By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Fred Hampton had a dream. It was a little more militant than Doctor King’s, but no less ambitious. The young chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party dreamed of a grand coalition of revolutionaries spanning […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley There are few things that strike terror in the dark hearts of god fearing, beef eating, Republicans like the scourge of the Squad. Transgender bathrooms, the female orgasm, pissing off the Israel Lobby. All pale in comparison to […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley January 6 was a day that will live on in infamy, an unparalleled assault on the precious vital organs of our exceptional democracy that this great nation is still reeling to recover from, or at least so I’m […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Exile in Happy Valley Rarely a week seemed to go by during the Trump years when the sky wasn’t falling. The cable news already has a tendency of covering every single day like it could be the last, but this was different. Even […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley There is a narrative commonly held by observers in the west that the Afghans are a people defined by perpetual warfare. Like many stereotypes, this one comes with a cornel of truth. After all, the people of Afghanistan […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley 2016 was a strange fucking year to be an antiwar voter. It was the first open Democratic primary since the Iraq War without a clear peace candidate and Ron Paul’s heir apparent, Rand, proved to be a total […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It’s been twenty years since 9/11 but it feels more like twenty years of 9/11. That’s probably because an entire industrial complex has been constructed around a concerted effort to keep those wounds fresh and harvest the anguish […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It was the perfect plot for a desperate hour. It was 2019 going on 2020 and the Clintonians who had run the Democratic Party since the early nineties were on the cusp of losing the parties presidential primary […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley In case you haven’t noticed, the shit has kind of hit the fucking fan in Kabul. If you haven’t noticed, you must be Amish and I envy you because the banshees of cable news have been screaming about […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Do you smell that, dearest motherfuckers? Secession is in the air and not just among freaky anarchists like me. From coast to coast, from border to border, Americans of all stripes, shades and sizes are openly discussing and […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley I am not a politically correct animal. Out of the good of my bleeding heart, I’ve tried, but my species of genderfuck extraterrestrial just doesn’t swing that way. When the good lord Kali made this mess, she made […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley When I was twenty years old, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara stood taller than Jesus on the cross. Wild eyed, twin fisted, bearded banditos taking on the greatest empire the world has ever known with nothing but a […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Well, dearest motherfuckers, I had published my doubts, but it appears that Old Man Biden is prepared to finally end our twenty year clusterfuck in Afghanistan by the end of summer after all. Well, sort of. Like any […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Tuning into the evening news has begun to take on all the charming qualities of a seventies Scorsese flick. Some nights I have to wipe the blood from the screen. From coast to coast, from sea to rising […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit, Exile in Happy Valley Contrary to the gospel of Joy Reid, you really don’t have to be a right wing dick to acknowledge that there is a crisis at the border anymore than you need to be a weatherman to know which […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Well dearest motherfuckers, it’s that time of the year again. A time for heat waves, fireworks, hotdogs, and backyard swimming pools. Annoyingly enough, it’s also a time for that kneejerk, braindead brand of jingoism that Americans like to […]
This week, I am discussing Anarchist Unity with Nicky Reid, radical contributor at Counterpunch.org, assistant editor for Attack the System and gonzo blogger at Exile in Happy Valley, covering everything from Queer Anarchism to the endless wars to what the future of our society could be. Apparently, we […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Surfing through the news, it seems like every other motherfucker and his brother is flipping their proverbial wig over the supposedly literal threat China poses to the future of western civilization. Over on the center-right of what passes […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Sometimes I can’t help but feeling like the Ebenezer Scrooge of Pride Month, pissing on everybody’s parade from my high horse of moral superiority. It’s not that I’m not proud of my people. Quite the contrary. We survived […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Believe it or not, dearest motherfuckers, these can be depressing times for an upstart genderfuck anarchist like myself and not just because I have depression. On the 52nd Pride Month, this bastard nation seems to be divided up […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It’s official dearest motherfuckers, those goddamn Jesus freaks have declared war on trans kids, my kids. As I gaze upon the legislative wreckage from the tsunami of hate laws that have washed over the Bible Belt and beyond, […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley America loves its monsters. We love to make em and we love to blow em up. For all our high talk of freedom and democracy, we are a superpower with a long and storied history of building up […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It’s an inevitability if you’re an online muckraker. It happens all the time. You get dragged down the rabbit hole by some malignant grandstanding troll and, regardless of what the devolving conversation was actually about, somebody gets called […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Dearest motherfuckers, we need to have a serious talk about America. I’ve been tapdancing around this subject for years like a genderfuck Shirley Temple but I think we’ve come to the point where we can’t afford to mince […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley There is a deadly virus on the loose in this country. An unstoppable plague rampaging through communities big and small like an untrammeled beast, picking us off day by day, two, three, four at a time. The news […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Oh sweet lord Satan, is this it? Is this really how it ends? With Joe Biden struggling to pronounce Pashtun words on badly shuffled cue cards. Is this it? After twenty long years that could only accurately be […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Dark storm clouds are gathering over the contested Ukrainian border regions of Donbass and Crimea as two antiquated superpowers surge headlong towards a conflict that could easily end in nuclear oblivion. It may take two dinosaurs to tango […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Every decade or so anarchism seems to find its way back into the limelight for another 15 minutes. We’re usually roundly vilified but it still offers us a rare window to attract the non-political class and shop around […]
By Nick Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It’s hardly unusual for me to take the news personally. It comes like a card with being a journalist with clinical depression. But some weeks the news almost feels tailor made to tare me down and the last […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit The more things change the more they stay the same. The only place where that seems more true than Washington is at the border. Obama and Biden built the camps. Trump filled the camps. And Biden is building more as thousands of […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Who is Nicky Reid? If some random suit on the street asked you that question, what would your answer be? Aside from a pussy crushing genderfuck fox and the baddest fucking blogger alive, of coarse. Your answer would […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Sometimes I have this dream. A terrible dream. A dream about a war. It begins like any other war, with a big country attacking a weaker one. An empire chases an army of starving ghosts into a deep […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley If this isn’t the winter of our discontent then John Steinbeck can die twice writing shitty novels in an igloo of frozen dicks. This winter has been a toxic cloud of ice fog belched from the bowels of […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Is it just me or has Black History Month become kind of a gross corporate circus lately? Just another banal commercial grab bag of Hallmark moments to peddle the superiority of the American experience. I feel like shit […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile Happy Valley Its been nearly a month since the villagers chased off Orange Man Bad with pitchforks and torches and most of my liberal friends in group therapy have sunk into that warm bath of post election honeymoon euphoria. The more […]
Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Valentine’s Day is a bitch for the weirdos and trust me dearest motherfuckers, they don’t come much weirder than me. I’ve long fancied myself a hopeless romantic with a heavy emphasis on the hopeless angle, but lets face it, […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Even a bitter Queer curmudgeon like myself has to begrudgingly admit that we’ve come a long way, baby. I don’t know if I can join the chorus of pretty pink-washed celebrities in singing “It gets better!” After all, […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley January 6th was a day that will live on in infamy, or at least so I’m told. Maybe I’ve just become too jaded in my young age, but three weeks later and I still don’t see it. The […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Mainstream pop culture historians always deify the 1960’s as some kind of Woodstock utopian fantasy gone to seed. But any true countercultural history buff knows that the Seventies were where it was really at. After Charlie Manson scared off the flower children, […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Finally, mercifully, it’s twenty-hundred and twenty-one, dearest motherfuckers. The year of our lord Satan, 2020, is finally fucking over and all around America there are signs of life. It’s a brand new spanking day for democracy, because 2021 doesn’t just bring an […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Maybe you missed it, but there is a second terrifying virus spreading like spilt milk across the media zeitgeist. A hip new mental illness plaguing that precious resource known as teenage girls. All across the country our precious […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Tensions are hurtling towards a fever pitch again in the Middle East. The entire region seems to be haunted by a phantom chaos. All through out the deserts of the Orient, an ugly rash of seemingly random acts […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley People often ask me why I continue to insist on identifying with the far-left considering my growing rash of beefs with the movement and my increasingly contrarian tendencies, and its not a bad question. I find myself asking […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley “And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson
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