Stop Bullshittin'

Circle Jerks—Coup D'etat (1983 / California Hardcore)

Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re calling it by it’s name.

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America’s national pastime isn’t baseball, its regime change.

AKA Coup D’etat.

And America has done it so well, and so often, that it finally became time to test it at home, against the very democracy the world used as its beacon for freedom, liberty and hope.

Pretty unreal.

And still, the news media is having a hard time saying the words. In the 90s, then US Ambassador to the UN Madeline Albright hemmed and hawed about labeling what was happening in Rwanda as a genocide. The results of her “big regret” were an estimated 800,000 massacred—mostly with machetes—and thirty plus years of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo stemming from the massacres, that the news media is still pretty much neglecting.

They didn’t like using the word genocide either. Then or now, really.

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I don’t have much to add. I barely feel like doing this newsletter these days.

People may dismiss the anti-Reagan politics of 1980s American hardcore as unfocused or immature, but those young people saw things for what they were. Public Enemy #1 Chuck D said rap was the Black CNN, because those young people saw things for what they were, too.

And now as we are living in the middle of a coup in the United States of America, in the year 2025, hopefully we see it for what it is as well.

And fuck what Henry Rollins said about this being the time “Joe Strummer prepared us for”.

That’s just dumb, man.

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