letters from a weirdo

They are trying to starve you, deny your healthcare, and terrify you into submission with abductions and state violence. They’re doing this not because they’re winning but because they’re losing-- bigly. They need you terrified, desperate, and playing into their hands. I’m going to give you a map to pull the rug out from under them. It’s time to move from protest to mass-cooperation with our neighbors so that we can withstand this political abuse, build parallel systems of support, and refused to be cowed. We will not break. We will not turn on each other. And even as these institutions are liquidized in front of our eyes, we will not yield our collective liberation to weak-witted despots.

Mike Johnson was handpicked by Donald J. Trump to become the Speaker of the House precisely because they knew he’d do two things: (1) cover for a serial child rapist and sex-trafficker and (2) sabotage Congress to aid and abet a fascist coup. But why Mike Johnson? What skeletons does this guy have in his closet that would make him an easy mark for a child-raping mobster like Donald Trump? I suggest that it’s because Mike Johnson was stupid enough to admit to sexually grooming his teenage son— on stage, in front of rolling camera— which begs the question of what he’s doing behind closed doors if this is what he’s admitting out in the open.

Because we live in a country steeped in rape culture, pesky things like definitions of consent, grooming, and the dynamics of power and control might be lost on you. That’s not your fault. You have lived in a country that has spent decades brainwashing you into believing every vulnerable person who comes forward as a victim of sexual abuse is somehow lying… and that people who are brave enough to step forward are the real villains for ruining innocent men’s lives. I call b******t, and I hope you do, too.

We aren’t passive victims here. Mike Johnson has always been in a precarious position as Speaker of the House. His colleagues already attempted to remove him once. That was two years ago. At the time, there wasn’t enough support.

Now? Times are a’changin.

There are an alleged one hundred GOP members of the House of Representatives that are willing to sign a discharge petition to release the Epstein files— the very files that look so bad for Trump that members of Congress are spooked.

In contrast, it takes only nine House Republicans to co-sponsor a “motion to vacate” which would remove Mike Johnson from the Speakership.

For the sake of survivors and children everywhere, I want YOU to pick up the phone, call Republican House members (202-224-3121), and ask them to work with Rep. Thomas Massey and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to co-sponsor a motion to vacate.

Mike Johnson has not only betrayed his constitutional responsibilities but he has shown us that he himself, through complicity in a cover-up alone, is a danger to children.

Young people in this country may not be able to vote, but they are absolutely aware of what’s happening right now. Show them you’re a safe adult by making the effort, regardless of the ultimate outcome, to stand up and remove a man who doesn’t care if kids get raped, trafficked, or starved to death… so that fascist elites can dodge accountability.

This story came out today, and I need you to understand: Mike Johnson is the weakest link. He recessed the House because his caucus is mutinying against him because he’s protecting a child rapist and letting children starve to keep him in power. Turns out that not everyone is a Christian nationalist like creepy Mike Johnson. Let’s work together to get him out. It only takes nine Republicans to get him out. There are way more than nine Republicans willing to do this— they just need to hear from us.

thank you: Kathryn Wallenstein, Heidi Yamate-Morgan, Tia Shamba, flightlessblrbs, mums, and many others for tuning into my first (slightly embarrassing) live video!

i went on substack live, not because I enjoy being on screen, but because i engaged with this post by Don Knight, and I have a modest proposal about how to fight back. go ahead and expand his post so you can read the whole thing.

anyhow, i think we should spook the techno-fascists and get off our screens… engage in a little austerity measures ourselves.

let the idea percolate. would it be inconvenient? yes. but when we’re talking forced famines and forced pandemics (the whole point of cutting SNAP and the ACA credit is to cull the population) and ethnic cleansing, we really need to move out of a place of singular self-interest and into a space of shared commitment and shared sacrifice to reclaim our collective liberation.

yes, being without the internet and abstaining or severely limiting our use of phones, is difficult. so is fascism. so are death camps. so is forced famine. so is a forced pandemic. there are no “convenient” ways moving forward, neighbor. this is a “choose your hard kind of moment,” where we need to ask ourselves if we want to engage in shared sacrifice to save our democracy or whether we want to sit back on the train to hell and watch techno-fascists and christian nationalists lock arms to sacrifice our neighbors (one by one, and then all at once) on the altar of mammon.

these people’s entire-ass plan is contingent on all of us feeling like we can’t survive without the internet or our cellphones.

i got news for you: we can.

not only can we survive, but getting offline and abstaining from our cellphones might be the very thing that kicks ‘em in the change purse and helps us reclaim our lives. because that’s where we are right now: we’re fighting for our lives.

to me? you’re worth giving up screens. you’re worth a temporary loss of income. money is fiction. you are real, irreplaceable, and precious to me. you are worth my solidarity.

i have done the moral math: you’re worth it every time.

also many things you’re looking for online, particularly by way of genuine connection, is in abundance when we walk away from the very tech currently being designed to bankrupt, surveil, abduct, and literally unalive us.

maybe it’s time we break up with our techno-fascist abusers, flip the script, go dark online, and organize in our communities offline— building parallel systems of support— as if our collective lives depend on it. it’s not enough to protest. we need to stop engaging with these heifers entirely and start building parallel systems so that we simply don’t need any thing they’re selling and the wheels fall off their janky soapbox derby car.

i wanna be clear: yeah this is scary, but there are also WAY more of us than there are of them, they’re already crashing out, and if we pull together and do a brave, sustained thing, i believe we will win.

do not let our collective addiction to screens be the thing that ends democracy.

it’s not like we have to stay offline and without cell phones forever: it’s about reclaiming our human dignity, standing up for our neighbors, and refusing to endanger young people by kicking the can down the road.

we need to be the safe adults in the room.

if not now, when?

i know this moment is scary, but i want you to know that there is something you can do in this moment that won’t just help your neighbors: it’ll also turn the tide.

(small side note: this is my first video recording, and something weird happened with the sound halfway through, so it sounds a bit fuzzy. who knows? maybe it makes it more human.)

grow wild — by flightlessblrbs

Neighbor, this is a follow-up podcast to a recent blog I wrote titled, “Obstruct Your Junk.” Mainly this episode is an audio essay, with a little ad lib thrown into the mix. The thing I most want to communicate to you is that the advice I’m sharing with you isn’t about vibes; it’s based on over two decades of studying Christian nationalists.

These aren’t Christians.

Jesus of Nazareth figures nowhere into their teaching; they are domestic abusers who believe in a racial and gendered caste system, and they wrap their extremist ideology in scripture under the guise of “religious freedom,” while doing everything they can to force this country into a regime under their ideologically depraved rule.

Christian nationalists are domestic terrorists, who delight in rape culture + are fully planning on creating a legal system that forces people to carry their sperm to term. You need to plan accordingly, even if it’s all too terrible to think about.

You don’t need to look the monster head-on to take steps to protect yourself.

If you’ve like to read the corresponding essay to this podcast, you can find it below.

Thanks for reading my work! If you like this weirdo’s content, follow me as I shift my content to a free Patreon, in order to get outside this nonsense, anxiety-inducing algorithm. Weirdo’s Patreon will go live October 13th. There you’ll find Weirdo’s blogs (including vintage weirdo archives from Substack), flightlessblrbs’s pro-democracy art, a new podcast called “My Weirdo Friends,” and a series of hosted community discussions to focus on the tactical art of neighborliness during times such as these.

the great bear always points to north star — by flightlessblrbs

a friend recently reminded me that what we know about history is pretty spotty, and the fancy guys always get the spotlight when it's usually us regular people who do the actual historical s**t. so if you’re feeling small in the enormity of this moment, please understand that rich people got to write history. they’re self-aggrandizing. it’s everyday people, striving for right relationship and a more perfect union, who have always arisen and made positive change in times like these.

and the other part is this: sometimes the task before us seems impossible. maybe there’s a risk we don’t succeed in the way we hoped but, out of profound love of our neighbors, we are trying— and that striving is worth something. it’s holy. it’s remembering our place in the great tapestry of life and knitting ourselves back together. the other part is this: sometimes regular people working together in murmuration can effect what might seem miraculous… but is actually us tapping into our ancestral wisdom.

editorial note: in the podcast i mentioned the concept of backdraft as a metaphor for this moment, but my words got all tangled up. what i meant to say is that, like in firefighting, sometimes it’s better to approach an overwhelming, volatile thing from the sides and not open the front door. the daisy chain, the project you keep hearing me talk about, is a heuristic (loose neighborhood choreography) for moving together from the sides to firefight fascism without opening the front door.

anyhow, i talk about these and other things in tonight’s podcast.

i hope some ember of what i say here feels relevant and helps light your hearth and move you into neighborly action. if it speaks to you, pass it on outside the algorithm. let this story shape how you move through your neighborhood.

Thanks for reading my work! If you like this weirdo’s content, follow me as I shift my content to a free Patreon, in order to get outside this nonsense, anxiety-inducing algorithm. Weirdo’s Patreon will go live October 13th. There you’ll find Weirdo’s blogs (including vintage weirdo archives from Substack), flightlessblrbs’s pro-democracy art, a new podcast called “My Weirdo Friends,” and a series of hosted community discussions to focus on the tactical art of neighborliness during times such as these.

the fascist wheel of power + control — by flightlessblrbs

Domestic terrorists, who self-identify Christian nationalists and members of the Heritage Foundation, are pressing to charge any person they choose with a “capital offense,” regardless of whether or not murder was involved. Why would they want to call things that aren’t murder a capital offense? Because they fully intend themselves to frame anyone they don’t like— particularly immigrants and transgender people— as committing capital crimes punishable by death.

See Dissent in Bloom’s journalism on this front:

They will not stop the killings with immigrants and trans people. These are the people this regime is banking on you seeing as “expendable,” because if you don’t fight what they do to them, they know they can eventually do it to you. Don’t believe me? Think about how many times our Black neighbors warned us of civilians being treated like enemy combatants— now look at our occupied streets. Think about how many times our immigrant neighbors told you about ICE abducting people off the streets and abusing them behind bars— now look at how ICE has been turned into a modern gestapo: here to traffic and enslave anyone who isn’t white and abduct and murder any person who “violates” the customs of domestic terrorists who call themselves Christian nationalists. They tried to warn you, and you didn’t listen. Trans people tried to tell you they were coming for everyone’s bodily autonomy— women and gays— not just us. Our disabled neighbors tried to warn you of the eugenic impulse in Trump 1.0 COVID policy— now they’re actively trying to make us all sick, to cull the population because they don’t want regular people who get sick to live.

I have been banging on about the regime’s revised capital punishment, not just since the first round of Trump’s EOs but from the moment Michael Knowles said on stage at CPAC that transgender people should be eradicated. Why? Because, for literal decades, terrorists who self-identify as Christian nationalists and Heritage Foundation members have said, loud and proud, that they think transgender people should be executed. But when any person actually researching these domestic terrorists said: “Hey, these guys literally want to kill trans people and re-criminalize being gay,” y’all were like But Target has a Pride display!

You have watched this regime begin by eradicating every single mention of transgender people from public and historic record. This is only something you do so that you can then turn around say: “Trans people have never existed— these are sex abusers and must be executed!”

Crazy, right?

Well, the Heritage Foundation has been saying this for decades about trans people— literal decades. And, by the way, the reason they have been so successful at targeting trans people isn’t because we’re some legitimate threat evoking popular animus (we been here for years) but rather with help of Russian sovereign wealth and the wicked counsel of Vladimir Putin himself.

See, when a hostile foreign dictator wants to destroy a nation from the inside, he does what any KGB agent was trained to do: (1) partner with the target nation’s homegrown domestic terrorists (Christian nationalists), (2) help them organize into a legal arm that can weaponize democracy against its people (Heritage Foundation), and (3) give the domestic terrorists a Russian asset to aid them in destroying the country from the inside out.

I need you to hear me—from a part of you that exists beyond numbness and beyond the need to feign helplessness—that you must intervene. Now. Offline. In your own neighborhoods.

When this regime says of immigrants that they are “rapists and murderers” and when this regime screams that trans people are “grooming and sexually abusing children,” remember that every accusation from these domestic terrorists is a confession. DO. NOT. LET. THEM. DISAPPEAR. YOUR. NEIGHBORS.

HIDE THEM FROM THEIR KIDNAPPERS.

Donald Trump is a child rapist, he sex trafficked children, and he murdered his criminal co-conspirator, Jeff Epstein, who was running the same kind of sex trafficking circuit for a different foreign boss.

Donald Trump is not a president. He is a foreign asset. He is a slave to Putin, a traitor to this country, and an enemy of the People.

Every single soul who still supports this regime knows the score. They fully intend to go all the way. Fascism never just fizzles out. Fascism only stops when regular people make fascist stop.

The only way to do that— from a pure level of pragmatism and civilian defense strategy— is to create para-institutional, coordinated local networks (made up of everyday people) that: return to our neighbors the basic necessities of life this regime has stolen from us, protect our targeted neighbors from being stolen, shut down fascists through mass-noncooperation, locate and return our disappeared neighbors, draft a new constitutional convention for a that serves Our People and Our Planet, and to hold every single willing abuser to account.

Gun wars are over. These people have drones. I’ve said this many times. Do not be so foolish as to agree to the terms of engagement set before you by literal domestic terrorists (because that is exactly who these people are): They want you in the streets with guns so they have an excuse to bomb the s**t out of any blue state or blue dot on the map. Don’t you remember when Trump said maybe blue states “won’t exist” anymore? I do.

Neighbor, this country isn’t red or blue. We’re regular people who have been gaslit and help captive by fascist elites and their henchmen for too long. If this mask-slipping moment teaches us anything let it be that we refuse to be manipulated or controlled by them any longer and refuse to comply with such determination and love for our neighbor that the entire regime collapses under its own weight— while we emerge prepared and organized with new constitutional documents that truly move us toward a more perfect union, not just with each other but with our ecosystem and our neighbors around the world. This madness must end.

So many of you have said sentiments like “I am glad my ____, a true patriot, didn’t live to see such times.” But here is another thing you know. Your ancestors are still here. They see these times. They are with us. They are at our backs. They will not leave us, and they need you to know that you were born into this very moment in history to break the generational curse of settler colonialism and white supremacy that brought the original sin of terrorism to this land. You are not small. You carry the skills, talents, fire and legacy of every ancestor who claims you as kin. You were made for this moment. You don’t need to do it all, but you do need to do your part— and that starts in your own neighborhood. Here’s some encouragement to get started.

Thanks for reading my work! If you like this weirdo’s content, follow me as I shift my content to a free Patreon, in order to get outside this nonsense, anxiety-inducing algorithm. Weirdo’s Patreon will go live October 13th. There you’ll find Weirdo’s blogs (including vintage weirdo archives from Substack), flightlessblrbs’s pro-democracy art, a new podcast called “My Weirdo Friends,” and a series of hosted community discussions to focus on the tactical art of neighborliness during times such as these.