Brace Belden

Brace Belden is an American leftist who volunteered to fight with the People's Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish militia, in the Syrian Civil War. Belden is also widely known as his former Twitter handle, PissPigGranddad.

Early life
Belden was born to Jewish parents in San Francisco in 1989 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 committed suicide when he was six-years-old. Belden has said he was "a troubled teen" and went to five different high schools, including an out-of-state boot camp from which he ran away 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 and they released their first album, Give War A Chance, in 2006. The band, however, broke up in 2008.

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
He arrived in Syria in October 2016. He went into 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 as part of the Raqqa offensive. His unit helped to capture Tal Salman 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 Kurdish front line. "Hundreds of civilians coming across for days in a row", Belden said. At night, his unit stayed in whatever building they had just captured and camped out on rooftops in the cold. "The first week we were out it was awful", Belden told Rolling Stone. After capturing Tal Salman, Belden's unit withdrew to Ayn Issa.

In March 2017, Belden was nominated as a candidate for Rector of the University of Glasgow.

Belden was among those Western volunteers profiled in Rolling Stone in March 2017. He later described it as "pretty fucking ridiculous, man. They just kind of made up my biography. Which is tight, because I've literally done nothing in my life but jack off before I came here." It was later announced that the profile was to become a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by Daniel Espinosa.

Twitter account
Using the handle @PissPigGranddad, Belden generated a significant following on Twitter. By the time he returned from Syria, @PissPigGranddad had amassed more than 30,000 followers. The account was permanently suspended shortly after Belden's return to the United States for accusations of violating Twitter's policies on "targeted abuse or harassment." Although Twitter has not commented on the suspension, the account was locked shortly after Belden mocked a white nationalist's short stature on the site; according to Belden, "alt-right"-affiliated accounts (or, in Belden's words, "a bunch of Nazis/4chan dudes who were mad at me for making fun of that guy for being short") had tweeted about plans to report @PissPigGranddad en masse.

Because of his widespread following and familiarity to Twitter users by that name, "PissPigGranddad" has been widely used to refer to Belden both in the press and real life encounters with Belden. Commenting on the "pseudo-celebrity" he had acquired under that name, Belden said "I kind of wish I hadn't made my name PissPigGranddad. I picked it before I ever thought anyone would say it to me out loud." Nevertheless, after his first account was permanently suspended, he reemerged on Twitter under the new handle @PissPigGrandma which has also been suspended.