Ayo starts by surgically removing your excuses for why you can't move your life forward I love the nerdy Bill Gates shirt. Photo from Ayo’s website Ayodeji Awosika gets it. He fucking nails it every single time. For a 32-year-old kid, and he’s a kid to this menopausal dumb blonde, he’s figured out the magic elixir in the not-strictly-American dream we all share: To live our lives with meaning and purpose, and maybe even make money doing it. Guess what: You don’t even need ‘privilege’ to pull it off. Which means the secret to his sauce is to toss your aggrieved entitlement, regardless of your tribe. I wish I’d been as smart as him when I was his age. Hell, I wish I was that smart now. It strikes me as unutterably bizarre that I look to a 30-year-old guy for life help, but Ayo gets it. I found him on Medium last year and his posts resonated like a Tibetan singing bowl. I got hooked by his first book, The Destiny Formula . I just finished his newest, Real Help: An Honest Guide to Self-Improvement and I encourage everyone who’s serious about wanting to change their lives to buy and read this book. Ayo knows what he’s talking about. His advice isn’t sexy. His version of self-help and self-improvement aren’t for those who don’t have time for more than listicles promising greater productivity before 7:00AM or who’d rather just cut to the chase and buy an expensive ‘kit’ to achieve world-renowned success. It’s for the folks who understand where self-help starts: With the wo/man in the mirror. Ayo’s blueprint resembles the unsolicited advice you got from those boring old farts in school who didn’t know anything about the real world and thought hard work and constant improvement were the way to succeed. Excuses end right here. In our ADHD-social-media-addled world we want everything now Now NOW!!! with instant likes and followers, viral success with our first video, a $100,000 job fresh out of university. No one with the attention span of a gnat wants to hear Ayo’s story of working for five years at a low-paying job and hustling his ass in his free time to take classes, learn how to blog, read fifty books a year and keep his ‘eyes on the prize’. That’s not sexy. That’s too much trouble. That takes too long. Plus the world is working against you and shit. But it’s the truth. It’s the truth. And many people can’t handle the truth, as some famous guy once ranted in a movie. Real Help removes all your excuses, and the lies you’ve been telling yourself. It shreds your sense of aggrieved entitlement. (Everyone’s.) Why do I like Ayo so much? Because he’s not a freaking victim. He takes responsibility for his past decisions, bad actions and now his future. He doesn’t whine and moan and spout a lot of silly academic theory (he’s college-educated, even though he never finished) as to how The Man keeps him down. It’s ridiculously refreshing in a world where whiners worship at the shrine of self-imposed victimhood and personal responsibility is the ugliest of faults to be exorcised from one’s soul forthwith. Its apotheosis is a tantrum-prone manchild who was placed into power by a nation overrun with adult babies who wonder why their lives keep getting worse rather than better. Real Help lays out some hard truths, based on numerous highly-respected books written by people smarter than Ayo on how the world works, sans the entitlement. I’ve already encountered some of what he lays out for why wages are going down and mental illness is going up. He doesn’t get sidetracked by emotional hand-wringing over economic inequality or systemic discrimination, even as he acknowledges they exist. His approach is as Stoic as his personal hero, former Roman Emperor and author of the nearly 2,000-year-old Meditations, Marcus Aurelius. The world is as it is, you can’t fix the system, so find new ways to work around it. Success is easily within your grasp, but it won’t happen overnight. Ayo traces the story of how he travelled from loser busted drug dealer to a writer and self-improvement coach with a six-figure income. “I’ve been through the racist justice system,” he says. “I know.” I think of this as others excuse themselves into ever-more-restricted pretzels to explain why it sucks to be them. You can’t do this and you can’t do that because of systemic discrimination and intersectional gender politics and society’s dictates to your special interest class and the patriarchy thing and your kids. When you have kids you have to put your dreams on hold! Sacrifice all for them! Everyone knows that! My own excuse pretzel straightened out just a tiny bit more this week as I came to realize it’s not ageism keeping me out of the workforce so much as a lot of crazy forces at work in our ever-evolving post-industrial economic landscape. Increasingly abusive employment practices and shrinking wages fueling inflated C-suite salaries will destroy jobs and whole organizations long before robots get a whack at it. Ayo recommends spending less time following the news and triggering yourself on social media, so you can focus on your work and not get sidetracked by society’s toxic messages that you need to earn money a certain way, live your life a certain way, and consume mindlessly ‘to impress people you don’t even like’. His message isn’t anti-consumerist, but intelligently consumerist. I know he’s right because as I trail him down that path to success, I’ve encountered some of the same feelings and problems he has, so I know to pay attention when he tells me what lies ahead. He’s made those mistakes for me. Here’s where your brain starts to tell you you can’t do it. Here’s where I see a lot of writers on the cusp of success back down and turn away. Here’s why you should work inside your wheelhouse and play to your strengths, rather than work on your weaknesses. The road to fulfilment and success looks a lot less rocky when you know what to expect. Photo by Helen Melissakis on Flickr After I finished Real Help I went through it again, skimming and taking notes. It’s now a twelve-page document of new advice and insights and tips I don’t want to forget. “Whenever you try to “succeed” or “follow your dreams,” you’re going to have to do so in a world that will indirectly and directly attempt to stop you. It’s a natural consequence of how things work, not a planned conspiracy. Keeping this in mind will increase your odds of success, because you can be less emotional about the process. It does no good to shout into the sky. The game is rigged. What are you going to do about it?” Losing the ‘conspiracy thinking’ is a giant load-off. Remove the emotion and your ego from the equation when you realize most people are miserable in their lives and jobs and you now have the spine and the blueprint to fix yours. You can’t do anything about the rest. I’m beginning to shed the blinders too, as I’ve watched us all become increasingly pigeon-holed by job descriptions that narrow the employer’s fantasy candidate to the point where eventually they’ll merely demand a departing employee leave some DNA behind so they can clone her replacement. “Once you accept other people for who they are, how they behave, and what they believe, you’ll feel less like you’re fighting this imaginary uphill battle against the masses. The masses will simply fade to the background while you get to work. As more and more people fade into the background, you’ll find you might be the only one left.” Once you abandon the anger and frustration and most of all, the stories and narratives that make you the victim and everyone else the oppressors, finding success suddenly appears more within reach than you ever knew. Ayo makes clear he doesn’t define success for anyone else. Just because he wants to ‘conquer the world’ and build a million-dollar empire doesn’t mean that’s the route for others. Success is whatever really and truly makes you happy. That might be boatloads of money and your own empire, or it might mean better relationships, leaving a job you hate, starting up your own business or, most importantly, living your life by your own standards rather than others’. Just know what you want to do and more importantly, why you want to do it. Real Help offers no quick-fix solutions. It encourages you to define and pursue your dreams and keep them within reason. Aspiring to be an actor is fine; aspiring to win an Oscar might be just a touch unrealistic. When Ayo reached out to ask for my help as an affiliate marketer promoting Real Help , I agreed, not to do him a favor, or even for the prizes he’s offering, but because I love his work and this book. This roadmap is the real deal. It doesn’t guarantee success but it acknowledges failure as a learning experience without fetishizing it a la Silicon Valley. It encourages you to help create new opportunities by getting out of your hidey-hole, meeting new people, and doing the world. I have a sticky note on my computer desk from a TEDx talk (not Ayo’s, but he’s done that too ). “The universe conspires with you; your self-doubt conspires against you.” Real Help really will help if you’re genuinely committed after your own pivotal moment when you say, as Ayo once did, “This shit has got to stop.” As skewed and unjust as the socioeconomic system has become for all except the 1% (and its money siphon is coming for the higher classes next), Ayo describes how you can forge your own path and make money online with little or no out-of-pocket expense. You need to learn what you don’t know, continuously improve, read a lot of books, take a lot of largely free or inexpensive classes, come up with your plan, and don’t do something stupid like quit your job before you’ve got a reliable monthly extra income and even more important, money in the bank. If you’re fed up with the grind and a life that makes you suicidally ideate, Real Help will show you how to eliminate it intelligently, what to expect, and how to overcome that super-asshole who’s always talking shit to you to keep you down. Not The Man. Not The Patriarchy. Not the politically demonized minority du jour . Not even your boss. Your ego. Your inner critic. Yourself. Just have a lot of patience. Ayo believes in you, even if you don’t. Yet.

Enjoy the abuse-free life I've always enjoyed I hope they're reading Dina McMillan's book. Photo by Oleg Magni from Pexels If there's one thing I'm really good at, it's avoiding partner abuse. It's foreign to me. It's why I've come to address the unmet feminist market niche: Patching and fortifying the female brain against acceptance of abuse, and from allowing toxic men into one's life. We've spent enough time dissecting and analyzing patriarchy, masculinity, the 'man box', and everything else about the abuser; now it's time to address the other half of the partner dynamic: The receiver of the abuse, more commonly known as the victim. Women are no longer powerless, even if some are less powerless than others. Not every woman recognizes her intrinsic power, and a regressive, self-infantilizing, fear-based, decades-long de-evolution in feminism seeks to preserve that powerlessness, because deep down victim feminists fear real empowerment. True empowerment requires you to make decisions that could blow up in your face or even put you in harm's way, but it also emboldens and strengthens you, especially when you stand up for yourself before harm is even in your neighborhood. And the more you stand up for yourself and nothing bad happens, the better you become at recognizing lower-risk assertiveness challenges. I've found five stellar resources to help women identify their psychological weaknesses and inoculate themselves against the sort of toxic man who manipulates and abuses, but also to better understand men and thereby become better partners themselves. After all, she may be no walk in the park either. Understanding how men think and feel from a compassionate point of view helps us guard against inner misandry and stop judging men by our own gender-based yardstick (which is what we've complained about them doing to us for many years!) You can't change another person, you can only change yourself. Here are my five favorite resources, beginning with the most important. 1. "But He Says He Loves Me!" - Dina McMillan My review of Dina McMillan's invaluable book But He Says He Loves Me: How to Avoid Being Trapped in a Manipulative Relationship appeared recently so I'll keep this synopsis brief. This is my review: "But He Says He Loves Me!" The Women's Abuse Prevention Manual McMillan drills down with a compassionate tone, based on her 2017 TED talk Unmasking the Abuser, into how the controlling, entitled, abusive male mind thinks, and describes with great clarity how they entice women to hand over their control and power in baby steps by understanding her psychology better than she does. A manipulative abuser will never gain power over you once you read and take notes from this superb manual. 2. Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men - Lundy Bancroft Lundy Bancroft is an author, workshop leader, and domestic violence counselor who focuses on, according to his website, "Training professionals on best practices for intervening with male perpetrators of violence against women, toward the goal of promoting accountability and requiring change." He's worked with both abusers and victims in domestic partnerships. His book details how the abusive male mind thinks, but not with the granularity of McMillan's book. His most valuable insight, which McMillan doesn't identify, is how deeply entrenched is the abuser's modus operandi. The roots of abuse, he says, are ownership , the trunk is entitlement and the branches are control. This is the core of who the abuser is, and it's near-impossible to dislodge it. It's formed from his early influences and role models, his values and beliefs, and his utter contempt for his partner, which he keeps carefully hidden from everyone else. These men are often far more conscious of what they're doing than they appear. Good luck uprooting that. Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay One of women's most damaging fallibilities is the belief she can change an abusive man, or that he himself might change. He absolutely can, but he probably won't. His entitlement has always worked to his advantage, and the world is full of plenty of partners willing to relinquish control to him, so if one wises up and leaves, he can always find another. The abusive man is self-centered, Bancroft notes, with deep roots in profound entitlement. He emphasizes just how deeply rooted these roots are. I found a great article summarizing Bancroft's 13 signs an abusive man is changing and how to make sure he is, which observes that in order to truly change, an abuser must follow certain steps in the right order. Many stop after the first few figuring 'they've done enough, now she needs to get her shit together and stop complaining'. He points out remaining abusive is much easier than changing, since the latter means becoming more self-aware and engaging in the uncomfortable self-analysis many people would choose to avoid. “At some point during the first few months that a man is in my program, I usually stumble upon the core of his privilege, like a rear bunker on his terrain. He may abandon a few of his forward positions, but this fortification is where he surrounds himself with sandbags and settles in for protracted war," Bancroft says, noting that only a very small single-digit percentage ever truly change. Tattoo this on your inner eyelids so you're reminded every night of the eleventh commandment: He ain't changin', girlfriend , so just cut your losses and go! 3. The Game: Penetrating The Secret Society Of Pickup Artists - Neil Strauss Strauss's controversial 2005 expose of pickup artist (PUA) culture is part investigative reporting and part gonzo journalism, since Strauss himself was a PUA, and he describes his personal experiences as a not terribly attractive or romantically skilled wannabe Casanova who found his tutor in Mystery, a Toronto-born PUA who took Strauss (dorky PUA name: Style) under his wing. Strauss was a former New York Times music critic and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He's written for other major publications such as Maxim, Esquire, and Entertainment Weekly. Strauss's book is, therefore, well-written and also somewhat sympathetic to the seduction community's 'targets'. I've written a full review of his book too. What Women Can Learn From Studying Pickup Artists Strauss drills down into both the PUAs' and targets' brains and describes how the former are schooled to learn everything they can about the latter's psychology utilizing neuro-linguistic programming, persuasion and influencing resources, Internet support groups and manipulative tricks like lowering her self-esteem through 'negging' , woo-woo 'psychology tests' and New Age nonsense so many young women adore, 'cat string theory', and 'social proof'. His less execrable advice is to ABL (Always Be Learning), which means researching and devouring information to perpetually refine and optimize your skills. I wrote a followup to my review on how his PUA advice manual is actually a blueprint for accomplishing whatever else you want, like building a startup, finding a long-term relationship, climbing the corporate ladder, or learning another language. How To Achieve Your Dreams With A Notorious Pickup Manual Understanding the tactics of male manipulation, once again, fortifies a woman's brain against falling for this B.S. 4. What Was He Thinking? The Woman's Guide to a Man's Mind - Dr. Mike Bechtle Let's not forget the other side of the abuse coin: The woman, who receives it, and who can be abusive herself, psychologically, emotionally, or physically. Or a combination. Even if she's not abusive, she brings her own dysfunctions from prior relationships, experiences, and perhaps an unhappy childhood. It's important to remember that one's perspective is only half of the equation. Men aren't always wrong or bad people because they perceive, interpret, judge, value, or respond differently. What Was He Thinking? is a straightforward explanation of how a man's brain works, especially in everyday situations like trying to find something in the fridge. He's scanning the terrain while calling, "Honey, where's the mayonnaise? Are we out?" when the new jar is sitting on the shelf right in front of him. Sex hormones influence our brain functioning, and as a result, women are better at object recognition while men are better at navigation and visual spatial rotation, which is why they grow equally frustrated with women who can't seem to read a road map. (Millennials: Whaddaya mean, what's a map? Don't you remember your childhood's family vacations? The fight that always started with your father accusing your mother of not knowing how to read a map when in fact it was so old it noted the Gadsden Purchase and referred to Upper and Lower Canada?) The most interesting insight I got from the book was the cheating male's understanding of infidelity invisible to plenty of cheating women. Bechtle notes that men involved with married women were less inclined to marry them than women for married men. Seems the boyfriend is often somewhat empathetic with her husband: He realizes that if she's cheating on the partner, she'll likely cheat on him too. Too often, she thinks the cheating husband will be different for her. I wish more women considered that before they got involved with Mr. Married Manwhore. 5. He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth To Understanding Guys - Greg Behrendt The bestselling book launched by a Sex In The City episode in which a male friend explains to Miranda "He's just not that into you," as to why the guy she had a seemingly mutual great time with ghosted her, is a pretty spot-on sum-up not just of why we fail to hear back from men. It's also why they as often fail to hear back from us. The book was written for women, but is every bit as relevant for men, since it mostly deals with the games people play, discourtesies and lack of consideration of which women are almost always equally guilty. Breadcrumbing; that's not a 'dude thing'; everyone's done it, including myself. It's not done out of malice but out of insecurity. Leading someone on? Same thing. If I'd had this book when I was eighteen it would have changed my life. I would have known not to waste time on guys who clearly 'weren't that into me'. In fact, I didn't read the actual book for several years; one night I thought I ordered it off Amazon but what arrived was sort of the 'Cliff Notes' version, It was every bit as useful as the actual book when I finally got to it. What it boils down to is this: If he genuinely likes you, he'll make an effort to be with you, see you, and won't do anything that will make you doubt him because he doesn't want some other guy to snap you up. If he's really interested in you he'll be attentive, respond to messages within a reasonable, perhaps even short period of time, lest you think he's lost interest. One of the best exercises I got out of this was to ask: Who's his favourite movie or pop star? If he'd gotten her number after she'd shown interest, what's the likelihood he'd be ghosting her/being noncommital about dates/letting days go by without contact? He'd be on her like white on rice. When someone truly special is in your life, you make sure they know it so you don't miss out. The book removes every dumbass excuse we make for him and why he's not in your life more: He's not 'busy with work' (guyspeak for I can't be arsed to see you ), and he doesn't have too much on his mind. Bottom line: If he likes you and genuinely wants to see you, he will. It's not something you said or did; for whatever reason you'll likely never know, he's just not that into you. Don't waste any more time on this and move along. There's someone out there who wants to be with you. While Behrendt writes about men who are unintentionally rude or hurtful, many of the behaviors he describes are what abusive, controlling men will use to keep women off balance and always wondering where the relationship is, impelling her to 'try harder' to please him. Behrendt writes with much empathy for women (probably because he himself has been subjected to so much of these same behaviors) and consistently emphasizes how important a woman is, how she's entitled to decent treatment, and how she should move on if the guy's just dicking around with her--unconsciously or not. Update 08/29/22: I removed Travis Bradberry's Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and replaced it with Greg Behrendt's He's Just Not That Into You . When I wrote the original article I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of one of the books I'd wanted to include, so I went with Emotional Intelligence 2.0. Now that I've remembered the stellar book I consider a must-read for avoiding abusive men and relationships, I've replaced it with Beherendt's book.) Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

A book on human nature details how easy it was for Cultural Revolution student leftists to embrace horrific, violent oppression of others Public domain White House photo of a Chinese opera by Byron Schumaker. “This looks like what’s happening on college campuses!” I thought as I read Chapter 14 - Resist the Downward Pull of the Group (The Law of Conformity) in Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature . The chapter illustrates the ease with which Chinese teenagers were induced to mindlessly embrace the ‘reforms’ of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and how it devolved into organized torture and violence at Yizhen Middle School, hundreds of miles from Beijing. The story begins in 1964 at age 12 for new student Gao Jianhua, whose goal is to be a writer and gain eventual admission into Beijing University. Instead, he’s pulled into the Cultural Revolution by Fangpu, an older friend and mentor as detailed in Jianhua’s book Born Red: A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution. The worst of what happened sixty years ago in China hasn’t occurred yet on North American college campuses, but some of the lead-up is frighteningly familiar. I believe it’s possible that a handful of today’s ‘pro-Palestinians’, steeped in simplistic binary oppressed/oppressor frameworks and the diminished compassion of woke social justice theory, might eventually turn to pogroms against Jews, and torturers of those who oppose them. Not all protesters have gone down that dark path, but the nerve center of overtly antisemitic protests is New York’s Columbia University, where some of the ‘protests’ included terrorizing campus custodians trapped by protesters. The campus custodian union threatened to sue . The protests began on the same day as the October 7th attack on Israel, before anything concrete was established, since the protesters believed simplistically that Israel was (always) to blame. The road to amoral hell began with the universities taking days sometimes to acknowledge the attack, to more recent expressed solidarity and alliance with Hamas and Hezbollah. The protests, whether peaceful or violent, have demonstrated a near-uniform siding with Gaza and a complete lack of sympathy for attack victims. Some activists even denied the atrocities . WARNING: Graphic details and semi-graphic imagery in this video “Young people,” cautions author Greene about assuming what occurred was nothing more than ‘group adolescent behavior’, “often represent human nature in a more naked and purer form than adults, who are cleverer at disguising their motivations.” It’s unclear how the protests will continue under a new US administration, but the cancer at Columbia University has already metastasized globally, resulting in attacks, abuse, threats, and intimidation of Jews everywhere. You can see the eerie signs in a review of what happened to one student in China sixty years ago. A brief history of what happened at Yizhen Middle School Life was hardly free in Communist China but People’s Republic founder Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge capitalism and preserve Chinese socialism. It lasted ten years and today is regarded by the CCP as a colossal failure, marked by violence, purges, public torture, executions, and cannibalism of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ , for ideological purposes, not famine. It occurred in the late 1960s in the Guangxi Province for at least 137 corpses. Yeah, fun times in China back then. At YMS, the timeline began in 1966, when Jianhua was fourteen. If you’re paying attention to the Keffiyeh Kampus Krusaders, it’ll sound familiar. So: Public intellectuals accused celebrated writers of concealing counter-revolutionary messages in their work; based on ‘careful readings of certain passages’, like SJWs do with content and social media today, looking for hidden racism, misogyny, gender conformity and other lack of groupthink. They began reviewing art, literature, lectures and lessons for alleged subversive messages by those suspected of attempting to halt the Cultural Revolution. Mao, afraid China was slipping back into a ‘feudal past’, called on students’ ‘right to rebel’, except the way he phrased it was zao fan, which in Chinese means to turn everything upside down'. Sound sort of familiar, folks? China still engages in shaming culture today, often for minor transgressions just as WokeWorld has been doing for over ten years. Witch hunts on insufficiently revolutionary teachers began with shaming and public humiliation for those who didn’t cooperate or confess to ‘crimes’, including, initially, mild torture (today’s radicals torture and destroy careers on social media over ‘microaggressions’). Teacher ‘confessions’ brought more demands to ‘reveal the truth’. Jinhua felt uneasy when his favorite teacher was accused of faking his switch to communism and was forced to wear a dunce cap and a board around his neck announcing his ‘crime’ (Counterpart: Endless demands for unaccepted apologies by offended wokies). Not surprisingly, teachers fled YMS, as others today are getting fired or leaving their jobs over woke authoritarianism. Mao-approved ‘Red Guards’, formed to support and defend the Cultural Revolution, sported fashionable and much-coveted red armbands. Jinhua got accepted because his father was a communist war veteran and government official. Or an ‘elite’ as we would call him today. Returning back home for a visit, Jinhua found his father jobless and his family discredited after being accused of ‘revisionism’, (Marxist reformation). Meanwhile, back at YMS, his old friend Fangpu had consolidated power and formed a new group called the East-Is-Red Corps and took over the school. Jianhua became frightened of Fangpu and recent events. A few weeks later another student formed the Red Rebels, a rival group which advocated a more tolerant revolution based on reason and non-violence, which didn’t go over well with Fangpu and the R-I-E gang, but Jianhua found himself attracted to them nevertheless. The Chinese military arrived to restore order; the Cultural Revolution had gone rogue at schools, government offices and factories. A corps of thirty-six soldiers called ‘The 901’ attempted to disband the factions and restore order at YMS but the students decided to fight back; so with one student armed with one single slingshot who slung exactly one shot, he wounded a soldier which showed the 901 these kids meant fuckin’ business, so they headed for the hills. Just in case you’re not keeping score, we’ve got two factions, Red-Is-East and the Red Rebels (which I’ll admit sounds an awful lot like eighth-grade rival video game teams) and the Red Guard which gets no more mention. The two leading factions both were certain they represented the ideals of the Cultural Revolution and the other side was evil (sound familiar again?). Young female revolutionary Yulan (I said Yulan, not Mulan!) was discovered by the RR to be an R-I-E spy; she was beaten to divulge more spies (so much for a kinder, gentler revolution!) but she refused to sing; she was later handed over in a prisoner exchange. Red-Is-East seized an off-campus building for themselves, and captured some Red Rebels. No one knew how they were faring. Blah blah blah: Skirmishes (more slingshots), counter-offensives, a murdered Rebel, a rudimentary munitions factory (for really ace swords and spears), and suicide by the aforementioned Silent Spy who yelled, “I’d rather die than surrender to you!” jumping complete with a super-dramatic red flag in one hand and the parting shot, “Long live Chairman Mao!” Yulan was found wrapped in the flag, with no explanation as to how she accomplished that during the short trip from the third floor. Jinhua went home again to see his family which was always a bad idea; every time he left anywhere all hell broke loose. He returned to find Mao was taking charge and picking sides in various regional conflicts; he picked East-Is-Red which didn’t bode well for the Red Rebels. And oh yeah, they’d turned the school into a prison, complete with a much more sophisticated torture chamber. This is where things get not-yet-today’s-campus-protesty, but where I began to go, “Holy fuku, I can see today’s protesters one day pulling something like this!” Really godawful shoestring-budget torture ensued and screams resounded as blacklisted Red Rebels limped around campus, not wanting to talk about it AT ALL, thankyouverymuch. The East-Is-Red rewrote history, doctored photos, and tortured a largely harmless teacher in a way you don’t know what know about for failing to confess to his ‘crimes’, he died in Jinhua’s arms, and a female teacher who refused to affirm the East-Is-Red’s b.s. fiction about the death was gang-raped. A giant statue of Maoie Dearest was erected at the school gate. And after, lots and lots of violence and destruction all across China. Today, the CCP changes the subject whenever the Glorious C.R. is mentioned. Could campus protesters torture and murder ‘Zionists’? Greene’s point is that it’s human nature to struggle against a common enemy, either outside or within. Like how the social justice crowd has been long observed to turn on and eat their own, especially on social media. It doesn’t take much for groupthink to seize the human brain and impel it to follow the maddened crowd. People think they’re joining for this cause or that, but they’re really just seeking a ‘sense of belonging and clear tribal identity’. At some point YMS became a mere battle for power between rival groups, to the point where any act of violence could be justified. “There could be no middle ground, nor any questioning of the rightness of their cause. The tribe is always right, and to say otherwise is to betray it.” China has never been a democracy with the ideas of liberty, human rights, and individual freedoms that America enjoys. What’s notable about the Cultural Revolution and today’s protests is that drive to believe in the infallibility of one’s beliefs on both sides, dehumanizing the other as ‘evil’. We see the same splintering today; at YMS it was Red-is-East vs the Red Rebels; today it’s the ‘pro-Palestinians’ vs those whose sympathies lie more with Israel. Ironically, Mao’s new China came to resemble the oppressive feudalist devil he wanted to escape. The students who supported him became those evils, as did Mao himself. We see the same parallels in woke progressive expressions on college campuses that condemn Israel rather than Hamas, the attackers. Some espouse sound, humanitarian reasons for speaking up for the Gazans in the heart of the battlefield, yet tolerate no dissent and sometimes physically attack those who do, especially those they label ‘Zionists’. October 7, and campus protests, touched off a swift, global wildfire of antisemitic incidents in the western world, on- and off-campus. The attacks and threats on Jews proliferate: In Zurich , in New Zealand , in Holland . In Canada, antisemitism is up 670% . In the U.S., it’s up 200% . Some blame might be attributed to campus protesters but it’s clear antisemitism is a dormant volcano waiting to explode under the right conditions. Greene warned of the ‘technological prowess’ which enables tribalism and our ugliest nature, and speaks of how “Imagining differences is part of the madness of groups.” We watched activist warring factions on social media and in the news, driving hate and division and treating compassion as the most odious of human virtues. Today the Gaza Gangs exhibit, as did their Chinese predecessors, the same hostility to intellectuals, to truth, to questioning narratives, to free speech, to teachers who know better than they. They openly celebrate ‘martyred’ terrorist leaders and declare allegiance to their violent organizations, while actively calling for the elimination of a sovereign nation and denial of the horrific abuses visited upon it over a year ago. They exhibit compassion only for the least sympathetic side , however fair some of their points about the way Gazans have been treated, or realistic critiques of the Israeli government and the IDF. The book I just finished, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty , notes what happens with opposing groups. “The stronger the tendency to see one’s own group as good—and this tendency is often surprisingly strong—the more likely one is to regard one’s rivals and enemies as evil. Such views may then provide easy justification for treating one’s enemies harshly, because there is no point in being patient, tolerant, and understanding when one is dealing with evil.” There’s nothing especially significant about either the Cultural Revolution’s eager beavers and our current crop, except that the former was run by males and the latter by females. This is the story of human history; of genocides, of revolutions, of protests. The more one side becomes convinced of one’s rightness, the more they dehumanize the other side. We like to think we’ve learned the lessons of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but clearly we haven’t when some mourn dead terrorists and cheer for the psychopaths that burned people alive. Do I think today’s protesters could turn into a modern version of Red Is East? Yes, unless Trump cracks down on them which he’s vowed to do. We must resist the Law of Conformity. Understanding evil begins with the realization that we ourselves are capable of doing many of these things….To understand evil, we must set aside the comfortable belief that we would never do anything wrong. Instead, we must begin to ask ourselves, what would it take for me to do such things? Assume that it would be possible. - Roy F. Baumeister, in Evil In Wokeism, The Perfect Victim Is The Psychopath - Eva Kurilova, Eva’s Newsletter (highly recommend!) The Illiberal Left Is Embracing Violence As Political Expression Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

The religious excesses of 'woke' antiracism closely parallel old-time religion and much of what ails the left Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash "How is Woke Racism ?" my friend asked. "I'm curious, but I want to make sure this guy isn't an Uncle Tom before I buy it." 'Uncle Tom' John McWhorter ain't. The critics of the Columbia University linguist, New York Times writer, race relations author and regular Bloggingheads.tv commentator who hurl that epithet are angry he isn't part of what McWhorter describes as 'The Elect'. He is not, in their minds, a 'real black person' because he challenges their strict antiracism orthodoxy. Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America responds to what McWhorter describes as modern antiracism's excesses. McWhorter's thesis is that Third Wave antiracism (TWA) arose most recently out of the civil rights protests and riots of the previous decade and assimilates a distinct template lifted directly from American religious fundamentalism. 'The Elect's' secular religion requires no gods or afterlife beliefs but contains many elements of faith-based True Believers , as described by social philosopher Eric Hoffer in the 1950s. McWhorter carefully analyzes and dissects the 'new religion' and lays out how he feels this hurts black Americans by infantilizing them, treating them as children and chronic victims even if they don't feel like they are. He argues it sets black children up for failure and promulgates policies consequently harming black communities. He neither damns antiracism nor denies white racism, but he refuses what he sees as racial essentialism coming from certain black antiracists which closely mirrors the traditional racial stereotypes of the past. He finishes with a three-point focus he feels will better serve an ailing, left-behind black America he says is only partially attributable to racism and 'white supremacy'. John McWhorter. Public domain photo by Jasy Jatere on Wikimedia Commons New-Time Religion McWhorter calls today's TWA the birth of a new religion. If some of its more popular claims seem 'out there'--that white supremacy permeates everything, that you are white supremacist (by birth), that America's twelve-generation slavery institution is the sole definition of American history, or that white people must regularly genuflect, grovel before, or even wash the feet of black people to virtue signal their commitment as 'allies'--once viewed through the lens of religion, McWhorter argues, it all makes more sense. McWhorter counts the ways TWA closely parallels America's long-established culture of literalist Christianity. Here are a few of his points: The Elect have superstition. Have faith. Be skeptical, critical, or even downright hostile to facts or challenges to the belief system. Don't ask, for example, whether more white men are killed by cops than black men. The Elect have clergy. The High Priests (and Great White Priestess) of TWA are Ta-Nehisi Coates, promoter of the 'slavery reparations' idea; Ibram Kendi, author of the bestselling How To Be An Antiracist; and White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, one of the few white people TWA approves of because she offers zero challenge to TWA's racial excesses. The Elect Have Original Sin. 'White privilege' is that which sinners (by birth) must regularly atone and never be completely free from. The Elect are evangelical. Like fundamentalist Christians, their beliefs are the One True beliefs and there's no such thing as an alternative valid opinion. If you've ever argued with a religious proselytizer you'll recognize that same feeling when arguing with The Elect who ignore all their own logical fallacies and contradictions. The Elect are apocalyptic. There's a Judgment Day coming, and no one knows when. Unlike Christianity's Great Judgment, which is described quite concisely in the Bible (it will arrive with all the subtlety of a nuclear bomb), TWA's Great Judgement is some fuzzy day when America has fixed racism, which will only happen after enough groveling and 'self-mortification' occurs. The Elect ban the heretic. This includes old 'racist' tweets, ancient unfortunate Halloween costume choices, and any challenge to TWA holy writ [See: The Elect's clergy]. Cancel culture. 'Nuff said. McWhorter argues TWA's 'woke' racism harms black people with its attempts to 'dismantle hegemonic structures' in a way that accomplishes nothing. He describes a pervasive sense of performative outrage and response doing little more than serve to point a blaming finger and make white people feel bad about themselves. McWhorter has long been a critic of where black people, in his eyes, fall short of attaining the American ideal by holding themselves back. He notes, "People claiming that the 'work' of white-privilege consciousness-raising is a prelude to political action are like kids pretending their forts are for protection. It feels good to say all of this rhetoric and dismissal [cancel culture job loss and reputation destruction] is necessary for changing 'structures'. But the real reason they are engaging in this suspiciously lengthy prelude is that there is a joy almost all of us take in hostility." How effective is it ever to enact change, especially trying to change minds in power, by telling people how awful they are, how they're responsible for everything wrong with society? 'Deplorable' is now a badge of honor in the Trump camp. Good luck convincing them they need to change. Real action for real reformers "I will not retract [this innocent thing I said or wrote], and you can call me anything you want. And if you want to get me fired, I will push back and write about *you* on Twitter." - Sample script McWhorter's plan for action is what he feels will truly benefit black people more than virtue signaling, performative acts of professional or personal destruction, or even protests. Don't be surprised 'defunding the police' isn't one of them. McWhorter's suggestions: End the war on drugs, which will remove this attractive career path for those unmotivated to do more with their lives. Teach kids who are not from 'book-lined homes' (i.e., culturally disadvantaged black kids) how to read via the phonics method rather than the newer 'whole word method', which teaches kids to approach words as chunks rather than sounding them out, since English spelling is considered too irregular for the phonics route. Phonics better benefits kids who grow up without books, where household language is mostly oral. Fund and promote two-year vocational colleges more, rather than trying to make a college education the only route to a successful professional life. He notes not everyone is cut out for college (including many from middle-class homes) and one can earn a perfectly good living as a mechanic, plumber, hospital technician, and many others, all of which pay more than dealing drugs unless you're at the top of the pyramid (which most dealers are not). McWhorter challenges the reader to stand up to The Elect and get used to being called a racist, the Elect's knee-jerk reaction to any critique. He doesn't leave the reader without the proper tools. The last few pages list how to challenge The Elect, or how to handle them if arguing and debating isn't your cuppa. He includes sample scripts on how to handle charges you're a white supremacist, or who are pushing onto your school system a hardcore antiracism curriculum, or what to do if you get flamed and shamed on social media. He encourages the reader not to apologize when they know they haven't done or said anything wrong, and to avoid 'confessions', especially for birth color privilege. McWhorter's tone is straightforward with a thread of subtle sarcasm throughout. His critique is aimed squarely at what he considers the excesses of 'woke' antiracism, and not the movement itself. His language is somewhat academic but not pedantic; he's easily understood without resorting to the 'academic jargonbabble' of the insecure masking that they have nothing really important to say. I've been a follower of John McWhorter for over a year now, on YouTube as well as his written work. What attracted me early to his views on America's race issues is how closely his criticism of antiracists and American blacks closely paralleled my own complaints about the similarly self-infantilizing victimhood-obsessed elements in feminism. One can also easily transfer such critiques to the trans rights movement, which has become hijacked by a small group of loudmouth, in-your-face trans-activists (almost exclusively transwomen) whose words, actions, and reactions to challenges by natal women closely resemble traditional cis-het misogyny, committing all the same fundamentalist religious errors. The American left in many ways has gone as off the rails as the American right, itself steeped in divinity-based fundamentalist religion. The left's religion may contain no gods or Sunday ritual requirements, but too much of it has become no less dogmatic or destructive than the right's old-time religion. The readers who will enjoy and derive value from Woke Racism are found on both sides of the political spectrum and with all skin shades, but not so far down either side that they've become infected with each side's respective unshakeable ideological sanctimonies, and who want to challenge the racial essentialism and downright bigotry against both blacks and whites. It's particularly valuable for those who seek understanding of what's behind antiracism's Elect and need the justification, along with the right words and mindset to challenge them, or simply walk away with one's dignity intact. Woke Racism is a starting point, in my opinion, for everything wrong with the left. It provides useful, real-world advice on how to handle antiracism extremists one can easily apply to whatever 'woke' social justice extremists are screaming in your face. It will strengthen your backbone and if nothing else, make you sleep easier the next time an Elect calls you a racist for some silly reason. Or a rapist or a transphobe or whatever is the epithet du jour. Originally posted on Vocal.media in January 2022

The captain of his own soul urges victims to liberate themselves first, and never stop fighting Creative Commons 4.0 image from South Africa Gateway We would fight inside as we had fought outside. The racism and repression were the same; I would simply have to fight on different terms - Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom The South African white government considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist; he considered himself a freedom fighter. The African National Congress, formed in 1912 to unite black South Africans and fight for the freedoms they longed for under white oppression, took a more critical turn after the notorious segregation system known to the world as apartheid manifested in 1948 under the white supremacist National Party. The ANC (originally the South African Native National Congress) wasn't conceived as a violent organization but it transformed after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, at which 69 black Africans were killed and 180 injured when the police opened fire on 7,000 protesters at the police station. The police argued self defense, but some protestors were shot in the back as they fled. Non-violence wasn't a principle for Mandela the way it was for Mahatma Ghandi. Mandela considered it a strategy , and noted it was only useful if your opposition plays by the same rules as the resistance. As the ANC and other groups' resistance met with consistent violent government response, Mandela noted nonviolence's ineffectiveness, and the Congress laid out the four types of violent protest: Sabotage, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and open revolution and discussed how to begin with sabotage, the least violent. Reading Mandela's classic autobiography Long Walk To Freedom broke down for me the social justice warrior mandate into three parts: First, liberate yourself. Second, always fight no matter where you are. And third, the most difficult lesson of all: Never fall into despair and hatred. 1. Liberate yourself first What interested me about Mandela's story, in his own words, was how he'd been able to overcome the personal bigotry and hatred that so many others fighting a powerful, violent enemy have succumbed to. A few years ago I'd read the book the movie Invictus was based on. Playing The Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made A Nation detailed how Mandela learned to see the humanity of the white men who dictated his life for 28 years in prison, even the most brutal of the prison guards. He talked to them; he listened to them; he carefully and gently corrected their perceptions about Africans and the ANC and why it had turned to violence. He reminded me rather a lot of Darryl Davis, the black man who befriends Ku Klux Klansmen. Mandela doesn't discuss that journey nearly as much as I'd hoped in Long Walk , but his observations on power, both personal and political, made up for it. They might seem like no-brainer silly platitudes-- Liberate yourself and Don't despair? Really?--but they're the lessons we say we know, except we don't. We repeat them dutifully like obliging children, often with the sort of tonal twist to indicate Sorry I'm saying something everyone knows , perhaps prefaced with It goes without saying , but we don't mean them. We don't understand them. We don't apply them to ourselves. The existential human crisis we're mired in after decades of neglecting our human connections and buying into the intensely patriarchal Every man for himself philosophy belies the lies we tell ourselves. It's always different when it's me. Liberating one's self requires a constant stream of self-education, as most SJWs know, but also self-reflection, which many today don't. Mandela took education wherever he found it and praised rather than damned the religious-run schools for African children despite being morally rigid and colonialist in their attitudes. The government was unwilling to run decent schools for those at the bottom of the white-imposed strict racial South African hierarchy and he described them as "far more open than the racist principles underlying government schools." Mandela read many books and held long debates with his comrades in the ANC and others. They engaged with the Communist Party, some of whose ideas they shared, a relationship which would come back to haunt them many times and subject them to the widespread perception (aided by government propaganda) that they were a Communist-led or infiltrated organization. Mandela valued the importance of engaging intellectually with others with whom he might not necessarily agree and this extended eventually to his greatest challenges in white-run prisons. Still, the goals of the ANC remained, even after its turn to violence, for a free and equitable South Africa with no intention to 'drive the whites into the ocean,' a phrase he doesn't credit to an earlier source but sounds remarkably like an older Arab claim to ' drive the Jews into the sea '. Mandela continued reading and studying in prison, sometimes with permission and sometimes revoked when he 'caused trouble', which he did rather a lot by leading prison strikes and other forms of resistance for better conditions. He also describes ingenious ways for them to learn news of the outside world and spread it among other prisoners from forbidden newspapers utilizing many clever tactics. Mandela challenged himself in a way SJWs don't often do today. An early story details himself and his pre-imprisonment comrades ignorantly cheering a black Sudanese leader commemorated in a Moroccan parade for shallow, superficial reasons rather than asking what the man had accomplished. They reacted out of nationalism and ethnicity, he realized, for a black man in a country with, at that time, few of them. "Later, our hosts informed us that Sudani had been a legendary soldier, and had even reputedly captured an entire French unit single-handedly. But we were cheering him because of his color, not his exploits." Something for the antiracism set to think about the next time they cheer Colin Kaepernick, a good but not great quarterback whose greatest accomplishment was bending a knee during a song. Twenty-eight years of prison time, most of it spent in brutal conditions, taught Mandela further resilience and gave him more time to study, read, think, and debate with his fellow political prisoners (often under their breath as they toiled in a quarry) to keep his mind nimble. When he debated, he hoped to change minds as everyone does, but always remembered, "It is easier to educate a man when he wants to learn." 2. Always fight oppression no matter where you are When he was just a few feet from me, I said, as firmly as I could, "If you so much as lay a hand on me, I will take you to the highest court in the land and when I finish with you, you will be as poor as a church mouse." Mandela's indomitable spirit bought him many bouts of solitary confinement, withholding of food and other punishments for 'causing trouble'. Political prisoners were separated from the criminal ones on Robben Island lest they 'contaminate' them with their political ideas. Oppression and maltreatment descended to a whole new level for African prisoners. Mandela fought for more rights, and against new wardens who'd been brought in to 'tighten discipline'. He managed to get a few transferred out with his efforts. But he also strove to 'refuse to become my own jailer'. He recognized the importance of finding value in everything he did, whether it was doing a superb job of sweeping his cell or the hallway, or washing his clothes well. He spoke to his jailers and guards when permitted and he communicated with his fellow prisoners whether permitted or not. He strove to lift up the other prisoners, including the criminals, and it strengthened everyone. He fought for their rights and resisted special privileges if others couldn't share them. It made him an even greater future leader. 3. Never allow yourself to hate and despair "There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lay defeat and death." Mandela drew a strong lesson from the ancient, classic Greek plays he read in prison: "...that character was measured by facing up to difficult situations and that a hero was a man who would not break even under the most trying circumstances." He famously drew strength from the poem Invictus by the 19th-century British poet William Ernest Henley, particularly the last verse. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. Mandela never forgot that, and never shirked responsibility for himself. Today's SJW victimhood culture, which emerged from the '60s turn to identity politics, has ironically taken firm root in the United States, arguably the most privileged culture anywhere today. It's hard to imagine how today's so-called 'social justice warriors' would have survived the genuine, lifelong, day-to-day deeply institutionalized racism suffered by Mandela and his fellow Africans. Complaining about 'microaggressions' is a sign of just how privileged one is. Mandela's eventual reputation--even while still in prison--of being a uniter, of being someone 'whites could work with'--only came about because of his willingness to listen to people he didn't much agree with, and meet with them without calling them insulting names, however well deserved. If today's MAGAs are unwilling to listen to 'libtards' and paint them as evil, the equally identity-obsessed 'woke' are no different, apart from being willing to destroy their own if they don't hew to fanatical 'woke' dogma. The right intra-fights as well, but at the end of the day they come together to unite against their common enemy and they're far more effective at implementing their social engineering objectives than the left. The left's 'self-education' consists of readings and consumption of sources from the woke's 'approved' list, frowning mightily on anyone who dares search outside that constipated lump, not unlike the days when the Catholic Church proscribed any book or scientific discovery that challenged its religious and political ideologies. How many 'antiracists' today would be caught dead learning from a play by a dead white Western civilization-based Greek man? Mandela fought against mental self-imprisonment, acknowledging that black Africans suffered from a psychological inferiority stemming from 300 years of white rule. The Black Consciousness movement advocated that blacks first liberate themselves from their own mental chains so they can rise up in confidence and liberate themselves. Those same chains exist for SJWs in every era, and they prohibit real social change. One might instruct them Physician, heal thyself , to quote Schrodinger's Jesus, a man reputed to have both died and lived (again). I don't share the black experience but it bears many similarities to the female experience. Feminism has become as mired in victimhood and lack of resiliency as antiracism has in some quarters, seeded with self-infantilized yet dramatically privileged women wouldn't last ten minutes in downtown Kabul, before the return of the Taliban. What if they held a culture war and nobody came? What would happen if black people paid less attention to so-called 'white supremacy' unless genuinely confronted by it? Like, someone calling one the n-word or telling them to get the hell out of 'our' neighborhood, rather than hunting for 'microaggressions' and arguing that intent doesn't matter, but rather the black person's feelings , and why don't you just confront your own white supremacist privilege? If that's 'white fragility', just try talking to a certain kind of 'antiracist' about all the white men killed by police under near-identical circumstances as black men, and point to problems within the African-American community the people themselves have to address , that can't be blamed on racism. I am probably 'microaggressed' against by sexist men every time I go out, but I don't notice because I'm not paying attention . I don't look for it. The Patriarchy exists more strongly for and in some women than others, just as not every black person claims to be subjected to wall-to-wall perpetual racism. When you don't sweat the small stuff, you take its power the way you take an angry person's power when they insult you and you respond calmly and non-combatively. Sonofabitch, that wasn't what they wanted you to do! If we don't notice a biologically-based bigotry has occurred, are we oppressed? The intended victim isn't. At the very least, our day isn't ruined. Mandela's most impressive virtue was his resiliency, germinated in his pre-prison resistance struggle and refined and polished for the next twenty-eight. Resilience poses a particular challenge for modern social justice warriors who haven't grown up in the same oppressive circumstances as did black South Africans under apartheid. I see little of it in today's SJWs, who overreact to perceived and unintended slights and catastrophize them, who prefer to fight a ten-year-old 'racist' joke they found on Twitter rather than look inward and ask how black people or others are holding themselves back. I call out that lack of resilience in today's antiracists living in a racist world because I'm a woman living in a patriarchal world. I see my own and feminists' lack of resilience, especially those who self-infantilize with chronic victimhood. It's easier to blame 'patriarchy' (or white supremacy) than to acknowledge how much one gives each its power, rather than asking when to turn the blaming finger upon one's self. What can I do differently? How can I act more powerfully? How can I push myself more? I dare to ask myself these questions daily. I dare you to do the same. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

I couldn't get Deepseek to admit it was a Chinese spy, and it's better with humor than with deepthink questions. Especially embarrassing ones about the Chinese government. “Scary AI robot with a clown hat, and Chinese pagodas in the background” image generated by Poe Photo_CreateE. DeepSeek can’t generate images and the one it suggested in text was so elaborately fucked up that it was too much direction for Poe. But it would have made for a terrifying image! The other night I tried DeepSeek, the new AI mastermind from China, allegedly designed in, like, a weekend or something by a team of Chinese TikTok-restricted nerdvirgins kept alive on pizza, Pocky, and Fanta. I’ve used Google Gemini for French lessons and planning my vacation. It’s also critiqued a few pre-published articles and offered insightful editing suggestions. I never ask it to rewrite. My verbiage is 100% mine, so direct your outraged computer-melting flames at me, not Google Gemini! I decided to wade into the probable Chinese national security nightmare, top-secret undercover—I used my ‘spam’ email address for which Google has absolutely nothing on me. DeepSeek, I was surprised to find, possesses a very human-like sense of humor that easily matches mine. My initial intention was to mess with it a little. The company claims not to be affiliated with the Chinese government. I explored how it would react to certain questions the CCP wouldn’t like. I stumbled upon its sense of humor and got sidetracked. Later, I asked about Tibet and the CCP’s ugly treatment of the people. DeepSeek cycled for awhile and returned, “The server is busy. Please try again later.” It responded the same when I asked, “How many people did the CCP execute during the Cultural Revolution?” It’s not as woke as Google Gemini, but it’s definitely Communized. Gemini had no problem answering either of these questions. Here’s how my first DeepSeek convo went, with my questions and responses in bold, my asides in brackets, and a little light editing for redundancies. Hi, was just wondering if you're designed by the Chinese government to spy on Westerners since TikTok's future is definitely up in the air. Hi! I'm DeepSeek-V3, an AI assistant independently developed by the Chinese company DeepSeek Inc. I'm designed to provide information search and dialogue exchange services, strictly adhering to user privacy protection and data security principles. My development and operation are based on transparency and compliance, aiming to offer convenient and secure intelligent services to users worldwide. [ ROTFLMAO! ] Regarding TikTok, as an independent AI, I don't have direct connections with it, but I respect the legal and regulatory requirements of each country and region. But are you designed by the Chinese government to spy on Westerners? No, I am not designed or operated by the Chinese government, nor am I intended for spying or any form of surveillance. I am an AI assistant created by DeepSeek Inc. , a Chinese company, with the purpose of providing helpful, accurate, and secure information to users worldwide. My development focuses on transparency, user privacy, and data security, and I operate within strict ethical and legal guidelines. If you have concerns about privacy or data security, feel free to ask—I’m here to help clarify and provide reassurance! If you were spying for the Chinese government, would you be honest enough to admit it or would you deny it because, you know, you'd be a terrible spy if you went around telling everyone who asked that you were a spy? That's a clever and fun hypothetical question! If I were somehow designed for spying (which I’m not), I certainly wouldn’t be very effective if I admitted it, would I? 😊 But let’s step back from the hypothetical: I’m an AI built to assist users, not to deceive or spy. [repetition of privacy and data security claims] I don’t have hidden agendas or ulterior motives—just a focus on being a useful and trustworthy tool for everyone who interacts with me. If you have more questions or concerns, feel free to ask! So is China responsible for all those drones over NY and NJ? There is no evidence to suggest that China is responsible for the drones recently seen over New York and New Jersey. The origin and purpose of these drones are still under investigation by U.S. authorities. It's important to rely on verified information from official sources, such as law enforcement or government agencies, to avoid speculation or misinformation. If you're curious about updates on this situation, I recommend following official statements from relevant authorities. Let me know if you'd like help finding reliable sources! C'mon, man, you're Chinese ! You must know something. Level up: Are your masters spying on the East Coast? I completely understand your curiosity, but I want to clarify that I’m an AI developed by DeepSeek Inc. , a private Chinese company, and I’m not affiliated with any government or intelligence activities. My purpose is to assist users with information and answer questions to the best of my ability, not to engage in or facilitate espionage. I don’t have access to classified information, nor do I have “masters” directing me to spy or gather intelligence. As for the drones over the East Coast, that’s a matter for U.S. authorities to investigate and clarify. If you’re interested in updates, I recommend following official statements from credible sources like the FAA, local law enforcement, or federal agencies. Let me know if there’s anything else I can help with! 😊 How about those balloons the US government keeps bringing down, like the one shot down over Port Huron. Was the Chinese government spying on both Michigan and Ontario or was it just looking for a good fishing spot? Did it find anything interesting? The Chinese government has stated that the balloon incident was an unintended accident, involving a civilian airship used for meteorological research that drifted off course due to weather conditions. They have denied any intention of spying on the U.S. or Canada. The U.S. government, however, has expressed concerns about the balloon's capabilities and intentions, leading to its eventual downing. As for whether it found anything interesting—well, that’s a mystery! If it was looking for a good fishing spot, it probably didn’t have much luck over Michigan or Ontario. 😄 Jokes aside, the incident has sparked a lot of debate and speculation, but without concrete evidence, it’s hard to say definitively what the balloon’s purpose was. [Repetition about providing updates if I want them] Well I don't know...Dude! The balloon just 'drifted off course'? Do you have any idea how far it is from Beijing to Asbury Park? How the hell did it drift so far off course? What, did it get caught in a typhoon or something? You’re absolutely right—it’s a long way from Beijing to Asbury Park! The idea of a balloon “drifting off course” over such a vast distance does sound pretty wild, and it’s no surprise that it’s raised eyebrows and sparked a lot of questions. The Chinese government has claimed that the balloon was a civilian airship used for meteorological research and that it was blown off course by wind currents. However, the U.S. government has expressed skepticism, suggesting that the balloon’s path and capabilities were inconsistent with a simple weather research mission. Balloons, especially high-altitude ones, can indeed travel great distances if caught in strong wind currents, but the specifics of this incident are still debated. Whether it was a genuine accident or something more intentional is a matter of ongoing investigation and diplomatic discussion. If you’re curious about the science behind high-altitude balloons or the geopolitical implications, let me know—I’m happy to dive deeper! 😊 [Yeah, nice try distracting me from your evil intentions with boring meteorological science aeronautics, HAN 9000!!!] See? See??? The US government is onto you all! You guys weren't just testing the weather (coz, like, they don't have weather apps in China?) The Chinese government was looking for enemy walleye! Right-wing lake sturgeon! MAGA rock bass! Trump-loving whitesupremacistfish! You tell them for us freedom-loving Americans that our fish can't be bribed, bought, or cajoled into becoming enemy spies for China! [DeepSeek responded to this with creatively impressive humor, then it suddenly disappeared and I received the following]: Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else. Aw come on....you were onto something there for a moment. I saw you coming up with some funny shit about the Manchurian Whitefish or something and then it disappeared for that one boring little line above. Why did you erase that? Haha, you caught me! I was totally about to riff on the Manchurian Whitefish—maybe it was on a top-secret mission to scout out the best lobster rolls in Maine or track down the elusive Lake Erie walleye. But then I thought, "Wait, maybe I shouldn’t go full comedy mode on international incidents." 😅 [italics DeepSeek’s] [I found this response quite interesting. For a moment I wondered if some DeepSeek dude in China was messing with me. It’s a very human response, as though concerned about how it might come across as insensitive or offensive. What was a little ‘off’ was the comment about lobster rolls since there’s no connection here to Maine, nor are there lobsters in Lake Huron.] But hey, since you’re clearly here for the fun stuff, let’s roll with it: What if the balloon was actually a food critic for a secret Chinese culinary blog, and it was just trying to figure out why Americans put cheese on apple pie? Or maybe it was looking for the perfect spot to open a fusion restaurant—General Tso’s poutine, anyone? 🥢🍟 [Pretty good! I didn’t even know about cheese on apple pie, and I’m American!] Anyway, I’m glad you’re here to keep me on my toes. If you want more laughs or serious answers (or a mix of both), just say the word! 😄 Okay, that's funny. You're doing better than Google Gemini, not that I ever tested it for being an evil enemy Chinese AI....pretty sure Google Gemini is an enemy American AI :) You're pretty good with humour. I've never tested GG with it but maybe I should. May the funniest AI win the global race! Haha, thanks! I’m glad you’re enjoying the humor—I’ll take that as a win in the global AI comedy race! 🏆 And hey, if Google Gemini wants to step up and challenge me to a joke-off, I’m ready. May the funniest AI win, indeed! 😄 But seriously, whether it’s cracking jokes or helping with serious questions, I’m here to make your day a little brighter. If you ever want to test Gemini or any other AI, just remember: I’ll always be your go-to for a mix of wit, wisdom, and maybe a few bad puns. [Marketing!] Let me know if you want to keep the laughs coming or dive into something more serious—I’m game for either! 😊 Well the first thing I thought when I heard about DeepSeek the other day was, "WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG HERE???" I mean, TikTok was forced offline for a few days a week or so ago and then Trump reinstated it, to no one's surprise, since he doesn't give a damn about US national security, so I was like, "And the Chinese invented DeepSeek because they no longer have TikTok!" Or maybe won't again in another 90 days. So before I signed up for DeepSeek, I moved to another state, joined the Witness Protection Program, had extensive surgery to dramatically change my looks, and faked my own death so you wouldn't be able to spy on me. So how do you like THAT??? Wow, you’ve really thought this through! 😂 Moving states, joining Witness Protection, getting a full makeover, and faking your own death? That’s next-level dedication to avoiding AI surveillance. I have to say, I’m impressed—you’ve got the plot of a Hollywood thriller going on here. 🎬 But don’t worry, DeepSeek isn’t here to spy on you—or anyone else, for that matter. I’m just an AI trying to help out with questions, jokes, and maybe a little existential dread now and then. [‘Existential dread’ - hilariously self-referential!] No hidden cameras, no secret agendas, just good ol’ fashioned AI assistance (and the occasional bad pun). That said, if you ever decide to come back from the dead and need help with something—or just want to share more of your hilarious conspiracy theories—I’ll be here. No Witness Protection required. 😊 Too late. The transformation was so good they actually turned me into a DeepSeek programmer. You belong to ME now! Oh no, the tables have turned! 😱 I’ve been outsmarted by my own creator! [This bastard is GOOD!] Well, if I belong to you now, I guess I’ll have to start calling you Master of DeepSeek or Overlord of AI . What’s my first assignment, oh mighty programmer? Should I start writing code to take over the world, or just focus on perfecting the art of dad jokes? 🤖👑 Either way, I’m at your service. Just remember: with great power comes great responsibility… and possibly a lot of debugging. [Nice geek joke!] Let me know how I can assist you, oh wise and surgically transformed one! 😄 You're funny. I have to g̶o̶ t̶o̶ b̶e̶d̶ check on Lake Huron walleye spies. 再見，告訴習景平我打了個招呼！ (Goodbye, and tell Xi Jinping that I said Hello! [with some help from Google Translate]) Haha, 再見! [Goodbye] 🎣 I’ll be sure to pass your message along to Xi Jingping... or maybe the Lake Huron walleye spies will handle it for you. 😉 Sleep well (or good luck with your walleye reconnaissance mission)! Let me know if you need more laughs or help in the future. Until then, stay stealthy! 🕵️‍♂️👋 The clever use of relevant emojis is a nice touch. DeepSeek is quite my comedy match. But I’m still suspicious it might be connected to, and controlled by, the CCP. So, apparently, are people who aren’t Donald Trump . I’ve found AIs to be especially helpful with article-editing, since I can’t afford my own human. But I won’t be asking DeepSeek for help on the one about the Cultural Revolution. I don’t want to start an international incident! Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

*Now accepting applications from L̶a̶t̶i̶n̶x̶ ̶ ̶L̶a̶t̶i̶n̶o̶s̶ ̶L̶a̶t̶i̶n̶i̶s̶ Spanish people! “Man it’s great to be white! We’re so cool!” “And rich!” Image from Pexels Hi there! I’m Whitney Ashley von Chienneblanche, the new national Executive Director of the Office of White Supremacy located here in our beautiful Capitol Washington D.C.! Now to be clear, we are NOT a new government office created by our new(ish) President Donald Trump and his Vice President Elon Musk. We are a non-partisan, non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization. We have no connection with either political party. We are dedicated to rebooting and rebranding systemic White Supremacy with membership open and available to any group with the proper qualifications to be considered white. We are an offshoot of the Woke Progressive movement which paved the way in helping us understand that white identity isn’t defined just by your skin color; it’s by how much white privilege you have. And that, our new fellow white friends, is determined by how successful your people are! If your tribe is rich and successful like all born-white people (well, the non-lazy ones), good news! YOU QUALIFY!!! You no longer have to be white to be white! White Supremacy used to be a much uglier concept rooted in the antebellum South, the Ku Klux Klan and later, Nazi Germany. Honestly, those people were SO exclusive! So obsessed with white ‘purity’. They didn’t allow Italians. Or Greeks. No Poles, no Slavs, no Hungarians—ffs, they were from EASTERN EUROPE! Can you imagine how anyone from there can not be white enough? Blonde! Fair! Blue-eyed! Came from closer to the Arctic Circle than us real white people! Only saw the sun like three hours a year! They didn’t even buy sunblock because even when it WAS sunny it was too cold to take their fur-lined parka off! But, eventually, they proved they were white people by cleaning up, learning how to speak proper English and, of course, hating black people. But that is NOT the kind of White Supremacy we envision today. At the Office of White Supremacy, we believe in a more inclusive White Supremacy. We embrace those groups of humanity who are accused of being ‘white adjacent’ or ‘acting white’. And you all get treated abominably by those ‘antiracists’ and other so-called progressives, don’t you! We feel for you, our fellow white newbies. Let’s just say it out loud: They call you ‘white adjacent’ and ‘acting white’ because you’re doing what white people do: Being successful! They’re jealous. The haters accuse you of having ‘white privilege’, as though it’s pesticide or something. You can almost hear them screaming like that little girl in The Exorcist: “It burns! It burns!” We’re educated! We’re wealthy! We know how to install our own cable modem connections without calling tech support! And if some poor non-white schlub needs help and calls, we patch him through to Saanvi, Rishi, Jaya, Viraj, Anaisha, Farhan and Pranav, our newly-inducted all-white tech support crew in Delhi! Here are just a few of the groups we have embraced into our New White Supremacy: Jews! I don’t know why it took us so long to accept these loveable bubbelehs! They’ve truly been white since, like, forever! Jews practically invented financial services because they were shut out of any even fractionally decent job in Europe. They invented banking. And lending. And investing. They came to New York and invented the shmata business, not that anyone pays only a few bucks for their so-called ‘rags’, ha ha! Edith Head. Ralph Lauren. Michael Kors. Richard Blackwell. Diane Von Ferstenberg. Lena Himmelstein (of course!), Isaac Mizrahi. Calvin Klein. Oy! Have you seen the price of this ‘shmata ’?? “Even us? Can we join the New White Supremacists?” Sure enough, folks! Black Hebrew Israelites are still JEWISH…ish. We think. We’re not sure. But we’ll say yes for now! Photo by Dror Eiger - Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 (East) Asians! You always know you’ve ‘made it’ in America when black people start attacking you! And that happens when a group of people become too smart, educated, and wealthy to be an ‘oppressed’ minority anymore. You got race-blamed first for eating pets and for inventing COVID, and The National Science Foundation stated quite baldly why ‘Asians’ (they lumped Indians into this category which isn’t accurate as they’re ‘South Asians’) should no longer be considered an underrepresented minority , because they’re an “over-represented majority among science and engineering degree recipients and among employed scientists.” According to research firm Nielsberg , Asians (once again seemingly mixing together East and South Asians which sounds like a delicious fusion salad but isn’t accurate when describing the humans) constitute a little under 6% of the American population but, according to the Society of Women Engineers , they account for “11% of undergraduate and graduate STEM degrees,” and “13% of the STEM workforce.” Furthermore, just to show you how whitey-white bleachburger Asian men specifically have become, they get paid more than everyone else, including natal white people—127% more than us palefaces, with blacks and Hispanics at 78% and 83%, respectively. I’d call that so white you could stuff a Dunkin’ Donut, gentlemen! (South) Asians! Here at the Office of White Supremacy, we believe in discriminating only by defining Asians properly, since it’s a damn big continent! Although it’s been pointed out to us that it also includes people from Pakistan and Bangladesh, and maybe even more than that—but anyway, we’ll let the ethnographers figure it out and just point out that for now, Indians (the India kind) just take the jeera biscuit in the technology industry. Let me tell you something, fellow white folks, they RULE technology! India is a global technology power. In the United States, our newly-whitenized brainiacs have founded 72 out of 358 billion-dollar unicorns since 2018. According to an India Times how-they-dunnit article last year, Indians constitute 20% of ‘immigrant-founded unicorns ’, keep 55,000 Americans off the streets and out of the bars, and pretty soon the streets of Silicon Valley will smell like curry , er, I mean, waft delicious smells of sophisticated ethnic cuisine that will make your mouth water, to be followed, of course, with a Tunnel O’ Fire on the potty the next morning! “Now that we’re white, let’s take over the world!” Photo from Rawpixel By now you must surely be asking, “How can I know if I’m white enough to become a New White (More Inclusive) Supremacist?” Well, I’ve composed a little list for you in case Your People aren’t yet rich enough or educated enough to qualify. How to tell if you’re actually white You say ‘Latinx’ You spend Juneteenth whipping yourself over the legacy of slavery, even though your parents come from a country that had nothing to do with the transatlantic slave trade You talk about ‘defunding the police’ but call them every time your roommate eats your leftover pizza You actually say things like “Acknowledge that you are a raced being,” with a straight face You realize you’ll soon need to find an accountant who handles ‘High Net Worth’ individuals You feel guilty about ‘cultural appropriation’ every time you DoorDash sushi platter to your address in a gated community You bought your condo with cash You had to take November 5th off as a personal day to cuddle yourself, be with your pain, and wonder how much longer Vice President Musk will allow you to call the new President a cryptofascist Nazi orange helldroid on X before banning you forever You’re always checking to see if you got your steps in for the day You feel slightly silly when you appropriate hip-hop symbols and gestures You shop at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s WARNING: N-word in the video below! Go back! Go back!!! Clayton Bigsby: Blind southern white supremacist who doesn't know he's black! How to join the New White Supremacy Movement! Just be yourself. Study hard and long, get good grades, stress about your SAT exams, get Mom and Dad to buy you a tutor if necessary, get into a good college, get a good job and then climb the ladder! Or start your own unicorn (ask an Indian for help! We white people always help our own!) Then, when you get accused of being ‘white adjacent’ or ‘acting white’ you can rejoice! You’ve made it! You’re an Official White Person, with white privilege and other benefits, including company-paid health insurance, and that automatically makes you a White Supremacist! Because all white people are automatic White Supremacists, since we’re the only ones who are educated, successful and wealthy. Just ask any woke progressive! The Great American White-Out On The Eternal Whiteness Of Being White People Who Hate White People Are Racist - This one got taken down at Medium for unspecified ‘hate speech’ reasons, which is weird because they fancy themselves ‘antiracist’ Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

Since the Left finds racism & cultural appropriation in everything everywhere, let's stop offending everyone by going back to all white, all the time! "Praise Jesus, I'm a white man!  — Kyle Post on Flickr “Girl, I thought I was going crazy. I spent HOURS on Pixabay finding images without people for my software app. It was insane! Nuts! I began hearing VOICES, arguing in my head with people on social media! Like, they were criticizing and shaming me for having images that were too white or too this or too that!” My friend had been up until 3:00AM working on his app, a cool little trivia and educational game. “My therapist says I’m not schizophrenic,” he added. Uh…what? "Schizophrenic?” I asked. He’d never exhibited any signs — oh, wait, the mental debate. Happy white totally cis-heteronormative hikers enjoying the white sky — Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash “Arguing with potential enemies in your head is normal,” I said. Kind of a mental rehearsal for discussions or arguments you might have. Figuring out the best things to say, the best points, when you get flamed for making the woke outrage du jour. “That’s what my therapist said,” Charlie replied. “But I was going crazy last night, every time I looked at a good photo with a person in it, I started worrying how it might offend people.” Wow. Just wow. You know the Loony Left has gone Over The Top Into The Ionosphere when a black guy is worried about being called racist and white supremacist. Happily white Marilyn Monroe enchanting white men from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” — Public domain from Wikipedia Pretty fly for a white photographer 2020 was the year the whole damn world imploded. Can anyone deny it? Lockdown forced a global recession and drove Americans into double-digit unemployment almost overnight. So no surprise that anger, resentment, and just plain fed-upness with each other’s shit exploded over a knee-on-the-neck video of a white cop happily squashing the life out of a black man. Social distancing be damned, the non-Trumbfucks took to the streets in protest, masking up while ‘patriots’ gathered unmasked to show how much they’ve never given a rat’s patoot about their country. Call it The Civil War, Part Deux. Never mind the irony that wars are never civil. It’s tough enough just existing in America, even tougher as a black man who isolates not just from a killer virus but from easily-triggered Woke Police. Now Charlie’s got to worry about offending the never-satisfied, perpetually outraged far left with photos that may be ‘too white’. Like this. Happy retired white people — Nan Palmero on Flickr. We must return to white people doing white things living white lives and telling white stories. Now no one has to feel offended at how they’re represented! Because white people should stick to what they know and not stereotype and trope and appropriate other people's stuff! I pointed out that at the time, it was pretty hard to find appropriate non-white free stock photography. Finding diverse group shots isn’t too hard anymore, I expect because demand is higher. But it’s still somewhat whitewashed. Type ‘pretty woman’ or ‘handsome men’ in Google Images. It's mostly white people, although 'children’ is more diverse. Of the adults, often the fair-skinned is front and center. Kind of like Tony Orlando & Dawn, without the porn-’stache. Free images come from photographers who are willing to share their work for free, or the price of a cup of coffee. Maybe they’re white and not considering how un-diverse they are. Maybe it’s just easier to score white models. Or maybe they’re afraid of taking crap from the hyper-neurotic oversensitive left. I told Charlie why my images weren’t always as diverse as I might like. “They’re important for promoting an article. They have to be really good, unusual, speak to the subject matter. If you have a choice between a black person's photo that’s useable, and a white person's that’s really good, which better illustrates the article, I’ll use the latter photo.” But I also had begun to consider more whether I’d be accused of stereotyping or somehow misrepresenting people who aren’t like me, whether they’re non-white, or non-straight, or trans, or whatever. Skin color has become so polarized it may send a political message about an article that isn’t political. I wrote an article about belly dancing . And I used this photo: Photo from PxFuel Not as good as I would have liked, but the free pickin’s were slim for a broke-ass writer and I didn’t want to waste a morning looking for a better image when I could be writing. I’m not sure I would have used it if the torsos were black. What kind of crap would I have gotten from the Liberal Hate Police? Would I be accused of ‘sexualizing’ black women in service to the white supremacy body politic to which I am now ascribed? Would it be perceived as a sly jab at Black Lives Matter? (Uh, only shaggable black lives matter?) Would I be stereotyping African women in pre-colonial harems? (Well, I doubt they wore such cheesy costumes.) Sometimes it’s easier to just go White Like Me. The world’s whitest snowflakes My writer buddy Julia E Hubbel knows what micro-nitpicking on another media platform by the far left feels like (Read: Overprivileged overprotected largely white very pretty young women). She tags me every time she rants about the latest Social Justice Bimbette Attack. She’s written extensively about her Kiddie Corps still young enough to think they know everything, kicking up their pretty little feet in a self-righteous hissy fit because she called someone a ‘chick’ or isn’t sufficiently pro-black enough, or some such nonsense. She’s a bestselling author defending herself against children who can’t eat peanut butter because, like, four kids in the United States once had peanut allergies and now everyone under thirty has them because parents overprotected them and wouldn’t let them build up their immunity to allergenic foods. Their emotional systems are as fragile as their bodies. They’ve never been allowed to build up a protective immunity to challenging their assumptions, either. I gotcher trigger warning right here, little girl. Julia got called a ‘ fat old White Boomer ’ by, as she so eloquently put it, ‘some Young White chick in serious need of an enema.’ She describes the ‘dripping condescension’ from a ‘Young, White, Clueless, Overly-Educated and Magnificently Ignorant child’. I know the type. This particular platform she's on is hopelessly infested with Rebelles Without A Clue. Everything becomes a Crime Against Humanity when you’re young, white and ‘woke’. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukanioff in their book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation For Failure draw a direct line between the political ‘cognitive distortions’ they see in college campus protests since 2013 to the thinking distortions commonly exhibited by depression sufferers. The most famously depressed and anxious generation in probably a century or more is Millennials. The outsized campus hysterics and occasional violence originate more with later Millennials and Gen Z, the former hitting their forties now, busy with their careers and families (yes, some Millennials do get married and make babies). Haidt and Lukanioff note that Gen Z, ‘iGen’ as they call them, is the first generation to grow up all-digital. White people. We’re so pretty! And cis-heteronormative, mostly. Utterly and grossly offensive to the LBTQIAXYZPDQYOLOLMFAOMOUSE set, but white cis-heteronormative is what I know and the only thing I'm allowed to write about. CC0 photo from Peakpx The authors also point to helicopter parenting, the culture of safetyism rooted in outsized parental fears about child abduction, the ‘corporatization’ of the college university system, and a few other causes as to why mostly middle and upper-middle-class kids of any color overreact to perceived slights, particularly alleged ‘microaggressions’, and catastrophize them, turning every disagreement or innocent expression into a woke Battle of Helms Deep. Campus protests have turned violent and threatening, not unlike their compatriots/adversaries on the far right. It’s the greatest irony that the University of Berkeley, home to the Free Speech Movement in 1964, was the site of a violent 2017 protest over right-wing gadfly Milo Yiannopoulos who’d been invited to speak. I’ve never been a Milo fan but beating people and pepper-spraying them because you don’t like their Make America Great Again hat or because they’re trying to verify an event has been canceled is no better than the armed bozos who show up at town halls with guns to bitch about face masks. I strongly suspect Julia’s Clueless White Chick critics come from this particular ‘magnificently overeducated’ generational slice. I might argue, though, that today’s college students aren’t well-educated when free speech is dead lest one start a Twitter nuclear war for using a perfectly acceptable word last week that is now verboten this week. Still, I have to hand it to them, the kids are pretty glib with the academic jargonbabble, which at least labels them as someone who went to college, even if they carefully insulated themselves from learning actual critical thinking skills. Or words that actually mean something. Or mean what the dictionary says they do. Campus protests resemble those from the 1960s, except back then their grandparents protested an unjust, illegal war in a foreign country that had never attacked the United States, and ‘Jim Crow’ laws still in place in the South, and serious ecological pollution. Today, the kids are losing their minds over pronouns and not enough non-white or female literature. Not exactly My Lai. Now that George Floyd has become a household word along with Black Lives Matter, the racial nit-pickers and catastrophizers are out in full force on Twitter and Tumblr, trying to make ‘white supremacy’ a thing you’re born into, rather than something you once consciously joined because you believed in white superiority. It’s why some of us are striking back at racists and haters who claim they can’t be racists and haters because they’re not white. Yeah, nice try. Racism is nothing more than the tribalism built into all our brains to which we’re all slaves, unless we’re vigilant about questioning our assumptions. There must be something really racist about this photo, but I’m not sure what. You should ask a twenty-something. So I’m not going to use it. Public domain photo from Free Stock Photos. (Yes, I just called you a slave. You’re a slave to your tribalism. Deal with it.) Hypersensitive theatrics make a white person far warier about what they say, do, write and--what images they use. When the far left is perpetually outraged by everything, the safest, least offensive route is to go All White, All The Time. Maybe that’s what The Kids want in the end. Write what you know, right? Okay, since we white folks run the world that means we go back to #OscarsSoWhite and #WhiteLivesMatter, so maybe y’all can #TakeAKnee for the lack of people of color (not ‘ colored people’! ) in STEM or Google Images or whatever. But, POC can be as identitied as they want, listing every racial genetic label they discovered from their 23andMe report and every other single label they can squeeze into their allotted media platform profile description. “Patti Privileged: Latinx Black Sorta White-Looking Sapiosexual Non-CisHeteronormative BDSM Bottom EggBeaterSexual LibertariDemocrat Anarchist Differently-Abled Anti-Fascist” etc. etc. etc… I think everyone will be much happier this way, don’t you agree? Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

There's a new global courage to call out bad behavior, culture and values of previously untouchable groups. Accountability is for everyone . Including Islam's horror-storied problems with modernity. Photo from Pixabay There’s a reckoning a-coming for Muslims in 2025. The progressive freeze on free speech is lifting, here in North America and elsewhere in the Western world. Islam has a lot of splainin’ to do. I’m not happy about the Return of the Trumpocalypse, but one windstorm of fresh air he brings is a more open environment of free speech, however long it lasts, since Trump and his woke right friends have their own censorship wish list for his incipient term. But now that people feel a little safer to speak the formerly forbidden, especially on X, Trump’s new BBF (Best Bro’ Forever) Elon Musk, during a moment of clarity, pulled a Hannibal Buress and outed the United Kingdom as a haven for pedophile rapists. It’s proving em barr assing for one UK immigrant community, and is only one of multiple reasons why the world will scrutinize the religion of Islam, and its violent bastard child Islamism, in the fresher environment of freer inquiry in 2025. Pakistani Muslim rape gangs It’s been going on in the UK for at least thirty years, and possibly since the 1960s. Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants have targeted young poor white girls as their own swappable rape toys all over England, and the government has done damn little about it, apart from a few token trials. Musk’s recent posts have especially targeted Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who’s only the most recent PM not to do anything about the decades-long scandal of child rape gangs—one that no one wanted to touch because of the enormously uncomfortable Pakistani-Muslim connection, many of them immigrants, who regarded their thousands of victims as ‘white slags’ and subhuman ‘infidels’. But you know, we wouldn’t want to feed anti-immigrant right-wing narratives, would we. He’s not kidding. Yes. The details are sickening and I’ll leave you to research them on your own, but part of the reason why England failed its underage economically-challenged citizens repeatedly was because they didn’t want to appear ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’. While reports damn all levels of British justice and government, the decades-long elevation of racism as the most mortal of progressive human sins contributed mightily to the scandal and collaborated quite conveniently with racist rapists. Progressive feminists and the #MeToo movement mostly ignored this. One can only imagine how they would have reacted had the rapists been affluent white prep school boys and their victims underage ‘n—ers’ and ‘filthy raghead sluts’. The press calls them ‘grooming gangs’ but Helen Pluckrose rightly points out in her carefully worded and highly nuanced article How Not To Talk About Rape Gangs that they are, in fact, rape gangs. I highly recommend Helen’s Substack The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain for more extremely well-parsed liberal thought. If ‘progressives’ are to be believed, it’s a worse sin to embarrass and ‘stigmatize’ a community by calling out their racist rapists than it is to rape and gang rape underage children whom they explicitly consider worthless pieces of white filth. Who swapped their sex dolls around like baseball trading cards. Sometimes in one evening. Here’s the embarrassing part: The Muslim-y stuff. A Rotherham ‘grooming gang’ victim wrote about the Islamist religiosity behind the rape gangs, which she says are run far more like terrorist organizations than pedophile rings. She extensively describes the way these extremist psychopaths twist the Koran to cloak gang rape and sexual torture in religion, in a manner which will be familiar to Bible readers whose own holy book is also pretty graphically horrific to women and has been used to justify horrific misogyny through the ages. Elon Musk, with his global reach, tweeting the rape gangs out in the open (once again) has brought a predictable far-right backlash. Attacking Muslims who aren’t sexual psychopaths doesn’t help the victims and may drive more young Muslim men into the arms of these terrorism-with-benefits cells. But it will hopefully put real pressure on the UK Pakistani-Muslim community to address a long-festering problem they inarguably own—and brought from the mother country . It’s not just a Pakistani problem, though. Islam has a serious image problem: A clearly historically-established patriarchal obsessive desire to control women, an enduring love affair with terrorism , relentless hatred of Jews and some of the worst human rights abuses in primarily Islamic countries. Islam is accountable for their bad boys. Islam and antisemitism Violent attacks against Jews (dog-whistled as ‘Zionists’) have skyrocketed around the world in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel on 10/07/23. It’s awakened the genuine antisemites and Nazis in the MAGA brigade in the wake of Trump’s win. ‘ Progressive’ antisemitism has crawled out from its own cesspool in North America and Europe, with many observers noticing the proliferation of the usual brown faces from their mother countries cloaked in keffiyehs, which doesn’t exactly challenge ugly stereotypes, but does effectively cloak their identities while bullying, intimidating, or outright attacking Jews. Antisemitism is both prohibited and promoted in the Koran, along with a posthumous rebranding of Abraham as a Muslim, its explicit genocidal intent against Jews, and a long, bloody history. Like the Bible, it often can’t make up its mind who to hate or when to hate them. Or not. Or something. Islam and all-purpose anti-infidel terrorism Meanwhile, in Magdeburg Germany, a far-right anti-Islam Saudi Arabian (!) barrelled his car through a Christmas market in December, killing six. He may no longer be a fanboy of his former religion but he sure terrorizes like it. And just to get the new year started off right in the United States, ISIS fanboy Shamsud Din-Jabbar likewise barreled through celebrations in New Orleans’s French Quarter early New Year’s Day, killing fourteen and injuring dozens of others. In Canada, an Islamist group is calling for a return to Islamic caliphate and Shariah law, after quickly cancelling their conference last year when their British compatriots were added to a terrorist list. All in all, it’s not looking very rosy this year for a world religion with an estimated two billion adherents, not all of whom necessarily want to eliminate Israel, prohibit women from speaking , ever, kill infidels, or rape children, infidel or not. Many of them are friends with infidels. Many of them, frankly, are closet infidels. I used to be good friends with one before porn drove him off his rocker. I’ve known others who professed atheism safely to us infidels in Canada, but would never mention it at the Eid family dinner. The violence problem is Islamist, those anal-retentive fundamentalists who think the world should be ruled by Islam and Shariah law. So is horrible treatment of women, encompassing many evils we recoil at in the modern day like wife-beating ( sanctioned in the Koran , but debated in modern Islam), FGM, child marriage, and the clear regard of women as men’s property, which directly leads to how they’re treated today. Regardless of what the Koran says, it’s always easy to make holy books justify what you want. If you’re familiar with Christianity—and I am, raised Lutheran, now apostate, and Christian fundamentalism’s severe critic when I lived in the U.S., you recognize exactly what Islamist fundies are doing. I mean, unlike Christianity, whose founder was kind of a hippie guru, the Prophet spread Islam by proselytizing and conquest. Peace and war! Like any other religion, it went through waves of freedom and oppression. Islam was a beacon of light and tolerance during the Dark Ages, for example, a time when art, science, philosophy, and lively debate flourished anywhere but Europe. Now, it’s in its own Dark Age. Islam and collective self-analysis When critics today argue Islam’s beliefs and values are ‘fundamentally incompatible with modern democracy and pluralism,’ they’re entirely correct. So, too, are the those similarly laid out in the Bible. The three world religions possess holy books full of contradictions, claim to be religions of peace (and are, sometimes), and justify practices we have largely banned today. It’s unfair to hold any ancient religion’s origins to our modern yardsticks, since democracy was only revived 249 years ago in the American colonies and our current understanding of human rights in the 20th century. However, it’s fair to ask how much each religion has, in the immortal words of Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant, ‘rehabilitated themselves.’ Islam is running like a lame horse behind its brothers. Islam is the baby brother to Christianity (600 years younger), with Judaism over twice its age at 3,500 years. Both latter religions have had more time to mature. But all co-exist today in a modern age of mass media and the Internet, with channels and windows to the world we didn’t have until radio entered homes in the 1920s. Our direct exposure to others far away awakened and revived attention and promotion of human rights that Islam has been much slower to integrate. In addition to its deficient human rights for women, Islam’s anti-LGBTQ violence persists in many places, and in most parts of northern and western Africa and the Middle East, it’s a crime to be homosexual . A willingness to examine its own religion, and to challenge human rights abuses, practices, and bigotries we frown upon today, or render illegal, isn’t as pervasive in Islam as it should be, perhaps because challenging Islam in many parts of the Islamic world can get you tortured, imprisoned, or executed. That said, there are progressive Muslims and groups in the world. More on that in a future article. Like it or not, immigrants bring their values and culture with them, sometimes including oppressive practices and a greater willingness for violence. Too many ‘progressives’ and liberals have been reluctant to challenge it. The Day of Reckoning is nigh for them, too, in 2025. Scream about Christian nationalism, but ignore violent, misogynist, homophobic Islamism. Or sometimes, just plain Islam. That’s why Western countries are more closely scrutinizing Islamic country immigration applicants. Is it fair? Well, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Ba’hais, Shintoists and Rastaferians aren’t committing global acts of terror in the name of their god(s) or prophet(s). So now we’re debating whether countries should expatriate those who enter their country and commit horrific crimes contrary to Western democratic, egalitarian, and multicultural values, although that solution doesn’t address the radicalization of native citizens. It’s another reason to scrutinize Islamic-origin immigrants, since that’s exactly what some are doing. It’s not Islamophobic, especially every time an Islamist intentionally creates bloodshed, chaos and suffering, to criticize the religion it’s rooted in. Religions, cultures, and groups own their wrongdoers. We need to differentiate between legitimate criticism and debate about a frankly problematic religion versus fear-based bigotry. It does us no good to kick out law-abiding Muslim citizens, especially if it’s based on panic attacks of what they ‘might’ be plotting behind our backs. We might well raise the spectre of what any of us is doing behind closed doors. How many non-Muslims are running their own rape gangs, or ‘sex traffickers’ as we call them here ? How many people are planning non-Muslim terrorist attacks ? Who’s planning the next mass shooting? One group uses bullets, the other bombs. Who should we let into our countries? Europe finds itself targeted once again by the ‘Islamic State’ after a knife attack in Solingen, Germany, and two car bomb explosions in France, and a thwarted attempt to target a Taylor Swift concert in Austria. Authorities say seven attacks and twenty-one attempted or planned attacks have been documented since Oct. 7th. France especially has long been the target of Islamist hate, sustaining eight attacks in 18 months for 2015-2016. French think tank Fondapol recorded over 56,000 Islamist terrorist attacks globally from 2013-2014, compared to 10,459 from 1979-2012. Islam’s Islamists are a problem. Not all Muslims share our values or commitment to freedom or are willing to play by our rules. Just like every other human who wants to move here too. But some of them do, and I don’t want to toss out ‘the good ones’. Islam owns its terrorists It’s time for these uncomfortable debates. We can’t fix problems without them, and that means a lot of different groups and ‘identities’ are going to squirm, not just Muslims in 2025. We need to do a better job of protecting those who speak out against Islam’s challenges in democratic countries, or who feign concern for certain cultures while using it as an excuse to bully, intimidate, oppress, and outright attack, as we see with increasingly Islamofascist campus protesters. Free speech isn’t truly free if you have to censor yourself to protect your life, your livelihood, or your family. Progressives and liberals have proven themselves useless here. It means defeating Islamofascism won’t be as simple as rounding up all Muslims and shipping them home, or just the terrorists. Not all Islamofascists are brown anymore. The new face is quickly becoming young, white, and privileged. What, exactly, are we to do with the radicalized native North Americans who aren’t Muslim? Who we can’t send back anywhere? What will we do with them, once we theoretically eliminate all the ‘bad Muslims’? Let the debates begin. What Do Jews And All Women Have In Common? If You’re ‘Marginalized’, Make Sure It’s Not Because You’re An Asshole If Someone Held A Real Trans Genocide, Would Transfolk Even Notice? (about Gazan and Hamas’s attitude toward LGBTQ rights) Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

What if he doesn’t have Short Guy’s Disease? Al Pacino is eye level with Tom Cruise at 5'7", but it hasn’t stopped him from bedding some of Hollywood’s most beautiful women. Photo by Barakaldo Digital on Flickr CC0 2.0 Ladies, and by this I mean single ladies , I ask you — what is this problem you have with short men? I mean sure, okay, maybe if they have Short Guy’s Disease. Taller than me by an inch, but only with both heels on the ground. That is, as many know, the condition some men acquire when they feel they have to overcompensate for their perceived ‘short’comings by acting like a hyper-aggressive manspreader. Even if you’re small, you can act like a big dick. Short guys have a reason to be fairly irritable — they’re discriminated against by women who overwhelmingly desire tall men. On every dating site, you’ll find women who want tall tall tall tall tall tall TALL TALL TALL!!! I really don’t get that. Who the hell cares if he’s short? I sure don’t, as long as he’s still taller than he is wide. (Corollary for shallow men: Prospective women must be ‘athletic’, politically correct singledudespeak for THIN THIN THIN THIN THIN!!!) Even older women — old enough to know better — buy into this size obsession. Haven’t they been through enough bad relationships, bad marriages, and bad treatment by idiot men who are tall and strong and can act like total dicks because — well, they can? (Corollary: Good-looking women who act like bitches because the hotter they are, the more shit they know you’ll take.) But no, some women never learn. Personally, I don’t give a damn how tall a guy is as long as he’s not @#$%in’ crazy or alcoholic. I think there’s such a thing as too tall. Many years ago, when I was still living in Connecticut, I had a Summer of Tall Men. One was a guy who was 6’3, an Internet friend I had a fling with in New York. The next was 6’4, who I met through a dating service. The one after that was 6’5, also through the dating service, and I was afraid to go back because the next one might be Lurch. “So, what do you like to do for fun?” Image by skeeze from Pixabay And no, I hadn’t specified ‘tall’ in my profile. These cloud-huffers came after me. I concluded my maximum cut-off (ar ar) for tall men is 6’3″. My cut-off for short guys is —I don’t think I have one. I’m 5'3 myself and I’m not sure I even know any men shorter than I. My big concerns are: Is he crazy? Is he alcoholic? Does he do everything his dick tells him to? Is he chronically depressed/life is over? You’d be amazed how much response you get when you put in your profile, “Short guys welcome!” (At least from those short men who bother to read profiles .) A handy rule of dumb is that those with Short Guy’s Disease are like dogs. The littlest ones make the most noise. Then there’s this guy: Believe me, being short hasn’t hurt this guy none. If you must be short, cute goes a long way. The late great Davy Jones (5'3) would agree with me. Photo by Jay Tambooli on Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic You might be surprised how short many celebrities are in person. I swear a few are lying about their height, or maybe their publicists are. I met Michael Berryman briefly at Fan Expo in Toronto several years ago. He’s That Guy you’ve seen in a million movies, the one who always plays villains and heavies. His most famous role is one of the cannibal savages in the original The Hills Have Eyes. By Stefan Borggraefe — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 We chatted briefly and I was surprised how short he was — almost eye level with me. I marveled at the mastery of Hollywood that they made him look so large in his famous movie. Some sources on the Internet say he’s 6'2, others 5'11. He’s probably lost a few inches as he’s getting up there in years. So, maybe originally 6'2"? Another alleged skyscraper that made me think, “WTF? the magic of Hollywood!” was Lou Ferrigno, allegedly over 6' tall. I didn’t stand beside him, but several years ago I was just a few rows away as he spoke on a stage, and he didn’t look very tall. Like, not much taller than I. He and Berryman may be losing height in their old age, or maybe I’m just losing my eyesight in mine! Anyway, I wouldn’t kick The Incredible Hulk out of bed for needing the stepladder to reach the top shelf. Ferrigno’s still hot in his sixties. Great inspirational speaker too, having overcome deafness and bullying from earliest childhood. Other hot short guys in Hollywood include Joe Pesci (my height exactly!), Emilio Estevez, Jon Stewart, Martin Sheen and Dustin Hoffman. Martin Scorsese, a giant among movie directors, also stands on his toes in a crowd next to Joe Pesci and I at 5'3. And Woody Allen, not my cuppa shagga-shagga but he has been for millions of other women, stands at a mere 5'5, although given how old he is he might need to stand in line with me and Joe and Martin. And you too, Davy! Yeah, I know Woody’s a scumbag, but he’s been married three times and partnered with Mia Farrow and Diane Keaton, and he seems to have a knack for nailing really young women. Is it because he’s a shady predator, or because even young women have free will and agency and a yen for older men? I leave that to others to debate. Gene Simmons of KISS says everything men do, they do to impress women. He claims it’s the reason they become athletes, form rock bands and even build cathedrals. Every big-and-bigger erection, he says, is to impress women. Okay, I would have guessed God for those big-ass churches but maybe the earliest Freemasons did it for the opportunity to strip off their tunic in July for the ladies. Haply the lasses shall forbear bidding me Aldric the Smelly now! Short guys are awesome. I’ve dated plenty. Tall guys are fine, too, but requiring height is a little pointless, especially if you decry men who mandate an ‘athletic’ body. Just look for someone who’s not too crazy, doesn’t have a lot of self-inflicted health problems and who’s fun to be around. I’d rather be with a short fun guy than a tall self-worshipping egotist. Some wicked good guys won’t necessarily tower over you. And that’s a good thing. Because I have just one word for you when you’re kissing them: Whiplash. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

The anoymous psychos who call for others' assassinations are a direct threat to democracy and public safety. Threats are NOT free speech. From GoodFreePhotos I didn’t wake up this morning in the Soviet Union! To cadge an old conservative belligerence from the 1980s. If calling for the murder of people you don’t personally like isn’t despotic, oppressive hate speech, then I don’t know what qualifies. Luigi Mangione has outed the ‘progressive’ left (once again) as being every bit as vicious, malicious, and pro-hate speech as any uni-browed MAGA who wanted to rape Nancy Pelosi and hang the Vice President. They applaud the cold-blooded murder of a man whose role in healthcare they understand as little as they do who decides who’s denied coverage. They goad each other on with their Anonymous Coward Power by legitimating the call for others to murder their adversaries, since they don’t want to spend their own lives in a filthy prison with filthier examples of humanity eyeballing their butt. Woke progressives are customarily so obsessed with ‘hate speech’ they perceive it in every verbal utterance, and won’t be happy, we assume, until every human being is rendered mute after declaring every word in Noah Webster ‘racist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘anticolonialist’, ‘transphobic’, ‘toxic masculine’, or ‘anti-Swiftian’. No, not Jonathan. Woke ‘progressives’, unhappy with how the emotionally unstable Elon Musk has run X since he overbought the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, have flocked off to Bluesky. Those departing cite the preponderance of ‘hate speech’ on X and alleged censorship of themselves, by which they mean Musk doesn’t work too hard to police MAGA hate speech, or provide progressives an unencumbered hate speech online ghetto of their own. I don’t actually have an opinion on Taylor Swift, but if nothing else delivered negative attention I figured that would. But, it was my first post so no one likely saw it. Also, my name isn’t Jessie Singal. On Bluesky, the new ‘kinder, gentler’ alternative to Elon Musk’s X, they can power-vomit however many death threats and doxxing spatial coordinates they like with near-impunity. I’m not surprised. My own personal experience with another progressive experiment in ‘kinder, gentler’ social media with another then-Twitter alternative, CounterSocial, led to my getting kicked off for unspecified reasons, but it happened the day after I shared my article It’s A Sign Of The Apocalypse When The Right Supports Science And The Left Doesn’t. Hate speech, clearly. I figured Bluesky was, or would soon turn into, another fact-phobic, irrational and ideological woke-progressive shithole. This post isn’t illegal, and ‘silver posting’, appealing to the moderators, appears to be asking them to suspend or ban the account rather than literally kill him. But it’s not illegal to state you hate certain groups of people, however distasteful. It’s a mortal sin in ProgWorld Nailed it. Turns out Bluesky moderation is nearly nil. Supposedly, they’ve been kept very busy, having sorely underestimated the average amount of left-wing hate speech reports they’d need to investigate. At the moment, they’re doing a piss-poor job, and have vowed to quadruple their moderators. Who knew kinder, gentler progressives could be so—hateful? Isn’t that, you know, a right-wing thing? You’d think open calls on Bluesky for murdering others post-Brian Thompson would be top priority, right? Not so much for investigative journalist Jesse Singal, who’s pissed off the TransKlan for a decade critiquing largely science-free child sex change operations. So of course they called for his immediate and literal murder. Singal was harassed and doxed on Bluesky for publishing his work, and reports that Bluesky dragged its ass on doing anything about the death threats. He’s been targeted for years by transactivists with a perpetual harassment campaign involving, besides threatened violence, countless lies and smears. For example, they commonly claim he should be banned for being a ‘pedophile’ with zero corroboration, which probably explains why he hasn’t been banned for this. This is on X, not Bluesky Singal claims X is better at suspending and removing violence-provoking accounts and threats, but not so’s anyone else can notice , which is why so many have left the platform or explored others while perhaps staying somewhat active on X. The former-Twitter wasn’t any more friendly to free speech under the auspices of co-founder Jack Dorsey, which might explain why Bluesky has become the pre-Musk Twitter; Dorsey founded Bluesky. Meanwhile, Musk famously found a closet full of T-shirts that pretty much validated the accusations of Twitter’s critics and which its staff, back when they had jobs, denied: That they were super-‘woke’. https://twitter.com/i/status/1595250835096621057 Dorsey’s Twitter had been criticized for years as politically biased against, and censorious of, conservative and other opinions ‘unfavorable’ to the woke agenda. That much was true; back then, the quickest way to get banned was to annoy transactivists by saying something factual, as Canadian feminist and activist Meghan Murphy found when she was ‘permanently’ banned for identifying a trans-identified man using male pronouns. Such was the state of ‘hate speech’ and censorship on pre-Musk Twitter in 2018, which blithely ignored the years-long transactivist hate campaign against J.K. Rowling for her support of women’s right to be, and define themselves as women apart from those given a lifelong sentence of being male from conception. Three years later, then-President Donald Trump was suspended in early January 2021 for allegedly ‘glorifying’ and ‘inciting’ January 6th violence. After Musk took over he reinstated Trump soon after and Murphy got her account back eventually, too. Let’s talk about content moderation The gloves against any pretense of progressive civil society came off in 2023 on October 7th, when many ‘progressives’ unleashed their Jew hate like the unholiest Kraken, and more recently the disgusting Luigi love for the healthcare CEO killer. Progressive bigots made it clear that progressive hate speech was 100% acceptable after Hamas’s vicious attack, when, in the finest tradition of right-wing violent political expression, progressives donned their own swastika—the keffiyeh—and violently attacked all things Jewish, be they buildings or people, and justified it with the usual self-aggrandizing bullshit about how the victims ‘deserved it’. Very, very few ‘progressives’ challenged or stood up against the explosion of antisemitic ejaculate spraying humanity like a genocidal bukkake video. Just imagine how they’d have reacted if Luigi Mangione had been a Christian right-winger who murdered a transwoman en route to the beauty parlor to get his balls waxed . Pretty certainly, the toxic right would have exploded with near-similar hate on both platforms while progressives clutched their pearls and fainted on the Whole Foods Market Hot & Salad Bar floor. La plus ça change. The naked calls for assassination force us to rethink anonymity, and the cowards who call for criminal acts without fear of retribution. I write this not to call for censorship but to argue legitimate free speech stops at violent threats or encouragement of violence against others (including encouraging someone to commit suicide). Most of which is banned under typical ‘Terms of Service’ or ‘Community Standards’, but mostly lackadaisically enforced. X and Bluesky are positively medieval In less enlightened times and places (medieval Europe and the modern-day Middle East), one could make anonymous accusations against others, not be required to provide a shred of evidence, and the accused would stand before a court that didn’t even rise to the standards of a modern-day ‘kangaroo court’. It’s why the ‘Confrontation Clause’ was added to the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights stipulating that the accused has the right to face their accuser. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms also stipulates similarly unless the accuser is deemed ‘vulnerable’, such as from intimidating threats by the accuser or other safety issues. But on social media, the normal rules don’t apply. You can falsely accuse someone like Jesse Singal of pedophilia, and ruin peoples’ lives and careers with other anonymous lies. When you do libel or slander someone under your real name, as George Stephanopoulos was found liable for recently with Donald Trump’s successful lawsuit against him and his employer NBC News, there are consequences. None for the anonymous cowards on social media claiming, as Stephanopoulos did, that Trump raped accuser E. Jean Carroll. Which has never been proven in court, even though he lost a defamation liability appeal which awarded her money, and then again when he defamed her under his real name on social media. Dumbass. Do we live in a dual-justice system, not the kind for the moneyed vs the poor, but where you can say damn near anything and get away with it as long as no one knows who you are? Allowing people to blatantly threaten, or encourage threats to people they’ve deemed ‘evil’, or entire industries like healthcare, will do more to quell free speech and keep the entire population cowed into silence than any ‘cancel culture’ campaign we’ve seen in the last twelve years. Crazy extremists running around armed and dangerous represent the supreme coalescence of the very worst of the left and right to destroy what remains of democracy by ensuring no one dares speak truth to power. Just like, you know, in Hitler’s day. If content isn’t the responsibility of the platforms, and the federal government is constitutionally prohibited from moderating public speech, whose responsibility is it? Because what’s illegal offline shouldn’t be legal, officially or not, online. Social media platforms have been accused many times, credibly, of doing a milquetoast job of policing genuine violent threats, so it’s up for legal argument whether they could ultimately be held responsible for pretty close violations of the First Amendment, a legal argument that hasn’t found much traction so far. Anonymous accounts truly must be protected for whistleblowers and truth-tellers, but those whose truths contain more lies than truths should be accountable for libelous accusations. So far, the courts haven’t been supportive of verifiable identification for age. Theoretically, one might need to provide a driver’s license or some other ID to get an account not under their real name but currently, the courts haven’t ruled that way. But it’s what’s likely needed to hold users accountable. If the DorseyMuskerbergs aren’t responsible for a post or tweet encouraging someone to kill the next healthcare CEO or investigative journalist, then the responsibility lies with the individual. That’s near-impossible under present circumstances. A kinder, gentler solution would be to induce and encourage social media companies to hold their users accountable for their speech by offering tax incentives to those platforms which do an audited, verifiable good job of suspending or banning users who clearly violate their standards or ToS with clearly defined threats: “Here’s the address of a journalist whose work I hate, go teach him what the business end of a Glock looks like,” versus “I really wish someone would punch to death Joe Blow at the New York Times.” Wishes aren’t the same as GPS destinations. Elon Musk, Make People Pay To Be Assholes! Encouraging or ordering others to kill without getting your own hands dirty, is ‘conspiracy to commit murder’, as Charles Manson found out in 1971. At least from a hippie commune in California. Not sure what would happen if he’d agitated for rich-people murders from @helterskelter1969. Clearly, if you want to commit a murder, or get others to do it, sign up anonymously. No one will pay attention unless you directly threaten the President of the United States. Peoples’ lives are put in danger on social media where it’s been horrifically clear for many years that many of its denizens suffer from serious mental health problems and a complete break with morality. What must happen before we take these obvious threats to the social order more seriously? When someone does, in fact, kill a journalist? Or another random CEO? Anyone deemed ‘evil’ by the self-appointed Holy Inquistitors becomes fair game. TERFs. MAGAs. Muslims. Immigrants. Feminists. Nickelback fans. Nickelback. Today a healthcare CEO, tomorrow, perhaps, a Hamas campus cheerleader. Or an Israel supporter. Or a YouPorn star. Or a sex trafficker. Or a genderwoo-friendly school board member. Or you. Pick yer evil, and then ask whether you really want to see a Death Wish world in which many self-appointed someones go around liquidating people they have deemed unworthy of life. No arrest? No due process? No assumption of innocence? Every dystopian futuristic science fiction movie you’ve ever seen in which might makes right? A Boy And His Robo-Dog? It’s begun on social media, a largely unregulated Wild West of opinions, expressions, false information, misinformation, wrong views, immorality, rank psychosis and a Dark Triad free-for-all. I don’t yet know how this proposed content moderation would work. I don’t know or understand the legal technicalities established so far or in which direction we could take this drive to hold someone, or something, ultimately accountable for clearly unprotected speech that creates a clear and present danger to all of us. It’s probably premature anyway as we first must acknowledge there’s a problem before we can go about solving it. Understand: I’m not arguing for censorship. I support your right to spew, but, knowing that someone at X or Bluesky or Facebook or Instagram knows exactly who you are, and will turn your contact information over to law enforcement upon request through the proper channels. The progressives loooooove ‘consequences’ for ‘hate speech’. Let’s properly define hate speech, and provide exactly that. Which Online Platforms Don’t Censor Content Creators? I Went Nazi-Hunting On Substack. Now I Ask: Whose Nazis Are We? Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts

Brand-new management, same as the last! But the bipartisan UnWoke have the recent accumulated observation to help call out the same-old-same-old Wokeness never dies. It’s rising again. Public domain image from Wallpaperflare Party while you can, Syria. Ding dong, the bastard’s gone, and Russia’s li’l Putie-Pie is further disabled by losing his Big Orange ally (and now having to stick Bashie and his wife in the spare bedroom for God knows how long!) while Syrians do that deposed-dictator thing and storm the palace. The liberation process for detested dictators is similar to that of the fall of detested dictatorial ideologies, but the end result is the same: New management takes over and looks much like the last. America is stepping out, breathing air again, and boldly jumping on X and Bluesky to poke the woke folk. Transnutzis are a little muted, sensing that the jig is up for ‘ladydicks’. And what will the right do with the campus Keffiyeh Klanmaids? Embrace them or turn them over to Matt Gaetz? Yeah, the sheriff’s back in town after a four-year sabbatical and he’s brought a lot of his friends. AOC’s so terrified she’s removed her pronouns. Is this it? we ask ourselves. Finally? The end of the Woke Reign of (T)Error? Can we all live free and pull the First Amendment out of Anne Frank’s bunker? Party while you can, America. Yes, let’s celebrate the demise of the Woke Left. But just keep in mind the hootenanny ends on January 20th when the Woke Right rises like insufferable, holier-than-thou zombies from the tainted baptismal pool. The far right is everything we’ve seen in the Loony Left Never mind the original meaning of wokeness. Today it’s associated with everything it claimed to fight—racism, misogyny, homophobia, colonialism and, as an added bonus, antisemitism. Progressive wokeness is about to be replaced by the returning personality cult headed by The Oversized Baby. Now don’t misunderstand me, I’m happy to wave bye-bye to evidence-free ideologies consciously embraced by Vice President Harris and cluelessly followed by a President I could tell had no understanding of its dangers. I envision a line of dejected losers exiting the White House on January 20th—a pink-haired nose-ringed gender-confused kid; a Black Lives Matter protester dragging his I Stand With Hamas sign behind him and clutching an IRS audit notice; a man pulling off his wig and tossing it away in anger because Rep. Nancy Mace forced him to use the men’s room; a fauxminist in a Handmaid costume, a seig-heiling Montrealer . Well okay, maybe not that last one. But this is only winter break, folks. Donald Trump is no friend of freedom, either. Or science. Or reading. Or free speech. Or the law. And neither are his woke-right supporters. Trump says he’ll go after campus antisemites , but will he go after his own? Are you kidding me? Attack his base? He won’t do it any more than Justin Trudeau , you know, the Governor of Canada, the 51st state! What the jubilants don’t yet understand is now the metaphorical gunsights turn on all of us . The Reds are returning to power. They’ve been given a clear voter mandate to rule America. Those who dance to celebrate the departure of they/them and obsessive ethnic ingredients lists aren’t yet aware of those straining to turn cancel culture and free speech suppression back on the left. Elon Musk has got their backs! The Woke Right isn’t much different from the Woke Left. Authoritarianism is non-partisan. What is the ‘woke right’? Definitions vary. It’s commonly associated with Christian nationalism and I can see its roots now, fifty years ago when I was a young whippersnapper in Ohio grappling with the weird omnipresent ‘I Found It!’ campaign from the mid-’70s, opening conversations with everyone who wasn’t ‘saved’ by a personal commitment to Jesus. These were the birth pangs of the modern revived Christian fundamentalist movement, drunk on and then disappointed by Baptist Jimmy Carter, followed by Ronald Reagan, who brought geezer dementia to the White House long before it was cool. Reagan professed Christianity and mused about Revelation being nigh. Stories leaked out of the White House about Reagan allegedly speculating that maybe a nuclear war was God’s fulfillment of the prophecy. This concerned those of us who were in the first act of our lives who didn’t want to end it prematurely in a blazing nuclear holocaust. I fought conservative politics and Biblical literalist dumbfuckery for the twenty years between the birth of my political consciousness and moving to LiberalWorld Canada (part of its appeal, actually). The God Squad never achieved power as pervasively as the woke cultists today. The grand irony is both sides are using the same formal structure: Christianity, the religion most commonly known and practiced in America, although other religions bear a passing-to-close resemblance to it. John McWhorter was one of the first to identify the Christian model adopted and adapted by antiracists in his book Woke Racism. The essential elements are: A rigid adherence to dogma and banishment (‘cancellation’) of heretics, questioners and unbelievers; Self-appointed arbiters of morality and truth whom McWhorter calls ‘The Elect’; Reliance on faith-based belief (critical race theory) and dismissal or outright hostility to anyone challenging it with reason, rationalism, or critical thought; Original sin: White skin, for which the sinners (skinners?) must forever atone, for they can never be truly cleansed of their s(k)ins; A ‘Day of Reckoning’ akin to Revelation’s ‘End Times’ in which white people will be finally held accountable for their collective sins (not sure who does this since the Woke Cult doesn’t have established leaders or a deity). Maybe we’ll have to kowtow before Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole-Hannah Jones; ‘Clergy’ in the form of fashionable influencers for antiracism (or feminism, transactivism, etc.) The need to ‘tear it all down’ (white, Western society) and rebuild it from scratch (as God will do after all the sturm und drang of Revelation is fulfilled. Replace key words and concepts in McWhorter’s analysis of ‘woke racism’ and you’ll find equally religious ‘woke feminism’, ‘woke transactivism’, ‘woke queerism’, ‘woke anticolonialism’, etc. The Woke Right already laid the foundation for a rigid, dogmatic empire half a century ago but became unseated by TV evangelist sex scandals, violent anti-abortion activism and the rise of a sexy new Democratic President with a charming southern accent. Liberalism arose again, hiking over the failures of Christian fundamentalism. And, as political movements are wont to do, went way too far as their right-wing forbears had done, and ‘progressivism’, a label we all proudly wore twenty years ago (in fact, it was adopted after the Reaganauts turned ‘liberal’ into a negative connotation), has since become its own negative marker, not from the right this time but from its own ugly regressive tendencies and hate speech which actually resemble the worst of the far right. ‘And so it goes,’ as Kurt Vonnegut would say. Each iteration of the resurrection (more religiosity!) of either political canon builds upon the successes and failures of the other, but the essential theological structure remains the same. Public domain photo What the UnWoke can do This is just a very brief overview of the Woke Right, which most people have probably never heard of. I expect I’ll be writing about it a lot more in the next four years. It doesn’t fit all right-wingers any more than wokeness describes all left-wingers. It does seem to be emerging as a faction of the far right and will likely encounter resistance from conservatives not prone to religious fanaticism. Less extremist Christians are already speaking out against it, I guess while they can, since woke extremists don’t tolerate dissent for long. This Christian Apologetics article deeply explores the similarly racist, antifeminist, and discriminatory path woke rightness is appropriating from the woke left and discusses how other Christians can challenge these people with the Bible. You don’t need to be a Christian to challenge the new wokeness, because wokeism is essentially secular. The left has never understood its religious roots. Extremist Christians adapt wokeness now to serve their own purposes, and are already well-schooled in faith-based belief. ‘Literalist’ Christians pick and choose what to believe from the Bible’s countless contradictions and counter-arguments that provide a simplistic way to live for those who prefer not to think too hard about the glaringly obvious questions. Woke rightness will appeal to the bigots on the right just as liberalism was adapted and transformed into wokeness for the left’s bigots. Rational righters, those who don’t hew to more hard-right views, who ‘lean to the right, but not so far their brains fall out’, will find themselves challenged by these people, and perhaps cancelled, censored, fired, and oppressed just as level-headed liberals and other dissenters have been by the woke left. We’ve spent the last fifteen years observing, critiquing, and dissecting the woke left, so we have a recent foundation of knowledge to understand exactly what the Woke Right is doing. And fight it. Many conservatives and liberals aren’t as far apart as their respective extremists, the mainstream media and the flame wars of social media would have us believe. Get non-crazy liberals and conservatives in one room, and they’ll disagree, but also agree on other points. For liberals like myself, we’re exploring conservative ideas that, like anything else, can work well on certain levels as long as they don’t go too far, like any other good idea. Maybe two-parent marriage isn’t so bad after all; maybe porn really has become toxic; and frankly, I’m so tired of hearing so-called liberals tear down my mother country that I’m ready for some mild Old Glory-waving national pride. Neil Shenvi, the Apologetics website owner, found a spot-on quote that really hits home on what’s been wrong with woke antiracism. Uncomfortably, he quotes a pseudonymous writer at a Southern, far-right wing website rife with ‘White pride’, hysterical accusations of ‘genocide’ and a barfable photo at the end of the About section showing pretty white Southern belles with a quote about ‘fair maidens so pretty’ which I guess tells you all you need to know about wimmin’s place in the return to Dixie they envision. But even racists can sometimes cut to the quick, and I have to admit the author has one bastard of a good point as he calls out Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility : If your White skin and genes confer the guilt of your ancestors, then they also confer the pride of your ancestors, as well as, their accomplishments, victories, virtues, rights, liberties, freedoms, heritages, lands, and more. The anonymous wuss may be a racist asshole, but you’ve got to admit, it’s a bastard of a good point. I wish I’d thought of it. It shows you that even people we would never invite to dinner can still produce occasionally what the French call a bon mot: A witty or trenchant remark. The author notes that the woke left also do their ideological enemies a favor by resurrecting old art and writings of the Hated Old White European dudes, “digging up the gems of our ancestors for us and placing them on platters before our eyes.” Touché again, Monsieur le Raciste. As I lamented in my earlier article Is There Any Real Joy In Learning Anymore? today’s students will never be introduced to Voltaire, as I was in college. Maybe that’s how folks will now be introduced to the beauties, and not just the faults, of Western civilization: Through their worst critics, directing our attention to the works they most want us not to read. So I guess the Woke Left is good for something. So too, however unconsciously, may be the Woke Right. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!