Where have these late-night boneheads been for the last fifteen years? Why weren't they defending the rest of us from free speech fascists? Especially, you know, their own fellow comedians? Jimmy Kimmel in an only superficially more tolerant era. Public domain photo  by Erin Scott on Wikimedia Commons First they came for Kevin Hart, and I did not speak out—because his ten-year-old jokes were said to be ‘homophobic’. Then they came for Dave Chappelle, and I did not speak out—because he was said to be ‘transphobic’. Then they came for Stephen Colbert, and I did not speak out—because I didn’t watch his show. Then they came for Jimmy Kimmel—and I wondered where in hell Trump got the idea that he had the right to oppress and abrogate comedic free speech. - Pastor Nöballzer Oh, isn’t it cute how the far left is in a tizzy over a war on comedy, now that the first cannonball has been fired by the Orange Menace’s hand-picked FCC content police lackey. I guess the ‘woke’ finally WOKE THE FUCK UP. Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel got axed for jokes that annoyed President Manbaby. In saner times, Kimmel’s somewhat insensitive joke about Charlie Kirk’s assassin would have warranted an apology rather than tabling his show. But now he’s reinstated, and we’re all glad. Take that, you senile lump of useless protoplasm. Dictators do, it’s true, come for the comedians and humorists first. The irony is Trump doesn’t have much left to clean up. Explain to me why I’m supposed to get all upset for these tone-deaf Karoline Leavitts who’ve been kowtowing for years to other authoritarians: The left’s ‘social justice’ warriors. The notoriously thin-skinned toddler in wolf’s clothing has lost this round and I hope Democrats hold FCC head Brendan Carr accountable, but these watered-down deadbeats have been recycling old jokes for years about the Evil Awful Republicans even when the Democrats are in power, ignoring the progressive hard-on for authoritarianism  surrounding them—cancel culture, deplatforming, the hecklers’ vote, doxing, swatting, book banning , social media dogpiles. Censorship . Who defended Kevin Hart when he was cancelled for gay jokes? Jerry Seinfeld, Nick Cannon, Rob Schneider, and Dave Chappelle ( before  his own cancellation). Not the Late Night gang. Who defended Dave Chappelle? Eddie Murphy, Flame Monroe, Natalie Cuomo, Patton Oswalt. Blandly, Jon Stewart kinda sorta supported him  on a quickie TMZ interview, and, to his credit, so did Stephen Colbert. Although that was in one interview with Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau, in which Colbert defended ‘marginalized’ groups’ oversensitive feelings and never considered what those groups might need to answer for themselves. (The lengthy interview is here , and his comments start at 31:21). ‘Consequence culture’, the MAGAts’ cancel culture rebrand, is what these fake First Amendment supporters past their expiry dates have ignored for the last fifteen years. Wokèd Came The Danger Dictators aren’t always embodied by one man, wearing a uniform with bad hair or a silly hat, and a game plan  for enforcing his will over all. Some dictators are a collective effort. Which is why there’s not much left for the Orange Baby to erase, since the woke War on Comedy has already made it too unsafe to be funny in the Ignited States of Americrap. Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, Larry the Cable Guy and Chris Rock stopped performing on college campuses years ago. When the woke dug up ten-year-old ‘homophobic’ jokes to force Kevin Hart to step down as the Oscars host, the dictators were identified by all the recognizable garish Batvirtue signals of the Rainbow set. I agree Hart’s old gay jokes weren’t funny—about breaking his son’s head if he played with his sister’s dollhouse or calling someone a ‘fat fag’. They were tasteless and offensive, but totally 1A-approved. Mass entertainment’s cowardly lions kowtowed to anonymous humophobes rather than telling them to wo/man up. Dave Chappelle: Nearly hounded out of the business because of jokes that offended some transwomen, but not those who were wo/man enough. Like Daphne Dornan, who laughed through his most ‘transphobic’ material and with whom he was friends until she killed herself, having been also hounded and shamed on Twitter for defending his 2019 ‘Sticks & Stones’ special. Humor speaks truth to power, and America’s Comedy Police came first for the funniest, because humor calls attention to the foibles and hypocrisies of groups progressives hold sacred. As though any human being, or group of humans, is beyond taking down when they need it. The edgiest, funniest, most shareable comedians are those who voice a truth that others hadn’t considered themselves (He’s right! I never thought of that!) or who dare to speak aloud what others don’t (OMG I can’t believe she said it!) The best jokes strike a nerve. Which is humor’s job. Someone, somewhere, something, or some idea must be the recipient of the joke for humor to work at all. “ABC stands for Always Be Caving,” Bill Maher quipped , which perhaps goaded ABC and Disney executives to wo/man up with Kimmel. A guy who proved that even a neo-Nazi  can be right at least once in his life said, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” This makes it clear that our new overlords are Trump and the FCC, and no longer the faux ‘disempowered’ who reigned over, and reined in, the first quarter of twenty-first thought: Transactivists, ‘antiracists’, fauxminists and college kids so dumb they couldn’t challenge Charlie Kirk or name either the river or the sea. When the woke spoke, comedians obeyed Funnymen shalt ignore that skin color is a tired excuse for criminal behavior and that ignoring the racist attack  by a black man on a white woman in North Carolina is itself RACIST. Thou shalt not make jokes about one’s transitioned Hollywood agent throwing her old dick  on the conference table. Thou shalt not point out the irony of the feminist movement taking orders from misogynist cross-dressers while damning men who simply fancy women’s company. Thou shalt not defend, nor call out, the injustice of allowing clearly biological men to compete against women. Or even what the definition of an actual woman is. Ah yes, Jon Stewart. He used to be my fave. Now he’s a Good Little Soldier in the woke army, obediently criticizing the gender-critical who know biology better than he. The man who made me roar through ‘Mess O’ Potamia’ during the Bush II years, who always did his homework and nailed the Bushshit of every single administration member, didn’t ask the glaringly obvious questions or investigate whether sex is ‘assigned at birth’ as the ideologically insane maintained. The man who made international headlines on Fox News’s Crossfire twenty-one years ago to ask Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala to ‘stop hurting America’,  pushed, long after he should have known better, genderwoo exemplified by a detransition movement of young people who outgrew their gender dysphoria as many critics predicted, and now suffer more than a few-ah regrets. Stewart returned a grizzled old geezer who effectively demonstrated who you shouldn’t invite for Thanksgiving unless he promises to behave. “Now remember, children, don’t mention the Supreme Court’s Skrmetti decision banning harmful transition treatments, because you know how Grandpa gets and you’re not going to change his mind, he still believes his gardener is spying on him for Karl Rove!” Seth Meyers, after the Democrats returned to power, kept making fun of the Republicans and Trump as though they still ran the show. He missed so much ripe for comedic criticism. He was on Trump and the Republicans forever about racism but never noticed anti-white racism or the pseudo-historical  1619 Project. Nadda word about ‘progressive’ factions who pushed anti-white racism, but when Trump began rounding up immigrants accused of being brown and talking weird, big surprise, Meyers decried ICE raids. Blind. As. A. Bat. When you ignore the Democratic sinners behind the curtain, you make the same rote jokes every night and they’re just not funny anymore. Trump is crazy, Trump is stupid, MAGAs are evil, Republicans are racist. Jokes about racist Republicans fall much flatter when hosts play to an audience that itself embraces racism. Or when they make fun of loony QAnon but not ‘Free Palestine’s blood libels. Or when they damn Trump for being racist. Or fail to condemn Black Lives Matter for gross antisemitism. Ever heard of Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X. Kendi, guys? Apparently not. They wouldn’t speak truth to power when bright blue ocean liners of fresh material rotted in the harbor, so Trump’s FCC is merely driving the final nail in their coffins. While late-night comedians ignored progressive censorship, less powerful people like me and several others I know were getting shut down not by conservatives, but by progressives. How much more audience might those of us deplatformed by Medium, Counter Social, Vocal, Bluesky, Mastodon and others have if these so-called Free Speech Warriors had shamed the progressive censormonkeys of their heyday? How much bigger might late night’s  own  audiences have been? Maybe too big for Brendon Carr to shut down? The new breed of comedians Past-their-primers have opened the door to new comics and humorists who will also re-make the progressives’ mistakes, but at the moment are making us laugh at what the comedians could have been making bank on themselves if they weren’t such massive wokeweenies. Matt Walsh, conservative self-described ‘theocratic fascist’, makes hilarious documentaries like What Is A Woman and Am I Racist? and progressives lament how rich he’s gotten. Why? Because he’s FUCKING FUNNY!!! Watch the following short video of Walsh reading his children’s book Johnny the Walrus  and tell me it’s not what any of the late-nighters could do right now. Admittedly, the kids sound coached. Matt Walsh does liberal comedians’ jobs by calling out the very worst excesses of Democratic, progressive hypocrisy and stupidity the way the Late Night gang once did against whoever the hell was pretending to run the government that term. What’s embarrassing is, Walsh does it so much better. By   speaking truth to power. By calling out the glaring stupidity of the trans kid movement. Woke progressivism followed the traditional Dictator’s Handbook: Pretend you and your followers are the victims while oppressing everyone in sight. Trump’s Project 2025 MAGAs have seized the handbook in the name of ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’, ‘democracy’, and a lot of other fancy words neither they nor the Late Night gang truly pledge allegiance to. Now it’s the left suddenly discovering hey, there are ‘consequences’ to ignoring First Amendment attacks by ‘fascists’. It’s rich, it really is, to hear the lamentations of the liberals. Constitutional rights are  under full-blown attack by a demented old coot with nothing but revenge on his mind for ever being held accountable for anything. I agree that Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and anyone else targeted by Trump’s Schutzstaffel  have the right to be stupid, lame, and sometimes wrong. If only the left had embraced that idea earlier, rather than their born-yesterday longing for a return to free speech. The poor saps think it disappeared with Stephen Colbert’s contract. The left’s hate-on for humor might well have begun with that unfortunate joke Justine Sacco tweeted back in 2013 about South Africans and AIDS . Progressives cheered when she lost her job. Now the joke’s on them. Along with the unemployment line. Challenge Humophobia With The Almighty Power Of Comedy! Conservative Humor: It’s Getting F’n Funny And It’s Pwning The Woke! 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!

No, he didn't, and they're not even saying it on social media because I just made it up. But for even just a nanosecond, did you believe it? Graphic generated by Poe Image_Creators Until September 10th, all I knew about Charlie Kirk was enough to exclaim the sum total of all I knew about Charlie Kirk: “The right-wing guy?” I knew his name, but nothing about him. Immediately, my social media feeds exploded with gratitude and rage against the ‘Nazi, fascist, racist, misogynist, Satan’s fluffer’ guy. On the right, it was all outrage. So, that at least confirmed Kirk was right-wing. How much, I didn’t yet know. Now that I do, I’m pissing everyone off by denying he was absolutely, positively, no-holds-barred, the worst fascist Trump-cozying Nazi puppy-eating Kamala Harris-abusing asshat in this particular multiverse. My Substack inbox vomited Charlie Kirk headlines. I’m as sick of hearing about him as you, but, what’s one more brilliant or dumbass opinion? Charlie Kirk was a complex individual just like ourselves with whom many of us strongly disagreed,—who also don’t deserve to be murdered for beliefs others find offensive. I find it interesting that so many who disavow much of what Kirk stood for, are still defending his right to exist. One of my favorite Real Liberals™, Helen Pluckrose , even wrote a firm and brilliantly liberal denunciation of killing people whose free speech one doesn’t like. To be fair, Kirk’s critics can point to things he’s said (and have been fact-checked by Snopes) to bolster their arguments that he was often out of step with a fair chunk of America. Or just flat-out wrong, like linking the rise of transgenderism to inflation. The smirkiest I will get about his unforgivable assassination is to note that yes, Chuckles said a few gun deaths were worth the ‘small’ price to pay for the Grand 2A. ‘Collateral damage’ as Timothy McVeigh might put it. I’m sure Kirk would agree. Especially since he already approved of assassinating one’s political enemies. Wonder if he’d make the same plea for Tyler Robinson? There’s plenty to loathe him for and you’ve probably already seen his Top 100 horrendous hits on social media. But…. Where did you agree with Charlie Kirk? Kirk described his parents as ‘moderate Republicans’, which isn’t exactly seig heil territory, regardless of what your college-age niece tells you. He was raised Presbyterian, was a Boy Scout and an Eagle Scout. He rejected university to form Turning Point USA to fight what he felt were the excesses of woke progressivism. This so-called dog poo on your Birkenstocks was pretty sympatico on free speech with myself and many others on both sides of the divide. He said, and he was right, [ellipses not mine]: “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens. Because you start to think the other side is so evil and that they lose their humanity. Marriages break apart when you stop talking, churches fall apart. … And I think what makes this country on the verge of going to a place we don’t want it to go right now, is we’re afraid to go to places like this and have these conversations.” Nailed it! "My wish for the left is that you’ll become liberal again and no longer leftist. Free speech is a liberal value. It is not a left-wing value. …as of today, Lucy Connelly is going to jail for two and a half years in this country [Britain] for a social media post that she apologized and deleted about a migrant hotel. That is not a free speech value at all. You should be allowed to say outrageous things. You should be allowed to say contrarian things. Free speech is a birthright that you gave us and you guys decided not to codify it and now it's poof, it's basically gone." Fuckin’ A, man. Speaking as someone who’s been liberal for longer than Kirk was allowed to be alive, I can tell you that this is what almost all of us libs thought thirty, forty years ago. I was there, man. My free speech views were tempered and forged by atheists and freethinkers I encountered in the early years of online, back when communication all happened in text. No video, no photo images, no downloading anything unless you were lucky enough to be attached to, I don’t know, Microsoft’s server farm. Hold up bad ideas to the light, they said. Let’s examine them. Let’s see what works better. The Constitution does a good job of delineating what shouldn’t be legal. You have to prove what you claim. And you can’t threaten to kill the President, even if he’s an asshole. ‘Hate speech’ was so strictly defined you practically had to be a card-carrying Nazi and David Duke’s BFF to get arrested. If you want to know what un-reined woke progressivism looks like, just cast your eyes east across the Big Drink. You can get arrested for shit even our crazy-ass wokies here in North America can’t pull off (yet). The U.K. is now one of the worst places to be if you have an opinion. At all. You can literally be arrested for talking shit to your friend in a pub that offends someone who overheard you. Maybe it’s safer to go tip a pint in someone’s woodshed. Chuckles the Klaüen and I wouldn’t agree on most everything besides free speech. But a self-defined ‘liberal’ (his word) on free speech at least wasn’t the cardboard Nazi monster your TDS-addled sister-in-law with the nose ring and five divorces behind her tells you. I couldn’t stand Kirk’s hero Rush Limbaugh, but when a liberal acquaintance emailed me many years ago crowing that he was losing his hearing , and isn’t it ironic that he can no longer hear when he refuses to listen to others, I told him I was sorry to hear that because it’s tragic, even for Rush Limbaugh. We love our schadenfreude; wanting to find virtue in the misfortunes of our enemies while damning them when they find the same in ours. The Great Debater. Not. Politico, left-center-biased but highly factual , analyzes Kirk’s influence by observing that his real superpower was “intuiting — and deftly exploiting — the institutional hollowness of the Republican Party under Trump.” He also, they claimed, filled the gaping holes in the campus environment opened up by dogmatic academia. I agree with Charlie Kirk very much that so-called liberals have abandoned free speech. I have to laugh watching him take on dumbass college students who can’t define or defend whatever they just called him. Not that he was a great debater himself. In addition to some of his more illogical comments, he ‘manterrupted’ and often wasn’t interested in actually hearing anyone out, or helping these poorly-educated college students currently bankrupting their future by pointing out the flaws in their logic. But, don’t take on a dude like this if you’re incapable of original thought because he could think on his feet, while most of his biggest critics, I’m pretty sure, can’t even locate their own feet. Love him or hate him, he knew which way the wind was blowing without raising a moistened finger. He embraced social media and podcasting early on. According to Politico, he turned from “Tea Party-era libertarianism in favor of a Trump-inflected populist nationalism.” Apparently with more time on his hands during the pandemic, he embraced conservative Christianity which undoubtedly increased his influence more with the Jesus set. (I do wonder if he became more radical for the likes and Instagram glory rather than evolving personal principles.) I’m not the only liberal who doesn’t believe Charlie Kirk straps kittens to rockets and sends them into space just because some idiot on a newsletter platform suggested it. California governor Gavin Newsom took real grief from the left for being congenial, if not necessarily BFFs, with Charlie Kirk. One point of agreement between them: They both believe transgender women in sports is unfair. Who has the right to play God? I wonder if the shooter consulted anyone else’s opinion on Charlie Kirk before he took it upon himself to decide who lives and dies. Like, maybe, Kirk’s children. I wonder how evil they thought Father was. Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s self-appointed judge, didn’t know what his target would be like ten, twenty, thirty years from now. Maybe Kirk wouldn’t have changed much. Maybe he’d be worse. Or maybe he’d have softened his extremist views with the wisdom of greater experience, like Malcolm X did toward the end. We don’t know. And neither does Kirk, because he got cut down by someone who had no right to make that decision for him. Those who believe it’s okay to murder another human being because they don’t like their political views legitimate those who might want to eliminate them for theirs. Soon you won’t even need to be famous for eligibility. I’m speaking to everyone who defended any assassination by perfunctorily condemning it while adding that hypocritical ‘but’. There are no ‘buts’. It’s either wrong or it’s not. It’s either open season on everyone or not. Laws are for all of us, or none of us. Anarchy now? Or do you want to see your children grow up? 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!

Or why the 'tolerance' gang is as consumed by the same fascist hatred as the right's, passively manipulated by the Islamofascists driving Gaza's problems AI Image by zhi wei yu from Pixabay I’ve never understood the tribalism that inclines humans to hate others based on ridiculous reasons. I understand the evolutionary drive to protect yourself and your kinfolk from potential enemies, but even as a four-year-old, it was clear to me how utterly stupid discrimination is. I don’t understand why we’re still committed to it, when we live much more peacefully with others than in earlier eras. Yes, even with all of our modern mass shootings and other in(s)anities. I especially find antisemitism incomprehensible. I don’t understand why history, and Europe, had such a hate-on for such a small group of people that they fought a war over them. Or why Germany was ground zero, providing fertile ground for Adolf Hitler, who weaponized a mindless hatred already so deeply embedded in the German psyche that they could be induced to attack, ruin, and methodically murder their neighbors. Kenneth Branagh in Conspiracy (2001), about the Swansea Conference that led to the Final Solution. Supposedly, the dialogue and storyline were taken straight from the only recorded transcript of the meeting. Such embrace of evil exists not only on the far right, where some proudly identify as ‘Nazis’ and publicly endorse Hitler’s policies, but also with its eruption on the left like an ugly zit, every bit as virulent and toxic as those ‘Nazis’ they declaim, merely a stone’s throw on the other side of the fascist barbed wire fence. Never in my sixty-two years have I seen such naked hatred for others, by those claiming the ‘right side of history’, ‘compassion’, ‘empathy’, ‘inclusivity’, and ‘embracing diversity’. The failures of wokeism and what is actually the regressive, rather than ‘progressive’ left, is exemplified by their worst moral failure: Embracing Nazism via Islamofascism. The very nadir of ‘progressive’ spiritual corruption has been its embrace of Hamas, the filthy brotherhood of animals behind October 7. Israeli bodies were still lying in the desert in pools of congealed blood in the golden rays of the rising sun when the Western left woke up, learned what had happened, and immediately jumped to the following conclusion: This was Israel’s fault! No patience for investigation. No glaringly obvious questions asked by the ‘social justice’ brigade about how this was anything other than an animalistic attack on a bunch of kids having fun at a music concert. No acknowledgement of what anyone with eyes, ears, and a functioning brain can see—that not Israel, but Hamas’s Islamofascism, cradled by the support of the deeply morally flawed antisemitic Islamic world—are the primary sources of endless pain and suffering in Gaza. Wokeism yawns at barbarity Hamas’s live-streamed vicious attack globally united keffiyeh-waving antisemites, kumbyeyah ’ing to the vicious rapes, the tortures, the murders, Israeli living rooms and bedroom walls splattered with blood. So-called ‘progressives’ cheered the filthy fascist pigs who engineered the slaughter, they who stand for everything the left claims to hate. How nauseated and disgusted so many of them profess to be about the barbarity of the ICE raids in the U.S. Kinda catchy, innit? Is this slogan wrong? Discuss. Debate. Explain. Yet they identified Israel as the genocidists rather than the terrorist mob whose own charter acknowledges that they must rid the world of Jews. If there was any one thing that drove the final nail into the coffin of woke politics, and possibly helped elect Donald Trump, it was the left’s response to Oct 7. Its uncritical embrace of the world’s oldest hatred, claiming ‘antifascism’ while whoring itself to Islamofascism, exposed how cruelty and hatred are as baked into their dead souls as the MAGAs’. Feminists embraced the rapists’ ‘truths’ about what happened, not the victims’; the U.N. didn’t get around to issuing a response for two months; the ‘Queers for Palestine’ gang emerged, waving their retarded banners while ignoring Gazans throwing people like them off roofs. They embraced an Arab world that encourages genocide not just against Jews but also homosexuals and transgenders. (Except for Iran’s policy of sex-transitioning gay people to make them ‘normal’ and acceptable in the eyes of God.) The rest of humanity still in possession of human decency ‘woke up’ in a way the left hadn’t intended, and abandoned the Democratic Party that had itself abandoned compassion, truth, and a four-year-old’s understanding of gross injustice. Too many Democrats got stoned on the venom, while their senseless sycophants celebrated the cruelty, the mindless hatred of a whole other people they knew nothing about. They who lost their minds over ‘misgendering’ or an old joke from fifteen years ago applauded and smiled at stories of families tied together and set on fire. Axios detailed how ‘The Squad’ had already begun to lose genuinely liberal support with antisemitic statements made previously by professional haters Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who encouraged the U.S. to cut off aid to Israel in response to Oct 7, joined by Cori Bush. It became clear, that same day, that the ‘Free Palestine’ movement was all about Jew hatred, not any fucks given about the Gazans. Unsurprisingly, the protests featured the typical brown faces, dark beards, and head coverings we associate with the primary source of enduring antisemitism in the world. The Trouble With Islam Islam, and its military commander founder, has a hate-on for Jews. Why? That part of the world has been mutually problematic for millennia. Many have lived in the Holy Land since the days of their ancestors; others immigrated or invaded, like Muhammad’s imperialist, colonizing army in the 7th century. Here’s an inconvenient fact: Both Judaism and Islam trace their origins back to the same source, Abraham of the Bible. The world’s first Jewish guy. Granted, pre-Judaic Biblical Israelites weren’t exactly humanitarians themselves, pioneering selfish interests disguised as religious commandments. King Josiah was a fanatic who executed pagan priests and even dug up the bones of the already-dead and burned them on altars. Then there’s the Godly stuff about baby-bashing (Psalm 137), destroying all your enemies (Deuteronomy 20:17), and killing all the Midianites except for the hot virgins (1 Numbers 31:7–18). If you’ve ever read the Old Testament stem to stern, there are only two words to describe Yahweh: Fucked. Up. War crimes and mindless violence between Israelites and their rivals and enemies stretch through history to modern times. La plus ça change. But four thousand years past Abraham, Judaism is a much more peaceful and tolerant religion than had been their priests with Pagan Derangement Syndrome. Mostly because they’ve paid over and over again as the world’s buttmonkeys for everything wrong with it. There’s no logical reason today why Israelis and Gazans can’t share the land and live together, but too many Gazans Muslims just can’t seem to handle it. It’s Hamas, not Israel, stupid The Islamic world can’t solve the problems in the Holy Land when it’s riven with authoritarianism and terrorism. Islamofascism is the problem. There’s not much to truly find fault with the religion of Judaism or its people anymore, and Zionism doesn’t count because antisemites created it with the Holocaust. The Gazans in 1948 were offered half the land; they fought a war to remove the Jews and take it all. The Gazans and their Muslim collaborators, not Israeli Jews, are the real stumbling blocks to peace. Those who embrace rather than fight Hamas’s control of the region, and the endless warfare and starvation they bring unto the Gazans, are in no moral position to criticize Netanyahu and the IDF’s actions. Standing with Hamas is standing with evil, plain and simple. If you’re still unconvinced, ask a four-year-old. As Coleman Hughes pointed out in a recent article, “It’s possible to agree with the goals of an army but condemn its methods. During the Civil War, the Union Army burned down 40 percent of Atlanta, including civilian homes. Some of that was unnecessary, even immoral. But the North was still the good guy. Not because it was the underdog, or because it suffered more war crimes than the South, but because its goal—to end slavery—was fundamentally just.” War crimes are omnipresent in war and always bi-guilty. Jews have received the brunt of history’s hate despite the fact that they haven’t ruled anything for thousands of years. What matters is what’s happening now, and we need to call out the world’s most violent religion, whose holy book records that even trees and rocks approve of killing Jews, and is desperately in need of modernizing and yes, civilizing. But we can’t do it for them; only Muslims can reboot, revamp, rebrand, and fix the baser elements in their religion, and so far, not enough want to do it. Which is why Gazans can’t have nice things. Liberty vs authoritarianism How easy it is to ignore the pain on the other side’s, when one is a mindless ideologue committed to its own cause. One side in the Holy Land would happily live in peace if only their enemies would leave them alone; the other side only if their enemies lay down and die. Idiot know-nothings happily flap their flags in support. Others quietly watch from the sidelines, not partaking, perhaps dismayed, but unwilling to stand against the Keffiyeh Klan’s genocidists, the Good Little Germans we saw during the last round of fascionable Nazism. Why can’t they understand it makes more sense to discriminate against bad ideas, bad values, and ass-dragging cultures rather than people. A ‘bad’ person should be one who has earned that label through wrong action, thought, and speech. Who embraces policies for others they wouldn’t want to live under themselves. Islam is a vast collection of both good and bad ideas, but they haven’t ‘done the work’ to purge the latter, the way Judaism and Christianity have done. Political satirist Andrew Doyle, speaking with the Canadian journalist Tara Henley recently on Lean Out , identified the real battle: “…the eternal struggle between those who believe in liberty and those who believe in authoritarianism.” Today’s polarized gormlessness isn’t between left and right, because liberty lovers and authoritarians are clearly on both sides. Doyle claims, and I agree, that authoritarianism is the ‘default position' for human beings. We liberty lovers are happy to watch the MAGAs destroy the excesses of wokeism, but the ugly truth is the illiberal left and illiberal right feed off each other. They’re replacing one autocracy with another. It will now be the left’s freedoms curtailed, their language policed, their renegades and mavericks shut down, and jailed, especially if they speak truth to power. The white supremacists will replace the anti-white ones. The latter represent the other side of bigotry, demonizing white people while the darker-skinned remain beyond reproach, as infallible as the Pope. What we haven’t yet considered is whether the two sides of illiberalism will eventually realize how much common ground they share, with the one thing they can agree on completely: Their hatred for the world’s favorite scapegoat. Antisemitism is the most prevalent bigotry in the world today, driven by a religion prone to fanaticism, and poorly-educated young people who’ve been fed woke critical theory and social justice mischigoss. Antisemitism marks its supporters as morally corrupted people in desperate need of a spiritual enema. Woke progressives ran afoul of human decency when they turned their truths into sacred dogma. They never questioned themselves, asked those obvious questions, or wondered where they might be wrong. You can support the Gazans without calling for genocide of the Israelis. But if you align with groups like Hamas, you’re not an ‘antifascist’. You are quite explicitly fascist yourself, and you sure as hell aren’t ‘pro-Palestinian’. Why Holocaust Denialism Hurts Islam - by V.A. Mohamad Ashrof in Countercurrents These. People. Are. Motherfarking. CRAZY!!! If Someone Held A Real Trans Genocide, Would Transfolk Even Notice? The Difference Between Islamophobia And ‘Islamojustifobia’ Sadat Shami's photo , licensed as CC BY 2.0 on Flickr 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!

Resistance and reality denial make us sicker in a world where victimhood reigns and emotional strength is uncool Image by kp yamu Jayanath from Pixabay Oh, the ‘fundamental violation’ of Pap smears. An Eva Kurilova article mentioning female-born, now non-binary Maia Kobabe, the ‘e/em/eir’ author of Genderqueer, made me smile at the phrase. A quote from the book’s description describes the ‘trauma’ and violation Kobabe felt from Pap smears. Just reading about it made me want to squirm. They ain’t fun. The Pap smear is the only part of a gynecological exam I dislike. For a minute or so you’re on your back with your hoo-ha spread by a cold speculum while the doctor inserts a lengthy Q-tip and mines for gold or something. It doesn’t hurt but it’s uncomfortable and fundamentally frightening on a deeper level. For just a few moments I’m entirely vulnerable and exposed. I can’t help but think of horror movies. I get Kobabe’s discomfort with Pap smears but I wouldn’t call it ‘traumatizing’ or a ‘violation’. I consent to it every two years, after all. It’s all in how you look at it. A few moments of discomfort on my back is a small price to pay for the much more serious potential discomfort of dying of cervical cancer. Thank the Gods for modern medicine, and anyway, if I had one cancer prevention procedure I would dispense with, I’d choose the colonoscopy. You wanna talk invasive??? But even then, it’s an annoyingly inconvenient price to pay for avoiding butt-related cancers. I wonder if Maia Kobabe might make her Pap smear experience worse because she’s already in denial of her biological sex, but it’s still nothing to look forward to no matter your state of personal acceptance. It demonstrates a truth that eludes many in our modern age: Not all trauma is thrust upon us. Sometimes we create it ourselves. Trauma is inevitable. How we frame it matters Human beings can’t avoid trauma. It’s encoded into the human experience. It begins in infancy and sometimes even before. Stress hormones impact a baby’s developing brain at a deep level by rewiring their neural pathways and priming it for fear. It can even impede development of the cerebral cortex in some cases. Maternal stress hormones affect the fetus during pregnancy. We can’t avoid mini-traumas or larger ones, but we can control how we handle them. Viktor Frankl’s globally beloved classic Man’s Search for Meaning details his experiences in several Nazi concentration camps. He lost everything: His wife, his family, and his research which the Nazis destroyed. He described the prisoners and how he could identify those who had the will to survive, who didn’t, and exactly when they commended themselves to death. Facing one of the most critical traumas of all time, those who weren’t murdered often survived by choice—with emotional resilience and not giving up. Frankl went on to publish 39 books, re-build his ‘logotherapy’ research, and framed his trauma in healthier ways rather than allow himself to be consumed by bitterness, hatred, or learned helplessness. It’s hard to imagine how any of us could survive something like that, raised as we are in comparatively safe North America where our ‘traumas’ are minor compared to those who faced Nazi hospitality. I’ve been friendly with a Vietnamese woman whose family escaped the Communists in the mid-’70s, and a woman who navigated gunfire helping her little brother escape to safety when Saddam invaded Kuwait. A former co-worker escaped Rwanda in the ‘90s. I can’t imagine how I would react in those circumstances. Or even if I would survive. Traumas are always made worse by human action and inaction. Research shows that people who experience great loss in a natural disaster are traumatized, but not nearly as much as by those for whom the government response is inadequate, like after the incompetent way the Bush administration handled the response to Hurricane Katrina. Depression, anxiety, fear and resentment is compounded following a natural catastrophe in which the government responds poorly. Otherwise, what happened is merely an ‘act of God’, or in modern parlance, ‘shit happens’. The emotionally resilient look at traumatic events in different ways to reduce the sense of trauma. Fighting reality makes it worse The Buddhist teacher and author Tara Brach teaches that ‘Pain x Resistance = Suffering.’ We can’t avoid suffering but we can compound it or relieve it. Reality resistance makes it worse. I have a friend who hails from a famously warm country. He’s been living in Canada for twenty-seven years but he just has this thing about winter. He’s loved the overly-hot weather we’ve had this summer and mentions mournfully that summer is almost over and how much he hates cold weather. “It’s a pain,” I acknowledge, since I dislike having to figure out every day what I’m going to wear, how heavily I should dress, whether I need galoshes or not. But, I also recognize that I live in Canada, which I chose to move to (as did he, a refugee from violence), and that cold weather is part of the bargain. I pointed out crappy weather is a small price to pay for freedom. While his country isn’t war-torn anymore, conditions exist in which it could break out aga in. Which is why I assume he hasn’t moved back. He increases his suffering by resisting cold weather rather than accepting it. The motivational speaker Louise Hay found a way to relieve the aggravation she experienced from paying bills—a not-uncommon human grievance. She re-framed her resistance by paying them with gratitude that she was able to afford these services, and appreciating the people who trusted her to pay on time. I can’t actually ‘rejoice’ as she does when I pay bills, but it does help to remember that I’m not living hand-to-mouth as others are forced to do, and it makes it easier. But today, for some, ‘trauma’ has become the cool thing to acquire, and if you don’t have any actual trauma, you can find it anywhere, like images in clouds. Need some suffering? Ask TikTok! ‘Trauma’ is popular and has become conveniently appropriated to excuse and deflect personal responsibility. One can manufacture it for sympathy, for example. A few years ago I took interest in a minor celebrity scandal centred around Tony award-winning Broadway star Alice Ripley, who was accused by several fans of ‘grooming’ them, although they couldn’t clearly articulate for what, and ‘using’ them for their attention, thereby sending some into therapy. They were mostly confused young adolescent girls attracted to the popular performer, some of whom might have not been aware yet they were gay. The story drew my attention for two reasons: The fact that someone was getting ‘cancelled’ for nebulous reasons again by the usual culprits, confused teenage girls; and also because I went to college with Alice, and took two dance classes with her although I never spoke to her; I was jealous of her beauty and dance skills. The Daily Beast ran a lengthy article about the girls’ complaints against her, which mostly involved attention from Alice, but apparently, not enough. Alice didn’t respond to the allegations, although apparently the Beast reached out. I researched further. Alice’s groupies never accused her of molesting them, although one accused her of an unexpected, but not seemingly unwanted kiss. The fan’s gripe seemed not to be lack of consent, but lack of romantic continuance. Many were clearly hurt by Alice’s inability or unwillingness to spend more time with them; and they took their revenge on social media, trying to make her out as some sort of monster to generate sympathy and hurt her back. Her fans were young, impressionable, starstruck, and infused with genderqueer ideology, which drives and reinforces a victimhood mentality. The fortunately-unsuccessful cancellation campaign against Alice struck me as exaggerated, such as it was on Twitter and TikTok, ground zero for trauma farming. Imagine going into therapy because a celebrity didn’t pay enough attention to you. In a Psychology Today article, How TikTok and Twitter Get Trauma So Wrong , a trauma-trained therapist says she’s ‘angered’ by trauma misinformation online. ‘Trauma’ becomes an excuse for everything, she points out, like perfectionism or watching a favored TV show repeatedly. If you don’t know what your trauma is, you can peruse the TikTok library or comb your childhood for reasons to join the club. Picking out one particular cause to explain anything wrong with your life, including habits or personality quirks you didn’t even know were ‘wrong’, is something we’ve seen already with social media’s years-long campaign to pathologize every unhappy feeling a child or teenager has as ‘born in the wrong body’. Before that, it did exactly the same with anorexia. Hurt feelings and misunderstood connections, once considered normal, now become cause célèbres when one party conflates the two, as we saw in the Aziz Ansari fuss a few years ago. As Yale psychologist Molly Crockett pointed out in a New York Times article on the rise of ‘trauma talk’, “Algorithms can’t distinguish between what is proportionate or disproportionate to the original transgression.” Trauma gets clicks, likes, shares, and maybe even turns one into a star or an influencer. Any sort of discomfort one human being feels toward another is explained by trauma or it becomes the trauma. Trauma has become such a coolness marker among the young that even when they were raised by good parents, they find reasons to label them as ‘toxic’ so they can leave them behind and join the confederacy of pseudo-traumatized dunces. In Anne Bauer’s Persuasion article America’s Families Are Not Okay , she describes a young woman who cut off her family over genuine abuse and dysfunction, which made her friends from happy homes excited, almost jealous of her. They talked about their ‘toxic’ parents, but their reasons seemed awfully ‘dumbass’, like a dad who disagreed with them on climate change. Family estrangement is always tragic, but it’s amplified when it’s fake or manufactured. Bad parents often know on some level that they’re the reason their child no longer comes for Christmas; good parents are horribly hurt, trying to figure out why their child hates them so. One can’t help but wonder what will happen to those generations who have permanently altered their families and relationships, even if they eventually reconcile. Blinded by the night What does it say about our society when so many thrive on dysfunction, and reject what is good and loving? It’s not just young people driving themselves off a cliff who seek dysfunction if it’s missing in their lives; we see it in adults too, as I detailed recently in my article about anxiety junkies . Rather than look for the positive in the world’s news, many prefer the darkness. It makes it more difficult to find healthy responses to global and local conflicts when we believe the worst about others, and do unto them before they do what we fear unto us. Suffering is inevitable, but there’s still choice. We can’t cancel pain, but rather than seek the dark camaraderie of others, we can resolve to suffer less rather than more. 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!

Some say they simply 'can't' not look at the news or stay away from social media, even though it's literally driving them crazy. Royalty-free photo from Hippo PX “I can’t not look at the news,” Scott replied when I pointed out it wasn’t an emotionally healthy habit. “But it’s making you crazy,” I pointed out. “I have to know what’s coming,” he insisted. We think if we consume enough news we’ll be prepared for whatever disaster’s barrelling toward us. Except we’re not. Algorithms’ job is manufacturing and monetizing fear. The more frightened we are, the more we doomscroll—and the easier we are to control by those who want us to act, think, or vote a certain way. Scott has been ranting about billionaires for years and got angry when I asked where he got his sources about certain Jeffrey Epstein claims. He also leans toward conspiracy theories. He once got so triggered during a political discussion I considered ending the friendship. Other friends suffer from, I suspect, ‘anxiety addiction’, as described in a Psychology Today article . “Our world is in the midst of an emotional meltdown,” it begins—in 2011 . The psychiatrist author describes people who suffer ‘techno despair’, information overload from an Internet addiction of obsessively seeking bad news. He also describes a new kind of ‘attachment disorder’ some feel when they’re separated from their mobile and can’t access their emails or keep in constant touch with their favorite feeds. Eleven years later, in 2021, the American Psychological Association warned that media overload increases mental illness and a learned helplessness over our lives. There’s a partial evolutionary explanation for anxiety addiction: Our caveman brains are primed to worry and stress over the next big threat to our existence, back when opportunities for which existed hour to hour. Thinking ahead and preparing for many possible outcomes has ensured our continuation as a species. Millions of years later, daily threats haven’t changed, except for a decrease in the number of opportunities to die. We still have to plan for various unpleasant scenarios. What if my husband leaves me? What if I lose my job? What if my wife does too? What if there’s a recession? What if I get Parkinson’s like Dad and Granddad? How will I buy a new car with the prices so jacked up? What if there’s stagflation? Civil war? Nuclear war? Humans are primed for vigilance, and anxiety junkies may not know how to live without it. Or they may worry that good news or a more nuanced way of viewing politics, national and global problems will render them more vulnerable to ugly surprises. How can they ever let their guard down? Reading and writing for sanity Fifteen years ago, when social media was still in its pre-teens, I decided to write novels, which meant no more scrolling through Facebook or Twitter keeping up on the lives of friends and people who drunk-friended me after a party, or checking CNN for the latest political outrage. I wasn’t doomscrolling; but I was on social media more than today, and felt triggered but not addicted. Writing novels diverted me down a healthier path while social media was just taking off. I spent the next few years banging out several novels. Later, I moved to writing on Medium until I got kicked to Substack. I still sometimes lie on my couch, letting three hours guiltily slip away courtesy of Instagram, but at least I’m watching harmless drivel—people busting the dance moves, cute kitties, old classic movie snippets, funny sketches. Not nonsense about Trump and Epstein doing a threesome with an underage aardvark or how supporting Israel makes you the moral equivalent of Pol Pot. In Canada, we worry about aU.S. threat to our sovereignty by a mentally unstable president. But I deal with it by listening to our leaders, who are taking it seriously, and I’m not as convinced as others that the U.S. military—the key to success or failure in this endeavor—will support Trump. I manage not to lie awake at night worrying about a different type of Occupy Toronto. I read more books than most, with a view toward finding the positive. I seek hope in historical perspective. I remind people that Hitler’s thousand-year Reich fell short by 988 years. Finishing When Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty taught me that dictators never last, and that they enjoy shorter reigns when there’s enough popular support for regime change, especially from the merchant class. So I worry a little less about a White Haus Putsch —Americans are a scrappier bunch than dutiful Germans. So are Canadians, as it turns out. Reading books provides a twofold function in preserving my sanity: It doesn’t just give me a broader perspective, as finishing one book introduces new questions and I seek new books for further clarity, but it also deflects the doomscrolling seduction. I suspect a particular, less-observed but pervasive root behind others’ anxiety addiction. Why so much of it? Often, what anxiety provides for our political preoccupations is a cover for unrelated anger and stresses. A fellow ex-pat I used to be friendly with seemed to thrive on clickbait, driving an irrational hatred of his mother country, though he could never articulate why he hated it so much; his wife speculated he was actually angry at his mother, his parents’ divorce, and a somewhat dysfunctional childhood. Another friend shared brainless memes about stupid culture war outrages like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, terrified white supremacists were subjugating humanity via groceries. He suffered from multiple health issues, stuck at home on disability. Later, his wife joined him for the same reason. There’s a common thread linking these and other anxiety addicts I know, backed up by research. Liberals suffer news-related anxiety more than conservatives. A 2021 study on emotional responses to news research during the COVID pandemic revealed the more liberals sought information, the more stress they felt. Conservatives felt less distressed, and didn’t worry as much about catching the virus. Young people and women also scored higher for COVID-related anxiety. As Ph.D Steven Stosney notes in the APA article , the red flag for too much news exposure is, “if you get this body tension, or a rise in your pulse rate, just before you check the news. Then you have intrusive thoughts about the headlines—you think about them throughout the day.” News-driven anxiety exposure reduces emotional resilience and our ability to cope with problems overall. Take back your power I have a “Let’s see what happens,” view of the world, which annoys those when I refuse to melt down over Trump’s latest outrage. I recognize that he thrives on keeping people anxious and uncertain about the future. There’s plenty to worry about; he’s clearly a dangerous man with an increasingly unfettered ability to behave lawlessly and unconstitutionally, but I also see domestic problems he’s creating that may force his limited attention span if he wants to make it through his term. I still think America could come out of the Trumpocalypse with some shreds of democracy left, and that history will show he had a greater positive impact on the country in unexpected ways even as he may well drive it toward ruin like he’s done so many of his businesses. I don’t possess the learned helplessness about the prospect of an American invasion. When I do think about it, I mull ways I can fight back. I ponder what I’d do if Toronto suffered a drone attack. I think about how much resistance Trump would encounter at home. How much sabotage against American aggression would come from his own side of the border in a way that never happened before when wars were fought in distant lands. I think about how I can help The Resistance. Anger, as Dr. Stosny states, “is really a cry of powerlessness.” What can anxiety junkies do to restore more peace and control over their lives? As with any addiction, the first step comes from Alcoholics Anonymous: Admit you have a problem and resolve to fix it. Take back your power from the algorithms and your own insular mind. Understand that seeking the positive and less stress-inducing news experiences doesn’t make you a Pollyanna. The herd is stampeding. You don’t have to join them. Question your negative, fear-inducing beliefs. Going cold turkey from the news isn’t the answer either, as anxiety increases from lack of knowledge. Although it works quite well for another friend of mine. The more attention a potential disaster is given by the media, the more likely people are to worry more about it happening to them. Especially if they seek more information. Whatever I worry about—Trump’s latest tariffs or a forthcoming recession—I research different angles. Then I go look for something else. Like cat videos. Or Fluffy or Russell Peters . Another thing: Don’t ruminate about the past or some prior Golden Age. It’s never coming back, but losing the better also means losing the worse. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s books are great for seeing the longer view of history and human evolution. Perhaps most of all, be part of the solution . Do something to fix whatever ails you. If you’re worried about climate change, recycle your plastic bags, educate others, buy a bike. Plan your Resistance to Trumpistan. Tell your Congresscritters you won’t vote for them until they stop pushing crazy woke or batshit-insane Project 2025 crap. Write. Speak out. (Anonymously if necessary.) Protect your assets. Anxiety addiction is one’s own responsibility. You have the power to control how you feel and to not let others keep you in a constant state of adopted fear so they can control you. My friend Scott was horrified when he eventually learned he almost lost a friendship because of his lack of anger management, and a girlfriend left him over it, too. But today, he’s got both of us back and when I was with him recently he said something I rarely heard him say before about his political assessments for the future: “Of course, I may be wrong about this.” Hope is now a radical act. 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!

But only once. Not sure what he saw in me. Surely not victimhood… Photo by Charles C. Collingwood on Unsplash He did a double take as he passed me walking through the mall, and stopped to chat me up. He reminded me a little of a young Frank Langella, so I let him. I’d just moved to Canada. “I’m sorry. I felt compelled to say something. You look so much like a friend who’s recently died.” It was one of the weirdest pickup lines ever, but I fell for it because of prior precedent in my family. My mother’s second love had done a double-take on the bus when he saw her. She said he looked so stunned she believed him when he said Mom looked exactly like the woman he’d been in love with who died back in Germany. He and Mom fell in love, but the romance went nowhere fast because he was already married. So, like mother, like daughter, n’est-ce pas? Well, except for the married part. His name was Sam, and he wanted to take me to lunch. Okay, I said, but first I have to apply for my Ontario Healthcare Insurance Program card. He went with me, and we talked in the waiting room. He seemed okay, nice and friendly, and I kind of liked him, so I thought I’d better drop the bomb that ended things quickly with a lot of Yankee men: I told him I didn’t want children. “Neither do I,” he said. Well okay, then! We couldn’t just eat in the mall, it seemed; he had some special place he wanted to take me. Foolishly, I got into the car with him and we drove somewhere. This is what I call women ‘doing dumb shit’ that puts us in danger. Dumb Shit I’ve Done Spoiler alert: Nothing bad happened. We went to some restaurant on the water — probably Lake Ontario. I had no idea where I was. He’d been pretty free with the compliments, oh how pretty you are, you’re so pretty, I just love being with you, blah blah blah. Guys say a lot of stuff. There was something not right about him. Kind of phony. He asked a lot of questions. He seemed eager to establish an early intimacy. “What are your plans for this summer?” he asked. I mentioned I was going to a family wedding in New York in September. “I’m going with you,” he informed me. “Um, excuse me?” “I’m going with you,” he stated. “Oh no you’re not.” “Why not?” I gave him A Look. “Because we don’t know each other well enough.” “We will by then.” “Why are you worried about September? You don’t even know if we’re going to make it to the weekend yet.” “Why wouldn’t we?” “You’re not going.” “But I want to meet your family.” “I’ll decide when you’re ready to meet my family.” Wisely, he dropped it. There’s nothing that sets a control freak back on his heels quite like an early sign that his victim doesn’t take any shit. Later he pushed my hand down and took the fork from me. “Let me,” he said, and he tried to feed me himself. What was I, two? “No,” I said, and I took my fork back. Did he think that was romantic? I found it infantilizing. After a little more conversation — oh yeah, we were sitting side by side, he didn’t want to sit across from me — he announced, “I’m in love with you.” Photo by Gage Walker on Unsplash I crinkled up my face and said something along the lines of, “What the hell?” “It’s true,” he replied. “I’ve fallen in love with you.” “After only two hours?” “I’m serious.” “Oh, cut it out!” I spat. “You’re not in love with me. That’s bullshit.” “I am,” he insisted. I’d had enough. This afternoon was growing tiresome. I realized I was somewhere in or around Toronto, nowhere near a bus line as far as I knew, with some joker I’d met at the mall and had idiotically gone somewhere in a city I didn’t know very well. Worst came to worst, I could call my roommate to come get me, but that would be supremely embarrassing, not to mention a huge inconvenience for him. Still, I didn’t feel like I was in danger. I’ve gone through life largely convinced I’m not the sort of woman who gets raped and/or murdered. So far so good. He asked a few more questions, but I wasn’t in the mood anymore. “Tell me your hopes and dreams,” he said. “What???” “Tell me your hopes and dreams,” he smiled. Who the hell says that? What were my hopes and dreams? To make a new life in Canada. To find a job soon. To finish my dark fantasy novel and get it published. To be a famous writer. To meet a great guy and fall in love, after so much disappointment in Connecticut. “I don’t have any,” I stated. “What? How can you not have any? Everyone has hopes and dreams!” Sam cried. “I don’t.” “Sure you do. Tell me.” “Nope. I don’t have any. Sorry.” Stated with that smug sarcasm that says screw you, buddy boy! He tried, but he couldn’t pry any hopes or dreams out of me. I was done. I sat back. “I need to get home,” I said. “I have to start making dinner for my roommate.” Or some other stupid lie, I don’t remember. I wondered if he’d return me or just abandon me, but we got into his car and went back to the mall. He dropped me off there. The conversation was more real, less phony, so we kissed before I got back on the bus. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. Today, that would be the end of it, but back then I was trying to turn over a new leaf. My last five years in Connecticut hadn’t been good after my ex and I split up. I call them my Angry Drunken Bitch years. But, there was enough about Sam to like and we’d talked a lot, so when he reached out for another date I agreed. I wanted to be less picky and judgemental. I’d been rather unfair to men, and my last foray in Connecticut, with a customer I’d met through work, hadn’t gone anywhere. The second time Sam called, I had planned to get a haircut. “Cancel it,” he said. “Let’s go do such-and-such.” I was a little taken aback, but I was flattered he wanted to see me so badly, so I did. The next time, I was en route to the salon when he called. “Let’s go do something." “Not this afternoon. I’m going to get my hair cut,” I said. “Cancel it.” “No. I did that last time.” “Do you have to do this today?” he asked. “No, but I cancelled it last time for you. This time I’m getting my hair cut. Some other time, Sam.” For some reason, he expected me to just drop everything when he decided we should go do something. Once or twice I reached out to him, but he said he had other plans. I didn’t ask him to cancel them. I wondered if it was another woman, but I didn’t ask. None of my business; he wasn’t my steady boyfriend. One day we went out to lunch. No annoying comments or pushy suggestions this time. Then we went to see the movie Cinderella Man. All was fine until he tried to push my head down on his shoulder. I pulled it up again. He pushed it down again, more forcefully. “Stop it, that’s annoying,” I hissed. What the hell was wrong with him? Why was he trying to force this intimacy? It was like when he tried to feed me. And told me he was in love with me. He’d said the love thing several times since but I never said it back, and he didn’t ask why. I didn’t believe him either. Five years of bad dating experiences taught me not to believe anything men said anymore. We went back to my place and made out on the couch a little, then he had to go. And after that, I heard nothing. Not a thing. I was pissed. Still quite insecure, I had outdated ideas of how dating was supposed to work. I’d been out of it for awhile. The ex and I were together for over seven years, with a split in between, so by the time I moved to Toronto things had changed a lot, but no one cc’d me the memo. I thought if Sam really cared he’d call. It was out of the question that I call him. I don’t remember if I was just being an idiot or testing him. The silence drove me insane. My roommate and I decided to spend a weekend at Algonquin Park, a huge nature preserve north of Toronto to shoot some moose. Relax! This is the only way we shoot moose. Although that mofo does look like he’s contemplating pulling some shit with me, doesn’t he? Photo by the author's moose-obsessed then-housemate I enjoyed myself, but I also stewed a lot. I never believed Sam’s love bullshit, but it always aggravates me when men meet my low expectations. So much for his great love if he couldn’t be bothered calling! Then I accidentally almost dialed him since I’d either forgotten or not gotten around to deleting his number from my mobile. I hung up quickly. A day or so later, he called, seemingly out of the blue. “I’m so glad I found you!” he exulted. “I’d accidentally deleted your number, and I couldn’t remember it. I tried everything to get it again but I couldn’t remember your last name either. Finally I saw you called!” “How come you didn’t have my number written down somewhere?” I asked as I rode the bus. “I never thought to do that, I’m sorry.” “I thought you were madly in love with me. If that were true you’d have made damn certain you wouldn’t lose my number.” “I should have, I apologize. “Or bothered to learn my last name.” “Uh, yeah. Where are you?” “On the bus.” “Well get off. I’ll pick you up wherever you are. Let’s go out to dinner.” “I can’t. I just got a job offer and I have to go do the paperwork.” “Can’t you do it some other time?” “NO! Sam, for god’s sakes, it’s a new job!” “Okay. I really want to make it up to you for losing your number. I’ll take you out to a really nice place I know. I’ll pick you up tonight, then.” “No, I have plans tonight,” I lied. “Cancel them,” he said. “Fuck you,” I replied. “What?” “Thursday night is better. We’ll go out to dinner Thursday night.” “I can’t. I have plans.” “Cancel them,” I said. “I can’t.” “Why not?” “Because I can’t.” “Just call her and tell her you’ll meet her some other night.” “It’s not another woman.” I highly doubted that, but I honestly didn’t care anymore. “Thursday night is best for me. If you want to go out, that’s the night to do it.” “I can’t. I told you. I have plans.” “I’m expected to drop everything when you call. Now, I don’t actually give a damn whether we go to dinner or not. I’ve over you. You want to do this, we do it Thursday night. We do it on my time now. Otherwise forget about it.” “I can’t cancel.” “Okay, we’ll just forget about it, then.” “I still want to take you out!” “Nah,” I said. “I’m over this. You disappeared. Out of sight, out of mind." Not true, but I’ll bet he believed me. I always wondered what Sam’s deal was. Everyone’s obsessed with narcissists, so I wondered if maybe that was his problem, but I tend not to go with pop-psychology labels, so I figured maybe he was just a manipulative little bastard. At any rate, I lost no further sleep over him. That Cancel them crap had gotten on my nerves more than anything else. It wasn’t until I watched a TEDx talk by a domestic violence social psychologist named Dina McMillen that I realized there was a possible explanation I’d never considered: That I was being groomed for an eventual abusive relationship. McMillen tells of over 630 violent domestic abusers, (95% male) she’s interviewed over the years in a client-doctor relationship in which she’s prohibited from telling on them. Without fear of punishment, these men have ‘dropped the mask’ and spoken with her quite freely about what they did to their partners, displaying male privilege at its ugliest and often evincing no empathy for their objectified partners. McMillen believes our solutions to domestic violence are too reactive rather than proactive. She advocates teaching young girls and women ‘in about two hours’ the ‘secrets’ abusers don’t want women to know about their psychological manipulation techniques. The mind-blowing, eye-opening takeaway for me was when she ran through the list and Sam ticked off several. Like: He needs you to trust him, plan a future with him, and fall in love with him. He pulled ‘too much, too soon.’ Early claims of love; artificial intimacy attempts; telling me what we were going to do; planning for our future together. All at the first meeting . I wondered if he’d read The Game or something that told him women think you’re serious when you speak about the future with them. McMillen spoke about pushing for constant contact but Sam didn’t do that. He did, however, want my attention like a cat: When it was convenient for him. He tried to get me to confide in him before he’d built trust. He expected me to drop everything and be at his beck and call, although he didn’t get mad when I wouldn’t. However, McMillen noted that often women go along with the little decisions these guys constantly make for you because we want to be liked and thought of as easygoing. Which I did. I’ve long believed our need to be ‘liked’ by men is one of the biggest vulnerabilities in female psychology. Whenever I’ve done dumb shit that put me in danger, like getting into a strange man’s car, it’s been because I wanted him to ‘like’ me. She offered several other red flags but you can watch the video for yourself. I strongly encourage it; it’s not graphic with no descriptions of violence. She was only able to speak very generally about her subjects and not identify anyone. “Holy fuck,” I said as I watched. She didn’t even list all the warning signs. It would take too long. She wrote a book about it, though. "But He Says He Loves Me!" - The Women's Abuse Prevention Manual Sam complained a few times about my ‘walls’ when he tried to get too close to me. He was right, but I felt pretty justified. He telegraphed his phoniness at every turn. I wonder what might have happened if I was more of a victim. Or what I might have done if I’d met him when I was more emotionally naive and trusting. Would Sam have had better luck taking advantage of me? Maybe, although I don’t think it would have advanced to emotional or physical abuse. I’ve never been abused by a man and don’t believe I’d have tolerated it from anybody. Do You Have A Thing For Abusers? Knowing the red flags will help you avoid them When I was young, I was, like many women, easier to manipulate with the carrot-and-stick approach. It’s unconscious and not specifically male; women do it too. It’s when you give someone just enough attention to keep them interested but you’re really not that interested yourself. Didn’t understand that one until I read the book He’s Just Not That Into You. I recognized how this had been done to me several times, but also, that I’d done it a few times myself. Wish I’d had this book when I was younger. I hope others will take lessons from this and realize that abusers can’t abuse you unless you let them. First and foremost, recognize their need to control and establish authority and resist it. And get out early. Because they can’t control a woman who won’t take their shit. This article first appeared on Medium in January 2020. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

But what if those questions could set them free? What if it led to greater freedom, happiness, more trustworthy friends and--increased status? Pixabay public domain image I didn’t want to be one of those right-wing bigots , of course. It was my last days of blogging on Medium in late 2021, slowly becoming aware of the toxic transactivism that had consumed the liberal mind while I challenged wussy feminism. I was arguing with a popular uber-feminist writer, more learned about the history and philosophy of feminism than I. She said my remarks about transwomen were harmful to a vulnerable, marginalized population when I voiced obvious questions, and I felt guilty; maybe she and the trans-allies were right? She said they needed our compassion, not our judgement. A few times, I acknowledged that transwomen were women, uncomfortably. I wanted to agree with her, but my knowledge of basic biology precluded it. I said to her: I'm also disappointed in your frankly bigoted approach to J K Rowling, who has been quite supportive of the trans community if you're not an entitled dude in a dress (I don't know if she sees them that way, but I see some of them that way). Maybe we should just start labeling the indisputable facts? People with XX chromosomes menstruate and carry babies; people with XY chromosomes don't. We can accept transgenders for what and who they are but please, don't gaslight us about who can menstruate and who will never carry a baby in their belly, until transgender surgery/treatment gets a helluva lot more sophisticated. “Where’s your compassion?” she asked. “Where’s your common sense?” I countered. How could a highly educated, grown-ass woman assert that transwomen were no different from women? She fancied herself a feminist expert! How could she not see the classic abusive male personalities that simmered beneath transactivist Etsy-sourced frillies? I asked all the glaringly obvious questions she wouldn’t. Five days later, my account was suspended. I didn’t petition to get it back. I was already used to the pointlessness of trying to reason with Medium’s woke unreasonables. I still wonder whether my former feminist foe actually believed her own B.S. Not all Believers are as True as they pretend. They know deep down what they profess is wrong-headed, or maybe even downright harmful to others. But preserving positive self-regard offers less psychic pain than a personal integrity unpopular with the maddened crowd, and so they persist, pursuing their personal poison the way alcoholics and drug addicts obsessively seek that which makes them feel worse rather than better. This article focuses on the cognitive dissonance that tortures the human spirit arising from beliefs and narratives one professes, but which one knows on a deeper level to be untrue, when one’s actions don’t align with them. When intelligence and education isn’t enough For woke progressives and liberals, part of our narrative is that we’re good, empathetic people who don’t want anyone to feel the pain of exclusion, which many of us have felt at one time or another, or perhaps throughout our lives. When everyone else professes X and agrees that’s the correct belief to be a good person, the crowd is always right, right? But I’m addicted to reality. I’ve never been very good at not challenging those who deny what I know to be factual. I try to keep an open mind, but not so much my brains fall out. I knew it was wrong from the get-go to claim that transwomen are the same as women because they claim that’s how they feel. The more I explored trans issues, and encountered transactivists, I realized not only weren’t they ‘the same as biological women,’ but they were about as male and misogynist as the guys I wrote women should avoid on Grow Some Labia. The reality-denying Medium feminist didn’t understand that compassion and inclusion can quickly turn into complicity and cruelty. Where was her compassion for women who felt uncomfortable sharing private spaces with the be-penised? Or for female athletes who had to compete against hulking men like Will Thomas? Or lesbians accused of ‘genital fetishism’ by transwomen with a penis? She may not have known about the growing awareness of medical harms potentially visited on ‘trans’ children, or the sudden spike in trans people coinciding with the rise of gender-questioning content on social media, and the creeping influence of queer theory public education. Maybe she didn’t know about Tumblr’s role as a queer factory for gender-morphing labels, pronouns and ‘microaggressions’ pulled out of thin air to be weaponized against people who didn’t adhere to queer mythology. Maybe she didn’t have friends with teenage kids coming home with weird ideas about whether they were actually the immutable sex they were born with. She would have, though, if she’d asked those glaringly obvious questions, and Googled. On some level, she feared what it would mean about her, her values, the hills she’d died on, the public stands she’d taken, and the testament to her intelligence. Who wants to admit they were gaslit, the ‘expert’ who could cite endless highly-regarded sources in support of feminist theory but somehow missed the angry Twitter invitations to ‘suck my ladydick’? Who frequently dissected ‘the Patriarchy’ but missed the ‘cotton ceiling’ whiners , formerly the entitled heterosexual men of our youth accusing women now of being lesbians if they wouldn’t have sex with them? ‘Trans-allies’ are in for several years of high-level, self-inflicted psychic torture, beginning with the death of sex changes for children. The Trump administration’s HHS has issued a ‘best practices’ report for treating confused ‘trans’ children beginning with therapy first. According to Jay Battarcharya, the National Institutes of Health Director, “We must follow the gold standard of science, not activist agendas.” ‘Gender-affirming care’ is shaping up to be one mother of a medical scandal. Not only will woke progressives increasingly face a hostile mob of ‘normies’ turning accusing fingers, demanding to know how they could let his happen, but also the realization that the Trumpoids were right and they themselves were grievously wrong. They thought the science was settled. They trusted progressive media outlets that turned out to be deeply incurious. They didn’t question, and explore for themselves. They didn’t wonder how a respected periodical like Scientific American could issue a mind-bogglingly brainless article like Stop Using Phony Science To Justify Transphobia, or wonder about the credentials of the author, a dude named ‘Simón(e) D Sun’? Scientific American, like other science periodicals, used to believe in evidence. But now, belief is the evidence. Progressive ideologues eliminated inconvenient science, just like their compatriots on t’other side, the fundamentalist Christians. A social psychologist and the UFO cult Dr. Leon Festinger was an important figure in social psychology who infiltrated a doomsday cult which believed a UFO was going to pick them up and save them from a forthcoming apocalypse. He developed the theory of cognitive dissonance after infiltrating the cult to study the members’ actions, behaviours, and thoughts once the expected continent-destroying flood failed to materialize. He examined the psychological distress they felt and how they coped when reality didn’t align with their expectations. Many refused to acknowledge they’d been wrong and rationalized away what went pear-shaped, instead spreading their message and seeking more Believers, each new recruit vindicating them. Their founder helped them rationalize away their pain and disappointment, by relaying the aliens’ convenient new message that their faith had saved the world and therefore, given humanity a second chance. Others, less committed, left the group egg-faced. Monty Python nails the cult mentality in 1979’s The Secret Policeman’s Ball To achieve cognitive consistency, the opposite of cognitive dissonance, one must rationalize the contradictions away, or change one’s mind. In other words, be willing to acknowledge new data has invalidated the old. Rationalizing is easier than thinking things through. “The experts say that if trans kids aren’t allowed to transition they’ll commit suicide. But why didn’t any do that when I was growing up?” The Pain of Asking — and the Greater Pain of Not Asking A far healthier way to achieve cognitive consistency is through learning a very simple but difficult life lesson: Knowing when to acknowledge one is wrong. The sooner the better. It’s extremely hard on the ego to admit you’ve been misled, or simply haven’t done enough research, but the longer you wait to admit what shames you, the worse your future. Being ‘wrong’ is often just a matter of believing what you do with the best available evidence , until more comes along that contradicts, disproves or simply changes the story. You weren’t wrong before; now you’re demonstrating intellectual honesty thanks to newer or better data. This is the whole foundation of scientific inquiry. The Trump years will be sheer hell for ‘trans-friendly’ progressives. They’ve denied the evidence, refused to ask the glaringly obvious questions, kept themselves as insulated as possible, and blithely dismissed facts as ‘right-wing propaganda’. They’ve rationalized their critics were vile TERFs, carefully sealing their ears, eyes and minds. Many, like Dr. Festinger’s Seekers, will cling to their original beliefs, because it’s awfully late in the game to pretend they didn’t know. The consequences of admitting error are high. Achieving cognitive consistency relieves irritating moral hypocrisy, but introduces the new threat of ostracism by unenlightened friends and family, because if Cousin Martha confesses she thinks she was now wrong about something, by extenuation she damns them all. What awaits the Questioners on the other side? The upside for Cousin Martha, if she chooses honest cognitive consistency, is immense psychological relief. Especially if she can avoid talking about it. One way she can re-reconcile her vision of herself as a Good Person is to work with the group she feel she’s harmed. If her intellectual mistake was to support gender-affirming care, she could help detransitioners facing angry backlash from transactivists for publicly admitting they made the wrong decision and now want out. Martha’s experience with her former community would be invaluable for smoothing the detransition backtrack. She’d bring compassion to her new community who tragically bought into a pseudo-scientific narrative detrimental to their health, their mental well-being and their ego. If Martha is brave, she could publicly speak about her personal journey. She could explore why she chose to believe what she did and why she no longer supports it. If she doesn’t want to do it publicly—with good reason—she can do it anonymously on a Substack or an X account. She’ll receive negative feedback, criticism, and outright flaming, but she’ll be safe from personal or professional ruin. Learn how to admit your errors and correct your mistakes. Recognize that changing your mind in light of new evidence makes you honest, not a ‘flip-flopper’. Few actually realize the power —and the optics —in being strong enough to admit and correct mistakes, especially publicly. We all understand that children blame others and everything else rather than accept responsibility. People who act like what we believe adults to be are the obvious adults in the room. And we admire their courage and integrity. There’s increased status to be found in changing your tribe from the fact-fearing to the Questioners. Achieving cognitive consistency starts with asking those glaringly obvious questions. Realigning one’s sense of self with reality may lose some friends and family, but there’s a whole other community of the intellectually and morally responsible waiting for them. Maybe the solution to losing former friends is finding wiser, truer ones. 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 battle for democracy's soul in the ICE Age is beginning to look less like good vs evil than Alien vs Predator. Guess who the losers are? By Elkman on Flickr - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 It’s been distressing to watch Donald Trump’s depressingly predictable strong-arm response to violence during the Los Angeles ICE protests. He’s been itching for just this sort of fight so he can prove to his voters he’s the manly-muscular he-man to protect the nation from illegal wrongdoers and anarchic criminals. So of course the more violence-prone on the left handed him his golden justification and demonstrate just how much moral confusion and decay rots the souls of the left as well as the right. The ICE protests are legitimate acts of free speech and began, as always, much less violently than Trump’s Himmlerian response justified, when the damage was still easily within the purview of the LAPD and Governor Gavin Newsom. But the tired pattern we saw with the George Floyd/BLM protests emerged yet again like the Alien from John Hurt’s chest: First Amendment actions degenerated into violent riots and what was once peaceful was now a legitimate reason to bring in outside help. Naturally, Democrats and liberals condemned Trump’s response rather than also the violence that justified  calling in the Guard which, just a tad too early, certainly were necessary not long after. Nadda word from the Demmies against torching shops that put people out of business, or Waymos, arguing that no one drives them so it’s okay. I doubt the firebugs would feel so sanguine if someone torched their cars as a political ‘statement’. Watching political shenanigans in the Trump II era looks more like Alien vs Predator. “Whoever wins…….we lose.” Fetterman stands alone Americans may largely agree on the need to control illegal immigration and remove criminals, but less so on Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional response. On January 22 , about half of U.S. adults thought controlling illegal immigration should be a high priority and only 20% didn’t care. It was a winning campaign promise. Most approved of removing violent offenders, but not how Trump’s executive orders dictated. Today, according to new Pew Research Center findings , while many Americans approve of suspending asylum applications and deporting illegals, 61% disapprove of shipping them to a foreign nation like El Salvador. Support for the the ICE raids is at 54%. One wonders how much higher it would be if the raids were conducted in a methodical, strategic, and properly targeted manner. Support for a border wall is also higher than it was during Trump’s first term—56% vs 46%. Democrats, unsurprisingly, support anti-illegal immigration efforts much less than Republicans, who adore the brown-shirted gross human rights abuses and complete disregard for the law and Constitution that define the very core of Donald Trump’s administration, MAGA Republicans and his own degenerate personality. No one with a shred of human decency could support this. Even some Republican voters are muttering what has become many’s repetitive mantra, “This isn’t what I voted for.” Meanwhile, the left selectively condemns the violence they dislike while ignoring or applauding that which they approve of. Bad: Right-wing response to the ICE protests. Good:  Protest violence pretending to be protected speech. It’s a pattern we’ve seen over and over again in previous protests and especially within the ‘Free Palestine’ movement which exemplifies the moral rot of the woke progressive carcass. Liberals were supposed to be the good guys, remember? Only the lone voice of Senate Democrat John Fetterman rang out in the Democratic wilderness, the only member of his party with the balls to hands-down condemn the violent protesters who invited the tough government response. “I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, and immigration—but this is not that. This is anarchy and true chaos.” He also noted how much Democrats “lose the high ground” when they “refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement.” Fetterman may be the only ‘normie’ left in the Party. The moral morass of Trump vs the Islamofascists No one can claim the moral high ground in the campus Thunderdome when one side (s)creams for the genocide of another country while the President tries to deport anyone who expresses an opinion he doesn’t like. Protected speech: Criticizing Israel and the IDF’s actions. Unprotected speech: Attacking, harassing, discriminating against and vilifying Jews, and subjecting them to clear hate speech. Funny how quickly the left came to embrace it when it was their own. Funny how Trump came to embrace cancel culture when expressed by Islamofascists rather than MAGA fascists. No one defended Jews during Biden’s Reign of Error. The Democrats turned a blind eye, except for the Volksgemeinschaft  the Squad who gleefully encouraged the blatant violation of Jewish students’ civil rights. It’s open season on Jews in a way the world hasn’t seen since the 1930s. Remember when our  side was against Nazism? It’s dead certain President Kamala Harris would have turned a blind eye to her own Jewish citizens. Before she replaced Biden, President Wannabe WishyWashy praised campus protesters , saying, “There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.” She worried more about whether women in Gaza had enough sanitary pads rather than whether Jews in her own country could go to class without being vilified as baby murderers. She never blamed the Gazans for their filthy Islamofascist dictatorship that invited retribution, nor asked why Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. She fell forever squarely on the Blame Israel side. She never asked how kids obsessed with LGBTQ rights supported the most violently homophobic people in the world. Nor how their obsession with right-wing ‘fascism’ blinded them to the Islamofascism driving the ‘Free Palestine’ movement. If she’s so appalled by IDF violence against the Gazans, where’s her outrage for Hamas’s violence against them? They’re a brutal dictatorship. She and her morally rotten compatriots didn’t see what so many of us do: Harris is as much of an authoritarian cheerleader as the Trumpitarians. Trump decided to do the right thing about campus moral rot: FIX IT. And of course, he screwed it up royally. Trump’s actions are every bit as anti-free speech as anything they’re doing or teaching at Harvard. Political diversity? Do we have any reason to believe he’ll do anything other than turn elite institutions from woke ideological shitholes to MAGA ones? Watching him work to put an end to the blatantly illegal and unconstitutional actions of student protesters violating others’ civil rights isn’t exactly Justice League. Holding my nose I grow ever-more estranged from my fellow liberals as I observe the abandonment of traditional liberal values. Remember when we  weren’t the violent ones? Now we justify violence for ‘a good cause’ the way the right has always done. Luigi Mangione is a far-left folk hero, and the same people who condemn Vance Boelter for assassinating Minnesota Democrat politicians were sad that Thomas Crooks missed Trump  last year in Pennsylvania. Los Angeles rioters threaten, “Delete that photo or we’ll fuck you up.” Condoning your own bad actions gives permission to the other side. The political football in America, like the eternal Israel vs ‘Palestine’ clusterfuck, stretches back for centuries. Axios found that in 2022, all U.S. extremist mass violence was linked to the far right , which has historically been more violent, with occasional eruptions from the left, as we saw in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and once again galvanized by the Hamas October 7 attack. The far right has no moral credibility, either, when it condemns L.A. protest violence. They gave permission. So many partisans can’t differentiate between just causes  and bad actions. Facebook friends I know to be good people post weirdly uncomfortable responses when I say things like, “You can want to criticize or end the violence against the Gazans without being antisemitic or calling for the end of Israel,” or that there is absolutely no moral justification for the October 7 attack. Many on the left don’t understand the complex history of hostilities between the collective descendants of Abraham, and worse, they conveniently ignore the vast body of historical violence and terrorism endemic to Islam. Today’s Islamofascism began with a 7th-century military commander. These Facebook friends aren’t antisemitic, but they’re soft on it, and willfully blind to who’s actually responsible for turning Gaza into a shithole, long before October 7. Squirmy leftists drag out of mothballs, instead, the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. Um, eight years ago, folks? They don’t like when pointing out the same sins they excoriate on the right, clearly present on the left. Even more exemplifying of the complete moral bankruptcy of many leftists are the so-called liberal ‘feminists’ of the Antisemite Set who denied  the horrific rapes that took place on October 7. False 'False Rape Allegations': The Way Feminists Now Collude With Rape Grow Some Labia 31 January 2024 Read full story We libs are supposed to wax hysterical about Project 2025 when our own embrace genocidal calls, mass rape and Islamofascism ? Of course, the left lost immediate credibility when it weighed in on the side of the October 7 attackers the very same day . Why is racism bad, but antisemitism good? Why is it so hard to say, “Protests good, rioting bad”? Is the law for all of us, or just Donald Trump? Alien vs Predator The MAGA Klan cheered when Trump pardoned his January 6th insurrectionists   rioters  exuberant tourists. When the ICE violence started, the right-wing media shrieked in horror and exaggerated the violence, while the left-wing media practically pretended it wasn’t even there. But how can conservatives claim to stand for law and order, when Trump failed to bring in the Guard for January 6th, or when he hypocritically refused to call the Capitol Hill rioters what he now calls the ICE protesters: Insurrectionists. The morally rotten right gave permission for violent ICE protests. FFS, they chose a demonstrably lawless man to uphold the law. A second time. It’s hard to envision this bipartisan moral decay as ending in anything other than pain, blood, and at least some deaths. I still sometimes wonder whether Donald Trump is America’s ugliest enema , the man who will purge the shit out of both sides of the polar-ized ICE caps. Well, someone had to do it. The haters, criminals and rioters on the left weren’t going to clean themselves or anyone else up. It’s just a shame that the right won’t either. They’ll simply replace their own lawless, authoritarian vision for America to replace the Democrats’. And for now, it’s Alien vs Predator and—guess who’s losing. 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!

Why do people cling to outdated ideas more than their unfortunate past hairstyles? Fossilized dinosaur Image by Peter Griffin at Public Domain Pictures Bill Maher’s recent New Rule explains in the most sarcastic manner possible why the ossified #MeToo movement needs to add a new amendment for 2025: “If you’re being abused, you’ve gotta leave right away.” This updates a relentless drive that #MeToo did nothing to dispel, consistently ignoring the central statement of fact in Maher’s Rule: Women have choice and agency. Maher quite rightly notes, as I’ve been screaming into the feminist wind, that #MeToo needs to recognize sex crime reporting has shot up, as have the number of women willing to speak out—often under their own names rather than social media pseudonyms. States have passed more victim-friendly laws making it easier to report. Sez Maher, “We’re no longer in the ‘No one listens to women or takes them seriously’ era anymore.” Including the police. His comments were inspired by the Diddy trial, in which Cassie Ventura’s texts come across as less non-consensual than she testified. It points to the strangely controversial feminist notion that women have the agency to leave abusive relationships, and the time to report and leave is as soon as it starts, not ten years into the abuse, or worse, ten years after it ends. The LA Times doesn’t agree; a modern chickie-boo journalist stuck in 1982 argues, essentially, that Diddy’s victims had no personal agency ; that ‘trauma connections’, the feminist catchphrase to explain away inconvenient female responsibility, kept them psychologically bound to him. Although they weren’t the only thing, as Cassie Ventura admitted. She stays (present tense) for the money: Diddy is still paying her rent. The LA writer’s ‘feminist’s’ perspective is so ossified I’m surprised she could move her fingers to type. She rails against those who ask ‘why don’t they leave,’ rather than asking when that will become a viable question. How much longer, and much more power, must women accumulate before we recognize that it’s easier to avoid developing those infamous trauma connections in the first place? This ain’t the Ike and Tina Turner era. It ain’t The Battered Wife, The Burning Bed, or a 1980s marital rape trial in which the defendant’s lawyer asked, “A woman who’s still in a marriage is presumably consenting to sex…Maybe this is the risk of being married, you know?” Never does the LA writer ask the question so many other ossified feminists don’t either: Yes, we agree trauma connections are real along with many complex reasons why women get involved with men like P. Diddy and stay, so why aren’t we encouraging women and particularly young girls to observe their personal psychology to identify their weak points so would-be Cassie Venturas can avoid Diddies? P. Diddy’s Misogyny and Misogynoir Are The Red Flags His Victims Ignore I suspect others like Ms. I’m-So Ossified-I-Still-Sport-A-Toni-Home-Perm fear the embarrassing answers, like that putting up with abusive men often involves a mental cost/benefit analysis: How worth it is it to stay? Enough to not have to pay one’s own rent, apparently. And, you got to meet a lot of stars and celebrities, so maybe the drug-laced compulsory group sex was worth it. The L.A. writer and others whose ideals should have gone extinct by now continue to infantilize women, when they can easily ruin a man’s life by naming him in a #MeToo tweet. Women no longer lack power they once did in the face of patriarchy. I’d expect my contemporaries to get with the program, look around, and observe how downright feminized , for example, the Democratic Party has become. They’re still going on as if women are constantly dragged under by a perpetual riptide of misogyny. Oh please. We have all failed the Millennials and Zoomers by teaching or at least not challenging outdated victim mentalities that don’t, as Bill Maher points out, hold up to scrutiny anymore. ‘22 scariest lines’? Speaking of ossified feminists, Ms. magazine recently extracted what they consider to be the scariest parts of the Republican Project 2025. If you’ve read the document (has anyone?) or even skimmed it, you know there are a shit-ton of bad ideas, but Ms. managed to pull out , instead, good ideas that make the project look a lot less sinister to people whose Permian-era values aren’t summed up as, “If the other side supports something common sense, I’m against it.” Most of Ms. ’s fear factors are those which are now supported by a fair chunk of normie human mammals, including protecting children from trans ideology; adopting “marriage, family, work, church, school, volunteering,” as ‘building blocks’ of a healthy society; promoting patriotism, colorblindness, and workplace competence in place of woke/social justice ideology; marriage promotion; calls for a more fact-based approach to the next pandemic; and defining a woman as what we actually are: Adult human females. Evolution: It doesn’t just terrify bass-ackwards Christians! Other selected ‘scary lines’ were genuinely scary, demonstrating conservative hostility to abortion rights and the environment, and a serious hard-on for authoritarianism we’re already watching unfold; but one ‘scary line’ for Ms. was downright hypocritical: Damning the Project for proposing to eliminate promoting abortion information and services abroad. Totally cool, though, with screwing up perfectly normal kids overseas with social-justice ideological genderwoo. Most of Ms. ’s hand-wringing is rooted in unexamined values. These lefty lollies haven’t investigated modern research in the areas of brain science , evolutionary psychology , history , and other schools of thought that have greatly changed how we think about men and women, sex roles, and power. Their views are as ossified as their knees. As are those of so many in both parties in Washington. The dinosaurs of D.C. Washington is a town full of lumbering walnut brains. The comet finally struck, on January 20th. Now all we mammals have to do is ride out the bipartisan authoritarian winter. The exemplar of ossification in America is our own Trumposaurus Wrecks and his creaky MAGAdon John Hammonds resurrecting bad, unworkable, no-longer-viable ideas like an ideological Jurassic Park. Like tariffs as stuck in the early ‘80s as much as the L.A writer. Like eliminating healthcare. Like hoovering up anyone not-white rather than checking to see if they’re actually illegal immigrants, or criminals. Like eliminating pollution standards. And his love affair with a ‘Gilded Age’-era economic agenda . Donald Trump is such a relic I’m surprised he didn’t drag his supermodel future wife off the runway by her hair. ‘Pussy-grabbing’ is positively Paleolithic. The Jurassic Park of museum-worthy long-past-their-sell-by ideas aren’t just limited to the GOPosauruses and their red-capped semi-fossilized Congresscritters. The equally-ossified Democratatops are now less popular than a Bible at a Diddy freak-off because of their own ideas that, like Trump, they Just. Won’t. Let. Go. Here’s a screaming example of everything far left-ossified that drives the Democratatops consistently into the extinction ditch: The 5,000-year-old hate-on for all things Jewish, particularly Israel, and the ludicrous notion that the ‘Palestinians’ are sinless and blameless. The left was goose-stepping antisemitism when I was in college, although mostly behind closed doors. But an attack on a music festival empowered them to crawl out from under their death camp rubble to fly their keffiyeh freak flags. New York mayor wannabe Zohran Mamdani wants to ‘globalize the intifadah’'; Democratic ‘Squad’ Congress members Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush and Ilhan Omar were the only Democrats who couldn’t muster the moral courage to vote for a House resolution late last year to condemn a ‘global rise of antisemitism’. Then there’s the Kiddie Keffiyeh Klan at your local elitist university. These people who haven’t cracked open a book about Israel or Judaism since the original Exodus would feel quite at home in fifteenth-century Europe. Traditional Democratic ideals once sensibly rooted in tolerance, human value, diversity and inclusion have fossilized. No one’s questioned whether they’ve taken laudable values too far for too many years. Is there such a thing as too much tolerance, too much human value, too much diversity, too much inclusion? Can we consider those questions, please, while Democrats and the far-left lament the University of Pennsylvania revoking Will Thomas’s swimming awards and naming the actual (real female) winners years after they ‘lost’ to a man with an obvious dick in his swim trunks? Who’s running the Democrats, anyway? Dr. Renee Richards ? Today, they console themselves after an election trouncing with self-congratulating, holier-than-thou virtue signalling, mouthing pieties to tolerance, human value, diversity and inclusion while they turn away their conservative, Trump-voting family members from Thanksgiving dinner. And they think Trump voters are the intolerant ones. Evolve already! CC0 1.0 Universal image from Open Clip Art I know so many people whose beliefs and values remain mired in amber. Cognitive scientist Dr. David Levitin at Montreal’s McGill University claims humans are not wired to change their minds because until very, very recently, information changed so little that facts tended to get stuck in proto-craniums. Except, how would humans have survived if they weren’t forced to learn new ideas and skills, like how to survive the approaching Ice Age? It strikes many that we often refuse to re-examine old values and beliefs periodically, or simply to naturally evolve, because it might suggest we were wrong, about which we have a veritable phobia, even though it might not always have been a wrong belief, but something changed, or we now have better knowledge. More contemporarily, changing one’s mind carries particular peril for those whose community is particularly intolerance-based: Failing to kowtow to established ossified narratives runs one the risk of being ostracized from their community with ‘cancellation’ and defriendings. Liberals won’t cross party lines as much as the right. Many Democratic young women won’t date a Trump supporter ; who are less likely to feel the reverse, although, as more women drift toward the Republicans, maybe dating is getting easier, especially since many white women traditionally vote that way. Never do they wonder whether perhaps Trump won partly because he promised to roll back the excesses of Democratic ossified policies and values, however ossified his own might be. Some people believe they don’t need to change their views when they already ‘know’ they’re right, howevermuch facts fail to support their ossification. Easier, it becomes, to embrace safer ‘crony beliefs’ that reduce the risk of social ostracism rather than adopt ‘merit beliefs’ based in evidence and best available knowledge. Like they say in Communist countries: Shut up and keep your head down. Thinking too critically leads to cognitive dissonance from holding conflicting beliefs. De-ossification isn’t popular with one’s peer group, whether they’re lefty liberals or hardcore conservatives. Remember the Dixie Chicks fiasco during Bush II when they offended conservative fragile flowers and got banned from radio? It really doesn’t pay to think for yourself. Critical thinking is for losers and people who never want to receive a social invitation ever again. But the dinosaurs did eventually die out, and sometimes it feels like maybe we’re experiencing a global T-Rex vs Velociraptor duke-out to the death. Maybe all we ‘normies’ have to do is stay underground until the last of the progressive and MAGA dinosaurs fall. After all, we inherited the earth from them once before, and we can do it again. No one knows if this is a Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, anarchist or autocrat. All we know is that it didn’t move fast enough. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 image by Nick Normal on Flickr 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!

Thoughts of a 'From away' during my Freedom Week: Today is Canada Day, and Friday is the Fourth of July. Yay, and uh....yay? Photo by the author I’m a ‘from away’ who’s lived in Canada for twenty years and I’ve never lost that sense that I’m still a bit of an outsider. ‘From away’ is an Atlantic provinces expression meaning someone who’s not from here or has moved from way the hell somewhere else in Canada. This is ‘Freedom Week’ for this ex-pat From Away, when I feel most conflicted about where I come from and where I am. I feel most at home with my fellow ‘from aways’. My neighborhood is nothing but foreign—us. Lately, we’re deluged with Ukrainians. We were up to our butts in them before as home to a fairly large diaspora; but since the war began, we’ve been up to our earlobes in them. I’m considering learning Ukrainian after French. While today’s Canada Day is more intense and aggressively patriotic than previous ones, I expect the Fourth of July in the Ignited States of American’t will light the skies more easily than their own muted souls, with questions of how much longer it will remain the Land of the Free, along with soul-searching about how the American Project all went so unimaginably tits-up. Canada is now under threat from the United States, which is now a national mental health casualty driven collectively mad by insane split politics that re-elected a demented criminal madman to replace the senile but sweet old man before him. The current geezer seems hell-bent on destroying his own country, and everyone else’s, although I imagine it will eventually be mostly America pulling itself out of the wreckage. Canada has gone uber-patriotic in a way that would shame a MAGA after Donnie Demento forced us to realize neither Americans, and by extension their political parties, can be depended on to nominate and choose their leaders wisely. Fifty-first state , indeed. It’s a MAGA mentally masturbatory delusion to think any other country wants to become part of the Ignited States for the same reason Ukraine and other European countries resist the Putinocracy. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled a week or so ago that Trump can, in fact, deport migrants to shithole dumping grounds like El Salvador and South Sudan to which they have no ties. No doubt ‘traitorous’ ex-pats like me, especially us dual citizens, and other ‘enemies’ of the state are next if we dare cross the border again. The U.S., to be perfectly blunt, is skipping down the failing-state path. How American wars against Canada always turn out. As The Eagle falls, the Mighty Beaver rises I remember telling my mother when I was maybe ten or so, “I’m really lucky to have been born when and where I was.” I was old enough to recognize my life was pretty damn good in the United States, not like the ‘ starving children in China ’ Mom would invoke to shame me into eating my vegetables. I knew my mother and my uncle got crappier Christmas presents than my brother and I because they grew up during the Depression, when Grandma would say, “Jim, only cut the pot roast this far, I need the rest for the weekend.” Whereas in our house it was no big deal whether there were leftovers or not. I recognized, also, that I was better off in 1973 than people were when kids died regularly and girls didn’t have much freedom to do anything except boring household chores, and teenage boys went off to die in foreign wars fought on someone else’s soil. My adolescence and college years were an era of free speech and thought in which I could say anything I wanted, except to call my mother a bitch, as I found out the hard way. But the American sense of can-do degraded over the years, along with freedom of thought, more reasonable politics, and social movements with actual problems to solve. The country seemed no longer to stand for what it used to. Little by little, Americans’ collective identity as all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips declined, and by the time I moved to Canada in 2005, a moron running the country approved of prisoner torture, and manufactured new America-hating Islamofascist terrorists in a Cuban prison. Moving north made me feel safe again. Shortly after, I met an American lesbian who told me she and her girlfriend also felt safer here, too—the very reason they emigrated. I concurred, thinking of how faintly ominous was the flapping American flag while crossing the Blue Water Bridge to visit my mother country. I knew I would return, but still. Mass shootings. Conservative crazies who recognized, on some level, that Canada was more like Golden Age America than the U.S. was now. Rising crime. Racism from all sides and a growing hatred for women. Then, Obama. “Hello again!” I’d cheerfully greet Old Glory at the bridge. Today, America be crazier. My flag looks more like a skull-and-crossbones. I’m so afraid of my mother country I won’t cross the border at all. My fellow Americans, in a fit of madness, re-elected a demonstrated incompetent again, who has now gone mega-MAGA-toxic full-blown megalomaniac. Canadians and other foreigners literally fear crossing the border for hassles, pushy questions, and demands to access our phone data. Or worse, detention. The very worst: Jail on Trumped-up charges. And maybe not in America. So here we stay, and vacation anywhere that isn’t the U.S., a trend that’s spreading around the world as the U.S. tourism industry quickly collapses. Absent Canadians lead the world in the American exodus, as it was we who until now provided by far the most U.S. tourism and vacation trips annually. America’s loss is Canada’s gain. Hell, we’re even visiting our own country more . America may actually Make Canada Great Again While America commits seppa-kook, Canada turns hopefully to a new endearingly crooked-smiled Prime Minister who embodies what American politicians used to before fuzzy but affable Ronald Reagan. Mark Carney is the adult in the room, a kind and sober father bringing a steady voice, a strong hand, and a willingness to stand up to an intellectual peon of a President the way our former deer-in-the-headlights prettyboy couldn’t. The ‘governor’ crap stopped with Mark Carney. “I hear what Donald Trump says, but I don’t take direction from him.” Trump, he says, isn’t bringing up annexation anymore in private conversations. Complacent Canadians are forced to grow up as the empire next door melts down. No longer can we casually rely on U.S. support for defense or allyship. Trump declared war on our economy, hoping we’d knuckle under and become a state, but he severely ‘misunderestimated’ how proud and patriotic Canadians actually are, and how fiercely we are willing to fight to retain our sovereignty. Trump knows little of American history and may not know America’s two previous attempts to annex Canadian territory failed. And America collectively forgets, over and over, how it’s inevitably forced into guerrilla wars by Canadians, Vietnamese rice paddy farmers and Middle Eastern goat herders, only to return with no mission accomplished. America is still exceptional. Sort of. No country is perfect, including Canada. My adopted people, like Americans, have become too ‘woke’, with the concomitant reductions in free speech and an ugly antisemitism every bit as virulent as the U.S.’s. Although left-wing ‘progressives’ assure me Nazis and fascists are only on the right, the only Nazis I see here scream Free Palestine rather than Heil Hitler. Our economy is in the crapper, housing is unaffordable, and we’re sitting ducks not just for our deranged neighbor to the south, but just as critically by China and Russia, who are eyeing our melting polar caps for the buried treasure beneath. Mr. Carney is strategizing heavily for our defensive future, creating priorities, forging new alliances with Europe, and warning Canadians sacrifices will be required. He didn’t elaborate and I wish he would. I want to know what to expect, as I’m sure my countryfolk would too. But as a Canadian, I feel more hopeful than I have in a long time. I feel less stress, despite our immediate threat from the south. The TrumpInSloMo for Canada is that he’s forcing us to become a better country and closer Canadians. Donald Trump may actually Make Canada Great Again. Prime Minister Carney said that if America no longer wanted to lead the world, Canada would. TrumpInSloMo is forcing our attention away from culture war issues to the very real threats we face, rather than Trudeau’s First World problems like masking wars and ‘trans rights’. (I haven’t seen much Pride pride on my end of Toronto this year. Fewer rainbow flags and letter-jumble virtue signalling from local businesses. #PrideFatigue ) Canada: We’re getting serious. And proud. We’re waking up and, ironically, many of us see a brighter future as the demented old coot drives allies, goodwill, and corporate megaliths to the True North strong and free. Long before I even considered leaving the States, I thought we Americans needed to get over ourselves. We were not put anywhere by God. We’re not as exceptional as we think, although we’re more exceptional than the rest of the world thinks. We Americans brought democracy back after a 1,700-year hiatus and with the help of our French, Spanish, Prussian, and even a few Indigenous allies, we won our right to sovereignty and self-determination with a victory we couldn’t have accomplished without them. We dragged our asses behind the rest of you on abolishing slavery, but then pioneered new heights in human rights recognition and declaration. We’ve fallen short of it in the decades hence, and so has everyone else. We have failed ourselves, and each other. But many Americans admit now—our shit does, in fact, also stink. I can still identify, talk, think, and be American. You can take the American out of America, but you can never take America out of the American. I still love my country. I still love my peeps. I believe moral right will eventually prevail. It has for 249 years. Today, I prefer the red-and-white to the red-white-and-blue, but I harbour hopes that my mother country will one day allow me to straddle the border proudly flying both flags. With the American one right-side-up. That one day I can cross the border fearlessly, regardless of which party is in power. But for now, this ‘from away’ will stay away. America will celebrate its 250th birthday next year and that’s saying something. The Bicentennial was a truly joyful year for us; next year’s—sesquibicentennial? Bicentennial-and-a-half? One quarter-millennium? Semiquincentennial! — I hope will be more joyous than today would suggest. Happy Freedom Week to all my North American peeps, and especially all my fellow ex-pats. We get twice the fireworks! Actor Darren McGavin, the ‘Night Stalker’, offers a 1976 Bicentennial minute. These breaks offered Americans a brief thumbnail sketch of Revolution-era stories and events. Canadian equivalent: Heritage Minutes, except we haven’t stopped producing them since 1991. 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!

You don't have to be an expert in everything. Just Google it when people make claims you're not sure about. And, sometimes ask for evidence. Me, when someone asks me a dumb question they could have easily Googled. Public domain image from Pikist. We humans live in abject fear that we might be publicly busted for looking stupid; that if we don’t know something we’ll be laughed at and shamed for our lack of omniscience. And sometimes we are, whether we deserve it or not. We fake it hoping they’ll take it. We make it up if we have to. Intellectual bullies, meanwhile, roam the planet looking for exactly you—someone they can shame and diminish. They may not even be experts in the topic of discussion; they just have to know a little bit more. I’m here to tell you you don’t have to know everything about everything, and you don’t lose an argument just because you admit you don’t know much about it. This spring, my Montreal filmmaker cousin stayed with me for Toronto’s annual HotDocs festival. We had a grand time hanging out, catching up, drinking ‘cuz-tinis’ and watching movies - including a few my filmmaker cousin had made. We both lean left (like me, he doesn’t let his brains fall out either) although our realms of knowledge differed. My cuz knew a lot about space travel, about which he’d made a documentary, as well as foreign defense politics, which he keeps up on more than I. “Can you name the four biggest nuclear powers in the right order?” he challenged me. No, I couldn’t, although I figured Russia, the U.S., and China all had to be on the list. They were, in that order, with France as the distant fourth. (I would have guessed Germany.) I felt a little intellectually diminished not knowing that, but then realized, hey, I’m not as knowledgeable as Alan about this. It’s okay . Image from Pexels Later, I told him about the alleged 6,000 burials of Indigenous Canadian children, which Indigenous bands claimed have died in our country’s residential schools, although they haven’t provided one single case of excavated remains. My cuz found it hard to believe. “It’s true,” I said. “Everyone’s always surprised. Look it up.” The next morning when I emerged from my bedroom he said, “Hey, you were right! I Googled this morning on the Indigenous graves and holy cow, they haven’t unearthed a single kid!” You have to Google it because it just sounds too crazy. Later, we talked about trans issues. “I find that hard to believe,” he said several times as I told him about the lack of science behind sex transitions for kids, and the driver of the sexual fetish autogynephilia in the movement, and the trans-identified men who had used access to women’s private spaces to assault or intimidate them or just to satisfy their need to ogle women and girls undressing. “I’d need to know where that came from. I’d like to see those sources,” he said. He wasn’t skeptic-bullying, it was an honest response. I really didn’t want to dig up links again like I have for so many others. “Google it,” I told him, knowing he’d find his answers in the first page of search results. He said later, “I thought about a lot of the things you said about transgender issues and came to realize that it’s okay to say, ‘I just don’t know enough about that.’” Ironically, he’d come to the same conclusion about his lack of knowledge on trans issues that I’d come to about nuclear politics. It’s liberating once you realize it’s okay to admit you simply don’t have enough knowledge about an issue. She never minded admitting she didn't know something. So what, she thought; I could always learn.― Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy Not everyone has gotten into the weeds on culture war issues as I have, and many are genuinely mystified as to why I even find them important. I can be impatient with people who don’t seem to get it, but some don’t even know what’s going on; an apolitical news-avoiding friend was surprised to find we’re now giving sex-change treatments to children. My knowledge of global politics will probably never approach my cousin’s level. It’s his bag, not mine. Nevertheless, Alan doesn’t pay much attention to the eternal Israeli-Gazan conflict and didn’t know that the Middle East took advantage of the then-new state of Israel by pushing their own Mizrahi Arab Jews out of their homelands because now they had a ‘dumping ground’ for them. How many people don’t know that Israel was only first populated by European Jews, but that a second influx came shortly later from the antisemitic Arab world? Betcha 95% of the college campus Kiddie Keffiyeh Klan don’t know that, including the ones from the Arab world. I don’t know if Alan felt momentarily stupid by my greater knowledge of trans issues or Arab Jews, but we both came to realize we’re not stupid if we don’t know as much about an issue as someone else. You learn important things talking to others, like that Indigenous bands here are making some highly spurious claims and excoriating Canadians who ask too many questions like, “Where are the bodies?” Or, that France is more nuclear-badass than you thought. Now, let’s examine when should you provide evidence, and when you should point folks to Google. Demands to ‘Prove it!’ We often end arguments by demanding, “Prove it! Send me your source!” Such requests can be valid, or wielded to mire the statement-maker in endless Googling trying to find that article they read last month by that guy, in the article in the Conversation? Or was it Quillette? Or maybe Newsweek? The challengers might not even look at it, either through lack of interest (the purpose might be to shut you up) or worse, for fear that you proved them wrong. One intellectual bully in a pro-science skeptic chat group I once belonged to put down those he deemed his inferiors by challenging them over anything. If one failed to provide evidence, he declared them ‘debunked’. If you challenged him on some claim, he’d tell you he didn’t need to provide sources, it was ‘common knowledge’. While ‘common knowledge’ is sometimes a fair response, a bully can use it to abrogate responsibility, holding others to a higher standard than himself. Another type of bully simply seeks to destroy, roaming social media looking for targets. When I was working for a technology company a few years ago I made an online joke about “Which pronouns are we using this week?” and two users tried to start a cancel campaign to perhaps get me fired, since I was posting under our professional account. I didn’t think what I said was bad, even professionally, but I checked out the two accounts and one described himself as a ‘professional Millennial,’ which I took to mean professionally unemployed, especially since he was tweeting in the middle of the day. The other person also looked suspiciously jobless. I blocked them and no other Twitterati picked up their calls for action. I wiped my forehead in relief, since my boss was absolutely phobic about ‘controversy’. Ideological bullies are near-religious about their political beliefs, whether it’s trans rights, antiracism, supporting the ICE raids or devotion to a political figure like Donald Trump. Women have finally achieved some unpleasant equity—in political and social media bullying. Some discussions are beginning to center around how feminized ‘cancel culture’ is , how much it resembles the feminine power games any female older than two years old has experienced, and that women may be behind the popularity of wokeness politics. Campus protests are dominated by women . Educator and narcissism expert Dr. Nathalie Martinek , in her article Dark neurodivergence or Cluster B traits? , analyzes what she observes as “a social pattern I’ve observed in adults who frame antisocial behaviour as trauma-based neurodivergence. These individuals often display vulnerable narcissism , covert manipulation , and antisocial tendencies that never come with real accountability. They rarely apologise unless there is something to gain. They are skilled at DARVO [deny, attack, reverse victim and offender] and consistently position themselves as the victim, the empath, and the misunderstood one.” These people, she says, reframe as ‘neurodivergence’ what is actually “indicators of arrested emotional and moral development,” rather than subject their ‘fragile identity’ to self-awareness and confrontation. Sound familiar, ladies? Nathalie notes the ‘flood’ of social media warnings about ‘narcissistic’ and ‘toxic’ people. She doesn’t mention sexes here but I’ve noticed they appear to be predominantly women, and when they’re not, they’re often men claiming to be or pretending to be women. Back when I was on Medium, it was hands-down biological women diagnosing everyone they’d ever dated or had a disagreement with as a narcissist or a toxic personality. Sound kinda like the Mean Girls you dreaded in school? Back in my early-Internet skeptic group days, on the other hand, intellectual bullies were almost all men. My ex-partner was in an email free speech/anti-censorship discussion group, where many seemed more interested in argumentative victory than actually changing minds over various media stories and court cases they were debating. There were no women on this list. He asked me if I wanted to join and I said I had no interest in an intellectual dick-slinging contest. Go figger. When do you need to provide evidence? I’m circumspect when people ask me to ‘send me your sources. I have to see them.’ It’s not bullying, it’s a fair request, but if it’s fairly common information, I tell them to Google it if I think they’ll find it on the first page of results. (My ‘common knowledge’ defense). On the other hand, if it’s not something they can easily find themselves, like a particular research paper they won’t find by general Googling—I dig it up and send it to them. That’s a valid request. I archive many articles on a thumb drive so I can find them easily. People aren’t stupid for not knowing something someone else does. (I’m assuming you don’t hang out with sub-literate NEETs who spend their entire day downloading porn, gaming, and debating whether that guy with Karolyn Leavitt is her husband or her dad.) What we shouldn’t do is allow anyone to make us feel stupid for not knowing something. We also shouldn’t bully ourselves for not knowing something. Hector from #holysmoke, the aforementioned skeptics’ group, loved laughing at others but, predictably, had no sense of humor about himself. One evening I showed up with mischief on my mind. “How do I know you’re really Hector?” I challenged him. “How do I know you’re the real deal? Have you got a DNA test to prove yourself? A notarized testimonial? Any witnesses here to whether it’s really you or not?” “Fuck you, Frenchy!” he replied. “Yep, that’s the real Hector,” everyone else laughed. He was the only one not amused. Always remember: Bullies are ridiculously insecure. Write that down! 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!

Childfree-by-choice is still and always an option. Don't listen to the most unfit, irresponsible Genghis Khan wannabes. Eight billion is enough. Tragedy stalked this family like P Diddy at a high school. Photo by the author. Public domain. The above photo is from a small cemetery around the corner from where I live. Six Bryans children, and only two made it to adulthood. I remember reading elsewhere of a nineteenth-century family in America who had twenty children, only one of which made it that far. Back then, relentless breeding was necessary to perpetuate the family line. Today, losing a child is a tragedy beyond imagining in an era where parents can reasonably expect their children to outlive them. My French grandmother lost her firstborn to a tragic accident back in France, but it’s a wonder she didn’t lose more of her six children. Although her last three were born in the late teens and ‘20s, and in America, where kids drank milk instead of wine at meals, and had vaccines for tuberculosis, diphtheria and tetanus, and wars were fought elsewhere. My mother knew a child who died of a childhood illness. Fifteen years earlier, she would have known several. Six billion humans later… The eight-billion-strong human race is in no danger of under-replacing the dead, no matter what you’ve heard from billionaires racing each other to see who can be the most Genghis Khan, at least with consent since mass rape is now largely frowned upon. Baby production is the renewed conservative obsession, propagandized by Elon Musk and Greg Lindberg, whose baby-factory network landed him in prison. Other criminal billionaires the enterprising womb can engage with is Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, who claims to have fathered over 100 babies around the world and is currently also in legal trouble in France. Rich men seek out young beautiful women to bear their children, in true 21st-century form—sexlessly. In fact, only one of Elon Musk’s children was conceived while he was there. Right-wing baby-making is liberally (ar ar) led by the very worst stereotypes of irresponsible non-fathers spreading their sperm as if that’s all that matters, who believe fathers really aren’t all that important in raising a child. (Um, how is this right-wing again?) Some conservatives ignore it, seeming to believe fathers are only tsk-tsk necessary when a woman gets pregnant by someone who isn’t an entitled rich guy. Rather, she’s a deplorable welfare ho whose kid will grow up to be a CVS smash ‘n’ grabber because he didn’t have a steady paternal hand. But when a father decides to seed a child from afar, and nothing else, many conservatives are silent, except for the ‘family values’ religious right, with whom I haven’t agreed on anything for forty years until now . Nearby are ‘tradwives’ who prefer housewifery to the rat race, and work to convince others via TikTok and Instagram that really, doing everything for your man and your children is all the fulfillment you need. While I won’t deny that avenue, it’s the very reason why Betty Friedan freed women from the family trap in the first place, since women weren’t finding the Betty Crocker life as fulfilling as they might. It was a trap for fathers, too. They didn’t get to see the kids grow up. They didn’t get to see the ‘firsts’. First smile, first wobbly step clinging to the divan, first time discovering grass. (The lawn! The lawn!) 1960s dads after a big holiday dinner. Photo by the author’s mom Gen X introduced—with some success—the notion that men should spend more time with their families, in a world in which both parents now worked, but with only limited success. Digital media made the sex divide even worse—mobile-addicted young people can’t even connect with each other like normal humans, many remain virgins , and young males (virginity Ground Zero) ruin themselves through porn or toxic influencers like Andrew Tate. While young women ruin themselves with toxic feminism and ‘progressive’ politics: Is there a real argument behind the concern about declining fertility? The reduced fertility hand-wringing isn’t for naught. Fewer or no children means no one to take care of the elderly in their dotage. Fewer taxpayers mean reduced services all around, not to mention reduced federal funding for states. Lower fertility worsens labor shortages, although wages failing to keep up with the cost of living for decades also contributes. The anti-immigration sentiment will fade quickly when populations realize they need to get shit done. The Trump administration is pondering $5,000 ‘baby bonuses’ to encourage people to go forth and be fertile—already a demonstrably failed policy, as the South Korean government has ponied up $200B trying to get South Koreans to propagate which failed to inhibit their ‘4B’ movement - No dating, no sex, no marriage, no babies. Why? Because Korean women are sick of misogynist men with prehistoric attitudes who resist women’s advancement, feel entitled to sexually harass, and are often overtly hostile. Maybe the money would have been better spent addressing the four U’s of South Korean masculinity: Undateable, unshaggable, unreliable and unmarriageable. Meanwhile, back in the States…. A more level-headed strategy for boosting birth rates won’t please liberals: Graduate from high school, get a full-time job, marry first, then have babies. Fifty years ago, everyone was doing it. Now, not so much. But as Rob Henderson pointed out in his newsletter recently, it works . The only proviso is this ain’t the 1950s and you can’t make much money on a high school education unless you learn a trade, which pays a lot less than it did before union-busting. Unions, love ‘em or hate ‘em, built the U.S. after the war, and as they declined, so to did the middle class. The drive to thrive is highly complex and will take more than one or two solutions to resolve. For certain young women, rich-entitled impregnation makes sense if she wants a child but is surrounded by man-children, and knows she can’t afford single motherhood. But. Strike a deal with a faraway sperm donor who provides the child support, and voilà ! You have a right-wing Murphy Brown . Billionaire genetics must factor in as well. Maybe she, too, could produce a genius kid who might make billions and set her for life. Except for the research she may not be aware of that consistently links negative outcomes to fatherlessness by about 76%—mental illness, suicide attempts, incarceration, dropping out of school. Environment and culture matter as much as genetics. If she doesn’t find a loving stepfather to provide the real example and effort billionaire donors don’t, she may raise the most deviously genius CVS looter in the ‘hood. Conservatives need to remember their most cherished value is that it takes two to make a baby, and, if they remain true to their ideological values, two to properly raise it. They must make up their minds: Are fathers important or not? If not, admit the libs were right and stop shaming single mothers. If not, prove it by doing it. Get married, make babies with one woman, and help raise and take care of them. But condemn those of your own who aren’t doing it right. What’s good for the libs is good for the cons. What would happen if a few billion humans quickly died off? Experts think we’ll hit peak humans at somewhere between 9-10B in a few more decades and then live with regular human decline permanently. There’s a controversial ‘ Toba catastrophe theory ’ which begs an interesting question: What if a chunk of humanity suddenly died off? The theory considers whether the human population experienced a serious reproduction bottleneck 70,000 years ago after a supervolcanic eruption in Indonesia. It’s theorized to have brought down a ‘volcanic winter’ on the world population after ejecting ash and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere, resulting in vegetation die-offs and significant cooling in some areas—and maybe to a huge decline in human reproduction. Scientists cite the fairly low genetic variation in humans at this time, without the same in other primates. After recovering from the catastrophic event, humans eventually moved out of Africa and populated other parts of the world. Archaeologists argue that some regions may have been more affected than others, while other experts argue there might have been other causes for the mass migration. So how bad would it be if something similar happened and we lost, say, a quarter of the world’s population—about two billion? That would take us back to the world of 1999. Depending on how and where the population declines were worst—most likely the poorest and unstable parts of the world—post-shock humans would eventually come together and do what needs to be done to pick themselves up and move on, like our ancestors had to do throughout human history. To misquote another great philosophical thinker—Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, humans, like life, find a way. Which is why I don’t lose sleep over declining fertility rates. There are genuine consequences to a globally declining birth rate we need to consider and adapt to; there are, I would remind population hysterics, other solutions besides baby-making. Maybe we’ll need to spread our resources differently. Maybe we’ll need to take care of our own elderly family members more. (Maybe give that $5,000 to people caring for relatives instead.) We didn’t know how to handle a pandemic lockdown until we were forced. Rather than fretting about a baby dearth, we can accept the drop until humanity somehow collectively decides the time is right to go forth and be fruitful again. Maybe declining fertility is all just part of the natural evolutionary process. Childfree by choice is still an option There’s a lot to be said for not raising humans you don’t want. I chose the professional life, and never regretted it. My life definitely does not suck. Many others’ don’t either. In fact, it would probably be greatly to our benefit to stop fucking for ten or fifteen years. Darwin knows it would be a boon to the environment, and we keep forgetting we still have to live here since Elon can’t build a rocket yet that doesn’t explode like Mentos in Coke. It would probably suck even if he could get us there. Seriously, after about three weeks of a tedious landscape you can’t easily visit, or send the kids out to play in, you’re going to long for a walk on a beach, or a mountains horizon (with trees), or Jesus, even the flat unending plains of Saskatchewan. Geez, if this is what you want to look at for the rest of your life just build a house in Death Valley. Image generated by Poe AI The hell with baby-making. Americans especially can’t afford it now with a mentally unstable old man ruining the economy and ensuring low prices will never terrorize consumers again. If Trump’s MAGAs really want to make America fruitful again, maybe they should raise wages and stop destroying jobs. In fact, raise taxes on the rich rather than everyone else which is what tariffs do-. After all, if billionaires can afford to pay 100 women to have their babies, they can sure as hell afford higher taxes. Just sayin’. Did you like this post? 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