I challenge a privileged British Medical Journal essay that argues against what should be a Universal Human Right: Sexual pleasure. Universal rights vs moral relativism. Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh on Pexels Sometimes I swear no one hates women more than women. I came across an extended essay in British Medical Journal arguing against the cultural ‘insensitivity’ and ‘harms’ produced by anti-Female Genital Mutilation campaigns globally. Twenty-five contributors ‘critically examine’ the ‘harms’ they say emerge from the campaign to end the practice of physically altering, often without anesthesia or hygienic conditions, female genitals from infancy to adulthood. Twenty-three contributors are women. They claim the conversation is “driven by a heavily racialised and ethnocentric framework,” which they claim has contributed to “the erosion of trust in healthcare settings, the silencing of dissenting or nuanced community voices, racial profiling and disproportionate legal surveillance of migrant families.” They also conflate what is often done without consent to an adjacent but consensual practice in the West: Genital cosmetic surgery. The authors argue, somewhat correctly, that FGM doesn’t necessarily stem from ‘patriarchal control’, and correctly note that we can’t be sure how or why the at-least 3,000-year-old practice began in multiple times and places. It may have originated with a desire for males to control female sexuality by making relations unpleasant, and to ensure paternity. The Egyptians, as some scholars believe, may have originated the practice as a marker of the aristocracy. In sub-Saharan Africa it may have started as a puberty rite, similar to male circumcision. In some cultures, FGM is said to make the woman look ‘cleaner’; whether it came from male preference or a desire to one-up the competition is lost in the mists of time. Today, brains that haven’t been morally nuked by a female-driven obsession with ‘tolerance’ ask the glaringly obvious question the BMJ contributors didn’t. Why is FGM acceptable for largely powerless ‘racialized’ females but not for Western women? Western academics like the BMJ contributors hew to a santized language of ‘decolonization’, ‘anti-racism’ and ‘migrants’ rights’ to defend FGM, while accepting a system of healthy female sexuality granted to Western women and girls but not to those unfortunate enough to be born in places where FGM is considered decidedly groovy. How privileged. I believe Rob Henderson would call this a ‘luxury belief’. FGM has always been the rage in parts of the world with demonstrably fewer women’s rights: Somalia, Guinea, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Mali, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. To be fair, some of its greatest defenders are the women who live there who seek to conserve ancient practices and resent foreign interference. Here’s where it becomes easier to, in popular progressive parlance, accuse them of ‘internalized misogyny’. Everyone needs a scapegoat, and when you’re powerless in your own culture, you can at least oppress other women. Especially if you’ve already been oppressed yourself by the lady with the knife. The authors correctly note that not all FGM practices are extreme; in fact, some are relatively non-invasive, like symbolic nicking or cutting rather than mutilating flesh. One must wonder, though, whether the native defenders have ever questioned it, or whether women who were themselves subjected to FGM and have never known sexual pleasure can understand what they’re denying to their daughters. Or whether they do know—because they themselves were cut after discovering female pleasure, on their own or with friends, or because they’ve heard the stories, or others enjoying female sexual pleasure. The article never asks, “Are women in these cultures capable of making edified decisions about their daughters’ sexuality when they’ve never been allowed to experience it themselves?” Little girls in FGM-friendly countries have been known to badger their mothers to get the procedure, complaining of schoolyard bullying for not being ‘clean’. The pressure is intense to become a ‘woman’ rather than remain a ‘girl’, and with the procedure also comes elevated status, gifts, celebrations, and other public positive reinforcement. They’re in no way old enough to understand what they’re giving up; or the lifetime of pain and health problems that awaits if the procedure is performed to the extreme, or improperly. They can’t conceive of pushing a baby out of a mutilated passage. The article disingenuously compares cultural FGM to Western cosmetic surgery practices. But their argument is strongest when they compare it to what’s permitted, applauded even, in Western culture; when young people are permitted to engage in ‘bottom’ surgery for sex transition. It’s weakest by not asking another glaringly obvious question: Who’s forced to engage in genital alteration: Western children encouraged by the school system, social contagion and progressive parenting, or little girls pulled into a ‘purifying’ or ‘cleansing’ ritual without being told how they’ll be ‘cleansed’? Or who don’t understand what this entails as an adult? A similar hotly contested debate is happening within our own culture: Whether even Western children possess enough agency to make cosmetic decisions about their bodies. Loss of the human right to sexual pleasure is indeed a risk with sex transition bottom surgery, supported by damning admissions in the WPATH Files clarifying that the transactivist group acknowledged children might well lose the ability to achieve orgasm, or even enjoy sex at all; that they couldn’t truly comprehend potentially permanent decisions about their bodies that would change when they hit puberty, and adulthood, and wanted to start a family—and might not be able to. Never does the BMJ’s anti-anti-FGM article explore the ethics of making children wait until the age of majority to make the FGM decision for themselves. Nor do they ask the most important question. Is sexual pleasure a universal human right? Would any of those BMJ authors support their five-year-old daughter’s ‘right’ to be ‘cleansed’ of her most sensitive vulva if she said she wanted it? What if their government passed a law making it legal? What if she said, “I want to be a boy,” versus “I don’t like the way my wee-wee looks”? Her body, her choice, right? No. Not until she’s eighteen, at least. The age of majority. ‘Health’ and ‘hygiene’ excuses offered for female cutting are complete bollocks according to the United Nations Population Fund. Babies can never give consent at all. (I’m against even piercing babies’ ears.) The BMJ article’s strongest point is actually that, apart from Jewish and Muslim practice, how little public outcry we hear anywhere over male circumcision, which is performed, in the West, on babies, mostly in the United States. In Canada it’s described as ‘rare’ (to which I will merely add, “not in my experience”). I’m against male circumcision for the same reasons as female: I don’t care about hoary religious practices. It’s barbaric, at least until the age of majority, and the ‘health’ reasons given for male cutting are also debunked. The female enforcers of patriarchal power Are human rights universal, or only granted on the basis of birth privilege? What’s particularly troublesome about the desanitizing, uncritical female academics (and two sycophantic males) of the BMJ essay is the moral cultural relativism focused on ‘racism’ and ‘ethnocentrism’. It demarcates anti-FGM campaigns as targeting the ‘Global South’, which they define as ‘African’, ‘South Asian’, and ‘non-Western’. They compare it to the more consensual cosmetic practices in the less-defined ‘Global North’, vaguely referenced as where the ‘diaspora’ communities go. That would be to the West, mostly located north of the equator. The language maintains the two-tiered system of West vs East: One set of rules for thee, another for me. Western academics vocalize what they accuse The Patriarchy of doing: Enforcing control over other women’s bodies and denying them sexual pleasure. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the Aunts and Wives were willing to exercise, even enjoy, brutal control over their lower-hierarchy sisters because they themselves were brutally controlled and punished by the patriarchal Commanders of the Faithful. Which makes one wonder just how ‘enlightened’ women from those parts of the world are when they insist on ‘cleansing’ their daughters, who are brought up in a culture that teaches them they’re ‘dirty’ until someone ‘liberates’ them from their ‘ugly’ ladyparts. No, the BMJ article never raises that question. The weaponization of ‘progressive’ language by female, and allegedly feminist, academics belies the privileged moral disability beneath. ‘Surveillance,’ ‘racial profiling’, ‘harm,’ ‘decolonization’, ‘ethnocentric’ and other activist terms shield their internalized misogyny—their Orwellian subsconscious belief that some women are more equal than others. They wield cultural ‘genocide’ accusations as dangerously as a two-year-old with a loaded gun, with results as devastating for non-Western women as for the child’s hapless family. The ugliest euphemism is ‘cultural sensitivity,’ a term used to defend abhorrent practices entrenched in cultures that aren’t primarily white, ergo ‘oppressed’. Because a long-established practice is part of a ‘culture’, we should be ‘sensitive’ and not engage in a form of ‘cultural genocide’ by forcing them to change. These sound horribly like excuses to not do anything. “Not my country; not my problem.” If we applied the feminist ‘cultural history’ to issues closer to home, ‘sensitivity’ looks a lot more—insensitive. There’s a long cultural history of preventing abortion in the US; of wife- and child-beating; and a no-longer passive tolerance of incest, until the twentieth century. Culture-rejecting feminists drove change on all these fronts. They never considered the ‘cultural practices’ that stretched back farther than the first European footsteps on the Massachusetts coastline. Like the Catholic Church’s teaching from the beginning that abortion was a mortal sin; the Biblical right to physically ‘chastise’ your wife and children; the tacit, if non-Biblical practice of sexual abuse within families. Who were they to criticize the wife-beaters and kid-diddlers when it was a long, established, cultural practice? True liberals and conservatives, fighting for genuine social justice, recognize the rights of all humans: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Including orgasms. ‘Cultural relativism’ is a First World privilege for those holding fashionable authoritarian luxury beliefs they don’t believe will ever affect themselves. They permit FGM for one set of girls—notably, black and brown girls, but not for white girls (or children of color fortunate enough to have been born in the ‘Global North’). It’s irredeemably racist. Misogynist. Vulvaphobic. If women in less-developed, less-educated parts of the world have no right to bodily autonomy before they’re eighteen, then who’s to say any woman does? It becomes easy for autocrats, whether progressive or conservative, to dismantle Western women’s hard-won rights to their body autonomy. Because you know, culture. You might not be able to easily procure an abortion where you live, but at least your mom can’t drag you to a cutter because she thinks you’ve had too many boyfriends. You whore. Reclaiming Universal Humanism We’ve allowed ‘Global North’ feminists, especially cloistered academics, to get away with their fauxminism long enough. Real feminists, female or male, can stand up for their faraway sisters (and brothers) who need their support far more than North American women who should be able to fight for and advocate for themselves by now. This isn’t as hard a battle as you think. We have accomplished much of what we aspired to here in the Global North. We can remind Western feminists, and especially activism-blinded academics, that women’s rights are all women’s rights, including sexual pleasure, as granted to them by nature. We can speak up for our sisters in the Global South who need our fierceness and protection more than overprivileged, often white, elitists. I’m calling out the servile minions of this ridiculous BMJ article as human moral failures guilty of the filthiest sort of racist hypocrisy. Not one of them still uncut would be willing to prove their FGM solidarity with their manicure scissors, in the bathroom, by clipping off their clitoris. If Sudanese women don’t need one, neither do pretty privileged-class academics in their Park Slope or Santa Monica homes with kids in private Montessori schools. Never say never, ladies. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. 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Examining black privilege, DEI absurdity, and the illogic of transracialism Hangin’ with mah homey. We sistahs have got to stick together. Black power! Stick it to the Man! Black is beautiful! Right on, baby!!! Free use photo by Darina Belonogova on Pexels I am as Black as you are! Why? Because I say I am. That’s all you need to know as a Good Progressive. Good Progressives are good people. They accept others for what they claim to be, not what they actually are. Reality doesn’t matter to Good Progressives; reality is racist, imperialist, colonialist, supremacist, cabalist, hedonist, herbalist, fetishist, thaumaturgist, horticulturalist and sacerdotalist. You don’t want to be any of those things! Then you’d be a right-winger! Some Black people have told me I can’t be Black because I’m White. I told them they were racist bigots and that identity is the most important thing ever. That my brother is a Chinese Mithraist transwoman and has been since last week when we got drunk over a pitcher of martinis while watching Pose. I told these internalized racist bitches off! That if it was okay to declare one’s self a woman or a man or a non-binary meta-ethnic pantodemisexual stegosaurus, that it was okay to be Black if one wanted. They said that’s not how it works and I said you’re oppressing me, and that we must decenter normative racial positionality through intersectional praxis of racial accountability.* And they said, "To unpack this assumptive racist boundary construct you’ve pulled out of your ass, one must interrogate the discursive mechanics of your underlying oppressive race fascism, you culturally appropriating blackface Karen cracker!” Which was totally unfair because I do NOT wear blackface. I tan my skin and rat my hair like my sistah, Rachel Dolezal. And man, they couldn’t tolerate me putting them in their place like I did, so it ended after the paramedics scraped me off the sidewalk and shoved me in the ambulance. The transracial double standard I kid about ‘going black’, but the progressive fight against ‘transracialism’ exemplifies one of the last great woke hypocrisy holdouts. Why is self-identity the unquestionable ruler for how you should treat others, but transracialists are somehow crossing some intersectional Rubicon? Critics can’t argue that white people mustn’t ever appropriate the color line because they’re oppressors. They’ve already accepted transgenderism. Men are still unquestionably more powerful than women, but all a man has to do is declare his womanhood, and the social justice set falls into line like good little second-graders. Therefore, it’s hypocritical for critics to argue that white people can’t be black but men can be women and vice versa. We Accept Transgenderism. Are We Ready For Transracialism? Black privilege is unearned special rights granted to one by virtue of one’s birth, developed primarily by progressive ideologues to provide cultural immunity. Sixty to seventy years ago, no one except white men needed to apply for better-paying jobs. Beginning around fifty years ago, white women began making more headway in the boardroom. It wasn’t fair to those not granted their skin privilege, which is why we’ve tried to rectify that in more recent decades. White privilege is with us still, but, like its brother ‘oppressor’ Da Patriarchy, it’s ceded much power since the dawn of the 21st century. Liberal politics brought white awareness to the ‘black experience’ and the acknowledgement of systemic racism and racial harassment. A sense of privilege arose among black activists who argued they could never be racist because they’d suffered oppression, or at least their ancestors had, ergo they were above reproach. But the grievances have began to wear thin, especially viral racial incidents later revealed as false. Political scientist and academic Wilfred Reilly wrote a whole book about fraudulent racial attacks: Hate Crime Hoax: How The Left Is Selling A Fake Race War. The height of black privilege may have reached its peak with Ibram X. Kendi’s expression that nothing will fix the history of black oppression except 400 years of white oppression, a position he has since backed off on. Support Local Bookstores: You can find the titles mentioned in this post on my Grow Some Labia page at Bookshop.org. Every purchase supports independent booksellers (and this newsletter!). From Equal Opportunity to Institutional Engineering Affirmative action intended to give women and racial minorities a better chance at being hired on the basis of their qualifications beginning with the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964. Modern DEI evolved around the 2010s to address alleged systemic inequalities and replace affirmative action programs and policies. With the rise of woke ideology around the same time, black activists were still complaining that ‘almost nothing has changed,’ while by 2012, the black vote had achieved a historic high in U.S. elections, 83.2% of blacks were attaining a high school diploma or more, black test scores had continued rising, poverty rates had fallen to 27.2%, and the average black annual household median income was at $33,321, as compared to 1968’s $5,400 in unadjusted dollars according to the U.S. Census Bureau. What got me thinking about it is the Journal of Free Black Thought’s Substack piece, There’s Little Or No Anti-Black Discrimination Today by social psychologist Lee Jussim, a white man. Jussim has written other articles challenging the narrative of racial discrimination and implicit bias. “This is not 1954,” he notes, and I am reminded once again of Barack Obama’s last speech as President. After my election, there was talk of a post-racial America. And such a vision, however well-intended, was never realistic. Race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society. Now, I've lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were 10, or 20, or 30 years ago, no matter what some folks say. Jussim executes a nerdly dive into the heart of past studies and finds that in the past ten years, ‘the most relevant social science’ “does not show any clear pattern of racial discrimination”. Not that it’s non-existent, but when we’re talking about who gets hired, or doesn’t (applicant outcome disparity), according to Jussim, hiring discrimination or bias in the last decade occurs around 3.6% of the time. Which means there’s no evidence of bias 96.4% of the time. He has his critics, as comments below the article show. His findings have been challenged by academics at the National Institute of Health, at Rutgers University, and of course, those esteemed pundits at Reddit. The Bigotry of Low Expectations Some research, he notes, shows some bias in favor of black people. His evidence for pro-black bias includes the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions U.S. Supreme Court case which found significant pro-black admission bias at two universities, Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Black applicants at Harvard, data showed, scored over 60 points lower than Asian applicants and 40 points lower than white ones. It brings up a highly uncomfortable question: Were these DEI admissions the best of the black applicants to Harvard? Research has shown a combination of factors responsible for test score disparities. Differences in student studying time, for example, show lower rates in black families, even when compared with similar parental education and the same level of family income as whites and Asians. Here, the black study gap grows wider. Black kids in higher social classes have the same opportunities as others, including expensive tutors and coaches, yet still punch in less study time. It’s also been noted that first- and second-generation immigrant families tend to value education. A National Institute of Health study found that black students from immigrant families, including African and West Indian, were ‘twice as likely’ as third-plus generation African-Americans to attend highly-elite institutions. And they outperformed African-American students with significantly better grades and higher persistence. This contradicts what DEI hiring subtly suggests: That black people can’t compete on merit. Or African Americans, anyway. ‘Blatantly discriminatory’ is the only way to describe the DEI framework in many institutions that explicitly state which identity boxes receive special priority for the job, which has sometimes led even to black people being discriminated against because the hiring process wanted an Indigenous or trans person, or perhaps a different human recipe for cross-woke-AF-ness. One of several examples of job postings at a Canadian university that as much as says, “No white men need apply.” From the Quillette article Measuring the Academic Cost of Affirmative Action in Academia," on X. The Human Rights Act verbiage underscores this isn’t just an HR preference; it’s state-sanctioned institutionalized racial discrimination. Cambridge University’s DEI accepted Jason Arday, who claimed autism (unproven), certain alleged unsupported racist attacks, and is accused of fictionalizing some of his history to get the professorship. It suggests he already understood on some level that being black wasn’t enough of a qualification anymore. There was too much competition. It’s gotten better—for some It’s much more difficult for a white man to get a job today than a black man, and harder for a black man than a black woman, thanks to arbitrary post-modern illogical discourses hierarchizing ‘marginalization’ (a human construct). One must wonder if some white men are ‘going trans’ because it’s easier to get hired. I’m serious. The world will never be free of human tribalistic impulses, but it’s a lot less imperfect than the one I was born into, ninety-eight years after the Civil War ended. I’ve packed over sixty years of living with eyes wide open and attention paid. Blacks and many others are earning more, accomplishing more, and getting elected more, which research and observation bear out. But the DEI anti-meritocracy has been leaning into the bigotry of low expectations set by decades of liberal activism and kowtowing to one specific domination history, while domination is The Story of Humanity Everywhere. It makes it doubly difficult for women, Indigenous, blacks, and others, who truly are superlatively qualified for their jobs, to be taken seriously. Leveling the identity field What social justice activists never want to admit, strangely, is victory. Outraged activists rail against the pale-faced babadook which dares to step outside its assigned role and challenge the rise of black privilege. Or worse, appropriate the mantle of victimhood as Rachel Dolezal and so many other white, almost exclusively female, black wannabes have done. White women might be arguably ‘oppressed’ by black social justice activists because even white men are permitted to step outside their ‘oppressor’ class when they appropriate womanhood. I jest, but only somewhat. The fact that white women are far more likely to appropriate other racial ethnicities (consider the plethora of ‘pretendians’ like Buffy Ste. Marie), certainly suggests the existence of ‘black privilege’, given that it’s easier to get a job that way, and because you receive the elevated status of now being ‘oppressed’, and the concomitant sympathy and attention that follows, while snatching cushy jobs away from actual black women. That’s bad, somehow, in the same world where womanfacers become Woman of the Year, easily ‘win’ trophies in female athletic competitions, and get Vanity Fair covers. I challenge black privilege when I state that if ‘some women have penises,’ then ‘some black people have white skin’. It’s otherwise discriminatory, racist and misogynist. So I argue, tongue poking through my cheek, that if women are forced to accept people they don’t regard as women (males), then black people should be forced to accept the self-pigmenting into their own communities. By federal fiat, if necessary. We must be allowed to change our racial identity on passports and other government documents, just as the self-womanized do. We must be allowed into all black-exclusionary social groups and committees, and if they resist we’ll file lawsuits and accuse them of being TERDs (Transracial Exclusionary Radical Discriminators). It’s not, at this time, possible for black people to turn White Like I Used To Be. That remains the only real objection ‘antiracist’ activists have for white people joining the woke Come As You Aren’t party. But self-identity rules, and I’m quite certain cosmetic medical science (or maybe just Revlon) is working on a ‘cure’ right now for black skin. Just as transgenderism ‘cures’ males of oppressorism. 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! 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How a portable religion survived the ancient world, baffled its neighbors, and inadvertently contributed to the blueprint for global prejudice. “Waters of Babylon,” 1920, By Gebhard Fugel - Own work (fotografiert in der Ausstellung “Gebhard Fugel 1863-1939. Von Ravensburg nach Jerusalem”. Galerie Fähre, Altes Kloster, Bad Saulgau, 2014), Jews remember Jerusalem on the Tigris banks in Babylon. Public Domain. From the perspective of the Jews ancient and modern, they were simply following the orders of their One True God. From their neighbors’ perspective, to whom Yahweh had not reached out personally, and about whom He had trash-talked to his so-called ‘chosen people’ according to their prophets, it sounded understandably a little dotty and hey, maybe just made up? In my last article I explored the origins of antisemitism beginning with the hiving off of a certain group of Canaanites who became the Hebrews, later the Israelites, and finally, the Jews. I explored practices, self-isolation, self-elevation and a partially mythologized Old Testament military history. Here, we continue the journey through ancient antisemitism. Imperial overlords: Babylon and Persia The stories of the twice-destroyed Temple of Jerusalem start with King Nebuchadnezzar who destroyed the First Temple when Judah’s king stopped paying a rather hefty tribute. ‘Tribute’ was akin to either a bribe or a tax to ensure protection and that the powerful kingdom would not invade. We pay taxes today, partly to support a national defense, but ‘tribute’ was perhaps more akin to a Mafia practice known as a ‘protection racket’. Nice little kingdom ya got heah, Judah. Would be a real shame if someone destroyed it. Why don’t you pay us to make shooah no one gives you any trouble, unnahstan? Predictably, Nebuchadnezzar kicked the Judeans’ asses, destroyed the temple (the First Destruction), and sent them away into the Babylonian Exile. Many returned several decades later, eventually rebuilding the Second Temple after Persia’s King Cyrus the Great conquered the hell out of Babylon and it fell. He wisely returned some control to Jewish lives and—this is important—recognized that this was their ancestral land and specifically decreed that they could rebuild their Temple, and restored many of their previous rights. Cyrus’s reasoning was that happy subjects were less inclined to rebel. He also returned what had been looted by Nebuchadnezzar’s army. The ‘ancestral land’ piece is important because it recognized even back then that Israel was where Jews had ancient ties. Read Part 1: The Origins of Antisemitism The Hellenistic period (3rd-2nd centuries BCE) The ancestors of the Jews may have laid the foundations of friction with their neighbors, but they assimilated somewhat during the Hellenistic period and experienced greater acceptance from the kings. The Hellenes demonstrated less hostility to Jews, who were themselves better-accommodating subjects to the empire. Jews served in the military and were given land rights in the third-to-second century BCE. But the same grievances against them remained, and contributed to real hatred, oppression, and discrimination. Refusing to respect and honor local polytheistic gods grated on a society where religion and civic life were inseparable. Some of the earliest diatribes against Jews labeling them as ‘seclusive’, ‘alien’ and ‘misanthropic’ came from Hellenic writers. The Macedonian Seleucid empire was formed by one of Alexander the Great’s top generals after he died, spanning what’s now Turkey and Syria through Persia and northern India. The Hanukkah story originated in this period after the Seleucid conquest of Jerusalem, and Jews were permitted to govern themselves in accordance with Torah law. Some Jews had petitioned to form their own polis, Antiocheia, next to Jerusalem. Then the tensions between Hellenized traditionalist Jews broke out into an internal war, leading Antiochus IV to suppress it in view of what he regarded as a treasonous rebellion. He stripped the remaining Jews of their rights, their self-governance, and their Temple, which became one honoring the Greek gods. King Antiochus did what Greek kings were wont to do back then, command worship or at least honoring of the local gods, and executing anyone who objected. This led to the Maccabean revolt and the Jews’ famous victory over their persecutors. They reclaimed their Temple, and the Seleucids gave up trying to control them. If only Antiochus had left well enough alone, right? To our modern eyes, and especially Americans with a fractious history of defying authority, it’s hard not to applaud the scrappy Jews for their chutzpah. Still, it didn’t make them any more popular with their pagan neighbors, and the polemics against them continued. It didn’t help that the victors formed the Hasmonean Kingdom in the aftermath and then embarked upon real conquests of their neighbors, forcing them to convert to Judaism which, surprisingly, did not win them any popularity contests and made them no different from those who had once oppressed them. The Jews weren’t a people in a position to rule over others historically, nor were they proselytizers for most of their existence, but their actions shocked even the Jewish scribe Josephus. The Jews’ actual conquests, coupled with their mythologized victories in the Bible, have less to do with religion than just bog-standard political desires of conquest and enforced assimilation of others. Plus, compelled religious conversion enabled them to expand their numbers. Funny how power works that way. Le plus ça change. Roman rule & destruction of the Second Temple, (70 CE) What happened next explains why the Babylonian empire gets such a bad rap in the Bible and may well be what St. John the Divine was writing about in Revelation. So, here we are now in the Roman period, where another Great Jewish Revolt, a rebellion against excessive taxation and oppressive domination ended with utter defeat at the hands of General Titus during the Roman period. The remaining rebels took sanctuary in the Temple, where the Romans murdered them and then torched it. To our modern normie anti-antisemitic eyes, it reads as another story of resistant Jews who just wanted to be left alone to live their lives in accordance with their God. St. John didn’t dare criticize Rome, the Second Temple destroyers, so he used Babylon as a metaphor, imagining/fantasizing God’s wrath against Jewish persecutors. A new connection to the evolution of antisemitism stemming from this period occurred later when early Christian fathers argued that the two Destructions were a sign that God had rejected the Jews, the first stirrings of Christian antisemitism. The Anatomy of a Holy Rebellion The religion that would one day become Judaism began as a calculated strategy to remain strong and defend against imperial kingdoms: The Assyrians and Babylonians. It was based on commonly-understood suzerainty covenants demanding absolute allegiance to leaders which included neither foreign alliances nor foreign gods. In its earliest iteration, the Hebrews-cum-Israelites were henotheists, acknowledging there were other gods, but that their own was the One True One. Yahweh himself admitted it in the First Commandment: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; - Exodus 20:5 Gee, not too over-the-top… But, it’s what held the Israelites together. Later, cultural fences were erected by the priests to further insulate the Jews from ‘corrupting’ practices around them (like, you know polytheism!); and in fact, the semi-assimilated Hellenic Jews were criticized for associating and socializing with the Greeks; there were also economic irritants as the Hellenes, with their property rights and military careers, had more money than the backwards-seeming traditionalists stuck in the past. The early priests did what so many marginalized communities have always done: Used their persecution by others to claim divine validation, a useful explanation to keep a hated people together when it might be more tempting to give in and assimilate. Christians later turned persecution into a near-religious fetish, based in the terrible treatment they received from the Romans, but then, like the Jews and so many others, they turned around and oppressed everyone within reach. Instead of throwing heretics and pagans to the lions, Christians burnt them at the stake. ‘God’s chosen people’ began as a strict moral burden of accountability, but over the centuries began to sound too much like “Father loves us best!” The covenant of protection by Yahweh was specifically granted to the Israelites out of love and to keep the promise he’d made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Furthermore, the Jews were small in number and demonstrably weak; Yahweh apparently favored the underdog, as so many of us do today. Also, and here’s where it gets a little fictiony again, it was offered later as thanks for their ‘liberation’ from Egypt, a story for which archaeologists and historians agree there is no evidence of slavery, liberation or wandering around in the desert for forty years. I posed this evidence-deficient question to an Orthodox Jew I used to speak with online thirty years ago who also had no real answer. His theory: ‘The shifting sands may have covered it up?” Not for today’s sophisticated archaeological discovery techniques. But, to be fair, the Iliad and the Odyssey are also a mixture of ancient history and mythology. The monotheistic tradition and desire for sovereignty was an early effort in self-government and egalitarianism. Rejecting foreign kings was a response to the relentless conquest and subjugation of others at the time, and a rejection of royal tyranny. Ironically, the Babylonian Exile seems to have been the catalyst that transformed the uppity rebels into a global, portable religion. Defeat and exile meant that your god was defeated and about as dead as your political aspirations. But rather than calling the end to a great, centuries-long effort and simply assimilating, the remnants of the Jews instead turned their culture and religion into a portable text-based one and removed the ties to the land, and embraced monotheism completely. They turned to textualizing (and occasionally fictionalizing, as we have seen) everything about their religion. They laid down the early groundwork for the synagogue system by gathering in small groups to pray and study. Animal sacrifice, with no Temple anymore, fell out of practice and they stuck with the rituals that didn’t require it, and scattered to found other communities (“The Diaspora”). This resulted in a massive psychological shift for the Jews: They realized they no longer had to defend one piece of land, that they could go forth and be Jewish outside of Israel. This is what’s so remarkable about the relentless survival of the people today: Their culture and religion are one of two that survived from ancient times. All major pagan religions died out, and newer ones emerged. Zoroastrianism is the other BCE religion to survive modern times, but with a much smaller population of less than 150,000. Judaism today isn’t what was practiced before the Exile, but circumcision, dietary laws and many other core practices remain unchanged since the priests first decreed them in the boonies of Canaan. From Ancient Frictions to Modern Scapegoats This has been a very thumbnail-sketch exploration of the earliest origins of antisemitism and how it emerged from the earliest pastoralists. None of it excuses the loathsome display of antisemitism today, which differentiates those who have learned the lessons of European antisemitism and the Holocaust, and those who haven’t. Modern antisemites have only themselves to blame for the re-creation of Israel; had it not been for the genuinely genocidal Final Solution, twentieth-century Jews wouldn’t have needed a country of their own in which they could feel safe, however much one can feel safe when surrounded by antisemitic enemies of a younger religion in desperate need of a Reformation. Jews today aren’t making the same mistakes their ancestors did (mostly; the ultra-Orthodox are somewhat up for debate), and they shouldn’t be held accountable for it, just as Christians justifiably get tired of hearing about the Inquisitions, the witch hunts, the persecution of Jews, Muslims, ‘heretical’ Christian sects and offshoots, and others. Those deplorable actions happened hundreds of years ago (thousands for Israelite abuses of neighbors, real or imagined) and today Jews number globally around 15.8 million, according to the Berman Jewish DataBank. The numbers would be higher but for the Holocaust. Jews have ties as ancient to the former Land of Canaan as those who call themselves ‘Palestinians’. In fact, Jews and Palestinians are closely related to each other: They share the same Levantine genetic pool. The long-running Middle East conflict is essentially the world’s oldest civil war; as science shows that over 70% of Jewish men and half of Arab men studied inherited the Y chromosomes of the same paternal ancestors who lived there for the past few thousand years. They possess, as geneticist Michael Hammer found, a Y chromosome ‘almost indistinguishable’ from that of Jews. The Infidel: A hilarious movie about a Muslim man who finds out he was adopted—and Jewish. Israel was formed for the Ashkenazi Jews fleeing Europe, but shortly after populated further with all the unwanted Mizrahi (Arab) Jews pushed out by the surrounding nations once the Islamic governments and leaders now had a place to send them. The Holocaust, and Islamic antisemitism, created the State of Israel. And never in its creation did it state that the existing ‘Palestinians’ had no right to stay there, and the 1948 Declaration of Independence explicitly asked the Arab residents to stay and help rebuild the nation as equal citizens. Although, to be fair, there were plenty of examples of Israeli abuses against them over the decades they are justifiably still angry about, especially as these human rights abuses and land acquisition occurred less than a century ago, and not in 1000 BCE. Why does everyone hate the Jews so persistently? Why Jews have remained the relentless victims of a particularly pernicious and millennia-long hate campaign has continued to mystify me. Something was missing. When I couldn’t figure it out, I presented the question to Google Gemini: Why have the Jews persisted as the ‘buttmonkeys’ of the world? To which the AI response was redemptive antisemitism and punching-up scapegoating. Regular racism ‘punches down’, but when you portray your enemy as shifty, greedy, usurious, and a secret cabal controlling the world with puppet strings, well, now you’re righteous! Now it’s David against Goliath: Except Goliath is said to be the tiny state and their massive enemies the David. The 2,000 years after the Jewish Diaspora saw both Christians and Muslims baking antisemitism into their religions, codifying it for the world. The Evil Jew has become a cultural metaphor even for people who have never met a single Jew; Poland lost most of them during the Holocaust but today remains highly antisemitic. With today’s obsession with billionaires and their alleged control of the world (Jewish or not), when people want explanations for why their lives aren’t the way they want them to be, they reach for explanations, and the Evil Controlling Jew is always at the top of the hatesack. Jews have long been the ultimate scapegoat. The white supremacist right views them as seeking to destroy white culture through ‘The Great Replacement Theory’. The far left views historically highly successful Jews (themselves created by antisemites who barred them from holding normal jobs) as evil capitalists, colonialists, and privileged Westerners, ignoring the history of imperialist, colonialist Christianity and Islam. The Christian extremist today regards them as heretics and ‘Christ killers’, who need Jews to die in the apocalyptic war if you interpret the Bible the way fundamentalist Millennialists do. I hope this has enlightened folks a little. There’s much more than can be said but I focused on pre-Christian antisemitism as we’re all familiar with Christian and Islamic antisemitism. If you managed to make it this far, thanks for sticking with this long-ass essay! Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. 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How ancient Israel's early literature, isolation, and religious exclusivism unintentionally laid the groundwork for a global obsession. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons. Painting by Henri Frédéric Schopin (1804–1880) I want to be clear up front: This article is NOT an excuse for antisemitism. What I’m about to describe happened many thousands of years ago and isn’t any different from any other cults-cum-religions that made many mistakes. We don’t live thousands of years ago. Jews aren’t ancient Hebrews or Israelites anymore. But we need to acknowledge a few uncomfortable behavioral origins of where the historical obsession with Jews comes from. The Uncomfortable Question How did Jews become the symbol of all things evil for large, historical swathes of humanity, which has never lacked for excuses to be hateful? Where does antisemitism originate? Primarily considered today to be an evil of the right, Hitler’s adopted ideological child has proven to be a powerful force on the left since October 7th. Let’s not forget the historically antisemitic Islamic world, a primary force behind it today. Where this particular moral weakness in the Western mind manifests, opportunistic Muslims seem always to be right there to nurture and encourage it. But I got to wondering: What about pre-Islamic, pre-Christian antisemitism? The Koran didn’t invent it. Hostility against Jews was already existent, not just in the Middle East but in early Christian polemics as well, which developed the concept of ‘deicide’, contending that Jews were responsible for Jesus’s death and that Jewish descendants all bear an indelible mark of guilt for this crime, recalling the doctrine of original sin. The Koran itself isn’t wholly antisemitic; it’s a mixture of hostility and acceptance for both Jews and Christians for a variety of reasons. Mohammad’s gang began corrupting his teachings before his body grew cold; they didn’t like anyone who didn’t accept Islam as the One True Religion (an arrogance shared by its two main competitors at various times) but the Koran also praises and lauds both. The mixed messaging demonstrates that for Jews especially, it’s clear there were pre-existing tensions with the first Muslims. The journey begins with the Hebrews, who, like almost everyone else, lived in a risky world of potentially being swallowed up by conquering empires. They might not be able to stop it, but they could at least preserve their identity for generations to come. The evolving religious structure confined them within a framework of religious practices, language, dietary regulations and rules to distinguish themselves from the Others. Unfortunately future empires would weaponize this template to ‘Other’ them and render them hated wherever they wandered. Let’s take a look at where antisemitism originates. The Myth of Conquest: When archaeology meets historical Fiction The ‘Hebrews’ were the original incarnation of today’s Jews: A wandering band of pastoralists who emerged from the Canaanite peoples who’d inhabited the land for many thousands of years. The line begins with Abraham, the first person to be referred to as a ‘Hebrew’ in the Bible, and continues with his son and grandson Isaac and Jacob, whose twelve sons became the patriarchs of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The slow evolution out of paganism to early monotheism took place over hundreds of years, with eventual Israelite monotheists fighting a neverending battle against backsliding, exemplified by the famous story of the Golden Calf. This is why both factions in Israel today—Jews and Palestinians—have rightful inherited and genetic claims to the land. Both have ties or have lived there for many thousands of years. The Hebrews eventually ‘hived away’ from the Canaanites much the same way many religions or religious branches split from the mother religion, like the Protestant Reformation. The Isolation Strategy: Pork, Laws, and the "Other" The ‘Hebrews’ moved off into isolated hill country, developed their monotheistic Yahwism based on their God Yawheh, and began distinguishing themselves from their pagan neighbors by refusing to eat pork and creating a whole system of rules to be as unlike the left-behind Canaanites as possible. Hence the hundreds of laws. The injunction against pork is not, as many believe, a common-sense practice given the danger of trichinosis; archeaologists have found evidence of pig consumption in both Canaanite as well as early Hebrew excavations. The Hebrews stopped eating pork to discriminate themselves from their estranged community, although there were perhaps some practical reasons as well since pigs aren’t designed for a desert environment and produce no by-products themselves, unlike cows and chickens. Fictionalizing History: The Blueprint for Backfire Ironically, the Hebrews now set the stage themselves for a millennia-long hate-on for future Judaism by fictionalizing their own history. The Old Testament details how they set about attacking and conquering their neighbors with Yahweh’s blessings and committing various acts we would call ‘war crimes’ today: baby brain-dashing, pillaging and sacking, and all that. Except archaeologists and historians agree that a lot of those Old Testament ‘heroic’ tales never happened. These ‘conquests’ were inscribed centuries later, so the magnificently militaristic Book of Joshua withers under modern archaeological and historical scrutiny. The biblical writers fantasized a glorious military legend for their people acting on God’s orders when in fact they weren’t the righteous Scourge of the Pagans they painted themselves as. The lack of historical support for the Israelites’ grand conquests don’t read well for modern eyes who are aware of the rampant invention. The historical fiction did double future damage for what would one day become The Jews: It made their ancestors look like imperialistic conquerors and without question influenced the future Christian religion’s wars against competitors and non-believers. St. Augustine pointed to the Old Testament to argue that if it was okay to slaughter unbelievers and smash idols back then, it was okay now. God said so!!! The Old Testament writers couldn’t have envisioned how their work would be weaponized to what later became a larger global crusade against ‘God’s chosen ones’. The Exclusivism Trap: Monotheism in a Polytheistic World “Sadat complained to me that Begin was trying to use a title deed from God to claim sovereignty over land that belonged to other people.” - Jimmy Carter, speaking of the Camp David talks, in Living Faith, 1982 If the Israelites weren’t as warlike as advertised, theirs was, at least, a highly intolerant religious society compared to their pagan neighbors, and this would also bite them in the ass for centuries to come. The Old Testament is full of references to God’s wrath against pagan neighbors, at least according to their own scribes. God wanted the Israelites to have the land, not those now-filthy Canaanites. At least so said the prophets and later writers of the Bible who wanted the land recognized as theirs and theirs alone. ‘God said we could have this land and we’re taking it!’ is an argument for a divine title deed that landed with a thud as heavily with the ancients as it did during 1978’s Camp David Accords. Another big mother of a backfiring strategy was their hubris in setting themselves apart and above their pagan neighbors. Countless religions and cults were practiced all over the the Middle East and southern Europe and they generally existed easily enough with each other, with the understanding that whatever official/regional gods existed must be recognized and/or honored along with whatever gods thou worshippest. The Old Testament writers had already set the stage for appearing disrespectful for those who read their heroic fantasy: Not only did they paint theselves as intolerant, violent assholes, but even their own god didn’t always support them. When the Israelites won a battle, it was with God’s help, but when they lost, it wasn’t because of God’s weakness against the enemy’s god, but because the Israelites were weak, rebellious, disobedient, prone to pagan backsliding, wicked women, whatever. To outsiders, they looked like a bunch of religious fanatics—and they were. Early Precendents: Elephantine and Esther The earliest recorded anti-Jewish event occurred in Elephantine in 410 BC when Egyptian priests destroyed a Jewish temple. Another early example is the story of Esther which details the arguments Haman makes to her husband, the Persian king, to justify wiping out the local Jews. "There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom whose laws are different from those of all other peoples and who do not obey the king’s laws; it is not in the king’s best interest to tolerate them." - Book of Esther It’s ironic to our modern eyes that religious tolerance was widespread back then, if not available everywhere. One could customarily avoid running afoul of the local religious authorities by recognizing the local gods and attending a religious festival now and then. Yahweh, with his relentless tyrannical monotheism fetish, failed to foresee his narcissistic Commandment prohibiting the worship of others would easily become a primary vehicle of hatred for his Chosen People. Familiarity may breed contempt, but unfamiliarity breeds fear, and the Yahwists’ unwillingness to socialize and worship with their neighbors made it easy to wonder just what those people might be up to. Humans have always distrusted secrecy for very good reasons. Sometimes those others are up to something. The ancestors of the Jews unconsciously created an unfortunate antisemitism blueprint by pioneering religious intolerance and fanaticism, leading to a worldwide spread that continued through the centuries, even to countries with hardly any Jews or knowledge of their alleged history. Fanaticism is never popular although it’s ever-present in human society. It’s likely what prevented them from asking themselves why they were hated so much and making a few changes. Then again, it’s hard to argue with a fanatical prophet. They claim to speak directly to God and who are you to say they don’t? This isn’t to blame the Jews for antisemitism; they live much more comfortably with their non-believing neighbors today as long as those neighbors aren’t actively trying to kill them, and that’s what’s important. The Holy Land was full of seemingly crazy cults making outlandish claims in the Late Bronze/early Iron Age; why the Jews’ cult-cum-religion survived as long as it has it will be addressed in Part 2. The Power of Fictional Holy Books The ancients had an excuse for something they didn’t know about, nor did we until about thirty years ago: That the Old Testament was heavily fictionalized by greedy ancient real estate agents centuries after the alleged facts. It’s understandable how St. Augustine could use it to justify future Christian imperial barbarities of others even he couldn’t have conceived of. The history was what they knew in a ‘holy book’ that was said to be the inerrant word of God; the justification monotheists have been using ever since. If you believe, as the ancients did, that my god(s) were more powerful than yours, the insanity of a god who doesn’t reliably support his own people is understandably bizarre; Zeus or Mithras might lose a battle but it wasn’t for lack of trying. The other army’s god was just in better form that day. According to the Yahwists, God let his own side lose because of alleged pious infractions; a blueprint for self-hatred we see in certain fundamentalist Christian sects today. But it wasn’t self-hatred back then; the Prophets created theodicy, in which the Israelites’ god is never defeated by a more powerful god, they’re punished by Yahweh for various moral infractions. It’s still largely unrecognized just how fictional holy books can be; they’re rooted in many of the arguments I had with Christian literalists when I was younger and living in the States. Modern theologians try to explain away ugly Biblical justifications about slavery; warring against one’s neighbors; religious persecution of others; marital enforcement; stoning miscreants to death for ‘crimes’; and ‘blasphemies’ (mostly for social control) we now see daily on social media. They’d rather not acknowledge just how awful and immoral the ancients’ Patriarchs were to others and each other; how the God of the Old Testament approved of all of the violence. Yahweh comes across as a narcisstic psychopath who favored twelve tribes of children over all the others he created; and blames the pagans for their paganism when he never revealed himself to them. Yahwism must have sounded an awful lot like the cults du jour we see today; and for many centuries, Yahwism-cum-Judaism was exactly that. Just another crazy cult; but also a deeply unpopular one. Why Christianity Won the Middle Eastern Mind It makes it easier to understand why Christianity captured the world’s imagination, eventually. Once the Gospels were created 70-150 years after the alleged birth of Christ (his Biblical character historically and archaeologically unsupported), a kinder, more loving God who would always forgive your fallibility as long as you sincerely repented and would eventually redeem you in the afterlife, had to have been a powerful draw for people tired of living under a harsh Jewish god, or who found little solace or comfort in dying Greek and Roman polytheism. Nevertheless, Judaism survived. Why? In Part II, we’ll pick up where we left off with the earliest recorded antisemitism of the Babylonian Exile and trace the enduring dislike or outright hatred of Jews. 📚 Support Local Bookstores: You can find titles mentioned in this piece on my Grow Some Labia page at Bookshop.org. Every purchase directly supports independent booksellers and this newsletter. 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!

They've never lived in a truly free and democratic America, which may explain why they're less supportive of it Party like it’s 1999. Photo by RDNE Stock project Karoline Leavitt, Trump II’s trained parrot, is stepping down at the end of the month to take care of her second child. I found her fascinating when she first emerged into the national consciousness as the press secretary for the Liar-in-Chief. All White House press secretaries are professional Pollies, dutifully parroting what their boss wants them to say, and how. She performs her duties with especial gusto. I can’t watch her; she too-gleefully repeats bald-faced lies just too painful to hear, to her own people, and I wonder if this silly child ever questions or feels embarrassed about the omnipresent cross at her throat. Christian hypocrisy is the most cherished Republican virtue, but what does the young Catholic say in confession? Does she even bother to go? Perhaps she avoids it altogether. Every press secretary has to lie to some degree, but Leavitt works for the most dishonest President in U.S. history. Bill Clinton may have stretched the truth on the rack until it screamed like a Manichean heretic, but eventually he came clean with a more inclusive definition of ‘sexual relations’. Trump couldn’t tell the truth if you held a gun to his head. Leavitt must know on some level that her boss tells nothing but lies all day long. The MAGA-chic gold cross virtue-signals she’s a member of the tribe, not necessarily that she’s anything resembling a Christian, especially as her job description requires her to break the Ninth Commandment daily and repeatedly for a man who’s regularly broken all of them except the one about murder. The MAGA’s 21st-century Leni Riefenstahl joyfully serves her boss’s propaganda dish cold, glorifying his authoritarian wannabe Reich in service to her career just as Riefenstahl did, both driven by their relentless ambition, communicating lies to their nation. Leavitt’s face glows as she defends even Trump’s genocidal expression to wipe Iran off the map; there’s nothing he can do that she won’t defend or brush off to her journalist toys. Riefenstahl and Leavitt both knew and know what they were and are doing. But I may be too hard on her; after all, Leavitt is a conservative artifact of the first generation for whom speech is not necessarily a search for truth so much as an exercise in brand positioning, loyalty testing and partisan weaponry. She lies and excuses as easily as she breathes. But she grew up in an America that had begun to devalue truth. She knows nothing else. Born into the anocracy When I Googled her age - she’s 29 now, born in 1997—I realized she’s a ‘cusper’ - a tail-end Millennial, with the first Zoomers three years ahead. They came of age in what was better described as an America shuffling toward anocracy—not the free or mostly free country into which us Xers and Boomers were born. Karoline Leavitt’s generation was raised in a newer era in which public speech was no longer about facts, honesty, or, most importantly, dialogue, but about performance, bullying opponents, and above all, controlling the narrative. Both the left and right served as public examples of how to wield power to demonstrate tribal loyalty and receive supportive accolades. Virtue-signalling was for everyone. I’m not sure exactly when the American belief in truth and honesty died—maybe with George Bush’s contentious first election win, or maybe 9/11—but it’s not surprising that America’s decline is bipartisan. Both political parties embrace authoritarianism, although the party faithful can’t see it or acknowledge it. Today, the right controls liberty and free speech from Washington; the left from everywhere else. The Authoritarian Progressives Leavitt represents the Millennials. The first for whom democracy was clearly eroding by the time they were old enough to become conscious of their own existence. Leavitt became a teenager in 2010. This was the decade that marked the beginning of the early 21st-century bipartisan battles against free speech. She was raised in a conservative Catholic family and was a Trump fangirl years before she got hired, and became a legal adult in 2018. She was born three years before the closest, most contested federal election in American history and was finger-painting during 9/11. She was 19 when her boss won his first election and U.S. intelligence sources found that Vladimir Putin had pretty certainly meddled in the election, although it was never proven that Trump knew or had anything to do with it. Washington was broken by the time her generation graduated high school during the dawn of woke dogmatism. The language policing, social media’s emerging cancel culture, book-banning (although America has never not banned books), the crazy-ass victim feminists materializing out of ‘gender studies’ classes, the black obsession with white skin as the secret handshake that grants you membership into everything. Transgender witch hunts against scientific-thinking critics would begin soon. What we Xers and Boomers have that Leavitt’s generation doesn’t is experience with a truly free, if imperfect America, with less oppressive policies and speech policing. The bipartisan war on free expression Karoline Leavitt probably wasn’t paying attention to infant social media in 2007, but the Bush administration had already set forth the 21st century’s conservative anti-First Amendment crusade in the guise of ‘fighting terrorism’. Bush’s Patriot Act’s ‘national security letters’ allowed the federal government to snoop on American reading material. Bush’s bulldogs attacked journalists and other critics of his Iraq War and used the Espionage Act to investigate leaks and intimidate whistleblowers. The left also geared up in the battle against the First Amendment, outside Washington. Cancel culture reared its ugly head to protect intellectual babies from facts. The first university complaints began trickling out against conservative professors, teachers, and university staff, who pointed out that ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘safe spaces’ were suppressing conservative, or merely alternative, opinions. For example, in her early document of the rising culture of Millennial safetyism and victimhood-centered grievance culture in her book Who Stole Feminism?, Christina Hoff Sommers argued that such kid glove handling encouraged women to become fragile flowers who were easily damaged by ideas that made them think too much. She argued there should be no such thing as a ‘safe space’ from challenging ideas, and in fact, that’s what universities were designed for - to discomfort the comfortable. To irritate the elites. She described a ‘safe space’ she encountered on a 2015 book tour, enacted specifically for her own campus appearance, a room in which female students “played tapes of frolicking puppy dogs and they had bubbles and games,” which she described as ‘infantilizing’. Support Local Bookstores: You can find the titles mentioned in this post on my Grow Some Labia page at Bookshop.org. Every purchase supports independent booksellers (and this newsletter!). A few years earlier, a woman who tweeted a ‘joke’ about AIDS and whiteness became the first to get fired merely for an ill-considered public jest. Apologies were useless; the New Progressive Left decreed that redemption and forgiveness were critical moral faults, not virtues. Social media became equality tools for fanatics on both sides, weaponizing influence and followers to destroy those who didn’t agree with you, whether they were on your side or not. The left attacked its own with more vehemence, but conservative self-cannibalism wasn’t absent either. As campuses across America ignited with a burning desire to make the country ‘safe’ for anyone who felt or at least pretended to be ‘marginalized’ or ‘disadvantaged,’ progressives flexed their new muscles and realized they now had a chance to remake America in their own vision—one of racial and economic equality. That meant, of course, quelling opposing viewpoints. Campus curricula continued moving away from heterodoxy and anything smelling of ‘right-wing’, coinciding with the rise of increasingly ideological ‘race studies’, ‘gender studies’, and restricting any utterance deemed ‘harmful’, while Obama’s Washington ignored the threat. By the time Millennials became legal adults Americans censored themselves more effectively by simply refusing to speak out. They needed to feed their families, after all. Leavitt’s tribe also grew up in a safety-prone world of heightened airline security prompted by 9/11, and heightened surveillance of Americans prompted by a Republican president. Hers was the first generation to grow up online, when they were young and learned easily, unlike the rest of us who had to struggle as adults to understand these newfangled computers. The federal government warned Americans constantly about vague, potentially forthcoming terrorist attacks to keep them in a state of heightened fear (and easier to control). By 2013, college campuses policed speech and made it dangerous to express a conservative view, or something now deemed conservative that wasn’t before. ‘Trigger warnings’, safe spaces, and deplatforming speakers became de rigueur. An early example of the conservative fight against free speech emerged in a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project, determining that groups could be prosecuted for ‘material support for terrorism’ even if said material provided detailed peaceful methods of conflict resolution. The Court argued it could lend legitimacy to a terrorist organization and encourage more funding for them. “Throwing people in jail who are trying to create peace is a poor strategy for fighting terrorism,” commented a senior counterterrorism counselor for Human Rights Watch, which joined the ACLU and eight other groups in filing an amicus brief. Teaching the value of friction For those of us on the right and left who would like to ‘reactionarily’ return America to a state of the far more expansive free speech rights we enjoyed in the 20th century, it’s going to mean fighting the dual forces of authoritarian censorship: A right wing that steals your First Amendment rights in the name of ‘national security’, and a left wing that wants safetyism to protect them from emotional discomfort. Except when they’re recording others they think are behaving badly in the Mobile State, which does a better job of policing Americans than the government. Karoline Leavitt gleefully lying to her own country and the campus activist presenting a petition to the dean demanding ‘trigger warnings’ for Ovid’s Metamorphosis have more in common than they look at first glance: Truth is what someone in authority says it is, not what the actual facts state. “The heresy of heresies was common sense.” - George Orwell, 1984 Younger generations aren’t going to ‘get it’ unless we re-educate them; they’ve been socialized to believe ‘freedom’ means from uncomfortable thoughts, emotions, or critical thinking. Or that the government knows what’s best for us and we should trust them. It means calling out manufactured call-outs; holding the President and Congress accountable for how they’re fighting free speech, not for it; and that critical thinking is not some fascist colonialist plot. Reclaiming objective reality America’s in a bad place. The Zoomers are even less educated and emotionally resilient than the Millennials and many now vote. Zoomers fill town halls cheerleading for socialist leaders yet can’t define ‘socialism’. They can’t name either the river or the sea while they yell a genocidal chant. They’re mad as hell that they can’t get good jobs, and they’re taking it out on the rest of us. But, America’s not over yet. The older generations still outnumber the younger, although the Boomers are dying. It’s up to us, Generation X, to challenge these newer bad ideas now, their bad candidate selections now, and to support our precious First Amendment. Regardless of party. The primary problem is that neither side values Enlightenment epistemology, which defines the rational, reasoned, evidence-based search for truth, upon which we can come to an agreement on objective reality. The far left specifically attacks reason and rationalism as ‘colonialist’ or ‘white men’s thinking’ while the right simply denies it. Trump will never acknowledge the Reflecting Pool’s troubles were the result of poor workmanship rather than vandalism; he refuses to respond to the refrain that there’s no evidence of the latter; he believes what he wants to believe, not what’s true. And here’s the kicker: ideologues can’t be swayed by facts; their belief is their own personal religion. ‘Normies’ have to start speaking out or we won’t deserve the America (or Canada) we once had. It’s on us, kids. The X-Gen. Put on your superhero suits. 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!

We need libraries and badass librarians more than ever. We start by decolonizing them of our self-appointed intellectual dictators, and returning to ideological neutrality Creative Commons CC0 image from Peakpx I remember when librarians were badasses in oversized glasses and plainclothes. During the Reagan years, librarians defended their free speech fortresses against the barbarians at the gate—Christian fundamentalists with a long list of thou-shalt-not-reads, politicians afraid of criticisms of the American project, and activists like the Gablers who wanted to excise evolution from textbooks. There were a few reported book burnings in the ‘80s, mostly localized. The censormonkeys of the right really really really didn’t want you reading books they deemed ‘harmful’. Sound familiar? Yeah. Later, under Bush II, librarians genuinely fought for social justice and freedom to read when the USA Patriot Act allowed the FBI to secretly obtain library and bookstore records under the guise of terrorism investigations. It wasn’t much of a leap to wonder whether they also wanted to know who was reading books critical of the Bush administration, so I kept a running list of titles I would read once I moved to Canada. Oh, the glory days of right-wing censorship! Now the left’s censormonkeys burn books (although some righties still join in). Who holds the real power in America? Here we are, once again, with a right-wing President still trying to control the message, but with an interesting wrinkle: Only so much, because unlike at the turn of the New Millennium, he doesn’t hold primary power. How do we know? Donald Trump’s cancellation victims continue to work. Stephen Colbert is happily co-writing a new Lord of the Rings movie and evaluating where to go next creatively. It’s not hard to imagine he’ll return to commentary as Jon Stewart did. Why? Because Colbert and friends speak truth to secondary power, not to primary power. Sixteen actors who have trouble finding work after mostly progressive cancellation demonstrate that left-wing power still rules the day. Not all of the listed ‘banned actors’ are on the persona non grata list because of conservative political views, but most are, their lives and careers upended by progressives. Progressives own and run Hollywood, although that’s beginning to change. The far left holds the primary power in America. It’s much more dangerous to criticize progressive racism, sexism, homophobia, or its own colonialism. While the right colonizes lands, the left colonizes womanhood, language, public and higher education, Hollywood, publishing, theatre, mainstream media, non-profit and advocacy groups, hiring, and religious groups. Who owns you? Which opinion would you feel more comfortable expressing on X under your real name? Donald Trump is a senile old coot and the most corrupt president the U.S. has ever had. Release the rest of the Epstein files! If GOP Republicans weren’t such massive wussies they’d have Amendment 25’ed him by now. or, ‘Transphobia’ isn’t bigotry. It’s the genuine fear men pretending to be women generate when they insist on colonizing women’s private spaces. You can’t change your sex, period, and they clearly can’t change their exceedingly male and often misogynist brains. I know which view obedient Stephen Colbert regularly expressed. Humor speaks truth to power and these comedians don’t Stepin Fetchit for Trump. The Biggest Joke Of All: The Comedians Who Didn’t Care About The First Amendment Until Now Challenge Humophobia With The Almighty Power of Comedy! Progressives feign oppression by the right wing when in fact, they themselves are the apex oppressors. They are more powerful than the current administration. Which brings us to today’s libraries, with a cultural censorship dictated and curated by modern authoritarian progressives who greatly resemble the God Squad of my youth. Libraries could be sources for The Resistance but for two obstacles: They’re far too ideologically captured, and books have become remarkably expensive. The squeeze: The ALA will tell you what to think Reason Number One for why libraries have become irrelevant: Lack of heterodoxy on the shelves and in the staff room. The lack of neutrality at the American Library Association (ALA) is an erosion rather than a coup. It began in the social justice-mad ‘60s and ‘70s with an increasing emphasis on activist causes which, to be fair, was what people wanted to read then. Activist-oriented librarians formed groups like the Social Responsibilities Roundtable, to address social justice issues like racism, the Vietnam War, civil rights, and other pressing matters of the day. Many challenged the idea that libraries should be neutral spaces, giving rise to the idea that libraries should tell people what to think. FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism) continues the conversation on how ‘social justice’ librarians have abandoned institutional neutrality and enforce their ideological orthodoxy on staff and new hires. How Librarian’s New Social Justice Mission Goes After the Privacy of Library Workers - Fair For All DEI diktats ‘train’ newbie censormonkeys to think the ‘right’ way and make disagreement too costly in staff meetings. Ten-year-old library Best Practices emphasizing fairness, viewpoint diversity and neutrality, it notes, have been tossed in the trash. Staff members are encouraged to develop only four ‘competencies’ — “awareness of racial identity, manifestations of racism, commitment to countering racism, and analysis of racialized outcomes.” And here I thought America had bigger problems than residual racism. Everyday readers have begun drifting away. But you can at least buy the books you want easily on Amazon, right? Why are books so expensive? The death of mass market paperbacks Reason Number Two for the decline of library anti-normie-ism: The rising cost of books. I haven’t been to a library in many years. They’re still stuck in the ‘90s. And we need libraries more than ever. The last time I was in one, it was to beg them to make my kludgy, slow, mostly useless Overdrive app work. It’s an app that allows you to borrow e-books. Theoretically. But I can’t always get the books I want. I looked around at the carrels of old-looking books and wondered why anyone even bothered to visit anymore. With Amazon, I didn’t have to wait weeks or months to read what I wanted. When they allowed independent bookstores and sellers to offer used books for much less money, a $100 gift card was the most exciting birthday gift I could receive. Public library budgets have dwindled (mostly from Republicans). Certain elements of conservatism have never been at all keen on self-educating curious-minded Americans; they tend not to vote Republican. Contarily, though, research shows that opinions of libraries, among the thin sliver of Americans who still access them, are pretty non-partisan: Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, mostly enjoy perusing the shelves and risking upper respiratory infections from pulling down out-of-print books and wondering, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche? What the hell? Support Local Bookstores: You can find the titles mentioned in this post on my Grow Some Labia page at Bookshop.org. Every purchase supports independent booksellers (and this newsletter!). But in the last two years, the cost of new books has gone way, way, up and, it’s not just the Orange Menace’s tariffs, either. Book Riot historically tracks book affordability. To access the entire article you have to join, but there’s enough in the first few paragraphs to answer the question: There was a paper supply issue in 2018; the cost of books rose between 2018 and 2023, coinciding with the COVID crisis and supply chain disruption; and the publishing industry has largely removed the reader’s cheapest access to books, mass market paperbacks. Making books unaffordable makes well-stocked, diverse libraries even more necessary. Publishing is begging for piracy, having learned nothing from the Napster Age. What destroyed the market for free but illegal music back in the ‘90s was the Apple iStore, combined with a Clinton administration takedown of artificially frozen CD prices, both of which brought the price of music down to the point where buying reasonably-priced music was less stressful than waiting for the music cops to knock on your door. USA today asks, “Is reading becoming a luxury?”, noting that formerly $20 hardcovers are now closer to $30, and that fewer people are buying new books, opting for used ones, which have also gone up in price. It’s what once allowed me to buy six Amazon books for $120 in May 2023, and today I might be able to get only three or four for that price. E-book pricing is only slightly less expensive. Hardcovers and trade paperbacks drive higher price margins, which is why the lowly mass paperback has fallen into great disfavor by publishers and booksellers, but not readers. So you can return to the library, but the dwindling choices and the lack of funding for a fix to lumbering Overdrive are a bit like trying to find a good movie on Tubi.tv: There are a few, but mostly it’s crap. The Normie Revolution: Making libraries cool! Libraries could be a great fix for what ails us politically, but first, we’ll need a revolution—by us normies, the maverick sans-culottes, to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the elites who consider themselves our intellectual ‘betters’, who have colonized our libraries and rendered them no longer revelant. We shall drag our DEI-addled librarian gatekeepers to the Place de la Concordia where they shall be tried for their crimes against cognitivity and their Heads of Staff forever severed from their body politic! We shall erect signs out front that read FREE BOOKS!!! so everyone knows they can come in and browse, then check out however many books they want ABSOLUTELY FREE!!! We shall remove their narcissistic, virtue-signalling overblown Pride displays and relegate them to their own corner, no more or less than any other special interest group’s. Down with Rainbow Narcissism! We shall welcome coffee shops as many bookstores do, setting aside a place where book lovers can exchange ideas, recommendations, and get to know their neighbors. We shall pressure Congresscritters to allocate more money for improving libraries so they can provide us with the books we want now, and find quickly the books they don’t have in-house. This will induce the publishing companies and booksellers to reduce their prices and make cheaper books again just as Apple once did for music. We shall condition those funds on their return to the goddess Neutrality and her rightful place, offering a balanced diversity of beliefs, views, ideologies, and ideas, especially any book the other side deems ‘harmful’. We shall create or adopt better apps for borrowing e-books than Overdrive. We shall bring forth library websites where you can browse the shelves from home and mark one for pickup. Where possible, we will also offer a patio where one can continue the conversation outside when the weather is warm. We shall install more comfy couches. We shall allow authors and speakers to make appearances at libraries, with big, burly security guards prepared to drag out deplatformers who try to shut it down. ‘Protesters’ who fail to observe the rules of civilized discourse will be sentenced to reading Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time, a 3,000-page doorstop. They must sit at a library table phone-free near the main desk until they’ve submitted a handwritten book report of no less than 5,000 words. No open book. No help from friends with longer attention spans, Coles/York notes, or AI. We can bring people together face to face. We can lengthen human attention spans. We can have great conversations and find common ground. We can turn librarians into rock stars and, dare I even suggest it, sex symbols! “Marcel Proust lovers make me sooooo hot!” Image generated by Open AI, after a lot of argument about its inability to generate anything erotic. I predict an uptick (ar ar) in male library attendance :)) We can Make Libraries Cool Again. And we can burst the intellectual bubbles of small-minded people, right or left, and render them about as cool as overplucked eyebrows or ‘millennial gray’ interiors. We can return diversity to starving libraries where radical freethinkers can read Genderqueer or Charlie Kirk’s Time for a Turning Point. We can resist our wannabe brainmasters on the right and left. And don’t even get me started on Drag Queen Freethinkers Hour! 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!

Because woke is dying and #WhiteAsianIndianJewishLivesMatterToo It’s hard to stand apart from the crowd…but fortunately, it’s getting more popular. Free image from Pexels A few weeks before Christmas last year, the U.K. experienced a George Floyd-adjacent crime, an alleged ‘racist attack’. In Southampton, the police found Henry Nowak down on the ground, curled into a fetal position, moaning, “I’ve been stabbed.” They’d been summoned by the alleged victim, the brown-skinned Vickrum Digwa, who claimed a ‘racist attack’ by the white man bleeding his life away from five stab wounds. Instead of calling an ambulance and taking Digwa in—who should at least have been a ‘person of interest’, being the only one near the young man at the time—police instead handcuffed the dying man in the video and denied he’d been stabbed, then informed him he was being arrested for an alleged racism. Or something. Nowak died, and Digwa’s trial wrapped up quickly as pre-attack video refuted his racism story. It shows he had grabbed Nowak’s phone who was ‘likely’, according to the judge, trying to get it back. Digwa has been sentenced to a lifetime in prison with a minimum of 21 years. Nowak’s last words to police were, “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe!” The U.K., which exploded with righteous virtue-signalling hysteria amidst lockdown madness over George Floyd, has little to say about their own moment. The late Henry Nowak, a Polish-British citizen, was labeled the villain by police solely because of his skin color. Bolstered by a racist lie. The sad tale testifies to the progressive anti-white hate we normie liberals and conservatives must fight. White Guilt Silenced Henry Nowak - Eli Steele, The Free PressWhite People Who Hate White People Are Racist The extent of progressive racism Progressive racism includes Indians, Asians and especially Jews, racists having defined the last as the world champions of global oppression. Antisemitism drives their keffiyeh-branded Nazi-adjacent politics around the world. Muslim protesters lead the pack, Ground Zero for demonstrably higher anti-Jewish opinions than other groups. More on that in a future article. Antisemitism is racism. Because Jews have a claim to the land of Israel and whatever’s left of ‘Palestine’ no more or less than whatever’s left of the Gazans. Most progressives are ignorant of the genetic history of that part of the world. We ‘normies’, we Exhausted Majority, now have the opportunity to challenge woke racists and hold silent sheeple to the same antiracist standard to which they hold everyone who isn’t themselves. Wokeness is dying, and we can collectively drive a stake through its hateful heart. The U.K., along with their George Floyd scandal, is also being forced to reckon with their decades-long racist willful ignorance of the Pakistani-Muslim rape gangs. (If you’ve been silent on that, would you have if the colors were reversed?) Voices are calling for a Day of Reckoning for the U.K. Pakistani-Muslim community who has ignored this problem for fifty years. Coming from their community specifically, not other immigrant Muslim communities. The Rape Gang Inquiry Report, provided by a British MP after the U.K. government refused to investigate the scandal themselves, can be downloaded here. Meanwhile, back in the U.S…. Wokeness is dying, and progressive racism isn’t as cool as it used to be. An unlikely ally for the #AllRacismMatters camp is Donald Trump, who we should wholeheartedly support when he gets something right. His jam is going after DEI. He’s specifically targeted medical schools who’ve allegedly favored black and Latino students over higher-scoring whites and Asians, preferring they should prioritize merit and scholarship over skin color (yes, how ironic!); and for college admissions to provide evidence they’re not discriminating. The administration also warns against the use of ‘race proxies’ to circumvent U.S. Supreme Court rulings clearly defining that prioritizing race—any race—over merit-based considerations is a violation of students’ civil rights. That’s good news for whites, Asians, and ‘white-adjacent’ Indians. Not so much for those who coast on their biology. Come Join The More Inclusive White Supremacy 2.0*! - with my writing partner Anuradha Pandey Trump’s demanding American universities work harder to protect these groups from campus racial discrimination. According to Time magazine, Trump stated, sounding, admittedly, like school counselor Mr. Mackey in South Park, “But I think the laws are very unfair right now. And education is being very unfair, and it’s being stifled. But I don’t think it’s going to be a big problem at all. But if you look right now, there’s absolutely a bias against white [people] and that’s a problem.” Zero gold stars for eloquence but his point is clear. Anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-Indian racism is real. Progressive. And unconstitutional. Yeah, he’s a racist himself. It takes one to know one. But he’s still right. Progressives reject that they themselves might be racist, while it’s undeniable to those who must live with progressive racism. Racism is always wrong. Whites are not universal blanket oppressors. Black people aren’t nearly as powerless as they once were, and many activists resist asking the hard, and obvious question: How are (some) black people holding themselves back? This book was written in 1990, and I read it about three years ago. It’s every bit as relevant today as it was back then. Steele digs down into black resistance to changing themselves, improving their game, competing on merit and the need to stop blaming Whitey for their own shortcomings. Support Local Bookstores: You can find the titles mentioned in this post on my Grow Some Labia page at Bookshop.org. Every purchase supports independent booksellers (and this newsletter!) Trump’s antiracism mandate extends to off-campus. His administration is vigorously enforcing the Civil Rights Act’s Title VI with an executive order reminding progressives that it includes Jews. He’s established a task force for rooting out antisemitism and is aggressively forcing action against antisemitic activity. He’s launched investigations into the most well-known and notorious elite universities who have ignored or encouraged antisemism on their campuses. I’ll just say it out loud: Good job, Donald! Don’t shy away from praising Trump just because he’s an awful human being. No one is 100% evil, or always wrong, which he’s proven. #WhiteLivesMatterToo We can de-toxify woke/black racism, and somehow repair the broken moral compasses too many self-hating white progressives, and racist black activists, carry around. Traditional liberals must stop being ‘team players’. Woke progressives aren’t on our team; they’re on Team Illiberal, along with their MAGA compatriots (and adversaries). We need to call out people like the ditzy chick who wouldn’t file charges against a black man who violently attacked her on a Manhattan subway because she ‘didn’t want to put another black man in jail.’ Presumably, she would have if he’d been white? THAT’S RACIST!He went on to murder someone shortly after. She’s now a collaborator, however unintentionally. She’s not legally responsible, of course, nor should she be; but we need to call out and push white weenies like her to file reports and ignore woke whines about racism. They’re merely projecting themselves onto her, and actively helping right-wingers who accuse progressives of being soft on crime. In another case of anti-white racism, the media was remarkably silent on the murder last year on a North Carolina light-rail line of Iryna Zarutska, a young Ukrainian immigrant returning home from work when she was stabbed to death by a black loony-tune. Little public outcry from anyone except perhaps White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a rare moment of truth-telling to the American people on the dangers of progressive crime treatment. Wow. The Barbie Parrot understands right and wrong better than the media. The media is RACIST. How to fight progressive racism We start by defending merit and competence. We can use sports as a metaphor. Superbowls, World Series, FIFA matches, and World Cups aren’t exciting because they’re played by people chosen for their biological diversity; they’re chosen for one reason only: How good they are. Sports teams are one of the few merit-based professions left. Some are dominated by one color or another, but for economic rather than ideological or race-related reasons. Tiger Woods is one of the few black golfers in a whiter-than-Friends professional sport, but that’s because of its higher financial barriers. It’s closely linked to exclusively white country club culture which is still being dragged kicking and screaming into the post-civil rights world. Blacks and other Athletes O’ Color predominate basketball and football because they’re tickets to getting out of the ghetto if you’re really good. All you need to start is a ball. Maybe a basket. Now suggest to your favorite woke progressive sports fan that their favorite team is too white, or too black, and that DEI should replace a few for more ‘balance’. Make common sense more common We must challenge progressive racist ideology with a strict adherence to just-the- facts, ma’am. This is how I learned to combat Christian fundamentalism when I lived in the U.S. They knew the Bible far better than I, but I knew science and history far better than they. I probably didn’t convince many True Believers with my brilliant assessment of Biblical errors. But. I may have planted seeds of doubt that flowered long after I was gone. That’s what we must do with today’s True Progressive Racists. You won’t ‘win’ arguments with logic and rationalism, but their hypocrisies will begin to nag them, especially if they hear challenges from more than a few sources. If you see them regularly, keep asking the questions. Like, “Do you secretly suspect black students aren’t smart enough to compete fairly with white and Asian applicants?” Why are they so suspicious of merit? Your question makes them realize they sound racist, or at least subscribe to the bigotry of low expectations. Zero tolerance for ideology that can’t be logically defended. Period. Take note where you flagged in debates and find better responses. Don’t try to argue on their turf; ideology is malleable but the facts are not. Drag them onto your own firmer ground. The more they hear the message, the more they will begin to doubt, especially when they hear it elsewhere. Truth is cool Nazi propaganda puppy Joseph Goebbels claimed that a lie repeated often enough becomes accepted in the public mind. Guess what, that also applies to the truth. We can diminish progressive racism by speaking out. We can surround these people with the facts from which they hide. Here’s a cloud with a silver lining: They’ve got two more years of Trump and his hate-on for woke. Continually call their beliefs racist. When they hear the label enough, they’ll change, or hide. The more vocal we are, the more others will feel empowered to speak out. We especially need to challenge our liberal friends who say they agree with us normies in private but mouth progressive pieties around their racist friends. Liberals need to prove criticism of progressives isn’t ‘just Fox News Kool-Aid’. It’s widely shared. Force progressives to play it safe before making statements publicly. Make it dangerous to be publicly stupid. Ask those glaringly obvious questions, and keep asking until they answer them. We won’t change many minds, at first. But what has been heard and read cannot be undone. They might see the light later. We can change the world, one progressive racist at a time. 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!

It's time for the grownups to challenge #MeToo victim feminists with vintage grudges, who simply refuse to grow up. “But I don’t wanna be a responsible, functional adult woman!” Image by Pexels from Pixabay Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. I think I speak for many when I say I’ve grown cold to the tired narrative that human females are helpless little victims of the patriarchy. Especially when a love affair ends in emotional pain. The Free Press covered a few recent frivolous #MeToo allegations beginning with a Stanford Law professor. Megan Wachspress proclaimed a fairly vague ‘grooming’ allegation against Daniel Biss, a mayoral incumbent just before an Illinois election in June. His opponent was the sort of uber-far-mega-left social media influencer type that’s about the only thing that brings Millennials and Zoomers to orgasm anymore. Fortunately, his path to victory was not derailed by a whiny Eternal Little Girl’s claim that he ‘groomed’ her for—well, we’re not sure for what, since no sexual contact took place, but it was the only allegation she could offer given that her story was riven with obvious consent. Wachspress had been a 20-year-old college student, and he, a 26-year-old teacher, and she took one of his classes. They went out several times after the term was over and she clearly dug him, then he cut it off because he didn’t feel quite right about the situation. This took place in 2004. She came up with a lot of silly, unconvincing reasons last month why this was ‘grooming’. Wachspress got hurt. But she’s a Millennial, so if she was ‘groomed’, it was by her parents, educators, and her peers to believe she’s entitled to a harm-free existence. She still doesn’t understand, at age 39, when she made the accusation, that love and romance are messy and we don’t always get what we want. Or who. Wachspress is an Eternal Little Girl still pouting over an unhappy love affair when she was an immature college student. The forever statute of limitations Eternal Little Girls are found primarily among Millennials and Zoomers. The roots of female victimhood stem from the Boomers and Gen X, but for good reason: Women really were oppressed, suppressed, and subject to male predation far more than today. But to misquote John Cleese, We gawt bettah. Not all of the older generations, of course. I’ve written before about wrinkly feminists still stuck in the ‘80s. If You Hold The Same Beliefs You Did Thirty Or Forty Years Ago—Why? #MeToo has turned into a monster with no statute of limitations on accusations. Women can claim victimhood against a man at any time, without evidence, just her word. #MeToo’s power may be thankfully waning, as in the case of Mayor Biss, although maybe the allegations simply came too late in the campaign to harm him. I hope it’s the former. Because that was a really dumbass story Meghan Wachspress told. We need to shine the light on women who don’t feel victimized at the time, but change their minds much later, often encouraged by their fellow fragile flowers on social media. Victimhood is a lovely place to live for the sisterhood. Victim feminists—women who see females as perpetually at the mercy of all-powerful patriarchs—hold back women and ‘turn back the clock’ more effectively than any ‘right-winger’. ‘Twas the older generations who raised today’s Eternal Little Girls, who seek validation through collective #MeToo narcissism. The movement was a great idea—to hold males accountable for genuinely bad behavior, but like all social movements, it overrreached, because it was spawned by Eternal Little Girls rather than grownups. The Eternal Little Girl, the Puella Aeterna, is a concept originating with Carl Jung, who described them as adults who resist growing up. They prefer to remain youthful (in actions if not in the inevitability of a body maturing into old age), playful, carefree, idealistic, and avoid emotional depth. The Puella Aeterna of today’s victim feminists expresses as an inability to take responsibility for one’s actions and feelings and forever blame others (primarily men), for whatever’s wrong with their lives. It’s the hallmark of today’s girl-women exemplified by Megan Wachspress: Spoiled three-year-olds trapped in women’s bodies. The Eternal Little Girls of #MeToo #MeToo has failed the accountability standard over and over. When they finally called for women’s ‘accountability’ in their interactions with men, it was to blame real victims—women—for not doing what men wanted. Ironically, a movement which claims to, in their own words, “channel their unique empathy in community with one another, and in service of a future free from sexual violence,” champions the right of fully-equipped males to invade women’s and girls’s locker rooms, bathrooms, and even prisons. Even those who have been physically and sexually victimized by men, are now expected to swallow their trauma and deal with it, according to countless #MeTooers. To please men. Who needs right-wingers to oppress women when we’ve got progressive Handmaids for the Patriarchy? They refuse their own statement by failing to protect women and girls from sexual predators—in spangly pink bikinis. Social movements, left and right, are never good at drawing boundaries. The desire to resist acknowledging victory, to keep the momentum going, to feel part of a united ‘tribe’, to relish that ‘us against the world,’ feeling is why movements, unchecked, invariably go off the rails. Trump’s MAGA movement, and Christian nationalism/fundamentalism, are both ideas from the other side taken way too far. The best, probably truest, #MeToo stories emerged in its earliest days. That’s when they took down power and clear predators. Others told tales of sexual harassment, groping, and other pretty clear-cut cases of male entitlement to female bodies. But as the movement progressed, the stories became less lurid, and sounded more like whining or minor complaints rather than serious sexual encroachment. The stories began sounding suspiciously made-up, coming from anonymous accounts who would never be held responsible for their posts or tweets unless they named names and someone filed a lawsuit. #MeToo never embraced the notion of personal responsibility for one’s life and safety, rejecting it outright in favor of a narrative that portrayed women as permanently innocent victims of alleged male rapaciousness. It laid down no boundaries for differentiating minor complaints (“He touched me lightly on the chest”) from more serious sexual allegations, like a boss who pushes an employee up against the wall or an actual rape. They catastrophized that which wasn’t serious enough to get engagement. #MeToo was birthed by an Eternal Little Girl, Tarana Burke, and its presence heavily boosted by an influential Eternal Little Girl, actress Alyssa Milano, whose childlike devotion to victimhood seriously needs to be purged by the adults in the room. It’s 2026, not 1986, young ladies. Now let’s talk about #MeToo, victim feminism, and alleged rape. The death of ‘Believe All Women’ We can comfortably have this conversation about exaggerated and false rape claims, now that many victim feminists have denied the documented mass rapes of Israeli Jewish women on Oct. 7 by Hamas. If we no longer have to ‘believe the [Jewish] women’, we no longer have to believe anyone else, either. The proper response from the grownups in the room to any ancient sexual assault allegation for which a woman has no police report and no other proof (like genetically stained clothing) is: That must have been awful. Sorry to hear that. Donald Trump Offers A Terrific Lesson On How Rape Victims Can Get True Justice How Not To Report A Rape And Compromise Your Own Credibility When You Do Many of today’s Eternal Little Girls do it for the attention. They receive support from other uncritical Eternal Little Girls. Still, even as we challenge them, we must recognize one element that’s legitimately not their fault: they were raised in a culture of safetyism, primarily by progressive-leaning parents, to believe their opinions mattered as much as an adult’s, to ignore rules they didn’t like, and that bad things that happened to them were never their fault. Because they taught they were incapable of bad judgment, they couldn’t learn from their own mistakes. We have to undo a lot of harmful parenting. We’re past the point where sexual assault allegations and predatory tactics aren’t taken seriously. Now they’re taken entirely too seriously, with testimony accepted outside the court as hard evidence when it’s not. Years after the fact, it’s she-said-he-said. Women shouldn’t be accorded more than passing attention when their accusations are older than a fine cheddar cheese. We should make it clear there’s a statute of limitations on their public credibility, and it’s a short one, if they don’t report a sexual assault before they destroy the evidence. Here are the hard facts, like ‘em or not: It’s a woman’s right not to report, but the social consequences are she may, in fact, not be believed later. It’s her choice. She abrogates the right to ruin the man with what may well be false accusations twenty years later. Victim feminists won’t acknowledge that victims are entirely too powerful, when they can ruin a man’s reputation or career with unsubstantiated allegations. I hope that men will also begin to fight back by suing women who do this. And we adult women need to support them. How to handle Eternal Little Girls Let’s discuss what the grownups can do. Enforce the Currency of Consequences The Self-Esteem Generations will stop throwing tantrums if we hold them accountable for their unfair cancel efforts. Even if the target isn’t a saint. A man who gropes women on the subway isn’t a nice guy, but unless he’s forcibly pushing his penis into someone, he’s not the same as a rapist. Language matters: Eternal Little Girls and others of modern progressivism expand definitions when it suits them, and limits them when it doesn’t. We need to call out the ‘Graces’ of the world, and women like Megan Wachspress, and point out the facts as she’s stated them: It wasn’t grooming, it was a guy who hurt a legal adult, however regretfully. And shouldn’t she be over it by now? If more adults speak up and challenge the Eternal Little Girl, they’ll be less likely to act up in public. There’s nothing like consequences to teach children they’re responsible for their own emotional regulation. Starve the #MeToo Narcissism Economy Please don’t feed the narcissists. Don’t provide Eternal Little Girls their incessant craving for attention and validation via appropriated or exaggerated victimhood. Genuine trauma is one thing, but you can’t always be certain they’re not just pulling it out of their heinies. I keep the timeline, and proportionality, firmly in mind. A rape she says happened last week requires a lot more concern and support than one she says happened fifteen years ago. Raise Resilient Women, Not Fragile Victims Life is hard. Just ask the Buddha, who thought life was fun and games and beauty until he escaped the Palace prison and encountered old age, sickness and death. Challenge the parents who’ve been raising these coddled Eternal Little Girls. Point out she can’t defend herself against a potential sexual assault—every mother’s worst nightmare—when she thinks of herself as a victim. If more people called out laissez-faire parenting in public, they might get angry retorts back, but those parents may have a private conversation with Missy-poo later. Shaming works both ways. And as for the Eternal Little Girls, who have been raised to be emotional weaklings, we need to say No far more often, especially when they’re adults. Eternal Little Girls are taught to say No, but not to accept it. That must change. NO to exaggerated trauma. NO to assumed victimhood. NO to catastrophism. NO to treating other people poorly or ‘cancelling’. NO to not taking charge of their lives and their safety and most of all, their emotions. Tellingly, Wachspress told her story on Substack and prohibited commenting. I rest my case. 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!

From One Tin Soldier to Charlie Daniels, a dual citizen's take on why the mother country will survive its latest midlife crisis. AI-generated image by Poe When I think of where the United States of America is headed today on its Semiquintennial, I am reminded of two songs that define us. The first is the 1970s folk song One Tin Soldier. You’ll only remember it if you’re Of A Certain Age. It was the theme song to the insanely popular 1971 movie Billy Jack—a movie that introduced one of America’s earliest examples of the modern action hero. Now the valley cried with anger “Mount your horses! Draw your sword!” And they killed the mountain-people So they won their just reward Now they stood beside the treasure On the mountain, dark and red Turned the stone and looked beneath it “Peace on Earth” was all it said Uber-folk-hippie music and all that. Okay. ‘Peace on Earth’ is totally cliche today. I get it. But, doesn’t it sound like America? Don’t negotiate with others for their resources, take their land. Destroy their country. And their people. Threaten to make everyone the 51st state. La plus ça change. But there’s a far more important song I’m reminded of, and it sounds even more relevant for America today: Listen to this song again even if you didn’t like it back in 1980. It sounds a lot different forty-six years later. “Well the eagle's been flyin' slow And the flag's been flyin' low And a lotta people sayin' that America's fixin' to fall Well speakin' just for me And some people from Tennessee We've got a thing or two to tell you all” I don’t know what will happen to my beloved mother country, and I do love it despite the way it’s acting right now, but I am quite sure about this: We will survive! (I will resist adding another video.) Here’s why: We survived an actual Civil War less than 100 years after the Founding Fathers flipped the middle finger to King George III, who pissed himself blue with rage, and declared independence from England. Civil wars ain’t funny, McGee Less than a century after the Revolution, the Civil War pitted brother against brother. Sometimes literally. Americans vs Americans over the right to own other human beings, or not. Don’t let the descendants of the sore losers tell you it was over ‘states’ rights’. It wasn’t. One side wanted uber-cheap labor, and the other, more Christian side, were willing to free them, but not marry them. Nobody alive today can fathom just what this meant for the long-ago severed Union. We make jokes or speculate about another ‘civil war’, but ‘it t’ain’t funny, McGee’, as my mother would have said. Civil wars are fucking brutal. You have no idea. All the South had to deal with was famine and Yankee rape. Just try living in the 21st century with that, plus your Internet, broadcasts, healthcare, gasoline, clean water and your food supply cut off. Remember that scene in Gone With The Wind where they have to cut off a man’s leg without anesthetic? That could be you, or your family member—your child. How will you get to the hospital without gas? What will they do for you without electricity? How will you like watching one child die of some common infection because the penicillin was long gone? Or your grandfather die because they ran out of his medication at Walgreen’s? “This lady may have stumbled But she ain’t never fell. And if the Russians haters don’t believe that They can all go straight to hell!” If you think I’m exaggerating about modern civil war risks, listen to a turkey-talkin’ Republican, Adam Kinzinger: So let’s please stop it with the civil war talk. Life may get far worse before it gets better, but I still believe, at the end of the day, much like the aftermath of World War II, America will stand tall, still. Although everyone will be picking a lot of debris out of their asses for years to come. I’m not convinced the ruins won’t be extensive, but I don’t think we’ll be devastated. I’m not sure if Xpocalypse will be from World War III or just plain dang stupidity and pigheadedness (I’m almost entirely certain it won’t be nuclear war), but I think a lot of Americans will die in the process. They already are, with their food aid cut off. Maybe famine. Maybe war. Massive inflation. Destroyed supply and logistics chains. Economic destruction, via the President’s inability to give a shit about Americans while he funnels money to himself, his family, and his rich friends (thank you, Grandma for sacrificing your SNAP, and R.I.P.!). Maybe it will be Civil War, Part Deux: Red vs Blue, rather than Blue vs Gray. That’s likely the worst-case scenario, unless I’m wrong about nuclear war. My money’s on self-inflicted economic devastation, but I beg my fellow Americans to prove me wrong. Because you’ll drag the rest of the world down with you. The cycle of pulling together I believe in my people, because we survived a real Civil War. We united again, and we got over whatever we needed to. Including the ‘inherent inferiority’ of other human beings, one of the most common and universally human moral faults. Here’s another reason why I believe we will survive today’s American national division. Our next big challenge, after the Civil War, was two World Wars, the latter of which being when we fought a guy so hideous his name still stands as the symbol of all things evil. The weird thing was, before that last war broke out, we all hated each other. Just like now. Yet eventually we pulled together by putting aside our differences. Once World War II ended—listen up, America haters!—everyone was pretty much sick to death of war so we rebuilt Europe, rebuilt Japan, built our highway infrastructure, passed civil rights legislation, funded the G.I.s to go back to school and learn new skills that didn’t involve killing people, eliminated smallpox, prevented polio, put men on the moon, launched massive social and civil rights campaigns for blacks, women, gays, migrant workers, and others, and, oh yeah, we had sex a lot leading to the Baby Boom. We will do it again. Even the sex. From the Bicentennial to the Border Patrol I was thirteen at America’s Bicentennial. My mother pointed out, like the thirteen original colonies. I was born on June 27th, one week before the Fourth of July. I pointed out that if she hadn’t been in such a hurry to have me that she’d had me induced, I might have been an Independence Baby. Mom pointed out I was already three weeks overdue and she was getting very, very tired of lugging that big load around, struggling to get in and out of her car. I was old enough to care about the Bicentennial. I was proud that I was alive when our country was celebrating its 200th anniversary and I loved our Bicentennial quarters and Minutes. I remember thinking ahead to the 250th in, what, 2026 and what that would be like. Never would I have dreamed, nor anyone I knew at the time, that I would be living in Canada, driven out partially by the slide towards authoritarianism under George Bush II, and that I would be afraid to cross my mother country’s border to celebrate the 250th there. Which I would have done otherwise. I’m not paranoid; I know what the law says: The border HAS to let me over, eventually, because I’m a U.S. citizen. But. An administration that acknowledges no commitment to our laws or our Constitutional rights. So sue us, bitch! While the chances are pretty slim, I can’t risk winding up in a foreign shithole prison or in whatever replaces Alligator Alcatraz. I’m disappointed I can’t be there with the rest of you, but I’m staying home. I can’t risk it. But a beer for me, kids. I’ll be back. I can ride out this crazy old coot and his clown car of MAGAts. And I do believe in you! “We’re gonna put her feet back On the path of righteousness and then God Bless America again!” - Charlie Daniels Band, 1980 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!

My '90s Kinknet trolling exposed the gap between Boomer/Xer resilience and the fragile "snowflake" culture we accidentally created. Beat me, hurt me, make me piss off a Long Island sex toy distributor! Image by Daniele Devoti, Creative Commons 2.0 generic license on Wikimedia Commons My last attempt at online trolling was in the ‘90s. Nerds like me and my then-partner hung out on local BBS’s before we knew the Internet had been invented. Jerry and I trolled a sexual fetish discussion group, provided by our sysop friend Chris. I subscribed to a full feed of adult groups solely for the Pagan/Wiccan discussions, which occasionally veered into sexual discussions about the Great Rite, Tantric sex, and whether the Clan of the Cave Bear novels had the right idea about adults initiating adolescent virgins of both sexes into the Rites of Love. I found myself fascinated, nevertheless, with the off-Pagan kinkazoids. I’d venture into a particularly kinky area (Sadomasochism, Spanking, Water Sports, etc.) and nearly fall out of the chair laughing. I mean what else can you do when reading about people who fantasize they’re ponies? Or men who fancied themselves ‘adult babies’, which seemed sad and sick, in a certain way, but it was also—hilarious. One bored afternoon I played a joke on the Bondage & Discpline group. You people are all a bunch of perverts! You should all pray to Jesus Christ to heal you of your sins, if you spent as much time reading the Bible as you do fantasizing about your sick pleasures, you would be much better off! Repent now, sinner, before it’s too late, for the day of Judgment is at hand! Signed, The Puritan I didn’t get any responses, so I assumed they’d ignored me. A few days later, I realized I’d posted as ‘The Puritan’, whereas primitive BBS comment notifications came only to one’s established account name. I would have to return to the group. Holy handcuffs, Batman! The echo had gone positively unchained. The Puritan was all they could talk about. The regulars, when they weren’t analyzing why they were “doms” or “subs”, were having a field day. Some were offended, and responded indignantly to my intolerance. Others fantasized about what they’d like to do to ‘The Puritan’ if they got hold of ‘him’ at one of their parties—which involved tying him up with his pants down to his ankles and humiliating him or performing certain sexual acts. A perceptive few remarked, “Does anyone else get the feeling that someone’s just yanking our chain?” (Yes, and if it’s attached to your John Thomas you’re probably enjoying it!) Jerry, my then-partner, came home to find me in hysterics, and I showed him what I’d done. He also found it risible. But I’d begun feeling a little guilty—some of these people were really offended, and I hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. So I posted a half-assed apology. Hi everyone, this is The Puritan. I’ve gotten a lot of laughs out of your responses to my message about finding Jesus. It occurred to me that maybe I owed some of you an apology because you were really offended. (But not to those of you who enjoyed it ) I am neither male nor Christian. Although I can’t see the point to B&D myself, I really don’t have a problem with whatever people do in the privacy of their own homes. Still, I can’t feel entirely sorry for what I did. Some of you recognized it for the troll it was, some were obviously upset and I’m sorry. But admit it, some of you got some GREAT fantasy material out of this. I read what you wanted to do to “this guy” at your parties, or if you could get him alone. So enjoy, enjoy! This is my last message here. I won’t bother you anymore. So let The Games begin again… Because Jerry worked the second shift at a newspaper, he didn’t look again until the next morning, after I’d left for work. He called me later. “You are ALL they’re talking about here,” he said. “Again? Why? I apologized,” I said. “Well, I think it has to do with my message.” Oh no. “What did you do?” “I posted a rant signed, ‘The Puritan’s Boyfriend.’” When I got home, I read his lengthier addendum to my apology, responding to the blowback with, “I enjoyed watching my girlfriend have a go at you folks, but we promise not to do it again. Because what we learned from this is that perverts have no sense of humor.” “Jerry, I can’t believe you did this. Just when I thought I’d ended it!” The moderator had just returned from vacation. She was obviously a “dom”—she ordered everyone, in flaming Nazi prose, to cease responding to any more of the Puritan posts immediately, under penalty of torture, or maybe in their cases no torture. She was livid—she insisted she was not only going get my BBS account cancelled, but also my provider’s access to Kinknet. Now I was scared. I’d never meant to get Chris involved. I called him. “I did something bad,” I said in a small voice. “What did you do?” “Well, um, I wanted to play a little joke on some of the folks in Kinknet, so I posted a Christian-style flame calling myself The Puritan, urging everyone to give up their sinful lifestyles and find Jesus.” He laughed. “And?” “Well, the whole group went bugshit, so I posted an apology, and promised not to do it again.” “And?” “Well, I didn’t know Jerry was going to do this, but he posted a message signed ‘The Puritan’s Boyfriend,’ saying, among other things, that ‘perverts have no sense of humor’. The moderator has gone totally ballistic. She said she was going to get my BBS account pulled—“ Chris was laughing at this point. “Don’t worry, I won’t cancel your account.” “What’s going on?” his wife asked in the background. “Oh, You-Know-Who posted a joke message on some Kinknet group and everyone went bananas.” “But wait, there’s more! She’s says she’s going to get your Kinknet access pulled and make sure you never get it back! Chris, I’m really sorry, I never meant to cause you any trouble! It was just a little joke!” Chris laughed again. “Oh, don’t worry, whoever she is, she doesn’t have that power. The most she can do is complain, I can handle it.” “Are you sure?” “Yeah. Just don’t do it again. Mia’s looking through it now, giggling.” We found out months later the moderator of the B&D conference was more talk than action, from Thomas, Jerry’s and my on-line acquaintance. She was a middle-aged woman from Long Island who ran a kinky sex toys distribution business. He remembered the Puritan fiasco—he was one of the members, apparently—and laughed to learn it was Jerry and I behind it. From 90s BBS Freedom to Modern Cancel Culture It’s hard to imagine today how seemingly Wild Wild West democratic free speech was thirty years ago. Just imagine being able to say what was on your mind, without consequence until it was really crazy. A group of mildly pissed-off fetishists expressed anger at someone who logged in and took a verbal dump on their playground. Ultimately, they moved on because not only did shitty people happen, but more importantly, it truly wasn’t a big deal. Their B&D forum was a safeish space for those with a particular pleasure to share with others, but it wasn’t a gated community. It existed in the Real World. There was no expectation that they would be, or had a right to, a bubble that protected them from alternative views. I doubt I was the first ‘Christian’ to upset their apple cart, but possibly the only fake one. I left, Jerry left, and maybe Chris emailed the dom lady and promised her it wouldn’t happen again. Everyone moved on. Now, what would happen today? You can troll all you want—viciously—but all one needs to do to ruin one’s own life is stating plain facts challenging someone’s self-constructed reality. The blustering descendants of the sex toy distribution dom rule the Internet today, but with a power she could only dream of to destroy others for refusing to validate a personal delusion, or a contrary opinion, like whether Blacks are living with oppressive, 24x7 racism every day. Left-wing college campus cultures deplatform, cancel, issue the ‘heckler’s veto’, dox, swat, and swat down alternative opinions that challenge their narrow little pseudoreality. But evangelical Christian colleges decree and enforce their own strict boundaries, too, and have for decades. Thou shalt not speak in favor of premarital sex or the legitimacy of the homosexual lifestyle, or criticize campus leadership, or say bad things about a President they favor. They stand on somewhat firmer First Amendment grounds on freedom-of-religion, as the whole point to attending a Christian university is to receive the perpetuation of a particular theological ideology which also sets limits on critical thinking. Hillsdale College in Michigan, a non-sectarian Christian classical liberal arts college, sounds awfully ‘woke’: It bans ‘offensive’, ‘abusive’, or ‘disparaging’ speech on social media, websites, private email, even private texts. All while proclaiming an alleged commitment to civil and religious liberty. Heterodox thinking is heretical thinking for the small- and petty-minded, worthy of social media crucifixion or explusion. And yet: It’s okay to abuse others or engage in ‘hate speech’ if it’s for a ‘good cause’. Abusive transactivists and antisemites applaud or ignore crimes against others as long as the perpetrators are not-white, not-Jewish, or not-heterosexual. Especially if they attack the ‘right’ sort of person, or are super-hot. The Internet’s thought police attack protected speech while approving of and normalizing actual hate speech. The even richer irony is that we Xers and tail-end Boomers are the culprits. During the Golden Age of local BBS’s, we X’ers were jumping online between diapering Millennial bottoms and schlepping preschoolers to playdates. We raised the ‘Self-Esteem Generation’ who believed every thought they had was Marcus Aurelius-level and every desire demanded fulfillment. They really did get participation trophies. While we championed free speech, we raised the thinnest-skinned people in the world to grow up and impose their authoritarian viewpoints on the rest of us, having successfully occupied and usurped our major institutions. And it’s not just the kids anymore; on the other side, ironically, we elected the thinnest-skinned human in America to the highest public office who imposes his own endless tantrums over minor slights challenging his own blinkered reality. In mid-May, moral psychologist and bestselling author Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Anxious Generation I’m always going on about and terrorizing subway riders with, gave a commencement speech at New York University encouraging students to take control of their own attention, to think for themselves, to turn off their phone notifications, to accept and talk to other people who may not share their values, or feel differently about positions or policies. Instead, he counseled, spend more time on human, face-to-face relationships. You’d have thought he’d called for nuking the Gazans. Support Local Bookstores: You can find the titles mentioned in this post on my Grow Some Labia page at Bookshop.org. Every purchase supports independent booksellers (and this newsletter!). The future of America, at least at that graduation ceremony, booed him before he uttered a single word, complained his views didn’t align with their values, expressed frustration and ‘disgust’ with his appearance, and complained in the campus newspaper. “It feels like Jonathan Haidt is meant to scold the student body and belittle them,” complained one graduating whiner in an op-ed. The student government similarly waah-waahed to the university in a letter bemoaning their speaker choice. They’d never consumed anything other than ideological pablum for their entire lives and they resented being asked to think for themselves now on Graduation Day. They proved Haidt’s point, Q.E.D. In the 1990s, the kinks mostly laughed off a joke and moved on. They actually did a sense of humor after all, but in the process they raised their own constipated, humophobic Puritans who didn’t. It would be unfair to blame either them, or even Gen X, for the state of affairs today. Even seasoned adults now yell and throw tantrums if they encounter a position they don’t like. Our President is a snowflake. But he reflects everything wrong with both sides. And all of us. What are we going to do about it? 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!

From Bacon’s Rebellion to modern fast fashion: The strategic amnesia about unabolished slavery behind America’s newest holiday. President Biden turns Juneteenth into a federal Thing. Don’t they all look so pleased with themselves? Uh, yay? Photo by The White House - P20210608CW-1394, Public Domain It’s impossible to morally argue in favor of one of the ugliest institutions in human history. Anti-slavery holidays like the U.S.’s Juneteenth exist in other countries, too, like Emancipation Day in Canada (I didn’t even know we had one! August 1st), elevated into federal holiday status a few weeks after Biden wielded the pen against the whip. Monkey see monkey do, eh? Mexico’s El Nacimiento de los Negros (shouldn’t that be Personas de Color?) while not a federal holiday, celebrates the Black Seminoles who fled to Mexico for freedom, after having fled their plantation masters for the tribe who welcomed the enemies of their enemies. The June 19th date was chosen to coincide with their fellow slaves’ emancipation in last-holdout Galveston, Texas. Slavery was abolished in Mexico decades before the U.S. or Canada. Celebrating the end of slavery isn’t much different from V-E or V-J Day feting the end of the world’s last and ugliest world war. Good-bye, and don’t the the door hitcha inna ass on the way out! But I’ve never embraced Juneteenth myself (I’m a Bad Liberal!) for a few reasons, mostly because it was birthed at Peak Woke in America. It strongly resembles just another dumbass progressive holiday giving self-hating white progressives another virtue-signalling moment, and overprivileged black activists another reason to piss and moan about how ‘marginalized’ they are when they should be home working with their career coach to optimize their resume for their forthcoming Goldman Sachs interview. Juneteenth is further unpalatable for its focus on one specific type of slavery (plantation). It ignores the reality of how prosperous the transatlantic slave trade was not just for white buyers, but also for African entrepreneurs themselves. And, if we’re being honest, we haven’t abolished slavery in America so much as transmogrified it. Slavery today Jeffrey Epstein epitomizes modern human slavery, even as he was only a tiny sliver of it. Human and sex trafficking aren’t just for billionaires; modern slaves are affordable and available for everyone. Human slavery is likely happening right in your very neighborhood. Maybe children are being forced to do sexual things in front of the camera in their father’s basement. Or they work in ‘massage parlors’. Prostitutes (not ‘sex workers’) are likely sex-trafficked. Hotels and motels famously provide safe havens for trafficking girls and women (and sometimes boys and young men too). You may live in a ‘nice’ neighborhood but don’t be so sure everyone who lives there is ‘nice’. ‘Sex work’ and ‘human trafficking’ are prettier term that blankets the truth: It’s human slavery. Half of human trafficking involves hard labor. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, forced vs sexual labor globally is about fifty-fifty—38.7% sexual and 38.8% forced labor. Today’s slaves work in fields (plantations!), on fishing boats, and the hospitality industry. Around ten percent are forced to engage in criminal behavior—purse snatching, pickpocketing, begging and drug selling. Traffickers can be strangers or members of the family. The Global Slavery Index (2023) estimates that 50 million people are living in modern slavery on any given day. The International Labor Organization’s reports on forced labor estimated the global profits at $150B in their 2014 report, and by 2024, $236B. We are all swimming in human slavery while we pat our own backs celebrating an early version we abolished a century and a half ago. “Hey baby! Wanna buy a slave?” Juneteenth fails to address who enabled African slavery by happily selling their countrymen enemies off to their new melanin-challenged market. In some parts of Africa, they’ve never stopped. Today, there are African countries where you can buy, sell, trade, and own other human beings. The slaves are multiracial. The buyers and traders are multiracial. It’s illegal everywhere but unenforced where there’s weak government, and officials who can make a buck. Some job seekers are forced to work in the Gulf States for wealthy Arabs. Let’s call out the biggest miscreants perpetuating human slavery even today: Eritrea, Mauritania, South Sudan, the Republic of the Congo, and Nigeria. All located on one big top-heavy continent. There’s still a huge global market for slaves while we pretend it’s finit. The irony being, not even in our own neighborhoods. The legacy of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) Juneteenth tastes uncomfortably of self-righteous grievance and white self-aggrandizement. As an ‘antiracism’ holiday, it’s cringey to see Black Lives Matter associate themselves with it. These are the people who condemn white racism but embrace antisemitism, and ignore their own ancestors’ complicity in enslaving Africans. My Great-Grandfather, The Nigerian Slave-Trader - The New Yorker Many of us are tired of hearing about an institution our great-great grandparents abolished, along with the pointless ‘1619 Project’, which also ignores pouch-stuffed Africans waving goodby at the departing ships. It suggests America was founded on the concept of slavery. When actually, African slavery became popular only when Scottish and Irish indentured servants (themselves partially enslaved) kept dying of malaria in the New World—a disease Africans had developed better immunities to because they’d lived with it for thousands of years. There was another big reason for standardizing Negro slavery: 1676’s Bacon’s Rebellion, in which a wealthy white man led a rebellion comprised of poor indentured whites and arguably ‘indentured’ Africans. United, they burned Jamestown to the ground. This scared the elites so much that they restructured society to ensure the poor could never pull this again. They enacted a series of codes and policies that essentially invented the racial hierarchy that came to define the American slavery system. Everyone invented slavery, not just Europeans or Americans. It was necessitated by the Agricultural Revolution when the need to farm enormous amounts of food for growing settled populations required mass labor. It’s questionable how many of us don’t have ancestral slaves, slave owners and slave traders in our family tree. Including pre-transatlantic slave trade Europeans, who practiced chattel slavery and serfdom. You want to play more-oppressed-than-thou? The earliest slaves we recognize were the Slavs—from whom we get the word slave—and they were the whitest whitey-whites. As were their enslavers, the Swedish Vikings and the early Russians. At the same time that the transatlantic slave trade was ramping up, darky-dark Barbary pirates were terrorizing the European coastline, capturing and doing some terrible things to their pretty white slaves. What’s in it for you? Holidays like Juneteenth, Emancipation Day, El Nacimiento and others are nevertheless worthwhile: They make at least some of us pay attention to the gross injustices visited on Africans by others, but it’s disingenuous and half-assed; it doesn’t tell the entire story, and it encourages too much wallowing in a sliver of the past. We’re told by proponents of Half-Assed History that we need to focus on the economic legacy and lingering effects on black African-Americans, when in fact vast oceans of ink have already been spilled on that subject. It’s old news, especially in an era where American blacks are faring much better than they did even half a century ago. I’ve seen the progress with my 63-year-old eyes. Africa is still Ground Zero for forced, unpaid labor. While we’re congratulating ourselves for eliminating slavery in particular places, the spirit of Juneteenth should resolve to do more to end it today, and to rub our faces in the ugly fact that most of us are still enjoying the benefits of slave labor, even if we don’t have our own under-the-table au pair. If you buy from Shein, H&M, Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton, Coach, Kate Spade, Apple, Tesla, Nestle, Mars, or Hershey, you directly benefit from slave labor. How committed are you to ending it by not paying for crap you really don’t need? Juneteenth can start by calling ‘trafficking’ slavery, and human traffickers what they are: Slavers. Here’s an uncomfortable thought to sit with today: All those fruit pickers and domestics who harvest your produce and help raise children rounded up by ICE and imprisoned or deported are partially enslaved, forced by poverty and illegal status to work for substandard wages with no protections. They can be abused, including sexually, and if they want to keep their job, they should open their legs and shut their mouths. If you love those immigrants so much, are you willing to pay higher prices so they can be paid working wages? Anyone serious about celebrating Juneteenth should ponder: How do I benefit from slavery today? Juneteenth could make Americans aware of how much we depend on human slavery: If you love yanking it over porn, know that, “According to cases reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline in the United States, pornography was the third most common form of sex trafficking (Polaris, 2020). And in the same vein, research with current and former porn actors suggests that exploitation and human trafficking are common experiences in the pornography industry (Donenvan, 2021).” (Source: United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner report, February 2024) Do you eat food? Forced labor packs your processed food and picks your aforementioned produce for some grocery stores. Who built that nice condo you live in? The Obamas weren’t the only Americans who lived in a dwelling built by slaves. The construction industry depends heavily on them. Nice nails. Did the lady who trimmed, shaped, buffed, and polished them get paid for it? I mean, after you paid your bill? We all benefit from modern slavery. The only ones who don’t are our slaves. Juneteenth bores me. We’ve been discussing ad nauseum the impact of human slavery on their descendants. In the U.S., the Juneteenth message is strictly controlled to keep the focus off the embarrassing factoids about African complicity, past and present. It’s why Juneteenth is more of a punchline than a genuine celebration. I don’t want to rain on your parade, but I do want your parade to call for an end to that which you prematurely celebrate the demise of 160 years ago. Because human slavery still sucks, even when you’re not picking cotton. 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!

If every life is sacred, it’s time for Republicans and conservatives to prove it by opening their homes (and wallets)! The Adopt-A-Fetus prototype: Not exactly destined for luxury and privilege. Free AI-generated image by Magnific It’s particularly cruel that the Trump administration has declared war on wanted babies by first stacking the Court during Term 1 to turn Roe v. Wade into a historical footnote, and also threatens birth control access. The Trump birth control mandates have made sexual intercourse even more dangerous, although given cross-generational erectile dysfunction, maybe it doesn’t matter. Contraception is no longer, as Politico points out, untouchable. Trump’s Reign of Error, Part Deux certainly doesn’t encourage family planning. The Republican’ts raise the alarm that Americans won’t have enough young people to take care of them in their old age, while making it as untenable as possible to plan or afford wanted children. Nor will they make childcare more affordable. Instead, Trump’s return a year and a half ago is to reverse-Robin Hood Americans in favor of anyone with ten-digit or more net worth. Even the price of a used car to get to work has made the cost of raising a child near-impossible. Like it’s the Middle East or something. Except run by the most double-digit IQ Christians rather than knuckle-dragging terrorists. God-fearin’, God-lovin’ Texas, where ev-e-ry sperm is sacred, whether you’re Catholic or not, has suffered an increase in newborns left in dumpsters since the end of Roe. They learned the hard way, in 2021, when they banned early-trimester abortions, that many babies died anyway, but, after they’d been born and left in trash cans. What a diff’rence ten minutes makes, from womb to tomb. Is this the generation (the ones who survive anyway) that they want taking care of them in their old age? From womb to tomb: The cost of Trump’s "Reign of Error" Since the Trumpazoids like enforcement, it’s time to instigate mandatory adoption for pro-life activists. If Republicans and other ‘pro-lifers’ want women to turn back into involuntary baby factories, they ought to put their money where their mouths are—or in this case, your Pampers bill—and take care of these ‘precious lives’ themselves. Ironically, conservatives are usually the last to be willing to foot the bill for other peoples’ babies, and the first to yell, “FRY ‘IM!” when someone’s unwanted, abused, neglected baby grows up to steal their Lambo or kill someone on the subway. Or as one pro-Roe protest sign put it, “You’re pro-life until you have to pay child support”. This has to change. There must be consequences for reckless ‘pro-lifery’, the ultimate luxury belief. Let’s give ‘pro-lifers’ something to think about, which they’ll have plenty of time to do since they won’t be having sex until they Make America (Voluntarily) Generate Again. For those of you with an activist mindset, accelerate change fast by enacting a “No More Blowjobs” campaign. Because Trump’s and J.D.’s plan to make sexual intercourse riskier works too well for lazy men. Under my Adopt-A-Fetus program, anyone who’s ever waved a ‘Babies are murdered here’ placard will be put on a list of people assumed to be willing to adopt a pregnant woman’s baby the next time one becomes available, which should be in about three or four minutes. Anyone over a certain tax bracket gets added too. The ‘pro-life’ agenda will become one gigantic involuntary conservative Birthright program. Which is more than ironic, right? Not everyone will be on the list, of course. They may hide their irresponsible pro-lifery by virtue-signalling for choice publicly. Or they’ll stop contributing to pro-life campaigns so no one can access their contact information, once they realize they’re the ones who must now take America’s unwanted, unloved new children. Simply drop off the baby they forced you to have at any home with a driveway with a gold-plated mailbox, a ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ flag or a ‘These Colors Don’t Run’ bumper sticker on their Chevrolet Silverado. Or: Who use the word ‘Jesus’ a lot in normal conversations. Or who are fond of saying, “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” Or the red ballcap (goes without saying) and Confederate Flag fashionistas. Or who are always going on about Joe Rogan. Or who drink Coors Light, Jim Beam, Jack Daniels, or Michelob ULTRA. Tradwives; ‘bro’-casters; people wearing garishly expensive watches; Chick-Fil-A customers; country music lovers; NASCAR fans; anyone active in Homeowners Associations. Budweiser drinkers. Fox News watchers (natch). Anyone bitching that “No one in this neighborhood looks like me anymore!” $TRUMPCOIN suckers investors. Ha ha ha, wait’ll they try to withdraw some money from that scam to pay for all the babies dropped on their doorsteps! But, I’ll acknowledge, that’a bit random. There may be better ways to distribute America’s surplus infants to those who claim to value them more than the parents. The Adopt-A-Fetus Math Let’s define which segments of Americana will be held responsible for the babies they would force others to have. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, which provides up-to-the-minute population data on the Web, there are 342,476,958 Americans, at least as of 7:45am on May 5, 2026 when I started writing this article. So, about 342.5M. Once we filter out the 65+ and 19 and under sets, this leaves us with a ‘draft pool’ of 207M potential adoptive parents. But, not all of those Americans are anti-choice, so the ‘hedonistic heathen’ shouldn’t be forced to pay for or adopt fetuses conservatives want more than they do. What happens otherwise? Let’s talk about Texas again, where infant deaths spiked 13% after abortion restrictions were enacted. The earlier-mentioned newborn babies turning up in dumpsters and ditches throughout the state, allegedly ‘traumatized’ the population that voted for the politicians with a hate-on for actual ‘family planning’. The national infant mortality rate at the same time, was only 2%. More irony! ‘Pro-life’ kills babies. So: According to Pew Research Center, 60% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or nearly all cases, leaving 40% who don’t. That leaves us with 82.8M Americans to do their part after MAGA’ing (Make America Generate Again) the future shoulder-to-shoulder China of the West. According to the Guttmacher Institute, via Pew Research Center again, which appears to have more accurate figures estimating abortions than the CDC, in 2024/2025, they recorded 1,126,000 abortions per year. Here’s where the math gets spicy with the inventory distribution. That computes to 73 babies for every ‘pro-lifer’. Every year. "Mommy, where do babies come from?" "Why, FedEx, darling!" Public domain image from FreeSVG.com “I theenk we need a beegger house!” Calculating the Fetus-to-Pro-Lifer Ratio Of course, those numbers would change annually since there will be a spike in unwanted fetuses the more the MAGA gang restrict birth control, but we’ll work with the numbers we have today. And remember: Recruit and train those babies raised in a fentanyl-laced placenta and with a high rate of criminality to take care of ‘pro-lifers’ in their old age! Lucky Americans about to receive their own personal army of new bundles of joy are eligible for a new baby after every still-living pro-life American has been delivered one. If too many ‘pro-lifers’ refuse, the rest may need to go on a monthly subscription. The other option for Americans who simply don’t have the physical room or time to raise someone else’s precious children, is raising their taxes. A 2026 LendingTree analysis estimates the current cost of raising a child to 18 to be $303,418. So if you refuse for whatever reason, your taxes rise to help defray the costs to the families who graciously (or not) accept your unwanted babies. And those taxes are cumulative, for one the first year, two the second year, three the third year… How healthy the baby comes to you depends on how much pre-natal care the uninsured mother gets, or is able to seek if she’s not blind-ass drunk or strung out most of the day. (Might want to start a savings account for your opioid-withdrawal babies!) Remember: Republicans don’t want to fund pre-natal care. Just fry the little criminal later. There would be no exceptions to the program; when your name(s) came up, you take the baby or you pay higher taxes (about $30,000 a year, the price of a new mid-sized sedan. You might have to sell yours.) This goes directly to whoever gets the baby you claim you can’t afford. But pshaw, Republicans can afford it, they’re all filthy rich anyway! Everyone knows only billionaires voted for Trump! Layoffs or a new baby of your own would not be an excuse; if you’re going to force people to have babies, you’re going to assume their responsibilities. All life is sacred! But maybe your church can hold a bake sale for you or something. Married people could conceivably—or not, ar ar!—get two babies in one year if both your names are drawn from the massive bingo ball—which includes Log Cabin Republicans single and married, many of which may become single again if all those kids don’t split up the marriage. Slightly racist, not my fault, I didn't ask for Asians! Poe-generated image of a "large transparent bingo ball filled with little slips f paper surrounded by children." Some slips appear to be wooden tokens. But, paper is made from wood so close enought for government work! Of course, the amount of actual pro-lifers who register will be far less than the 82.8M I estimated, with a corresponding ‘jump’ in American support for restoring Roe v. Wade and demand for neighborhood condom bowls. It will sort of resemble the Franklin Mint ads you used to see in the Sunday Parade magazine if you’re of a certain age, back when they periodically sent you a collection of Princess Diana dolls in five or six easy $29.95 installments. Except every three months or so you’ll receive a living doll to the family, and you’ll be laying out a hell of a lot more than $29.95, with a never-ending supply of baby dolls. But, in order to not risk fetuses being left on your doorstep daily, pro-lifers will want to regularly state, “Every child a wanted child!” in progressive settings and occasionally lament the loss of Roe. “Jesus? Who’s he?” The Resistance: How to Opt Out of the Adopt-A-Fetus Lottery The only way to get out of being buried in babies is to join The Resistance. Please! An orderly line, people! We don’t want a stampede! In order to opt out, you must sign a notarized affidavit which will be published on social media supporting a federal right to birth control and abortion. Or, you could ‘Sign up now for the 2027 lottery!’ which offers a “Platinum Tier” for donors who want “first dibs” on the most “sacred” [i.e., healthiest, whitest] fetuses. I expect Roe to be returned to federal law by the following Tuesday. 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!