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You’re Not My Daddy, Jorge Mario Bergoglio!

A pious letter from a San Francisco demigod to the chieftain of pedophiles at St. Peter’s Basilica


05/05/2025

Background 

Reuters, March 1, 2024:

“Pope Francis on Friday warned of the dangers of so-called gender theory, saying he had commissioned studies into what he condemned as an ‘ugly ideology’ that threatens humanity.” 

‘‘I have asked that studies be carried out into this ugly ideology of our times, which cancels out the differences [between men and women] and makes everything the same.’’—Pope Francis

CNN, April 8, 2024:

‘‘The Vatican has issued a strong warning against ‘gender theory’ and said that any ‘sex-change intervention’ risks threatening ‘the unique dignity’ of a person, in a new document [titled “Dignitas Infinita” ] signed off and approved by Pope Francis.

The Letter

Dear Dead Pope,

It has been known widely and painfully throughout centuries and continents that punching down and virtue signaling are integral parts of the Catholic church’s teachings, actions and history. This explains why a house of certified slavers, murderers, con artists, fascist collaborators, misogynists and above all pedophiles still stand in the most precious real estate south of Florence.

Your for-profit institution promoted slavery as the will of the “Almighty” to promote your God of murder and mayhem with the sole purpose of funding your predecessors’ orgies and payments to brilliant Dutch and Italian artists, jewelers and architects. What have you done about that, oh most “generous” Francis? Have you given back the billions your institution stole of the Native peoples of Amazon, Mexico, Peru and Bolivia? Have you compensated Jamaica and Haiti for your centuries of slavery? Have you opened your mouth except to tickle your vapid ego or to dehumanize trans people who are facing murderous hate from family and governments alike? 

I’d like to quote Martin Luther’s words for another leader of the un-Holy See who was also white but had a habit of fucking adult women instead of young boys, as written in his essay, ‘Against the Roman Papacy, an Institution of the Devil’: “Gently, dear Pauli, dear donkey, don’t dance around! Oh, dearest little ass, don’t dance around—dearest, dearest little donkey, don’t do it. For the ice is very solidly frozen this year because there was no wind —you might fall and break a leg. If a fart should escape you while you were falling, the whole world would laugh at you and say, ‘Ugh, the devil! How the ass has befouled himself!’ And that would be a great crime. Oh, that would be dangerous! So consider your own great danger beforehand, Hellish One.” 

Dear Francis, now that you are dead and playing chess with Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who is going to be the refuge of pedophiles from Warsaw to Aachen to Dublin to Boston to Buenes Aires? That was a rhetorical question, you hypocrite, dead fuck. 

That you and your followers believe that attacking transgender people—who are the embodiment of a hot Christ—is the right thing to do in the age of AI and the refugee crisis across continents and right outside of your castles is why oceans are dying, why temperatures are rising, why fascist parties are popping up across Europe, and popular fascists are ruling Northern and Southern America and, above all, why pedophiles thrive and continue to thrive in your schools, buildings and offices across the globe. Here’s another fiery nugget from that  16th century German country boy: 

“A natural donkey, which carries sacks to the mill and eats thistles, can judge you—indeed, all creatures can! For a donkey knows it is a donkey and not a cow. A stone knows it is a stone; water is water, and so on through all the creatures. But you mad asses do not know you are asses.”

Dear dead ‘n bloated but expensive Francis:

While you were suffering in the best hospitals that amassed profits of slave trade and stolen precious metals could buy, while you were struggling to overcome the constipation of dying, your institution of “the Devil” softened its stance on trans people?!

CNN, Mar 5, 2025: ‘‘Vatican clarifies its position on gender affirming surgery, calling for ‘greater care’ and a case-by-case approach.’’

So while you were staying in the hospital, far from your throne, servants, gold, silk, organic breakfast and imported mineral water, your church is softening its stance on trans people seeking to not kill themselves to only exist? HA!

I will tell you what I told you last year. Actually, I never said it, and now you are dead. Well, I have one last gem of Martin Luther’s for your vapid existence:


“I can with good conscience consider you a fart-ass and an enemy of God.”

April 21, 2025

Tenderloin, San Francisco

Revolutionary 1st May demonstration 2025

Berlin Neukölln, 1 May 2025


04/05/2025

Photo Gallery – The Left Berlin at the 1 May 2025 Festival

Mariannenplatz, in front of the Bethanien Building


“There’s A Lot Of Rage We All Feel, But More Than That, I Feel Love And Concern For My Friends”

Anam Raheem and Matt Davis call on our collective empathy to raise funds for Palestinians.


03/05/2025

Gaza Champions is a mutual aid network founded by Anam Raheem and Matt Davis that places people in direct contact with families in need of support in Gaza, allowing them to directly fundraise for those hit hardest by the war. The champions are also pen pals with their families in Gaza, learning about their lives and experiences, building morale and helping them to better tell their stories. In times of staunch political division and polarization, Gaza Champions manages to cut through, and in its own way, enables people across the world to make small, albeit concrete contributions to the lives of people, who they now have meaningful relationships with. The Left Berlin spoke to Anam and Matt to learn more about the organization.

TLB: Can you tell us about your connection to Gaza?

Anam Raheem: Both Matt and I worked for Mercy Corps, which is an American international humanitarian aid organization. Specifically, we were working for a program called Gaza Sky Geeks, a Google-backed tech hub in Gaza City. The idea was to connect the youth in Gaza to the outside world, to earn dignified incomes by participating in the global tech industry. It wasn’t a typical NGO job where we were in an office and would have field visits. Instead, we were based in a community center in Gaza. We would have hundreds of people come through our doors every day, and so, we developed very close relationships with the people in Gaza, irrespective of whether they were our team members or people who participated in our program.

TLB: When was this roughly?

AR: So I was there from 2017 to 2021, and Matt left just before October 7 2023. 

TLB: And it was after that that when you started thinking about Gaza Champions, right?

AR: Yeah, so it started about a year ago. As I’m sure you know, all these GoFundMes started coming out of Gaza. And because Matt and I both have a huge network in Gaza, many GoFundMes started coming our way. At first, I was just using my Instagram page to share GoFundMes, to try and tell the story of this or that person, and mobilize my small network to contribute. But very quickly it became overwhelming– with hundreds of GoFundMes it wasn’t effective to just fill my Instagram with these stories. 

I have a friend in DC and she sort of naturally connected with some of my friends from Gaza on Instagram, and formed a pen pal relationship with one of them, and started promoting her GoFundMe, saying “This is this person, this is what I’ve learnt about them – let’s support them!” And that planted the seed for me– this one to one relationship where someone is just telling the story of someone in Gaza in a very human way, and using their platform to mobilize funds for them. At the time the border was open, so there was hope for their evacuation, but these days, with the border closed, people still need to survive day-to-day life, the cost of which is severely inflated during wartime. 

I started out by simply writing a call for volunteers in the notes app on my phone and posting a screenshot of it on Instagram. That post went pretty far, I think the first wave was about 60 people. And then I told Matt about this idea and we created a spreadsheet to have a mechanism to start matching the GoFundMes we have with people who are volunteering. And that’s how Gaza Champions was born. 

MD: For the first six months of the genocide, we were in shock, like everyone else. We were doing what we could, posting and so on, but by February or March it had gotten to the point where everyone in Gaza had run out of money and needed help, so it was a way of dealing with that feeling of wanting to share stuff my friends were sending me, but knowing that that wasn’t going to help.

TLB: So it sounds like the pen pal connection was part of it from the beginning.

AR: Yeah, the idea was that it wouldn’t be this anonymous thing, and that you would be in direct contact with someone, supporting them. I think what’s really effective, is being able to tell a story over time– this is a person I know in Gaza, this is what they went through this month, and from our fundraising, they were able to get a tent, for example. Some champions FaceTime with their person in Gaza with their whole family, so the whole family rallies around them and checks in on them and wants to know how they’re doing. It’s flourished beyond what I could have even hoped for. 

TLB: There’s also a kind of accountability that comes through that as well – there’s a degree of responsibility that you feel as the connection with your family grows. 

MD: It’s not even accountability, it just makes it feel more real. That’s the amazing way in which it has bloomed. When we worked at Sky Geeks there were about 40 people in the office, and some of them were super close friends, while others I would chat with but I wouldn’t still be close with them. But they’ve connected with some of my friends in England and now they’re really close friends, better than I ever knew them in person. So it’s that human element.

AR: Yeah, the thing that’s really motivating is friendship, right? If the world has turned on your friends you would do whatever you could to help them. And I think that is what keeps me sane, because there’s a lot of rage we all feel, but more than that rage, I feel love and concern for my friends. It’s also a great way of bringing people into the cause. You’re not just fighting for this abstract “Free Palestine” concept, you have someone in Gaza to help get through this. It keeps people motivated and helps not to burn out or give up.

TLB: Do you have any way of measuring the impact? Do you know how much you’ve raised across all of the different Champions?

MD: The short answer is we have no idea. At one point I was trying to track it a little bit, by looking on GoFundMe how much money had been raised before and after we connected people. But it’s hard to track because there’s no public API for GoFundMe, so getting the data is really hard. 

AR: Yeah, we are doing this in a totally voluntary capacity. We know that we have 150-ish champions in 13 countries. In terms of impact, we have some beautiful anecdotal evidence– some people that were able to evacuate directly, and others who have had months of groceries covered because of their champions. But, yes, we don’t have a dollar figure estimate because we just don’t have the capacity. 

TLB: Have you had any political opposition or pushback to the project?


AR: Well, generally speaking, it has been pretty insulated from the pushback and hate. I think that’s primarily because this is mutual aid, not protest or direct advocacy, keeping it very human to human. Especially compared to all the other kinds of actions and demonstrations and how charged things can get, Gaza Champions is like, warm and fuzzy. 

There was one champion who reached out to me to say “Someone in my network googled the person I’m championing and found tweets around October 7, celebrating this act of resistance, so I don’t know if I can champion this person anymore.” I then reasoned with them, that while it was up to them to champion or not, I would call into question the motives of someone who put in their time and effort to look up someone enduring genocide, to find a reason not to support their humanity or support their survival.

It brings in the perfect-victim framework that Mohammed el-Kurd puts into context in his book, Perfect Victims. We need Palestinians to be ideologically pure, according to Western standards, to be worthy of our care and support. This is just one instance, but that person has continued to be a champion, and it shows how this can expand people’s political education around Palestine, because you’re not just thinking of it as an abstract cause, these are living, breathing humans. 

Violence sucks, but we can understand that if someone is living under oppression, they have seen so much death, so much loss, and so much loss of opportunity. So if they see this as the first punch thrown against their oppressors, I can understand why someone might look at that day and feel a certain way, feel a certain catharsis. And it goes beyond that. You get to understand Islam through them, you get to witness Ramadan through them. So this is a really beautiful form of political education, that’s very practical, and isn’t in the form of demonstration or protest.

Something else that comes up a lot, is people wanting to know if these are verified campaigns. And it’s tricky, because it’s verified in the way that mutual aid is just a network, right? We know a lot of these people directly, but we also don’t know some of them. It’s just all word of mouth. So our rule is that it’s either someone we know directly or it’s being referred to by someone we trust– that’s the extent of our verification. On top of that, a lot of people want to be donating to a registered non-profit with a 501(c)(3) status– things that have, like, a Western stamp of approval. So Gaza Champions is about shifting how we think about aid in Palestine, or in a war-torn region, by going directly to people in a mutual aid format, as opposed to having our resources gate kept by big organizations. 

MD: Anam and I were both working at a major NGO where we had to deal with a lot of red tape, and our hands were tied in a lot of situations, so being able to just do this has been very freeing. I love that there’s this moment where we connect people, and just say “Okay, you guys go do it.” When people are first connected, there might be some uncertainty, but as the relationship builds, it resolves the issue of verification– I don’t think that any of our champions would ever be questioning the people they are raising money for. And sure, we have more families who need help than champions at the moment, so you see why the red tape developed, because we just have to randomly pick cases. But it can also be a barrier, when you have to tell people you can’t help them because they don’t meet a certain set of criteria. 

Going in, we had no idea of what it was going to become. I don’t think at any point did we expect it to get this big. And this has been a group learning experience, where one champion does one thing, and then they share that with others. This natural evolution– that is what solidarity is. The past two years have been really horrible, and there have been so many awful moments, and me and Anam have said to each other many times that doing Gaza Champions is what got us through.  

AR: Yeah, it absolutely has kept me afloat. We are deeply personally affected by it, so to see that there are other people who care, and want to do something, even if they have never been to Gaza, is really uplifting. I like to focus on that. Of course there are the toxic trolls, and they make me want to do bad things, but if I didn’t have Gaza Champions, I don’t know where I would be right now.

You can support Gaza Champions or become one yourself! Sign up here.

Red Flag: Why Berlin’s Revolutionary May Day Was So Huge

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin reports from 1. Mai.


For most Berliners, 1. Mai is about going to a park to dance, drink, and soak up some sun after an interminable winter — Görlitzer Park was packed with tens of thousands of revelers. For the city’s leftists, though, May Day is the most intense, longest, and best day of the year. It’s Commie Christmas.

The Maifeier or May Celebration has a long history in Berlin. Protests have taken place every year since 1890. But this year, the 135th anniversary, feels different. Germany is set to get a new Kanzler next Tuesday. The Blackrock gremlin Friedrich Merz promises to combine austerity with militarism and far-right culture war: hundreds of billions for the military and cuts for social programs. Merz hasn’t even been elected, and he’s already among the least popular politicians in the country, with 56 percent declaring him “nicht gut” and just 38 percent “gut”

The rise of the far-right AfD, endless rent increases, and racist fear mongering brought Berliners onto the streets on May Day.

Union Morning

In the morning, up to 10,000 people joined a demonstration by the German Union Confederation (DGB). Every German city has an official union rally featuring beer, bratwurst, and bad music. Social democratic politicians like to make appearances. Since post-war (West) Berlin has almost always had social democratic mayors, so public-sector workers have to demonstrate alongside their boss.

And so many choose to sleep in, only a tiny sliver of Berlin’s union members take to the streets. For the bureaucrats, this has long been an “alibi” event, doing as little as possible to claim they at least did something. I could never think of any other reason to pick an impossible time (usually 10am on a holiday!) and relatively unknown meeting points. They don’t put up posters nor send out e-mails to their members. Even people looking for the demonstration didn’t have an easy time finding it on the DGB website. 

Back in 2022, then mayor Franziska Giffey was booed out for ten minutes as she tried to speak from a May Day stage. People were unhappy that she was refusing to implement the referendum that called for the expropriation of big housing companies. After Egg Day [editor’s note: a protestor threw an egg at Giffey], big politicians have avoided the space.

Yet even as union bosses refuse to mobilize, and union members sleep in – the proletarian Left keeps turning up. This year, the Class Struggle Bloc made up perhaps half of the demonstration. That was — more than all the union blocs together, according to junge Welt. Last year, “antideutsch” union stewards made ham-fisted attempts to expel the leftists. But that became such an embarrassment that there were no more attempts by DGB leaders to kick out half the participants.

Revolutionary Evening

As the sun was setting over Kreuzberg, tens of thousands of people gathered at Südstern for a revolutionary demonstration. By all rights, it should have been at Hermannplatz, but police have banned gatherings at this more political location. Over the next few hours, the crowd grew to 30,000 people. There was a hard core of several thousand anarchist and communist militants in tight formations, surrounded by several times as many supporters.

This goes back to the Kiezaufstand, the neighborhood uprising in Kreuzberg on May 1, 1987, when residents plundered dozens of shops and burned down a supermarket. That inspired an independent demonstration the following year, which has now taken place for 37 years, and wanders south toward Neukölln at a glacial pace.

Berlin police brought 6,000 officers to the scene, including water cannons and metal fences. But as the revolutionaries marched through the streets, cops generally held back and the mood remained peaceful. The unavoidable conclusion from decades of Revolutionary May Day — just about 100 percent of violence can be traced back to police. To put it scientifically: No cops, no problems.

Yet while the march was largely peaceful, police couldn’t let us reach the end without creating some images to justify the tens of millions of euros they spent on repression. Shortly before we returned to Südstern, they attacked the Palestine bloc and detained several dozen people. I won’t demean myself by repeating their ridiculous justifications for violence, which have been obediently repeated by bourgeois politicians and journalists.

The great thing about Berlin’s May Day is how it connects different struggles. Yesterday, Palestine was everywhere — like one would expect at left-wing demonstrations in every other country. I was pleasantly surprised when an autonomist feminist bloc, all decked out in purple, declared that people who didn’t support Palestine weren’t welcome. Yesterday’s demonstration was probably the biggest demonstration in support of Gaza Berlin has seen in the last 18 months.