Tag Archives: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Fear and Loathing In Coronaville Volume 3: Forced Social Media Distancing Reply

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

It has recently become abundantly clear that Facebook hates my fucking guts. I’ve suspected as much for a while now but this week it became pretty much undeniable. After posting my praise for the latest victories of the fabulous Houthi rebels, those faceless censors at America’s biggest social media juggernaut regretfully informed me that I had violated their pristine standards by supporting “dangerous individuals and organizations”, and since this was my third offense, they’re blocking me from posting on all their platforms for thirty days. They tossed another 7 days of forced isolation from instant messaging on the fire when I attempted to finish a comment on a friend’s post that I was in the middle of when they spanked me. Apparently, I’ve been a bad bad girl. Pappa Zuckerburg needs to send me to bed without supper thirty times in a row, all at the height of social distancing season with my clinical depression already in full bloom. I can’t even message my epileptic bestie back in plague ravaged England to make sure she’s not ice cold on the kitchen floor of her girlfriends flat. And for what exactly? What the fuck even is a dangerous individual or organization?

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Fear and Loathing in Coronaville Volume 2: Panic On the Streets of Tehran Reply

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

There’s panic on the streets of Bellefonte, panic on the streets of Lancaster, I wonder to myself, could life ever be sane again? Barely two weeks into Pennsylvania’s largely mandatory shutdown and I’m already paraphrasing lyrics from vintage Smiths songs. I can’t deny to anyone, much less myself, that I’m not handling this shit particularly well. Quite frankly, I’m losing my proverbial shit. Flipping out on fucking trashcans and stalking the halls like Jack Torrance in lipstick, dragging an ax called ‘Nervous Breakdown’ behind me. I’d say I’m just a few loose screws away from chopping my family up into three neat stacks and hammering out “All business and no play make Nicky a dull girl” for volume three of this fucking thing. I’m an agoraphobic for shit’s sake. How the Christ did I do this for six years straight without committing a single homicide? I had sixty minutes with my shrink over the goddamn phone this week and she stopped my yammering no more than three times to ask me if I was suicidal. So, yeah, dearest motherfuckers, I’m not exactly doing well. At least I’m not alone.

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Fear and Loathing in Coronaville Volume 1: Dispatches From a Terrified Heartland Reply

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Being a certifiable agoraphobic basket case, you would think someone like me would be almost preternaturally suited for the stone blind isolation of fever fucked pandamania. And you would be completely fucking wrong. I spent six years in self imposed isolation as a twenty-something shut in. I spent another six desperately clawing my way out of that hole and slowly building what has only just begun to resemble a life, and in less than six days, covid-19 has torn this intricately constructed matrix of groups, volunteer jobs and therapy down to the ground and reduced me to the shambled debris of ground zero. I’m a little bit pissed, but mostly I’m just fucking scared. If I’m going to write about something like this, I’m going to write about it with the naked ferocity that defines my writing. A strange, vaguely haunted cobweb of Gonzo muckraking and navel gazing confessionals that I’ve come to refer to as Emo-Gonzo. I am the genderfucked bastard bitch of Hunter Thompson and Sylvia Plath, humped together in the dizzy oven of some bored press junket cafeteria, and today, this is my story. George Romero eat your heart out.

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The Art of the Phony Peace Deal Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Well, it only took a million years but peace has finally come to Afghanistan, sort of. Or at least so it appears. I’m not one of those hyperventilating liberal opportunists, bursting at the seems to piss on any peace parade led by a dayglo elephant. I have genuinely made an effort to put my best foot forward when Trump has made his occasional isolationist noises. Hell, I’m probably the only one to the left of Sebastian Gorka who cheered as he told the deep state to sit and spin from Helsinki with Putin at his side. But even in the wake of all the reactionary chaos of a flip-flopping Pat Buchanan wannabe, I’ve begun to notice another trend of vain opportunism which makes me feel less than easy about Orange-Man-Bad’s latest peace deal with the Taliban.

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You Don’t Need Putin to Undermine American Democracy 1

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

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

With the 2020 election heating up, there is a stiff wind methodically weaving through this fierce desert of geriatric combat, something evil and relentless, sending haunted tumbleweeds rocking back and forth over fractured highways. No, I’m not talking about the winds of March, dearest motherfuckers. I’m talking about something far more sinister blowing our way. I’m talking about the return of the invisible Russian meddling menace. If you peer through the blinds, things may appear woefully normal at this glorified nursing home we call a primary, but we have it on the good authority of anonymous intelligence sources and retired sleazeballs like John Brennan and James Comey that it’s anything but, and our corporate media takes them at their word.

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…Now Can We Celebrate Some Dangerous Black People? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, History and Historiography, Race and Ethnicity • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Another Black History Month comes and another Black History Month goes. The 29 dreary days of the year when we reduce the history of the people who built this country beneath the weight of the whip to extra crunchy peanut butter. I’m not a black person, so every word of this rant may very well come across as politically incorrect and racially insensitive, but I am a history nerd, and as quite possibly the queerest person on this side of the rainbow, I do know what it’s like to have my tribe’s history hijacked and commodified by the same capitalist cunts who once conspired to have us annihilated. Truth be told, growing up as a freak, I often found it a hell of a lot more easy to relate to black historical figures than white ones. Malcolm X may have peed standing up but something tells me he knew more about being the straight man’s faggot than the Kennedy’s.

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Socialism Without Anti-Imperialism: A Different Flavor of Tyranny Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Well dearest motherfuckers, socialism is back and it only took about a century, or at least so it appears. Nearly half the country has polled as being down with Debs. In spite of the worst efforts of his party’s trenchant neoliberal leadership, Bernie Sanders, who splays his socialist ID loud and proud, is now the undeniable frontrunner in the 2020 Democratic Primaries and even his moderate competition are aping his modus operandi. For the first time in ever, formerly far left positions like single-payer and free tuition have become so mainstream that they’re downright boring. Even beyond America’s official “left-wing” party, the socialist renaissance is in full bloom. At over 50,000 members, the once flimsy Democratic Socialists of America is now the largest American socialist organization since the height of the Labor Movement. More young people self-identify as proud socialists than ever before. So why the fuck am I so bummed?

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Hillary, Donald & Bernie: Three Who Would Make a Catastrophe Reply

by • Uncategorized • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

America is a country that both loves and hates its conspiracy theories. On the one hand, our popular culture is lousy with them, from cinema to the president’s goddamn Twitter account. On the other hand, we host an academic elite which not only views such cultural trends with disdain, but seems to see our history, their history, the “official story”, as some kind of irrefutable biblical fact. Few people make the connection between these parallel trends, the likelihood that the overly presumptuous and at times downright jingoistic orthodoxy of our ivory tower elites is precisely what drives pedestrian America to search for alternatives to their “truth”. That old adage, consider the source. The reality is that history in and of itself is not black and white science. At its most accurate it is a collection of narratives, different perspectives from the ground floor that could easily be described as conspiracy theories. What appears to be a conspiracy theory from Arlington or Manhattan, looks a lot more like bad memories from Hiroshima or Tuskegee. Any true revisionist historian must become a collector of conspiracy theories, viewing all available narratives with a healthy grain of salt.

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A Vote for Mayor Pete is a Vote for Assimilation 2

by • Electoralism/Democratism, Sexuality and the State • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Once again, dearest motherfuckers, I feel obligated to reprise my roll as ‘that bitch.’ Do I really have to be the queer bummer who smashes the Buttigieg delusion? Are all the other faggot anarchists busy? Oh well, fuck it. Hand me my hammer and I’ll do what I do best, which seems to be pissing off other queer people by interrupting their increasingly statist pride parades with the stone cold inconvenience of reality. I’m really sorry darlings, but its time for some tough love. This hurts me more than it hurts you but hopefully it hurts Mayor Pete the most. Because a vote for Mayor Pete may be a vote for the first gay president, but it’s also a vote for assimilation. So, here we go.

Around the country, queer kids are getting emails and Facebook pokes from their grandparents, congratulating us collectively for producing a viable presidential candidate. We must be so proud. Maybe you are but I’m not. I wouldn’t even want a legit queer occupying that glorified porta shitter called the Oval Office, much less one who appears to have been raised by neoliberal wolves. Pete Buttigieg may be gay but he is not one of us. Pete is more vanilla than most heterosexuals. He’s the kind of queer you bring home to mom instead of your black-bear boyfriend to make your rejection of her suburban values more palatable. He’s the kind of queer who tops just so he doesn’t ruin the good linens. He’s the kind of queer who nags his boyfriend into a church marriage and a couple of adopted Guatemalans just so he has something to brag about to his soccer-mom bitch sister in the annual Christmas letter. He’s the kind of queer who has one trans friend just so he can tell his Lincoln Republican friends that he has one trans friend. He’s the kind of queer who really isn’t that queer at all. He prefers LGBTQ. He’s the new queer; domesticated, neat, house broken, a novel wonder of modern western civilization. “But he’s a sign of progressive inclusion, so what are you bitching about?”

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99 Reasons to Impeach (But Ukrainegate Ain’t One) Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Urgh! Ma, do I have to write about impeachment again? Cant I just take the trash down to the curb instead? Yeah, that’s right, dearest motherfuckers, its another goddamn impeachment piece, because apparently the thing about purgatory is that it’s never fucking over. Just when you think you’re about get paroled to the sweet hereafter, John Bolton writes a fucking book and you get another century added to your sentence. By the time it’s through, you’re begging for hell, anything to cut the fucking boredom. Hell is supposed to come this Wednesday but if the anticlimax of the Muller Report didn’t end this circus, something nauseating tells me the Senate’s partisan acquittal won’t either. I usually enjoy writing. It gives me some sense of control over the downright hellish purgatory of day to day life in the prolapsed colon of a herniated empire. Its hard work but it’s usually pretty rewarding. This impeachment shit, though, its like fucking math homework. It doesn’t matter how necessary it is, it still feels fucking pointless.

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The Many Faces of Bernie Derangement Syndrome 1

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

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

It’s getting pretty damn near impossible, even for a vengeful anarcho-cynic like myself, to deny that the system clearly despises Bernie Sanders. Both the DNC and their moronic B-team in the so called mainstream media seem to be downright apoplectic over the fact that the grizzled old buzzard is leading the presidential pack in all the ways that count. Not that you’d ever know it by watching the news. Based on the coverage, you would think Bernie was trailing behind the Yang Gang in the polls. Even at the debates, they avoid his perpetually pontificating old ass like the drunk chick at a wedding party, while they softball grounder after grounder to poll-fucked centrist losers like Amy Klobuchar.

CNN’s January surprise, a totally toothless collection of anonymous accusations about a single hypothetical sexist comment made years ago to progressive rival and pathological opportunist, Elizabeth Warren, is just further proof of this prejudice. The sheer absurdity of the idea that Bernie just randomly went all Archie Bunker all over Warren’s ass and everyone, including her, just happens to remember the event just in time for the last debates before the Iowa Caucus, is downright dumbfounding. The only thing more bugfuck nuts in my mind is the fact that any suite-and-tie wearing member of the status quo actually considers this asshole a threat. He’s a fucking poseur and he’s their best hope for taking back the White House. Clintonism has officially become a mental illness. Call it Bernie Derangement Syndrome and call those TERF’s at the DSM.

In case you missed it, I’ve never liked Bernie Sanders. It’s not the pie in the sky welfare spending or the tiresome FDR (founding father of the modern American concentration camp) worship. I could begrudgingly live with all that. But it’s the simple fact that the motherfucker, a self-proclaimed Eugene Debs loving leftist, just isn’t antiwar. It’s the one issue I vote on as an anti-imperialist syndicalist vehemently apposed to any mockery of “democracy” that doesn’t begin and end on the factory floor. Oh sure, Bernie says all the right shit and voted No on a couple bloodbaths, but when push comes to shove, he’ll vote for any atrocity sanctioned by the Democratic Party, whether it’s starving half a million children to death in Iraq under Clinton or sending half of Africa to hell through the black hole of that rapist’s wife’s Libyan no-fly-zone. And this is largely what defines Bernie’s absolute lack of character. In spite of his populist pleasing Independent pedigree, like all social democrats, Bernie is a creature of the party. The party, the party, the party, all else falls beneath the godlike benevolence of the party, including the peasants, fuck, especially the peasants. If the party wants a war, the party gets a war. If the party deems it necessary, they’ll feed the war-shy proletariat to the Freikorps dogs like puppy-chow, and Bernie will loosen the leashes.

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It’s Time to Bring the War Home Again Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

As the dust settles on Donald Trump’s latest high octane game of chicken with the Islamic Republic, an eerie calm seems to have risen like fog from Soleimani’s grave to take its place. But while the whole world exhales, war nerds like myself struggle like David Carradine to find the loop to loosen the belt around our throats. That’s because deep down in our wonky ill-nourished guts we know that this shit is far from over.

Unlike Trump’s usual foreign policy impulses, that seem to be governed more by techno-Tourette’s syndrome and penile insecurity than anything resembling a sane strategy, there is a very sick method to the madness when it comes to his dance with Iran, and that’s because the clumsy footed fuck is dutifully following the same choreography as George W. Bush. The choreography of slow consistent escalation that can only end in the most devastating war the world has seen since the fall of Germany’s Third Reich and the rise of Uncle Sam’s Fourth. Trump may be a pathologically unbalanced wild card on every issue from abortion to bathroom etiquette, but he still takes his marching orders from the same Zionist piggy bank as the neocons he won 2016 mocking.

Every step Trump has taken since entering the topographic maze of Pennsylvania Avenue has been tailor made to provoke Iran into the genre of open warfare they have masterfully avoided since their Reagan era bloodbath with Trump’s Middle Eastern counterpart Saddam Hussein. The violation of the Nuclear Deal. The escalation of the Shia genocide in Yemen. The recognition of colonial Jerusalem. The build up of troops to fight our own former proxies in neighboring Iraq. The Gulf of Tonkin games in the Strait of Hormuz. And now the calculated cold blooded murder of Iran’s greatest strategist, the man who designed the Islamic Republic’s cagey Fourth Generation foreign policy which has made a fantastic fool of the nation’s most fearsome foes.

Qassem Soleimani died on his way to peace talks with his Saudi adversaries that Trump himself encouraged. He was shot down in the most chickenshit cowardly ambush our government has thrown since J. Edna plied John Dillinger to the Biograph Theater with a whore in red. There is no going back from this one, kiddies. The dye is cast. The only question left worth asking now is what do we, the few proud anti-imperialists living in the belly of the beast, do about it? How do we prevent World War 3?

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Trannies with Guns: Because Enough is Enough! 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I need to buy a gun. I can’t state it any simpler than that. It’s something I’ve needed for sometime and I seem to feel like I need it a little more each day. The gun doesn’t have to be fancy or high tech. I don’t need some AR hunting rifle in drag or one of those phallic three digit magnum monstrosities. I need something basic and reliable. Maybe a .38 or .45 wheel gun. Something just powerful enough to put an irate cis-male down in two shots or less. I’ve always wanted a gun but I never felt like I really needed one until recently, about four years ago to be exact, right around the time I came out as a trans person. Now, as my fluctuating gender continues to veer further and further towards the feminine end of the spectrum, I’ve come to understand the stone-cold necessity for the Second Amendment more clearly than I ever have before. So I’ll say it once more with feeling, dearest motherfuckers, to really drive the point home, I need a fucking gun.

Those are the thoughts that swing through my dizzy skull every time I hear another horror story about some trans or gender-bending individual being slaughtered for the high crime of living outside the closet. I’ve been having these thoughts a lot lately, 22 times in the last year to be exact. That’s how many trans murders occurred in 2019 that we know of and that doesn’t even include the girls killed in police custody. I wish I could say that this is an anomaly, but it’s not. According to the American Medical Association, it’s a goddamn epidemic. At least 157 of my people have been slaughtered since 2013, right around the time the Christian White, I mean Right, switched gears from the now dated practice of fag-bashing to that new national pastime of tranny-stomping, and I say ‘at least’ before that staggering headcount because most transgender murder victims still go unreported or misgendered. The police can’t seem to help themselves, even in death they spit on us.

And this is why gun control is a steaming sack of elitist bullshit. When you tell people to give up their guns, you’re really telling them to trust the cops. This might work smashingly for billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and the bougie brats in March For Our Lives, but for marginalized people like myself, it’s a fucking slap in the face. As I mentioned above, pigs kill trannies. Just ask Layleen Polanco, who was found dead in her cell at Rikers this year. Or Johana Medina, who was only released from one of ICE’s fine concentration camps just in time to die in the ER from untreated medical problems.

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Sympathy For Soleimani Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: , ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

A preemptive strike, that’s what white people call terrorism, and that’s apparently what transpired this Thursday on the tarmac of the Baghdad International Airport. A preemptive drone strike, ordered by our president, murdered General Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most important military figure, alongside six others including the commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Unit, a legally recognized part of Iraq’s military. This was not an attack on a military operation. These men were meeting to attend a funeral for victims of another American terrorist attack earlier in the week. This was an act of extreme cowardice. This was a war crime. But most importantly, this was indeed a calculated act of war against two sovereign nations, a week in the making.

The previous Friday, rockets struck an American base in Iraq, killing a single American mercenary. This is a crime that remains unsolved, but the Trump Administration wasted zero time blaming it on Iran via their alleged proxies in the PMU. No evidence given, no evidence required. An American soldier of fortune died in Shia country, which is the greenlight Trump has been looking for to shithouse Iran since Sheldon Adelson payed him to do so in 2016. I suspect that Sheldon’s friends back in occupied Jerusalem may be the ones truly responsible for this convenient attack, but that’s just a hunch from a stalwart anti-Zionist with too much time on her hands. Take it with a grain of salt.

This attack set into motion a procession of tit for tat escalations that ended with the assassination of a man so revered by his people that a response is all but a forgone conclusion whether Iran wants it or not. Their hands are tied. Meanwhile, thousands of American troops prepare to re-flood the scarred battleground of America’s greatest imperial blunder, as the shitheads of American cable news take turns telling facetious horror stories about the extra-judicially murdered Soleimani. If you were dense enough to take these morons at their libel, you would be forced to come to the conclusion that the general was some kind of blood drinking Sith lord. But who was he really, to us and his people?

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Some People Who Actually Didn’t Suck In 2019 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I love holiday traditions, dearest motherfuckers, and every year since I started this blog several years ago, I’ve welcomed in the new year by compiling a short list of the few people on this goddess forsaken rock who actually managed the small miracle of not sucking, or at least not sucking much, this year. Naturally, it’s usually a pretty weird fucking list because, generally speaking, you have to be pretty fucking weird to earn the respect of a pretty fucking weird ass bitch like me. This year is no exception. It’s a regular rogues gallery of contrarian fire-starters and Molotov chucking iconoclasts like myself. You won’t like all of em. Hell, I don’t even like all of em. But if I’ve done my job right, and you’re not a total fucking asshole, you’ll at least respect them begrudgingly. So here’s a dastardly dozen (give or take) dearest motherfuckers who actually don’t suck. With one telltale finger in the air, I solute them.

Mike Gravel-  The only oxygenarian bitch who should have taken the White House by storm, crazy Old Man Gravel, ex-Alaskan Governor, bitter old coot and lifelong evangelist for direct democracy, ran for all but a hot second this year. But what a fucking second! The last true anti-interventionist in my soiled former party, Gravel blitzed the DNC like Don Quixote on Geritol, with a guerrilla campaign that literally consisted of a handful of rag-tag college stoners using their spare pot money to make Mike the libertarian socialist Bernie. And they might just have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for those meddling adults in the suicidally self-assure Democratic establishment, who used their arcane debate regulations to fuck the old bastard out of a platform. Fuck it. Best laid plans. Thanks for the memories, Mike. We’ll build you a monument after the revolution. And, once again, thanks Geritol.

Joaquin Phoenix-  Hollywood has long been a fucking wasteland for anything even mildly resembling the dangers of unfiltered creativity. But every once and a while, someone, somehow sneaks something truly subversive passed the censors and into the theaters, and the normies lose their proverbial shit. There hasn’t been a blockbuster as teemingly incendiary as this year’s Joker since Oliver Stone’s psychedelic opus, Natural Born Killers, and the maniacal performance of Joaquin Phoenix is the number one reason why. Like Woody Harrelson’s Mickey Knox, Joaquin hijacks that silver screen for 2+ hours of riving anarchy as Arthur Fleck aka the Joker.

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(Happy Christmas) Forever War Is Over: If You Want It…. 3

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

So this is Christmas, and what have we done? Another year over, and a new one just begun.

I’ve always loved this season but I’ve never been much for Christmas carols. The new ones are moronic garbage and the old churchy ones tend to depress the shit out of me. Too many ugly memories of being a differently gendered dirty secret in a harsh Catholic climate. Too many old wounds. Some still haven’t healed. Some probably never will.

Since I’m in the confessional kinda mood, I might as well admit that I’ve never been completely sold on the apparent sanctity of The Beatles either. They’re not a bad band, the hype just always felt a touch contrived to me. To be perfectly honest with you, they always struck me as a glorified boy band before they dropped acid, and even then they always sounded second fiddle to The Rolling Stones shambolic heroin blues.

But I’ve always loved John Lennon. I spent about 15 minutes as a teenage hippie between Goth and punk, and John and those fantastic Yippies are the only two relics that remain. I’ve also always loved Yoko. I felt that she brought the best out of John, artistically, politically and spiritually, not to mention being a brilliant provocateur in her own right. For this she was naturally rewarded with the brand of chauvinistic racism and sexism that often creeped just beneath the hippie veneer. And it was John and Yoko who created the one Christmas carol I truly cherish outside of the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack.

Happy Xmas (War Is Over) didn’t begin as a hit song. It began as part of an avante garde guerrilla marketing campaign to coincide with John and Yoko’s ’69 Bed-ins. Billboards across 12 major cities worldwide were decorated with the simple message “WAR IS OVER: If you want it- Happy Christmas from John and Yoko.” Two years later this message was set to the traditional English ballad “Skewball” and accompanied by the Harlem Community Choir. It was a deceptively radical message for mainstream radio, even in the peace and love era. In 1971 the war was far from over. There were still millions of bodies to be buried beneath blankets of napalm and Agent Orange. What John and Yoko were conjuring wasn’t a Utopian fantasy but a simple Christmas wish. Happy Christmas, in the name of god, cant this wicked war be over? It can. If you want it. And today, nearly half a century later, that wish seems more cruelly unfulfilled than ever.

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The Panarchist Solution to a World Divided Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

In these days of epic collapse, with the established order rapidly disintegrating before our very eyes, mankind seems to be tearing apart at the seems and resorting to the bipolar extremes of the far-left and the far-right. And why the hell not? Poor people across the globe have grown weary of the false promises and bald faced lies of the so-called moderates. The one thing the warring camps of extremes seem to agree on is that the mass democracy of neoliberal globalism is an epic wash. A rigged shell game that only pays out to the house, and now the house is on fire.

So we witness the spectacle of populism on both the left and the right. Record numbers of young people embracing the once tainted label of socialism while the kind of xenophobic nativism which was once only uttered in hushed tones at the far corners of church potlucks has now become mainstream fodder, openly brandished like Hermann Goering’s revolver. These are the times that we live in but we’ve seen them before. Whenever empires crumble and the fixed markets of state capitalism find themselves in peril. The people who stand to gain the most from the cataclysm find themselves divided on the opposite ends of the barracks. Stalinists and Brown Shirts. Antifa and the Alt-right. It’s times like these when the call of Samuel L. Jackson’s prophetic DJ in Spike Lee’s classic dissection of urban upheaval, Do the Right Thing, rings like tinnitus through my eardrums. “Can we live together?! Together, can we live?!!” I’ve spent my life in search of an answer to that existential question. I believe I’m getting closer.

I’ve always found myself on the far-left end of the barracks, even while the proletariat was still drunk on the delusions of progress that came with a first black president and Apple Store commodity fetishism. I discovered Marx young and Chomsky shortly after. I spent the lion share of my teens flirting with a caraselle of Libertarian Socialist ideologies, Chomsky’s Syndicalism, Red Rosa’s Council Communism, Subcomandante Marcos’ Zapatizmo. All set to a hard driving soundtrack of Billy Bragg, Joe Strummer and Zack de la Rocha.

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Sorry Lefties, Your Impeachment is Bullshit 1

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

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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Dennis Kucinich, Tulsi Gabbard and the Slow Death of the Democratic Delusion 2

by • American Decline, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Electoralism/Democratism • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

As a practice, I despise both major parties with a passion usually reserved for religious zealotry. But I’m not ashamed, even as a lifelong leftist, to admit that I hate the Democrats most of all. In fact, it’s precisely because I’m a leftist that I hate the Democrats most of all. The only thing worse than a racist horde of war hungry zillionaires is a racist horde of war hungry zillionaires who try to pass them selves off as the high handed voice of egalitarianism. It’s like having Strom Thurmond throw on a Rasta wig and wax poetic about how he understands why the n*ggers feel cold and the slum’s got so much soul (compliments to Jello Biafra). It doesn’t exactly make me feel better that I use to be a member of that limp-wristed blackface fraternity.

But it was 2008, the scoundrels of the Bush junta were on their way out the revolving door to cushy no-show jobs in the defense industry and there was one candidate left in that party that I still believed in, and I’m not talking about Joe Lieberman’s designated black dauphin. Dennis Kucinich was the last of a dying breed. He seemed to have stepped out from a different era, like the long lost munchkin lovechild of George McGovern and Joan Baez. He didn’t just want peace, he wanted revenge against the war machine; 50% cuts in defense spending, shuttering all foreign bases, Nuremberg Tribunals for the retreating Bush junta. He didn’t have a chance in hell and I didn’t give a shit. He was on a crusade that was bigger than any election, and I was willing to swallow my vomit and leave the Green Party to join him.

I look at the ten clown car pileup that is the 2020 Democratic primaries and there is no Dennis Kucinich to be found. Just a multicultural graveyard of hyper-statist partisan corpses. For five fucking minutes we had Mike Gravel’s beautiful crusty old ass, but the glorified carnies who rig the debates quickly erased all signs of his existence until his shallow well ran dry. What we have now is a contest largely between two separate but equally deceptive cliques of creeps. The “Moderates” or, as I call them, the Obama Revivalists, and the “Revolutionaries” who are really little more than blood and butter social democrats (to quote the late Dr. Thompson, “You people voted for Humphrey… and you killed Jesus!)

The Obama Revivalists have to be the most comically delusional conglomeration of convoluted cunts since Obama himself sold half my generation on an 8 year extension of the Bush regime with Hopelandic gobbledygook lifted straight from a Chicken Noodle Soup paperback he found at the airport. The basic pitch of these neoliberal imbeciles, who only the Clinton News Network would have the gal to call “Realists”, can be summed up by Cher’s tattooed ass on a battleship, ‘If we could just turn back time. If we could just find a way…’ They seem to all suffer under the grand-mal delusion that all of America’s woes began in February 2017, and just 8 more years of Obama (or 24 of Bush) can cure the American Empire of an authoritarian collapse that has been a longtime coming. Donald Trump is not the problem, he is the symptom. Voting for one of these mass media approved Obama Revivalists would be the equivalent of treating a brain tumor with a shotgun blow to the head.

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Thanksgiving Should Be America’s Day of the Dead Reply

by • Uncategorized • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, There lived a group of magical white Christians called the Pilgrims. After growing weary of their King’s discrimination against witch trials and buckle-hats, they climbed aboard a magic ship called the Mayflower and sailed the deadly Atlantic on a quest for religious freedom and laissez-faire capitalism. They found a wild, mysterious and sparsely populated New World and quickly busied themselves building the foundation of the exceptional American Dream. When they came face to face with pestilence, they graciously excepted agricultural advice from an unwashed horde of noble savages, who were intern thanked with an invite to a grand feast of Thanksgiving.

Well, there’s the official national fairy tale, here’s the open handed bitch slap of reality. The sainted Pilgrims were a clan of puritanical Christian wack jobs sent by King James as a sort of glorified death squad to wipe out the Native Peoples of Turtle Island. There was no multicultural feast. That was another Christian tradition scalped from the Pilgrims original pagan victims back in the old country, where a successful fall harvest was celebrated with a tribal village feast. The first Thanksgiving was a work of fiction propagated to pacify the citizens of this country during times of great social upheaval, first during the Civil War, then revamped in it’s current form during the Great Depression. It’s a fable designed to unify an empire, not around family and community, but around the state that robs us of both and fucks us until we bleed. The very same state that systematically butchered the native peoples of this continent, only to use their distorted memory as token props for the pageantry of American Exceptionalism.

But history ain’t a straight line, my dearest motherfuckers. It’s a circle and that circle is coming back around again. After the “savages” coexisted relatively peacefully on this continent for thousands of years without the modern perversion of the state, the righteous, enlightened, Europeans have managed to burn out after just a little over two centuries of rabid over expansion. America and Western Civilization as we know it stand on the brink of collapse. It turns out all that raping and pillaging isn’t a particularly sustainable model for economic solvency after all. With bases on every fucking continent and a bloated military apparatus that would make Darth Vader wet with envy, the American giant is coming apart at the seams. A morbidly obese, blood spattered glutton, drowning in debt, endless war and staggering economic inequality. To many this fate is terrifying, after all, the fall of Rome was followed by a Dark Age. But as a bluntly anti-American anarchist, I see this coming upheaval with a devilish glint of hope. The Dark Ages came about when Europe fell into denial over their failure to control the world. If America can boldly face the truth that the empire is not only dead but deserved to die, this could be a new beginning. An opportunity for hope.

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Only Queers Can Save the Flaming Refugees of Love: Time to Decriminalize Polygamy 1

by • Sexuality and the State • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Massacres aren’t exactly unusual in the failed narco-state of Mexico, especially since the US pushed its beleaguered southern neighbor to declare all out war on the cartels a couple of decades back. More blood irrigates the Sonora Desert than acid rain. Barely a week goes by without some horrendous Bataille-esque crime of absurdly grotesque proportions popping up on the CNN news ticker, – 16 heads found in Juarez Chucky Cheese ball-pit, no tongues or eyes – But it’s rarely enough to steal Anderson Cooper’s attention from the latest minute kink in the Ukrainegate circus. This month was different though. This month, in early November, the cartels crossed the ultimate Rubicon of corporate news hysteria. They killed a bunch of pretty white people. 9 to be exact. 3 mothers and 6 children, savagely slaughtered in what appears to be a tragic case of mistaken identity.

But as the usual yammering heads blathered on about the proven necessity for endless drug wars, and Donald Trump used the garish details to further his border jihad while he and his brown counterpart AMLO compared dick sizes, there was one detail to this story that seemed to come to no one’s attention but mine. Oh, there was plenty of coverage of the fact that these innocent victims of American drug policy were Mormon Fundamentalists, usually in the form of some off-hand detail on the way to some other asinine point. But nobody seemed to do the math, to acknowledge the very basic fact that in an age when people are so desperate to get the hell out of Mexico that they’re willing to risk losing their children to one of Trump’s immigration zoos, there are still American citizens, dual citizens to be exact, who are living in exile in this hellhole, seeking refuge from 19th Century American puritanical persecution. The cartel put the bullets in those bodies, but those bodies where put in cartel country by the American government’s ongoing war on polygamy.

The families who were shot and roasted alive in their SUV’s were part of the Mormon Fundamentalist community of La Mora. While most of this community no longer practices plural marriage, they are all descendants of polygamist families forced to flee Utah after the federal government strong armed the Church of Latter-day Saints into banning a lifestyle among consenting adults which had long been a cornerstone of their religion. To this day, all fifty states maintain bans of varying degrees of severity against polygamy and the federal government has continued to make a point of persecuting polygamist communities, often on severely flimsy evidence of child abuse, separating and, in the case of Waco, even murdering whole families in the process. Our government has made it crystal clear that they don’t approve of the way these people choose to worship and raise their families and the result has been historically devastating. Thousands live in exile. Others have been forced to seek refuge in the shadows of demented false prophets like Warren Jeffs. All because of what? People finding love in unconventional places? Where the fuck have I heard that before? And why am I the only one outside of this community who seems to care?

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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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