By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley In my lazy little corner of rural Central Pennsylvanian Trump country there has always been a sizeable minority of Russian emigres. I honestly have zero idea why but at some point, some lonely Soviet refugee found this bucolic […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley 9/11 seemed to come out of nowhere when I was a kid. One minute it was all bubblegum, Britney Spears, Pokémon cards, and gender dysphoria and the next the sky was raining commercial airliners and America was at […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It’s super hip to give a fuck about Ukraine right now. Everybody’s doing it! All the cool kids anyway. Everywhere you look it’s blue and yellow, blue and yellow, blue and yellow. There seems to be a Ukrainian […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley “Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view.” Jean Baudrillard, The Procession of Simulacra “I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It seems like just yesterday that our newly minted president, Joe Biden, was promising this country and the world at large a brand spanking new era of peace for Yemen. After watching two consecutive administrations facilitate Saudi Arabia […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley I don’t believe in taxes. I know that’s not exactly the trendiest take on the left these days, but I just can’t justify giving any institution that kind of power. I would love nothing better than to play […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley “Black power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.” -Huey P. Newton Growing up as a secretly Queer white kid in a predominantly white conservative community can be a profoundly surreal […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal…. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It’s been just over two weeks since the latest act of Islamic terrorism on US soil and the powers at be in the Fourth Estate already have it all figured out. Hell, it took those brilliant motherfuckers less […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It has been a cold cold winter for Afghanistan and I’m afraid it’s only getting colder. As the temperature drops below freezing and the snow continues to fall, this tiny war-torn nation that has already seen so many […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit “Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other” -Frederick Douglass “A worker is a part time […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Something truly terrifying is happening at the Capitol this January. Something deeply deadly to what passes for democracy in this stagnant empire. Something far more severe than the QAnon Shamen and Proudboy lunkheads who garnered so much media […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley The American Empire is crying genocide again. It’s an old song that the war class loves to sing, but one that never fails to get their compliant colleagues in the mass media dancing. No matter how woke these […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Let’s face it, dearest motherfuckers, this year sucked. From start to finish, 2021 was a hard year for hope. The Pandemic that never ends never ended. To the surprise of only the gullible, Joe Biden turned out to […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley The following is the Gospel according to Nicky Reid, a ranting, genderfuck, lesbian, Christopagan anarchist from the 21st Century. Like all religious propaganda, it is loosely based on a hot mess of new age folklore, revisionist history, pharmacological […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It happens over and over again. Another day, another shooting. Another day, another nightmare. Another sleepy small-town community put on the map for all the most horrifying of reasons. Another school shattered by unspeakable violence. Another lonely pissed […]
By Nick Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It’s the end of the world as we know it and the rich feel fine. In fact, those greedy motherfuckers have never seemed better. The ozone layer is evaporating, the oceans are rising, and the plague just keeps […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley America is a nation that loves its fairytales and folklore, not just the legends that we teach to our children as if they were scientific fact, but the stories we tell ourselves that make up the very fabric […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Something happened on May 25th, 2020, when George Floyd’s heart stopped, something revolutionary. As the whole country watched helplessly while a clearly psychotic police officer murdered a bound and incapacitated human being before a captive audience on a […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It seems like stupid season comes earlier and earlier every two years. Why, I could swear that only ten months ago was the most important national election of my young life and we’re already gearing up for another […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley I didn’t know Daphne Dorman but she was one of my people. Daphne was a transgender comedian and a Queer rights activist in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a gifted software engineer who created her own […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley America likes to think of itself like Van Helsing in a world full of monsters; a rogue vigilante republic cursed with the responsibility to protect the weak and the downtrodden from the forces of evil with it’s superpowers. […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It’s that time of year again, dearest motherfuckers. My favorite time of year. A time for mischief and chaos. A time for goblins, ghosts and ghouls. A time for swirling leaves, raucous bonfires and flickering jack-o-lanterns. A time […]
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 […]
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson
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