Tag Archives: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

My Shitlist 2018 Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

This blog is a lot of things to me. It’s art. It’s therapy. It’s a bullhorn from which I can shout my radical diktats to a small horde of loyal followers whom I lovingly refer to as my dearest motherfuckers. Hopefully it’s a launching pad for a future revolution that will liberate poor people once and for all from the shackles of big government and big business (or do I repeat myself.) But when it all comes down to it, lets face it, I’m here to bitch. That’s why once a year I drop all artistic and political pretenses and simply make a list of all the people who piss me off the most. I call it my shitlist and 2018 has provided me with no shortage of shit. Now if I put everyone that chaps my ass on this list it would be longer than fucking Gravity’s Rainbow, so I’ll just pick a handful in no specific order to roast like pigs on a spit. So here it is, dearest motherfuckers, My Shitlist 2018.

John McCain–  After a lifetime as America’s most celebrated war monger, the one thing that John could do for the world, the only act of mercy that that rapacious murder junkie should have been capable of performing is to finally do us all a big goddamn favor and just fucking die already. But no, John McCain even has to die like a fucking dick. Over a week, a goddamn week of funerals and parades and tributes and memorials and animal sacrifices and imperial orgies, all of them carefully planned by that ego-drunken light bulb factory bomber, to celebrate his foul legacy of homicide advocacy like a goddamn pharaoh. By day five of this ordeal, I was screaming at the TV set “Just give me a goddamn shovel! I’ll bury the cunt myself!!” All I have left to say to the first dead man to make this list is bon voyage you putrid butcher of civilians. Tell Satan that Armageddon’s going great.

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Voluntary Tribalism: Why Not? Reply

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

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I’ve always found it absurd that white nationalists bitch the loudest about identity politics when they’re the winy snowflakes who fucking invented the goddamn concept. White isn’t even a race for Christ sake. There is no Whitestan. There is no traditional white tribe. It’s a class concept designed to justify an oligarchy without a royal bloodline. I’m pretty sure that the first “white” guys were just a bunch of slave owners who settled on the superiority of their lack of melanin after they finished taking inventory on eye color and penis size and came to the conclusion that skin was the one thing they had in common that the field hands couldn’t lay claim to. In today’s divided states of America identity politics are mostly used to keep different genres of poor people at each others throats while the one percent rapes their wives (often literally) and pollutes their land.

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Looking Left to Panarchy 2

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I haven’t always been an anarchist but I’ve always been a radical. After being raised in the pro-life movement I discovered the Communist Manifesto as a 14 year old lapsed malcontent. I didn’t understand every word of it but the inflammatory anti-clerical rhetoric lit a fire in me that never went out. After spending several years as a teenage anarchist, influenced in equal measure by Subcomandante Marcos and Johnny Rotten, I turned to state socialism, inspired by the bold anti-imperialist antics of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution. It was also around this time that I became enamored by tales of the Bolsheviks, Che Guevara, and those dastardly Castro brothers. Marxist-Leninism and Democratic Centralism made sense to a twenty-something closeted agoraphobic. Like my life it felt preserved in formaldehyde. It felt safe.

But there’s nothing radical about safe and when I came out of the closet to take my life back from mental illness and gender tyranny, I was ready to dream dangerously again. The suspiciously early demise of Hugo Chavez followed shortly by the cataclysmic failure of his signature revolution was the final straw. Chavez did everything right but when he dropped dead the revolution dropped dead with him. For me, that was the last nail in the coffin for state socialism or state anything for that matter. I was drawn back to anarchism by the unexpected triumph of the Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria and the prison writings of the man who inspired it, another post-Marxist anti-statist named Abdullah Ocalan. But I’ve remained both conscious and unapologetic of my tangled radical roots and my objectives have always remained the same, the creation of a classless post-capitalist society.

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A Politically Incorrect Guide To Not Being a Dick 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Land

Political correctness is a fucking bust. It may have started with the best of intentions but so was the Russian Revolution and both ended in bourgeois tyranny. Political correctness has been more or less the law of the zeitgeist since the early Eighties when the radical feminists teamed up with the puritanical Reaganites to poop the raucous party of the Seventies, after the CIA unleashed AIDS to kill all the fun faggots (I’m only half-kidding). And in the proceeding decades the PC revolution has achieved absolutely nothing. Black and brown people are still poor as dirt. Women and femmes are still roundly violated on a daily basis. And the prison state has never been stronger.

The only thing political correctness really achieved was making it easier for bigots to hide behind the facade of good manners. Based on policy alone, the Clintonian Democrats clearly despise brown and queer people as much as those knuckle-draggers in the alt-right, they just know how to cover their ass with careful newspeak like “super-predators” and empty gestures to people who disgusted them three weeks ago when they weren’t politically viable. Personally, I’ll take an open bigot like David Duke over some squishy closet-basher like Alec Baldwin any day of the week. At least that silicone supremacist will call me faggot to my face.

So the current backlash against the malign influence of political correctness in not only totally natural, it’s also totally necessary. But that doesn’t mean you have to be a fucking dick. The reality is that marginalized individuals such as myself do have plenty of reasons to be pissed off and straight white cis-folk could strongly benefit from learning why and realizing that their mainstream cache does afford them some privileges that the rest of us don’t have. I’m willing to bet that most of you can enter a public restroom without having to seriously consider the possibility that somebody might set you on fire for having the wrong genitalia. But nothing gets solved without conversation, so I’ve decided to put together a few suggestions on how to be politically incorrect without being a total dick.

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Who’s Afraid of Comrade Hermit? 31

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By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Its recently been brought to my attention by a well respected member of the libertarian literati that my writing more or less sucks. I wont name any names, god knows I’ve burned enough fucking bridges, but suffice it to say you would know who he is if I did. This isn’t a new complaint. I’ve heard it before but the certain terms of his criticism and the fact that I actually respect the son of a bitch made its way through my armor like a spear. Unfortunately for him, the only way I know how to cope with such turmoil is through my bad writing.

His gripe was a tired old sawhorse often tossed about by white cis-gender libertarians. What it basically amounts to is that he’s uncomfortable with my “personal” style of narrative. He’s revolted by all the I, I, I’s. I this, I that, I hate war, I have feelings, and I share them with my work, and apparently I shouldn’t fucking do this. Fair enough. My writing is personal. I’m a personal person. Things like war and the state effect me deeply so I express those feelings honestly through my prose. Apparently this along with my penchant for profanity makes my work unpublishable by the big shots of libertarian online journalism. Apparently my work is too unconventional to meet their sterling standards of literary integrity.

Well fuck them. Apparently those cunty know-it-alls have never heard of New Journalism. If it was up to these self-appointed Mandarins of the fifth estate Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Matt Taibbi would have never been published. Apparently they skipped class the day their staunchy universities taught about Gonzo Journalism. The basic message that I’ve gotten from these people is that I’m too different. And they call themselves libertarians?

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Notes From a Sputnik Leftist Reply

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By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Russophobia has become America’s new favorite form of bigotry. You can’t jaywalk in this goddamn country without being accused of first degree Putin puppetry. This cold borscht of xenophobia has been brewing for some time but it has taken on a whole new spiciness with Robert Mueller’s blockbuster witch trials and the alleged pervasive Putinist conspiracy to subvert our so-called democracy. The shocking thing, to me at least, is that even stalwart elements of the radical left have been effected by the fumes of the latest Red Scare. One of my favorite writers, CounterPunch’s Jeffrey St. Clair, has taken to referring to Russiagate critics such as myself as the Sputnik Left. It’s cute. I kinda like it, but then again you are talking to a non-binary person who takes tranny as a compliment. I’ve never been particularly hesitant to embrace the role of the villain. After all, who else is going to blow up the system? But there are still bones to be picked and I’m just the bitch to pick them.

The general stereotype of the Sputnik Left is that we’re a bunch of bitter, Putin loving, conspiracy theorists who ingest RT like cheap caviar and maintain a decidedly myopic view of Russia’s alleged involvement in the 2016 election among other nefarious acts of Rusky skulduggery. Jeffrey recently described us as “political activists who rigorously apply Chomsky’s lens to the NYT, WashPost, and the Guardian, but regurgitate as gospel whatever they read or hear on RT or Sputnik”, and like even the least of Jeff’s work there is a grain of truth here. I have friends who fit that description to a tee but it’s an awfully broad brush for a diverse crew. I can’t speak for all of us but I figured one of us might as well attempt a rebuttal.

First off, Putin: I am not nor have I ever been a Putin puppet. As a genderqueer anarchist, I’m sure that Vlad wouldn’t think twice about chucking my radical faerie ass into a gulag. Like all politicians, Putin is greedy, vain, stupid, and shallow. People in his country starve while he hobnobs with the kind of cruel oligarchs that were rightfully strung from the lamp posts during the Revolution. But the western notion that Putin is the worst thing to happen to Russia since Stalin is just fucking silly. The man may be a greedy egomaniac (and likely closet queen) but he has shown an enormous and at times downright shocking amount of restraint when confronted repeatedly by western aggression. My and others recognition of this fact doesn’t make us Putin apologists anymore than the critics of the Second Gulf War were Saddam apologists.

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Who Cares About Dirty Brown Genocide? Reply

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

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

The scene was apocalyptic, like something out of a George Romero movie gone horribly wrong. Tiny bodies littered the shattered concrete, stained pitch black with soot and blood. Some of them were as still and stiff as calcified ventriloquist dummies, breathing nothing but smoke. Some of them rived in agony, mangled limbs throbbing and kicking, eyes rolled back in their battered little skulls as they screamed in agony to an indifferent god. The landscape that surrounds them is a bleak, smoldering, landfill overpopulated by a seemingly random collection of twisted metal and charred body parts; Arms, legs, heads, jagged fragments of bones and bubbling molten globs of shredded viscera, and every here and there a haunting sign of the casualties battered innocence; A doll with a heat warped plastic face, the busted half of a pink plastic lunchbox, and at the center of it all, a boy no older than 7, sitting upright, covered in his playmates blood, with an oversized UN-blue backpack still strapped to his bony shoulders, staring a thousand yards into an abyss that no one that young should ever see. They were children. They were all just children. And they were obliterated by an American bomb.

This was the latest chapter in the endless horror story called the Yemen Civil War. But it’s not a civil war. A civil war requires two sides on the same playing field. Whats going on in Yemen ceased to be a war at all long ago. This is a slaughter, a genocide, a holocaust. It’s latest victims were children on a school bus, coming home from a picnic, miles away from anything resembling a military installation. Over 40 dead, scores injured, many if not most of them under 10. This was a deliberate act of terrorism perpetrated by our “allie” Saudi Arabia with the full aid and support of these fine United States. We supplied the weapons. We fueled the planes. We provided the precise logistics that told our proxies exactly who they were murdering. We did everything but pull the goddamn trigger. And as usual nobody in this timezone or the next could be bothered to really give a shit.

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First They Came For the Douche-Bags 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Censorship has never been more hip. All the kids are doing it, all the cool ones anyway. Someone tweets something spicy and they go running to Big Brother to set things straight. And why not? The adults are doing it too, or at least the people who call themselves adults in the legacy media do. After centuries of covering civil wars, Red Scares, and Nixonian scandals, our gilded Fourth Estate has rendered themselves to the status of a bunch of snot-nosed, apple snitching kids crying foul whenever some pedestrian steps on their feelings or questions their inalienable right to zeitgeist supremacy. I speak of coarse of the latest Stalinist purges being undertaken on social media juggernauts like Facebook and Twitter in the name of protecting our precious bodily fluids from a dastardly Slavic midterm conspiracy that everyone is apparently too terrified to prove exists.

So far the victims of this purge have mostly been douche-bags like that rambling boil with teeth, Alex Jones. But that’s how it starts and we’ve already gotten a taste of how it ends. After verbally spanking one too many corporate news jackass (some chickenshit stringer from the New York Times), State Department whistle-blower and fifth degree black belt smart-ass, Peter Van Buren was given the Twitter death penalty and permanently removed from the sites recorded history, just as easy as clipping Yezhov from a photograph. In a rampant spree of crypto-fascist overkill a couple of other fine upstanding civil libertarians, Scott Horton who still refuses to publish me at antiwar.com (not that I’m pissed about it!) and Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute, where slapped in the purgatory penalty box just for coming to the poor bastards defense.

This all suites the virtue signalling martyrs of the “free” press just fine. Guys like Peter have devoted their lives to debunking their bullshit. At the time of his expulsion Peter was crashing the pity party being thrown by those self-fellating imbeciles in the wake of our techno-Tourette’s stricken president’s latest tweet lashing the mainstream media as the “enemy of the people” (Stalin’s wraith seems to be quite active these days). Peter was not-so-politely reminding these perpetual victims that our dear leader made one accurate point- that you motherfuckers start wars with your propaganda. The righteous indignation of these very war-whores, caught with their hand in the hypocrisy jar, was almost laughably absurd. As was their total stone-blindness to the fact that this kind of obnoxiously clueless behavior is precisely what allows morons like Donald Trump and Alex Jones to prosper from its blowback. I’d probably still be fucking laughing if a hadn’t read 1984 in 8th grade.

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Call Me Nicky 2

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Introducing our newest contributor at ATS.

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Most of you know me as Comrade Hermit, muckraking shut-in extraordinaire, but my slave name, my name in the straight world, the one on my birth certificate, is Nicholas Adam Reid. Growing up, most people called me Nick and for the most part that was never really a problem. Being a fluid dyke like me is tricky because there are no Barbie dolls or frilly dresses to tip you off that I’m trans. For a long time even I didn’t know. There were no people on TV that looked the way I felt so I just figured that I was a freak and that became my identity- Nick the Freak.

And in many respects I am a freak and I take great pride in that. I’m a Rothbardian-Freudo-Groucho-Marxist-Syndicalist with a library that includes everything from Che Guevara to Ernst Junger. I’m a sado-masochist power bottom with a fetish for quite literally everything. I’m a politically incorrect sex-positive transfeminist who loves nothing better than shouting theater in a crowded fire. I’ve never owned a cellphone. I’ll never own a credit card. I hate social media with a passion leftists usually reserve for Kulaks. And I’ve never eaten a green vegetable. I also have an odd affection for gangsters, outlaws, serial killers, revolutionaries of every stripe, and histories misunderstood super-villains in general. I’m a freak alright. I live for the fringe. Society is just a classy word for totalitarianism and I wan’t nothing to do with it. But my gender identity has nothing to do with my freakdom. I didn’t choose to be a mostly female butch lesbian in a mountain man’s body. Believe me, I’ve tried not to be. I’ve tried to be male. I’ve tried to be female. Both fit me like a leash. I am who I am and Nick just doesn’t feel like an accurate label for that anymore.
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You Don’t Have to Like Trump to Hate Russophobic Hysteria 1

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

Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I hate Donald Trump. Every cell in my body rejects that man like a bad virus. Being a genderqueer anarcho-feminist with a functioning conscience, everything I believe in, everything that I have built my foundation of basic human values upon, is in complete and utter opposition to that depraved, misogynistic, xenophobic, orange-nationalist and everything he stands for. His treatment of women, Muslims, and immigrants in particular makes me physically sick. But this week I am not revolted by Trump, I am revolted by his self-righteous opposition and this makes me one very, very, very, pissed off lesbian bitch. No one gets in the way of my own self-righteous hate without getting a fucking taste of it. The Resistance hasn’t seen shit until they’ve fucked with me and when you fuck with detente, you fuck with Comrade Hermit.

Last Monday Donald Trump did something right for a goddamn change. He met with our “enemy” Russian president Vladimir Putin and appears to have taken a legitimate stab at diplomacy. After the meeting he was polite to his guest and registered doubt that Mr. Putin was behind any sort of interference with the 2016 election. He went on to boldly criticize Robert Mueller’s childish reenactment of the Salem Witch Trials for grievously damaging Russo-American relations and recklessly endangering world peace between the worlds foremost nuclear powers. “I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than risk peace in pursuit of politics” he proclaimed in a defiant display of what looked suspiciously like leadership.

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If Putin Did It: A Hypothetical Defense for a Hypothetical Crime 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

What if Putin did it? That’s the question I’ve been getting a lot of lately. The proverbial ‘it’ being the oft-repeated accusation that the Russian government, under the direction of Czar ubermensch Vladimir Putin, colluded with Donald Trump in the 2016 election. I happen to be one of a handful of people on the left who has never bought into this half baked conspiracy theory, cooked up by Democrats to explain how they lost the White House to a reality TV monster and picked up by the so-called intelligence community to justify their purse shriveling budgets. But still I get asked, usually by some limp-wristed Whole-Foods progressive, what if Putin did it?

Since I’ve grown blue in the face trying to explain to these well intentioned morons that after 18+ months the worst thing that the biggest investigation since Watergate has managed to uncover is a mercenary Slavic clickbait farm and the kind of casual run-ins with Russian oligarchs that are sadly de rigueur for existence in the Washington swamplands, I figured I might as well just answer the goddamn question, which has developed a vibrant new layer of cacophony in the wake of Robert Mueller’s latest wave of baseless indictments against Russian nationals who will never stand trial. So what if Putin did it? I would have to shrug my shoulders and say Karma’s a bitch.

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