While the world scrolls toward despair, I’m sleeping with dead presidents and Nazi children. Here’s why you should join the insurgency. Image by Thought Catalog from Pixabay Last year on the subway I was reading The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. I held the ‘Okay grandma’ large clunky hardback edition. I noticed the young man opposite was looking at the cover. He looked exactly the age of its subjects, Gen Z. He stared, eyebrows slightly knit. I smiled behind my book, hoping my subversive declaration of intellectual sovereignty encouraged him to read it. (You may owe me a beer, Jonathan Haidt!) Support Local Bookstores: You can find the titles mentioned in this post on my Grow Some Labia page. Every purchase supports independent booksellers (and this newsletter!). The beauty of reading dead-tree books in public is so others can see what you’re reading. My titles alone will make the woke-comfortable squirm, and perhaps encourage the Silent Exhausted Majority to track them down. It sends a message from The Cognitive Resistance: I’m not a mindless consumer of the Attention Economy. I read books that challenge me, that require more than 5-10 seconds of attention. Even when I’m reading an e-book, you can tell I’m not doomscrolling: I stare and swipe. My thumb isn’t in constant motion. Reading isn’t just a hobby, it’s a rebellious act of intellectual sovereignty. The “Pro-Vaxxer” of the Mind I have a greater immunity to anxiety, outrage, and Trump Derangement Syndrome than the Doomscrollers of Despair I wrote about last year. I read. A lot. I read hundreds of Substack’s long-form essays and bang through 12-15 books annually. When I was in college I counted 70 books in one year, only a fraction of which were required, and I did read those, except Anna Karenina which was simply too unfocused and boring. Doomscrolling-filtered, highly biased, questionably- or badly-sourced ‘information’ has led us to where we are: Everyone hates each other, it’s okay to murder your enemies; we’re not having sex; we scream about billionaires after putting a billionaire retarded toddler back in charge of the most powerful country in the world, and no one in America thinks it’s their fault. As if the manchild and the knuckle-draggers in Congress just wandered in and took those chairs. I view politics as surmountable, rather than insurmountable problems because I read. Books are like drugs or The Force: They can be used for good or evil. Subvert the dominant paradigm! Embrace cognitive liberty! Weaponize your brain against the Agents of Algorithms, for whom it’s in their best interests to keep you scrolling, outraged, and dangerously stupid. Treat books not as an escape—eventually you have to sober up, or stop to make dinner, where reality awaits—but as an escape from The Mucktrix. Because when you finish a good book or a really killer longform essay, you feel better. More empowered. Even if all you scroll is silly animal videos and people making cooking mistakes, it’s harmless, but then you realized you pissed three hours away. At worst, you want to kill yourself or someone else—maybe both. When I finish a book, or an idea-packed longform essay, I feel like I’ve accomplished something. I feel better about myself. I feel smarter. I’m a reading pro-vaxxer! I believe everyone should vaccinate themselves against the Despots of Doom by refusing to consume their mental garbage. But I wouldn’t, like, force you into a library and chain you to a chair in front of an open book. I’m not a booknazi. I know. You ‘can’t focus’ long enough to read a book. Bear with me. The dangerous people I’m sleeping with (Ha! You kept reading because of that provocative subtitle!) I just started sleeping with Matt Ridley. (Don’t tell his wife! In fact, don’t tell him!) He’s the author of The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge. His book makes me think, to see past, present, and future slightly differently. Here’s something creepy: I’ll be sleeping with Hitler’s children after I’ve had my way with Matt and tossed him on my Mighty Bookshelf O’ Subversion. I know, Hitler thankfully blew himself off this mortal coil without leaving any bad seed behind. Hitler’s Children is a book by Gerald Posner detailing the children and grandchildren of leading Nazi figures, including how they dealt with their ancestral legacies. And after that? I’ll be sleeping with a DEAD GUY! Thomas Jefferson! I slept with his dead friend last year, Benjamin Franklin. It was electric! (Ar ar!) I read in bed, obviously. Just before lights out and, in the morning before breakfast, on the weekends. And always on the subway! Heaven! Reading is for rebels, not for bland conformists who believe everything their algos tell them to. It’s taking the time to sit down and focus for more than a few seconds and think about what you’re absorbing. It sometimes takes me a long time to get through a normal-length book because it makes me think so much I have to stop and think some more. Or I put it down to Google questions it just brought up. James Lindsay’s and Helen Pluckrose’s book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody was one of them. So was Becoming a few years ago when I was sleeping with Michelle Obama. (Yes, I’m bitextual!) Heterodox thinking is badass. I want to better understand the people I don’t like (wokies, Trumpies, Islamofascists, etc.) as well as ask other points of view. I started subscribing to the right-leaning The Bulwark a few months ago, and found that the conservative columnist Mona Charen, who I hated with every fiber of my being thirty-five years ago, is now my sister-in arms against crazy Trumpism! Intellectual sovereignty means asking yourself what those people you hate the most believe in, and why. It teaches me not to ass-u-me I already know. Heterodox thinking is the most effective reduction in Attention Economy-induced negative outlook. When you look for or listen to other viewpoints, you often get a takeaway or two even if you still don’t agree with the thesis. Viewpoint diversity is The Rebellion. It’s digital inoculation against nihilistic extremism. An hour before I sat down to begin banging out this article, I read one by Eva Kurilova, Contending With The Dark Nights Of The Soul. She pours out the dark stretches of depression plaguing her life, and how she found respite in books. I’m a ‘Five Percenter!’ Here’s something interesting: When I asked Google Gemini what percentage of Substackers actively write, it claimed roughly 5% or less were active publishers. Further, that 44% of publishers ‘ghost out’ after three posts, never publishing again. It also claims many joined for Notes, possibly as an alternative to X and Bluesky, the respective right-wing and left-wing shitholes of humanity. When I asked (because I know you will, you little heterodox insurgent!) where Gemini got its information, it responded, “…by triangulating current platform data (April 2026), industry reports from analysts like Backlinko and Exploding Topics, and Substack’s own growth updates for the first quarter of 2026.” You join Substack for two reasons: Either you love to read, love to write, or both. Substack, with its allergy to censorship, supports others who also subvert the dominant paradigm. Substack is the ‘Tactile Tap’. Social media is the ‘Infinite Scroll’. One is a treadmill, the other a destination. Treadmills are better for building bodies rather than minds. Soul Therapy: Beyond the “Woke” Filter I don’t read much fiction, and when I do, it’s older. Today’s pap is too ‘woke’ and ‘preachy’. Or just—not really good. I bought a novel last year on a lark about a house sort of haunted by puppets and the brother and sister inheriting it who’ve never gotten along. It was—okay. But not very fulfilling. At least it didn’t tell me how to think or feel about Indigenous, Pride, racial, gender, or other political issues. The back cover blurb made it clear what to expect, which few books I pick up in a bookstore can. “K’taelrylny-thyn, the stunning pseudointrapolyhedrasexual with creative pronouns to match every single permutation of feeling ghi has,” invokes a gravity attack that lands it back on the table. I read almost entirely non-fiction. I keep a ‘wish list’ on Amazon, but I buy locally. Heads up: “King Dork” is one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read. If you lived through the ‘80s, and especially if you were or knew a bullied teenage boy who dreamed with his equally dorky friend of becoming a rock star, this is the novel for you! Bonus: It makes wicked fun of Catcher in the Rye if, like me, you don’t get what the big deal is about it. And yes, that’s an old Kobo reader. Not to mention an appalling collection of shot glasses. I read to inoculate myself against my own brain. I keep up on the news, without falling into the dirty laundry basket. I read outside the idiot box. Idle, unchallenged neural synapses are the devil’s workshop. The Sovereignty Protocol (How to Take Back Your Power and Start A Revolution) If you have trouble focusing, remember: You’ve been trained not to. The Mucktrix abhors People Who Concentrate. If you’re not used to reading books, start slowly. Find an interesting book and commit to reading five minutes a day, at minimum. Or, if it has short chapters, one daily. If the book is boring, drop it. Find another. When you find one you like, read for five minutes or until you get fatigued. (Training fiction: James Patterson’s books are super-popular with extremely short chapters.) Then, read in public. Send the silent signal: I’m not one of The Scrollzombies. I think for myself! Embrace heterodox thinking: Read books that challenge you. Not simply ‘books that make you angry’. Those are for advanced readers who’ve built up resistance to outrage. If you’re on the left, read something a little right-wing, and vice versa. ‘Extremist’ books aren’t useful unless you’re trying to understand extremists (a laudable goal!) A really terrific book, in my opinion, is Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. (Two beers, Jon!) There’s plenty of well-researched, well-written food for thought no matter where you fall on the political spectrum. I promise you, you won’t hate ‘the other side’ as much as you did before, and you will notice a reduction in anger. If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,But make allowance for their doubting too;If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise…- Rudyard Kipling, ‘If’, courtesy of The Poetry Foundation Read. A. Book. 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!

There's a strong connection between suspiciously neurodivergent 'strange kids' in the 2000s' 'Indigo' mini-craze, and today's trans kids driven by parental status-seeking The beautiful white Star Children will lead us into a harmonic New Age. Or not. Pixabay public domain image by cocoparisienne If you were old enough in the ‘90s and ‘00s, when ‘progressive’ was still a respectable rebrand for ‘liberal’, you might remember the ‘Indigo children’ phenomenon. Especially if you were into alternative spritituality, like Paganism or the New Age. The Indigo concept is one chapter in the history of New Age parenting labels that entered the public eye via a whisper rather than a roar with the publication of a book by a self-described ‘synesthete’, one who claimed she could see peoples’ ‘colors’ via their auras. She claimed she’d begun seeing indigo hues around certain children. But two later authors, citing her initial observations, turned Indigoism into a late-stage New Age craze: 1999’s The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived by Lee Carroll and Jan Tober. Support Local Bookstores: You can find the titles mentioned in this post on my Grow Some Labia page. Every purchase supports independent booksellers (and this newsletter!). Amazing psychic abilities were attributed to these supposed ‘star children’, including a more deeply empathic feeling for others; they were said to be especially strong-willed; possessed a high IQ, had particularly intuitive senses, were viewed by others as fairly odd and, my personal favorite, possessed a strong feeling of entitlement and a resistance to authority. The culture arose, perhaps not-so-coincidentally, during the Millennial generation and progressive laissez-faire parenting techniques including an unwillingness to discipline or even say no to their children. ‘Crystal children’ and ‘Rainbow children’ soon followed, the post-Indigo ‘generations’. Believers attributed to these wunderkind telepathic, clairvoyant, and other psychic powers along with boundless optimism and lovingkindness. These ‘special kids’ exhibited certain behaviors: Creative but easily frustrated, delayed speech development, fearlessness; high-energy; optimistic. Claiming one of these children conferred special status in progressive/New Age communities. Pagan author Lorna Tedder claimed that practically every Pagan woman she knew who’d had a child or was expecting a child claimed it was an Indigo. Later ‘generations’, the Starseeds and the Diamond/Golden Others, embraced any child whose parents felt the desire for ‘special’ children. According to one uncritical website, “Indigo children can sometimes find it difficult to integrate into mainstream society, which leads to them being misunderstood, rejected, or misdiagnosed.” Misdiagnosed, indeed. Or, what we could today call ‘neurodiversity.’ The new ‘special children’ “There’s a terrifying conclusion for parents who were wrong: Indescribable psychic pain realizing they allowed their child to harm themselves.” Anyone who has followed the rise and current decline of the kiddie transgenderism craze recognizes the patterns: The status gain and ‘coolness’ factor of having a kid who’s different, outside the mainstream, completely misunderstood, ergo superior to your boring little not-above-average conformist. Instead of ushering in a peaceful New Age of Humanity (how’s that working out so far, Indigos?), ‘trans children’ were expected to usher in a new era of equality, with the smashing of gender stereotypes and the erasure of what they claimed was a ‘human construct’, biological sex. ‘Indigo children’ were said to possess an innate, pure, spiritual truth; ‘trans children’ are believed to possess a similar infallible ‘inner knowledge’. Both movements deify the child’s “inner truth.” They’re ‘aura’ and ‘gender’ become metaphysical. What connects the two cultures most closely is the chronic parental fear of having an ‘average’ child, or worse, one with diagnosed developmental challenges. Many parents from the ‘Indigo Age’ rejected diagnoses that their child had ADHD or a higher seat on the autism spectrum. Recognizing what wasn’t as well-understood thirty years ago hasn’t diminished the Indigo movement; neurodiversity has been incorporated into the spiritual belief system without rejecting the galactic fluff. It may be more difficult, though, for today’s parents of trans kids to do the same. They’ve argued the science is on their side from the beginning, yet now we know it’s not: The earliest ‘science’ was based on an admittedly flawed Dutch study and it’s been established for decades that most ‘gender dysphoric’ kids are gay. Evidence-based critiques of gender-affirming care, numerous global systematic evidence reviews, and especially the UK’s comprehensive Cass Review have all but debunked the transactivist claims to science. The trans True Believers more closely resemble Christian Creationists, clinging like barnacles to their cherished belief system. There’s a terrifying conclusion for parents with a ‘trans child’ they supported who now may be experiencing regret or real anguish: Indescribable psychic pain realizing they allowed their child to harm themselves—and that the gender critical, especially conservatives, who fought it all along, were right. Ironically, Indigoism, however quieter, survived to the modern day because its fundamental strength was faith. The lesson for social justice is that basing it in ‘science’ invites destruction. Plus, no one wants to give up the status in their social bubble. How LGB got their groove back: Welcoming T It’s cooler to be ‘trans’ than, frankly, boring old gay. It manifested in Hollywood, where actors and actresses, after years or decades of success, suddenly announced they were gay, to much media fanfare. Oh, how brave they are to come out in this homophobic world! But the attention began to peter out, especially after gay marriage’s 2015 Supreme Court decision, which ruled the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry and be recognized in all fifty states. With one Supreme Court decision, homosexuality suddenly lost its ‘cool’. Gay married couples proliferated, and homosexuality mainstreamed, about as comment-worthy as last night’s TV dinner. Hollywood, always ready to infect themselves with the latest cultural contagion, applauded actors who ‘came out’ as as ‘trans’ rather than gay. Like Chaz Bono, who us Boomers and Xers remember as Chastity on her parents’ 1970s TV show; Eliot Page, née actress Ellen Page; The Matrix’s Lana Wachowski and Orange Is The New Black’s Laverne Cox. Celebrity influence pioneered childhood gender identity emerging with those who became famous by transitioning: Jazz Jennings, whose mother is widely believe to have pushed her son into it; Shiloh Jolie; and proud (i.e.: Cooler than you) Hollywood ‘trans parents’ Naomi Watts, Robert DeNiro, Jennifer Lopez and Jamie Lee Curtis. Later, Bruce Jenner cemented the ‘coolness factor’ by ‘coming out’ as trans in 2015, advertising for the medical profession by appearing on the covers of Vanity Fair and Sports Illustrated. Alongside the adult influencers, the notion that children were ‘born in the wrong body’, particularly if they were embarrassingly effeminate or butch, gained traction with anxious progressive (and possibly homophobic) parents who ignored the long-established traits of likely incipient gay children to hie them off to the doctor to be ‘normalized’. They called it ‘gender-affirming care’ rather than what it was: ‘gay conversion therapy’. Virtue signaling and the parental status marker race ‘Indigo children’ were said to possess an innate, pure, spiritual truth; ‘trans children’ are believed to possess an innate ‘inner truth’ transcending parental assertion. Parents have always been in competition with each other, to have the smartest, brightest, fastest-developing, fastest-growing, superlatively excellent child. My next-door neighbor playmate was born three months after myself. When my mother reported to Benny’s mother that I had said my first word (on average, around 12 months), Mom heard the husband through an open window coaching his son to ‘Say Dada! Say Dada!” In the first year, infants develop at incredible speed but they have to master one skill before the next. They begin grasping toys around five weeks; they can (but don’t always) stop sleeping through the night around three months; begin eating solid food at six months; teethe at seven. At nine months, most babies can only babble, although a few can manage a ‘mama’ or ‘dada’. If one’s baby is developing later, and parenting anxieties set in, it becomes easier to rationalize one’s seemingly underachieving infant as an advanced, enlightened being. Hence the appeal of the Indigo and trans child with varying personality quirks, neurodiversity, or homosexuality, or who were simply victims of overly-permissive parenting. Like ‘entitlement.’ The culture of the ‘trans child’ confers greater physical ‘proof’ that one’s child is ‘exceptional’. By delaying puberty, administering cross-sex hormones, and letting kids live as cross-sex or who-the-fuck-knows, one’s child is ‘taking charge’ of their life and not ‘consenting’ to puberty ‘just happening’ when they haven’t made up their mind (or maybe they have) which sex they ‘choose’ to be. ‘Trans children’ often enjoy increased popularity in school and an end to bullying; it’s cooler to be a ‘trans boy’ than a lesbian girl. Affirming parents receive kudos and kowtowing as they virtue-signal how wonderfully tolerant and affirmative they are. A commenter on my recent article The Beginning Of The End Of Transgendermania told the anecdote of a woman she complimented on her tote bag who lit up and exclaimed, “My daughter is trans, and I'm just so proud to represent her anywhere I go,” to which another mother responded, “Congratulations!” Tote Bag Mom telegraphs how more hep she is than all those other unlucky moms and dads with gay kids who may yet grow up to give them grandchildren, because Mom and Dad affirmed their budding homosexuality rather than trying to ‘fix’ them. My child is more special than your boring happy-in-her-own-skin daughter or your embarrasingly heterosexual son who brought a girl to the prom. From vanishing labels to irreversible damage The tragic difference between ‘Indigo children’ and ‘trans children’ is that once they grew up and had to confront their own mediocrity, the former weren’t left permanently damaged, especially if they decided they didn’t want to be known as an Indigo any longer; they simply abandoned the label and perhaps chose not to speak of it further. All of this, for the eternal parental status marker race. Trans kids, on the other hand, are left with permanent scars and irreversible damage. Substack’s Aaron Kimberly detransitioned from lesbian to male and back again, only to find himself permanently looking and sounding like a man, and ostracized from the lesbian community (I had no idea just how brutal lesbians could be against those who leave the fold.) Today he’s chosen, mostly out of fatigue it seems, living as a man. (To be fair, he was in his thirties when he began). As detransition lawsuits wind through the courts and the frankly sensible Trump administration (on this issue, anyway) rolls back the special rights lobbied for by mostly transgender biological males, the glitter falls off the trans train, transgenderism loses its coolness factor and the pride of being a ‘trans parent’ may quickly turn dangerous. But humanity being what it is, an eternally status-seeking animal forever in pursuit of ‘better than thou’, it’s highly unlikely the lesson drawn will be, “Be grateful for your healthy, normal child,” with some new fad to latch onto to ‘prove’ one’s child is the future of humanity, and yours is a retro ‘average’ loser. At least until the regret sets in. 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!

These simple rules will dramatically improve your odds (and save you from unnecessary rejection) CC Image from tao alexis on Wikimedia Commons In this guide, you’ll learn: The 33-Minute Rule: Why your appearance is your best “opening line.” Reading the Room: How to spot facial cues and “stop signs” before you say a word. The Exit Strategy: How to handle rejection (or “drama queens”) with your dignity intact. I don’t fault a guy for trying. Last summer a man ran across the street to catch up with me. I cut to the quick— “If you’re hoping for a date, I’m seeing someone.” His face fell and I added, as I often do, “I think it’s great that you took the initiative to do what you did. It’s flattering. I hope you’re more successful next time. Keep trying!” He saves face, he receives honest praise from someone who just rejected him, and encouragement. His timing was terrible, not his fault: I was on my lunchtime break, and had less than ten minutes to get back to my desk. I hate making snap decisions. If I have to, and these guys always force me, the answer is invariably NO. He was too young for one thing, and, I’ll be honest, clearly from a culture with famously limited romantic skills. Mostly, I’m skeptical of younger men because they’re never looking for a relationship—with me. Had I had a little extra time, I might have chatted for a bit. Women need to get to know you first. This is a major reason why the ‘cold approach’ often fails. But first, let’s start with a dating etiquette baseline for gentlemen wanting to approach strangers they find attractive. You’re not a bad guy for trying to get a date The universal, organic truth about life: It exists to mindlessly perpetuate more life. Unicellular organisms and bacteria split themselves. The other 99% of life on earth is male and female, sometimes hermaphroditic, but always designed to perpetuate life. Males and females, in the flush of youth, are designed to dig each other, and to hook up, fall in love, and make babies. The traditional rules and guidelines may be supremely messed up right now, but heterosexuality persists. For those of you who aren’t hetero, it’s okay, you’re outliers. The human race won’t die out. Don’t listen to J.D. Vance. Life has only one objective, and it doesn’t care about your identity or your politics. Now, let’s talk about you, Hot Stuff! The only two things that actually matter The gentleman who sprinted through traffic sure got one thing right: He was dressed decently, in office clothes. Celeste Davis put it succinctly in her excellent Substack article about why dating is so hard, especially for men who, she argues, backed up by a lot of research, need women more than women need men, and always have. Women spend an average of 33 more minutes per day than men each day on their appearance. But given who should be trying to impress who more, it should be just the opposite. Men should be the ones who take an hour pruning, shaving and beautifying before dates while women should be the ones rolling out of bed a few minutes before. First lesson: Look better Cold approach: This is critical. Work with what you’ve got, even if you’re average-looking. Dress decently, stylishly (for yourself!), get a flattering haircut. Never be the least attractive guy in the room. First impressions matter. This is something I will probably have to repeat until the end of time, even though it’s an easy hack, since most men will never do it. Once you’ve stopped looking like every other faceless Average Joe, there are strategic ways to approach women you’d like to get to know with reduced drama risk. Second lesson: Be aware You must pay attention to social cues. What’s she doing? If she’s scrolling her phone, she’ll likely be less amenable to an intrusion. Is she facing away from others even if not on her phone? Also not an open sign. Is she wearing earbuds? If she removes one and listens to you, move forward. If she brushes you off, move on. Does she look like she’s in a good mood? If she’s frowning or pissed off, don’t approach. Ergo: Pay attention to facial cues You seek that quick smile of unconscious recognition when she first glances at you that she finds you attractive in some way, but don’t fret if you don’t get. It’s why you need to look better. Since Average Joes would be hard to pick out of a police lineup, a fleeting smile leaps the first hurdle. But, she may have a partner already, or she’s not on the market for some other reason. It’s not a stop sign. Try chatting with her anyway, because The Smile might come shortly. Don’t spend too much time if she’s only being polite or exhibits signs of annoyance or discomfort; move on. Now: How to chat her up without blowing it Start a conversation. You won’t always be successful, even if it sounds natural, as it must. It may be difficult, given the environment. Pay attention to facial and social cues. Last year a guy approached me commenting, “Hey, I like your sunglasses!” Lucky for him, I was trying to meet guys with my wild ‘n’ crazy conversation starter. Also, he was cute. If he’d looked like Mr. Blends-Into-The-Woodwork I probably would have kindly brushed him off. I’ve given the Average Joes plenty of opportunity to disabuse me of the lesson they taught me long ago: If they look boring, they are boring. Men who don’t take pride in their appearance send the message they’re unserious or apathetic about finding a partner. If they are serious, they work to make the best impression they can, rather than aimlessly casting their line into the water looking for someone who’s also willing to settle. Don’t comment on her clothes if they’re commonplace. This guy observed a clearly outstanding accessory. If they were average sunglasses I would have said “Thank you,” and kept walking. But if the object of your affection wears something attention-worthy, comment on it! Say, “I agree!” with a big smile, pointing to her slogan button. Or, “OutRAAAAAAGeous shirt!” Sunglasses Guy got twenty minutes of my time before I cut the convo short, and if he hadn’t asked for my phone number I would have asked for his. What men relentlessly don’t understand is that women need a little time to get to know you. I quite comfortably generalize here. It’s not misandry, guys. Danger is our lived reality. It’s mind-boggling how few men understand this. “Come on, get in the car, I’ll take you up to the mall, you don’t have to wait for the bus!” “No thank you,” she says. “What’s the matter? I won’t hurt you!” “Come on, I’m a violent serial rapist! I’ll drop you off at the mall!” said no stranger ever. If she scooches away from you—LET IT GO. It’s frustrating, but it’s better than making her fearful, and it’s not important whether her discomfort is you, wokeness, some past trauma or she has a boyfriend. It’s a negative signal to move on. Make it natural. Ask for directions. You might get that fluttery initial smile. If she doesn’t go back to her book or mobile, crack a joke about how you once got lost in your own apartment. If she laughs and smiles—keep it up. And natural. Don’t try to be super-clever, which is hard to do when you’re nervous. If you can keep the conversation going for several minutes, ask if she’d like to get together again. You might get turned down, or you might not, but you probably won’t get accused of systemically oppressing a female person with your phallocentric entitlement. Neil Strauss advised in The Game that rejection is how you get better at getting a yes. How not to talk yourself out of a yes I will assume you’ve dropped everything by this paragraph and gone through your closet and schlepped to the thrift store anything that makes you look stupid, invisible, or worst of all, like Adam Sandler. I will assume you’ve at least made an appointment for a good haircut. So now, here you are, looking better than you did several sections ago. Congratulations, we can see you better now! You might find you’re kind of cute or handsome, after all. I’ve seen men I thought unattractive appear with a great haircut and think, “How did I miss that? Oh, he was hiding it.” You now have another small leg up on most of your competition, except for the babe-a-ramas. Fortunately, not all women want one. Don’t ask her name upfront She knows what you’re doing. You’ve just informed her you don’t understand the need to chat her up first. She has to make a snap decision. You’ll get a yes only if she finds you attractive at first sight. Don’t start by asking personal questions See the previous paragraph. Don’t comment on her physical looks Ditto. Be wary of ‘woke’ or ‘social justice warrior’ signals. These women can be fairly tetchy, although not all, of course. Research consistently shows that young liberal women report higher levels of mental health distress than other groups, and sometimes expect potential dating partners to tick a lengthy list of ‘acceptable’ political and ideological positions. What if she goes viral-worthy on me? Oh. Them. The drama queens. Here’s how to handle rejection. Don’t pull out your phone and record her. It will just inflame her, and draw attention from others who haven’t heard the previous friendly interchange, and think you’re the asshole. Don’t get defensive or apologize. You did nothing wrong. When dealing with a bad or over-reaction, your job is to remain calm, and the most powerful thing you can do is walk away. Nothing looks worse for a crazy woman than a man who doesn’t grovel for forgiveness, and then shows her his receding backside. Have standards and boundaries. Don’t tolerate bad behavior. “Sorry I’ve caught you on a bad day,” and walking away will encourage anyone who’s watching to respect you more than her. It’s easy to assume ‘the crowd’ is a bunch of wokies in sympathy with her. But they’re a small albeit loud minority. Chances are, the crowd is peppered heavily with normies silently sympathetic to you. Snappy comebacks for drama queens Give her something to think about before you pull your head-held-high retreat. Remember: Finding women attractive isn’t a crime. “Wow. I didn’t think it was bad form to ask for a date when we seemed to be getting on so well, but a simple No would have sufficed.”“Sorry, I wasn’t being patriarchal. It’s my day off.”“I was just being social, not systemic. Have a nice day.”“Thank you for making it clear I just avoided a big mistake.”“You’ve mistaken a polite introduction for an act of aggression. Thanks for helping me dodge a bullet.”“All you needed to say was, ‘No thank you’. But now I have a great story to tell on Facebook tonight about crazy feminists!” Remind her that shaming works both ways. Only offer a snappy comeback if you can walk away after your zinger and leave her. Otherwise, you will be drawn into her drama and lose face. The simple rules most men ignore If this advice sounds pedestrian or common sense, I can assure you: IT’S NOT. Most men will research anything except “how to get a girl to like me”. What if incels stuck in ’80s movies spent their time Googling to better understand women, instead of moaning to each other about hypergamous females and hot chads? I’ll sum it up in three points: Look your best. Start a conversation. Move on and try again. Good luck! And if you’d rather not try, you might well have a future as a career criminal. 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!

Beyond virtue signaling: Why genuine reconciliation requires acknowledging the messy, violent, and shared human history of Turtle Island Image by ivabalk from Pixabay There’s an interesting ritual offered by the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee bands of southern Canada called the Dish With One Spoon, in which they acknowledge they both have a right to the land, (the ‘dish’), and the one spoon with which they both feed from it. They agree to take only what they need and clean the dish for others. It’s a responsibility-centered covenant with which they bury ancient grievances, and agree not to let the nastiness from before happen again. Which involved an awful lot of warfare and land-seizing back in the day and a helluva lot of abuse by the Haudenosaunee against many others. The Haudenosaunee pretty much went all European on their neighbors, but today, there are no ‘land claims’ by the descendants of the conquered against the descendants of the conquerors. While there are Indigenous groups that offer their own land acknowledgments, the formulaics require deference for doing what almost every culture of humans has done at some point: Migrate to another place that sucks less than yours, and clear out anyone who gets in your face. Still, migrants often co-existed with contemporary neighbors via trade networks and fluid territorial use on a continent where ‘property rights’ were much fuzzier than they are today. The modern white land acknowledgment is loosely rooted in traditional North American Indigenous practices of acknowledging the host nation when visiting neighboring territories. Rituals included ceremonial greetings, diplomatic speeches before gatherings, and gift exchanges for permission to travel or settle. All perfectly respectful. But the land acknowledgments developed in the late-20th, early 21st centuries have less to do with respect for earlier inhabitants or ‘burying the hatchet’ than forcing ‘white oppressor’ self-flagellation. The newer intent differs from those offered by one Indigenous group to another, even when the land was acquired by brute force. Indigenous groups offer political histories of their battles and massacres when they meet in peace today, and recognition that ‘your people lived here, then our people lived here;’ somewhat more sterile than the white versions, which carry a subtle scent of public rebuke. The current ritual recitations, one can’t help but suspect, allow privileged progressives to shake their virtuous peacock feathers in others’ faces while not having to lift a talon to actually do anything for modern Indigenous groups, many of whom still live in gross poverty, only partially due to their displacement history.* Hypocrisy comes into play when the Indy-Indy land acknowledgements view the newcomers/conquerors/colonizers as the ‘current face of the land’, a/k/a the now-stewards. Unlike the descendants of white Europeans today who are now being held responsible in court for occupying land they’re apparently not ‘the current face of’. The other history of abuse of Indigenous people The land acknowledgement’s higher purpose, for white people anyway, is to recognize the rights of Native peoples and to de-legitimize the injustices done to them. But Europeans weren’t uniquely racist, violent or genocidal. With a very few extremely isolated exceptions, North America’s original inhabitants were anything but. Globally and historically, humans exhibit, and always have, every single pathology now attributed in certain circles only as the ownership of white Europeans and their descendants: Rape, mass rape, torture, massacre, cannibalism, slavery, tribalism (the ancient equivalent of ‘racism’), looting, land acquisition and genocide . In fact, raiding, which is historically documented around the world, resulted in extremely high murder rates. Sometimes it wiped out entire communities. Genocide, before it was uncool. It wasn’t Shakespearean mass slaughter 24/7, but Indigenous migrant settlement wasn’t necessarily paper-shuffling and rubber-stamping, either. Like everywhere else, violence within groups and against others fluctuated by region and time period, with long stretches of peace in some places, and some tribes noteworthy for their aggressive violence: The Sioux, the Apache, and the Haudenosaunee (who we’ll get to in greater detail shortly), just to cite a few examples. Up in the Arctic, the Copper Inuit (or ‘Eskimo’, as anthropology professor and author Lawrence Keeley called them), were cited as an example of a culture that, “experienced a high level of feuding and homicide before the Royal Canadian Mounted Police suppressed it….Other Eskimo of the high arctic who were organized into small bands also fit this pattern.” The Netsilik Inuits’ murder rate, he noted, was noticeably high in comparison to modern times, even after the Mounties cracked down on interband feuding.** Some true histories of Native colonizing and land appropriation In order for Canadian society, at least, to achieve genuine ‘truth and reconciliation’, we all need to acknowledge that humans are far more similar than they are different, especially when it comes to the basis of all wars: Taking other peoples’ stuff, and that it’s ‘colonization’ when one people come to live on other people’s land, regardless of what their SPF sunblock level is. Let’s examine two of the best-documented histories of Indigenous people acting rather a lot like European colonizers: Starting with the Haudenosaunee merger and acquisition (or ‘stealing’ as progressive parlance calls it) of traditional Huron land on which I’m living now—southern Ontario. After the seventeenth-century Beaver Wars , the defeated Huron-Wendat gave up their land to enemies who either killed, assimilated or displaced them. Sound familiar? It was an aggressive expansionist campaign by the Haudenosaunee that succeeded, although the Wendat population had already been greatly devastated by contact with European diseases. To be fair, the wars were driven partially by European influence. The Beaver Wars began with increased demand for beaver pelts which were the oil economy of the day. The Haudenosaunee exhausted their own supply, which necessitated pushing into Huron-Wendat territory where you could get all the beaver you wanted. It was an aggressive push which resulted in destroyed villages, with the current residents sometimes adopted, others scattered, and many fleeing to Quebec. The rest were creatively killed, sometimes involving a sloooooow effort involving burning, cutting or beating, and, if you were a Big Name Chief, the ritual consumption of your corpse to consume your strength, but also to show contempt for your weakness in getting captured and subjected to this, you little wuss. Victory was aided with the addition of British-provided firearms, and as we all know, the Great Spirit is always on the side with the most flintlock muskets. When the Haudenosaunee offer a land acknowledgment today, they reference the Huron-Wendat as the ‘original peoples’ of the land, rather a lot the way white ‘slightly less original peoples’ do, and this somehow reconciles the two without much fussing and agitating over who killed who and how, nor do they go to court over it. “Money, it's a crime Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie Money, so they say Is the root of all evil today” - Pink Floyd Meanwhile, down South of what lay beyond what would one day be known as the 49th Parallel…. Firearms access from the French aided the Ojibwe in the late 17th and 18th centuries when they expanded into Dakota Sioux territory who had already displaced the Crow, Cheyenne, and others unfortunate enough to live where the Dakota wanted to go. That, too, was shaped by European forces but it wasn’t much different from life before the palefaces. Archaeologists still don’t know who was responsible for expediting the 14th-century Crow Creek Massacre in what is now South Dakota, except that it wasn’t Europeans. Archaeology has unearthed many examples of pre-Columbian restless and acquisitive Natives: fortifications against enemies in places like the Mississippi Valley, and in the Southwest, in what is now New Mexico. The ancestors of today’s ‘Puebloans’ there,, who were formerly known as the Anasazi in the thirteenth century, engaged in attacks on their neighbors including mass killings and mutilations. ‘Anasazi’ is a Navajo term the Navs created for this group, meaning ‘ancient enemies’ or ‘enemy ancestors’. They changed their name to distance themselves from their well-named ancestors the way Philip Morris changed its name to Altria to escape their legally-established reputation for killing their customers. European contact didn’t introduce Indigenous violence, it reshaped it. This is just a hair-thin sliver of the Indigenous history violence not just of the people who lived on Turtle Island before the Europeans divided it up into states, provinces, territories, and viciously disputed voting districts, but that of nearly every single human community and culture anywhere in the world. Canadians today deal with endless land claims by Indigenous groups who may or may not have ‘stolen’ the land from those who lived there before they themselves were displaced. They sue the Crown rather than each other because to do otherwise would be to acknowledge that the Court has the ability to decide these claims, and no one wants that! We certainly should feel badly for the way our ancestors treated theirs, but why not do a Dish With One Spoon Ritual with the Canadian government, and its weary taxpayers? Only against non-Indigenous is past conquest a neverending legal battle rather than a fait accompli. Human history narratives are dishonest when they detail a story that only speaks to a fraction of human experience, and don’t hold the (genuine) victims of past violence accountable for that which they inflicted on others in extremely nasty ways. Violent Indigenous histories do involve numerous social, economic, and historical complications and pressures, pre-Columbian and post-, that also sound resoundingly modern: Trade disputes and wars; climate pressures; famine; replacing low populations by capturing others for breeding purposes. Bands, tribes, and nations also sought their own strategic dominance just as human societies continue to do. And if European torture and hideous executions were bad, they were pretty gawdawful here on Turtle Island, too. God help you if you were captured by the Comanches. Who, by the way, drove the Apaches off their land, but they don’t offer land acknowledgments; instead, today, they offer straightforward oral histories. The more one delves into the history of pre-Columbian cultures, the more one recognizes the need for Indigenous peoples to reconcile the truth with their established anthropological, archaeologically-supported, and equally shameful histories. Or stop expecting the rest of us to self-flagellate. Given this history, should there be such a thing as permanent historical entitlement? Land acknowledgments for all Real history is messy, shameful, and far less flattering than mythologies—or ‘oral histories’—pretend. Today’s white land acknowledgements are mostly a moral caricature which harm rather than help the truth and reconciliation debate. But moral claims are not enshrined in amber; they must be perpetually renegotiated as societies, and humans, evolve. Not all Indigenous support this pandering anyway, and know they can’t always blame the white folks or the government for their troubles. Many Canadian Indigenous ask hard questions of their own people about where the millions in reparative tax money is going and has gone. They complain to the government, and although there’s an existing financial act that mandates bands must account for the money they’re given, it was partially repealed, and the government stopped enforcing compliance, so poverty remains while others prosper. Indigenous North Americans’ histories, and their current plights, are far more complicated than land acknowledgments and other intellectual frippery offer, with band responsibility denied for and to Indigenous. Activists offer, instead, a vacuous ‘historical grievances’ brick wall that perpetuates, rather than solves, never-ending Native problems, aided by band leaders who don’t have to explain where the money went. Indy2Indy land acknowledgements never address land claims, which can literally drag out for decades in this country. Only we are expected to offer reparations. Integrity-driven land acknowledgments should reflect everyone’s shared responsibility for changing that which is in our power. Honesty surrounding Indigenous violence doesn’t exonerate European atrocities. But it reinvigorates history and reduces prejudice, on both sides, by acknowledging we have more in common than we know. Frances Widdowson, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation ) *Source: Keeley, 1996, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage ). 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 Reign of Error required more suspension of disbelief than a Fast & Furious movie. And now, Le Déluge of skepticism. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. From publicdomainpictures.net The February school massacre in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia was committed by a not-so-committed ‘transwoman’. Jesse Van Rootselaar, like his predecessor Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook, warmed up by killing family members before moving to the secondary school where he killed six more people, and injured 27 more. I Google the ‘trans’ shooters to see if they’re a guy, or a girl on testosterone. Because nothing drives violence quite like the androgen rooster booster. While I tend to be fairly unsympathetic to the rainbow tribe’s overweening concern for ‘how this will affect transpeople’ as opposed to “how will this affect the victims’ families?”, I do feel sympathy for those transwomen who were cruelly misidentified on social media as the shooter. Van Rootselaar was just another typical male loner with a plethora of pre-existing mental health issues, including a preoccupation with online violence as entertainment, and of course, that classic male love affair with weapons. His attraction to transitioning brought the customary psychiatric co-morbidities conveniently ignored, as they have been for well over a decade in ‘gender dysphoric’ youth. That’s beginning to change, as we’ll get to shortly, but Van Rootselaar’s ‘gender dysphoria’ was almost certainly a related but not relevant side effect of his shooting spree. In fact, he allegedly expressed regret for having transitioned and for having ‘brainwashed’ himself. Van Rootselaar also shared with his fellow mass shooters participation in the ‘nihilistic’ darkweb where those who believe nothing is real and life isn’t worth living fester and suppurate. In fact, the relationship of the recent rise in transgender mass shooters may have grown out of a fatalistic impulse already present in the trans movement, which might make the violent darkweb more attractive, according to an Illinois doctor who explores the connection in her article, Gender Nihilism and the Revolutionary Impulse . Dr. Brooke Laufer emphasizes that exploring transgenderism and ‘gender identity’ causes neither violence nor criminal behavior. But, she notes, “When a person’s identity becomes detached from embodied reality, personal history, and stable relationships, it can drift toward nihilism: the belief that life itself has no inherent meaning or value. In that state, ideology can rush in to fill the void. For a small but notable subset of radicalized individuals, the combination of identity instability, existential fear, and moral absolutism can make violence feel not only permissible, but purposeful.” I’d be hard-pressed to identify a movement, subculture, or group as frighteningly detached from reality as transgenders, trying to escape an immutable biology that was set at conception. Even so, transgenderism doesn’t look much like a cause, just as a more brightly-colored iteration of underground nihilism. Laufer goes on to explore transgender-driven revolutionary groups like the Turtle Island Liberation Front, a collection of pro-Palestinian and anti-capitalist ideologues who’ve allegedly plotted attacks against ICE facilities. And the Zizians, better-suited for those drawn to a techno-apocalypse driven by AI. They’re young, they’re transgender, and they’re loaded for destroying society and remolding it with accelerationist Play-Doh. Public domain photo from Pxhere But if it seems as though transgenderism is now moving into a more dangerously violent phase, take heart: This may well be their death rattle. Transgendermania is dying. But it’s not going down without a fight. They’re beginning to lose them, though The times they are a changin’. Most of us, liberal or conservative, don’t care how others live their lives as long as they respect others’ boundaries. Progressives wouldn’t draw them, so now the rest of us are. The pink-and-blue flag crew’s losses are racking up. For starters, transgender as an identity has been losing steam for the last few years. According to a new report by Canadian Politics professor Eric Kauffman and director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science , there’s been a precipitous drop in identification as ‘trans’ or ‘queer’ in Gen Z since 2023, from 6.8% to 3.6% as of 2025. The Day of Wreckening came with the reinstatement of Donald Trump last January. Love him or hate him, his election marked a blessed and long-needed death knell for a movement that just didn’t know when to quit. He ended male athletes competing on women’s sports teams (one of Kamala Harris’s most unpopular positions), he redefined biological sex (correctly); he reassigned ‘trans’-upon-conviction men back to male prisons; re-allowed single-sex emergency shelters to reject biological male ‘trans’ people from female-only facilities; and defunded transgender health initiatives for children, along with raising the age of consent to 19 for anything from puberty blockers to surgery. ‘Trans rights’ has lost several court cases in the last few years, and especially the beginning of this one. The losses include the Skrmetti decision last year, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors. Several state bans on restricting or banning gender markers on official documents have been upheld, and a Kansas ‘bathroom bill’ to force transgender people to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their conception sex was vetoed by the governor but defeated by overriding Republican lawmakers. It’s important to note there are no cases of trans-identified men being attacked in men’s rooms, but plenty of bad-boyism among TiMs in ladyspaces. If I’m wrong about cis attacks on trans dudes, comment below or DM me here. Twenty-twenty-six began with the first successful detransition lawsuit against medical doctors accused of malpractice. Fox Varian was awarded $2 million in the State of New York for her double mastectomy at 16, after which she came to regret her decision once she no longer identified as male. Close to thirty other lawsuits around the U.S. are in progress. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, just a week later, issued a brand-new guideline for medical practitioners and and teenage patients: that all surgical interventions be postponed until age 19. I wonder why they waited until now to say so? And, speaking of lawsuits, the State of Florida has launched three : Against the activist WPATH, the American Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics for engaging in a ‘coordinated campaign’ to develop clinical guidelines for demonstrably harmful treatments of children for which there is little to no scientific evidence—a finding that had been well-documented for years. At the same time, the FTC is investigating the three for alleged ‘false or unsubstantiated claims’ and whether the guidelines of each of these groups constitute ‘unfair or deceptive practices.’ The Horrifying WPATH Documents Leak Details Appalling ‘Gender Affirming Care’ Malpractice Mr. & Mrs. Darling Transgenderism is the ultimate denial of reality: To be human meant to pass through puberty, and the only way to avoid it was to die young. Telling children they have a ‘right’ to not go through puberty, as transactivist whack job Andrew Chu has assured them, or that they were ‘born in the wrong body’, are dirty lies discouraging immature, half-formed humans to reject their healthy bodies and live in psychological and physical torment for the rest of their (presumably) long, but now potentially shorter, lives . Transactivists, educators, therapists, medical practitioners, and even ‘science’ magazines have been pushing these filthy falsehoods for nearly a generation. Telling children they can avoid adulthood speaks to an unacknowledged but fundamental psychic problem not with children, but with their parents primarily on the progressive left: A longing to return to childhood. Perhaps it was the ruminative pining of Mr. and Mrs. Darling, the parents of Michael, John and Wendy, to give their children a Never-Never-Land where no one ever has to assume the mantle of responsibility for themselves and others. How conveniently the Mr. & Mrs. forgot how managed their lives once were by adults, exemplified by compulsory school, when every child’s fondest wish was to ‘get big’ as soon as possible so they didn’t have to do what they were told. Unless they were paid to do it with a job. In contrast to every generation until the Millennials, growing up was long-anticipated by children eager to manage their own adult lives. But progressive parents sundered that by teaching them they need never experience a negative feeling, that each child knew what was best for themselves and that their safety was so paramount they mustn’t do anything to endanger that. Best to stay home, therefore, than to risk living in reality like an adult. Along came the ‘self-esteem’ movement in which every child got a trophy for minor transactions simply expected of children from previous generations, led by Progressive Parenting for whom No was the dirtiest word in the English language. So when their children expressed a desire to be what they weren’t, progressive parents naturally said, “Of course, honey.” For some it was even a status symbol. Transgenderism is arguably the most deeply damaging Bad Idea to come out of the progressive movement this century. It’s the most inauthentic social movement ever, denying the fundamental reality of organic life. It’s never been about ‘gender dysphoria’; it’s a transhumanist social justice project that attempted to bring equity to the sexes by, ironically, embracing traditional conservative gender stereotypes before erasing them. A rock might as well identify as a tree. The Rise Of Unhappy ‘Trans Kids’ And The Role Of Progressive Parenting A Dude-y Transactivist Shows How Dangerously Dudeist The Trans Nuts Are Transgenderism 2.0 That said, sex-changing will never go away, nor need it. I’ve argued that transgenderism, in addition to providing genuine relief for that tiny slice of humanity that genuinely needs it, could also be a force for real change as I argued a few years ago in What If The Transgender Movement Evolved More Honestly? What it offered was what humanity most desperately needs right now—an ‘under the skin’ game in which we learn what life is like for others, whom we aren’t. The Transfolk Who Really Do Need Our Support (about Aaron Kimberly) I’ve argued similarly in We Accept Transgenderism. Are We Ready For Transracialism? Why not experience life as a woman, when you were born male, or black if you were born white? Or the reverse? I theorize how. I know cross-racialism is primarily a white female thing, and ‘female Pretendians’ abound. (Are there even any genuine Indigenous anymore?) I know most of these people traverse boundaries for the wrong reasons, and I understand why various races or ethnic groups object. They’re the same reasons defenders of womanhood offer as objections to transgenderism. But what if people crossed sex and race for better reasons? The left has primarily been misappropriating sex and race mostly to qualify for membership in victimhood clubs. If a young woman feels guilty about being born white, as the left is wont to do, she may well de-whitenize herself. If a man feels like women can have sex with anyone they want, to the point where the girls turn their genitals into a ‘roastie’, then becoming a woman might seem the ticket to endless sex. Or simply to stop being lambasted for being born the way he was. If we turned the narrative from victimhood to inquiry, the reasons for ‘crossing the border’ might well change. For the better. If we encouraged people to be true to themselves, to be who they really were instead of wishing for whatever they weren’t born with, we’d create happier, more self-actualized human beings who could continue to progress humanity and fix our sick society rather than change one’s sex, and commit suicide anyway , because it didn’t solve all their problems. Like, you know, Jesse Van Rootselaar. Transgenderism is sometimes nihilistic, but so are many non-trans. Change is good, necessary, and even unavoidable, but conscious change should be for the right reasons. I honestly don’t want transgenderism to disappear. I merely want it to grow up. And to stop hurting people. I welcome today’s death rattle. 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!

How bipartisan cruelty and stupidity came to dominate American politics Photo by R. du Plessis  on Unsplash I don’t like torture porn horror movies for the same reason I don’t like American politics: both reward cruelty and stupidity on a bipartisan scale. The Hostel  franchise presents privileged rich fucks who treat the plebs (that’s us, folks) like objects. Or, as in The Human Centipede , the cruelty is simply the point. Torture porn sometimes wraps itself in flimsy righteousness, testing and ‘teaching’ morally questionable characters by antagonists who are themselves far more morally compromised. Saw pretends to teach the value of life by, what, permanently traumatizing people? The psychopathic ex-Nazi creates a human centipede the way a child pulls the legs off a spider. Because he can. Because it’s cool. Because the power. Knowing how popular these torture porn franchises are, I wonder why anyone with a soul would want to watch them. And that makes me want to go live in the woods with the animals. So here we are. Trump/Harris America, with a blindingly sadistic and stupid President, only occasionally corralled by one party of obedience who’s afraid of him, and the party that drove voters to this hellish vision right into his arms. Cinematic Nero’s circuses remind me too much of us. Mindless cruelty and moral decay are what customarily precedes the decline of the republic. 2024: A bipartisan comparison of cruelty and stupidity The 2024 U.S. election was emblematic of what’s failing with America, and Americans. Our winner was he who embodied both elements in near-equivalent measure: One of the stupidest Presidents ever with an astonishing capacity for cruelty. Trump’s opponent’s fatal flaws manifested differently, in a very smart and educated woman, but who catered to the stupidity of woke progressives because she thought they would lead her to victory. Kamala Harris also embraced its sister, not by being cruel herself but by catering to the most heartless voters of her base rather than failing to challenge them—the gleefully vicious anti-semites, the Goebbels-censors of social media and blogging, the pronoun police, the elite academic madrassas, the manipulative, rank misogynists and child groomer transactivists, the ‘acceptable’ racists struggling to preserve DEI. Both candidates exemplified everything hideously wrong with America. The difference is that Harris didn’t embody cruelty and stupidity like Trump, but rather, refused to question progressive values which had long since crossed over into sadistic Dark Triadism, smiling like a Brat as she toted her putrescent backpack through the Democratic Thunderdome. There’s a Trump knuckle-dragger somewhere on the left, with the same narcissistic cruelty and commitment to advancing the cruelling and stupiding of America, but I don’t know who that is. I have a few ideas, but it’s possible we’ve not yet heard of them. It may take years or decades for that far-left narcissistic psychopath to manifest, unless Americans decide they don’t want to become a failed state duking it out over scarce resources like Sudan. Trump epitomizes the cardboard movie ‘serial killer’ we all fear, yet, on a deeper level, admire. Real ones sometimes get away with it forever; 150 years later, we still can’t be sure who Jack the Ripper was, or the Zodiac Killer. You can’t help but respect that cleverness on some level. Sometimes, the bad guy wins. Trump appeals to the reptilian corner of the psyche because he’s meaner than anyone else. He’s not afraid to use force, violence, or even torture  to accomplish his goals, and his followers revel in watching him eviscerate those they hate, driven further by algorithms. Meanwhile, their brothers and sisters and ‘thems’ on the left have enjoyed torturing anyone who runs afoul of the house extremism, mostly by daring to express original, critical, questioning thoughts. They destroy, too. Trump’s core supporters knew he was no Rhodes scholar; many voted for him because they hoped he’d punish those they’d come to define as Everything Wrong With America. Payback’s gonna be a bitch, bitches. I don’t look forward to it. Some voted for Trump out of desperation for something different, others because they were little different from him. Hillary Clinton was right about the basket for the almost inarguably worst candidate America had to offer. He didn’t muscle his way in like most wannabe dictators; he was chosen by the people, who knew of his criminal legacy, that he was a convicted felon, who tried to steal an election, that he was a compulsive liar, a serial cheater, a confessed sexual predator, who refused to stop an insurrection, and who associated with a notorious pedophile. I feel no pity for these voters who are now whining about an unstable economy and spiralling food and gas prices and wars they didn’t vote for. Yes they fucking did. But I also have zero fucks to give for the deplorables on my own side. Progressives, Epsteinmania, and what they ignored Epsteinmania conveniently distracts stupid progressives from a presidential moral crime far more detrimental to the entire republic than Epstein’s rich-boy yen for very young women. Progressives blew it—as they are wont to do—with the scandal they could have plausibly used to bring down Trump for good. It flew mostly under the radar, though, because there were no glamorous islands, wayward penises or teenage titties on display: The highly classified, stolen documents found in the potty at Mar-A-Lago. Trump appointee Judge Aileen Cannon has ‘permanently blocked’ Jack Smith’s probe of the highly sensitive documents at Trump’s Florida home. This has, as usual, flown over stupid progressive heads, who have yet to figure out that they are not going to bring down Trump via his wayward toadstool. There were no obsessive lamentations on social media about this. Of course, ‘permanent’ is such an impermanent word in Washington. If American progressives and the rest of the world— all of   whom have skin in this game if that information is weaponized against any of us, wielded or provided by someone who was no longer authorized to have it—for eyes who were NEVER authorized to see it— had spent as much time demanding the release of the Jack Smith probe as they have the Epstein Files, America might be a different country today. Let’s remember, out of all the politicians from both parties caught with classified documents at home, all complied with requests to return them except Trump: He lied, of course, about having them, leading to a raid on the premises to retrieve them. Here’s what Harris herself demanded: Kamala Harris accuses Trump of ‘gaslighting America’ on Epstein: ‘Release the files!” Oops, sorry, I guess she wasn’t paying attention, either. Harris got all legalistic when  she spoke of the classified documents case, framing it as evidence Trump believes he’s ‘above the ‘law’ and should be held to the same standards as everyone else. Duhhh. No moral outrage there. Just legalism, when she’s not talking about his titty-mongering friend. Yeah, that was really going out on a limb, Kammy. She focused on unemotional legal precedent yet again when Aileen Cannon dismissed the documents case last summer, ruling Jack Smith’s appointment as ‘unconstitutional’. Harris lamented, instead, the now-MIA guardrails. No yelling on a podcast about how Trump could have shared his highly classified information with his boycrush Vladimir Putin or people who’d be happy to pass it on to Islamofascist terrorists. The files included nuclear secrets; we know there was correspondence between Trump and his other boyfriend Kim Jong-Un. We don’t know much else except that it was some of the most sensitive intelligence the United States possesses. We truly have no fucking clue how much danger we might be in because we’re too obsessed with dick. Joe Biden and Mike Pence were caught with top-secret documents as well, but both were considered less sensitive. Troubling, still, especially since the former was going senile. I don’t suspect Biden or Pence of ever having actively colluded with our enemies against America, but the completely indefensible Trump kept those documents stacked in his bathroom, and lying about it makes me wonder whether we might have to start sticking kiddie porn in top secret documents to get progressives to pay attention when they disappear for awhile. It’s no wonder Biden revoked Trump’s right to Presidential Daily Briefs, unprecedented by any previous President. He cited Trump’s erratic behavior and his connection to the January 6th proceedings. I don’t know whether Biden missed the Mar-A-Lago boat along with seemingly every other progressive in America, but I would have cited the FBI seizures first. Harris, the Regressive Left, and the Party of Obedience Harris embodies Stupidity more than Cruelty, but lacks not the latter. She’s no Trumpian villain, but instead represents the vacuous intentional stupidity and moral vacuum of what passes for ‘progressivism’. Leaning into ‘The Brat’ and surrounding herself with woke, mostly female cheerleaders, Kamala Harris was an appointed post turtle, and Democrats obediently bent the knee. Harris’s obvious weakness was why so many of us didn’t vote for her. Wokeism is predicated entirely on victimhood identity and an eternal search for ‘disadvantage’ status. America’s greatest threats, before the election, were Putin and Xinpeng; there was no way this little girlie-girl who hid out during most of her vice-presidency at the White House was going to stand up to them. Harris’s wokeness looked opportunistic and performative, and  s he stated her support for many deplorable ideas because the Mean Girls wouldn’t like her if she didn’t. I chose Neither in the 2024 election to avoid voting for cruelty and stupidity. The Regressive Left is every bit as capable, handed enough power, of turning America into an authoritarian snakepit, which is why I approach the 2026 midterms apathetically. Misogynists, fauxminists, racists, trans-nazis, antisemites, and the Islamofascist Regressive Left define the cruel and stupid that Harris embraced. Choose her for 2028, and I will vote Neither again. I want a better Democratic candidate than the last two. My standards are high. A challenge for YOU I’m fuzzier on what Democrats’ Amerithoritarian Hell would look like, but I know I would hate it as much as I already hate MAGAvision. Having just read Tim Miller’s Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road To Hell , he emphasizes over and over how Republicans reacted to the first Trump term (the book came out before 2024) much the same way the rest of America did: With horror, shock and fear. They’ve been, however, much quieter about their unease. They mouth loyal pieties in public but behind the scenes they sound just like us: WTF? How could this have happened? How could Americans have been this stupid? Stupid, indeed. And cruel. There’s been little soul-searching since then, Miller says. To which I would add: And that goes for the Democrats and their cruels and stupids, too. We Normies have to speak out more. We have to be willing to shed our stupider, crueller brethren who shouldn’t be our friends if we can’t say Israel has the right to exist  without risking social blackballing. Good-bye. Good riddance. I challenge you all to pick a topic, issue, ideal, or value from your side  of American politics that you disagree with—stupid or cruel, or both—and publicly refute it. Just one. It doesn’t have to be a big idea, just something that sends a message to your partisan friends— I don’t support this. I challenge it. I question. Maybe even, I’ve just asked the glaringly obvious question you won’t. Go ahead. Choose one. Write it in the comments. Better yet, write a Substack about it! And then say it publicly in front of people you know will object. I dare you. Don’t be a pussy like Lindsay Graham:

The good, the bad, and the guys who just need to try a little harder ‘Ridiculously overmuscled man’ AI image request generated by Poe, because even the Hulk wasn’t he-man enough for this! I need a hero, I’m holding out for a hero ‘Til the morning light He’s gotta be sure And it’s gotta be soon And he’s gotta be larger than life (Larger than life!) -Bonnie Tyler, I Need A Hero I wrote recently about manipulative men and the younger women easily played. Modern feminism—two waves past my own—has often failed at teaching younger females how to navigate the vagaries of dating and mating. A more power-centered feminism emphasizing personal agency attempts to counteract the sabotaging message of self-imposed victimhood— if the message reaches the vulnerable. And if the vulnerable are amenable to the message—which they aren’t always. For someone who never had a date in high school until a week before graduation, I nevertheless managed to avoid a lot of the potholes other young girls didn’t when I started dating in college. It helped that I wasn’t desperate for male attention. I graduated with a keen nose for lower-quality males based on my high school observations—the ‘burnouts’, the self-impressed jocks, the bullies, the jackasses—and avoided them. I observed that guys from working-class or lower-class families treated girls less respectfully than middle-class boys. I wanted a ‘nice guy’, although he needed to be cute. Some of this development in good taste I can lay at the feet of my late mother. The rest I figured out on my own. “How?” My first encounter with misogyny came from the little boy next door. Billy possessed a weird phobia about girls I found mystifying. Sometimes he played nice with me and sometimes not. I asked my mother why little boys hated girls and she couldn't answer. That's just the way they are, I think she said. It seemed pretty stupid. In grade school, I learned to recognize the 'nice' boys who didn't hate girls versus the little jerks. (A few of the 'nice' boys I now suspect were gay, although I had no concept of that at the time.) In middle and high school I began to connect hypermasculinity to misogyny. In college I connected homophobia to a hatred of women. Homophobia became a red flag for identifying the misogynist male, who got the cold shoulder. As I entered the dating scene in college, I found I attracted mostly ‘nice’ boys, and they were attracted to me. The macho he-men didn’t have much interest in me, nor I them. It seemed, I thought, as though they could tell I wouldn’t put up with any hairy-chested strongman bullshit. Hyper-masculine men, like the characters in the-then Golden Age of action heroes, were very sexy, but I recognized real he-men were Bad News. I did notice that hyper-masculinity worked very well, nevertheless, on other women, and I privately felt sorry for them. I figured they must be getting abused or mistreated. But what about the good ones? What I know now that I didn’t then is that not all hyper -masculine guys are guilty of toxic masculinity. Nor do they deserve the hatefest they get from certain ‘progressive’ feminists. Sometimes the biggest badasses are the nicest guys. Years ago, when I worked downtown, I had to take the streetcar to work. At Spadina station, a group of kids clustered every morning who seemed, for lack of a better word, developmentally disabled. One particular large, heavily muscled, tattooed, pierced transportation worker looking like a bouncer at the toughest nightclub in Toronto, treated the children with genuine friendliness, and knew their names, and talked to them while we waited for the streetcar. I felt envious of his wife. She had found a good one. ‘Hyper-masculinity’ must be approached with caution. And one mustn’t believe the movie fantasy, which is this: Action movie characters, hyper-masculine AF, always ‘nice’ guys, heroic types, often very violent, but never toward women. They consistently play The Protector. In reality, it’s much harder in Real Life to prevent emotional violent spillover. Some men can do it, but many can’t—like police officers and military men , both of whom offer a higher risk of domestic violence. For many women, regular masculinity is just fine, and safer. Hyper-masculinity need not be demonized, even as we recognize the capacity for violence. For men who consciously adopt that persona, they need to understand that it is, on its face, threatening to the more canny women. Women who consciously avoid abuse will be naturally wary of them, and if they aren’t looking for women who accept abusive behavior , they’ll need to exhibit patience and to prove themselves non-abusive first. But what about the less masculine man? Taylor Swift and the transgender fish ‘Romantasy’’ is a primarily female-focused fiction genre—a romance/fantasy mashup. According to Bill Maher , it’s fiction built around women falling in love with and having passionate sex with vampires, werewolves, fairies (or ‘fae’ as they’re called), demons, elves, even a Minotaur. Anything but human males. Maher blames it on the lack of masculinity in modern males, and says Taylor Swift ‘epitomizes the entire journey women have been going through’. He’s serious. He notes that until she landed Travis Kelce, a six-foot-five smokin’ hot football player from Ohio, Swift “…dated a procession of skinny, fay, gay-adjacent, meek, porcelain doll shy guy twink-like tortured poet metrosexuals in America and Europe,” and finishes, “but the second she got some old-school wood from the heartland, it was game over.” Kelce doesn’t do it for me, but I get why Swift and other women fancy him. He’s reputed to be a genuinely nice guy, described as generous, fun-loving, charismatic, supportive of the family, and authentic, a trait sorely lacking anywhere anymore, especially on the left where one is taught that whatever you are, you should be ashamed of yourself. Kelce is also a generous philanthropist, including a foundation he created called Eighty-Seven & Running, for ‘empowering disadvantaged youth’. He established a Robotics Lab at a Missouri-based non-profit, and gave money to some Ohio school foundations to help them weather the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s even paid for repairs to a senior former athlete’s home. Kelce advocates for social justice, calling for less homophobia in American football, and support for Black Lives Matter. All told, he seems an all-around good guy. He’s not perfect but criticism of him seems pedestrian, like his admittedly declining abilities in football, but at 36, that’s not surprising. He’s got a few old tweets he probably regrets, but most of the criticism is aimed at occasional disrespect (we’re all guilty of that), being a ‘clout chaser’ (maybe, or maybe just critical jealousy), and unprofessional behavior like making obscene gestures or shoving a teammate during a game. No critical sexual assaults alleged, bitter ex-wives spilling it to the NY Post, or Surprise Babies in his family tree. No mention in the Epstein Files! Maher suggested a point he didn’t explore: Travis Kelce is a manly man and what would seem to be a healthy mix of the best of both liberal and conservative values: He’s gay-supportive, wants to marry and start a family and he wants to make a positive difference in others’ lives. I don’t know if they’ll be happy together—she’s a billionaire and he hasn’t even cracked $100 million in net worth yet. That kinds of pressure can break the strongest, most loving partnerships. Or, the pair could turn out to be like Pat Benatar and Neil Geraldo, still together 44 years later. Maher was perhaps a bit harsh in his assessment of modern masculinity, or lack thereof. There is some evidence, not yet conclusive, that synthetic hormones in the water may be feminizing human males. What is established is that it’s definitely feminizing male fish , producing ‘intersex’ specimens who produce female eggs inside the testes, and these are fish that aren’t hermaphrodites. Other effects include reduced sperm count and resulting population declines. One of the primary culprits is suspected to be synthetic estrogens, originating in birth control pills and HRT replacements, that aren’t completely removed by wastewater treatment, as are plant-based estrogenic sources as well. There’s an interesting video making the case that male celebrities looked much older and more masculine in previous decades than today. It’s from the NY Post, not the greatest source ever, but not the worst either, and it makes a provocative case. What it all comes down to Travis Kelce strikes me as a good model for the new Modern Masculine Male - if you can look beyond his less important manly looks and towering height. I honestly don’t think that matters quite as much as many think. I’m a ‘sapiophile’ myself; I’m drawn to very smart men, and I don’t care if they’re short. ( Many other women don’t, either .) I discovered my sapiophilia in high school, with crushes on some of the brightest students, not that I got anywhere with any of them. One turned out to be gay. Most were too shy to deal with girls even if they weren’t. But many of us also value a man who’s strong but not abusive. It’s a spectrum. The ‘porcelain doll shy guy twink-like tortured poet metrosexuals’ are on the low end, with the Highlander Kurgan on the other end. The best men are somewhere in the middle. I like to be hopeful, and with the extended end of wokeness, I’d like to see normal, decent men ‘come out of the closet’, ar ar, and challenge the crazed harpies bathing in male tears. They’ll have plenty of support from women too. I run into many like myself, fans of neither patriarchy nor Patriarchy Derangement Syndrome. I listened to Rafaela Siewert’s interview with neuroscientist and sex researcher Debra Soh on The Free Press, where Soh discussed how hypermasculine men are often temporary flings for women, but not someone you necessarily bring home to Mother. I mourn the loss of normal, manspreading, chest-exposing, at least reasonably-groomed masculinity fraught with sexual tension and playful romantic banter, a prelude of possible things to come while getting to know someone. I miss guys who know how to flirt. It’s one cock fight where Canada actually led the United States. When I left in 2005, American single guys were still fairly, you know, average-masculine—enough to pique one’s hormones. After I moved to Toronto, I found a distinct lack of masculinity in the native locals. Today, even the immigrants are beaten into submission by over-the-top #MeTooism and, although I can no longer speak from personal experience, from what I’ve read, so are American men. It’s not all men’s fault, though. The manosphere exists in a symbiotic relationship with toxic feminism. Which means women have to change too, and I’ve spilled plenty of electrons writing about that for the last several years. I reiterate: You don’t need to be Travis Kelce or a fireman charging into a burning World Trade Center to be a Real Man. Heroes come in all forms, not just male, but also female and four-footed furry. Even children can be true heroes. Heroism doesn’t always require big muscles. One of the greatest historical heroes is Vince Coleman, the man who saved 300 lives in 1917 during the Halifax Explosion by bravely staying at his telegraph post warning an incoming train that a ship in the harbor was about to explode—knowing by staying he was surely to die. You don’t have to be a man to be that heroic, but it helps. The desire to protect the weak is ingrained in almost all of them, even if some fall tragically short. Men possess a unique testosterone-driven courage many women don’t. We chickie-boos freeze , even when we have the ability to protect ourselves. Ask yourself: Would you willingly leave your family forever to save 300 strangers’ lives the way Vince Coleman did? Now that’s a man who had courage we only aspire to, and the strength to stay in place until the train stopped. I’d like to think I would have, but I know: I’m not even close to being the man Vince Coleman was. Random Stuff Men Say That Make Me Go, “WTF, Feminists?” Masculinism 2.0: What Would A Positive, Healthy, New Men’s Movement Look Like? Bears vs. Strange Men: Who Would You Rather Meet In The Woods? 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!

Do you really think anything will change with a Democratic landslide in November? Photo by goodfreephotos.com We see that willful angelic cluelessness on the left as from the finger-pointing right— “They’re the racists and homophobes, they’re the anti-science side, they’re the censors and free speech haters,” and especially, “They’re the violent assassins and mass shooters, not us!”— despite thirty years of research showing near-monopolist market share violence from the right, with an uptick in left-wing violenc e only in the past two. How gobsmacked progressives are when I point out they have a bigger jones for antisemitism than Tucker Carlson’s fanboys. How the left taught the right how to censor and oppress free speech . The faces they make when I challenge their pediatric genderwoo ; institutionalized racism , just like ‘ No Coloreds ’; how countries have the right to decide who to allow into the country, or not; how ‘defund the police’ only sounds trendy in safe neighborhoods; how you’re not ‘antifascist’ for defying the Trump administration when you’re screaming for the Intifada. I just finished Veiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam by Yasmine Mohammed, a self-published author whose book has been widely read and quoted. She barely mentions liberals until the last chapter, focusing mostly on her memoir as an abused child in a fundamentalist Muslim family and whose arranged-marriage abusive ex-husband became a prominent Bin Laden terrorist. But she does excoriate liberals earlier when, as an eight-year-old, she reported her horrendous abuse to a schoolteacher who brought in the authorities, and the liberal judge dismissed her case, arguing that “corporal punishment wasn’t against the law in Canada, and due to [her] ‘culture’, sometimes those punishments can be more severe than in the average Canadian household.” The ‘corporal punishment’ in question was bastinado and regular beatings for minor infractions like failing to remember prayers properly. Not all Canadian citizens are equal in progressive eyes, especially when they’re children. What would be unacceptable in a white family was perfectly okay when a culturally relativistic judge sat on the bench. Beatings and abuse, Mohammed points out, aren’t any less damaging to Muslim children than they are to those of German or Dutch descent. The progressive love affair with Islamic authoritarianism negates any claims to ‘antifascism’ as it excuses the gross abuses of women, children, homosexuals, and the transgenders they otherwise passionately defend when it’s white men ‘oppressing’: Mohammed’s story exemplifies the very worst of a pervasive progressive racism: Brown children aren’t as entitled to the same human rights as lighter-skinned Canadian children, or simply Canadians who were fortunate enough not to be born into a religious fundamentalist family. Authoritarians don’t respect the rule of law, and as they damn the Trump administration for it, progressives do exactly the same. Criminality is excusable if you’re from a different culture. The darker one’s skin, the better the chance liberals will excuse or even applaud looting, stealing cars, assaulting others, rioting, and spouting racist thoughts. Many who consider themselves ‘liberal’ are not. Many who regard themselves as ‘progressive’ are not. They’re illiberals, like their counterparts on the far right, and they simply prefer their own brand of authoritarianism. Many believe the Democrats are headed for a landslide this November, including, possibly, even the Senate, for which they only need four seats. Many Americans hope and pray they will deliver us from the insanities and inanities of Donald Trump. I wish I could believe them. Kamala Harris was never our savior Countries go bad when ‘good’ liberals embrace hierarchizing humans and granting them special rights others aren’t allowed. The ideology is enforced through social controls like speech policing, content policing, gaslighting, public ridicule and ostracization, surveillance and monitoring, and cancellation. Eventually, they pass laws and policies mandating practices like DEI and ‘loyalty oaths’; refusing college admission applications for coming from the ‘wrong’ color applicants or who fail to espouse the ‘right’ political opinions; and forcing parents to accept decisions about their children’s welfare to which they object, whether it’s for puberty blockers or vaccinations . This is the playbook for both right- and left-wing authoritarians. See: Fascist Germany, Italy and Japan, the WWII Fascist Fun Trifecta. See: Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union. The 2024 U.S. election was less a decision on whether to head down an authoritarian path, but rather which one. Kamala Harris didn’t tote her own Project 2025 for America, nor did she espouse anything nearly as dangerous as Trumpitarianism. But neither did she promise to address some of the worst existing authoritarianism problems in America, some Democrat-created, like the criminals freely allowed to enter the U.S. via Biden’s open-door policy. She had nothing to say about addressing the Nazi problem among woke progressives, people who claimed to hate Nazis but screamed for the death of the Jews and the end of Israel, and who have driven an appalling jump in antisemitic acts, nearly consequence-free wherever progressives call the shots. She made it clear that male-driven ‘trans rights’ were more important than women’s safety. She suffered Sudden Onset Dementia when she denied ever supporting taxpayer-paid transition surgery for convicted criminals. And did she have a clear stand on anything? Her word salads approached Trump’s sometimes. ‘Woke’ progressivism’s oppression had been such an authoritarian nightmare for so many years that many Americans decided Trump really couldn’t be as bad. However they feel about their vote now, I can’t fault them for voting ‘anything but Democrat’. I did too, just not for Trump. Democrats are the party that claimed Nazis were only on the right while jumping on antisemitism like Harvey Weinstein on a new starlet, goaded by professional antisemites in Congress like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. This is the party that punishes pronoun resistors more swiftly and virulently than Jewish synagogue vandalism. Or religious fanatics who beat a little girl’s feet. This just in: Authoritarian progressives still scorn free speech According to FIRE , students saying it’s okay to shout down a speaker, block her entry to the venue, or stop it entirely are at “all-time highs”. Barnard College, Columbia University, Indiana University, the University of Washington, and Northeastern University comprise the bottom-feeding Filthy Five of FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings . And they wonder why the cancelmonkey Trump administration attacks universities and pulls their funding. He’s no better than they , but Kamala Harris would in no way have attempted to bring diversity of thought, expression, or political opinion to overwhelmingly progressive universities. Just like Trump is trying to exorcise any opinion to the left of the farthest-right as unforgivable treason. Meanwhile, woke progressive academics decry the same reason and rationalism he scorns, calling it ‘ white supremacist ’. I’m not at all convinced the Democrats and progressives are our only hope for saving us from the Trumpocalypse. I cheer while I watch them resist ICE: Warning others of their approach, reporting on them, and documenting the brownshirts’ many crimes against their own citizens. I’m happy they’re speaking out and challenging Donald Trump and his minion Nosferatu Stephen Miller. Yet these are the same people who have shut me down on blogging and social media platforms because they didn’t like my anti-woke articles. These are the same people who would disrupt my speech or deplatform me if I was important enough to speak on a college campus. These are the people who claim to be pro-science yet support the insanely nonsensical ‘gender-affirming care’ for children. The same people who, if I was in their family, would disinvite me to family celebrations because I refused to vote for The Brat. These are the ‘antifascists’ who worship New York socialist love god Zohran Mamdani who’s pretty near-Communist, an ideology that oppresses its unfortunate citizens every bit as effectively as right-wing dictatorships. So of course woke progressives ‘bend the knee’ for it, not against it. Yeah, tell me again how Democrats and progressives will save us. They offer, instead, Stalin rather than Hitler. Research shows that liberals skew the highest on reported mental health problems, while conservatives skew the lowest. It wasn’t always so. While mental health distress rose highest in liberal girls around 2012 when smartphones and social media really took off, liberal theories connecting it to the ‘awful things conservatives were doing’ failed to note that 2012 marked the second term for Barack Obama, bringing four more years of liberal governance. Try again, ideologues. Liberal women, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argued, adopted the disempowering ‘ Three Great Untruths ’ which lighter social media-using conservative young people did not. These were cognitive distortions pushed by progressive universities that taught youth exposed to them to trust their emotions over reason, to avoid all bad experiences, and that there was no middle ground in human conflict; the sides were straight-up all-good or all-bad. Social media algorithms drive what we want. If your authoritarian bag is progressive rather than MAGA political outrage, then that’s what you’ll see. If you’ve got Trump Derangement Syndrome, it will feed you more. Or maybe it’s the cause of your TDS. When progressives need to conserve I don’t see any authoritarian relief for America so far, and I don’t have high hopes for Canada either. Had the Democrats stayed in power I think we would have seen that same relentless march toward their ever-growing list of thou-shalt-nots, and protection of identity groups far less marginalized than advertised. Their Gestapo wasn’t ICE agents on the streets, but anonymous anti-free speech cyberbullies on Twitter. Both ruin lives. There’s simply more visual drama when burly, unqualified men wrestle a woman to the ground or shoot one smiling at them in a car, or an armed man who never brandished his weapon, than there is in someone fired because he refused to take his employer’s ‘unconscious bias’ training or a DEI consultant put on leave for addressing the ‘wrong’ racism. After the Republican War On Democracy, I don’t expect the Democrats to reinstall the guardrails once they return to power. I expect them to take advantage of their new freedoms. With a vengeance. MAGAs, Republicans, and anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders should be afraid. It won’t be as bad, initially. They’ll dial back Trump’s worst excesses, but also, the things he got right. They’ll return DEI. And men to women’s sports teams. And genderwoo (Make Gay Kids Straight Again!). Authoritarians believe they know what’s best for us, and don’t tolerate dissent. The woke social justice set has made that abundantly clear. They’ll go after their political enemies (again). They’ll reinstate language policing. Alligator Alley and other Trump concentration camps may be repurposed for their own ‘enemies’. Liberals’ and progressives’ big mistake was in not knowing when to quit and instead, to conserve what they’d accomplished. Instead of acknowledging their many great victories—civil rights, gay marriage, more equality for women, making bigotry uncool—they kept looking for more fights, which led them down the road to finding and fighting problems that weren’t there, like ‘microaggressions’ and humor . What those accomplishments needed was guardrails for those who’d roll them back. While they were fighting for pronouns, the right slowly chipped away at abortion rights until—well, you know how that ended. Conservatives conserved traditions and not all of them were good ones. Those were the liberal victories. Other traditions needed protection, and liberals failed them. Instead of reaching across the aisle they demonized their opposition. Worse, they assimilated the right’s discriminations and moral wrongs by changing them a little. They turned historical hatred against blacks to hatred against whites; misogyny into misandry; and Enlightenment values replaced evidence with ‘feelings’. S I woke up the morning after the 2024 election wondering who I’d be happier with as the winner. I found I didn’t really give a damn. Oh, Trump won again. This time I shrugged and said, “Okay, whatever.” It was easy to do safely in Canada. But I would have reacted to the same to a Harris win. It didn’t matter. Authoritarianism is bad for whoever are their enemies. As a freethinker, a skeptic and a social critic, both parties hate me. What interests me is this: Which authoritarianism will Democrats and progressives ultimately choose: Communism or Islamofascism? Or will they surprise me and return to a commitment to level-headed, normie democracy? We’ll find out. 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!

When women write misogynist kink for women. Because, like, pirate rape empowerment or something. Photo by Sophie Dituri on Flickr What if someone, under a pseudonym, wrote a kink lit trilogy about a beautiful teenage virgin from a warm and loving home who is raped while unconscious and taken away by the rapist, with the reluctant permission of her parents, to a place far away where she is forced to be naked at all times, is strung up for a man’s pleasure over his bed, is spanked until she technically should have no ass left, is trained to be a slave and sexual plaything for, like, everybody, is beaten and tortured, and pretty much horribly mistreated 24×7 until her spirit is broken and she learns to like it? Then engages in increasingly weirder and abusive sexual adventures consensually  — because looking to be brutalized more is apparently the only form of consent Our Heroine possesses in this quartetverse — because she was ‘awakened’ to how ‘boring’ her life had been before she was ‘rescued’ by a Prince who relieved her from the terrible, burdensome bonds of loving parents and personal safety? What if you learned that the mystery kink lit author was a man — especially an unpopular man — say, sex crime-probed U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz, or Alex Jones, or maybe schoolgirl killer Paul Bernardo? Betcha people would be screaming blue murder over the positive depiction of ‘hate-fucking’ and misogyny and violent imagery of sexual assaults on a woman and how just this sort of thing contributes to rape culture . Now what if you learned that it wasn’t Roosh who’d written it, or Bernardo, not even a screaming incel, but instead good ol’ vampire queen Anne Rice? (a/k/a A.N. Roquelare in 1982). And that it was written not for men but for women? Beauty and the Stockholm Syndrome I happened across a New York Times story from 2012 about how Rice’s hardcore kink lit BDSM Sleeping Beauty trilogy was re-issued to capitalize on the 50 Shades of Grey popularity (which made ‘mommy porn’ a household word. Who knew housewives could be so kinky?) One of the comments in the sidebar, though, written by a man, made me stop and think: So– I need to get this straight — men are pigs because they read and watch porn where women are dominated and sexually degraded (everybody knows this). But we now know that it is admirable for women to express themselves by reading “erotica… about being overwhelmed by a pirate, [because] that’s her right.” Huh…? Um….good point. Uh, conflicting messages about rape culture, ladies? I’ve read the first Beauty book, borrowed from a kinky friend, out of curiosity. By page 57 I was quite certain even the most dedicated spanking fetishists must surely be tired of all the damn spanking. I didn’t even think I’d likely finish the book, not because it was alternately offensive, horrifying and boring (boy oh boy did everyone have a thing for spanking) but because I’d vowed never to read another Anne Rice book until she’d learned about the Mysteries of the Plot Line, which were, IMO, missing in action in her first two vampire novels. I stuck with this one because even though its plot line was thinner than a Condé Nast fashion model’s breakfast, it nevertheless existed. Needless to say, I didn’t read the next two books, which I understand involve a move from spanking to sticking everything you can think of up southern regional orifices. Still, the whole time, I was keenly aware that I was reading porn for chicks. And that if it had been written by a man it would be held up as a classic example of What’s Wrong With Men And Misogyny. But…wow. I can see where men — a decent man, by the tone of the commenter — can be confused by the conflicting messages here. Violent porn is bad when men write and read it, but empowering when women do it? The thing is, even if I don’t understand what’s erotic about stringing a naked woman up by her ankles and wrists in the garden and smearing her ladyparts with honey to attract insects, I get that there are people who do. In the olden days I’d have guessed the prime suspects were, ‘men who virulently hate women,’ but now I know there are, apparently, empowered women who find this erotic. At least in fantasy, which is what the Beauty trilogy is. And I do understand the attraction of fantasies, even violent fantasies — because you, the star and producer, have complete control over what’s happening, even if your fantasy is that you have no control. No sane person wants to be in a real situation like that without full control — that’s why BDSM culture has safe words and rules and clearly delineated discussions about consent and permission. Beat me, hurt me, but hold on a minute, Wankel rotary engine, I need a breather. And no, you may not insert an egg beater up my hoo-ha, but yes, the spatula is just fine. Aunt Jemima me, baby!!! Maybe Anne Rice can ‘splain… We should ask the question the NY Times commenter asked — why are men pigs if they seek violent kink lit, but women are empowered when they do? I’m not condemning BDSM/kink lit or culture — whatever floats your boat in a free society, baby, and as long as you go about your somewhat risky business in as safe a manner as possible, which BDSM culture does, have at it. But consider what Anne Rice wrote on her blog about her re-release: It has to be remembered that within the frame of a sadomasochistic fantasy like the Beauty trilogy, the readers are invited to identify with and enjoy the predicament of the slaves. The books aren’t about literal cruelty; they’re about surrender, the fun of imagining you have no choice but to enjoy sex. Beauty’s slavery is delicious, sensuous, abandoned, and ultimately liberating. This is all part of the framework. Now imagine Matt Gaetz saying that. Or saying he identified with the Prince or other Master, and that ‘Beauty’s slavery is delicious, sensuous, abandoned, and ultimately liberating.’ Oh yeah. Or Donald Trump, Roy Moore, Jeffrey Epstein, any other misogynist man you love to hate, or even Ghislaine Maxwell. So how come Anne Rice gets a free pass? Standing outside kink culture, I don’t see any difference between the Beauty book I read, and the violent, humiliating, degrading and dehumanizing porn lit and imagery certain men are flagellated for consuming. Is Rice’s “erotica” more socially acceptable because it’s equal-opportunity abusive? Not just man on woman violence, but woman on man, woman on woman and man on man? 50 Shades of WTF Since I’m a woman who tolerates zero male control in a partner, I seriously don’t get the appeal of 50 Shades of Grey , but hey, I guess for women who like masochism and bondage and submission and especially nailing a filthy rich guy it’s awesome. ( Mommy, where do stereotypes come from?) Beat me, hurt me, make me read badly-written erotica. Photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr There’s certainly a double standard going on, and I’m just as confused as the NY Times commenter. Let’s just say it out loud: ‘Erotica’ like Rice’s Beauty series (Ugh, she wrote a fourth one) is contributing to rape culture, an idea that will not sit well at all with the kink community and many feminists (some of which, I suspect, are privately as disturbed by the 50 Shades and Beauty popularity as I am). Let me make something perfectly clear: The kink/BDSM community doesn’t offend me. Violent, degrading, humiliating porn does. Regardless of who writes it and consumes it. Remember the olden days, when women helped pioneer rape culture with bodice-ripping romance novels? I’ve read only a few, they’re not my cuppa, but I always wondered about the rapes women enjoyed complete with orgasms. Is porn desensitizing men to violence against women? Shortly after Toronto’s Jian “I want to hate fuck you” Ghomeshi scandal broke, the Toronto Star asked Is porn desensitizing men to violence against women? "Can she truly give consent in this situation?" Read it and then consider the following questions. Go ahead, I’ll wait. If violent porn as described in the article contributes to rape culture by making violence against women seem more acceptable, then doesn’t Rice’s Beautyverse also contribute by making it seem like that’s what women really want, and does it ‘train’ some to be willing to accept that treatment? If the Beauty books are just ‘harmless fantasy’, then isn’t violent porn by men and for men as well? After all, as the writer notes, we can watch an action film without wanting to shoot up a mall, right? What about the 50 Shades of Grey series? I haven’t read any of the books myself, or seen the movies, but others argue they glorify rape. If you ask, “Why the hell would a normal, sane man want to watch a woman being choked nearly to death?” why then would you not ask, “What normal, sane woman would want to read about a teenage virgin getting raped in her sleep?” We condemn that up one side and down the other when high school football jocks do it to a drunk, passed-out teenage girl. Maybe the question now is, is violent, misogynist kink chick lit desensitizing women to violence against women? Serious question. Okay, but just remember the safe word is “Mr. Rogers”.

What forty years of dating taught me about female "empowerment" Public domain image at Pxhere I ain’t no spring chicken. You can’t sweet-talk yourself into my pants. A recent dating experience re-introduced me to the romantically manipulative man, and reminded me of how much nothing changes in forty years of dating. I met Bruce in late fall on the last dating app I tried, overpriced eHarmony, theorizing the cost might filter out lazy-asses, has-beens, and never-wases I found on other apps. It didn’t. The washouts were a little higher socioeconomically, but otherwise identical: Flaky; too interested in polyamory; can’t hold a conversation; overweight and dresses like his dad; can’t be not-boring. The best-looking ones were always scammers. Their only commitment was to render themselves hopelessly single with gremlin-worthy photos and profiles so empty they cast an echo. That’s right, bowl ‘er over with that red-hot sizzlin’ manhood while you squint your pudgy face into the sun with your shoulders hunched like Quasimodo. I lowered my minimum age from 45 to 35 just in case I might be blowing off my Emmanuel Macron. I did encounter one 37-year-old who really did sound as mature as he claimed, was adamant about not wanting children and being accepting of someone a quarter-century older than he but—and it was a big one—he had a very high sex drive. “Not even when I was 21,” I told him. The last guy I talked to was a 45-year-old fellow immigrant. Bruce was good-looking, had a decent, verifiable job and was interesting to talk to. But…(there’s always a ‘but’)… When I asked what he was looking for, his response was, “To find a woman I can spend the rest of my life with.” He too, claimed he had no problem with the age difference, that he didn’t mind if I grew old and died before he did. So, what’s the problem, right? The previous guy spoke like a man much older than his years when we talked voice. Bruce was unconvincing. Plus, he came from a culture I know from experience fetishizes white blonde women. He oozed terms of endearment immediately—sweetie, honey, baby, darling. I’ve had to tell everyone not to do it. We never met F2F. Bruce always had some creative reason why he had to break an in-person date at the last minute. First his office was going out for drinks that night to celebrate a great sales month (plausible, given his LinkedIn-verified job). The next bag-at-the-last-minute: He’d wound up in the emergency room with a migraine. He hadn’t mentioned them before. I’ll admit my sympathy was a bit rote. I forget what the third date break was. Now, he had my attention for a different reason. He wouldn’t drop the terms of endearment. Customarily this nonsense is my exit ramp, but he became a short-term research project in male phony-baloney. He managed to make one Zoom meeting but blew off the second one. When I texted him he didn’t respond. I was quite certain I was being blown off for other women, but I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t emotionally engaged and I knew I was being played. He texted me a few days later so I blew him off. I told Bruce I’d actually Googled, twice, first on romance scammers and later video scammers to see if I’d actually Zoomed with an AI. That’s how phony I think you are, I told him. He texted that he ‘wanted me’, and ‘ur my girl’. He told me he loved me. I told him to go peddle it somewhere else, ‘coz I ain’t buyin’. His last text before I blocked him was, “I love you so much.” Brand new model, same as the last Does that lovey-dovey crap still work anymore? It must, since just about everyone is trying to sweetie-baby-honey their way into our drawers. Aging pimp Andrew Tate says he and his brother discovered that women were more willing to do webcam work if they thought they were in a relationship. So they each juggled multiple ‘longterm commitments’. It’s hard for naive women to understand how manipulative men are when they seek female compliance, and how driving emotional engagement early is a critically important tool. I think of all the naive young women who actually fall for this emotional manipulation. I speak from experience as a former young woman. Not all men are manipulators or abusers so much as just people who unthinkingly string women along. Women do it too. When you’re young and insecure, on some level you want to keep someone in the background in case you need a date or to ease a lonely night. You can’t know what you’re up against without life experience, and today’s feminism has taught young women that bad experiences are never their fault. Often they aren’t; a young girl can’t know what she hasn’t yet learned, or been taught, so she’s unprepared for the games manipulators play, whether they seek female attention (especially from a plethora of admirers), or a girl’s commitment, or, of course, sex. My mother prepared me well but not for everything. Every generation is different. Some women never learn just how predatory men can be. Consider how compliant progressive feminists have become to transactivists: I think some of them really believe that biological sex is ‘all in your head’ and that genital differences are no more remarkable than hair color. Manipulators always find a way to groom women for romantic and sexual compliance: Transactivists, driven primarily by autogynephiles and misogynists, easily manipulated woke progressive feminists, already self-primed to never say no, so it became easy to persuade them to accept men in places they never belonged and more importantly, never to question it. Ironically, they’re the feminists most outspoken about ‘patriarchy’ and ‘consent’. Men cleverer than they induced them to give it up, and enforce it against non-compliant resistors (‘TERFs’). What’s interesting is this: Each generation questions, changes, and evolves, but somehow, we always seem to wind up back at the model men have always preferred: Unfettered, non-consequential access to multiple women, particularly the youthful. I’m not jealous of younger women; I sympathize with them. I’m in the same boat. We’re both playing in each other’s pools. I can get younger men, they can get older men. I don’t know if it upsets them that they’re competing with attractive older women, but I don’t mind them playing in my pool. As I see it, it’s become so difficult to find anyone with whom you can be compatible that we all have to cast our nets as wide as we can. I do understand something about older men that they don’t: The men my age aren’t any more mature than when we were twenty. Rich older men seeking naive young women are red flags for controllers. Every generation wants to break its chains Marriage looks unappealing to generations more sophisticated than their mothers’. It’s a big lie sold by feminism, that women should be ashamed of their inherent evolutionary drive to settle down and have children. (Gee, I wonder where that came from?) The marriage model worked, however imperfectly, with children raised in largely stable homes. The Sixties counterculture sundered it. The refusal of marriage and parenthood was a more radical departure for women than men, especially the encouragement to pursue a career instead. As women, but not men, realized eventually that finite fertility means they might not ‘have it all’, Millennials and Zoomers gravitated to bisexuality, expanding the pool. Eventually, the biological clock kicks in. It did even for me although it didn’t say, “Make babies!” but rather, “Settle down.” Engaging in a lesbian relationship may make sense for young women who want a child, but with a responsible partner. The pool would seem to be more spacious with lesbians rather than man-children . Yet, ironically, the majority of identifying bisexuals end up in long-term relationships with the opposite sex. The fundamental evolutionary drive never goes away, regardless of our attempts to subvert it. Today’s women are dealing with wanting boyfriends (however quietly since that’s not ‘cool’ ) but can’t find acceptable mates . Instead, they do what the young and naive do who haven’t yet learned how to parse the players from the ‘good ones’: They submit to men’s terms, such as undefined ‘situationships’ (known to Millennials as ‘hooking up’) which of course better suits men resisting the nest. Or they accept polyamory, grudgingly. They don’t know they’re being played, just like their hippie grandmothers. ‘Free love’ worked better for men than women in the Sixties. Hippie dudes were passive-aggressive about female experimentation, as a formerly hippie friend experienced. Other women were pushed to accept multiple sexual partners, or be derided as ‘square’, ‘uptight’, or ‘hung-up’. Today’s young women are playing the same naive game we all played with males we love who love too many. Women don’t know that if they ‘keep it loose and casual’ to please him he’s not likely ever to come around, because he’s already quite pleased. Many younger women settle for half-assed men and piss-poor sex, especially the rough kind Millennial and Zoomer men learned from porn . But they can set the terms themselves. Not all men are players, and the ‘good ones’ often don’t know how to talk to women, so traumatized by #MeToo are they all. Standing up for what you want requires acknowledging what you won’t settle for and sticking to your guns: No matter how hot he is, or how attractive his financial position, she has to reject him if he demonstrates he’s not a serious contender. That’s hard to do when you’re younger and want to settle down but not to ‘settle’. You don’t know the signs, you second-guess your own inner warnings, and it becomes easier to believe he might come around when he probably won’t. Whether it’s Roaring Twenties ‘anything goes’, hippie ‘free love’, the Millennial embrace of bisexuality and bi-curiosity, or the Zoomers’ love affair with kink (possibly inspired by porn) it still comes down to: What men want , not what women want. (What did Gen X introduce sexually? AIDS-era fear of sex.) I’m in a knowledgeable place now that only comes with decades of experience. Oh, to have known then what I know now. Today I’m confident in the men I reject, the ones who’ve demonstrated for forever that they’re not serious contenders, and that the mediocre ones aren’t, as I’d hoped for too long, simply guilty of not knowing how to market themselves, but rather, of an explicit honesty: I really am as boring as my profile suggests, or I’m not serious about finding a longterm partner. If I could persuade young women and girls to read one book, it would be Neil Strauss’s The Game , published in 2005 about pickup artists. It’s the most accurate dissection of female psychology I’ve ever encountered. Pickup artists in their heyday were the masters of female manipulation. They knew exactly how to probe women for weaknesses and guide them into the nearest bed or dark corner. The Bruces of this world will always be with us. I laugh about my short experience, it was the perfectly stupid ending to over a year of goofballs and clueless dipsticks. He thought I was as guileless as women his own age or younger. He’s too young to understand that I wasn’t. Just remember, ladies: Whatever your generation, none of us ever change. 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!

Christians had one. Jews had one. Now Islam needs to catch up and align responsibly with the modern world. Image from Rawpixels Last year I wrote my highest-performing Substack so far, my critical 2025 Is Not Shaping Up To Be A Good Year For Muslims.   I took a lot of heat for it, ironically, not from angry Muslims but from others who damned me for not being critical enough. I hope they saved some venom for radical Islamists as we head into 2026. Antisemitism is partying like it’s 1935 driven primarily by a historical widespread culture of violent hatred in its heart, the Middle East. Islam is a religion of violence, as its predecessors once were, but it doesn’t have to be. The Islamic world needs to fix itself. Now. Like its sister religions have done. Radical Muslims In December, father-and-son team Sajid and Naveed Akram turned Australia’s Bondi Beach into a shooting gallery for Hannukah celebrants. An unarmed man brought Junior down—just like in the gun-mad United States, where the only thing that stops a bad man with a gun is a good man without one. Predictably, the two gunmen were Islamic State fanboys. But: The hero is a Muslim himself named Ahmed al-Ahmed who migrated from Syria in 2006. “My son is a hero. He served in the police, he has the passion to defend people,” his father is quoted as saying. “I’m proud that my son was helping people, rescuing people,” added his mother. I mean, they must have known by this point he was saving primarily Jews. I hope he doesn’t become the target of extremists. In Toronto, three young men planned  to kill women and Jews and attempted two alleged kidnappings this past summer. One of them has been charged with, among other things, conspiracy to commit murder as encouraged by ISIS. In the U.K., police foiled what they described as “ one of, if not the, deadliest terrorist attacks in UK history ” targeting Jews planned by a couple of IS fanboys for this past October. At Christmas, the IS instructed its faithful to kill Christians and Jews, to turn it into a ‘season of terror’. A few tried in Los Angeles  and North Carolina . To my knowledge, neither Jewish nor Christian groups have issued any similar ‘back atcha’ calls for murder and mayhem of Muslims. There are plenty of ‘good Muslims’ in the world like the al-Ahmeds, but unfortunately, jihad-addled followers of the Prophet lead the world in harming others. According to Fondation pour L’Innovation Politique, a French think tank, Islamist attacks  have killed nearly 250,000 people between 1979 and April 2024 (this includes wars and insurgencies). Not surprisingly, people in Islamic countries are most at risk. The Real War On Christmas  - The Free Press Islam needs a Reformation Islam isn’t the problem. Modern Muslims’ unwillingness to resolve ancient doctrines with an open, democratic world committed to essential human rights are. Do I need to spell it out? Violence is bad. Peace is good. That’s the difference. Islam needs a Reformation. Christians had one in the sixteenth century, and Jews in the 19th century. They brought both religions more in-line with the modern world, recognizing personal freedom, the rights of the individual, and embracing a less murderous view of religious competitors. Since Christian and Jewish doctrine have been at one time, violent, but today much more peaceful, Muslims must similarly reconcile. Most go about their daily lives while managing not to murder anyone, just like everyone else. They prefer to distance ‘those people’ from themselves and pretend jihadism has nothing to do with them, as though the religious umbrella stretches only enough to cover themselves. Young men are prone to radicalization of one sort or another no matter what religion they are (or not), particularly when they’re unemployed and/or living in a country with weak governance and security. For the Muslims who can speak out, do they? Do they teach their own sons that violence is not acceptable in our family? There’s no such thing as an ‘honor killing’ for family terrorists. It’s simplistic to claim ‘most Muslims don’t approve of or support terrorism’. A more granular question would be, “Where do Muslims fall on the spectrum of support for terrorism, from 1-10?” Such a yardstick would offer a more nuanced view of who does and doesn’t support it, and by how much. One can support, collaborate with, and finance terrorism without personally killing anyone by enabling the radicals. Others don’t speak out, afraid of ‘stigmatizing’ their religion, or of putting their families in danger. (Why?) As a result, extremists get away with as much as the surrounding culture allows. And that’s the key: The culture.  Many ‘good Muslims’ exist inside a culture that has not modernized enough  to give them the freedom to call out the crazy fun-demented-lists. The culture is as much their responsibility as those of the terrorist recruiters. When Christians in the United States complained to me, “Don’t judge us by those awful fundamentalists! They don’t stand for what we’re about! They’re such embarrassments!” I’d counter, “Do you stand up to them? Do you challenge them? Do you point out their non-Biblical, non-Gospel-oriented values or beliefs?” No, no they hadn’t. And they didn’t even have to worry about armed cross-bearing Crusader wannabes showing up on their front porch to behead them for their ‘blasphemies’. “Silence sounds an awful lot like assent,” I noted. “If it’s not, speak up!” It’s not Islamophobic to say You’re not doing enough! The dangers of Reformation Martin Luther’s life was worth nothing after his excommunication for challenging the very foundations of Catholic authority and practices. Once a heretic, anyone could legally kill him without consequence, but a sympathetic nobleman faked his kidnapping and hid him in his castle. This occurred during the most brutal period of the European Dark Ages, amidst socially-acceptable public violence and executions. Like breaking on the wheel, one of the most excruciating (and publicly popular) executions for the worst of the worst. Luther’s German Reformation, followed by a parallel effort in Switzerland, served to remove the focus from the all-powerful clergy who didn’t want the common man to read the Bible for fear he’d ‘misinterpret’. The movements later rejected theological violence and embraced separation of church and state, along with ‘just war’ theory, which defined how to determine whether a war is truly just. The West eventually ended judicial torture in the 18th and 19th centuries, heavily influenced by Enlightenment thinkers partially emboldened by Christian reformers. Christian Reformation has long since trimmed away non-Biblically-supported practices introduced via selective priestly interpretation, and recognized where their sacred texts fall short. Like the uncomfortable fact that the Son of God himself promoted compassionate slavery rather than calling for its elimination. Violence and death are the risks serious Islamic reformers also face from jihadist death cults like Hamas  and IS and isolated ‘lone wolves’ committed to destroying Western civilization. They justify killing unbelievers (including those of their faith who disagree with them), and who welcome death as it sends them, they believe, to a glorious afterlife with, of course, those famous six dozen virgins. Danger defines rebellion: Luther faced a powerful and violent Catholic Church, while the power against Muslims today rests in the hands of corrupt governments wielding self-serving Koranic interpretations, and crazed young men with nothing to lose, since they win even when they die in battle. Human rights violations continue to stain the Muslim world: Political imprisonment, suppression of free speech, child marriage, and denial of body autonomy (women, gays, transfolk, children). British Pakistani Muslims engage in sex trafficking while their communities look the other way; they’re ‘only’ white girls, after all, and ‘stigmatizing’ a ‘marginalized community’ is worse, apparently, than organized child rape. Abroad, Islamic countries’ various challenges include ongoing or worsening economic problems, poor education systems, poor governance, corruption, economic inequality, low literacy rates, and especially gender inequality, a huge driver for keeping many Islamic countries figuratively stuck in the desert. Where women prosper, so prospers the nation. Islamic reform’s greatest challenge after the risk of violent retribution, is one many Muslims want the least: The separation of mosque and state. Human rights demand more open, liberty-oriented governments. When religious authorities freeze interpretation, when enforcers, clerical or terrorist, crack down on dissent, and most importantly, when theology’s greatest strength is political power—violence ensues and human rights disappear. Policies and sacred dogma, for any Reformation, must become fair game. The Catholic Church has never been as powerful since Luther. It’s a less violent world as a result. The Jewish Reformation, by comparison, was much less dramatic. They weren’t a violent people anymore, not since their Biblical glory days. They were the persecuted minority everywhere they wandered. Yet still they modernized. Minor Islamic Reforms Some Islamic leaders are making real efforts to alleviate radicalization in the young. Violent extremists recruit free-floating rebellious young people; if they’re spotted early, there’s hope for intervention. ‘Good Muslims’ must drive the Reformation movement because the jihadists belong to them . The meaning of jihad is a major obstacle, which for some means waging a personal struggle within yourself for self-improvement and greater moral integrity, while the more authoritarian interpretation emphasizes violent response and warfare. Islamic modernization movements have embraced low-level reforms, but have yet to embrace major  reforms that would align it better with a West that clearly sees its flaws. Which are primarily: Violence; jihadism; gender inequality; violence against homosexuals; and ancient, endemic antisemitism. Westerners must begin scrutinizing Muslim immigrants to identify refugees for the ability to assimilate, without demanding they abandon their religious culture which, sorry haters, isn’t all bad, not by a long shot. Will these new permanent residents and citizens teach their children and grandchildren to take advantage of their new open societies offering greater economic opportunity, or will they allow them to succumb to the smorgasbord of violent death cults easily accessed on social media? Every affiliative group, religious or not, owns their radicals, which flourish only when permitted by lax oversight or tacit agreement. What to do next? Helen Pluckrose  recently argued in favor of liberalizing Islam , crossing swords with a devout young Muslim who likened the idea to ‘genocide’. Liberalizing Islam, as Helen pointed out, encouraged discarding bad ideas. To which I would add, because she didn’t, keeping the good ones: Bettering yourself, helping the poor, treating orphans well, forgiveness, kindness to one’s neighbors, giving debtors the time to repay their debt, treating your spouse kindly. Yes, there are contradictory verses (like ‘acceptable’ wife-beating) just as there are in the Bible. Blatant contradictions are also reasons why religions need Reformations. Islam—Muslims—are not, as some believe, ‘hopeless’. The more violent regions in the Middle East look an awful like like Luther’s Europe—violent, filthy, uneducated, deeply oppressive. Reformation starts with separation of religion and state, a hard truth for cultures in which religion is woven deeply into society’s fabric. Furthermore, secularization is a match to the Islamist powder keg. But let’s sally forth nevertheless with better ideas: Re-interpreting ancient texts to purge literalism and align it better with modern values (which don’t necessarily mean 100% liberal values). Re-embracing the principles of the European Enlightenment, or  Islam’s Golden Age, when education, scientific inquiry, the arts, and philosophy flourished from the 8th to the 13th centuries, in sharp contrast to Dark Age Europe. Moving away from cultic glorification of death and emphasizing that God didn’t send humans to earth to die, but to live and make the world a better place. Gender equality for sure. Women have proven in the West that we’re as smart, capable, and competent as men. Please, no more shooting girls in the face because they want to go to school. An embrace of diversity of thought and opinion, including religious. An embrace of the right of all humans to exist, including and especially Jews. The antisemitism of the Islamic world is a clear and present danger to all of us, a primary driver of Islamist terrorism, and no accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ will erase that. Muslims have a long, documented antisemitic history that dates back many centuries before the creation of Israel. If Muslims can figure out how to reform without democracy, have at it. But no more excuses. This is 2026, not 1106. When you’ve lost liberals like me, time’s a-wastin’. 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 birth dearth is a fake right-wing crisis. Declining fertility is real; the fix is easy but the U.S. government discourages it Motherhood, as depicted by the pro-natalists. Image by Satya Tiwari from Pixabay When I was six or seven I told my mother before Christmas, “I don’t want dolls anymore. I’d rather have stuffed animals.” Barbie was the exception; she wasn’t a baby doll. I played house and emulated my mother as she took care of my new brother, but there was an early tell I might not be as motherly as I’d been acculturated: When Mom took my brother out in the stroller I followed along, pushing Winnie-the-Pooh in my toy pram. I felt more love for Winnie than I did for baby dolls. I was drawn more to peoples’ pets. Dogs wagged their tail and cats rubbed against your leg. Babies were boring and mostly cried or screamed. When they weren’t screaming they slept. “Come on, don’t you want one of your own?” my cousin’s wife asked me years ago after she had her one and only child. She couldn’t, really couldn’t, understand how any woman could not want a baby of her own. She asked me several times. “Look at this! Look at this child! How can you not want one?” Because I’d rather have one of these! Image by bertin23 from Pixabay “Meh,” I’d answer. Then I’d go back to playing with their dog Martin, who was a thousand more times adorable, and after whom I never had to clean up. Ten years later, I got my tubes tied. I never changed my mind as so many had warned. At thirty-nine, I hadn’t felt even the tiniest pull toward motherhood. I’ve never regretted my decision. I am a free spirit. I was never wired to be a parent. Sexless In The City Declining fertility is real, as are the problems we’ll face without more humans, but it’s not the crisis the right pretends it is. The childfree by choice differ from the childless, who don’t want to be, even as the Western world suffers an epidemic of sexlessness. Predictably, the answer from the tech bros is, not surprisingly, technology, along with a return to good ol’-fashioned unrestricted penising. The sixty-year era of hippie (not-so) free love appears to be drawing to a close, more out of lack of sexual desire than incipient morality. Love and sex aren’t dead, and never will be, but they are on indefinite leave as humanity recalibrates and decides whether it wants to continue propagating. Or even surviving. We work on finding ways to perpetuate humanity without ever having to deal with the messiness of choosing a partner and doing it the traditional way. God help us, anything but having sex with someone else’s body! Billionaires pay strangers to gestate their progeny. A German (of course!) biotechnologist is developing a ‘designer baby’ lab . It’s envisioned from a sincere desire to help infertile couples or women who’ve had their uterus removed to produce their own dual-biological babies just like everyone else. It will also reduce or eliminate C-sections and premature birth, because guess what, the young’uns are grown in a lab ‘womb’ too. This was funnier in 1993. Now it’s just sad. It’s positively Brave New World. Even when allowance is made for human-to-human contact, ‘ polycules’ , fashionable in the ‘effective altruism’ movement, reinvent the male desire for feelings-free polyamory. Like in Brave New World, ‘everyone belongs to everyone else,’ and getting overly-attached to one person is discouraged. Problem is, neither technology nor polyamory has ever truly worked for a species whose ability to procreate and raise good humans is reliant on sexual relations and pair-bonding. Fortunately, not all men are as divorced from their emotions as tech bros. There’s a natural evolution for both sexes to eventually settle down, despite us outliers. Many ‘sow their wild oats’ until one day someone comes along who changes their mind. Like Neil Strauss, who documented the Pick-Up Artist culture he engaged in, and later rejected, in his controversial book The Game. Many women who think they’re ‘too feminist’ to have children find that pull to settle down and propagate as they get older, including old-school radicals from the First Wave. Bernardine Dohrn, ‘70s radical Weatherman leader, found as she approached 30 that she’d rather blow up birthday balloons than government toilets. Sexless gooning, MG/WGTOW-ing, and fake wombs as dangerously untested as sex changes for children are depressingly unnatural and anti-human. The right suggests the solution—a return to marriage and the two-parent family—but doesn’t take it seriously enough. Make America Fertile Again J.D. Vance, America’s only hope if Dozy Don kacks it in office, wants Americans to make more babies, despite having only three himself, when he’s rich enough to support many more. Maybe Usha has put an ‘Out of business’ sign over her cervix. Vance and the rest of the Make America Fertile Again gang don’t seem much interested in why people choose not to have babies . They pay lip service to parenthood while the President denies the affordability crisis, perpetuating parenthood untenability, leaving it to their biggest donors farming their progeny out to strangers on the Internet. Keep America Fatherless! Trump at least is calling for IVF treatments for all, despite his Veep’s historical opposition to it. J.D. and the MAFA gang assume they know what’s best for us non-conformists. They’re hell-bent on forcing parenthood at least on women by making abortion harder to find than a rent-stabilized apartment. They’re frowning at birth control too, especially emergency contraception, encouraging women toward celibacy. It otherwise leaves rape as the only way to perpetuate one’s genes. Fortunately for today’s women, the virgins have no idea where to put their ding-dong. Trigger warning: Sexual violence As always, the subtler reason behind MAFA is returning women to the home and nursery, leaving men as to run the world without a Great Feminization. Or HR. The clear and easy answer to the birth dearth is filling in the blanks with surplus humans from other parts of the world. Like maybe an immigration policy that falls somewhere between throw-open-the-doors and white-South-Africans-only? Rampant xenophobia and consequent government raids in the current administration is only one of many reasons why Americans can’t have affordable produce. Some farmers report 70% of their farm workers are missing which means cutting back on planting and higher supermarket prices. Alien hysteria impacts child care too , as parents and guardians are forced to cut back their hours, leave their jobs, or just return to stay-at-home parenthood. Some day, when the ICE Age is lifted and sane federal administration returns to Washington, we can also ‘lift our lamp, beside the golden door,’ to take in once again the huddled masses yearning to be free. And to raise the kids parents don’t have time for. We will survive Society changes and adapts to every unexpected blow, like most recently the pandemic. It adapted to the Baby Boom explosion and so too, will we, for fewer humans. We’ve survived famines, volcanic eruptions, and countless wars. At eight billion and counting, there’s no birth dearth in the world; simply a misalignment of humans. What we should be worried about is our planet’s finite resources we’re blowing through with every pointless new iPhone release. Scientists argue whether we’re in the midst of an Anthropocene Era-driven sixth mass extinction . We merely haven’t imagined yet how it will look with fewer future adults. We’ll just invite others back, if they trust us not to keep electing senile old men to positions of great responsibility. The ‘birth dearth’ is a course correction. Parenthood is not for the casual and irresponsible, and we are as free as we ever were to not produce other over-consuming humans. We can barrel forward childfree, guilt-free, inventing and creating and traveling and communicating with people who don’t pronounce the third number as free. I feel for kids who weren’t wanted, whose short miserable lives passed before my eyes in newspaper headlines. Like Charlie Wright , a 7-year-old Akron boy in 1987 beaten to death by his hooker mom who had “no desire to be a responsible parent.” Or the starved Turpin kids , or Jeffrey Baldwin , a 5-year-old starved to death by his Ontario grandparents when his mother lost custody. I feel for these kids because I was born into a good family, with parents who loved my brother and I and supported us. They didn’t beat us, rape us, starve us, tell us we were worthless or leave us alone for days at a time. I don’t know what I did to deserve my parents, nor what those dead children did, either. I was luckier, I guess. We don’t have to breed to fill jobs sitting idle. Just as you wouldn’t want a frustrated pro golfer operating on your dad’s heart because his parents insisted No, that’s a silly dream, you’re going to be a doctor, you want only the truly dedicated to raise children. We merely have to get rid of our political xenophobes and reintroduce a sane immigration policy with better screening for criminality and terrorist leanings. How else might we adapt? We could reduce our consumption considerably, and challenge how much we need all our useless stuff. We might find other things to do with fewer running factories. We could farm, return to hand-crafted items, and hang out with our fellow humans more. Do you really need a virtual reality set? What if reality is more fulfilling than fake-Tenerife? There’s no guarantee being a good parent, or a co-parent, will result in a child who makes you proud, but at least you can die knowing you did the best you could, despite your mistakes. We don’t need more humans. We need more humanity—the kind that emanates from our hearts, and allows us to connect as God or evolution designed us, before we allowed the tech bros to offer us a depraved new world. 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!