A Hell of a Mistress, the Beautiful Idea

This interview took place in the summer of 2018 with Aragorn!, a longtime anarchist involved in a large number of writing, publishing, and infrastructural projects. In the course of several hours of discussion, he describes his childhood in Grand Rapids, his youth in the hardcore scene, his introduction to anarchism, the motivations that drove him, and what it means to commit oneself to a life against the grain. This is an invaluable historical document tracing the development of counterculture and anarchism across four decades—through the Reagan years, gang conflicts with Nazi skinheads, the first Gulf War, and the emergence of the Internet. We offer this transcript in response to Aragorn!’s tragic and untimely death, so that you can hear directly from him how he developed his ideas and what he sought to accomplish.

We recommend this in conjunction with our eulogy, “Elegy for an Antagonist.”