I'm shit at introductions.

Like, I'm really much better in person - I look you in the eye, shake your hand, and we have some kind of discussion. That's easy. What's really fuckin hard is doing that online. Like... what do I type? I could say I'm cynical, in the sense that things suck, and pessimistic, in the sense that they're probably going to get a whole lot worse. I could also talk about my libertarian anarchy (voluntaryism), or my support for GamerGate, a hashtag for discussion of ethics in game journalism and industry.  But those are in my bio, so I don't know how interesting that would be. Even typing that paragraph felt janky as hell, and tacked-on with the world's worst epoxy. To be honest, I don't really like talking about myself... which makes this whole thing difficult. But in the first email I got joining this place, it wanted me to create and boost an introductory post. So here goes something really close to nothing.

Did I mention I don't like talking about myself? About that.

Yup. Not an exaggeration.I jus sort of feel like people overinflate their importance, and I don't want to be one of the people that does. We are infinitely small when it comes to everything, and quantum theory is starting to suggest that existence may be literally infinite, why should you give a muslcefold in a rat's ass who I am? But here I am. Before this one I'd never actually written a post totally about myself, and even making an Instagram bingo sheet was difficult to the point of taking hours and a break or two. Mostly because being concise about ideas is all I've gotten good at - people? Ha! Funny Joke! Here's that, in case you want to cut to the chase. I hope you finish the post though.

"Why are you so ＮＥＧＡＴＩＶＥ?"

 Is a question I've heard. A lot. My Super Concise™ answer? Because there's very little reason not to be, and if more people recognized that, the world may not suck so goddamned much. The summation of all negativity in the world (and probably exxistence, at large) has a metric tonne less to do with what people do, and a galactic shitload more to do with what people are willing to accept. So I reject a lot of things. A LOT OF THINGS. I'm one of those people that grew up "always arguing" (but not really) and ended up literally always arguing. Which I now want to do for a living. Bad idea? Fuck, I don't know. But it's my idea, damnit, and I'm sticking to it.

So... here's a little history.

I started my memorable life in a coastal city in NorCal (NO - NOT SAN FRANCISCO - DO PEOPLE NOT KNOW HOW TO CUT THINGS IN HALF?), and when my parents were about to divorce, I was moved to the deserts of SoCal, where I spent most of my life. Different, to say the least. Fucking desolate, boring, and isolated to say only a little more. Needless to say, the heat, and lack of human connection, combined with a somewhat rocky home life taught me to hate. Combine this with gruesome nightmares/terrors (which haven't stopped), distressing waking dreams, sleep paralysis, and the idea from some authority figures in my life that all of this was caused by invisible demons, since the age of four, and it meant that it was very hard to find, and needless to say maintain anything approaching inner peace. So I grew angry, and hateful, and tried to pray all that away, to no avail. Guess "mysterious ways" for me meant being a billboard for "Tormented Believers Daily".

Enter The High School...

... and a naive, political me. I was a neoconservative, and I can be quoted as saying "I don't think Bush did anything wrong", and "glass Iran", among other things. I was the kind of guy that got off wearing a literal wooden cross to school. And not a small one. A large one. Like, eight inches, or something. I was faithful, in spite of all the shit I dealt with, so goddamn it, everyone else should be too. So not many people liked me, to say the least. I was awkward and obnoxious almost my whole childhood, so why not be one of the literal worst people in High School? But that slowly eroded when I fell in with a cool crowd of people that were... dissimilar, to say the least.

I met a guy in the gym during orientation who said I should chill with his group at orientation, and was almost immediately friends with about six people. Something about my being into 80s music, Stephen King, video games (especially Sonic - thanks for the GC use, sis), and "violent" thrillers made me a candidate, and as the group grew, I changed. By junior year, I was more aggressive, less neoconservative, and way less Christian. It got to the point where the group I was in was considered by administration to be a possible gang, which was weird, because we were mostly nonviolent. And since I fucked off most of my time, got poor grades, and even failed some summer school classes (which I was in every semester), my senior year was spent in continuation school, where my transition to being proximal to my current self took place.

"Let's Be Libertarians!" Get it? Like the movie?

So I was nearing 18, and I was discussing political parties with my mother, who told me that I didn't sound like an R or a D, and I should check into the LP. I did that, and found myself nodding my head a lot. Then, after going around making a total bastardization of Libertarianism, not really knowing what I was talking about, and graduating HS, I started spending a lot of time at Starbucks (I know - not a proud moment), taking tech support jobs, doing other odd labor, getting refills, and talking politics online from a tiny Acer netbook. There, I started to learn how wrong I was about... uh, everything? Yeah. Pretty much.

I took up the philosophy of logic as a hobby, which led to my eventual atheism, and tried to hone my mind as much as possib.e. I also found out about Voluntaryism, and MRA, and started to trend in those directions. I became an antifeminist real quick (thanks, Tumblr), and started delving into antipolitical thought, and countertheory in general. Mises, LRC, Cop Block, and too many great thinkers and ativists to list, became regular places I'd visit. Then someone told me about Ron Paul.

R3volution

I listened to him a lot. I mean, a lot. When I found out about the evils of the Fed, it was like a light went on, and it connected enough dots I could really start digging into it. Hard. I had to take a job at Jack In The Box, and lived in my apartment with one of my HS friends, but when I wasn't working, I was researching, becoming angrier than ever, and finding out-

HOLY SHIT - IT'S HAPPENING!

The world is how fucked? And the literal sky is falling? Jesus Christ, we need him in the White House, yesteryear! By this point, it should be clear, I had fully reversed my positions on George Bush and neoconservatism, but that didn't stop me from being naive enough to think a Republican establishment could be good for the world. So I campaigned hard for him. My job at Jack started to reduce my hours, below the point where the surprisingly lengthy commute allowed me to break even. So I quit, tried the odd jobs market, and went to college, where I focused on Ron Paul 2012 more than grades (so sorry, to literally every professor I had).

Then, I found Young Americans For Liberty. Pure accident. I liked the page aimlessly, and was surrounded by a ton of like minded thinkers. I attended my first conference as soon as possible, just thinking it was there as a sort of networking thing, but I had no idea they were a college club organization. So I was hooked. I tried and failed to establish a chapter on my campus, and as I sat there, watching a ton of disinterested people go by my table, I grew more disheartened with the whole thing, and a literal murderous rage built in me. Then, RNC got the shaft at every end from the RNC, and the neocon establishment I used to endorse, so I got disaffected, and the rage built. After about a year, I needed to get out of that town - or my actual plan was homicidal and suicidal. I won't go into detail. So I moved. Which helped enough that I could rewire my brain.

"I WANNA LIVE... ANARCHY!"

Before I left, my music taste had changed, my attitude was darker, I had embraced pessimistic cynicism, and I had a bad enough addiction to caffeine that I spent almost 70% of the money I got from anywhere on high-energy drinks. Like, it made me feel better. That is, when I wasn't smoking weed, which I did frequently. My new favorite genre was industrial, and I literally spent hours just listening to that. A lot of it was very anti establishment, and the roots of the genre amounted to "fuck all musical systems", so I was sold.

This led me to my next town, where I spent a year doing odd work, and realising my idea of minarchy was, like most other things in my life, wrong. I watched a lot of Alex Jones, after finally watching Endgame, and listened to a ton of anarchist thinkers - again, too many to list.   Someone posted something that said the role of law enforcers was intrinsically linked to that of lawmakers, and that if you opposed one, you must oppose the other. That made sense to me, and I forced myself to watch hours of police brutality and war footage a day for a month or so, so I could come face to face with it. After that, I decided to move away from minarchy, to the more ethically consistent philosophy of anarchocapitalism.

Then, I moved back down to my old town, as odd jobs cleared up, and mainstream labor didn't want a fuckup pundit type like me serving customers. After that, I went hard in the paint for my new ideology, and learned as much as I could, every day. After this, I grew to accept the existence of a pluralism of rational approaches to anarchy, and grew exceedingly impatient with the cycle of debates I saw online between anarchists. As a result, I also started to look into all other forms of anarchism, and started to form coalitions with whichever thinkers would assist me in a total paradigm shift , and eventual abolition of the state. The rest is pretty much the same.

Now what?

Good question. At this point, I plan to be a long-term biweekly cohost ofthe Chain Reaction Podcast. Additionally, I run a weekly show called Moment of Rage With Jeremiah Harding. I run TimeToFree.US, an anarchist content site - contact me if you have new content, or something you want to crosspost, that contributes to the fight against the state. I have a business I'll be moving to New Jersey to start, but can't quite talk about that publicly. I'll also be doing vlogs, podcasts, and a lot of other things. If any of this makes my shit sound interesting to you, feel free to support my work by following me at the following links, sharing this post, giving me points, or letting me boost your relevant posts, and if you really appreciate what I do, feel free to donate Federal Reserve Notes by clicking here or Bitcoin by clicking here.

Also, did this suck? Let me know in the comments what you thought. I'm not used to writing personally, so it may not be that great. Let me know what you'd like to see here and elsewhere, and I'll do what I can to meet those requests. Seriously though, if you stuck through this, thank you. I'll be writing a lot of blog posts in the future, but it's good to know that some people out there are interested. Hell, some of you may even care. Thank you.

Me, elsewhere:

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