Category Archives: Culture Wars/Current Controversies

Sorry Lefties, Your Impeachment is Bullshit 1

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

The ongoing impeachment of one Donald J. Trump is bullshit. There, I said it and I’ll say it again just to make sure you heard me right. This impeachment is fucking bullshit, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise. I don’t care if this makes me a bad leftist or a bad libertarian or whatever, its the stone cold honest truth and I stand by it.

The left has poured so much of their identity into apposing Trump for the very sake of apposing Trump that they’ve lost all touch with reality. Their entire identity has become as defined by this moronic ass-wipe as his unblinking supporters. The Resistance has become a mirror image of what they despise, a pack of hyperventilating paranoid deplorables who have lost themselves 5 miles up their own asshole after crashing the Hybrid in their own fucking shit. They’re a bunch of inconsolable babies and they desperately need a good slap on the ass to clear their throats.

This isn’t to say I’m defending Trump. Not by a long shot. If it were up to me, he’d be in shackles at the Hague, answering for the cold-blooded murder of little Nora al-Awlaki and his putrid children’s concentration camps on the border. Trump can burn in hell. What I hate is this Ukrainegate nonsense. Just like Russiagate, it’s little more than a hodgepodge of rumors and second-hand gossip being trafficked by the only class of people more deplorable than Trump. What’s worse is that the entire spectacle is so obviously a complete and total farce designed to self-destruct just in time for that other complete and total farce known as the 2020 Election.

The Democrats know full well that this media circus will die on the vine once it reaches the GOP packed Senate, but they also know that it will drive the campaign conversation away from anything mildly resembling the radical change that their loverboys Joe Biden and Mayor Pete have zero intention of delivering on, while keeping the irate electorate distracted by empty partisan shit-slinging. This suits Trump just fine as well. He gets to play the anti-authoritarian martyr that Middle America relates too, even while he robs them blind and sends their sons and daughters to die in a dusty oilfield.

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"Liberal CIA" and New Left Foundations, Media, and Activist Groups Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right

The involvement of the CIA and other state security services in the US Left is a topic that is all-too-frequently ignored. This would certainly explain why so many “left-wing” and “anarchist” groups in the US take positions that amount to anarcho-Democratic Partyism, anarcho-MSNBCism, or anarcho-State Departmentism.

By Joel van der Reijen

NGO Study Center

Image result for congress of cultural freedom

An interesting collection of articles and links.

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Why Hate Speech Laws, Gun Control, and Vigilantism Will Not Prevent Fascism 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right

On the free speech question, it’s interesting to consider that the Weimar Republic actually had hate speech laws, along with stricter laws against obscenity and libel than what is the norm in most Western countries today. Weimar also had gun control laws, along with anti-fascist vigilantes that were regularly engaged in not only brawls but also gangland-like shootouts with the NSDAP-affiliated groups. Both the KPD and the SPD had their own private military armies just like the brownshirts, and the KPD was receiving support from the Soviet Union. None of that prevented the Nazi coup. As the CATO Institute explains:

“In my research, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic and found that, contrary to what most people think, Germany did have hate-speech laws that were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis, including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher, were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. And rather than deterring them, the many court cases served as effective pubicrelations machinery for the Nazis, affording them a level of attention that they never would have received in a climate of a free and open debate.

In the decade from 1923 to 1933, the Nazi propaganda magazine Der Stürmer — of which Streicher was the executive publisher — was confiscated or had its editors taken to court no fewer than 36 times. The more charges Streicher faced, the more the admiration of his supporters grew. In fact, the courts became an important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews.

Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation, points out that cases were regularly brought against individuals on account of anti-Semitic speech in the years leading up to Hitler’s takeover of power in 1933. “Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law,” he writes. “Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech… As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.”

The maintenance of civil society, the vigorous defense of all civil liberties across the board (the ones outlined in the Bill of Rights and beyond), maintenance of a social and cultural consensus in favor of at least some bare minimum of democratic, libertarian, or egalitarian values, sanctioning those who engage in political violence (whatever their ideology) is the best way to prevent totalitarian/authoritarian groups (right, left, religious) from gaining genuine political power.

Communism, Open Borders, and Natural Law Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration, Left and Right

By Libertarian Heathen

Libertarianism is Natural Law Enshrined In Politics

I have a variety of people on the social media pages associated with this website. I generally do not ban contrarians as they provide fodder for good debate.

Most Libertarians/Conservatives have encountered a common fallacy offerred by Marxists who still cling to the idea “Communism would work if it was only done right” or “There was never actual Communism”. The argument is made in varying forms, but this is the essential premise.

Here is a recent example from Facebook:

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“What About the Children?!”: Youth Rights Before Parental Police States Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

What about the children?!” Some haggard disembodied voice wails from my flickering TV set, jerking me awake from the Ambien-grade slumber that any more than 15 minutes of C-Span inevitably delivers. It’s happened a thousand times before. The voice almost always belongs to some sobbing middle-aged white woman, overdressed like June Cleaver for some senate hearing on the dangers of one victimless crime or another, online prostitution or E-cigarettes or satanic Portuguese techno, always something new, always something to be terrified of. Part of me feels for the woman, I really do. She’s usually lost a child to something or other. She’s clearly in pain. But another disgraceful part of me wants to tell her to shut the fuck up and take some goddamn responsibility for your own life. Because, beneath the theatrics, 9 times out of 10, this pearl-clutching stock character is really saying “I couldn’t find the time to parent my dead child, so now the police state has to pick up the slack!” And the Wall Street whores of Washington take their cue and start passing more pointless legislation.

I know, I know, I’m a cunt. In today’s era of 24/7 stage 4 late capitalism, many parents are too busy working 80 shifts for peanuts to so much as even check in on their kids. But the wailing woman on C-Span is rarely a blue collar casualty. She and her ilk, who fill the ranks of an endless barrage of parental guilt trip lobbies like MADD are almost always well connected, upper middle class, office drones, who’s kids dropped dead while they were busy paying off the Beamer or banging the European tennis instructor. And now they’re busy boycotting Juul or Marilyn Manson or whatever suburbia’s chosen monster of the week happens to be, while the rest of their brood are at home with some over medicated nanny, experimenting with dryer sheets or some such nonsense. This army of rambling soccer moms call themselves children’s rights advocates and “What about the children?!” is the manic war cry they shout just before decapitating your, as well as their own damn children’s rights.

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Trump’s impeachment inquiry may help his re-election campaign Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism • Tags:

Press TV. Listen here.

The rapidly escalating impeachment inquiry against US President Donald Trump may backfire and increase the Republican president’s chances of getting re-elected in 2020, says an American political analyst in Virginia.

Staunch Democrats “want to get rid of Trump by any means they can” but are “concerned that if Trump is impeached, that may have the effect of rallying his base, which may actually help him win re-election next year and discredit the Democratic candidate,” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

“There are some people who really dislike the president and just want him out of office, period, but there are other people who see this as a safety valve; they think that perhaps he won’t actually be impeached but this will have the effect of strengthening his base and strengthening his re-election potential, ” Preston told Press TV.

Democrats in the US House of Representatives launched an impeachment inquiry in September after an unidentified whistleblower alleged Trump had unlawfully used his office to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former US Vice President Joe Biden, a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

The rapidly escalating impeachment inquiry against Trump is the latest and perhaps most serious threat to his presidency, and the White House is failing to contain the crisis.

On Friday, House Democratic lawmakers demanded that the White House provide documents related to allegations that Trump pressured Ukraine for political favors.

PressTV-Democrats subpoena White House in impeachment probe

PressTV-Democrats subpoena White House in impeachment probeHouse Democrats issued a subpoena to the White House Friday evening for documents relating to the President Donald Trump’s contact with Ukraine.

During a July 25 call, Trump asked Zelenskiy to speak with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani about whether Ukrainian officials improperly dropped an investigation of a company that hired Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

Trump’s aggressive new strategy to thwart the Democrats’ impeachment offensive is already breaking down under the weight of new revelations.

Text messages released on Thursday between US diplomats and a senior Ukrainian aide reveal that Zelensky was told he should open an investigation against Biden if he wanted an invitation to visit Washington.

The Conscience of a Contrarian Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Some months are harder than others to be a poorly trained anarcho-gonzo visionary. During these last couple months of the hellishly hot post-apocalyptic summer of this year of our lord Xenu, twenty-hundred-and-nineteen, I couldn’t seem to write a blog post that didn’t smack one class of my dearest motherfuckers or another across the face like a goddamn dead cat. I attempt to make an argument that Ilhan Omar voters and Tucker Carlson viewers have far more in common in the realm of war and peace than they do with any carcinogenic class of moderates in their own parties and the leftists act like I’m some kind of crypto-fascist Rudolf Hess apologist. The very next month, I make an argument that the white race is little more than a violent social construct that does a grave injustice to all poor people and the same paleos who applauded my daring and seemed primed to declare me their genderfuck Phyllis Schlafly last month are taking their turn tying the fucking noose. I just can’t win with you people. It’s not every month that you manage to piss off people you admire on both ends of the aisle, but what can I say? I’m a regular Renaissance bitch.

It’s months like these that I get saddled by my friends on both the left and the right with the dreaded C-word, and I ain’t talkin bout See-You-Next-Tuesday. The word reserved for cantankerous ideological perverts like me is contrarian. Such a universally reviled slur, but what the hell does it actually mean. The popular consensus among the mainstream politicos is that a contrarian is simply a childish rebel who picks confrontational opinions based largely on their radical cache or lack of popularity among the scions of the centrist wonkgeist. A contrarian zigs when the rest of the country zags. A contrarian picks fights just for cheap kicks and the verbal exercise.

And I’ll own up to some of this. I’ve always been a rebel, distrustful of any and all authority, I mean, shit, I’m a lapsed Irish Catholic raised on punk rock and cowboy movies, it’s practically in my fucking DNA. But the fact that this distinction is seen as some kind of vice is just proof positive to me of how far down that proverbial rabbit hole our nation’s special genre of bipolar bipartisanship has taken us. To your average partisan American dupe, a contrarian is essentially someone who refuses to comply with our toxic left-right paradigm. A leftist who refuses to blindly back Russiagate just because they recognize the well established fact that Trump sits somewhere on the psycho branch of the anti-social personality tree. Or a conservative who doesn’t require endless war or organized fag-bashing to satiate his or her own personal biblical philosophy.

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Rope-A-Dope: How Red Flag Laws Will Eliminate Us Both 5

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Police State/Civil Liberties • Tags: ,

By Natasha Maria

An awful tragedy occurs, a shooting, a riot, a brawl, and as usual we hear the immediate cry, “Won’t the government do something to stop this?”

Yes, yes it will, in fact it wants you to beg them to.

Whether it be a mass shooting, or a riot in the streets, both are symptoms of a dysfunctional and neurotic society. The causes of such are deserving of multiple papers and discussions. The response though…that is the rub these days, that is what we must reassess.

-To the Right-

Whether an innocent journalist gets beat down, stores get windows broken, or a man gets a metal lock to the skull, the right are quick to call Antifa a ‘terrorist organization’. This is inconvenient for me I assure you. I consider myself to the right, and have done my fair share of talking smack about Antifa and enjoying their many failures. Nonetheless, the right must put their partisan anger aside and look at the bigger picture. Supporting legally categorizing Antifa as a ‘terrorist organization’ is not just shooting yourself in the foot, it is sawing off your whole leg. Of course Trump and the GOP support this, whipping the right into a frenzy, ‘do something to stop these masked thugs!’ Yes, do something alright, place yourself into a circular firing squad, having your enemy shot and you along with him.

-To the Left-

Let’s complete the circle. Mass shootings are horrific and unacceptable. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the myriad of possible things that could be done to prevent or remedy what is causing this psychotic malfunction in society. Many of the shooters have had ‘manifestos’ which have espoused half-done White Nationalist-like thought. Again, Democrats and their constingency cry, “White Nationalism is the new terrorist threat!” And again, people are whipped into a frenzy, preaching that these dissident rightists must be labeled a ‘terrorist organization’ and handled as such. The latest, and most threatening development from this, is the idea of a ‘Red Flag Law’.

How vague, how flexible, how convenient. A man deported over ‘anti-American’ social media posts, or another jailed for social media posts that sounded ‘threatening’. Under such type laws, left or right, dissidence will be deemed a threat to the establishment, categorized as terrorism, and swiftly eliminated. It’s definition of dissidence will be flexible, and why shouldn’t it be? Both left and right have supported this flexibility.

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The “Who’s Most Oppressed?” Pissing Contest Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies
No photo description available.

I would emphasize two main points with this stuff. First, it needs to be recognized that capitalism, communism, and fascism are merely different points on the same triangle, whichever one of these one happens to view the most favorably. Second, the red/blue left/right cultural civil war is a matter of localized conflicts between localized tribes, whichever tribe one belongs to and whichever sides one prefers.

There are many different philosophies, movements, cultures, ideologies, and historical currents that are compatible with, overlap with, or resemble anarchist ideas. There are plenty of what I call “people of the anarchist book” anarchists, “doctrine of the anonymous anarchist” anarchists, or situational/tactical anarchists. Also, fairly significant actual anarchist movements have existed in some surprising places like Russia, China, and Korea in spite of the autocratic traditions of those places.

The main two things I’m interested in are voluntaryism and scale. The larger states become, the larger the populations they dominate, the more imperialistic they become (depending on a variety of factors like wealth and technology). In a post-globalization world, a PC social democratic micronation like Iceland, a communist island like Cuba, or a fascist city-state like Singapore would be acceptable or least tolerable. But we wouldn’t want any of these to become the EU or the modern USA, the USSR, or the Third Reich.

American elite divided over US-China economic ties Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations

Press TV. Listen here.

The American elite are divided over what the economic relationship between the United States and China should be like, says a political analyst.

Keith Preston made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Saturday when asked about President Donald Trump’s furious reaction after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had warned the trade war with China was a risk to the US economy.

In a furious flurry of tweets on Friday, Trump attacked the Powell’s stewardship of the world’s biggest economy.

“As usual, the Fed did NOTHING! It is incredible that they can ‘speak’ without knowing or asking what I am doing, which will be announced shortly,” Trump wrote on Twitter.

“We have a very strong dollar and a very weak Fed. I will work ‘brilliantly’ with both, and the US will do great,” he added.

“My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?”

Preston said, “There is a split within the American elite, within the American economic and political elite over the question of what the economic relationship between the United States and China ought to be.”

“It’s clear that the Trump administration represents a vein of the American elite that do view China as a primary enemy and wish to take a more hawkish position towards China when it comes to things like tariffs and trade and those kinds of issues, economic relationships and also military relationships as well.” 

“On the other hand, there are other sections that the American elite that are very concerned about maintaining a trade relationship that currently exists between the United States and China, they do not want anything to disrupt that,” he added.

Trump lashed out at China on Friday, vowing a quick response to China’s announcement of new tariffs and ordering US companies to leave the country.

The attack came after China announced earlier on Friday it would impose new tariffs on US soybeans, lobsters, peanut butter and other imports worth $75 billion in retaliation for Washington’s latest round of punitive duties that take effect in two rounds, September 1 and December 15.

The United States will raise existing tariffs on $250 billion in Chinese imports to 30 percent from 25 percent, beginning on October 1, Trump said on Twitter Friday.

PressTV-US to hike existing, planned tariffs on Chinese imports

PressTV-US to hike existing, planned tariffs on Chinese importsPresident Trump says the US will hike tariff rates on most imports from China in retaliation for Beijing’s new duties on American goods.

He added that the duties on another $300 billion in Chinese products, set to take effect on September 1, will be increased by 5 percent, reaching 15 percent.

Why I Stopped Being White (and You Should Too) 9

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Race and Ethnicity • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Race is a touchy subject in the West. People across the aisle, especially white folk, tend to avoid it like a plague. A big part of the reason behind this reservation has to do with the fact that both the left and the right maintain an equally immature grasp on the subject. While the right seems to be convinced that race is some kind of scientific fact like a species of bird, the left seems to view it as an inescapable historical prison sentence with no hope for escape. Like usual, the left is wrong and the right is way fucking wrong. There is nothing scientific or permanent about race. It is a social construct as fluid in nature as gender or sexuality, and it is constantly evolving. Almost every known race was created by a collision of former races that have ceased to exist. About the only thing that the clueless class in the left-right paradigm gets right is that the white race is a very unique creature, and a dangerous one.

The white race is unique in that it is the first defining race of the imperial era and modern day imperialism defines its very existence. The Western Europeans designed the concept of whiteness to justify their expanse and enslavement of the New World and it’s dark skinned cousins across the Global South. As the insatiable nature of capitalism demanded endless expansion, it’s moneyed mandarins required the creation of a new super-class to rationalize the enslavement of the darker nations. This concept became even more necessary with American independence and the fall of monarchism.

This new white aristocracy replaced the royal bloodline and shaped the very nature of the planet’s economic ecosystem. The First World was created with the excess wealth pillaged from the Third World, and it’s subjects soon became victims of new races invented to further empower the white race. The colored races of black and Latino were constructed to both consolidate white supremacy’s ill-gotten gains and to rob the many tribes that made up these racial monoliths of color of their diverse indigenous cultures. The white race is unique, not simply by the Machiavellian nature of its design, but by the necessity of its supremacy over other similarly constructed mass races to justify its very existence. But like most imperial schemes, white supremacy backfired.

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I Was a Red Flag Kid 5

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Middle school sucks for everybody. But its harder for some people than others. After nearly a decade at a small, conservative, K-8 Catholic school, I was beginning to chafe beneath the cross of my mental illness. I had suffered from depression and anxiety since early childhood but as I entered the maelstrom of my teens, these issues became too turbulent to conceal. I didn’t feel like the other kids and my awkward individuality felt far from welcome among the pious adults. Even beyond my ability to cope with the basic everyday stress of being an active human being, I felt strange and detached from what passed as normal in this stifling environment. My body felt like a mistake and I couldn’t shake the fear that these feelings were evil. I had never heard of words like transgender or genderfluid. This was the Nineties and the only people who looked the way I felt were Dennis Rodman and Marilyn Manson, and the generally excepted wisdom at my church was that these freaks were going to hell, and so was I.

I was terrified. Terrified of myself. Terrified that if I ever let people in, that if people ever really truly saw me, they would either burn me at the stake or run screaming for the hills. So I retreated and found ways to cope. I lost most of my friends but I found shards of myself through the awesome power of punk rock music and radical politics. George W. Bush dropped bombs on Baghdad when I was in 8th grade and the very next day I came to school with a peace sign strapped to my arm. In early post-9/11 middle America, this mild gesture of resistance was tantamount to burning a pentagram in your forehead and declaring allegiance to Al-Qaeda.

I spent the proceeding weeks and months engaging in all out verbal combat with nearly every student and teacher I crossed. It was exhausting, but for the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t scared, I was proud. I had declared my independence from “normal” and stood my ground and it felt empowering. So I dressed in all black, stopped standing for the pledge of allegiance and gave up on trying to please the normal people who occupied my life. I decorated my backpack with badges emblazoned with the portraits of my new saints; Kurt Cobain, Che Guevara and Joey Ramone. Then the wolves came in and normal bit back.

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Who’s Afraid of Tulsi Gabbard? Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Elections are different for anarchists. We’ve already made our peace with the basic fact that representative democracy is a sham even when it’s not rigged by moneyed oligarchs. So when we do actually take part in the process, it’s usually for purposes of propaganda and/or Machiavellian strategy. One thing Trump was right about is the influence of the deep state, though it’s hardly the shadowy coalition of dope smoking lesbian Bolsheviks the Alex Jones-set imagines them to be (I wish.) Rather, they’re more of a loose coalition of rich old white men who travel back and forth between unelected positions in the federal government and the numerous industrial complexes of the Fortune 500. At the risk of sounding like a member of the tinfoil hat brigade, these are the people who really run this country. Elections, especially at the presidential level, are largely just theater, a glorified reality TV show designed to feed the masses the illusion of living in a democratic society beneath the steel boot of a rapidly decomposing empire.

I personally subscribe to the Murray Rothbard philosophy on elections, which basically goes that since the state is defined by it’s monopoly on the use of force, the best we the people can do when we’re not loading rifles is to support the most antiwar candidate available. To me, this school of thought is made doubly relevant by the fact that theoretically the only thing the president has direct authority over is the armed forces. To say that this philosophy has brought me to some strange places is an understatement. I have personally changed political parties no fewer than three times and counting. And I’ve found myself openly backing everyone from Jurassic goldbugs like Ron Paul to New Age hippie vaxxers like Jill Stein (who’s 2016 campaign sticker continues to haunt Hillaryites from the bumper of my Ford Taurus.)

The DNC’s bottomless clown car of milquetoast morons doesn’t exactly provide a lot of options for the Rothbardian voter. Most of the candidates seem to come from the Oprah School of social democracy, chumming debt besodden millennials with the promise of an endless procession of free shit, payed through taxing super-villains without offering to cut a single missile. The only solidly antiwar candidate was 89 year old former senator Mike Gravel, but since Mike has called it quits after essentially being banned from Cable TV and screwed out of his rightful place in the latest debates, that only leaves contrarian powder-keg, Tulsi Gabbard.

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