It's Always Worth Fighting

Don't Let The Bastards Take Your Neighbors

Some housekeeping: I just released a new print to benefit Ukraine. I did this drawing back in 2022 in Kyiv, when the full scale invasion was still fresh. Ukrainians had made a graveyard for destroyed Russian military hardware in front of Golden Domed St. Michael’s Monastery. Kids capered over the burnt out tanks and drew dicks on their sides. I was so struck by the contrast between the fairy blue delicacy of St Michaels and these charred death machines that I had to capture it. All profits from this print will go to the Ukrainian anarchist group Solidarity Collectives, who are sending convoys of food and medicine to civilians living in Ukrainian cities under attack. My gratitude to all the magnificent people I met in Ukraine.

Thank you so much to the hundreds of monsters who have signed up since I started posting regularly on substack. As an independent artist with a giant mouth, your subscriptions help me do the work I want, unconstrained by collectors or corporations. I am truly grateful. If you like my art, you can also buy my books and prints.

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I am back in Athens. An old lady across from our apartment hurls cat food on the adjoining rooftops. The cats scramble for the pellets. I know them by now. Slinky cow colored kitten. Fat yellow loaf. They scrap, then skulk off into their separate corners of sunlight.

In America, the government pulls people off the streets.

Sometimes it’s about suppressing the Palestine movement, as in the case of Mahmoud Khalil. But there are other political prisoners as well. Here are two:

Melissa Atwell-Holder, Miss Melly, a Guyanese anti-corruption blogger grabbed after her birth country’s energy minister made a visit to America.

Alfredo Juarez, who organized farmworkers in Washington, had ICE smash through his car window and drag him away.

Sometimes ICE just does it to make a quota. After all, every night a human spends locked in a filthy detention center translates to a few hundred bucks sent to one of the private detention companies that donated so lavishly to Trump. It’s just business. Richy rich needs to buy another yacht.

And sometimes its content. The White House posts of ASMR of men in shackles. Kristy Noam standing like a frosted-lipstick porn star in front of a cage in El Salvador full of men clad only in boxers, heads shorn. That fucking libs of Tik Tok Lady, given a tin sheriff’s star and permission to round up “illegals”. Like. Share. Subscribe. Scroll.

Humans disappear into cages. Humans die.

I don’t much like Nazi metaphors, which are thin from overuse (I beg you, read about another time period). However, one story comes to mind. Hitler quickly neutralized his opposition after seizing power. German socialists and communists vanished into camps. It’s not surprising then that there was only one real protest by German Aryans on behalf of Jews. It was by hundreds of German women married to Jewish men. When the government rounded up these men in 1943, the German women protested in front of their prison. The Gestapo threatened to shoot the women. They stayed. Allied bombs fell. They stayed. They stayed and stayed and stayed, until the Nazis flinched. Turned out, the prospect of Teutonic blondes gunned down on Rosenstrasse was a bit too much for the state’s propaganda arm to swallow. The Gestapo freed their men.

Imagine what might have been prevented if Germans had fought for their neighbors from the start.

Last month, ICE snatched a mom and her three kids from a dairy farm in upstate New York. This was the sort of real ‘Murican small town that the current regime thinks would welcome the arrest of their neighbors. The regime was wrong. Half the town got out in the streets to protest the kidnapping. The protesters did not stop. Now, the mom and kids are free.

Four humans, out of an ocean. Four humans, each of them a world.