What Radicalized Me

I didn’t pop out of the womb swinging a red flag. I wasn’t raised by union organizers or taught to quote Marx before I could walk. Like a lot of Americans, I coasted on autopilot for a while. I figured the president—whoever they were—probably knew what they were doing. The system seemed fine, or at least functional. Corrupt, maybe, but stable.

Then came Trump.

That was the first crack in the illusion. Suddenly the office of the presidency wasn’t just some boring institution, it was a circus, a cult, a threat. It wasn’t just bad policy. It was kids in cages. Racist dog whistles cranked up to bullhorns. And half the country cheered. That’s when I realized the system wasn’t broken. It was functioning exactly as designed.

That’s when I started reading. Rand again, first. I loved her in high school—thought she was deep. Then I picked up Atlas Shrugged as an adult and felt like I’d been duped. It wasn’t philosophy. It was selfishness with a thesaurus. The heroes were sociopaths. The poor deserved it. The rich were gods. It clicked: capitalism doesn’t just tolerate cruelty. It requires it.

From there, I fell down the rabbit hole. Camus hit me like a freight train. The Myth of Sisyphus gave shape to something I’d felt but couldn’t name. This low, constant hum of absurdity. The rock rolls back down the hill, and we push it again. Not because it’ll change anything, but because we refuse to give up.

That absurdism became fuel. So did my misanthropy. Not in the “I hate everyone” kind of way, but in the “I don’t trust people to do the right thing unless they’re forced to” kind of way. I watched people defend billionaires like they were sports teams, as if Apartheid Clyde was going to show up and hand them a Tesla for their loyalty.

I started arguing online. Then organizing. Then donating. I joined the Democratic Socialists. I started lurking at meetings, listening more than talking. I wanted to shake things up, but not just with signs and chants. I wanted disruption. Chaos. Direct action. Guerilla organizing.

I kept reading. Kept pushing. Anti-natalism hit me hard—David Benatar, Cioran, all of it. The idea that no one consents to be born, and that bringing someone into this world is an inherently selfish act. In a dying planet, under a dying system, having kids felt like feeding bodies into the machine.

All of that coalesced into anarcho-communism. Because socialism wasn’t enough. The state isn’t neutral, it’s a tool of capital. Voting helps, but it’s a bandage on a severed limb. I believe in mutual aid, in decentralized power, in horizontal structures. I believe in burning down what doesn’t serve us and building something new from the ashes. Something where people matter more than profit. Where community matters more than hierarchy.

And yeah, I still own guns. Gifts, mostly. I don’t shoot much. But they’re there—”just in case” feels more relevant by the day.

What radicalized me? The cruelty. The absurdity. The lies we’re told about success, about work, about life itself. And the quiet hope that maybe, just maybe, we can break the cycle. So I meme. I write. I organize. I fight. Because if this is a pyramid scheme called life, I at least want to go down pissing off the billionaires at the top.

What “The Wire” Got Right About Drug Policy

If you’ve watched The Wire, you probably remember the “Hamsterdam” storyline in season three. It’s one of the most controversial, radical experiments in the show, and maybe in TV history. For those who haven’t seen it: a police major named Bunny Colvin, frustrated by the utter futility of the drug war, creates unofficial “free zones” where drug dealers can operate without interference. In return, they have to move their business out of residential neighborhoods. He doesn’t legalize drugs, he just stops enforcing the laws in those pockets.

It’s a mess. It’s hopeful. It’s heartbreaking. And it’s probably the most honest take on U.S. drug policy ever aired. The whole thing gets shut down, of course. Because it worked. Hamsterdam reduced violent crime. It made it easier to get help to addicts. It gave communities some relief. But it also violated every sacred cow in American law enforcement. You can’t admit the war on drugs is unwinnable. You can’t show mercy. And you sure as hell can’t make policy based on reality instead of moral panic. That’s the part that stuck with me—because Hamsterdam worked. Not perfectly. But it worked better than what we’ve been doing for fifty years.

Our drug laws have always been more about control than safety. More about punishment than healing. We criminalize addiction, lock up the poor, and turn neighborhoods into war zones—all while pretending we’re “getting tough” on crime.

Meanwhile, drug use continues, overdose deaths skyrocket, and entire communities are hollowed out by mass incarceration. Hamsterdam wasn’t a utopia. It had problems. But it was rooted in a radical idea: What if we treated drug users as people instead of criminals?

Imagine if we took all the money we pour into SWAT raids, private prisons, and DEA sting operations—and used it for housing, harm reduction, mental health care, and treatment on demand. Imagine if we decriminalized drugs entirely, stopped arresting people for possession, and focused on actually helping people instead of ruining their lives.

Portugal did it. Overdose deaths dropped. HIV rates dropped. People got healthier—and the sky didn’t fall. The U.S.? We double down on failure because we’re addicted to punishment. Because it feels good to punish.

That’s why Hamsterdam couldn’t survive. It was too honest. We need more honesty. We need more Bunny Colvins willing to break the rules because the rules are broken. And we need drug policy based on compassion, not cruelty. Because right now, the real crime isn’t using drugs, it’s pretending our system works when we know damn well it doesn’t.

Why I Hate Elon Musk

Let’s get one thing out of the way: I don’t hate Apartheid Clyde out of any form of jealousy. It’s not because he’s wealthy, or famous, or “successful.” It’s because he’s the perfect embodiment of everything wrong with our world, gift-wrapped in a smug face and a broken social filter.

Apartheid Clyde is capitalism’s final boss. Not because he’s a genius–he’s not–but because he’s really good at taking credit for other people’s work while cosplaying as a messiah. He didn’t invent Tesla. He didn’t found SpaceX from scratch. What he did do was use inherited wealth to buy his way into tech projects already in motion, then spin a mythology around himself with the help of media and a small army of reply guys convinced he’s the second coming of Nikola Tesla, Tony Stark, and Jesus rolled into one.

Spoiler: he’s none of those things.

He’s a union-buster. A climate grifter. A serial breeder who thinks repopulating the Earth with his own genes is a noble cause. He preaches about saving humanity while exploiting workers and cozying up to dictators. He pretends to be a free speech absolutist while banning journalists on Twitter for criticizing him. He bought one of the most important online platforms just to turn it into his personal plaything–a megaphone for crypto scams, far-right rhetoric, and fragile billionaire egos.

He’s not a visionary. He’s a distraction.

Musk sells the illusion that billionaires will save us if we just let them run wild with our data, our money, and our futures. That if we tolerate their tantrums and bow to their brilliance, they’ll build us a utopia on Mars. Meanwhile, here on Earth, wages are stagnant, cities are burning, and the richest man alive is picking fights with disabled employees online.

I don’t hate him because he’s unusual. I hate him because he’s typical–a grotesque symptom of a system that rewards narcissism, hoarding, and unchecked power. A system that mistakes wealth for wisdom. A system that tells us the people breaking the planet are somehow going to be the ones to fix it.

He won’t save us. He can’t. He doesn’t even care to.

A Gun Owner Who Wants Gun Control

I’ve already posted once today, but I felt like I had to post this in lieu of the recent shooting in Florida. Your thoughts and prayers aren’t enough.

Let’s get this out of the way: I own guns. Plural. I’ve owned them for years. I even own an AR-15. Some were gifts, some I keep around for “just in case,” and no, I don’t sleep with one under my pillow whispering sweet nothings about the Second Amendment. But I am a gun owner.

And I want gun control.

Cut the screeching “Traitor!” “Liberal!” “You just want the government to take everything!” bullshit. Calm down, Yosemite Sam. Nobody’s kicking in your door to confiscate your tactical Hello Kitty rifle. But let me explain this in a way that even your average ammo hoarder can understand: owning guns and supporting regulation isn’t hypocrisy. It’s sanity.

I don’t want everyone’s gun banned. I want people who think a Red Bull and a grudge is a personality to have a slightly harder time buying an AR-15. That’s it.

See, the problem isn’t gun ownership–it’s the wild ass fantasy roleplay that’s metastasized around it. Some of you treat the gun range like a cosplay convention for failed protagonists. You’ve got more gear than the National Guard and a brain that could maybe pass a middle school civics test if it was a group project. And these are the people we’re supposed to trust with zero oversight?

I’m not buying it.

We regulate everything else. Cars, food, prescription meds. Hell, I need a license to fish. But guns? Nah, let’s just let any twitchy rage troll waltz into some store and suit up like it’s Call of Duty. Seems smart.

Gun nuts love to say, “If you don’t know anything about guns, you can’t talk about gun laws.” Cool. I do know. I’ve shot them, cleaned them, owned them, and locked them up when I wasn’t using them. And that experience is exactly why I know how dangerous our current free-for-all is.

The truth? Guns are fine. Gun culture is diseased.

It’s built on fear, fantasy, and fetish. It’s no longer about self-defense or even sport–it’s about ego, paranoia, and performative patriotism. Half the guys screaming about tyranny wouldn’t last five minutes without DoorDash and a cell signal, but sure, let’s arm them like they’re about to liberate Nakatomi Plaza.

You want to call me a “bad gun owner” because I want regulation? Fine. I’ll take it. You know what’s worse than a bad gun owner? A delusional one.

So yeah, I support background checks. I support waiting periods. I support red flag laws. I support licensing and training. And I still own guns.

If it breaks your brain then good. Maybe it was already cracked.

I’m a gun owner and I want gun control.

Share this. Re-post it. Piss off your relative with a Punisher decal on his lifted truck because the only way we fix this mess is if the “responsible gun owners” actually act like it.

Less Bodies for the Machine

Procreation isn’t a sacred act anymore. It’s a recruitment strategy. Capitalism needs fresh labor. Empires need more bodies to throw at wars and wage gaps. And the ruling class needs you too busy and broke raising kids to organize.

It’s a pyramid scheme, but instead of protein powder or crypto, the product is existence itself. And just like any good scheme, those at the top get richer while the suckers at the bottom hold the bag–and in this case–the diaper.

They’ll tell you it’s “selfish” not to have kids. As if sacrificing your sanity, finances, and future for a planet on fire is selfless. As if love can only be proven through reproduction. As if creating another sentient being without consent isn’t the actual selfish act.

I don’t just hate kids. I hate the system that demands them. The system that hands them a crumbling world, then blames them when they can’t fix it fast enough.

So no, I won’t be “giving my parents grandkids.” I won’t be “building a legacy.” I’ll be here—fighting for a world where people are valued for more than what they produce or reproduce. Opting out isn’t nihilism. It’s resistance. It’s one less body for the machine to chew on. And besides, why bring someone else into this absurd mess when you can throw rocks at the throne instead?

Sisyphus Shrugged

I didn’t drop the boulder. I just stopped pretending it mattered.

The myth goes that Sisyphus was condemned to an eternity of pushing a rock up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, over and over. Camus dared us to imagine Sisyphus happy. But what if, instead, Sisyphus shrugged?

What if he looked at the boulder–the job, the bills, the rent, the empty promises of “progress,” the demands to smile and reproduce under capitalism–and said, “Nah.”

Because here’s the truth no one wants to admit: the system is absurd. The wealthy are absurd. The idea of building a family on a dying planet is absurd. Apartheid Clyde tweeting like he’s the Oracle of Mars while workers piss in bottles? Absurd. Trump resurrecting fascism in a McDonald’s wrapper? Absurd.

We’re living in a pyramid scheme where life is the product, and the only way to win is not to play. They tell us to dream of owning homes we’ll never afford, to hustle in jobs that don’t care if we live or die, and to have children just to hand them the same existential debt.

But absurdism isn’t despair. It’s clarity. It’s rebellion.

To shrug like Sisyphus is not to give up–it’s to opt out, it’s to refuse the assigned meaning and create our own. It’s saying no to the wealthy, no baby cults, no to the grind–and yes to solidarity, sabotage, and stolen joy.

Why I and People Like Me Hate Trump

People hate Trump for all sorts of reasons and they’re all valid. Why do I hate him? Well, I’ll tell you.

I hate that he represents the worst combination of arrogance, ignorance, cruelty, and power. He’s the embodiment of everything wrong with American politics–corruption, racism, greed, and narcissism–and he’s turned politics into a grotesque reality show. I see him not only as a bad president but a symptom of a much deeper rot in our system: capitalism run amok, cultish nationalism, and the glorification of stupidity.

He brags about things he should be ashamed of. He lies like it’s breathing. He panders to white supremacists, demonizes immigrants, mocks the disabled, and dodges accountability at every turn. And somehow, he became president.

I hate him because he made it clear that cruelty isn’t a bug in the system–it’s a feature. He ripped children from their parents and bragged about it. He treated a pandemic like a PR problem and let hundreds of thousands die while pushing bleach as a cure. He spent years dog-whistling to fascists until the whistles became bullhorns, and then claimed no responsibility when his mob stormed the Capitol.

He doesn’t just represent conservative politics–he represents a cult of personality built on lies, resentment, and fear. He’s not just a symptom of decline, he accelerates it. He made it okay for the worst people to say the quiet part out loud–open racism, misogyny, transphobia, conspiracy theories–he gave it a platform and a suit.

He’s everything people warned us about in history books, except with a golf course and a gold toilet.

And the worst part? Millions cheer him on because of this, not in spite of it. That’s what really makes my blood boil.

Trump didn’t break America. He just held up a mirror, grinned, and asked if we wanted to make it worse.

“All Libertarians Are Scum”? Not So Fast

Recently, I told someone I was a libertarian socialist. Their response? “All libertarians are scum.”

It’s not the first time I’ve heard that sort of reaction. And I get it–libertarian is a poisoned word in the U.S. For most Americans “libertarian” evokes the image of a smug tech bro hoarding Bitcoin, quoting Ayn Rand, and arguing that child labor laws are tyranny. That brand of libertarianism–individualist, capitalist–has dominated the label in the U.S. for decades.

But that’s not what libertarian socialism means.

Libertarian socialism is anti-authoritarian leftist tradition. It’s about dismantling both state and capitalist hierarchies. It stands opposed to top-down government and to concentrated private power. It believes freedom doesn’t mean “I get to exploit people without interference.” It means collective self-determination, mutual aid, and horizontal organization. It’s about organizing society around human needs and not profit.

If you’re familiar with anarchism, council communism, or even some strains of syndicalism, you’ve brushed shoulders with libertarian socialism. It’s the politics of Emma Goldman, Noam Chomsky, and the Zapatistas in Mexico–not Ayn Rand and Elon Musk.

The confusion stems from a linguistic hijacking. In much of the world–especially in Latin America and Europe–libertarian has long been associated with the left. The term was originally used by anarchists to distinguish themselves from authoritarian Marxists such as Stalin and Pol Pot. In fact, in 19th century France, libertaire was often a stand-in for anarchist, especially when anarchism was censored of criminalized.

But in the U.S., thanks for Cold War politics, capitalist rebranding, and a lot of Koch brothers’ money, “libertarian” came to mean something closer to “I think poor people should die faster.” The right-wing libertarians here have tried to claim the whole world, but that doesn’t mean they own it.

So when I say I’m a libertarian socialist, I’m not trying to split the difference between Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders, I’m saying I want a world without billionaires or bureaucrats. I’m saying we need both freedom and equality, not as competing values, but as inseparable ones.

Here’s the core idea:

You’re not free if you spend your life working for someone else just to survive.

You’re not free if your boss can dictate your every move because they control your livelihood.

You’re not free if the government props up corporations while criminalizing poverty.

Libertarian socialism rejects the false choice between “state control” and “corporate control.” We want neither. We want self-control. We want power in the hands of communities, workers, and individuals, not oligarchs and technocrats.

So no, not all libertarians are scum. Some of us are trying to burn down the same systems you are, just from a different angle.

Revolutionaries or Mass Murderers

I’ve been doing more reading on revolutionaries such as Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara. Most of Americans were taught that these people were mass murderers and nothing else. If that’s the case then I argue that America’s Founding Fathers were too.

If we’re judging historical figures by the same moral yardstick, especially one centered around violence, authoritarianism, or the cost of revolution, then the Founding Fathers don’t get a free pass.

George Washington led brutal campaigns against Indigenous people.

Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves and upheld a system of racialized violence.

The American Revolution was steeped in bloodshed, repression of loyalists, and economic exploitation.

The American Founding Fathers launched a war that killed tens of thousands, built a country on the backs of enslaved Africans, and expanded westward by slaughtering Indigenous people and stealing their land. They violently crushed uprisings like the Whiskey Rebellion and created a political system designed to protect the wealthy elite.

Lenin and Che? They were revolutionaries in the truest sense–men who took up arms against brutal empires, fought for the poor, and tried to uproot centuries of aristocratic exploitation. Their revolutions weren’t clean or perfect–no revolution is–but they were aimed at liberation, not profit.

Yet we’re taught to worship the Founding Fathers as freedom fighters and condemn Lenin and Che as tyrants. That’s not a moral judgment, it’s a political one. The Founders fought for capitalism. Che and Lenin fought to destroy it.

Violence in the name of empire gets a statue. Violence in the name of emancipation gets called terrorism.

If we’re calling one side murderers, then let’s be honest: the blood is on every set of hands.

Presidents Are a Necessary Evil–For Now

The presidency, in all its grandeur and symbolic weight, often serves as the crown jewel of a system that feeds on hierarchy, spectacle, and obedience. We’re taught to look up to presidents, to CEOs, to gods of the free market. But real power should flow horizontally, not vertically.

Still, within a capitalist nation-state, presidents remain a functional necessity: someone to sign laws, to direct agencies, to act as a figurehead for national policy. But this necessity is not noble. It’s a byproduct of a broke structure, a structure that props up inequality, rewards charisma over justice, and reduces collective agency to a once-every-four-years ritual.

Libertarian socialism doesn’t just critique the office of the president, it critiques the entire system that makes such concentrated power seem normal. The goal isn’t to replace one “better” president with another. It’s to build a world where we no longer need one.