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No Means No

9 0
16.07.2026

CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Nobody likes to talk about rape, but it seems morally absurd not to considering that it seems to be everywhere you look; from frat row to death row, from the Vatican to Nickelodeon, from ICE to the IDF, from Trump to Platner and back to Trump again. I know that my own abuse has rendered me a bit hypervigilant, but you don’t have to have CPTSD to know which way the wind blows, and you’d have to be dangerously anesthetized from the neck up not to recognize that anyone and everyone with any modicum of power seems to be copping a feel and most of them are getting away with it.

Speaking as an anarchist, I strongly believe that it is precisely that power which is the defining factor here and it’s a factor that most mainstream feminists conveniently ignore as they aim high for the glass ceiling. American capitalism is and has always been a colonialist enterprise built on a foundation of conquest, and sexual violence has been at the cornerstone of military conquest going back to the Golden Horde.

So, it should come as little surprise that rape was the favored tool of the western civilizers who built the Pax-American leviathan, from the sainted Catholic Conquistadors who turned the “New World” into a chattel brothel by sexually trafficking the women and children of every tribal nation they “discovered” to our blessed Founding Fathers who used the routine defilement of their own slaves to keep their plantations in line.

Today, this fine tradition of predatorial manifest destiny continues perhaps most brazenly with our client state of Israel’s conspiracy to remake the Middle East in their own decidedly European image while their American masters continue to hemorrhage international influence with levels of unhinged debauchery that put Caligula to shame.

In the shadow of the Epstein Files, a series of leaks have been unleashed from inside Israel’s Sde Telman Military Base, transformed into the nation’s largest prison camp during the latest........

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