Brace Belden
Brace Robert Belden is an American podcaster and union activist who volunteered to serve with the People's Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish militia, in the Syrian Civil War. Belden is also widely known by his former Twitter handle, PissPigGranddad. He is currently the co-host of the podcast TrueAnon with Liz Franczak. Early life Belden was born to Jewish parents in San Francisco and grew up in Corte Madera, California. His father is a journalist at a local TV station, and his brother works in tech. His mother died by suicide when he was six years old. Belden has said he was "a troubled teen" and went to five different high schools, including Monarch School, a boot camp which he ran away from before being arrested for public intoxication in Mission Dolores Park. Belden has identified as a Marxist since his teenage years and protested the Iraq War when he was thirteen. In 2005, when he was fifteen, he and his friends started a satirical right-wing, pro-war punk band called Warkrime. His stage name in the band was President Chaos. They released their first album, Give War A Chance, in 2006, and the band broke up in 2008. After Warkrime, Belden played bass in Wild Thing, another punk band based in San Francisco where he adopted the "'Bad Boy' Brace Belden" nickname. Belden has said that he "always worked shitty jobs" and that he supposed he "should have gone to college", affixed with the caveat "but a lot of good that did other guys." After graduating from high school, he worked as a florist at Brothers Papadopoulos flower shop in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2015, he launched a petition to cancel A Prairie Home Companion, a radio show by American Public Media. The petition said it "is a dumb boring show that forces millions of radio listeners under 60 to turn off their radios whenever that stupid old guy starts his rambling crap. All people under like 100 years old should sign this." Willamette Week talked to Belden about his campaign before deciding to hire him as a freelance music writer. In September 2016, Willamette Week received a resignation email from Belden, saying that he had "accepted a position out of the country." Time in Syria Belden arrived in Syria in October 2016. He underwent training at the YPG's Academy, where he met other Western volunteers including Lucas Chapman and Tommy Mørck. Shortly after graduating from the Academy, Belden was assigned as a machine gunner on a makeshift tank for the Raqqa campaign. His unit helped to capture Tal Saman in mid-November. Brace commented that "We pushed up to Tal Saman till we had it surrounded on a half circle. Then we just bombarded the shit out of it." Many refugees fled the town and sought protection behind the YPG front line, with Belden describing "hundreds of civilians coming across for days in a row." At night, his unit stayed in whatever building they had just captured and camped