Anarchy Club, WSU’s premier organization for anarchists to meet and discuss, is finally up and running again, this time with a new goal: to bring punk back to WSU.

“I’m excited,” President Gordon Day said. “Finally, somebody will run this club right.”

With the revival, Day promises to cut out most, if not all, of the “stupid political stuff” that was prevalent in Anarchy Club two years ago.

“We have garage band nights,” Day said. “We make mohawks, we make sick skate videos and sometimes we just sit down, as a group, and just talk about why we hate our parents.”

Day believes the punk subculture has been dormant for too long at WSU and has even turned into a laughingstock on campus.

“I had my hair in liberty spikes one day,” said one Anarchy Club member who wishes to remain anonymous. “And this guy passed by, he saw it, and he said, ‘nice haircut.’ And I said ‘thanks’ but then I thought about it and I realized he probably didn’t think it was a nice haircut.”

Day said Anarchy Club members face daily harassment like this on campus, whether it be from people asking them to turn down their Fall Out Boy in the library or calling members “emo.”

“It’s ‘The Man’ trying to fit us into his boxes,” Day said. “And, it’s like, ‘you’re not my mom. Stop trying to tell me what to do.’”

The club was started two years ago by then-student Anna Grey as a place to discuss the ideology of anarchy, in which society operates without government.

While it quickly gained popularity, members dropped out as they realized the club focused more on the political ideology, and the faults of government rather than “cool stuff.”

Larry Green, a past member of Anarchy Club, said he joined hoping it would be a place to complain about his life as a straight, white, upper-middle-class male, but was dismayed to find out the club focused on actual anarchy.

“My parents would be pissing me off and I wanted a place to vent,” Green said. “But Anna just wanted to talk about ‘misconceptions about anarchy’ and ‘the conditions needed for it to work.’”

Green himself left after commenting that Grey was “bossing them around a lot for a club about anarchy,” to which Grey replied that anarchy is the absence of governing bodies, not leadership in general.

“What’s the point then?” Green asked. “I already have to talk to my mom every day, why do I need more people telling me what to do?”

Anarchy Club disbanded three months after its first meeting due to low membership, Grey herself being the only member to show up after the second month. Day believes Grey’s mistake was talking about “stupid things” instead of “stuff people, like, actually care about.”

“The state is nothing more than the monopolization of violence,” Grey said. “I wanted to make a space to talk about genocide and war being propagated by the state, but they just wanted to listen to Blink-182.”

Even with the new focus, Day said Anarchy Club won’t hesitate to talk about problems society faces today.

“We used to have to deal with just ‘The Man,’” Day said. “But it’s 2019 now. It’s not just ‘The Man’ telling us what to do. We have ‘The Woman’ as well. It’s just getting worse for us.”

As to why he hasn’t changed the name, Day explains it’s because he still wants to appeal to those interested in the idea but initially turned off by punk culture.

“It’s like, you come to learn about anarchy, right?” Day said. “But we don’t actually teach it, so you’ll stay for our cool pink mohawks.”