the beauty in chivalry firsthand in the transmen who seem to comprehend my own peculiar brand of androgyny better than most of my fellow transwomen and I myself have come to celebrate my own masculinity in the form of my butchness. Masculinity isn't toxic, civilization is and as usual, I don't blame men, I blame society.

Masculinity was once a driving force in matriarchal society. For the lion's share of human existence, we lived in stateless matrilineal hunter-gatherer tribes. Communities were small, transient and built around motherhood but men along with masculine women and third genders served equal roles, hunting in groups to provide for their villages and leading their tribes to victory on the battlefield. This all changed with the Agricultural Revolution. Suddenly, civilization became sedentary and focused on the accumulation of property. Hunters became farmers and mothers became broodmares as pure physical strength as exhibited by cis males became the deciding factor in dominating the natural world we once lived in harmony with.

Tribes mutated into villages and villages grew into cities which grew into states which grew into empires. The natural aggression of the male species was disconnected from servicing their communities and utilized instead to build colossal global superstates by turning war into an industry. With the slave trade and the conquest of the New World, rape became a way of life but once there was no more land left to conquer and machines began to replace men on the battlefield, masculinity essentially became obsolete. Men quickly found themselves penned up in cages known as cubicles and domesticated by the laws of the civilization they had killed so many to build.

It didn't take long for men to break, and violence quickly became a recreational sport. Mass shootings are common in places with easy access to firearms. Even Huey Newton-loving gun nuts like me will fess up to that, but civilian on civilian violence is more rampant in the Western Hemisphere than it is even in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. That's because these are uniquely post-colonial societies defined by rigid class systems with rapidly expanding underclasses of rootless and isolated men living in a culture that still valorizes forms of white supremacy largely automated by drones and smart bombs. Simply demonizing masculinity won't save a generation of lost boys from being prayed on by psychopathic groomers like Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis.

The truth is that transgender people actually have a lot to teach cis men if they're willing to listen. Against seemingly unsurmountable odds we have managed to revive the heathen third genders annihilated by Western Civilization and formed new stateless tribes built around both mutual aid and radical individualism. Men should be encouraged to build a new masculinity modeled after the old but not defined by it. One that encourages brotherhood and service to community over feckless materialist competition and brain-dead national chauvinism. One that venerates the kind of strength through vulnerability exhibited by warrior poets like Malcolm X and Yukio Mishima rather than the callous disdain for empathy encouraged by chickenhawks like John Wayne and Dick Cheney.

Incel baiting masculinists may use lost gender outlaws like Aiden Hall to demonize my tribe, but my tribe is too strong to play by their cowardly rules. The Christian right can declare war on me until the earth crashes into the sun and I will burn welcoming the boys their vacant culture betrays with open arms because love is the most lethal form of revenge that I know and Jesus Christ himself taught me that. 

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Hate My Way by Throwing Muses

* I Blame Society by Titus Andronicus

* Queen by Perfume Genius

* In Bloom by Nirvana

* Norman Fucking Rockwell by Lana Del Rey

* Get Your Gunn by Marilyn Manson

* I Don't Care by Black Flag

* Man by Neko Case

* Suggestion by Fugazi

* I Like Fucking by Bikini Kill

* Second Skin by the Gits 

* Disarm by Smashing Pumpkins

Fighting Fire with Free Speech: Aborting Antiwoke Fascism with Principled Political Incorrectness

 I've been called a social justice warrior for as long as that left-handed compliment has existed, and I'll own that shit till the cows come home. I am a loud and proud genderfuck sex-positive feminist who is all for open borders, reparations, smashing the patriarchy, abolishing whiteness and defunding pretty much anything that knocks on my front door with a badge (I guess Girl Scouts are cool.) Call me an SJW and my gut response is to yell "Metal!", stick out my tongue and flash the double devil horns like Randy Rhoads on one last plane ride to hell because I will proudly ride and die by those values any day of the fucking week.

The people on the bottom of this dying empire's boot have every right to revenge against the multiple systems of power that have trampled on us for generations but if there is just one tactic for righteous retribution that I just can't fucking stomach it's that grimy little kink known as political correctness. I may be "woke" as fuck but whenever I hear some white cis-het liberal drone on about free speech being equivalent to physical violence all can do is cringe and hiss. My Queer uncle Billy Burrough raised this SJW better than that and I get a never-ending supply of shit from my fellow SJWs because of it.

I don't have to prove that cancel culture is a thing because I've fucking lived it. I live it every goddamn day. SJW or not. I also happen to be a post-left market anarchist who supports bottom unity and swears like a drag queen on shore leave. I have been denounced as a fascist for defending right-wing libertarians who have been better allies to me than every gladhanding Bernie bro glued together. I have been tarred as a sexist and a racist for trashing Kamala Harris for throwing transwomen of color to the wolves in men's prisons. I have had entire organizations threaten to pull their support from websites that I sponsor simply because I'm published on other websites that they consider right-wing. And I have been banned and deboosted from every social media outlet known to man or beast simply because I choose to identify myself with repossessed slurs like tranny and dyke that certain sensitive breeders have decided to universally label as hate speech.

All of this shit may be legal and constitutional and most of it may even be done with the loftiest of intentions but that doesn't make it any less immoral. My biggest problem with the PC movement however is that it just makes for a shitty strategy even when it's hurled at cunts who deserve it. When a crowd of irate antifa kids get together to shut down some sick creep like Milo Yiannopoulos from giving another tirade on campus they really only achieve two things. They squander precious manpower better used to throw down with the police state on a cage rattling fabulist and they help that putrid puke artist sell another hundred books without even having to leave the comfort of his police escorted limousine. The most heinous blowback from this campaign to deplatform dangerous douchebags is that now those very same douchebags are using the free speech card to back a movement that is mowing liberty down like an unkept bush on a post-1985 porn set.

They call it antiwoke and it has become a thriving industrial complex of think tanks, parental action groups and political organizations that are using the banner of free speech to erase Black people from the history books and Queer people from the streets. Tennessee has even passed an anti-drag law that promises to charge anyone who their fascist police state declares to be a male or female impersonator "performing" in public with a misdemeanor followed by a felony for a second offense. 16 GOP-led states are pushing for similar assaults on free speech. Meanwhile schools across the country are gagging their students from engaging in discussions on anything that offends certain white Christian parents and books are being yanked from public libraries by the thousands. They call it antiwoke, but it reeks to high hell like political correctness in my nostrils.

None of this should be particularly shocking to those of us with a memory that extends past last Tuesday considering that the very same PC culture adopted by many misguided hipsters today was largely the invention of the wilting church ladies of the Christian right who claimed that three minutes of protected speech from Judas Priest could turn any Cub Scout into a Satan-worshiping faggot (I'm a Shaktiist dyke, thank you very much!) The right has always been at the forefront of cancel culture and unlike the left, they've never been afraid to use the state to enforce it with draconian laws and judicial witch trials. Just ask Lenny Bruce, Allen Ginsberg, Mike Dianna and the West Memphis 3 if you don't believe me. The only difference now is that the left has largely forfeited the fight for free speech to a bunch of fucking fascists who wear it like drag while they bring back the Inquisition.

Twisted twats like Ron DeSantis and Tucker Carlson embody all the worst aspects of both fascism and the same damn cancel culture that they claim to be using it to wage war against and why not? Both of these censorious perversions thrive on equating speech with violence and silence with safety. While left-wing brats struggle to silence these creeps with boycotts and corporate retribution, their voices just get louder and louder, and those voices are now openly calling for the annihilation of my people as they grope the courts for the legal machinery to make it happen. Political correctness hasn't made our nation woker. It has just turned a generation of leftists into compliant snowflakes begging the Fortune 500 for salvation while the right prepares for a literal genocide. 

Enough! I have seen the best mouths of my generation castrated by censorship, whispering hysterical mute. Those who truly deeply care about the plight of the marginalized must break free from their safe spaces and fight fire with freedom. We must take back the mantle of free speech from the reactionary right and weaponize it as an awesome tool for social justice the same way that the Yippies, Jello Biafra, the Beats and Mario Savio once did. We the faggots, perverts, trannies, whores, wetbacks, darkies, sluts and dykes must all come together and throw our screaming bodies against the gears of totalitarianism. 

We must make political incorrectness in and of itself a virtue worth signaling over. We must tell our stories uncensored in voices too shrill to be ignored. We must declare Babylon to be a white supremacist conspiracy and recognize race as a sickness. We must slaughter our sacred cows and call out our nations heroes out for being a stampede of colonialist rapists. We must declare the Pope a groomer, Hillary a bastard, Obama an Uncle Tom, Mayor Peter an Uncle Twink and Ron DeSantis a fucking Nazi in no uncertain terms. We must bring politics and religion back screaming to the dinner table and we must use the seven deadly words in every conversation because the fight for conversation is the fight for freedom and that fight begins with dirty words and social justice warriors who are unafraid to use them to offend the powerful.

If we are to die tomorrow, let us at least die screaming obscenities with our finger held high.

Peace, Love & Motherfucking Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne

* Rock N Roll N*gger by Marilyn Manson

* Rape Me by Nirvana

* Express Yourself by NWA

* MTV- Get Off the Air by Dead Kennedys

* Mother by Danzig

* Freedom of Speech by Ice-T

* Anarchy in the UK by Megadeth

* Tipper Gore by Alice Donut

* Breaking the Law by Judas Priest

Trans Butch Blues: Notes from a New Lesbian Underground

 Boys are loud and rambunctious. Girls are quiet, meek and well behaved. Boys get dirty, climb trees and scrape their knees. Girls stay neat and clean. Boys are husky growing lads. Girls are thin, dainty creatures who must be careful to watch their weight. Boys fight back with swinging fists. Girls sit back and take the abuse. This is but a Whitman's Sampler of the kind of binary bullshit that our chauvinistic society has used for ages to demolish the self-esteem of an entire gender. 

You hear it every fucking day, even in our self-congratulating woke society. They all point at the busted glass ceiling and wait for applause but the only women with anything even resembling power in this country are the ones who murder like men with the poise and dignity of Mary Crocker in a Chanel pant suit. Boys still wear blue, and girls are still defined by their approval regardless of what they wear. The result isn't just less pay and less agency, it's a sickeningly disproportionate rate of self-abuse, depression, eating disorders and suicide. The patriarchy still kills little girls who don't perform on key, and I should know. I may have been raised male but that didn't stop the unwritten laws of the patriarchy from stealing my childhood and teaching me how to destroy myself.

You hear the same Hallmark transgender story from the mainstream zeitgeist over and over again. You can practically recite the lyrics like a song. "She knew she was really a girl in a boy's body from day one. She dreamed of wearing pink dresses and playing with dolls and dating boys and she breathed fairy dust and she quietly farted sparkles and rainbows and blah blah blah..." If I have to listen to that Oprah-approved trans-female narrative one more time, I swear to Kali that I'm going to jam my head in the nearest Easybake Oven. This may be some trans girl's story but it sure as shit wasn't mine. I didn't grow up in some convoluted Lisa Frank fairytale. I was a weird little kid who dressed in black and grew up obsessed with pro-wrestling, heavy metal music and horror movies. There was nothing pink and frilly telling me that I was a girl, so I just assumed I was boy, but it never felt right.

I had plenty of male friends early on, but I never felt like one of them and when I was surrounded by them at Cub Scout meetings and sleepovers, I never felt more alien. As I got older those gross feelings of otherness became increasingly hard for me or anyone else to ignore. There was always something wrong with the Reid boy. Something not quite right. The adults seemed to pick up on it first. Every few years my conservative Catholic school would hold a secret convention among the concerned teachers and parents to discuss what should be done with me and my bewilderingly 'other' ways. They never came up with a proper plot, but they made their disdain painfully well-known through snickers and stares and it wasn't long before their children followed suit and all those male friends became taunting hecklers one by one, repeating what they had overheard at the dinner table.

I heard the word faggot a lot growing up, but I never quite fit the bill. Truth be told, I have been attracted to girls for as long as I can remember. In fact, I found them to be downright fascinating. I didn't dare to even speak to one until after I had already been thoroughly ostracized by every boy I knew. Even being seen playing with a girl was social suicide on the parking lot that Saint John's called a playground. But I couldn't shake the feeling that their secret world contained some kind of answer to the painful loneliness that plagued me even in a crowd of boys. 

I still remember the first time that I learned that lesbianism was a thing. An alarm went off in my tiny head screaming "That's it!" The idea of two girls together was the first time that love made any sense to me. Even knowing nothing about gender identity, I just knew in my soul that that was who I really was but knowing nothing about gender identity and way too goddamn much about sin and Catholic guilt, this revelation terrified me. The only conclusion that I could come to was that I was some kind of twisted fucking pervert and that I was going straight to hell to burn in a lake of fire for all eternity.

Even after I rejected the church and embraced the salvation of punk rock and anarchism, I still couldn't shake this cloud of toxic impending doom that always seemed to hang just out of reach above my head. As the secret witch trials became fiery parent-teacher conferences complete with open accusations of me plotting everything from school shootings to Satanic ritual abuse, my gender began to feel more and more like a claustrophobic prison sentence, and I prayed for execution. 

Even when I learned about the existence of the transgender phenomena, everything that was publicly available about the concept at the time told me that I didn't belong there either. I didn't belong anywhere. The only time I ever felt safe was when I was around the few girls who didn't treat me like a boy. It wasn't until after several nervous breakdowns and half a decade as a shut-in that I finally figured out that trans girls were just girls with defunct plumbing and that I had always been a tomboy in a boy's body. My life made absolutely no sense to me until the day I could look myself in the mirror and say, "I'm a dyke."

Radical feminists endlessly demonize trans women for representing an obscene caricature of stereotypical femininity, but who gets to define femininity in a chauvinist society? Who gets to define what is woman enough to be "real?" White cis hetero men, of course. And who do you think controls all the levers of power that define access to femininity? Who gets to decide whether or not trans people are even afforded the medical treatment necessary for transition? Trans women are hostages to the same sexist archetypes and institutions as any other woman only we have to be more feminine than female. Our tits have to be bigger. Our hair has to be longer. Our heels have to be higher. We have to be Dolly fucking Parton just to be visible and then we get stoned for that too. It's fucking exhausting. I just want enough hormones so I can be feminine enough not to have to try so damn hard. I don't want to be Dolly Parton. I just want to be Julien Baker. 

I wear my hair long and paint my nails, but I feel about as awkward in a dress as I do in a suit and tie. I'd much rather wear Doc Martin's and wrap the few curves Estradiol has afforded me in a trench coat. I'm loud and I'm rude. I talk with my mouth full, and I swear like a fucking sailor. My legs and armpits are hairy, and I have zero intention of ever shaving them. My heroes aren't ladies. They are brash and ballsy bitches like Joan Jett, Courtney Love and Frida Kahlo who built entire careers on terrifying cis men and quite literally flipping off the patriarchy. But somehow, I'm part of some sexist conspiracy to destroy womanhood and apparently our number one target is the endangered butch lesbian.

Every other week you'll find some TERF on Fox News going off about the coming extinction of the bull dyke. According to these hyperventilating gadfly's butch girls are being abducted by mad scientists and transformed into mutilated transgender pod people. There is a very fine grain of truth to this hysteria. A lot of young butches feel trapped by the perilously high expectations of the gender binary and get pushed by heterosexist adults into picking another gender stereotype and conforming to it surgically. Sexism exists in the trans community too. It's why I still have to fight every fucking day just to belong there as a gender-nonconforming female. But assuming that the only solution to this problem is to double down on chauvinistic schools of thought like biological essentialism isn't just stupid, it's downright un-lesbian.

The original radical lesbian movement was an insurrection against the gender binary that sought to define the dyke as a revolutionary third gender that existed completely outside of the expectations of the heterosexual establishment. Monique Wittig, the poet laureate of radical lesbianism said it all when she proudly declared that "lesbians are not women," insisting that to be a lesbian was about a hell of a lot more than flannel shirts and munching carpet, it was about rebelling against the chauvinist norm of the woman as defined by cisgender men's needs. Our Malcolm X, Andrea Dworkin, took a similar approach before she forgot about the revolution and conspired against her sisters in the sex trade with the same sexist Jesus freaks who destroyed my childhood and now call for my extinction. This Faustian bargain against free speech was in many ways the beginning of the end for the original radical lesbian movement.

But there is a new radical lesbian movement bubbling like molten lava to the surface from the underground and its one that has about as much use for the gender binary as Monique Wittig did. A growing number of butch lesbians are micro dosing testosterone, getting top surgery and experimenting with new pronouns. Some of them are transitioning to male while still proudly declaring themselves to be butch. Some butch women even fuck men and some of us have dicks. What unites us all is an existential drive to define ourselves outside of the reach of a patriarchal society that invented the gender binary to reduce human beings into easily commodified and governable categories that leave little room for individuality. This new radical lesbian movement is a conspiracy to make butch a revolutionary third gender again. One that seeks to liberate every gender outlaw who has ever suffered beneath the yoke of some pompous straight man's definition of what womanhood means and this is one pissed off bitch with a dick who is proud to be a part of this insurrection.

So, the fucking TERFs can go choke on their shallow hypocrisy. They have become willing tools of the patriarchy and I don't need them to tell me who I am. I am butch, hear me roar and I am not alone anymore.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Miss World by Hole

* Born On a Train by Samia

* Only Women Bleed by Alice Cooper

* Go Home by Julien Baker

* Handsome and Gretell by Babes in Toyland

* Under the Wire by Haim

* Bad Reputation by Joan Jett

* Teenage Whore by Hole

* Bad Catholics by the Menzingers

* Been a Son by Nirvana

Queer Anarchism is More Conservative Than the GOP

 Those motherfuckers in the GOP have been talking shit about me and my tribe again lately. In fact, it doesn't seem like they've shut the fuck up about us over the last six or seven years and the racket just keeps on getting louder. With less than 300 shopping days before the next sham that this failed state calls a presidential election, the Republicans have gone all in on making gender outlaws like me the official scapegoat of 2024. They made this frighteningly clear at this year's sparsely attended CPAC Conference where trendy right-wing gadflies like Michael Knowles and Candace Owens essentially called for the annihilation of "transgenderism" by any means necessary to resounding applause.

I'm touched, really, I am. Unlike your average vanilla agent of LGBTQ assimilation, I fully embrace my tribe's role as the glimmering harbingers of the decline of Western Civilization. What I have no stomach for is a party of warmongering sore losers who use the colossal hammer of big government to smash Queer children to bits and then sell this shameless hypocrisy as some kind of conservatism. 

Over the first few months of 2023 alone, Republican legislators have upchucked an acidic tsunami of over 340 anti-Queer bills across the country that seek to use armed government agents to police everything from children's healthcare to public restrooms. What this toxic slurry of judicial hate crimes really amounts to is growing the police state to gargantuan proportions and expanding their ability to intervene into even the most intimate corners of private life.

There is absolutely nothing conservative about this jihad but that shouldn't be shocking to anybody who has paid even the most cursory amount of attention to the GOP over the last fifty years. I may be a genderfuck Yippie anarchist but even I'm more conservative than those neocon crusaders and I'm not just being cute. In spite of my decadent lifestyle choices or perhaps even because of them, my uniquely Queer school of stateless existence is far more conservative on nearly every conceivable front than the current platform of the Republican Party.

Let's us first dispense with the contrived notion that my very existence is the product of rampant modernism. Quite the contrary. Every heathen tribe from Prussia to Peru celebrated the existence of at least three genders before the original globalist groomers in the Vatican forced them all by the barrel of the musket to conform to the modern social engineering experiment known as the gender binary and it is actually precisely the pre-Christian conservative tribal diversity that the Papists trampled that drives my own distinctly Queer school of anarcho-primitivism. 

You see dearest motherfuckers, I am more than just a Queer anarchist, I am a Queer panarchist. While my own private Catalonia may consist of a communal love-in of polyamorous gender freaks living like savage libertines in yurts on the weed-infested parking lots of flaming stadium churches, I believe that this radical utopia is only possible under a system of panarchy or many anarchies that affords the existence of an infinite amount of stateless tribal societies. These societies could be based on quite literally everything and anything from Black nationalism to Mormon fundamentalism, provided that every single tribe remains 100% voluntary and that every individual can choose to leave and start over just next door at any time.

The result of this Queer new world would be infinitely more conservative on every level than the rampant statism of the Republican Party. Just look at the debauched reign of their current boy-king, Donald Trump, if you don't believe me. That dayglo Caligula added $7.8 trillion to the national debt between 2017 and 2020. That is an increase of 33.1%, the third highest increase of any presidency in history. 

Part of this can be chocked up to the rampant corporate welfare that Trump used a totally avoidable pandemic to excuse, but even before Covid reached our shores, that orange lunatic was well on his way to the record books after taking the tax dollars of his own working-class constituency and redistributing it to his country club friends in the multinational corporate elite under the guise of tax breaks.

This fiscal blasphemy of reverse Robin Hood larceny is the Republican way. No more under my Queer anarchist system. No more corporate welfare. No more eminent domain. No more fucking taxes period. Taxation is a form of legalized theft that reinforces class divisions based on those who take and those who get taken. The taker class is an incestuous rat's nest of lazy thieves with shiny badges, and I am committed as a Queer anarchist to ending their infestation once and for all. This means defunding the police. All of the police. This means no more FBI, no more ATF, no more DEA, and no more fucking IRS. No more pencil-pushing bureaucratic thugs with guns breathing down your neck and asking for their cut. People's money would remain in their communities to do with as they see fit.

This would also mean an end to those corporate elites that Trump and his interparty competition pretend to combat. The One Percent only exists at the behest of a colossal international government that the rich built to justify their own parasitic existence. There would be no billionaire oligarchs like George Soros or the Koch Brothers if it weren't for a complex network of fixed trade deals and economic regulations that rig the game in their favor, all of which the Republican Party overwhelmingly supports. 

A panarchist society would run on a localist economic order similar to that of a massive network of decentralized farmer's markets in which everyone would be free to buy, sell and trade their wears with no federal middleman to tip the scales in one direction or the other. This is what a true free market really looks like, a place where anyone with the skills to sling the finest product wins the day instead of federally backed cartels and massive industrial complexes.

 This includes complexes of the military industrial variety like every Republicans favorite charity in the war machine, and you better fucking believe that a panarchsit system would erase that corporatist construct post haste, not just because its very existence is patently evil, but because it is little more than a big government boondoggle. 

Contrary to what the Grand Old Party would have you believe, there exists no Chinese threat to American military supremacy. There exists no threat of any kind to American military supremacy and there never has. This nation spends more money on "defense" than the next dozen nations combined and that includes China, Russia and India. America maintains 750 permanent bases on foreign soil in 80 different countries.

 This isn't defense and this sure as shit isn't conservative. It's empire and in spite of all his isolationist posturing, Trump was no exception to this rule. He literally broke records with his military budgets which included hefty doses of aid to foreign armies in places like Egypt, Ukraine and Israel. All part of the Republican Parties long shameless tradition of consistently countering every already bloated Democratic defense budget with demands for even more tax-pilfered loot to be carted away to blow people up on parts of the map that most Americans have never even heard of.

As for grooming, I'm as against that practice as any Bible-thumping fag-basher but it's a two-way street and it's one that I would never cross. I have never met another Queer person who has not been abused by America's compulsory school system. I carry scars in the form of complex PTSD from my own experiences of having a bunch of straight adults push their heterosexist gender ideology down my throat at a tender age. 

Unlike Ron DeSantis, my solution to this systemic barbarism isn't to replace one form of cultural hegemony with another, it's to obliterate the power structure endemic in the American school system entirely by putting children in charge of their own damn education instead of one pack of role-crazy adults or another. This means deschooling society entirely because if you don't want the government to indoctrinate your children then you shouldn't give those motherfuckers so much power over your children in the first place. This is something we should all agree on. 

That's because Queer anarchy isn't about queering society. It's about queering governance. If everybody was fucking Queer, then Queer people would be as boring as the rest of you bitches. Our power actually comes from being a minority because only minorities can truly be communities. The queerest thing that we can do is spread that philosophy by encouraging everyone to become a minority too and by encouraging the autonomy that minorities require to remain strong. This means encouraging the existence not just of Queer communes, but Amish communes and Objectivist communes and Catholic Worker communes, because only small governments truly serve their people and the smaller the better.

The GOP doesn't foster small government any more than the DNC fosters egalitarianism. They are two arms of the same colossal beast and regardless of how you or anyone else may feel about my kinky lifestyle choices or my unorthodox gender ideology, being a sworn enemy of that beast makes me far more conservative than Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis will ever be. There is nothing queerer than anarchy and if you're truly looking for small government like I am, then anarchy is the only answer. 

So, tell me breeders, Did I turn ya?

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* I Blame Society by Titus Andronicus

* Androgynous by the Replacements

* Not Strong Enough by boygenius

* Shoplifters of the World by the Smiths

* Lose You by Bully & Soccer Mommy

* Jennifer's Body by Hole

* Candy Says by the Velvet Underground

* Debaser by the Pixies

* Mississauga Goddamn by the Hidden Cameras

* Trash by New York Dolls

Pick a Cold War, Any Cold War: The Limits of Isolationism Under Yellow Peril

 It's an old plot and the bastards of Babylon have been at it for ages. From Halford Mackinder to Zbigniew Brzezinski, from the British Crown to their Yankee progeny right here in Pax Americana, the Atlantic powers known collectively as the West have been motivated by a single waking nightmare since white power ran on black coal, the fever dream of the dreaded Eurasian Century. The simple fact that the backwards landlocked Huns of the World Island that is Europe, Africa and Asia hold the keys to 60% of the world's land mass and an even larger share of its natural resources has kept western imperialists up at night for centuries and motivated every great bloodbath in the era of modern warfare.

It's why London and Washington engineered two world wars with hasty borders and crippling sanctions. It's why these same mandarins initiated the first cold war with an invasion of the barely formed Soviet Union in order to strangle the Bolshevik Revolution in its cradle. It's why they reignited that quixotic crusade with an atom bomb long after the Japanese had surrendered, and Stalin had begrudgingly agreed to keep his hands to himself. It's why we provoked the rise of the Iron Curtain with the neo-colonialist contraption known as NATO and rearmed the fascists with Operation Gladio to keep it valid. It's why we lured the Kremlin deep into the Hindu Kush by inventing modern-day jihadism with the Mujahedin and its why NATO just kept on expanding even after that geopolitical boobytrap finished off the communist threat that alliance was supposedly designed to contain. It's also why we continue to stoke the flames of a third world war by funding the current autocratic duel over Ukraine.

Every bottomless forever war, every convoluted conspiracy against world peace, every bomb that has ever been dropped beneath the contrived banner of liberal democracy and the American way has all been part of a plot to divorce Berlin from Beijing and prevent a common-sense economic union between East Asia and Central Europe that would permanently damn the empires of the Atlantic Ocean to global irrelevancy. This is the dirty little secret of American power. The despots who run this titanic battleship we call a country have never given two flying fucks about fascism, communism or Islamic Fundamentalism. It has all been one great big shapeshifting shadow puppet show projected over the graves of a craven plot for pure naked global power.

This isn't to say that those graves haven't long been populated by twisted ghouls that are more than deserving of condemnation from any sane observer with a functioning conscience. Stalin, Mao, Putin and Xi are all repugnant rapists in their own right but there is a reason that those monsters have become household names while others like Pinochet, Suharto, Duvalier and Salman have received the full blessing of those that combat them. The only monsters that Washington is willing to blow up the world to contain are the ones that threaten to replace it on the world stage. 

The latest cold war is no exception. Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a savagely venal crime against humanity and it's one that America actively encouraged. We have set Ukraine like a gigantic mousetrap over the last decade with this tragic fate in mind. We overthrew a corrupt but neutral democracy with a phony revolution in 2014 before packing their security forces with the most insanely Russophobic ultra-nationalists that money could buy. 

We encouraged the violent repression of Ukraine's Russian speaking population while running round the clock war games with American battleships and bombers capable of carrying nuclear payloads right off the shores and borders of an increasingly paranoid Russian behemoth. Then we turned up the heat by predicting their imminent invasion even while our own Ukrainian quislings begged us to cool it down. All so we could provoke a thin skinned capitalist Übermensch with daddy issues into obliterating his neighbors while we ran the footage of his savagery on a loop to discourage the blue bloods of Central Europe from investing in a future we didn't micromanage for western hegemony.

It worked, except it didn't. Putin more than lived up to the role we wrote for him as the ultimate boogeyman to end all boogeymen, but half of the American homeland still isn't willing to leverage the farm in order to dig him a bottomless grave in Bakhmut and it isn't the half some might expect. Since Putin began his special military rampage in Ukraine polls have shown a steady decline in Republicans willing to encourage its continuation with a steady diet of Stinger missiles,

Pew has the number of Republicans opposed to fueling this thing indefinitely at 40% and rising. Gallup has it even higher at nearly 50%. These are the blood and butter conservatives that America has long relied on to mindlessly support even our most batshit interventions long after their futility has become almost comically obvious. Democrats have always been the quickest nitwits to start a war but it's the Republicans who stick around for Old Glory and apple pie to finish the fucking thing long after it has become too heinous for the coastal elites to virtue signal over the carnage. So, what the fuck is going on here? Are we finally witnessing the second coming of the isolationist right in MAGA country? 

I wish, but as an often less than willing occupant of America's rustbelt outback, I can tell you from personal experience that it's actually a lot more personal than that. Once again, Hillary Clinton has shit this bed, this time by tarring the deplorables in flyover country as Russian dupes in 2016. All because they would rather vote for a reality television rapist then one of the two dynasties that sold their children into servitude to opioids and Walmart by hollowing out their futures with crooked trade deals. 

Regardless of where you land on Russia's supposed involvement in the 2016 election, the notion that backwoods farm folk are too fucking stupid to realize that even a goon like Trump is a lesser evil to a Bush or a Clinton without the assistance of Kremlin manipulation is beyond fucking offensive. The blowback from this campaign to blame the humiliating spectacle of a Trump presidency on anyone but the people who made it inevitable is that now middle America has finally become increasingly immune to Russophobia and right-wing shills like Tucker Carlson are chasing that money even if they have to sing "Give Peace a Chance" to earn it.

So, what's an empire to do? Pack it up and sue for peace? Never. Instead, the bipartisan war machine is tearing a page form the playbook that hoodwinked the original America First movement into throwing its weight behind total war. When all else fails, just try good old-fashioned American racism and stir twice. Republicans and Democrats alike weren't willing to return to the trenches of Europe in the wake of the Great Depression to kill a bunch of white people. But once FDR turned the war effort into a fight to keep filthy yellow hands off of Lady Liberty's creamy white bosom, all it took was goading the Japanese into bombing an American colony in the Pacific to get every farmer's daughter to willingly chuck her own sons straight into the wheat thresher.

Just turn on Fox News and you'll realize that things haven't changed a bit. Peace peddling peckerwoods like Carlson flipped the switch from isolationism to imperialism at the speed of a scatter bomb the moment an errant Chinese weather balloon passed over an American farm. That smug asshole went from blowing Glenn Greenwald to screeching for the blood of every first-born Chinese son faster than you can say 'Lindberg lovingly licks Lemonheads.' Now, it's Chinese fever around the clock. They're scuttling across the border. They're slipping fentanyl into your favorite soft drinks. They're training bats to peddle pandemics and critical race theory door-to-door. Biden and his gray-care handlers are already on the bandwagon too, sniping at UFOs with F-22s and fessing up to the dangers of gain of function research while they sail battleships through the Strait of Taiwan and dare Xi Jinping not to flinch.

And just like that, the Cold War is back in tetanus country like crystal meth. My neighbors have gone from sensibly questioning the efficacy of poking a nuked-up basket case with a NATO stick to calling for a ground invasion of Peking if those commie cunts are two weeks late with the next fucking X-Box. One step forward and a great leap backwards into the frying pan of 1950s-style xenophobic hysteria.

So, pick a cold war, any cold war! China or Russia, Ukraine or Taiwan, either way the Atlantic Empire achieves its real goal of isolating the bustling markets of Beijing from the sophisticated banks of Europe and stalling the Eurasian Century for another 15 minutes. The only problem with this conspiracy is that middle America isn't the only landlocked rust heap growing weary of constant war and it's a little bit harder to sell Sinophobia to Polish farmers when they're starving just three hours from a highspeed rail system that can sling them prosperity straight from the Orient. All while the fat cats of NATO tell them to take another one for the team.

I'm not the Bolshevik Barbie that I used to be. One century is as sick as the last one as long as rich men with small dicks and big bombs still run the show. But I also can't ignore the fact that a Second American Century is only possible with a nuclear bomb or that a Eurasian Century would put my trailer park smack dab in the middle of the next empire's blind spot. Call me a communist, but I'll take those daylight vampires in the Politburo over the double-speaking Doctor Strangeloves on Fox News any day of the week. I just wish that I could convince my neighbors to hate the bomb more than "the other" it drops on and learn to eat their grits with chopsticks.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Give Peace a Chance by John Lennon

* Home Again Garden Grove by the Mountain Goats

* Shark Smile by Big Thief

* China Girl by Iggy Pop

* Jesus Built My Hotrod by Ministry

* Holidays in the Sun by the Sex Pistols

* Faith Healer by Julien Baker

* My Girl by the Jesus & Mary Chain

* Counting Backwards by Throwing Muses

* Drunk Walk Home by Mitski

The Better and Worse Angels of Jimmy Carter's Nature

 Every time an ex-president dies a demon gets his wings. It's a time-honored tradition in these hallowed halls of Babylon. Lucifer himself could drop dead and provided that motherfucker spent no less than a hot minute in the Oval Office, every self-proclaimed journalist from the Wall Street Journal to Penthouse Forum would be lined around the block to polish his horns with their filthy flicking tongues. In fact, fuck Satan, just look to Ronald Reagan if you don't believe me. That B-grade cowboy slung crack to grade school kids for rapists in Nicaragua and limp-wristed Bay area liberals are still tripping over the AIDS quilt to throw themselves sobbing on his casket.

Naturally, being the terminally jaded cunt that I am, I have made it my own private jihad in life to pop a squat over the graves of the powerful and unleash a hot steamy piss on their sacred soil. I have plenty of reverence for the dead, but nobody lights a candle for Hitler during Suicide Awareness Month. What the hell makes our monsters so fucking special? A cult of personality is a cult of personality and if I'm not game to deface a few monuments then I might as well turn in my slingshot with my shoplifted copy of Never Mind the Bollocks and call it quits on being an anarcho-anything.

With that being said and may Bill Hicks have mercy on my soul for even saying this out loud, I'm finding myself feeling oddly pee shy as old Jimmy Carter shuffles towards the light. As surreal as it may seem, at least for the past forty years, that soft-spoken peanut farmer appears to have led the life of a halfway decent human being. While the Clintons would perform at a supper club for the Khmer Rouge if the price was right, Jimmy has spent the lion's share of his long retirement from power building houses for the Dollar Tree class and literally eradicating diseases in countries that Anderson Cooper couldn't even pronounce right with a goddamn Speak-and-Spell. The man will die in a one-story house he built with his own hands in a town even smaller and poorer than mine. I'm hard set to admit it but that motherfucker was a good ex-president. That does not however mean that he has a guaranteed table reserved for him passed the Pearly Gates between Gandhi and Dorothy Day.

Jimmy Carter does have a dark side, a downright hideous dark side in fact and that dark side is the 39th presidency of these United States of Babylon. While Jimmy may have spent the last four decades teaching Sunday school to pint-sized bumpkins, between 1977 and 1981 he spent four years dressing up an empire like Mr. Rogers and setting the stage for one of the most violent quarter-centuries in the storied history of its sick existence.

You can quite literally thank Jimmy Carter for Al-Qaeda. During the early hours of his presidency, Jimmy conspired with his twisted Machiavellian little National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski to arm, train and organize some of the Muslim world's sickest lunatics to start a rampant garbage fire on the Soviet Union's southern border in Afghanistan for the express purpose of luring Moscow into burning itself alive stomping out the flames. 

Jimmy and Zbig have all but admitted this with Brzezinski gloating mincingly that "the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, we now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War." Mission accomplished. The resulting fallout of the Carter Administration's midwifing of the Mujahedin speaks for itself. $3 billion US tax dollars, 1. 5 million Afghan lives, two Twin Towers, a partridge and a pear tree.

This was far from an isolated incident either. The all-knowing corporate zeitgeist generally considers the biggest triumph of Jimmy's one term tenure to be the 1978 Camp David Accord and its biggest folly to be his botching of the Iran Hostage Crisis but neither one of these incidents is generally given the proper context their casualties deserve.

The peace deal that President Carter organized between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin wasn't really a peace deal at all, at least not for the Palestinians. It was a bribe. Jimmy Carter agreed to arm Egypt's colonels to the fucking teeth if they agreed to look the other way while Israel continued to slaughter their fellow Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank like lambs. Gamal Abdul Nasser would have shot Sadat himself if he were alive to witness this Noble Prize winning screwjob, the end result of which being a military dictatorship in Cairo that even the Arab Spring couldn't upset and the Nakba that never ends.

As for Iran, few popular historical observers seem to pay much attention to the fact that the only reason hostages were even taken in the first place was that Jimmy had given sanctuary to one of the region's cruelest dictators, a loathsomely venal creature known as the Shah of Iran who Carter openly supported as he massacred student protestors during the Islamic Revolution and even threw a military coup to save him from the righteous wrath of the Mullahs. 

Even fewer historical observers waste the ink to report that Jimmy's most lasting response to this revolution was his establishment of the Carter Doctrine which officially made it a matter of public policy that the United States would treat any perceived threat to destabilize the Persian Gulf and its precious resources as a national security threat to be "repelled by any means necessary, including military force." By 1981, Carter had reorganized a gargantuan chunk of the United States Military into a 200,000-man Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force who would later be used in two Gulf wars and usher in the age of ISIS.

But perhaps the darkest chapter of Jimmy Carter's brief but eventful massacre on Capitol Hill occurred in 1980 in a Korean college town called Gwangju. After an assassination and a coup replaced a dictatorship in Seoul with a military dictatorship, South Korea exploded in a wave of largely peaceful student protests, demanding democracy on the peninsula. The boldest of these uprisings broke out in Gwangju, where students were joined by local blue-collar workers in an epic groundswell of resistance that reached 300,000 people in the streets. When soldiers attempted to violently shut these protests down, its partisans raided local arms depots and police stations to repel the troops, courageously holding their own for six days. Then Jimmy sent in the Black Berets.

While publicly condemning the increasingly gruesome crackdowns, documents released through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that the Carter Administration used the US Military's leadership over their joint command with the Korean Military to plan, lead and execute a colossal bloodbath with the hopes of avoiding a repeat of the Iranian Revolution. The Korean Army used American tanks to cordon off the city of Gwangju and after a 90-minute gun battle with the civilian militia organized by the protesters, these brave kids surrendered, the American trained Korean Special Forces known as the Black Berets invaded and the massacre began. Homes were raided, mass graves were dug at the edge of town and some two thousand of the bravest people America never knew simply ceased to exist.

This is the side of Jimmy Carter that no one but his victims knows, and it makes the side of Jimmy Carter that we've all gotten to know over the last four decades incredibly hard to reconcile. It's very tempting to believe that the better angels of Jimmy Carter's nature are simply part of a conspiracy to wash the blood from a callous killer's hands, but I honestly believe that the truth is far more complicated than that. Most of Jimmy's post-presidential actions don't seem designed for popular public fanfare. In fact, many of them have only provoked the ire of the manufactured consensus.

What did Jimmy have to gain from calling out his former homies in Israel for their apartheid ways other than being smeared by their lobby as an antisemite? Whose good graces were gained by preventing another American coup in Venezuela with the Carter Foundation's endorsement of Hugo Chavez's victory in his 2004 recall referendum? All of this smacks of something very different than your standard Washington whitewash. All of this smacks of legitimate liberal guilt, attempts made by a man with a functioning conscience to redeem himself for the evils of his office and no single effort was more heroic or more thankless than the one Jimmy made in Pyongyang in 1994.

Few people remember that the Second Korean War was set to begin before the end of Bill Clinton's first term in office. Hellbent on proving to the GOP that he wasn't the dovish pussy they had painted him as, Bill was fully prepared to launch a preemptive strike against North Korea's nuclear reactors. Ex-president Jimmy Carter was sent over the DMZ to meet up with legendary Stalinist strongman Kim Il-Sung as part of an "unofficial" and largely symbolic pre-war PR stunt, but then old Jimmy went rogue.

Not only did he go off-script to reach a deal to prevent the war with a deal that Clinton never actually signed off on, but Carter even called a press conference to announce it live on CNN before the White House could squash it. What resulted was the framework for a nuclear freeze and the closest thing to peace that peninsula that President Carter once so violently fucked over has likely ever seen, 7 years of free trade and a Sunshine Policy that only ended with Dubya's Axis of Evil. God only knows how many lives were saved in the process. Probably at least two thousand.

The Clinton's never returned Jimmy's phone calls again. He was ostracized by both the media and the DNC and only recently rehabilitated so Joe Biden could pose with the only Democrat old enough to make him look young. So, was Jimmy good or evil? 

The truth likely lies somewhere between. While Jimmy's post-presidential actions in Korea were undeniably inspiring, the fact remains that he has also never apologized for the horrors of the Mujahedeen, Hosni Mubarak or the Black Berets. All I can really tell you for sure is that the office Jimmy served in required the actions of a psychopath and the hideous legacy of these actions requires a very sophisticated cult of personality to turn every servant of American power into a saint upon the hour of their death. This institution is a danger that should not exist.

With that being said, I won't be pissing on Jimmy Carter's grave this year. For once, I would rather pray to Kali that the better angels of Jimmy's nature are reincarnated in some species not eligible for office. I'd like to think that the saints of Gwangju would approve.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* I Found a Reason by the Velvet Underground

* Salvation by Rancid

* Sixers by the Hold Steady

* Debaser by the Pixies

* Old College Try by the Mountain Goats

* The Pretender by Foo Fighters

* 100% by Sonic Youth

* Trying by Bully

* Makes No Sense at All by Husker Du

* Carry Me Out by Mitski