Image by Pau Casals.
It all began with a brazen and reckless pre-dawn raid in the desert wilds of Yemen. Seal Team 6 hit the ground shooting on the dusty streets of Yakla after lighting the village up with Reaper drones. The peasants put up a fight, one Seal was killed and two were wounded, but it was little use. By the time the sun rose on Yakla that morning it was strewn with body parts and smoldering in ashes. Among the dead were some 30 civilians including 8 women and 7 children, with the youngest slain by American heroes at the lethal age of 3 years old.
But one victim of this onslaught stood out among the others. An 8-year-old American citizen named Nora al-Awlaki was the third member of her immediate family killed on military orders issued from on high with White House executive authority. Nora’s father was the notorious Islamic propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, and in 2011 both he and her 16-year-old half-brother had been extrajudicially assassinated by drone strike within a week of one another under the orders of then-President Barack Obama.
Little Nora’s own execution came under the orders of one Donald J. Trump however, at the end of that man’s first week in the Oval Office in early January of 2017. She bled to death in agony in her mother’s arms over a period of two hours while that knuckle-dragging fiend-in-chief gorged himself on Big Macs and Diet Cokes. Her last words were, “Don’t cry, mama, I’m fine.”
And just like that, after less than one week in office, Donald Trump graduated from a sleezy, rapacious, corporate welfare queen to a full-blown baby killer. But anyone foolish enough to be shocked didn’t have to dig deep to find that this brazenly cruel war crime was merely another campaign promise fulfilled. “The other thing with terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” He had boasted vainly on the campaign trail. Mission accomplished.
But President Trump wasn’t done killing babies in Yemen. In fact, he was just getting started. As Gulf State lobbyists carefully messaged his son-in-law’s prostate, the Donald accelerated his predecessor’s already genocidal proxy war on the poorest nation in the Arab Peninsula. With a little help from Trump’s golf buddies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, he and Obama slaughtered 377,000 people by the end of Donald’s first term in office. 60% of these people died from starvation and disease made possible by a US facilitated blockade and more than half of the dead were children under the age of five. Now this orange baby killer is back and he’s calling to take Genocide Joe’s own proxy war on the children of Gaza to new levels of unapologetic cruelty.
Biden has already aided and abetted the hyper-Zionist government of Bibi Netanyahu in committing what might just barely surpass the massacre in Yemen as the most heinous act of genocide of the 21rst century. The official death count stands at nearly 40,000 in just under a year, with 15,000 of those bodies belonging to children but the Lancet has recently projected those numbers to be closer to 186,000 dead, and this apparently isn’t heinous enough for Donald Trump. In fact, he has actually accused Genocide Joe of being a “bad Palestinian” and has promised to help his old cronies in Israel to “finish the job.”
And somehow, this is the man that many members of the leadership of the Libertarian Party, my party, are lining up to offer their support too. The only thing more bizarre than a bunch of so-called anarchists and minarchists backing a man who quadrupled the deficit to put undocumented children in concentration camps is that they actually have a solidly non-interventionist candidate on the ballot, a 38-year-old gay antiwar activist named Chase Oliver.
But according to the Mises Caucus who now runs the party, Oliver is too “woke” for libertarian consumption. Some of this is just sour grapes. After allowing Donald Trump to turn their biennial Libertarian National Convention in DC into a MAGA circus by awarding him the keynote speaking slot, the Mises Caucus managed to secure the Party Chair for another term for Angela Mcardle but failed to get their candidate, Michael Rectenwald, the party’s presidential nomination.
However, poor losers aside, I find it a bit hard to ignore the fact that most of the people publicly rejecting Oliver’s candidacy, often in favor of tacitly backing Trump, list the man’s support for respecting the rights of parents with transgender children to make their own medical decisions first and foremost among his unforgivably “woke” sins.
This includes both the Montana and Colorado state Libertarian Parties who have declared that they will not even put Oliver’s name on the ballot. Idaho is contemplating doing the same and Chairwoman Mcardle appears to be right there with them. In a post-convention video address, the head of my party’s national leadership appeared in a clown nose before a rainbow backdrop and proceeded to faun over a man who spent more tax dollars than nearly any other president in history like a lovesick fangirl.
“Donald Trump says he’s going to put a Libertarian in a cabinet position. He came out and spoke to us. He said he’s a libertarian. He has basically endorsed us.” Mcardle gushed shamelessly before making her loyalties crystal clear. “And so, in return, I endorse Chase Oliver as the best way to beat Joe Biden. Get in loser, we are stopping Biden. That’s what I think this campaign is about.”
Speaking as a genderqueer libertarian antiwar activist, I dearly wish that any of this trash was shocking to me, and it probably should be. The GOP has been on a big government jihad against trans kids for years now, violating every civil liberty imaginable to erase them from existence. But the Mises Caucus and their leadership in the Libertarian Party have made their feelings about my community very clear.
After skuttling an attempt to add support for the civil liberties of trans people to the party’s platform earlier this year, a leaked internal party memo labeled “transgenderism” as a Cultural Marxist conspiracy that needs to be thwarted and sadly this line of bullshit jibes perfectly with many of the Mises Caucus’ ideological torch bearers like Rectenwald and Mcardle who spout baseless conspiracy theories about puberty blockers chemically castrating children.
Please allow me to rip the needle from the record right now. Puberty blockers have been used safely for decades to treat precocious puberty in cis children. The Mayo Clinic has found them to cause little to no permanent physical changes, but studies have consistently shown them to reduce suicidality in one of the most vulnerable populations of young people in this country by as much as 73% and I’m not even asking you fucking people to grow up and support a medical treatment proven to be effective in saving lives. I am merely asking that my party stand by its goddamn word and support the right for Queer kids and their families to exist without having the jackboot of the state stepping on our throats.
I am asking you to keep the government out of our schools where they are banning books and policing public bathrooms. I am asking you to keep the government out of our doctor’s offices where some states are trying to interfere with the medical decisions of individuals well into their twenties. And I am asking you to keep the government off our streets where states like Florida and Tennessee want to use anti-drag laws to penalize any gender performance that they deem to be “male and female impersonation.” But more than anything, I want you to put shutting down the war machine that mangles other people’s children like little Nora al-Awlaki before your culture war bullshit and this is what the Mises Caucus itself was supposed to be all about.
Formed in 2017 in revulsion to the Libertarian Party putting a known neocon warmonger named Bill Weld up for VP on the 2016 ticket, Mises was supposed to be a revival of the anti-imperialist values of anarchists like Murray Rothbard who founded this party. I have good friends and loyal allies in this caucus, fellow radicals who share my revulsion for compulsory schooling and my support for secession, both of which I view as indispensable tools for Queer liberation.
But over the last few years I have seen this caucus polluted by the braindead talking points of Christian Zionist globalists and this is the other objective of the GOP’s war on trans, to use cultural prejudices to hoodwink well-intentioned isolationist populists into supporting big government, baby killing scum like Donald Trump.
Sadly, it appears to have worked and this is why this post should not be misconstrued as an endorsement for Chase Oliver or any other candidate. A decade ago, I would have been happy to endorse this fatherfucker for the same reasons that I would have been happy to endorse Ron Paul or Eugene Debs for that matter. Because I would have wanted the most unapologetically antiwar candidate to have the loudest microphone that I could throw them. But in 2024, American presidential elections aren’t even affective for protest votes. The process itself has become a device for dividing oppressed people of every stripe against each other.
Before the GOP’s war on woke, I had no problem building alliances among even the most culturally conservative libertarians. Now, my own party treats me like a fucking pedophile because I want to keep other trans girls from getting molested in men’s bathrooms like I was, and because I need to stop my government from killing any more children, whether their name is Nora al-Awlaki or Nex Bennedict.
If this is what democracy looks like, then I am done with fucking democracy and the morons it plays like one of Donald Trump’s cheap casino games.
You people can vote for whoever the fuck you want but don’t you dare go calling your appeasement for genocide at home and abroad libertarian or I’ll kick your fucking ass.
The post Backing a Baby Killer to Spite Trans Kids appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
