Punk was not love. I was there—not as a punk, I want to be clear about that, because enough people from my Hawaii years are still on Facebook to call me out. I was a new wave kid. Smiths obsessive. New Order, The Cure, Depeche Mode, pastel oversized button-down, home-bleached jeans, black Converse. But Hawaii had a small scene and the nights were long and I ended up orbiting the punks by proximity—leather jackets in eighty-degree heat, homeless or close to it, moshing in 7-Eleven parking lots, fighting regularly because plenty of people wanted to fight them just for how they looked.

What I saw was not love. It was nihilism, anarchism, and the circle-A spraypainted on everything. Anti-government, anti-police, anti-authority in every direction simultaneously—not Democrat, not Republican, anarchist. The Doc Martens had a lace code that told you what someone was willing to do before they opened their mouth. Some colors had to be earned through violence. Johnny Rotten got knifed outside a pub. People died in the pits. Suicidal Tendencies got banned from playing all of Los Angeles. This is what it actually was.

The second generation showed up later and brought the community organizing, the benefit concerts, the mutual aid, the feelings. Real and valuable—but downstream of a first generation that made the space by being genuinely dangerous. The second generation kept the aesthetic and replaced the content. Their children put it on merchandise.

John Lydon going populist nationalist isn’t a betrayal. Punk’s target was always whoever sat at the top of the institutional pyramid telling ordinary people what was acceptable. In 1977 that was the Crown and the conservative establishment. In 2026 it’s the media class, the credentialed gatekeepers, the cultural institutions that decide which opinions are permitted. He’s still pointing at the pyramid. The pyramid moved.

I just bought the “Punk Is Love” mug for $20. It’s mine. It’s wrong about everything. I drink out of it every morning and think about those kids sweating through leather jackets in paradise, who would have found the entire concept so funny they might have actually hurt someone.