West Papua's War with the Modern World Should Be All of Ours

 They say that a picture speaks a thousand words. If that's true, then a hostage video must speak at least a million. The only problem with this technology and indeed most technology is that most of these words tend to get garbled when they're all being shouted at once. This deluge of information often results in a sort of narrative overdose that makes my head spin. That is the dilemma I face when watching the videos that have surfaced online of Philip Mehrtens, a 37-year-old bush pilot from New Zealand taken hostage deep in the jungles of the Indonesian occupied region of West Papua this February. In the few clips of footage made available to the public to prove that this man is in fact still alive, Mr. Mehrtens appears wide eyed and dislodged, like a tourist lost on a different planet. He stands as tall and as pale as a ghost, dressed in a denim jacket and a Boonie cap, surrounded by dark men with bushy beards and furious eyes. 

One thing that is hard for anyone to deny about this footage is that those reems make it crystal clear that this captured Kiwi has stumbled smack dab in the middle of something which he too is struggling against reason to comprehend. However, I can't seem to ignore the fact that his captors appear to be just as frightened and out of place as their own hostage. Armed with an odd assortment of assault rifles, bows and arrows and dressed to the nine in a clashing hodgepodge of tribal headdresses, war paint and second-hand military fatigues, these men who the western media has largely written off as quixotic savages somehow look strangely familiar to my own furious eyes. 

The only words that my mind can collect to make sense of the fear and loathing that I somehow share with Philip Mehrtens' kidnappers tells me that on the other side of the planet there are men who are also at war with the modern world. The same one that haunts my dreams with menacing footage of freeways and skyscrapers that scream a million words a second in my face, that looming metropolis that holds my soul hostage and stirs a terror deep inside me that smug doctors in white lab coats diagnose as a mental illness. Those dark men with their bushy beards and furious eyes clearly share my private war but unlike me they refuse to lose it in the privacy of a psychiatrist's office, and they refuse to allow the terror we share to rob them of the dignity of not going down without a hostage. God bless them.

Those men are the soldiers of the West Papuan National Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement and I am not ashamed to admit that I admire them. They are a poorly armed and loosely affiliated collection of hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers from ancient rival clans who have been united over the last half-century by a shared struggle for the liberation of their own tiny corner of nowhere which has long been cruelly occupied by the colossal juggernaut of the Indonesian Army and its colonialist backers in the United States, the E.U., Australia and New Zealand. 

It is in fact the financial and military support of those western hegemons that has led this mighty little army to kidnap Philip Mehrtens from his single-engine passenger plane in a desperate attempt to hold one of Babylon's own for ransom. That ransom originally took the form of a bold demand for nothing less than full international recognition for West Papua's independence but has since been reduced to simple access to UN peacekeepers. Indonesia's counteroffer was delivered by heavily armed commandos sent to rescue Mehrtens Rambo-style, but the West Papuans sent these western trained killers back to Jakarta wrapped in body bags. In the only hostage video released since, Mehrtens appears alive and well to condemn Indonesia for resorting to dropping bombs on his position in the mountainous Nduga region in the wake of this failed raid.

The fact that most of the western media has covered almost none of this story is nothing new so I will do my very damnedest to catch you up on the modern world's long war against the stubborn people of West Papua. Indonesia is a vast archipelago of 38 provinces spread across thousands of Islands. West Papua is the easternmost territory in this expanse and the western half of the island of New Guinea which is the second largest island on earth after Greenland and home to the world's second largest rainforest after the Amazon. Like all too many third world inventions, Indonesia isn't so much a singular cohesive nation state as it is a colonialist conglomeration cobbled together by the Dutch when they took its islands by force in the late 19th century. 

After the fiery imperial implosion of the Second World War shattered the white man's grip on Southeast Asia, a former Japanese collaborator named Sukarno attempted to unite the many tribes of Indonesia under one flag in opposition to western imperialism. In doing so, this otherwise courageous leader secured his new nation's independence in 1949 but also sowed the seeds for decades of civil war and genocide by trying to use the western contraption of the Westphalian nation state to overcome the reach of his former masters.

The Dutch managed to retain control over West Papua in one last stand but with America's support, Sukarno invaded in 1961. The West Papuans attempted to declare independence the same year but quickly found themselves under attack by their supposed liberators for threatening the cohesion of the new Indonesian nation state. The UN officially took control of the region in 1962 and supervised what has been widely acknowledged by most international observers to be a totally fraudulent election on West Papua's fate in 1969. 

Only 1,026 representatives handpicked by the Indonesian military out of a population of 1 million were allowed to choose their nation's fate at barrel of a gun in what the UN had the gall to declare an Act of Free Choice.  Over 30,000 West Papuans had been slaughtered during the 8-year occupation that proceeded this vote. Considering that this slaughter was overseen by Suharto, the brigadier general chosen by the CIA to take Sukarno's place in 1965, it can hardly be considered shocking that his electoral hostages voted overwhelmingly in favor of their own subjugation.

1969 was also the year that Suharto held a conference in Geneva for the multinational elites who bankrolled his bloody coup. During this bougie soiree Suharto's fascist New Order junta essentially carved up Indonesia's natural resources and handed them over to the highest bidder piece by piece. In West Papua's case, that highest bidder would be the massive Anglo-American Freeport Mining Company whose board members included then National Security Advisor and future Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Freeport would open what would become the world's largest goldmine in West Papua, reducing a sacred mountain to a bottomless pit and either murdering or displacing thousands in the process. This toxic hellhole would become Indonesia's single greatest source of revenue, pulling a million dollars a day from the earth before handing $33 billion dollars of the loot over to the jackals back in Jakarta between 1992 and 2004 alone.

Of course, none of this wealth would find its way back to the people of West Papua, 38% of which continue to live in poverty to this day. But the West Papuan people were treated to all the splendor of the modern world in a 50-year military occupation that continues to rage quietly as we speak. While Freeport counts their gold, over 500,000 civilians have been slaughtered in a massive spree of genocides against any indigenous tribe too proud to bow to progress. That's over 10% of the population. Women and children have been systematically raped, massive highways have been paved over mass graves, villages have been burnt to the ground during routine military sweeps, towers have been erected to house foreign investors and their mistresses, concentration camps have been carved out of the jungle and the Coca-Cola has flowed like wine and the sweet smoke of Menthol Marlboros has stained the air.

And of course, America the beautiful has been there every step of the way with her billions of dollars in guns and lethal aid awarded to the most savage death squads that money can buy, often all in the name of fighting terrorism. But most of the victims of Indonesia's final solution in West Papua don't even carry guns. In 1998, the entire village of Biak was loaded onto ships by the Indonesian Military and thrown into the ocean. Some 200 people, most of them women and children, drowned. Their act of terrorism was raising a flag that declared their independence from a cruel world that has violently intervened on their way of life. A way of life built on traditional Melanesian social contracts among hundreds of clans and marked by an absence of western style hierarchies or even Indonesian style chiefs. A way of life governed only by the will of the village.

West Papua's war isn't just a war against subjugation and genocide. It is a war against the forced homogeny of western civilization that those crimes serve. It is a war against a single world order with a single tribe of assimilated consumers. It is a war against the dislocation of humanity from the natural world and the dislocation of the natural world from the divine. It is a war against madness. I will concede that it is indeed a tragedy that innocent men like Philip Mehrtens have been caught up in this war, but I would also argue that it is far more tragic that the rest of us have not been considering that we too are the victims of this madness. Even with all the gold that we could steal from West Papua, the west is a desert of pathological loneliness, mass shootings and environmental devastation. We are literally choking on the fumes of the modern world that West Papua has decided they would rather die fighting than join. Maybe it is we who should join them.

Then again, maybe that's just the mental illness talking again. The narrative of another burnt out casualty of suburban decay during the heat of the Kali Yuga. But what else can I give when I find myself lost in the eyes of quixotic savages on the internet? My narrative is the only arrow that I have left in my quiver. This week that narrative belongs to West Papua for whatever little that's worth.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Wild Wild Life by Talking Heads

* Hey by the Pixies

* The Suburbs by Arcade Fire

* Back of a Van by Regina Spektor

* Gimme Gimme Gimme by Black Flag

* Safari by the Breeders

* Stand and Deliver by Adam & the Ants

* Search and Destroy by Iggy & the Stooges

* The Bends by Radiohead

* Human Behavior by Bjork

Why Anarchists Should Give a Fuck About Omali Yeshitela

“Sometimes our positions are unpopular in the short term, even among the masses, only to be vindicated as events unfold to reveal a truth that was obscured by the faulty analysis of the prevailing common perception. On such occasions we must move in opposition to the direction the masses are attempting to go. Otherwise, what is the meaning of leadership?”

-Omali Yeshitela

“The Law waits for you to stumble on a mode of being, a soul different from the FDA-approved purple-stamped standard dead meat — & as soon as you begin to act in harmony with nature the Law garottes & strangles you — so don’t play the blessed liberal middleclass martyr — accept the fact that you’re a criminal & be prepared to act like one.”

-Hakim Bey

 The name is Omali Yeshitela and maybe you've heard of him, but probably not. That's OK. It's not your fault. If you're reading this right now, odds are that you're only an American and the imperial zeitgeist demands a very short memory of its subjects, especially regarding the long history of badass motherfuckers who have resisted its dictates. I'm not special or anything, I'm just a marginalized geek with a lot of time on my hands. So, I'll do you a solid and fill you in, because in the pantheon of forgotten badass motherfuckers, Omali Yeshitela is about as bad as they come and he is currently on trial-by-empire for this sin, fighting for his life. So now seems about as appropriate a time as any for another one of my famous gonzo revisionist history lessons.

Before you can really understand Yeshitela and his importance to imperial apostates like me you have to understand exactly where he came from. Omali is a militant foot soldier in the struggle for Black Power who fought on the same battlefields as Huey P. Newton, Fred Hampton, H. Rap Brown and Mutulu Shakur and somehow lived to shout about it unbound. He was on the streets, in the shit, deep in the guts of Babylon during the height of J. Edgar Hoover's white supremacist jihad against the struggle for a New Afrikan consciousness and he's still fucking here. After Cointelpro and crack cocaine and Reaganomics and HIV/AIDS and the War on Drugs, Omali Yeshitela stands virtually alone as the last badass motherfucker swinging above ground and outside of a maximum-security plantation from the original Movement. All the snipers missed, and J. Edna died cursing his name. Statistically speaking, this is nothing short of a miracle.

So, above all else, Omali is a militant survivalist. Born Joseph Allen Waller in St. Petersburgh, Florida, the man who would become affectionately known by comrades as Chairman Yeshitela weathered a childhood in the ghettos of that sunny cities impoverished Gas Lamp District and four years in the white man's imperial army to become a founding father of St. Petersburgh's chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. After initiating a rash of successful boycotts to desegregate local business', Waller was infamously charged with a felony for tearing down a racist mural from the walls of St. Petersburgh's city hall. In spite of winning a landmark Supreme Court case that would help solidify this nation's standing on the use of double-jeopardy in persecuting his fellow political prisoners, Joseph Waller still spent two years in prison and over thirty years as a convicted felon before finally being granted clemency in the year 2000.

During that time, Joseph Waller became Omali Yeshitela and Omali Yeshitela declared total war against the system that wronged him and his people. He created the Burning Spear newspaper and formed and lead both the African People's Socialist Party and the international Uhuru Movement. He led the fight to free Dessie Woods after she was sentenced to 22 years in prison for killing her white would-be rapist with his own gun. He led campaigns that freed wrongfully convicted death row inmates like Wilbur Lee and Freddie Pitts from the gallows. He was on the frontlines of an uprising in the streets of St. Petersburgh when that city's finest murdered an innocent Black man named Tyron Mark Lewis in 1996. He ran for mayor in 1973 and 2001 on insanely revolutionary platforms that included emptying Florida's prisons and forming a goddamn African People's Liberation Army, and did I mention that motherfucker is still fucking hear!

More importantly, so is the movement he sired, and this movement is why a reactionary post-left tranarchist like me still counts this hardcore communist as a hero in my book. I may have abandoned my traditional Marxist-Leninist dogma along with my penis years ago for a weird gumbo of post-civ Queer tribalism and radical free market agorism, but I remain inspired by any movement that can create a revolutionary alternative to modern corporate supremacy right in the here-and-now and that is precisely what Chairman Yeshitela's African People's Socialist Party has done with their groundbreaking Black Power Blueprint.

They have built a complex and self-sufficient network of institutions across three states that has successfully weaponized the free market in order to create a thriving alternative to capitalism. Women's health centers, community gardens, doula programs, ex-con workforce operations, affordable housing co-ops and scores of non-profit Black-owned small businesses. This is how you win a revolution, by creating autonomous stateless nations inside the belly of the beast and showing the people that living without a master really is as simple as just living without a fucking master. This is what drew a genderfuck hillbilly like me to embrace the values of the Black Power Movement to empower my own people in the first place. I don't care if you call yourself an anarchist, a Maoist or a goddamn Mennonite, if you can sustain a community outside of the system then you are my ally and you have won.

But all of this hard work is in peril now as Omali Yeshitela and his movement find themselves in the crosshairs of Joe Biden's Department of Justice. Nearly a year ago, the FBI conducted a series of heavily armed pre-dawn raids on the homes and offices of the APSP in St. Lois and St. Petersburgh as part of a scant 25-page indictment against Aleksandr Ionov, a Russian citizen and Moscow resident who will conveniently never have to stand trial. Ionov operates an organization barely affiliated with the APSP called the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia which the State Department claims has connections to Putin's Kremlin. The original charge was a vague allegation of "conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States." This was only replaced with a slightly less skimpy 37-page indictment last month that continues to offer just as little in the way of actual proof of wrongdoing. 

The Department of Justice now charges Chairman Yeshitela and three of his Uhuru comrades along with Ionov and two other alleged FSB agents with conducting a "multi-year foreign influence campaign in the United States." This baseless accusation basically amounts to the Russian government paying a bunch of pissed-off Black people to talk smack about the United States. But pissed-off Black people like Yeshitela have been flamboyantly calling out the United States Empire on its bullshit for over half a fucking century without requiring a Kremlin paycheck to do so. If you don't believe me, just read that motherfucker's almost hilariously bold rap sheet.

In 1968, shortly after being paroled for the high crime of desecrating minstrel art, Omali Yeshitela was arrested again for asserting that the "assassin's bullet that killed Dr. Martin Luther King also killed nonviolence." That same year, he was arrested once more for yelling "White pig!" during a sanitation strike. And in 1988, Omali was arrested again for his inappropriate comfortability with the First Amendment, this time for chanting "The police and the Klan work hand-in-hand!" in response to the police shooting of an APSP member named Kenneth Harrington. I'm not sure what part of the term 'Black Revolutionary' you people don't fucking understand but Omali Yeshitela's job is to shout theater in a crowded fire, to paraphrase another honkey fellow traveler by the name of Abbie Hoffman. 

Chairman Yeshitela has also made no secret of his willingness to meet with foreign agents over the years, a conspiracy better known as Freedom of Association. The APSP quite publicly held close relations with the sadly short-lived New Jewel Movement-led government of Grenada as well as Nicaragua's Sandinista's both during and after their revolution against the US-backed Somoza Dynasty. Omali also visited Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles to secure the endorsement of the Irish Republican Socialist Party for the APSP's long fight to secure reparations for slavery. Once again, the American Government is essentially just accusing Russia of paying a bunch of people to do what they've been doing for free for decades and this isn't the first time either. It seems like every time a charismatic Black person shouts "Black Power!" in this country they get charged with being a Kremlin spy. That's how they got rid of Marcus Garvey, that's how they indicted WEB Dubois and that's how they ruined Paul Robeson. 

The million-dollar question here is why? Why the hell is Black Power still so goddamn scary to the biggest fucking empire on earth? After all, these are the most radical of the most marginalized. As I pointed out at the beginning of this revisionist history rant, most of you motherfuckers have probably never even heard the name Omali Yeshitela before some white bitch shoved it in your face. Some of you are probably still googling Marcus Garvey, for Christ's sake. So, then what's with the big bad wolf routine from the DOJ? The answer lies in why an anarchist like me does know those names and why an anarchist like you should. These people get it. The basic core philosophy of the Black Power Movement is that all poor people are the victims of the American Empire, and we can only win when we unite, not as one globalist hegemon but as a thousand stateless third world tribes who just want to be left the fuck alone so we can live free and take care of our own in peace and dignity.

Babylon has to crush any motherfucker bad enough to speak this truth like bug before the word gets out that their temples are all made of paper and are mouths are all full of matches. Anyone who hates the state should give a fuck about the persecution of Omali Yeshitela because anyone who hates the state IS Omali Yeshitela. Let this rant be categorized as a hymnal to unapologetic solidarity across all tribes, weird and small.  Sing along if you know the words and we'll burn Babylon to the ground for a song.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Banned in DC by Bad Brains

* Hip Hop by Dead Prez

* Fall Back Down by Rancid

* Keep Ya Head Up by Tupac Shakur

* Joiner by Blondeshell

* Nazi White Trash by Leftover Crack

* Who We Be by DMX

* Anti-Curse by boygenius

* Sailin' On by Bad Brains

* Wolves by Dead Prez

The Time for Queer Revolution Is Now: When the State Gets Genocidal, Reform Becomes an Act of Mass Suicide

 "Why don't you guys do something?" Those were the eternal words of Storme DeLarverie as the pigs hauled her away in shackles, bloodied but unbowed, after she threw the first punch of the Stonewall Uprising. I feel like I'm screaming this to my people all the time lately and I still can't seem to inspire the riot necessary for our collective survival. 

We live in dangerous times. We have lived in them before but genderqueer people like me have never faced a creature quite like this. As we reach an era when we have never stood farther outside of the closet, we face an open and brazen campaign to extinguish us from public existence. While popular right-wing ideologues proudly call for our annihilation, state governments across the nation are dutifully carrying out their dictates.

Genocide is an ugly word, but I can't think of a more appropriate description for the GOP's war on "transgenderism." At a time when violence and suicide have never been higher in the transgender community, we are drowning in a deluge of openly bigoted legislation. 

2023 is already the fourth consecutive record-breaking year for anti-trans bills in this country, with 498 hate laws in counting proposed in 49 states. 43 have already passed. This includes 12 states pushing laws that violate the rights of minors to seek what has been clinically proven to be lifesaving care, as well as three who have also expanded those bans to reach well into adulthood, banning the use of puberty blockers up to the age of 26. 

This hideous campaign also includes a growing rash of so-called anti-drag bills the likes of which have already passed in Tennessee and Florida and are affectively written to police public gender non-conformity in a blatant violation of free speech and expression. In Nashville, a second attempt at "male or female impersonation" is a felony that could lead to over half a decade in prison. That is six years upstate for the crime of having a dick beneath your dress. 

And these lawmakers aren't shy about their intentions either. They have made it painfully clear that they consider the entire transgender tribe to be little more than an ideology that they fully intend to censor out of existence by any means necessary and they are targeting our children first, using the public school system for its original intended purpose to kill the Queer and save the child so as to protect the sanctity of their idealized concept of purified cisgender youth. My people aren't clueless to these facts. The word genocide is popping up like daisies in every support group and Queer bar across my little slice of rustbelt Americana, but I still can't seem to inspire a single goddamn faggot to throw a fucking punch. 

The stormtroopers are returning to Stonewall and every time I say revolution, my own fucking people stare at me like some kind of crazed heretic, telling me to simmer down and that this isn't the appropriate time for such radicalism. Really? Then when? There is an open plot to erase us here. If this isn't an appropriate time to arm ourselves to the teeth and batten down the hatches, then when is? I seriously want to know so I don't miss the signal. Do we wait for the train cars to arrive at the gayborhoods? Or maybe we should just sing "We Shall Overcome" as they march us all into the fucking showers?

"Vote, march, be peaceful, repeat, vote, march, be peaceful, repeat..." this what they tell me over and over again. Hell, even the so-called radical Queers are simply peacefully marching to their local state capitols to demand that other powerful cis-gender people in Washington come to our rescue with the miracle of more useless legislation that no country sheriff or small-town principal is ever actually going to follow through on. 

And they keep quoting Martin Luther King at me like braying birds, promising me with almost embarrassing sincerity that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice." How do I politely break it to them that this is total fucking bullshit? First of all, King was quoting a 19th century clergyman named Theodore Parker who was actually trying to console his fellow white abolitionists with the hollow promise that at least there would be justice in the sweet hereafter. Second, there exists no single clearer case that peaceful liberal democracy achieves exactly nothing than the endless struggle for anything that even remotely resembles civil rights in this country.

Let me break it down for you.

Africans first came to this colonial outpost as indentured servants who could gradually reach the coveted status of property owners provided that they purge themselves entirely of their backward negro ways. 

They became the property when they rose up with fellow servants from Europe to demand more than the Faustian choice between backbreaking labor or soul-crushing assimilation. 

Rural chattel slavery wasn't so much abolished with Emancipation as it was replaced with the more efficient industrial wage slavery that made this colonial outpost an empire. 

These supposedly free wage slaves were further kept in line with the brutality of Jim Crow only to have it replaced by the white supremacist War on Drugs and the Prison Industrial Complex the exact same fucking year that Jim Crow was officially repealed by the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

So, now, thanks to that glorious arc of the moral universe, certain indentured servants with the right connections can reach the coveted status of Obamahood provided that they purge themselves entirely of their radical Black ways and kill 14-year-old Arabs with Reaper drones. Doctor King weeps. Sunrise. Sunset. Any questions?

Believe it or not, I actually fucking hate having to be this damn pessimistic all the time. Kali knows, I never get laid at parties. But I didn't write history and I sure as fuck didn't invent the cruelty of objective reality and the cruel objective reality is that racial disparity of nearly every kind imaginable in this country has not improved by one inch since 1968, meanwhile, trigger-happy cops are killing Black kids like menthol vape pens and the majority of Black men in major urban areas exist under the bondage of correctional control with permanent criminal records that allow them to be legally discriminated against in nearly every way that they were under Jim Crow. The arc of history in this country bends towards oppression. 

So, what happened to our precious liberal democracy? Motherfucker, this is your precious liberal democracy. I'll let you in on one more dirty little secret. This liberalism gig is nothing but a bourgeoise drag show. The Age of Enlightenment occurred among the intellectual elites in the dark heart of Babylon during the height of colonialism, slavery and imperial genocide. From this same swamp of powdered wigs and pompous twats came the twin inventions of race and liberalism and both were devised for the exact same reason, to rationalize psychotic behavior. 

Like any other serial killer, the state desperately needs to believe in the benevolence of its own cruel existence in order not to crash like an idle shark. So, it replaced monarchies with congresses that hand out "rights" like gangsters hand out turkeys at Christmastime and it replaced puritanical crusades with the new secular religion of racial science, all in the name of the endless march of civilized progress.

The gender binary was an invention of these same enlightened creeps too. More puritanical social conditioning masquerading as science. But the savages didn't need to be fucking enlightened. Our pagan tribes were doing just fine before civilization came to brain us with the bludgeon of their historical arch. Pre-liberal societies from Africa to Atzlan existed for centuries without rigid gender boundaries, hierarchical racial caste systems and enlightened academic sociopaths. They also existed without prisons or monsters with badges to pack them full of broken children.

The few major achievements in social progress that have ever been made in this country weren't made by Washington or Harvard. They were made by wild unassimilated savages in the streets when they finally stopped singing and started swinging. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 was only signed into law under the duress of massive nationwide riots that came after Doctor King was assassinated, and a year later proud faggots like Storme DeLarverie and Marsha P. Johnson followed their lead by beating the police state stupid like a rented mule at Stonewall. The only reason that we didn't achieve more is because we stopped short of the revolution that we needed to be free and the only reason that we stopped is because the state paid us to behave with temporary privileges that they call rights.

As long as the state stands, marginalized people will remain at the mercy of its enlightened aristocracy who will only ever give us just enough rights to behave and then replace them with more violence once we let our guards down. I don't believe in coincidences because I don't have the agency to afford them. Queer people became targets for genocide again the moment we began to assimilate into the same breeder state that Storme begged us to smash. 

So, I'm going to ask you people one more time, as nicely as a bloodied but unbowed genderfuck bitch like me knows how to ask. Why don't you guys' fucking do something? Justice doesn't come from civilization, it comes from pissed-off freaks like you and me in the streets, and the arc of the moral universe doesn't bend unless we grab it with both hands and wrap around the throats of the powerful.

When the state gets violent, reform becomes an act of mass suicide and I'm done with drinking that cult's punch. It's time to get fierce and it's time to get organized. It's time to finish the Stonewall Uprising and overthrow the government once and for all, side by side with every other tribe who refuses to conform to the institutional violence of liberal reform. Queer revolution now!

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Rise Above by Black Flag

* Bloodletting by Concrete Blonde

* Rope by Foo Fighters

* Dress by PJ Harvey

* I Don't Know Where to Start by Bully

* Where Is My Mind by the Pixies

* Margin Walker by Fugazi

* Speak Slow by Tegan & Sarah

* Mourning Dove by Screaming Females

* That's When I Reach for My Revolver by Mission of Burma

Her Name Was Nora al-Awlaki: The Real Reason Donald Trump Should Rot in Hell

 34 felony counts and homicide ain't one. That is all I can think anytime I see another news reel about the supposedly historic indictment of former and possibly future President Donald J. Trump. This son of a Klansman commits 34 felonies before his first Big Mac every morning and the best you can do is 34 degrees to Stormy Daniels. This case is shit and I'm tired of pretending otherwise just so I don't have to agree with my Fox News addicted mother. Alvin Bragg's entire house of cards is built on the single victimless crime of covering up another single victimless crime that nobody has or ever will be convicted of, and you all know it.

Don't get me wrong, I want to see Trump burn like a match head at least as badly as any pussyhat wearing Hillaryite. I want to see that motherfucker buried beneath the prison and I'm a goddamn prison abolitionist. But if we're finally going to bring a president down and put him in chains, let's do it for real, with a real fucking crime with real fucking victims and you don't even have to dive seven days deep into Donald Trump's disastrous first term to find one. The heartless son of a bitch signed off on a war crime during his first week in the White House when he sent a black ops hit team to kill a child.

Her name was Nora al-Awlaki, and I want you to remember that name because she was just an 8-year-old American girl and apparently, she had to die for your freedom. But she wasn't alone. She was one of thirty people murdered in a wild and reckless Seal Team 6 raid on a dusty little village called Yakla in Yemen's Bayda Province. A heavily armed death squad of American heroes came in so hot on this patch of sand that they literally crashed their chopper, injuring three of their compatriots in the process and leaving them with no choice but to abandon their sunken ship and burn the evidence by calling in an airstrike. Things just went from bad to tragic from there.

A 50-minute gun battle followed with America's most elite killers taking heavy fire from burka-clad women in huts on all sides. By the time they left that Allah forsaken village behind, they left it in ashes with one dead Navy Seal and another 30 dead civilians, including at least 8 women and 7 children between the ages of 3 and 13, including one American citizen named Nora who bled out in her mother's arms after being struck in the neck by a stray bullet. It took that child two hours to die. Her last words before the lights went dim behind her eyes were "Don't cry, mama, I'm fine."

Experts say, experts say... Every time America commits another atrocity, all their devoted stenographers in the mainstream media can tell us is what "experts say" and what do experts say about Yakla? A lot but very little of it adds up or comes with verifiable details. Experts say that village was an al-Qaeda hotbed. Experts say that some nameless heavy from AQAP was hiding out there among all the women and children. Experts say that we launched a massive raid on a densely populated village just to retrieve a treasure trove of vital intelligence on pilfered computer software. Experts won't tell us what exactly was on those confiscated servers, but experts do give us their solemn word that it was well worth the trail of corpses Seal Team 6 left in their wake to retrieve it.

Pardon my broken Arabic but "experts" can kiss my fat Queer ass. Those same experts told me that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that Putin blew up his own pipelines just for shits and grins. The gutless vultures of cable news may sing all day long about their precious experts, but they spend very little time if any at all on the victims and witnesses of the crimes these nameless experts seem to go out of their way to kick sand over. The actual people of the village of Akla tell a very different story about what they described as a "night of evil." The survivors speak of a sleepy village ambushed without warning by helicopters and Reaper drones before having armed white men storm through their houses, firing at will in the middle of the night. According to them there were no members of AQAP present in their village but there was a school, a clinic and a mosque before they were bombarded to rubble.

Nora's grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki, a well-known and respected Yemeni scholar and politician who had once served as the president of Sanaa University was among these witnesses. According to Nasser, not only was his granddaughter and several other children in the same house slaughtered in cold blood but the house next door was raided too, with everyone inside being murdered before it was burnt to the ground. This included a young female Saudi school teacher with rumored links to al-Qaeda, but I believe that the primary reason behind this bloodbath likely has a lot more to do with the name that Nasser and Nora shared than any mysterious visitor next door.

You see, Nora wasn't the first American citizen with the name al-Awlaki to be extrajudicially murdered by a sitting president, she wasn't even the second. If that name sounds familiar to you, that's probably because she was the daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, a notorious American-born imam who was assassinated in a drone strike approved by Donald Trump's Nobel Peace Prize winning predecessor Barack Obama back in 2011. His crime? Well, that really all depends on how much faith you have in what those experts say because their word is the only proof that exists that Anwar was guilty of anything more than being an influential Muslim fundamentalist with a reasonably low opinion of his home country. 

Anwar was born to Yemeni parents in Las Cruces, New Mexico and spent his childhood between those two deserts. He attended various universities across the US before returning to Yemen as a university lecturer and spending a brief period as a public speaker in the UK. He was detained by the American-backed dictatorship in Yemen and spent 18 months behind bars before being released without ever facing trial. It was around this time that Anwar began to earn a name for himself as an influential advocate of jihad on the internet. His religious rants against American imperialism became particularly popular in America and the UK due to Anwar being an English speaker with a downright mesmerizing screen presence. He has long been accused of being a powerful player in Yemen's al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula but his involvement in the group as anything but a skilled propagandist has never been proven with even the "experts" long stating that his role has always been more inspirational than operational.

This all seemed to change under Obama, who officially upgraded Anwar's status to "regional commander" before he became the first American citizen added to Barack's infamous CIA kill list. Though Anwar had never even been charged with a crime in the US, he did briefly exchange emails with Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, whose massacre the GOP had a field day blaming on the new president with the suspiciously Muslim sounding name. Anwar's father steadfastly contended that his son had never even been a member of al-Qaeda and that he was in hiding from American and Yemeni persecution with his ancestral tribe in South Yemen. Nasser begged Obama to give him more time to convince his son to hand himself over and even sued the president with help from the ACLU when this failed, but nothing seemed to convince that pacifist-in-chief not to pull the trigger.

So, in 2011 Anwar al-Awlaki was murdered in a CIA drone strike. But what is even more chilling is that two weeks later his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, another US citizen, was murdered in a separate Obama-approved airstrike. All the "experts" claim that Occam was just chucking razor blades like tomahawks for target practice that day and this kid was just an innocent bystander in a totally unrelated CIA facilitated homicide, but then-White House Secretary Robert Gibbs dipped the administration's hand when questioned at a press conference about the murder.

"I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children, I don't think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about your business" Sung like a natural born killer.

As noted above, regardless of Anwar al-Awlaki's actual involvement with terrorism, he is a veritable rock star among disgruntled Muslims in the English-speaking world and that star has only grown brighter with his murder. His videos have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, including by the jihadists behind the Boston Marathon Bombing and the mass shootings in Orlando and San Bernadino. Anwar is far more dangerous dead than he ever was alive, and somebody has to pay for the sins of the father to send a message to his followers.

Gibbs made this message loud and clear to anyone without their fingers in their ears and it was a message repeated much more bluntly by Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2016, when he promised not just to target terrorists if elected president but to kill their families as well. The raid that would murder the third American al-Awlaki in just under six years was actually planned by Obama, but he decided to kick the can to Trump once he was elected, likely knowing that bastard would finish the job for him and get more shit for doing so simply because he's an oafish lout.

Donald Trump will never be tried for the murder of Nora al-Awlaki for the same reason that Barack Obama will never be tried for the murder of her older brother. Because both parties kill children just like jihadists to send a message to populations who resist America's will and neither party plans to stop anytime in the near future. 

Then why should I care? You might feel tempted to ask. It's OK, I do to sometimes, and I'll tell you at the risk of tipping my own hand. I may be a bitter contrarian faggot, but I can't forget Nora's face. She looks too much like that little girl in the mirror that the Catholic Church tried to drown for existing in the wrong gender thirty years ago. She was just another innocent child caught up in the twisted games that powerful adults play, and I can't help but to take that personally.

So, I'll say it three more times before I say it again and again and again. Her name was Nora al-Awlaki. Her name was Nora al-Awlaki. Her name was Nora al-Awlaki. And I won't let you forget that fucking name because I am sick and tired of watching children die so powerful men can stand a little taller on their corpses. May they all rot in hell.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky Reid/CH

Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced This Post

* American Girl by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

* Asking For It by Hole

* Mary by Big Thief

* Barrowed Trouble by Feist

* Lawyers, Guns & Money by Warren Zevon

* Emily, I'm Sorry by boygenius

* Silent All These Years by Tori Amos

* About a Girl by Bully

* Army of Me by Bjork

* Shake It Out by Florence + the Machine

* 99 Problems by Jay Z

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