Dear Orange Man Bad: An Open Letter From the Enemy of Your Enemy ^Reply

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Well, winter is coming with a vengeance and I’m guessing that you’re feeling pretty bummed. I’ve noticed the dayglo orange has drained from your cheeks and your once histrionic tirades have taken on all the petty melodrama of a garden variety adolescent hissy fit. And who could blame you? After months of some of the finest race baiting since Willie Horton danced with the devil in the pale moonlight, after what felt like years of a vast Soros funded conspiracy of Black lesbian Bolsheviks and fire breathing Mau Mau flag desecrators coming to put their filthy Marxist fingers all over a daughter near you, even the excitable suburban soccer moms have agreed that they’d rather spend the next four years with a disintegrating fossil like Biden than the next four minutes with you. Tough blow motherfucker! And usually that would be all I have left to say to a glorified chatroom troll getting his comeuppance but, believe it or not, the two of us have something in common and I think it might just be something worth looking into.

November 15, 2020

Why Artsakh Still Matters to American Anarchism ^Reply

by Keith Preston • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

The news broke like a fever last Monday night. A deal had been signed by Armenia and Azerbaijan to end the bloody month long war in Nagorno-Karabakh which had claimed the lives of thousands on both sides. This is a good thing right? How could any peace be bad? But something felt all wrong about this one. Armenia’s Prime Minister announced the deal on Facebook before adding that said deal was “unbelievably painful for me and our people.” The response of those Armenian people back in Yerevan was equally pained but somewhat less somber. They rioted and stormed the buildings of their government peacemakers, demanding their resignation for treason. That’s because this was not a peace deal made between equal sides on an even playing ground. It was a hostage situation with one side, Azerbaijan’s side, armed to the teeth and openly backed by some of the most powerful and merciless militaries in the world, who helped that nasty little gas station threaten the impoverished Armenians to concede to the demands of their tormentors on nothing short of the pains of genocide.

The Nagorno-Karabakh region had already been affectively ethnically cleansed. It’s ethnic Armenian population cut in two with 90,000 of their 150,000 citizens in exile as refugees back in mainland Armenia. Shushi, the region’s second largest city, had just been captured and a Second Armenian Genocide seemed terrifyingly imminent. What’s more, a major player in this bloody conflict was oddly absent from the deal. The Armenian Government was poorly represented along with the Russians who had failed miserably to defend their allies. The viciously racist regime of Azerbaijan was there with their neo-Ottoman Turkish puppet masters. But what of the Republic of Artsakh? The autonomous nation they were supposedly fighting over. They were nowhere to be found. Apparently their opinion on their own fate was irrelevant to the masters of the universe, even though it was their republic being ransacked and sold off to foreign “peacekeepers.”

November 8, 2020

Trump Has Made the Left Fucking Stupid ⁴

by Keith Preston • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Donald Trump has made the American left fucking stupid. I honestly can’t think of a more eloquent way to put it than that. In one of histories most vicious ironies, the greatest legacy of Orange Man Bad may be that he drop kicked his enemies IQ in half to match his own. Like a Reddit troll, the Donald dared the left to overreact and then nailed them for taking the bait. The mainstream left has never fully recovered from the Reagan Revolution. They had the opportunity to take the grass roots infrastructure of McGovern and the Antiwar Movement and pivot to its natural successor, Ralph Nader, but they chose to go another way with it instead and ended up giving the Democratic Party back to the right with the Clinton Regime.

Your regular rank and file Democrat has never been more hysterically unhinged than they are right now on the cusp of a Biden victory. Their response to an unthinkable Trump presidency has been a binge on Russophobic Cold War paranoia and an open armed embrace of the psychotic neocons in the “Intelligence Community,” who saw Trump as merely a threat to brand marketability. Your average garden variety leftist now sounds like a politically correct Joe McCarthy, out to deplatform anybody who smells like borsch and questions the omnipotence of their geriatric savior-elect. Sadly, even the far left doesn’t seem too far behind the caboose of this crazy train.

We’ve seen this recently with the exile of two of America’s last great left-wing journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, to the social media outback of Substack. Both of these gentlemen were goddamn rock stars during the Bush era and rightfully so, but after just four short years of Trump hysteria they’ve gone from A-list muckrakers to persona non grata for the unforgivable crime of bringing up the unpleasant fact that Russiagate was a totally baseless farce cooked up by the same clowns who sold us the Iraq War. Greenwald has gone so far as to abandon the bottomless billionaire piggy bank he helped build known as The Intercept after it’s editors violated his contract and refused to publish a piece for observing another unpleasant fact, that Joe Biden’s son is an errant scumfuck. The left, even the far left, have responded to this blow by shrugging and saying, “Well, he talks to Tucker Carlson so he can suck it.” This is the motherfucker who helped break the biggest story since Watergate with Edward Snowden, but he talks to Tucker Carlson so he can fucking suck it.

November 1, 2020

Democracy as Mental Illness: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Cross 2020 ^Reply

by Keith Preston • American Decline, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

It’s early November in the dark heart of my Rust Belt swing state and I am getting dangerously close to the end of a very short rope. Or maybe it’s a lit fuse. Attached to a dangerously explosive skull. Either way it’s burning and I find myself in desperate need of drugs. Hard drugs. Schedule IV narcotics. Name brand benzodiazepines. I’m talking Valium, Xanax, Halcion, Ativan, Klonopin, Rohypnal. The kind of Halloween candy they feed senator’s wives after they’ve learned about the fourth underage mistress. That’s the good stuff. That’s my poison. Two or three weirdly shaped elephant pills and I’m fucking sailing over mountains and valleys. To some corner of this fucked up country where that incessant swarm of super PAC fueled adds can’t fucking find me. That’s what I need now. Where the fuck did I put my pills? Take me away, Joey Ramone. I wanna be sedated.

I haven’t felt this unhinged and desperate for oblivion since the first weeks of the lockdown and that shit was kid stuff compared to the last weeks of the 2020 presidential abortion. The most important election of my life, I’m told. I’ve been sold that bill of goods every four years for the entirety of my short and painful life and it’s beginning to ring a bit hollow. Then again, there does seem to be something extra special about this years campaign season. It’s never felt more unhinged. Both sides have adopted the tactics of the Manson Family to get their chosen mentally depraved scion of scumfuckery in the White House. Scrawling their names in blood across suburban doorways with subtle threats to take back America and make it heinous again. I’m starting to believe them. I can feel the fear and loathing closing in.

October 25, 2020

More Scary Movies for Anarchists to Watch in the Dark ^Reply

by Keith Preston • Anarchism/Anti-State, Arts & Entertainment • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

It has been one supremely horrific year since I wrote the virgin instillation of this list last October, what with apocalyptic plagues, dystopian police death squads, and collapsing empires. In many ways life has come to resemble many of the movies on it. Some might argue that horror movies are gratuitous at this point, I mean, haven’t we had enough? No, dearest motherfuckers, not by a longshot. The fact that everyday life has come to resemble a George Romero flick is just proof of his unsung brilliance. No genre in cinema gets dumped on like horror movies. Yet no genre of cinema is more stunningly prophetic. That’s because horror movies, good horror movies anyway, are perfect vehicles for social commentary. They seek to illuminate that which makes us uncomfortable and force us to actually fucking deal with it. And that is what 2020 needs now more than ever. We realize that we’re living in a goddamn zombie apocalypse, but how do we deal with it? That is the ultimate question that anarchists wrestle with. How do we create a new society amidst the collapse of the old? And that’s also what great horror movies strive to figure out.

So I made another goddamn list. A dozen more scary movies for anarchists to watch in the dark, and it’s as eccentric and idiosyncratic as the last. I have a love for both foreign arthouse shockers and overlooked grindhouse pulp. They both take the necessary measures to punish the audience into thinking about shit that scares them. Like last time, many movies on the list are not horror movies in the traditional sense, but they are all movies that seek to terrify their audience into challenging authoritarian institutions. Spoiler alerts abound. Read at your own risk.

October 18, 2020

Gretchen Whitmer Goes Boogaloo Catfishing ^Reply

by Keith Preston • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

The news broke like something straight out of a cheesy 90s blockbuster. Whisked away to an undisclosed location, we were greeted in primetime by the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, like a heavily Botoxed Bill Pullman commanding the troops. With the shades drawn and the lights low, she carefully but forcefully wove us a harrowing narrative. She and her family, now in hiding, were the unwitting victims of an elaborate plot by crazed neo-Nazi militiamen to kidnap the brave governor and try her for crimes against liberty before an armed civilian court. At least a dozen men were in on the plot and it was all Donald Trump’s fault for inspiring them to “Liberate Michigan” with his saucy social media banter and his blasé “Stand by and stand down” public demeanor. The bad men had been wrestled into submission for now by the selfless deeds of the brave men and women of the Federal Bureau of Investigations. But for how long? How long would it be before more came to attack the figureheads of our precious democratic institutions? How long before the dreaded Boogaloo?

As at it turns out, as compelling as this carefully constructed network TV narrative was, there were more than a few things wrong with it that haven’t been brought to the cable news watching public’s attention. The primary one being that it was largely bullshit. Madame Whitmer’s command performance as a humble public servant addressing a nation under fire was as badly scripted as the daytime soaps she interrupted. The governor was never in any real danger and she had been kept abreast of the details of the investigation for weeks if not months, being secretly shuttled about by the feds from secure location to secure location accordingly.

October 11, 2020

AMERIKA!: The Horror Story ^Reply

by Keith Preston • American Decline, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

No one seems to be quite sure where this creature first lurked from. What foul crypt lays claim to the title of the beast’s cradle? Most trembling fingers point towards Europe, to the land of Caligula and Vlad Tepes. In a haunted stammer they say Rome, Athens, London. But there is evidence of it’s existence going back thousands of years and stretching from the peaks of the Andes to the shores of the Orient. Perhaps it has always been with us. Perhaps it clawed its way from the loins of our darkest nightmares. From the fevered visions of landless peasants who in their weakness starved and thirsted for unspeakable power. A thousand whispers screaming ‘more’ like a howling wind. We may never know, and if we did, we may very well wish we hadn’t. But regardless of the womb of such a wicked force for human havoc, whether it gestated beneath the English thrown or nursed itself upon Vatican wine, its name stands tall and unobscured. The beast called Imperialism. It’s shadow stretches across the entirety of this savage planet. But today it stands tallest, perhaps taller than it ever has before, upon the shoulders of purple mountains majesty and the graves of Wounded Knee. Today, imperialism is pronounced AMERIKA!

October 4, 2020

Joe Biden, Multiple Miggs, and the Horrors of Lesser Evilism ¹

by Keith Preston • American Decline, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

As surely as the moon wanes and the dead leaves tumble, once every fourth October, it becomes downright chilling to be an American. That’s because every four years, like clockwork, Americans prove every flamboyant third world boogeyman we’ve ever high roaded right by openly flaunting our casual embrace of evil in the highest echelons of imperial power. I speak of course of the autumnal American tradition of choosing the lesser of two evils from this foul nation’s two-party oligarchy to run our horror show of a globalist menace. I feel like I talk about this subject a lot, but I never feel like I talk about it enough. That’s because words consistently fail to express how uniquely revolting I find this twisted mindset to be. The lesser of two evils. The lesser evil. Nothing exposes the cruel charade of liberal democracy like the fact that what is commonly excepted by the general public to be our most cherished democratic right is commonly excepted by that same general public as a choice to openly consent to nothing less heinous than pure evil.

I don’t feel like I’m being hyperbolic here and I don’t see the concept of the lesser evil as being merely symbolic. We are literally advocating choosing evil. One has to look no further than any two major party candidates in the last century. Hell, one has to look no further than Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

September 27, 2020

A Marxist Joins the Libertarian Party ^Reply

by Keith Preston • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nick Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

“Libertarians regard the state as the supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public”

-Murray Rothbard

“In Reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another.”

-Friedrich Engels

So a Marxist walks into the DMV and joins the Libertarian Party… No, that’s not the set up to an impossibly wonky dad joke, that’s the the story of my life, or at least it was last summer. It was a simpler time. A time before COVID, when the cops were only brazenly shooting Black children in the back every other week. That sunny day in July, I put on my best crack-whore-red lipstick and my biggest Jackie-O sunglasses and made my way down to the local Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my license with a special side mission motivating me to actually show up before the last possible second this time. After strutting past the usual throngs of sullen teens and sexy foreigners with the riff from “Rebel Rebel” on repeat in my skull, I approached an angry little man in a clip-on tie, took a horrific picture, swallowed a mouth full of stomach acid when the little prick misgendered me, and became the first self-declared Marxist in Pennsylvania history to join the Libertarian Party. I got a bumper sticker and everything, and I have every intention of voting for Jo Jorgensen this November.

September 20, 2020

A Radical Alternative to Whiteness ^Reply

by Keith Preston • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Race and Ethnicity • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Is it just me or do white people kind of suck lately? I mean more than usual. That’s not racist, I use to be one. I sort of still am, I guess. More on that later. It kind of seems like white folk have fallen into two equally obnoxious sub-species. There’s the White Alpha Douche, bitching like a 13 year old emo kid that he’s the real victim because everybody else is playing the fucking victim card and that’s his card. Then there’s the equally tiresome Squishy White Apology Addict, who’s just terribly terribly sorry about all the savagery his ancestors have dished out to minorities, but now he looks to the Noble Savages and Magical Negroes to show him how to walk and talk and censor people like me for not stepping in line. He’s probably banning me again from Facebook as we speak for self-identifying as a tranny and patting himself on the back for being part of the solution.

Both of these unbearable archetypes are offensively one dimensional and, lets face it, downright racist in their shallow world view. The first one blames all the world’s woes on people of color, and the second relies completely on this same coalition of minorities to save him from his ancestral evil ways. Black folks have enough trouble getting home from the grocery store without getting shot full of ketamine and chucked in the back of a police cruiser without having to choose between smacking us or holding our hand. Why can’t we just get our shit together? Well, believe it or not, it’s not all our fault. Not exactly anyway.

September 13, 2020

The Struggle for Bottom Unity in an Age of Division ^Reply

by Keith Preston • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Fourth Generation Warfare, History and Historiography, Left and Right, Police State/Civil Liberties, Race and Ethnicity, Strategy • Tags: Bottom Unity, Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

“The most interesting political questions throughout history have been whether or not humans will be ruled or free, whether they will be responsible for their actions as individuals or left irresponsible as members of society, and whether they can live in peace by volitional agreements alone.”

-Karl Hess

“We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity.”

-Fred Hampton

Solidarity is a bitch when everyone who can afford a knife is slitting each other’s throat. That’s the nasty little limerick that keeps playing on repeat in my skull like a mantra as populist grassroots uprisings devolve into bitter proxy wars between roaming tribes of bitter proles, killing each other over which oligarch’s name they have scrawled across their battle flags. Everyone wants to pick sides. Everyone is trolling for convenient scapegoats. I just see poor people killing poor people while two sick rich candidates arrange their corpses into clever platforms to stand on and promote more war from. The splintering of the George Floyd Uprisings into partisan turf warfare doesn’t just rip up my already bleeding heart because I had so much hope for the revolutionary potential now being squandered. It kills me because I have people on both sides of these gorey shenanigans and they should both be on the same damn team. All poor people should be, regardless of race or even politics.

September 6, 2020

The Lonesome Death of the Liberal Social Justice Warrior ²

by Keith Preston • Electoralism/Democratism • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Joseph Biden killed the liberal social justice warrior with a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, and blue lives were called in to matter, and his weapon took from him, as they rode him in custody down towards the White House, and booked Joseph Biden for Democratic nominee for president of these United States of Hysteria. But you who philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears, take the rag away from your face, now ain’t the time for your tears.

Yes, dearest motherfuckers, we stand here today to pay our respects to a pain in the ass. For with the nomination and all too likely election of one Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, that once thriving moral upstart known as the white liberal social justice warrior is as good as dead, bleeding out from cane related injuries on the white marble floor of Eva Longoria’s palatial Beverley Hills mansion, murdered in an act of domestic violence by her own racist party for reasons as tragic as they were inevitable. Her memory and the rhetoric of her cause live on in the cruel minstrel shows of her killers as they dress up the same neoliberal policies in the clothing of a movement that was supposed to end them.

August 23, 2020

Kamala Harris Is No Ally to Transwomen ²

by Keith Preston • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Police State/Civil Liberties, Race and Ethnicity, Sexuality and the State • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

“I have never really understood exactly what a ‘liberal’ is, since I have heard ‘liberals’ express every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject. As far as I can tell, you have the extreme right, who are fascist racist capitalist dogs like Ronald Reagan, who come right out and let you know where they’re coming from. And on the opposite end, you have the left, who are supposed to be committed to justice, equality, and human rights. And somewhere between those two points is the liberal. As far as I’m concerned, ‘liberal’ is the most meaningless word in the dictionary.”

-Assata Shakur

“It’s not progressive to be soft on crime”

-Kamala Harris

August 17, 2020

Trump Isn’t the Worst President, But He is the Most American ²

by Keith Preston • American Decline, Electoralism/Democratism • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Donald Trump is the worst president in American History! That seems to be the downright unanimous opinion of every left wing wonk from here to Noam Chomsky, and I might have a bit more respect for the view if these throngs of progressive intellectuals weren’t so goddamn smug about it. After all I’ve never been particularly tame in my criticisms of the son of a bitch myself. His penchant for pure evil is pretty well documented. Any human being who fucks with children the way he has at the borders deserves things I can’t publicly advocate without being shipped off to Gitmo. As if that weren’t enough, his role in the ongoing genocide in Yemen, the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and the downright apocalyptic baiting of Iran and China should make it crystal clear to anyone with half a working soul that Donald Trump is a world class bastard in the first degree. But the worst president in American history? I don’t know, the Donald has some pretty stiff competition there.

Pick a Cold War, Any Cold War! ^Reply

by Keith Preston • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Electoralism/Democratism • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Oh what a democracy we have in America! What a free and vibrant land of choices we’ve created for ourselves on the graves of more primitive civilizations. We just have so many goddamn choices to chose from, it’s enough to make a conspicuous consumer downright dizzy. We get to choose which dead-end box store to slave in for minimum wage beneath the tutelage of a 10th grade tyrant named Chip. We get to choose between several bloodsucking insurance cartels required by the Heritage Foundation socialism of Obamacare. We get to choose which Impossible Glop fast food franchise to slowly murder ourselves with, and if that fails to do the trick, we get to choose which caliber of bullet to snack on instead.

When the Chickens Came Home to Roost In Portlandistan ^Reply

by Keith Preston • Fourth Generation Warfare • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Well folks, it’s official, Donald Trump has declared war on America. Probably should have saw that coming. After all, I’ve long argued that our dayglow duce isn’t an isolationist but merely the world’s shittiest imperialist. After trying and failing miserably to bring fascism to Nicaragua and Venezuela, Trump has set his sites on targets much more suited to his America First brand of colonialism. The one war our asshole in chief has managed to wage successfully after all has been the federal government’s war on undocumented brown children. He may have failed to give Israel Iran but he succeeded swimmingly at giving ICE Aztlan, setting up a veritable gulag archipelago of Chuckie Cheese concentration camps on the Rio Grande that would make Woodrow Wilson wet with envy. Now he’s sicking those same feds on America’s more belligerent third world neighborhoods, turning Seattle and Detroit into Managua and Caracas in a sad and evil attempt to fellate his flaccid poll numbers by publicly thrashing black people and their allies for demanding an end to police state apartheid.

Get the Fuck Out of Afghanistan! ^Reply

by Keith Preston • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: Afghanistan, Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

This is the part of the horror movie where the plot collapses beneath the weight of one too many clichés. Having already gruesomely dispatched all the more promiscuous teens, the knife wielding masked psychopath has cornered the chaste final girl in an old dilapidated farmhouse. The backdoor is seemingly wide open, but instead of making an easy and sensible, if anticlimactic, escape, the bookish antagonist takes the fucking stairs to the attic, leaving her no place left to hide from the monster stalking her. You, the audience, is left beside yourself. Your mind boggles at the hackneyed rational of a supposedly sensible heroine. You’re left with no other plausible response than to yell out at the silver screen, “Get the fuck out of the house!” In 2020, this is the analogy where we as Americans find ourselves. Only we are all the final girls, the masked psychopath is a seemingly unkillable war of our own creation, and the farmhouse that we refuse to escape from is the imperial crypt called Afghanistan. If you are one of the few remaining committed anti-imperialists in this country, you find yourself on the outside of this colossal mess looking in, practically begging, “Get the fuck out of Afghanistan!”

Our Enemy, Law and Order ²

by Keith Preston • Police State/Civil Liberties • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Law and order. Just the sound of those three words sets my teeth on edge. Together they form a verbal menage a trois that quite possibly amounts to the three ugliest words in the English lexicon. It brings to mind dreadful images of everything my wild anarchist heart reviles. It conjures up everything I despise, everything I’ve sworn to die fighting. Law and order is rules and hierarchies and boundaries. It’s borders and courts and prisons packed full of shackled renegades. It’s cops and judges and prosecutors and priests and ties and condoms and dental dams and neatly pressed uniforms and carefully gendered haircuts and Kamala fucking Harris. It’s schools full of well behaved children, television sets governed by the paternal censorship of weaponized banality, bedrooms free from the glories of sin. It’s clean streets, carcinogenic manicured lawns, and jackbooted PTA’s slut shaming bouffant haired single mothers. It’s that motherfucker who coughs real fucking loud at the IHOP when you try to light a cigarette at 3 in the goddamn mourning. It’s that shrill church lady that gives you the stanky eyeball at the bus stop when you’re trying to lez out with your girlfriend. In a sentence, law and order is fascism, American style, and it’s where that human landmine, Donald Trump, finally found his fucking groove.

Antifa Punks and Boogaloo Bois: A Tale of Two Scapegoats ^Reply

by Keith Preston • Activism, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Police State/Civil Liberties • Tags: antifa, Boogaloo, Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

It was the kind of story that always seems to fly just beneath the radar. You probably missed it. I nearly did. Somewhere between the Pride parades and the Fourth of July, while the country was busy hyperventilating over the latest Coronavirus spike and I was busy scrubbing the glitter and gunpowder from my crack, a memo from Attorney General and Melvin Purvis impersonator William Barr was published by those fine parasites at the Washington Post. In this memo, Barr directed the Justice Department to form a task force devoted to combating the vague scourge of “Anti-Government Extremists.” The task force was to be led by a junta of state attorneys and would gather information on individuals and organizations deemed to be a threat by the same Attorney General who brought us Ruby Ridge.

The Stonewall Blues (Still Dreaming of a Queer Nation) ¹

by Keith Preston • Sexuality and the State • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade

Exile in Happy Valley

I should be such a happy Queer, shouldn’t I? At least that’s what I’m told. After all, aren’t all the other Queer folks just so goddamn happy? The ones on TV certainly appear to be, and even the ones I know seem to agree that shit’s getting better and I suppose in many respects it is. Then why do I find myself feeling like a genderfuck Charlie Brown every July, once the parades have gone home? This year’s Pride Month seemed particularly festive, even with the much hyped specter of COVID lurking just behind every glory hole.

Nothing Succeeds Like Secession: Suggested Demands for CHOP From a Friendly Panarchist Ally ^Reply

by Keith Preston • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Education, Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right, Secession, Strategy • Tags: CHAZ/CHOP, Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I have always been fascinated by secessionist movements. It goes back to my childhood love of maps, flags and geography. I use to spend hours poring over atlases and fixating on the strange autonomous zones that only existed inside fluid borders drawn in dotted lines. Strange places no American ever spoke of, with exotic names like Transnistria, Gaza, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Western Sahara. I would eventually grow into a commie, Third World, war nerd who fastidiously followed and supported these esoteric independence movements from afar.

Speaking Queerly About Whiteness ^Reply

by Keith Preston • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Race and Ethnicity, Sexuality and the State • Tags: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

White people hate to talk about race, even the supposedly woke ones. When they do, the entire conversation is almost inevitably governed by fear. With white conservatives, it’s usually the fear of being made irrelevant by darker bodies. With white liberals, it’s usually the fear of being outed as being just as scared as the conservatives they mock. I’ve never really had much trouble discussing race myself, though that does seem to get me into a lot of trouble. Identity fascinates me, probably because my own has always been so goddamn elusive. In spite of the color of my flesh, I can’t recall a time in my life where I wasn’t treated as an “Other”.