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 […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley No one seems to be quite sure where this creature first lurked from. What foul crypt lays claim to the title of the beast’s cradle? Most trembling fingers point towards Europe, to the land of Caligula and Vlad […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley As surely as the moon wanes and the dead leaves tumble, once every fourth October, it becomes downright chilling to be an American. That’s because every four years, like clockwork, Americans prove every flamboyant third world boogeyman we’ve […]
By Nick Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley “Libertarians regard the state as the supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public” -Murray Rothbard “In Reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Is it just me or do white people kind of suck lately? I mean more than usual. That’s not racist, I use to be one. I sort of still am, I guess. More on that later. It kind […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley “The most interesting political questions throughout history have been whether or not humans will be ruled or free, whether they will be responsible for their actions as individuals or left irresponsible as members of society, and whether they can live in peace by volitional agreements alone.” -Karl Hess “We’ve got to […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Joseph Biden killed the liberal social justice warrior with a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, and blue lives were called in to matter, and his weapon took […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley “I have never really understood exactly what a ‘liberal’ is, since I have heard ‘liberals’ express every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject. As far as I can tell, you have the extreme right, who are fascist racist […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Donald Trump is the worst president in American History! That seems to be the downright unanimous opinion of every left wing wonk from here to Noam Chomsky, and I might have a bit more respect for the view […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Oh what a democracy we have in America! What a free and vibrant land of choices we’ve created for ourselves on the graves of more primitive civilizations. We just have so many goddamn choices to chose from, it’s […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Well folks, it’s official, Donald Trump has declared war on America. Probably should have saw that coming. After all, I’ve long argued that our dayglow duce isn’t an isolationist but merely the world’s shittiest imperialist. After trying and […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley This is the part of the horror movie where the plot collapses beneath the weight of one too many clichés. Having already gruesomely dispatched all the more promiscuous teens, the knife wielding masked psychopath has cornered the chaste […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Law and order. Just the sound of those three words sets my teeth on edge. Together they form a verbal menage a trois that quite possibly amounts to the three ugliest words in the English lexicon. It brings […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It was the kind of story that always seems to fly just beneath the radar. You probably missed it. I nearly did. Somewhere between the Pride parades and the Fourth of July, while the country was busy hyperventilating […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Exile in Happy Valley I should be such a happy Queer, shouldn’t I? At least that’s what I’m told. After all, aren’t all the other Queer folks just so goddamn happy? The ones on TV certainly appear to be, and even the ones […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley I have always been fascinated by secessionist movements. It goes back to my childhood love of maps, flags and geography. I use to spend hours poring over atlases and fixating on the strange autonomous zones that only existed […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley White people hate to talk about race, even the supposedly woke ones. When they do, the entire conversation is almost inevitably governed by fear. With white conservatives, it’s usually the fear of being made irrelevant by darker bodies. […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley It always ends this way, you can almost set your watch to it. A glamorous soirée rambling into the wee hours of the morning in an opulent townhouse on a tony tree lined street of any given international […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley I’m pretty sure this place use to be a democracy. Not America. Contrary to what Broadway may have told you, even our saintly Founding Fathers were little more than racist neocons in pantaloons. I’m talking about the fucking […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Remember when the Russians were coming? It seems like just last week Vladimir Putin was whistling the Soviet National Anthem just around every corner of main street. After the colossal clusterfuck of Hillary 2016, you couldn’t swing a […]
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley Good morning dearest motherfuckers, it is spring time in this the plague besotted year of our lord Satan, twenty-hundred-and-twenty, and both major party candidates for the highest office of the greatest democracy imperialism can buy are confirmed geriatric […]
Check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6. By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit Exile in Happy Valley As the smoke slowly settles on the bucolic hills of my farmland community and many others, the Coronavirus nightmare may be far from […]
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson
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