The Forgotten Legacy of John Sinclair and the White Panther Party

"The revolution has always been in the hands of the very young. The young always inherit the revolution. You can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail the revolution."

-Huey P. Newton

"Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo."

-John Sinclair

 It seems like I'm always the last person to hear the bad news these days however, in my defense, I'm usually fucking drowning in it. We all are I suppose, what with the trials and tribulations of living in the Kali Yuga. But living with PTSD tends to make it all feel aggressively personal. Every bomb that drops on Gaza seems to awaken another monster in my Lovecraftian closet of repressed childhood memories, but somewhere amidst this maelstrom of misery, between the flashbacks and the war crimes, John Sinclair died and even my battered inner child feels the need to pay her respects.

For those of you who don't know that name, that is likely because John Sinclair was the kind of motherfucker who led the kind of life that your history books would rather you forget. John, who died from heart failure this April at 82, was a leading figure in America's other revolution, the one that saw a thriving underground ecosystem of Black Panthers, Street Transvestites, and Students for a Democratic Society taking on the man in the streets of Babylon over the savage injustices of white supremacy and the Vietnam War.

An enterprising young jazz poet and political provocateur, John Sinclair emerged from his native Michigan's underground art scene in the late sixties with an itching desire to join the people of the global third world in smashing the white pig state that he and his pale stoner friends in the jazz scene had grown to despise. Like a lot of other misfits from that era, John was through with being bullied just for being freaky and found impoverished guerrilla agitators of color like Huey Newton, Malcolm X, and Ho Chi Minh to be a hell of a lot more inspiring than anything the honky dinosaurs of the Old Left could conjure.

John was a part of the Detroit Artist's Workshop, which ran a network of communal houses along with a print shop and a performance space, but after years of police raids and drug busts, John decided it was time to up the ante. The breaking point came with the Detroit Riots that led to 43 deaths and nearly burned the Motor City to the ground in 1967. The Workshop proudly displayed a banner declaring "Burn Baby Burn" outside one of their communes and stood virtually alone amongst the white counterculture in declaring the riots to be a justified act of popular resistance against a racist police state.

Upon hearing an interview with Huey Newton in which the head of the Black Panthers suggested that the best thing white kids could do for the revolution was start a White Panther Party in solidarity with the third world, John did just that. Along with his wife Leni and a hippie half-breed named Pun Plamondon, John Sinclair formed the first White Panther Party in the charred ruins of Detroit with a rallying cry calling on the disaffected white youth of America to join the revolution in the name of rock n roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.

Many Black rebels were not amused, but John's rag-tag army of heavily armed long hairs and burn outs proved themselves to be worthy comrades by organizing the white counterculture in support of third world struggle by redistributing bulk foods and Black Panther newsletters to impoverished communities across Detroit and the Bay Area. The White Panthers also raised the noise to downright frightening levels with their pioneering proto-punk band, the MC5, who John Sinclair managed and used like a fifty-megawatt bullhorn to promote the revolution far and wide.  

Naturally, all this agitation against the amoral majority came at a price. John and his White Panthers may have joined their comrades in arms in Fred Hampton's Rainbow Coalition, but they also joined them on J. Edgar Hoover's Cointelpro shitlist. In 1969, Sinclair himself was entrapped by an undercover officer into providing him with a king's ransom of exactly two joints and was sentenced to a decade in prison for his charity. This is when John Sinclair officially became an underground celebrity. After Abbie Hoffman was booed offstage at Woodstock for attempting to bring attention to this injustice, John Lennon and Yoko Ono got involved by organizing their own rally in John Sinclair's defense, bringing everyone from Bobby Seale to Stevie Wonder together at Ann Arbor's Cristler Arena in 1971.

The John Sinclair Freedom Rally drew a sold-out crowd of 15,000 within two hours and John Sinclair's case was overturned within days. But even miracles come at a price. The feds sicked their dogs on John and Yoko and nearly had the couple of bougie dabblers deported for their good deed. As for the freshly vindicated Sinclair, he had already been charged within months of his initial arrest along with his fellow White Panthers, Pun Plamondon and John Forrest on trumped up charges of conspiring to bomb a CIA office. These charges were also dropped after the government admitted to illegally wiretapping the Panthers and John even won a landmark Supreme Court case vindicating the constitutional right to privacy, but all the court cases took their toll, and the Michigan chapters of the White Panther Party closed its doors in 1973.

So, why then should you give a fuck about a bunch of musty old hippies with guns? For the same reason that I do, because the Second American Revolution is unfinished history. Everything that forgotten outlaws like John Sinclair fought for back in 1968 is more valid now than ever before. The war machine continues to rampage across the globe, performing My Lai Massacres by proxy from Bakhmut to Khan Younis, white supremacy remains a thriving multibillion dollar enterprise with the prison industrial complex devouring Black and brown bodies like a Ku Klux Cthulhu with bipartisan support, and it is the youth, the young people of Babylon, who continue to feel the pain of the third world even from a place of relative privilege.

I did. I spent my childhood as a middle-class prisoner of a Catholic school that violated my body and taught me that my gender identity rendered me wicked enough to deserve this trauma. And when I was lonely and hopeless, I would escape the horrors of my existence by pouring over the moldy old magazines in my mother's basement vintage clothing store. This is where I discovered wild creatures like John Sinclair, the MC5, and the White Panther Party, and what they taught me was that I wasn't alone, that my youthful rebellion wasn't just valid, it was valuable because it served as a link to other oppressed people across the globe.

This was the truly brilliant thing about the White Panther Party. They made no attempt to co-opt the struggles of the third world, they simply pointed out the fact that young people were oppressed by the same power system and thus had every right to turn on their teachers and parents. Freaky people like John Sinclair militarized youth culture itself against the state and goddammit, we need this now more than ever. There is a reason that adolescents inherently identify with the 'other', from the ghetto to Gaza, and it has nothing to do with immaturity. Every single person under 18 is a second-class citizen in this country. American children are afforded all the rights and privileges of livestock, and this is why they are abused across the board at a far higher rate than any other demographic.

This has to stop, and John Sinclair gave us a glimpse into a world in which white children were empowered to stop it by embracing their otherness and throwing their lot in with other oppressed people across the globe who in turn taught them how to defend themselves against the adult establishment of the first world by any means necessary.

This is why I feel compelled to take a moment between the flashbacks and the war crimes to honor John Sinclair. He gave my battered inner child a loaded gun. Consider this rant a twenty-one-round solute from a fellow traveler. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* John Sinclair by John Lennon

* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

* Volunteers by Jefferson Airplane

* Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth

* Living for the City by Stevie Wonder

* $20 by boygenius

* Get Together by the Youngbloods

* Coyote, My Little Brother by Mitski

* 1969 by the Stooges

* Rock N Roll Nigger by Patti Smith

My Holy War with the Catholic Church

 “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”

-Mikhail Bakunin

It begins with an unstoppable flood of unbearable images. A child stripped naked beaten in a preschool bathroom. A visiting priest with a sinful smile. Two nude men in a rectory bedroom. An unrecognizable reflection in that same bathroom mirror... Quickly, this nightmarish montage forms a narrative like a terrible bedtime story you've heard a thousand times before for the first time. A story about a little girl trapped inside a scary body whose dysphoria was exploited by sexual predators at a Catholic school so they could have a good time with someone, some thing, too frightened to ever tell. 

This narrative was too much for that little girl to bear, so she blacked it out, she blacked out everything she saw in that mirror, including her gender identity, for decades. Until years of nightmares became an unstoppable flood of unbearable images, and those images formed a narrative of repressed memories that now feed an insatiable thirst for revenge.

This has become my life over the last several months. This waking nightmare has become the new normal. The trauma surrounds me, like living in an active warzone. Everything triggers flashbacks and the flashbacks have become so menacingly jarring that they have begun to trigger seizures. I feel like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, vomiting up secrets and bodily fluids that belong to men sent to save my soul. My life has become a horror movie that no one can bear to watch. 

I have been abandoned by all but my most devoted friends. I have formed multiple personalities that represent the children that the Catholic Church conspired to destroy. One of them is also a five-year-old girl who was passed around by priests until she became physically ill. I spend my nights consoling that child while she screams. Some nights she consoles me. My own therapist now refuses to see me, telling me over the phone like some cheap fling that I require a level of care that she cannot provide.

This has become my life and the only thing that has kept me from taking it is war. That word pounds in my head like a drumbeat. War. War. Over and over again. War. War. War. The moment that I stop shaking and sobbing. War. War. War. That five-year-old girl and her fourteen-year-old protector join the chant like a chorus. War. War. War. This is what keeps me going, the fact that there are still children coming and going from the churches and schools that those vile men combed like a brothel, the fact that those buildings are still standing after thirty years of them tearing me down and burning the pieces.

I want to kill. I want to shoot, stab, hack, and bludgeon. But that isn't enough. Any one act of violence, no matter how justified, would be little more than a senseless indulgence considering the depth of the conspiracy that inspires my rage. Burn one church and there are still thousands more standing. Kill one priest and there are still millions left walking, groping, hunting, lying, escaping.

Revenge is not enough because I am not alone. I am one of legions of broken children who have been mercilessly degraded and discarded by the Catholic Church. The only thing more horrifying than stories like mine are how many of them there are. In the United States alone, more than 11,000 complaints of abuse have been lodged against more than 6,000 Catholic clergy members by the children who survived their sexual degradation. Diocese across the country have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in out of court settlements just to keep them silent and my home state of Pennsylvania has hosted some of the vilest transgressions of this colossal conspiracy. 

The entire Keystone State was turned into a veritable harem. For decades, over 300 predator priests were given free reign over nearly every diocese in the state while the Church leadership compiled detailed records of their crimes and moved these monsters around like game pieces on a map of hell. Cases were reported to bishops and bishops reported them to the Vatican, but the only actions taken by Rome were in defense of the accused and the silence that kept them active. And Pennsylvania is far from the only hunting ground either.

216,000 children in France between 1950 and 2020. 3,677 minors in Germany between 1946 and 2014. Nearly 15,000 underage victims in Ireland between 1970 and 1990. And this doesn't even include the generations of children subjected to the horrors and humiliations of institutionalized corporal punishment, or the emotional abuse of homophobia and transphobia, or the slut shaming of children for even having a sexuality outside of a holy man's fist... or the Magdelene Laundries, or the mother and baby homes, or the dungeon-like orphanages and the illegal adoptions... The Catholic Church is not a religious organization, it is an international misery industrial complex that runs on shattered childhoods, and the responsibility for this monstrosity runs straight to the top of the Vatican. 

At least three consecutive popes have been complicit. In 2001, Pope John Paul II, a man now considered a saint by the Catholic Church, issued a global papal rescript compelling all of the Church's bishops to forward cases of abuse to Rome so that the Vatican could decide the appropriate course of action rather than the public. That same year, a high-ranking Vatican prefect who would go on to become Pope Bennedict in 2005 issued a document mandating that all cases of clerical sex abuse be reported directly to his office where they were to be kept under lock and key. Those files soon numbered in the thousands and were further secured under the Vatican's Crimen Sollicitationis, which required total silence from victims, perpetrators, and witnesses alike under the threat of excommunication.

Pope Francis was supposed to be different, swept into power in 2013 after Bennedict made the unprecedented decision to resign under a cloud of scandals going back to his days as the Archbishop of Munich in the 1980s, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was carefully marketed to the fleeing faithful as a caring reformer. He has reformed nothing. While touring the globe making heartfelt apologies to the victims of his church, the man they now call Francis has also carefully avoided making any formal admission of responsibility on the part of the Vatican so as to avoid ever having to pay a dime in reparations. 

Francis can also be judged by the company he keeps. The man he appointed as his anti-corruption czar and continues to praise in death, Cardinal George Pell, was a convicted pedophile only released from prison because Australia's High Court chose not to believe his victims on acquittal.

Pope Francis is not a reformer; he is a cleaner sent by an evil institution to mop up the scene of the crime and reign in a dwindling flock who is fleeing the church in droves. Pope Francis is proof that what the Vatican requires is not reform but revolution. This is a recognized nation state responsible for centuries of grisly crimes against humanity. An ancient imperial relic that has conspired with dictators, Nazis, mafioso, and death squads, and continues to horde billions of dollars in its bank, including gold picked from the teeth of the gassed Jews at Auschwitz. This monstrosity must be razed to the ground and fed to the woodchippers. But even this fate is not enough.

The only way to possibly call any revolution an act of justice is if this jihad ensures that the crimes that inspired it will never happen again. This is bigger than any one church. This is about a society that grooms its children to be prey by denying them any rights as individuals. There will always be adults that rape children as long as institutions of power afford them that right and childhood itself as we understand it has become one of those institutions. 

We must liberate our children by empowering them with the same rights we afford adults and teach them that their bodies belong to them and no one else, not the state, not the church, not even their parents. We must emancipate childhood and raise proud individuals instead of silent dutiful citizens.

If this is impossible then I will die fighting endlessly for the impossible. I will fight forever because it is the only thing that keeps me from destroying myself beneath the weight of the horror that has become my existence. I must become Che Guevara because it is the only fate keeping me from becoming Charles Whitman. I will not die a statistic. I will rage furiously unto my dying breath until the whole world can hear that five-year-old girl scream. Maybe then she can sleep and so can I.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH, Max, & Agnes

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* My War by Black Flag

* Me and a Gun by Tori Amos

* Cop Car by Mitski

* Jesu Dod by Burzum

* Retard Girl by Hole

* Kerosene by Big Black

* Oblivion by Grimes

* Transylvanian Hunger by Darkthrone

* Comeback Kid by Sleigh Bells

* Something I Can Never Have by Nine Inch Nails

This post is devoted in loving memory to John Sinclair, a tireless revolutionary who put his life and freedom on the line so young people could have a voice loud enough to tell their parents "Fuck you!" with their fists held high.  

Law and Order Is Republicrat for Fascism

 "Force is the midwife of any old society pregnant with a new one."

-Karl Marx

If you watch the news today, you'd think that Americans are living in one big stateless continental crimewave, stretching from sea to shining sea. Even on the crunchy granola liberal networks, every hour carries another newsflash about our nation's perilous decent into utter lawlessness. The undocumented are swarming the border! The homeless are swarming the subways! Wayward gangs of sticky-fingered Black youths are coming to a Target near you! Rape, murder, it's just a kiss away! You can practically hear every white liberal soccer mom in the burbs collectively dropping their morning coffee and screaming, "We never should have defunded the police!" 

Bitch, relax. Take a deep breath and stop watching the fucking 'news-today' because it's at least 90% bullshit on a good day. Don't get me wrong, things are still getting pretty wild down in the streets and they're likely to get even wilder, but nobody had to defund the police for them to get there and practically nobody has. When George Floyd was slowly lynched before a live studio audience and the nation exploded in an appropriately violent uprising the likes of which hadn't been seen since the race riots of 1968, the Democrats were forced to dawn dashikis and take a knee just to keep their target demographic governably passive. Everybody promised police reform, even old racist crooks like Joe Biden, but nobody actually did it. 

During those uprisings, every major city in the country saw these protests met with grossly disproportionate acts of police brutality and every single one of those police forces was being commanded by a Democratic mayor who then spoke eloquently about "reimagining" the police with fresh blood still wet on their jackboots. But these corporate shills didn't so much reimagine the police as they did reimagine their funding. Cities like New York and Minneapolis simply moved the money around in circles without ever affecting police budgets. 

So, why then are the streets getting wild like it's nineteen-seventy-something? Because Americans are having an existential crisis like they did back in nineteen-seventy-something. This nation's last big crime wave peaked somewhere between the early seventies and the early nineties after the American Empire lost the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement failed to cure systemic racism, and Richard Nixon exposed the highest echelons of Babylonian power to be little more than an elaborate organized crime outfit. Long story short, America lost its faith in the system and sadly that faith was what passed for a moral center in this country. So, the shit got wild and here we go again after the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the Pandemic, and two consecutive presidencies defined by Nixonian grade dysfunction.

We've been here before but this time the damage is far worse, and it may be irreversible. But that isn't stopping the mandarins of the two-party system and their devoted courtesans on 'the-news-today' from trying to fix this crisis the way they did with the last one back in nineteen-seventy-something. With our next sham election heating up, Joe Biden is tearing off his dashiki and pulling his white hood back out of the closet and while Trump warms up the MAGA set with promises of Christian Sharia Law and flaming border moats, Genocide Joe is flexing his muscles by attacking common sense reform to the District of Colombia's ancient criminal code and pushing immigration deals that promise to dump napalm into the Rio Grande. Meanwhile, the media is chumming us all with sensational stories of a Mad Max-style dystopia.

It's Law and Order Two: Electric Boogaloo. But here's the rub; nobody is actually asking for a sequel. Even amidst this synergistic propaganda deluge, most major polls show crime trailing behind the shit that causes it, like inflation, recession, and shitty leadership, on the list of demands for both Democrats and Republicans. In other words, average Americans don't want law and order. They would much rather watch the Temple of Emptiness burn like their savings. But American power desperately wants us to want law and order to save their hides from the fire the way they did the last time around.

The great crimewave of nineteen-seventy-something ended for reasons that continue to allude the experts but the powerful still believe that they cured that plague with a crimewave of their own called mass incarceration. The violence never ended, it just got monopolized by the police state. While burglary in the suburbs may have dropped, an entire generation of Black, brown, and Queer people were essentially kidnapped under the auspices of the War on Drugs and Broken Windows before being sold into virtual slavery to a modern-day gulag archipelago that would make Josef Stalin thick with envy.

In 1970, the state and federal prison population stood at 196,441. By 2020, the caged population had swelled to over two million with most of its indentured citizenry locked up for non-violent drug offenses. One out of every three Black males born American today can expect to serve hard time before he dies, along with one in six Latino males. Meanwhile, women have become the fastest growing incarcerated population in the country and Queer folk like me are incarcerated at three times the rate of the general population, with one in six trans people serving time, usually in prisons that don't match our gender identity.

The US now incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth, including China, and dumps $80 billion taxpayer dollars into the coffers of a bustling prison industrial complex every year, but law and order doesn't end at the prison gates. The spree in federal legislation that began with Nixon's War on Drugs and peaked with the Clinton Crime Bill that Joe Biden midwifed back when he still had all his marbles, turned American law enforcement into a colossal army of heavily armored goons with near unlimited power and state-of-the-art battlefield technology. There is a word for this, for the wholesale militarization of every facet of civilian society for the purpose of preserving the glory of a failed state. That word is called fascism, and while it may seem like Donald Trump is the only man running for president who is proud of this slur, both parties are thoroughly invested in the American swastika known as law and order. 

Democrats may use white supremacy and January 6 to spook their rubes, but the result is funding the exact same system that curb stomps migrants and Muslims. Fascism isn't really an ideology, it's just a very ceremonial list of excuses to put a collapsing power on life support by using the state to monopolize an unstoppable crimewave. The harsh reality is that whenever an old system collapses beneath the weight of its crimes, shit gets nuts, the streets get wild, but this is a stupid fucking reason to double down on the same system that brought us here.

This may be a little hard for the soccer moms of suburbia to grasp but the best way to fight crime, all crime, is to teach people that they don't need laws to have order, they just need values. The reason for the wave of violent nihilism washing over the country right now is that generations of Americans have been raised to believe that they need powerful people to define their moral integrity. It's a kind of spiritual learned helplessness invented by a powerful minority to infantilize the majority into a state of moral paralysis and once that powerful minority is exposed, there is nowhere left for the amoral majority to go but down. But just like law and order, this perception is nothing but an illusion. It can be broken. Not by voting or passing more laws but by building self-sufficient, autonomous communities that don't require such silly rituals to be decent human beings.

This is how we win, dearest motherfuckers. This is how we kill American fascism without firing a single shot. Live free and let the tyrants shoot themselves. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

* What About Us by Ministry

* Down in the Streets by the Stooges

* Expressway to Yr. Skull by Sonic Youth

* Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix

* Wave of Mutilation by the Pixies

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

* Get Your Gunn by Marilyn Manson

* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones

Embracing the Divine Madness of Multiplicity as a Spiritual Martial Art

 “Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”

-Carl Gustav Jung

My life has become a profoundly surreal landscape over the last several months and the shit just seems to get weirder and weirder. What began as a simple quest to confront the terrifying emotional flashbacks that seemed to increase in both number and intensity with my gender transition has become a downright psychedelic thrill ride to the third circle of my subconscious that I desperately wish I could get off of. Long story short: I made the fateful decision to stare into the rabbit hole and the rabbit hole devoured me whole like an Old Testament sea monster.

Short story long: After decades of attempting to outrun a past riddled with blank spots, disassociation, and outright amnesia, I decided to stop running and confront my demons headlong in polite conversation. I did this through an unorthodox therapy approach known as parts work in which you are encouraged to actually communicate with the voices in your head rather than trying to medicate them. This task went from complicated to downright mind-bending when two of my voices, a traumatized five-year-old girl named Agnes and a fourteen-year-old androgynous gender outlaw named Max, turned out to be full blown individuals complete with thoughts, opinions, grievances, and parts of their own.

The word for this experience is multiplicity, though most people know of the concept as split personalities, a state in which multiple identities share a single body. This state is experienced in a wide variety of ways by a wide variety of people but for me, Max and Agnes mostly exist outside of my body. I don't hallucinate, but I can see them clearly through my mind's eye down to what close they're wearing today, and I can carry out full conversations with them like I would with anyone else. 

This changes when I become triggered by my PTSD. When this occurs, I find myself becoming Max or Agnes and I find myself experiencing the trauma from their perspective, allowing me to recover memories that I have repressed or experiencing old ones which I had disassociated myself from fully feeling and comprehending the first time around.

In the process I have come to believe that both of these girls represent attempts by me to construct a functioning self during my childhood, attempts that collapsed beneath the weight of overwhelming trauma. Agnes was the little girl who attempted to tell the adults in my life that she was not a boy by acting out. When her attempts to reveal herself were met with violence and rejection, and acts of unspeakable systemic sexual abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church followed, she came to the conclusion that it quite simply was not safe to exist, and she made herself disappear, leading me to disassociate from myself entirely for most of my childhood.

Max came out when puberty coincided with the popular farce known as the War on Terrorism. Without possessing any conscious memory of Agnes, Max saw a world in which all the adults afforded with the ability to control her identity were willfully ignorant and morally depraved, cheering on a bloodbath in the Middle East based on obvious lies while the bodies of innocent children stacked up. Max was pissed. Max discovered anarchism and punk rock and for the first time in my memory, I had a voice that was mine and no one else's. 

But once again, the adults insisted on having the final word, accusing me of being a monster and plotting acts of mass violence against other innocent children. They all agreed, the teachers, the parents, and the priests. They were all talking, deciding how I should be dealt with for my indiscretions. It all felt too terrifyingly familiar to comprehend. Max shielded herself behind the persona of a psychotic antihero and disappeared like Agnes. 

Parts work didn't create these girls. They have always been with me. But it did give them the license to exist and define themselves in ways that those fine folks who raised me in the shadow of the Vatican had denied them. They had stories to tell and someone who was finally willing to listen. So, they became permanent, sentient participants in my existence and as insane as this whole experience has been, it has also been incredibly rewarding in the moments that aren't fiendishly horrifying.

Nicky, Max, and Agnes have formed an internal axis devoted to confronting the people who persecuted us and exacting revolutionary revenge against them accordingly. One has become three and these three share the burden of experiencing a past so atrocious that we had to numb ourselves just to survive it. I feel it all now and sometimes it is way too goddamn much, but I don't have to feel it alone. We all take turns being strong. Agnes is obviously the most fragile but there have been many late nights where that child has held me sobbing and shaking while telling me that she will keep me safe from the bad men in white collars.

I have written about much of this before on this forum because writing is the only way that I know how to deal with the world when it becomes impossibly evil. I fully expected these revelations to be a bridge too far even for the whack jobs and dearest motherfuckers of my audience, but the response has actually been downright shocking to say the least. Not only have I received a flood of messages in support and solidarity with my situation, but I have also had many people share incredibly similar experiences both inside and out of parts work. It turns out that in a world riddled with warmongers and pedophile priests, me and my girls aren't alone. Across the planet there are many other strange little internal family systems fighting the good fight too.

Sadly, not all of the responses that I have received have been so inspiring and the worst have actually come from the last people I would have ever expected to receive them from. A number of people diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder; the only form of multiplicity recognized by the mental health establishment, have viciously accused me of appropriating their sacred illness because my experiences aren't DSM approved. 

Heartbreakingly, this has included people very close to me, people I consider family, and their rejection has pushed me to the brink of suicide. Only those two pissed-off little girls in my head have kicked the razor blade from my reach, telling me that we have too many churches to burn before we sleep.

But once again, me and my girls are not alone. There is a thriving and growing online movement of lonely and traumatized kids seeking to divide their identities into multiple personalities in order to cope with a collapsing civilization indifferent to their technologically driven isolation. A community of spiritual psychonauts who call themselves tulpamancers, taking their name from an ancient Tibetan Buddhist technique of achieving enlightenment through multiplicity. 

Much like me, these tulpamancers have been savagely ridiculed by the diagnosed. But why? Unlike most of these kids, I didn't choose my personalities, unspeakable trauma chose them for me. But so what. These people have found a way to achieve self-love and inner peace without having to suffer through years of medical abuse like I did, and I'm supposed to spit on them for it. Fuck that shit. I'm proud of them. 

Speaking as a Queer person, we have a word for this kind of hopped-up oppression Olympics, and it's called gatekeeping. "You can't be Queer because you're not gay enough, you can't be trans because you're not femme enough, you can't be multiple because you're not dissociative enough..."It's all the same shit and it's one big counterrevolutionary trap. 

Every time a new minority succeeds at liberating themselves from the system that oppresses us, that same system tries to assimilate them into their hivemind by rewarding them with trinkets of tolerance like diagnoses in exchange for their service in stepping on the next minority. This is not the point of any kind of truly authentic liberation movement. The point is freedom. The point is turning all identities into voluntary tools of radical individualism. The point isn't joining the majority, it's destroying it with diversity by teaching everyone how to become an autonomous, self-sufficient minority. A million tribes of a billion individuals with a trillion personalities jamming up the matrix with our anarchic parade.

I have come to embrace what others refer to as my mental illness as a kind of spiritual martial art. A way to defend my individuality from the trauma inflicted upon me by the armies of assimilation, be they churches, schools, prisons, or states. I celebrate my madness as a tool for liberation. An ancient weapon wielded for centuries by prophets, monks, and shaman. And I welcome everyone to join me in this splendid mental illness so we can all celebrate our diversity on the grave of an immoral civilization that has long outlived whatever malignant purpose it once had. Let the voices in our heads join like a quire as the old order crumbles and the new disorder is reborn like a phoenix from the ashes.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH/Max & Agnes

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Schizophrenia by Sonic Youth 

* Crazy by Patsy Cline

* Geek USA by Smashing Pumpkins

* My War by Black Flag

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

* Ladies by Fiona Apple

* The Passenger by Iggy Pop

* Ironic by Alanis Morissette

* Cornflake Girl by Tori Amos

* Doll Parts by Hole

* White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground

* Best of You by Foo Fighters

Free Gaza and Free the Donbas Too!

 I quite frequently use this space to lament the untimely demise of the antiwar movement in this country and to wallow shamelessly in the miseries of what could have been. Those of my readers who have gone on to join the ranks of the loyal followers whom I lovingly describe as my very dearest motherfuckers likely know the sermon by heart at this point. The Gospel of Abbie Hoffman... 

The epic tale about a ragtag coalition of Black militants, angry faggots, dope smoking weirdos, and disgruntled GIs who came together in rage, love, and empathy to end Babylon's savage crusade in Indochina with a wild campaign of monkey-wrenching sabotage, campus arson, and fucking in the streets. For just one shining, impossible moment the weird people won, the empire coward in its corner, and everything seemed possible. But then they fired Nixon, put the draft on ice, and brought the troops home, and the movement collapsed. Or has it?

As down and pissed as I get, every once in a while, this nation, long sedated by a toxic casserole of reality television and high-powered prescription narcotics, shows me signs of discontent with their leader's bloodlust abroad. The truth is that this discontent has actually grown more cantankerous than it has been in decades in recent months. But like pretty much everything else good in this country, it has also been tragically bisected by petty partisan bullshit. 

On the left we have seen a sonic upsurge in unprecedented outrage over the Democratic Party's longtime support for Israel's increasingly genocidal policies towards occupied Palestine. While I have long cracked wise and mean about the complacent hipster brats of the nouveau left, what with their creepy Bernie Sanders fetish and their politically correct distractions, these kids have made me downright proud lately with the pure fury of their empathy for the long-silenced people of the Gaza Strip. They have literally shut down parades, engaged the pigs in fist-swinging riots, and relentlessly heckled that old white bastard in the White House with chants of "Genocide Joe!" Abbie would be proud too.

Meanwhile, on the right, a rising tide of conservative populists have similarly drawn the line over America's bipartisan spending frenzy in Ukraine. While Volodymyr Zelensky uses Putin's illegal invasion as an excuse to betray his promises for peace in the Donbas and sends ranks of the forcefully conscripted people who voted for him bring it to die in the trenches, three out of every four Republicans who support that scumfuck Donald Trump also support peace in Ukraine. And the GOP is playing along by holding up aid in congress in exchange for a more inhumane police state on the border. 

And yet, the same young Democrats who are threatening to ruin Genocide Joe's reelection over the bloodbath in Gaza overwhelmingly support the bloodbath in Ukraine and the MAGA mob furious over being mugged to reignite the Cold War seem to have zero problem dumping their wallets out so Benjamin Netanyahu can drop bunker busters on maternity wards in Rafah. It's total fucking madness and it has me ripping my pink hair out by the roots, screaming at both sides that it's all the exact same goddamn thing.

Palestine and the Donbas are both ethnically diverse but culturally distinct regions that have found themselves gift-wrapped and handed over to nations that they never asked to be a part of in the first place. Palestine had long been a barely governed patch of desert on the outskirts of the Ottoman Empire before the British and the Americans stole it and arbitrarily proclaimed it to be a homeland for European migrants. Similarly, the Donbas had been a region of Russia going back to the 1700s before the Bolsheviks made a unilateral decision to make it a part of their new Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1922 only to have Ukraine take it with them when they unilaterally left the Soviet Union in 1992.

While both Gaza and the Donbas have also had their movements for autonomy largely hijacked by imbeciles and monsters, none of that changes the fact that these are both illegally occupied territories fighting for popular autonomy and the crimes of Hamas and Putin do nothing to sanctify the barbarism that America and its heavily armed proxies have reigned down upon their heads. 

In the far less publicized case of the Donbas, I feel compelled to remind my fellow social justice warlords that these people were subjected to a cruel civil war for over seven years before Putin used them as an excuse to sack Kiev. 

After the Donbas defied Putin's own orders and voted to declare independence from Ukraine in 2014 in protest of a blatant NATO overthrow of a president who they overwhelmingly voted for, the new Yankee puppet regime in Kiev placed these people under a crippling blockade and sent openly neo-fascist ethnic extremists to terrorize them under a driving rain of indiscriminate artillery fire, killing over 14,000 people in the process, most of them ethnic Russians. 

Volodymyr Zelensky was actually elected on a promise to end this Russophobic apartheid nightmare and give the Donbas some degree of autonomy, but after being bullied and bought off by NATO and his own ethnic nationalist infiltrated military, Zelensky went back on his word and recommitted his country to forcefully retaking the Donbas in revenge for that region's desperate support for Putin's invasion.

As you can see, most people on both the left and the right only seem to know one half of the story but most of them have also been lured into this bipolar ignorance by a corrupt partisan circus that has turned even actual fucking warfare into just another theater for the culture war. 

While the Jesus freaks on the right have been bamboozled by their Evangelical megachurches into believing that anything less than total capitulation to Zionist slaughter is antisemitism, the DNC's cable intelligentsia has transformed Vladimir Putin from a corrupt neoliberal opportunist into the ringleader of some kind of international crypto-fascist conspiracy that has grown to include everyone from Donald Trump to Black Lives Matter.

Both sides need to snap out of this zombie fugue state and listen to their consciences because these busted pilot lights are both clearly telling them the same damn thing; it is wrong to rob entire regions of their popular autonomy, whether it be granted by God or Allah, and it is worse to slaughter them in mass just so sick fucking creatures on Capitol Hill can sell more bombs for their masters on Wall Street. 

Both parties overwhelmingly support both of these gruesome spectacles, and they are turning what could easily become a viable antiwar movement against itself while they play its peaceniks for dupes. The only viable solution to this con game is to dump these crooks back in their toxic swamp once and for all and join each other back in the streets to demand an end to this madness.

For the love of Abbie Hoffman, wake up dearest motherfuckers and end the massacres in both Europe and the Middle East. Free Gaza and free the Donbass too!

Rage, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Ramblin' Rose by the MC5

* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins

* Down In the Streets by the Stooges

* Teenage Riot by Sonic Youth

* All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix

* Breed by Nirvana

* Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival

* Touch Me I'm Sick by Mudhoney

* Bulldog Front by Fugazi

Confronting The American School System's Perverted Bathroom Police State

 Nex Benedict was kind of a weird kid. I know because the moment that I first learned who Nex was I also knew that we would have been friends. Like Nex, at 16 I was a pissed off metal head with a weird sense of humor and a bad temper who ferociously defended the few outsiders I could count as friends. I was also an androgynous trans kid at a conservative high school who was no stranger to getting my ass kicked simply because I stubbornly refused to bow down to someone else's conventions and thus much like so many other trans people in this country today, I find myself looking at the details of Nex Bennedict's tragic death and saying, "That could have been me."

For those of you who don't know, Nex was a 16-year-old non-binary student at a suburban Oklahoma high school who was murdered for being a Queer kid in the wrong bathroom in a state that has gone out of its way to make that distinction downright dangerous. Nex, who used he/him pronouns, had been brutally bullied for the past year over his and his friends gender identities before the incident even occurred and after standing up for his friends one last time in the girl's bathroom, he was violently assaulted by three older girls who pinned him down and beat him until he blacked out. The school nurse suggested that Nex undergo further medical examination for obvious head injuries, but the school simply sent him home with a two-week suspension for defending himself instead.

Nex's grandmother and adoptive mother, Sue Bennedict, was reasonably incensed by the school's total nonchalance towards an obvious hate crime and took her battered child to a nearby hospital where she also summoned the local police who informed Sue that if Nex filed charges against his attackers he could be expected to be charged as well just for fighting back. They declined and Nex was released. The next day, Nex Benedict collapsed in his home before being rushed back to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. 

The local police department claims that the autopsy results indicate injuries sustained during the beating did not directly lead to Nex's death, but the exact cause of death remains strangely undetermined a month after the incident occurred and everyone who knows anything about Oklahoma's toxic police culture is calling for an independent investigation. While the Federal Government's Education Department has announced their own investigation, I'm not exactly relieved. Oklahoma has been violating the rights of Queer kids for years and the Federal Government has done exactly jack shit about it.

Oklahoma is one of dozens of states across the Bible Belt that has essentially declared open war on kids who refuse to comply with the gender identity on their birth certificates. This war has included laws barring minors from access to gender affirming care proven over the decades to have fewer side effects than antidepressants. This war has included investigating the few parents actually willing to take their children at their word by affirming their gender identity as child abusers. And this war includes barring kids like Nex Bennedict from access to safe bathrooms. 

Oklahoma is one of 11 states that currently bans students from using bathrooms that don't align with their biological sex and Nex's death is precisely the kind of violence that these policies make inevitable. However, the officials behind these policies remain shamelessly unapologetic for the bloodshed. Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent that helped push through his state's bathroom apartheid bill with support from Governor Keven Stiff has been quoted pontificating over Nex Bennedict's dead body that "There's not multiple genders. There's two. That's how God created us." before vowing to "continue to fight for parents and never back down to the woke mob."

And that's about the size of the problem right there. Shitheads like Walters and the lobbyists of the so-called "Parent's Rights Movement" don't give one fuck about the rights of the kids they pretend to protect. They only care about the right for certain parents to police everyone's kids like cattle so they can segregate the normies from the weird kids who might taint them with the perversion of free expression.

Laws like these are aimed at erasing Queer youth by making their existence too unbearable to sustain outside of the closet without a noose around their necks. But once again there is an even bigger issue at play here that I feel is getting lost in the usual partisan shuffle of the culture wars, a question that no one else but me seems to be asking. Why the hell would anyone afford a bunch of poorly trained and virtually unsupervised adult public servants the right to police their children's basic right to use a goddamn toilet? 

Seriously! Let's stop mincing words right here and put it all on the table. We are talking about segregating children based solely on the contents of their genitalia and carefully policing when, where, and how they shit, piss, and bleed, and somehow, I'm the fucking pervert? This is way bigger than gender. This is about the basic right to bodily autonomy. Why should any child have to use a facility where they feel unsafe? Why should any human being be reduced to the humiliating position of having to beg an authority figure for the "privilege" of being able to relieve themselves?

Labor laws state that employers must allow their workers free and unfettered access to bathroom facilities, so why not children? Children's needs derive from the biology of their bodies, and nothing makes them feel less safe than having those needs systemically disregarded. There is a reason why so many adults suffer from anxiety related to public restrooms and it isn't just trans people.

The excuse typically given for the American school systems perverted bathroom police state is the usual rigamarole about law and order. Kids can't be trusted with basic human rights because of smoking or vaping or whatever the fuck the monster of the week happens to be right now but what this really all comes down to is something far more insidious. 

Like most factors of America's compulsory school system, the notion of bathroom privileges is a tool for social engineering and social control. Using the bathroom is a very basic human need like breathing or eating and basic bodily needs are what drives human behavior. Therefore, the ultimate form of social control is to afford only certain designated authority figures with the ability to sustain those bodily needs.

I feel like I shouldn't have to tell people how sick this is. It is precisely this line of thinking that allows children to be so easily abused by adults and it is precisely this line of thinking that allows individuals to be so easily abused by authoritarian institutions. We are quite literally house broken as kids to be good citizens and the "radical gender ideology" of freaky people like me and rebellious kids like Nex Bennedict is a direct threat to this conspiracy because it returns young people to the notion that it's their goddamn body and no one has the right to define it but them.

I'm proud of this ideology and not just because I am a trans person. I'm proud because I am an anarchist, I'm proud because I am a survivor of child abuse, and I'm proud because the people who abused me were authority figures who used heavily policed school bathrooms to get away with it. This whole system belongs in the shitter and kids have the power to flush it.

The solution to the creepy police state that jumped-up Jesus freaks have turned public bathrooms into isn't more laws and regulations. It's unlearning them and teaching young people to do the same. Every single trans bathroom law on the books is totally unenforceable. The money and manpower that it would take to regulate them would bankrupt the whole damn system. 

Like most laws, their power rests largely in the illusion of control. The kind of illusions they need to drive into children at a tender age with fear and humiliation. But kids can take that power back and they can take it back by simply refusing to comply in mass. If everyone decides collectively to use whatever bathroom they need whenever they need to use it, then the whole system collapses into nothing but a tightly coiled pile of meaningless words and edicts spewed from the incontinent holes of asses like Ryan Walters.

I have to believe that Nex would have gotten a kick out of this kind of revenge. I know I would have at his age.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Bullet with Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins

* Rope by Foo Fighters

* Jennifer's Body by Hole

* Outshined by Soundgarden

* Broken Man by St. Vincent

* Hear You Me by Jimmy Eat World

* Dress by PJ Harvey

* Seether by Veruca Salt

* Best of You by Foo Fighters

* Shove by L7

* Get Your Gunn by Marilyn Manson

* The Prisoner by Iron Maiden

The State of Israel Has No Right to Exist and Neither Does the USA

 The state of Israel has no right to exist. I believe that statement to be a fact based purely on the concept of right and wrong, but just try saying it out loud in any corner of this country and you would think that you'd said it on the streets of Tel Aviv. People who can't even find Israel on a map or properly pronounce the word 'antisemitic' call you out as a fucking racist and they do it with Confederate flags on their belt buckles. But I stand by my opening proclamation, and I challenge any sentient being with common sense to look at the history of Israel carefully and truthfully and tell me that there is absolutely anything legitimate about its existence.

Israel was built on a foundation of colonial piracy. In the bloody wake of World War 1 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a bunch of white men in khakis carved up the Middle East into strategically digestible pieces with the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916. The United Kingdom ended up with a diverse and under-regulated little backwater called Palestine. At the time, the largely Sephardim Jewish community in the Holy Land, known as the Yishuv, was in the single digits percentage wise and had zero ambitions of statehood, nor did your average European Jew. 

But the United Kingdom wanted to tame this stateless region, so they teamed up with a tiny Ashkenazi extremist movement that called themselves Zionists to do it. In 1917, the British issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to establish the British Mandate of Palestine as a national homeland for the Jews. Beginning in 1919, they facilitated a dramatic increase in Zionist immigration and between the years of 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population in the British Mandate ballooned from just 9% to nearly 27%, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians in the process.

However, try as they might, the British and their Zionist lackeys still couldn't seem to convince the majority of the Jewish people to get on board with hijacking somebody else's land based on secular misinterpretations of ancient holy books. This only changed when the openly antisemitic Nazis rose to power, uncoincidentally with the full support of the fascists in the Zionist movement who wrote love letters to Hitler and invited Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem while they used the reign of these cowards to herd somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 European Jews into the Mandate between 1933 and 1936. The Palestinians reacted with a bloody revolt that raged for three years until the British finally managed to crush it in 1939. But the Brits got scared. Fearing that they may lose control of the entire experiment, they attempted to pump the breaks on Jewish immigration until they could restore order.

Their Zionist proxies were not pleased and responded by declaring war on their masters, launching a series of bloody terrorist attacks that peaked with the King David Hotel Bombing which killed 91 people in 1946. With their empire already in shambles and their hands full of blood and guts in South Asia, the British finally handed this colonial hand grenade to their heirs in Washington, who used the horrors of the Holocaust and their new toys in the United Nations to give colonialism a veneer of legitimacy. The UN adopted Resolution 181 in 1947, unilaterally recommending the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. When the Palestinians learned that this deal would virtually cut them off from their coastline between Haifa and Jaffa, they violently rejected it, but the dye was already cast. 

With the so-called "international community's" official support and the Jewish community too shellshocked by genocide to resist another committed in their name, Zionist militias like Irgun and the Stern Gang unleashed a tidal wave of ethnic cleansing on the Holy Land between the years of 1947 and 1949 that would become known as the Nakba or the Catastrophe. 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes and at least 15,000 were slaughtered in more than 70 massacres. By the time the dust settled, 530 villages had been erased from the map and 78% of historic Palestine was officially colonized. The remaining 22% was divided into glorified apartheid townships in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And on this graveyard the state of Israel was born.

Upon hearing this uncensored history lesson, provided you can pry their fingers from their ears long enough to hear it, your average Christian Zionist zombie will usually respond by pointing out the striking similarities between this narrative and America's own hideous colonial origin story and ask with a pithy heir of pomposity; "Does the United States have the right to exist?" And on this point, they are absolutely correct. America, after all, was little more than another British experiment in colonial piracy built on what may very well be the two most devastating acts of genocide in recorded history.

The estimated population of people indigenous to what is now recognized as the United States of America stood somewhere between 8 and 15 million before the original Zionists showed up in 1492. By the 19th Century, most of this nation's north had been emptied out of red flesh by routine massacres and biological warfare and it was decided that the refugees who fled to the southeast would be dealt with in a much more orderly and systematic fashion. 

The white male landowners of Capitol Hill passed their own Nakba with the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and President Andrew Jackson, America's answer to David Ben-Gurion, spent the better part of the next decade forcing an estimated 100,000 Native Americans from 18 tribes to the desolate West Bank of Oklahoma where they would be confined to reservations surrounded by illegal settlers and military installations and left to rot in poverty. By 1900, America's indigenous population dwindled at around 237,000. The math isn't hard to do but the numbers are impossible not to choke on. Several Holocausts went into turning America into the original Israel. This includes the tens of millions of Africans slaughtered in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. 

With these shockingly true horror stories in mind, it's really little wonder why so many Americans are proud and unapologetic Zionists, our nation served as their blueprint. I guess a better question is how it's even possible that so many avowed anti-Zionists on this illegally occupied soil remain proud if annoyingly apologetic Americans. How can any morally dignified human being chant the words "from the nation to the sea..." and then head straight for the ballot box to validate the nation that outsourced the Nakba to Middle East by voting to fill a government that has no more legitimacy than the one in Tel Aviv?

This is why I am an anarchist as well as an anti-Zionist and this is why I proudly stand by the accusation made by so many Zionists that anti-Zionism is synonymous with anti-Americanism. They are absolutely right. The state itself, as it is currently defined, is a European colonialist construct designed for conquest. The notion that such a device could ever be rehabilitated for anything less than heinous is almost hysterically ludicrous and the proof is in the history. 

America's rampage didn't end in Indian Country. Manifest Destiny continues to expand to every corner of the globe with a trail of bodies in its wake to this day. The only reason why the Nakba never ended in the Holy Land is because the Nakba never ended in the Promised Land. Without Washington's full and unconditional support, the current massacre raging in Gaza would grind to a screeching halt. In other words, America doesn't have an Israel problem, the whole fucking planet has an America problem. Israel is just a symptom.

It is high time for American radicals of every political stripe to take off the blinders and recognize that what rests comfortably in Washington is a globalist Yankee Occupied Government that we can no longer afford to legitimize, not with our votes, not with our tax dollars, and certainly not with our petty fucking excuses. The Palestinians will only be free from the river to the sea once we dispatch the beast that resides between sea to shining sea. Because no state has the right to exist, and the ones built on genocide need to go first.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Soul to Squeeze by Red Hot Chili Peppers

* Broken Man by St. Vincent

* Territorial Pissings by Nirvana

* Atom Bomb by Bully

* Testify by Rage Against the Machine

* The Glorious Land by PJ Harvey

* Caught a Light Sneeze by Tori Amos

* Ruined by Adrianne Lenker

* The Land of Rape and Honey by Ministry

* Pretend We're Dead by L7

This post is dedicated in loving memory to Nex Bennedict, a young, non-binary, indigenous person taken too soon from the guts of Indian Country for refusing to go down without a fight. May all those who have seen their light carry their spirit of resistance forward into the darkness.