MAY 29, 2026 PRIDE MONTH EMPIRE from page 7 didn't understand why I didn't vibe with his white supremacist shit. I grew up in the same circles he did online, but he assumed everyone there was a white supremacist. In the anonymous places, there was no allowed mention of race, no gender, everyone was anonymous, revealing any such information would be a vulnerability, would be a violation of the entire endeavor. Everyone was white male John Doe. I was young, I didn't see this for what it was at the time: erasure. By sanitizing all reference to race and gender, anyone trying to discuss race or gender was attacked, vilified, ostracized, exploited, abused. "There are no girls on the internet." "Prove you're a girl, show tits." "I don't believe that's really you, you just grabbed that photo from the internet, post shoe on head." "Lots of girls have posted shoe on head, you saved that from a previous thread, post sharpie in pooper to prove you're real." This is where "pics or it didn't happen" came from. This is where "Traps" grew up. Kids socialized as boys would post as girls; when the misogyny poured out, and they started asking for pictures, they would try to pass as girls. Their goal: reveal progressively more skin and not get clocked until the final image of genitalia. If they were clocked or if someone was reposting known pictures, someone would post Admiral Akbar saying "It's a Trap!" Whether these "Traps" were of legal age, there was no way to tell other than by looking — some clearly weren’t. I was a child myself. Later I started to think about the ramifications. First the legal threat to myself as I approached adulthood seeing child sexual assault material (CSAM) thrown about. I had the technical knowledge to know that every image I saw in a browser was cached on my computer for some time, and how feds could use that to hurt me should they decide I was being too loud about my radical politics. I now know the feds just download CSAM onto your computer themselves after they arrest you if they feel like getting you murdered in prison. I looked for other networks, looked for the best encryption, the most anonymous protocols. Besides filesharing hubs, every network I looked at had a pedophile problem. Pedophiles delved deeper into their paranoia, for them it was worth scrubbing their cache and hosting private networks with hardened protocols to procure their vile abuse material. Trying to get the average person to use PGP encrypted email was a non-starter. The only people that would go through that trouble were whistleblowers and journalists. It was easier for me to abandon the anonymous pits and delve deeper into what I actually liked, the computer itself, video games, movies, anime and music. I had found the unrestricted speech I was looking for and the abyss peered back into me. The CSAM that drove me from those spaces will not drive away the children who don't understand or the predators soliciting it. I realized that completely anonymous uncensored spaces were doomed to become places of abuse. The ideas of total anonymity and the technologically uncensorable lost much of its appeal. Being held accountable by peers is good actually. Despite my newfound distaste I couldn't deny the need for anonymity and the ability to share sensitive information in the heart of this bloodthirsty empire. The U.S. military guns down innocent people. This isn't speculation, not hyperbole, nor debatable. People were exiled, imprisoned and tortured for bringing us the evidence. I stood with Anonymous in protest when Chelsea Manning was dragged into Guantanamo Bay and tortured for leaking video evidence of U.S. war crimes to WikiLeaks. I stood with and without a mask. This empire is fucked. America is a place where it's safer to be a pedophile soliciting sex shows from children than whistleblowing on war crimes. Grok (Elon Musk’s AI) generates CSAM on demand now, and protesters are shot in the street. Promote genocide and you can get a cushy job at CNN; promote peace and you're jailed. I grew up in a pit where kids playing with gender expression were groomed into sex shows for creeps because there was no safe space for them to express their gender, and now I see families of every description partying in the street. The war is still on. Recently I saw an adult catboy who was outed to his homophobic dad because a nazi talking head used his pictures as an example of the old nazi scare: "moral degeneracy," aka sin. The United States is attacking Cuba, a bastion of peace, a place of Black liberation, a place where all those families who have been queered by our vile overlords are protected by law. It's starving the Cuban people, and laying out manufactured consent for hot war. The state department is spreading propaganda claiming Cuba, which is starving, which is suffering horrific blackouts, has 300 drones ready to attack Guantanamo Bay. Fuck Guantanamo Bay. There's no evidence that Cuba is gearing up to attack Guantanamo, but I'd support them if they were. Guantanamo is a torture site. It's been used to torture whistleblowers and people who dared stand against the machine that raped their little brothers in Abu Graib. The GROUNDCOVER NEWS 11 U.S. military has no right operating on Cuban soil. The United States has no right to violate Cuban sovereignty. The United States has no right to continue its blockade of starvation. The United States has no right to wage war on Cuba. Cuba is a Black nation. Cuba is a Queer nation. On May 17th Cuba celebrated the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. These are our people. I didn't even know that was a thing! An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us, and the U.S. nazi machine aims to attack all of us, starting with our Black and Brown siblings. One of the first things the nazis did was burn the sex institute, to burn our history, to burn the evidence that we are not new, we are not abnormal. People are people. It's the nazis that queer us. Cuba has rebuilt the spirit of the sex institute in its Center for Sexual Education, and the nazis have come to burn it once again. "The U.S.-led blockade is designed not only to economically strangle the Cuban population, but to obscure from lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and trans people living in the imperialist citadel an understanding about what a revolution can achieve in terms of social progress." — Leslie Feinberg I wish for two things as we celebrate the anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion: I wish for a safe place for people of every queered description to live truthfully and safely, and I wish for a goddamn revolution. 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