Beyond virtue signaling: Why genuine reconciliation requires acknowledging the messy, violent, and shared human history of Turtle Island Image by ivabalk from Pixabay There’s an interesting ritual offered by the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee bands of southern Canada called the Dish With One Spoon, in which they acknowledge they both have a right to the land, (the ‘dish’), and the one spoon with which they both feed from it. They agree to take only what they need and clean the dish for others. It’s a responsibility-centered covenant with which they bury ancient grievances, and agree not to let the nastiness from before happen again. Which involved an awful lot of warfare and land-seizing back in the day and a helluva lot of abuse by the Haudenosaunee against many others. The Haudenosaunee pretty much went all European on their neighbors, but today, there are no ‘land claims’ by the descendants of the conquered against the descendants of the conquerors. While there are Indigenous groups that offer their own land acknowledgments, the formulaics require deference for doing what almost every culture of humans has done at some point: Migrate to another place that sucks less than yours, and clear out anyone who gets in your face. Still, migrants often co-existed with contemporary neighbors via trade networks and fluid territorial use on a continent where ‘property rights’ were much fuzzier than they are today. The modern white land acknowledgment is loosely rooted in traditional North American Indigenous practices of acknowledging the host nation when visiting neighboring territories. Rituals included ceremonial greetings, diplomatic speeches before gatherings, and gift exchanges for permission to travel or settle. All perfectly respectful. But the land acknowledgments developed in the late-20th, early 21st centuries have less to do with respect for earlier inhabitants or ‘burying the hatchet’ than forcing ‘white oppressor’ self-flagellation. The newer intent differs from those offered by one Indigenous group to another, even when the land was acquired by brute force. Indigenous groups offer political histories of their battles and massacres when they meet in peace today, and recognition that ‘your people lived here, then our people lived here;’ somewhat more sterile than the white versions, which carry a subtle scent of public rebuke. The current ritual recitations, one can’t help but suspect, allow privileged progressives to shake their virtuous peacock feathers in others’ faces while not having to lift a talon to actually do anything for modern Indigenous groups, many of whom still live in gross poverty, only partially due to their displacement history.* Hypocrisy comes into play when the Indy-Indy land acknowledgements view the newcomers/conquerors/colonizers as the ‘current face of the land’, a/k/a the now-stewards. Unlike the descendants of white Europeans today who are now being held responsible in court for occupying land they’re apparently not ‘the current face of’. The other history of abuse of Indigenous people The land acknowledgement’s higher purpose, for white people anyway, is to recognize the rights of Native peoples and to de-legitimize the injustices done to them. But Europeans weren’t uniquely racist, violent or genocidal. With a very few extremely isolated exceptions, North America’s original inhabitants were anything but. Globally and historically, humans exhibit, and always have, every single pathology now attributed in certain circles only as the ownership of white Europeans and their descendants: Rape, mass rape, torture, massacre, cannibalism, slavery, tribalism (the ancient equivalent of ‘racism’), looting, land acquisition and genocide . In fact, raiding, which is historically documented around the world, resulted in extremely high murder rates. Sometimes it wiped out entire communities. Genocide, before it was uncool. It wasn’t Shakespearean mass slaughter 24/7, but Indigenous migrant settlement wasn’t necessarily paper-shuffling and rubber-stamping, either. Like everywhere else, violence within groups and against others fluctuated by region and time period, with long stretches of peace in some places, and some tribes noteworthy for their aggressive violence: The Sioux, the Apache, and the Haudenosaunee (who we’ll get to in greater detail shortly), just to cite a few examples. Up in the Arctic, the Copper Inuit (or ‘Eskimo’, as anthropology professor and author Lawrence Keeley called them), were cited as an example of a culture that, “experienced a high level of feuding and homicide before the Royal Canadian Mounted Police suppressed it….Other Eskimo of the high arctic who were organized into small bands also fit this pattern.” The Netsilik Inuits’ murder rate, he noted, was noticeably high in comparison to modern times, even after the Mounties cracked down on interband feuding.** Some true histories of Native colonizing and land appropriation In order for Canadian society, at least, to achieve genuine ‘truth and reconciliation’, we all need to acknowledge that humans are far more similar than they are different, especially when it comes to the basis of all wars: Taking other peoples’ stuff, and that it’s ‘colonization’ when one people come to live on other people’s land, regardless of what their SPF sunblock level is. Let’s examine two of the best-documented histories of Indigenous people acting rather a lot like European colonizers: Starting with the Haudenosaunee merger and acquisition (or ‘stealing’ as progressive parlance calls it) of traditional Huron land on which I’m living now—southern Ontario. After the seventeenth-century Beaver Wars , the defeated Huron-Wendat gave up their land to enemies who either killed, assimilated or displaced them. Sound familiar? It was an aggressive expansionist campaign by the Haudenosaunee that succeeded, although the Wendat population had already been greatly devastated by contact with European diseases. To be fair, the wars were driven partially by European influence. The Beaver Wars began with increased demand for beaver pelts which were the oil economy of the day. The Haudenosaunee exhausted their own supply, which necessitated pushing into Huron-Wendat territory where you could get all the beaver you wanted. It was an aggressive push which resulted in destroyed villages, with the current residents sometimes adopted, others scattered, and many fleeing to Quebec. The rest were creatively killed, sometimes involving a sloooooow effort involving burning, cutting or beating, and, if you were a Big Name Chief, the ritual consumption of your corpse to consume your strength, but also to show contempt for your weakness in getting captured and subjected to this, you little wuss. Victory was aided with the addition of British-provided firearms, and as we all know, the Great Spirit is always on the side with the most flintlock muskets. When the Haudenosaunee offer a land acknowledgment today, they reference the Huron-Wendat as the ‘original peoples’ of the land, rather a lot the way white ‘slightly less original peoples’ do, and this somehow reconciles the two without much fussing and agitating over who killed who and how, nor do they go to court over it. “Money, it's a crime Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie Money, so they say Is the root of all evil today” - Pink Floyd Meanwhile, down South of what lay beyond what would one day be known as the 49th Parallel…. Firearms access from the French aided the Ojibwe in the late 17th and 18th centuries when they expanded into Dakota Sioux territory who had already displaced the Crow, Cheyenne, and others unfortunate enough to live where the Dakota wanted to go. That, too, was shaped by European forces but it wasn’t much different from life before the palefaces. Archaeologists still don’t know who was responsible for expediting the 14th-century Crow Creek Massacre in what is now South Dakota, except that it wasn’t Europeans. Archaeology has unearthed many examples of pre-Columbian restless and acquisitive Natives: fortifications against enemies in places like the Mississippi Valley, and in the Southwest, in what is now New Mexico. The ancestors of today’s ‘Puebloans’ there,, who were formerly known as the Anasazi in the thirteenth century, engaged in attacks on their neighbors including mass killings and mutilations. ‘Anasazi’ is a Navajo term the Navs created for this group, meaning ‘ancient enemies’ or ‘enemy ancestors’. They changed their name to distance themselves from their well-named ancestors the way Philip Morris changed its name to Altria to escape their legally-established reputation for killing their customers. European contact didn’t introduce Indigenous violence, it reshaped it. This is just a hair-thin sliver of the Indigenous history violence not just of the people who lived on Turtle Island before the Europeans divided it up into states, provinces, territories, and viciously disputed voting districts, but that of nearly every single human community and culture anywhere in the world. Canadians today deal with endless land claims by Indigenous groups who may or may not have ‘stolen’ the land from those who lived there before they themselves were displaced. They sue the Crown rather than each other because to do otherwise would be to acknowledge that the Court has the ability to decide these claims, and no one wants that! We certainly should feel badly for the way our ancestors treated theirs, but why not do a Dish With One Spoon Ritual with the Canadian government, and its weary taxpayers? Only against non-Indigenous is past conquest a neverending legal battle rather than a fait accompli. Human history narratives are dishonest when they detail a story that only speaks to a fraction of human experience, and don’t hold the (genuine) victims of past violence accountable for that which they inflicted on others in extremely nasty ways. Violent Indigenous histories do involve numerous social, economic, and historical complications and pressures, pre-Columbian and post-, that also sound resoundingly modern: Trade disputes and wars; climate pressures; famine; replacing low populations by capturing others for breeding purposes. Bands, tribes, and nations also sought their own strategic dominance just as human societies continue to do. And if European torture and hideous executions were bad, they were pretty gawdawful here on Turtle Island, too. God help you if you were captured by the Comanches. Who, by the way, drove the Apaches off their land, but they don’t offer land acknowledgments; instead, today, they offer straightforward oral histories. The more one delves into the history of pre-Columbian cultures, the more one recognizes the need for Indigenous peoples to reconcile the truth with their established anthropological, archaeologically-supported, and equally shameful histories. Or stop expecting the rest of us to self-flagellate. Given this history, should there be such a thing as permanent historical entitlement? Land acknowledgments for all Real history is messy, shameful, and far less flattering than mythologies—or ‘oral histories’—pretend. Today’s white land acknowledgements are mostly a moral caricature which harm rather than help the truth and reconciliation debate. But moral claims are not enshrined in amber; they must be perpetually renegotiated as societies, and humans, evolve. Not all Indigenous support this pandering anyway, and know they can’t always blame the white folks or the government for their troubles. Many Canadian Indigenous ask hard questions of their own people about where the millions in reparative tax money is going and has gone. They complain to the government, and although there’s an existing financial act that mandates bands must account for the money they’re given, it was partially repealed, and the government stopped enforcing compliance, so poverty remains while others prosper. Indigenous North Americans’ histories, and their current plights, are far more complicated than land acknowledgments and other intellectual frippery offer, with band responsibility denied for and to Indigenous. Activists offer, instead, a vacuous ‘historical grievances’ brick wall that perpetuates, rather than solves, never-ending Native problems, aided by band leaders who don’t have to explain where the money went. Indy2Indy land acknowledgements never address land claims, which can literally drag out for decades in this country. Only we are expected to offer reparations. Integrity-driven land acknowledgments should reflect everyone’s shared responsibility for changing that which is in our power. Honesty surrounding Indigenous violence doesn’t exonerate European atrocities. But it reinvigorates history and reduces prejudice, on both sides, by acknowledging we have more in common than we know. Frances Widdowson, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation ) *Source: Keeley, 1996, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage ). Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

The Reign of Error required more suspension of disbelief than a Fast & Furious movie. And now, Le Déluge of skepticism. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. From publicdomainpictures.net The February school massacre in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia was committed by a not-so-committed ‘transwoman’. Jesse Van Rootselaar, like his predecessor Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook, warmed up by killing family members before moving to the secondary school where he killed six more people, and injured 27 more. I Google the ‘trans’ shooters to see if they’re a guy, or a girl on testosterone. Because nothing drives violence quite like the androgen rooster booster. While I tend to be fairly unsympathetic to the rainbow tribe’s overweening concern for ‘how this will affect transpeople’ as opposed to “how will this affect the victims’ families?”, I do feel sympathy for those transwomen who were cruelly misidentified on social media as the shooter. Van Rootselaar was just another typical male loner with a plethora of pre-existing mental health issues, including a preoccupation with online violence as entertainment, and of course, that classic male love affair with weapons. His attraction to transitioning brought the customary psychiatric co-morbidities conveniently ignored, as they have been for well over a decade in ‘gender dysphoric’ youth. That’s beginning to change, as we’ll get to shortly, but Van Rootselaar’s ‘gender dysphoria’ was almost certainly a related but not relevant side effect of his shooting spree. In fact, he allegedly expressed regret for having transitioned and for having ‘brainwashed’ himself. Van Rootselaar also shared with his fellow mass shooters participation in the ‘nihilistic’ darkweb where those who believe nothing is real and life isn’t worth living fester and suppurate. In fact, the relationship of the recent rise in transgender mass shooters may have grown out of a fatalistic impulse already present in the trans movement, which might make the violent darkweb more attractive, according to an Illinois doctor who explores the connection in her article, Gender Nihilism and the Revolutionary Impulse . Dr. Brooke Laufer emphasizes that exploring transgenderism and ‘gender identity’ causes neither violence nor criminal behavior. But, she notes, “When a person’s identity becomes detached from embodied reality, personal history, and stable relationships, it can drift toward nihilism: the belief that life itself has no inherent meaning or value. In that state, ideology can rush in to fill the void. For a small but notable subset of radicalized individuals, the combination of identity instability, existential fear, and moral absolutism can make violence feel not only permissible, but purposeful.” I’d be hard-pressed to identify a movement, subculture, or group as frighteningly detached from reality as transgenders, trying to escape an immutable biology that was set at conception. Even so, transgenderism doesn’t look much like a cause, just as a more brightly-colored iteration of underground nihilism. Laufer goes on to explore transgender-driven revolutionary groups like the Turtle Island Liberation Front, a collection of pro-Palestinian and anti-capitalist ideologues who’ve allegedly plotted attacks against ICE facilities. And the Zizians, better-suited for those drawn to a techno-apocalypse driven by AI. They’re young, they’re transgender, and they’re loaded for destroying society and remolding it with accelerationist Play-Doh. Public domain photo from Pxhere But if it seems as though transgenderism is now moving into a more dangerously violent phase, take heart: This may well be their death rattle. Transgendermania is dying. But it’s not going down without a fight. They’re beginning to lose them, though The times they are a changin’. Most of us, liberal or conservative, don’t care how others live their lives as long as they respect others’ boundaries. Progressives wouldn’t draw them, so now the rest of us are. The pink-and-blue flag crew’s losses are racking up. For starters, transgender as an identity has been losing steam for the last few years. According to a new report by Canadian Politics professor Eric Kauffman and director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science , there’s been a precipitous drop in identification as ‘trans’ or ‘queer’ in Gen Z since 2023, from 6.8% to 3.6% as of 2025. The Day of Wreckening came with the reinstatement of Donald Trump last January. Love him or hate him, his election marked a blessed and long-needed death knell for a movement that just didn’t know when to quit. He ended male athletes competing on women’s sports teams (one of Kamala Harris’s most unpopular positions), he redefined biological sex (correctly); he reassigned ‘trans’-upon-conviction men back to male prisons; re-allowed single-sex emergency shelters to reject biological male ‘trans’ people from female-only facilities; and defunded transgender health initiatives for children, along with raising the age of consent to 19 for anything from puberty blockers to surgery. ‘Trans rights’ has lost several court cases in the last few years, and especially the beginning of this one. The losses include the Skrmetti decision last year, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors. Several state bans on restricting or banning gender markers on official documents have been upheld, and a Kansas ‘bathroom bill’ to force transgender people to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their conception sex was vetoed by the governor but defeated by overriding Republican lawmakers. It’s important to note there are no cases of trans-identified men being attacked in men’s rooms, but plenty of bad-boyism among TiMs in ladyspaces. If I’m wrong about cis attacks on trans dudes, comment below or DM me here. Twenty-twenty-six began with the first successful detransition lawsuit against medical doctors accused of malpractice. Fox Varian was awarded $2 million in the State of New York for her double mastectomy at 16, after which she came to regret her decision once she no longer identified as male. Close to thirty other lawsuits around the U.S. are in progress. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, just a week later, issued a brand-new guideline for medical practitioners and and teenage patients: that all surgical interventions be postponed until age 19. I wonder why they waited until now to say so? And, speaking of lawsuits, the State of Florida has launched three : Against the activist WPATH, the American Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics for engaging in a ‘coordinated campaign’ to develop clinical guidelines for demonstrably harmful treatments of children for which there is little to no scientific evidence—a finding that had been well-documented for years. At the same time, the FTC is investigating the three for alleged ‘false or unsubstantiated claims’ and whether the guidelines of each of these groups constitute ‘unfair or deceptive practices.’ The Horrifying WPATH Documents Leak Details Appalling ‘Gender Affirming Care’ Malpractice Mr. & Mrs. Darling Transgenderism is the ultimate denial of reality: To be human meant to pass through puberty, and the only way to avoid it was to die young. Telling children they have a ‘right’ to not go through puberty, as transactivist whack job Andrew Chu has assured them, or that they were ‘born in the wrong body’, are dirty lies discouraging immature, half-formed humans to reject their healthy bodies and live in psychological and physical torment for the rest of their (presumably) long, but now potentially shorter, lives . Transactivists, educators, therapists, medical practitioners, and even ‘science’ magazines have been pushing these filthy falsehoods for nearly a generation. Telling children they can avoid adulthood speaks to an unacknowledged but fundamental psychic problem not with children, but with their parents primarily on the progressive left: A longing to return to childhood. Perhaps it was the ruminative pining of Mr. and Mrs. Darling, the parents of Michael, John and Wendy, to give their children a Never-Never-Land where no one ever has to assume the mantle of responsibility for themselves and others. How conveniently the Mr. & Mrs. forgot how managed their lives once were by adults, exemplified by compulsory school, when every child’s fondest wish was to ‘get big’ as soon as possible so they didn’t have to do what they were told. Unless they were paid to do it with a job. In contrast to every generation until the Millennials, growing up was long-anticipated by children eager to manage their own adult lives. But progressive parents sundered that by teaching them they need never experience a negative feeling, that each child knew what was best for themselves and that their safety was so paramount they mustn’t do anything to endanger that. Best to stay home, therefore, than to risk living in reality like an adult. Along came the ‘self-esteem’ movement in which every child got a trophy for minor transactions simply expected of children from previous generations, led by Progressive Parenting for whom No was the dirtiest word in the English language. So when their children expressed a desire to be what they weren’t, progressive parents naturally said, “Of course, honey.” For some it was even a status symbol. Transgenderism is arguably the most deeply damaging Bad Idea to come out of the progressive movement this century. It’s the most inauthentic social movement ever, denying the fundamental reality of organic life. It’s never been about ‘gender dysphoria’; it’s a transhumanist social justice project that attempted to bring equity to the sexes by, ironically, embracing traditional conservative gender stereotypes before erasing them. A rock might as well identify as a tree. The Rise Of Unhappy ‘Trans Kids’ And The Role Of Progressive Parenting A Dude-y Transactivist Shows How Dangerously Dudeist The Trans Nuts Are Transgenderism 2.0 That said, sex-changing will never go away, nor need it. I’ve argued that transgenderism, in addition to providing genuine relief for that tiny slice of humanity that genuinely needs it, could also be a force for real change as I argued a few years ago in What If The Transgender Movement Evolved More Honestly? What it offered was what humanity most desperately needs right now—an ‘under the skin’ game in which we learn what life is like for others, whom we aren’t. The Transfolk Who Really Do Need Our Support (about Aaron Kimberly) I’ve argued similarly in We Accept Transgenderism. Are We Ready For Transracialism? Why not experience life as a woman, when you were born male, or black if you were born white? Or the reverse? I theorize how. I know cross-racialism is primarily a white female thing, and ‘female Pretendians’ abound. (Are there even any genuine Indigenous anymore?) I know most of these people traverse boundaries for the wrong reasons, and I understand why various races or ethnic groups object. They’re the same reasons defenders of womanhood offer as objections to transgenderism. But what if people crossed sex and race for better reasons? The left has primarily been misappropriating sex and race mostly to qualify for membership in victimhood clubs. If a young woman feels guilty about being born white, as the left is wont to do, she may well de-whitenize herself. If a man feels like women can have sex with anyone they want, to the point where the girls turn their genitals into a ‘roastie’, then becoming a woman might seem the ticket to endless sex. Or simply to stop being lambasted for being born the way he was. If we turned the narrative from victimhood to inquiry, the reasons for ‘crossing the border’ might well change. For the better. If we encouraged people to be true to themselves, to be who they really were instead of wishing for whatever they weren’t born with, we’d create happier, more self-actualized human beings who could continue to progress humanity and fix our sick society rather than change one’s sex, and commit suicide anyway , because it didn’t solve all their problems. Like, you know, Jesse Van Rootselaar. Transgenderism is sometimes nihilistic, but so are many non-trans. Change is good, necessary, and even unavoidable, but conscious change should be for the right reasons. I honestly don’t want transgenderism to disappear. I merely want it to grow up. And to stop hurting people. I welcome today’s death rattle. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

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

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

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

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

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

Christians had one. Jews had one. Now Islam needs to catch up and align responsibly with the modern world. Image from Rawpixels Last year I wrote my highest-performing Substack so far, my critical 2025 Is Not Shaping Up To Be A Good Year For Muslims.   I took a lot of heat for it, ironically, not from angry Muslims but from others who damned me for not being critical enough. I hope they saved some venom for radical Islamists as we head into 2026. Antisemitism is partying like it’s 1935 driven primarily by a historical widespread culture of violent hatred in its heart, the Middle East. Islam is a religion of violence, as its predecessors once were, but it doesn’t have to be. The Islamic world needs to fix itself. Now. Like its sister religions have done. Radical Muslims In December, father-and-son team Sajid and Naveed Akram turned Australia’s Bondi Beach into a shooting gallery for Hannukah celebrants. An unarmed man brought Junior down—just like in the gun-mad United States, where the only thing that stops a bad man with a gun is a good man without one. Predictably, the two gunmen were Islamic State fanboys. But: The hero is a Muslim himself named Ahmed al-Ahmed who migrated from Syria in 2006. “My son is a hero. He served in the police, he has the passion to defend people,” his father is quoted as saying. “I’m proud that my son was helping people, rescuing people,” added his mother. I mean, they must have known by this point he was saving primarily Jews. I hope he doesn’t become the target of extremists. In Toronto, three young men planned  to kill women and Jews and attempted two alleged kidnappings this past summer. One of them has been charged with, among other things, conspiracy to commit murder as encouraged by ISIS. In the U.K., police foiled what they described as “ one of, if not the, deadliest terrorist attacks in UK history ” targeting Jews planned by a couple of IS fanboys for this past October. At Christmas, the IS instructed its faithful to kill Christians and Jews, to turn it into a ‘season of terror’. A few tried in Los Angeles  and North Carolina . To my knowledge, neither Jewish nor Christian groups have issued any similar ‘back atcha’ calls for murder and mayhem of Muslims. There are plenty of ‘good Muslims’ in the world like the al-Ahmeds, but unfortunately, jihad-addled followers of the Prophet lead the world in harming others. According to Fondation pour L’Innovation Politique, a French think tank, Islamist attacks  have killed nearly 250,000 people between 1979 and April 2024 (this includes wars and insurgencies). Not surprisingly, people in Islamic countries are most at risk. The Real War On Christmas  - The Free Press Islam needs a Reformation Islam isn’t the problem. Modern Muslims’ unwillingness to resolve ancient doctrines with an open, democratic world committed to essential human rights are. Do I need to spell it out? Violence is bad. Peace is good. That’s the difference. Islam needs a Reformation. Christians had one in the sixteenth century, and Jews in the 19th century. They brought both religions more in-line with the modern world, recognizing personal freedom, the rights of the individual, and embracing a less murderous view of religious competitors. Since Christian and Jewish doctrine have been at one time, violent, but today much more peaceful, Muslims must similarly reconcile. Most go about their daily lives while managing not to murder anyone, just like everyone else. They prefer to distance ‘those people’ from themselves and pretend jihadism has nothing to do with them, as though the religious umbrella stretches only enough to cover themselves. Young men are prone to radicalization of one sort or another no matter what religion they are (or not), particularly when they’re unemployed and/or living in a country with weak governance and security. For the Muslims who can speak out, do they? Do they teach their own sons that violence is not acceptable in our family? There’s no such thing as an ‘honor killing’ for family terrorists. It’s simplistic to claim ‘most Muslims don’t approve of or support terrorism’. A more granular question would be, “Where do Muslims fall on the spectrum of support for terrorism, from 1-10?” Such a yardstick would offer a more nuanced view of who does and doesn’t support it, and by how much. One can support, collaborate with, and finance terrorism without personally killing anyone by enabling the radicals. Others don’t speak out, afraid of ‘stigmatizing’ their religion, or of putting their families in danger. (Why?) As a result, extremists get away with as much as the surrounding culture allows. And that’s the key: The culture.  Many ‘good Muslims’ exist inside a culture that has not modernized enough  to give them the freedom to call out the crazy fun-demented-lists. The culture is as much their responsibility as those of the terrorist recruiters. When Christians in the United States complained to me, “Don’t judge us by those awful fundamentalists! They don’t stand for what we’re about! They’re such embarrassments!” I’d counter, “Do you stand up to them? Do you challenge them? Do you point out their non-Biblical, non-Gospel-oriented values or beliefs?” No, no they hadn’t. And they didn’t even have to worry about armed cross-bearing Crusader wannabes showing up on their front porch to behead them for their ‘blasphemies’. “Silence sounds an awful lot like assent,” I noted. “If it’s not, speak up!” It’s not Islamophobic to say You’re not doing enough! The dangers of Reformation Martin Luther’s life was worth nothing after his excommunication for challenging the very foundations of Catholic authority and practices. Once a heretic, anyone could legally kill him without consequence, but a sympathetic nobleman faked his kidnapping and hid him in his castle. This occurred during the most brutal period of the European Dark Ages, amidst socially-acceptable public violence and executions. Like breaking on the wheel, one of the most excruciating (and publicly popular) executions for the worst of the worst. Luther’s German Reformation, followed by a parallel effort in Switzerland, served to remove the focus from the all-powerful clergy who didn’t want the common man to read the Bible for fear he’d ‘misinterpret’. The movements later rejected theological violence and embraced separation of church and state, along with ‘just war’ theory, which defined how to determine whether a war is truly just. The West eventually ended judicial torture in the 18th and 19th centuries, heavily influenced by Enlightenment thinkers partially emboldened by Christian reformers. Christian Reformation has long since trimmed away non-Biblically-supported practices introduced via selective priestly interpretation, and recognized where their sacred texts fall short. Like the uncomfortable fact that the Son of God himself promoted compassionate slavery rather than calling for its elimination. Violence and death are the risks serious Islamic reformers also face from jihadist death cults like Hamas  and IS and isolated ‘lone wolves’ committed to destroying Western civilization. They justify killing unbelievers (including those of their faith who disagree with them), and who welcome death as it sends them, they believe, to a glorious afterlife with, of course, those famous six dozen virgins. Danger defines rebellion: Luther faced a powerful and violent Catholic Church, while the power against Muslims today rests in the hands of corrupt governments wielding self-serving Koranic interpretations, and crazed young men with nothing to lose, since they win even when they die in battle. Human rights violations continue to stain the Muslim world: Political imprisonment, suppression of free speech, child marriage, and denial of body autonomy (women, gays, transfolk, children). British Pakistani Muslims engage in sex trafficking while their communities look the other way; they’re ‘only’ white girls, after all, and ‘stigmatizing’ a ‘marginalized community’ is worse, apparently, than organized child rape. Abroad, Islamic countries’ various challenges include ongoing or worsening economic problems, poor education systems, poor governance, corruption, economic inequality, low literacy rates, and especially gender inequality, a huge driver for keeping many Islamic countries figuratively stuck in the desert. Where women prosper, so prospers the nation. Islamic reform’s greatest challenge after the risk of violent retribution, is one many Muslims want the least: The separation of mosque and state. Human rights demand more open, liberty-oriented governments. When religious authorities freeze interpretation, when enforcers, clerical or terrorist, crack down on dissent, and most importantly, when theology’s greatest strength is political power—violence ensues and human rights disappear. Policies and sacred dogma, for any Reformation, must become fair game. The Catholic Church has never been as powerful since Luther. It’s a less violent world as a result. The Jewish Reformation, by comparison, was much less dramatic. They weren’t a violent people anymore, not since their Biblical glory days. They were the persecuted minority everywhere they wandered. Yet still they modernized. Minor Islamic Reforms Some Islamic leaders are making real efforts to alleviate radicalization in the young. Violent extremists recruit free-floating rebellious young people; if they’re spotted early, there’s hope for intervention. ‘Good Muslims’ must drive the Reformation movement because the jihadists belong to them . The meaning of jihad is a major obstacle, which for some means waging a personal struggle within yourself for self-improvement and greater moral integrity, while the more authoritarian interpretation emphasizes violent response and warfare. Islamic modernization movements have embraced low-level reforms, but have yet to embrace major  reforms that would align it better with a West that clearly sees its flaws. Which are primarily: Violence; jihadism; gender inequality; violence against homosexuals; and ancient, endemic antisemitism. Westerners must begin scrutinizing Muslim immigrants to identify refugees for the ability to assimilate, without demanding they abandon their religious culture which, sorry haters, isn’t all bad, not by a long shot. Will these new permanent residents and citizens teach their children and grandchildren to take advantage of their new open societies offering greater economic opportunity, or will they allow them to succumb to the smorgasbord of violent death cults easily accessed on social media? Every affiliative group, religious or not, owns their radicals, which flourish only when permitted by lax oversight or tacit agreement. What to do next? Helen Pluckrose  recently argued in favor of liberalizing Islam , crossing swords with a devout young Muslim who likened the idea to ‘genocide’. Liberalizing Islam, as Helen pointed out, encouraged discarding bad ideas. To which I would add, because she didn’t, keeping the good ones: Bettering yourself, helping the poor, treating orphans well, forgiveness, kindness to one’s neighbors, giving debtors the time to repay their debt, treating your spouse kindly. Yes, there are contradictory verses (like ‘acceptable’ wife-beating) just as there are in the Bible. Blatant contradictions are also reasons why religions need Reformations. Islam—Muslims—are not, as some believe, ‘hopeless’. The more violent regions in the Middle East look an awful like like Luther’s Europe—violent, filthy, uneducated, deeply oppressive. Reformation starts with separation of religion and state, a hard truth for cultures in which religion is woven deeply into society’s fabric. Furthermore, secularization is a match to the Islamist powder keg. But let’s sally forth nevertheless with better ideas: Re-interpreting ancient texts to purge literalism and align it better with modern values (which don’t necessarily mean 100% liberal values). Re-embracing the principles of the European Enlightenment, or  Islam’s Golden Age, when education, scientific inquiry, the arts, and philosophy flourished from the 8th to the 13th centuries, in sharp contrast to Dark Age Europe. Moving away from cultic glorification of death and emphasizing that God didn’t send humans to earth to die, but to live and make the world a better place. Gender equality for sure. Women have proven in the West that we’re as smart, capable, and competent as men. Please, no more shooting girls in the face because they want to go to school. An embrace of diversity of thought and opinion, including religious. An embrace of the right of all humans to exist, including and especially Jews. The antisemitism of the Islamic world is a clear and present danger to all of us, a primary driver of Islamist terrorism, and no accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ will erase that. Muslims have a long, documented antisemitic history that dates back many centuries before the creation of Israel. If Muslims can figure out how to reform without democracy, have at it. But no more excuses. This is 2026, not 1106. When you’ve lost liberals like me, time’s a-wastin’. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

The birth dearth is a fake right-wing crisis. Declining fertility is real; the fix is easy but the U.S. government discourages it Motherhood, as depicted by the pro-natalists. Image by Satya Tiwari from Pixabay When I was six or seven I told my mother before Christmas, “I don’t want dolls anymore. I’d rather have stuffed animals.” Barbie was the exception; she wasn’t a baby doll. I played house and emulated my mother as she took care of my new brother, but there was an early tell I might not be as motherly as I’d been acculturated: When Mom took my brother out in the stroller I followed along, pushing Winnie-the-Pooh in my toy pram. I felt more love for Winnie than I did for baby dolls. I was drawn more to peoples’ pets. Dogs wagged their tail and cats rubbed against your leg. Babies were boring and mostly cried or screamed. When they weren’t screaming they slept. “Come on, don’t you want one of your own?” my cousin’s wife asked me years ago after she had her one and only child. She couldn’t, really couldn’t, understand how any woman could not want a baby of her own. She asked me several times. “Look at this! Look at this child! How can you not want one?” Because I’d rather have one of these! Image by bertin23 from Pixabay “Meh,” I’d answer. Then I’d go back to playing with their dog Martin, who was a thousand more times adorable, and after whom I never had to clean up. Ten years later, I got my tubes tied. I never changed my mind as so many had warned. At thirty-nine, I hadn’t felt even the tiniest pull toward motherhood. I’ve never regretted my decision. I am a free spirit. I was never wired to be a parent. Sexless In The City Declining fertility is real, as are the problems we’ll face without more humans, but it’s not the crisis the right pretends it is. The childfree by choice differ from the childless, who don’t want to be, even as the Western world suffers an epidemic of sexlessness. Predictably, the answer from the tech bros is, not surprisingly, technology, along with a return to good ol’-fashioned unrestricted penising. The sixty-year era of hippie (not-so) free love appears to be drawing to a close, more out of lack of sexual desire than incipient morality. Love and sex aren’t dead, and never will be, but they are on indefinite leave as humanity recalibrates and decides whether it wants to continue propagating. Or even surviving. We work on finding ways to perpetuate humanity without ever having to deal with the messiness of choosing a partner and doing it the traditional way. God help us, anything but having sex with someone else’s body! Billionaires pay strangers to gestate their progeny. A German (of course!) biotechnologist is developing a ‘designer baby’ lab . It’s envisioned from a sincere desire to help infertile couples or women who’ve had their uterus removed to produce their own dual-biological babies just like everyone else. It will also reduce or eliminate C-sections and premature birth, because guess what, the young’uns are grown in a lab ‘womb’ too. This was funnier in 1993. Now it’s just sad. It’s positively Brave New World. Even when allowance is made for human-to-human contact, ‘ polycules’ , fashionable in the ‘effective altruism’ movement, reinvent the male desire for feelings-free polyamory. Like in Brave New World, ‘everyone belongs to everyone else,’ and getting overly-attached to one person is discouraged. Problem is, neither technology nor polyamory has ever truly worked for a species whose ability to procreate and raise good humans is reliant on sexual relations and pair-bonding. Fortunately, not all men are as divorced from their emotions as tech bros. There’s a natural evolution for both sexes to eventually settle down, despite us outliers. Many ‘sow their wild oats’ until one day someone comes along who changes their mind. Like Neil Strauss, who documented the Pick-Up Artist culture he engaged in, and later rejected, in his controversial book The Game. Many women who think they’re ‘too feminist’ to have children find that pull to settle down and propagate as they get older, including old-school radicals from the First Wave. Bernardine Dohrn, ‘70s radical Weatherman leader, found as she approached 30 that she’d rather blow up birthday balloons than government toilets. Sexless gooning, MG/WGTOW-ing, and fake wombs as dangerously untested as sex changes for children are depressingly unnatural and anti-human. The right suggests the solution—a return to marriage and the two-parent family—but doesn’t take it seriously enough. Make America Fertile Again J.D. Vance, America’s only hope if Dozy Don kacks it in office, wants Americans to make more babies, despite having only three himself, when he’s rich enough to support many more. Maybe Usha has put an ‘Out of business’ sign over her cervix. Vance and the rest of the Make America Fertile Again gang don’t seem much interested in why people choose not to have babies . They pay lip service to parenthood while the President denies the affordability crisis, perpetuating parenthood untenability, leaving it to their biggest donors farming their progeny out to strangers on the Internet. Keep America Fatherless! Trump at least is calling for IVF treatments for all, despite his Veep’s historical opposition to it. J.D. and the MAFA gang assume they know what’s best for us non-conformists. They’re hell-bent on forcing parenthood at least on women by making abortion harder to find than a rent-stabilized apartment. They’re frowning at birth control too, especially emergency contraception, encouraging women toward celibacy. It otherwise leaves rape as the only way to perpetuate one’s genes. Fortunately for today’s women, the virgins have no idea where to put their ding-dong. Trigger warning: Sexual violence As always, the subtler reason behind MAFA is returning women to the home and nursery, leaving men as to run the world without a Great Feminization. Or HR. The clear and easy answer to the birth dearth is filling in the blanks with surplus humans from other parts of the world. Like maybe an immigration policy that falls somewhere between throw-open-the-doors and white-South-Africans-only? Rampant xenophobia and consequent government raids in the current administration is only one of many reasons why Americans can’t have affordable produce. Some farmers report 70% of their farm workers are missing which means cutting back on planting and higher supermarket prices. Alien hysteria impacts child care too , as parents and guardians are forced to cut back their hours, leave their jobs, or just return to stay-at-home parenthood. Some day, when the ICE Age is lifted and sane federal administration returns to Washington, we can also ‘lift our lamp, beside the golden door,’ to take in once again the huddled masses yearning to be free. And to raise the kids parents don’t have time for. We will survive Society changes and adapts to every unexpected blow, like most recently the pandemic. It adapted to the Baby Boom explosion and so too, will we, for fewer humans. We’ve survived famines, volcanic eruptions, and countless wars. At eight billion and counting, there’s no birth dearth in the world; simply a misalignment of humans. What we should be worried about is our planet’s finite resources we’re blowing through with every pointless new iPhone release. Scientists argue whether we’re in the midst of an Anthropocene Era-driven sixth mass extinction . We merely haven’t imagined yet how it will look with fewer future adults. We’ll just invite others back, if they trust us not to keep electing senile old men to positions of great responsibility. The ‘birth dearth’ is a course correction. Parenthood is not for the casual and irresponsible, and we are as free as we ever were to not produce other over-consuming humans. We can barrel forward childfree, guilt-free, inventing and creating and traveling and communicating with people who don’t pronounce the third number as free. I feel for kids who weren’t wanted, whose short miserable lives passed before my eyes in newspaper headlines. Like Charlie Wright , a 7-year-old Akron boy in 1987 beaten to death by his hooker mom who had “no desire to be a responsible parent.” Or the starved Turpin kids , or Jeffrey Baldwin , a 5-year-old starved to death by his Ontario grandparents when his mother lost custody. I feel for these kids because I was born into a good family, with parents who loved my brother and I and supported us. They didn’t beat us, rape us, starve us, tell us we were worthless or leave us alone for days at a time. I don’t know what I did to deserve my parents, nor what those dead children did, either. I was luckier, I guess. We don’t have to breed to fill jobs sitting idle. Just as you wouldn’t want a frustrated pro golfer operating on your dad’s heart because his parents insisted No, that’s a silly dream, you’re going to be a doctor, you want only the truly dedicated to raise children. We merely have to get rid of our political xenophobes and reintroduce a sane immigration policy with better screening for criminality and terrorist leanings. How else might we adapt? We could reduce our consumption considerably, and challenge how much we need all our useless stuff. We might find other things to do with fewer running factories. We could farm, return to hand-crafted items, and hang out with our fellow humans more. Do you really need a virtual reality set? What if reality is more fulfilling than fake-Tenerife? There’s no guarantee being a good parent, or a co-parent, will result in a child who makes you proud, but at least you can die knowing you did the best you could, despite your mistakes. We don’t need more humans. We need more humanity—the kind that emanates from our hearts, and allows us to connect as God or evolution designed us, before we allowed the tech bros to offer us a depraved new world. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

What do you do when you've been illegitimately accused of 'mansplaining'? I gotcher answers right here! “Is he ever going to shut up?” Image by Megan Judge  from Pixabay Men explain things to me, but they never mansplain . Sometimes I ask for information, other times they lecture, uninvited, which is more annoying. Sometimes they simply don’t know when to shut up and I sit there thinking, “He answered the question ten minutes ago.” What are the differences? Some men get accused of mansplaining when all they’ve done is challenge  a woman on incorrect assertions or sloppy assumptions, or who’ve not thought through a particular proposition. A male commenter on Substack recently noted that ‘mansplaining’ is a particularly male dynamic because men simply love to explain stuff!!! Including to each other, regularly. What is actual mansplaining? he wondered, vs ‘regular old ‘splainin’, or just challenging in response? Let’s take a look at the two conversational male misdemeanors, beginning with the two that sometimes drive women to contemplate murder: Mansplaining and lecturing. We’ll end with challenging , which is perfectly acceptable, along with what to do when you’re wrongly accused, and how to avoid oversplainin’. Mansplaining The original, and most concise definition is, ‘when a man explains things to women he should expect she’d already know or that she’s already told him she knows.’ For example: I’m in IT sales. Today, basic, essential computer knowledge is hardly gendered; but when I entered the profession thirty-two years ago, IT was more female-free than a mancave during the Superbowl, and it wasn’t an unreasonable assumption to expect female ignorance, because most women had no interest in computers. When I joined computer BBS’s back in the early ‘90s, I ruled  the mostly younger male cohort because there was maybe one woman for every five (horny) males. The only other female who could compete with the French Wench in a photo-free dialup world where photos would have taken a geological age to load was Blue-Eyed Sex-Kitten. So if a man were to explain computers to me say, in 1997, I might say, “Oh I know this already, I’m in IT.” He’s not mansplaining unless he continues to explain things I just said are my literal profession. Mansplaining started when the God of All Mansplainers kept explaining a book he’d just read to its author, whose girl friend told him this several times,  ergo, that she knew exactly what it was about. He wasn’t sharing his insight, he was explaining it to the author. That’s it. THAT is the definition of mansplaining. When a woman tells you she already knows about something—skip to the point. If you can’t tell from looking at her that she already knows this stuff (like, when I wasn’t wearing my company-branded uniform), then it’s not mansplaining. Men mansplain mansplaining! Men mansplain mansplaining! There are other types of ‘splaining too. Whitesplaining: Explaining the ‘Black Experience’ to black people. Techsplaining: Talking over someone’s head without asking for their knowledge level. And I once accused a feminist of ‘femsplaining’ although she countered she wasn’t sure how much feminist history I knew. ‘Femsplaining’ might be better defined as when women ‘splain’ things to men in a manner designed to patronize rather than sincerely enlighten. Yes, gentlemen, call her out. “Hey, you’re not psychic, you don’t live in my head. Don’t tell me what I think. You’d raise the roof if I did it to you. And for your information, I know  how to operate the washer and dryer, I do my own laundry, including ironing!” Progressives expand and change the meaning of words at will, so progressive feminists schooled in professional victimhood have misused and overused ‘mansplaining’ to cover practically anything men say they don’t like, and especially when they feel intimidated by a man challenging their opinion or facts. That is not what the originator of the term , Rebecca Solnit, described, and we need to return to the original definition. It no longer means, a la Humpty Dumpty, exactly what any woman chooses it to mean. Just make sure your own riposte or assertions are true, because, as Solnit pointed out in her essay, men often assume women don’t know things they do, and more to the point, men often don’t know as much as they think. That guy who’s the expert on everything? Everyone knows one. Don’t be that guy. Lecturing This is by far the most common conversational misdemeanor men commit, and a lot of y’all are doing it. This isn’t lecturing to a class or to your wayward child, it’s when men start running off at the mouth about something that interests them, or even worse, something they think they know about, but don’t. This, I believe, is the distinction the ‘splainin’ the aforementioned commenter asked about. There’s no shortage of female know-it-alls, but they’re less inclined to monologue to display knowledge. What they are more inclined to do is bore your ass off with every detail of their forthcoming wedding or to complain about some chronic problem. I have a male friend who ‘lectures’. He loves to explain stuff whether I asked or not. In fact, he literally can’t shut up. He’ll push past your cries for rescue. He’s a wonderful person but he’s deeply insecure; lecturing is his clumsy way to establish status, but also to add genuine value, however foolishly. Some men just boldly walk up to others and start lecturing. A friend in community college complained about a man she already disliked who waltzed up to a conversation she was in with three or four people and just started popping off about some documentary he’d watched the night before. Just interrupted and started lecturing; no one was discussing it, no one was interested, and he was so busy impressing himself he was oblivious to their irritation. Lecturers aren’t good at reading the room, or watching for glazed eyeballs, averted glances or other signs of impatience. I watched my lecturing friend destroy a pandemic-era friends Zoom by lecturing and troubleshooting a minor tech issue that wasn’t important. He missed the clear signs of irritation on my other friends’ faces and I knew they would never agree to another Zoom. I was right. Challenging - Not a misdemeanor! This isn’t a particularly male impulse: It’s gender-non-specific when we encounter misinformation, bad ideas or ill-thought-out proposals. But it’s also what’s most likely to trigger accusations of mansplaining because no one likes being criticized or corrected, however politely, in public. Problem is, incorrect statements in public forums invite it. It’s a public forum. It invites feedback.  Posters, writers, and commenters never object to positive feedback (“You’re so right!”) but hackles rise with negative response (“Good point, but you’re wrong about….” or even worse, “Jane, you ignorant slut!”) NSFW: An adult woman will own up and admit she got something wrong; perhaps even thank the person for the correction. A less mature woman will react badly, which happened to a male friend of mine recently. The lady made a proposition on Facebook; my friend pointed out there were some flaws in her plan; and she got pissy and accused him of ‘mansplaining’ to the ‘silly little girl’. He called me to vent because she’s one of my Facebook friends, although I haven’t talked to her in years. He invited me to check out the thread, which did. He didn’t mansplain; he was polite; never suggested she was a child. She wasn’t mature enough to handle a direct challenge when a more mature person would have said, “You’re right, not everyone can do what I propose.” Later, she deleted the entire thread, cementing her lack of maturity. This is a woman in her mid-forties. Men don’t have to tolerate female hypersensitivity when they’re legitimately challenging something she said. Keep it straightforward and non-insulting, as a patronizing or condescending tone can easily sound like mansplaining. But it’s fair game to return with, “Sorry, but human blood is always red; it’s a myth that it’s blue until oxygenated.” Link a credible source if needed. Men’s conversation-dominant style works better in male-only spaces, where, the earlier-referenced commenter noted, it’s de rigueur . Some jerks intentionally dominate, talk over and belittle women to shut them up. Don’t be that guy, remember that women’s speech and conversational styles are different, managing ego protection, rapport-building, and softening bluntness, dynamics men should incorporate, too, for fewer misunderstandings. We all need to accommodate each other and recognize that what works at a ‘hen party’ , or in the mancave, requires refinement in a mixed setting. And ladies: DON’T LET HIM DOMINATE. The woman is not always right Comedians still joke about this when a man is married, although I don’t find it as funny as I used to, because too many women, especially progressives, seem to believe it. Which just goes to show you, it’s not just men who suffer from intellectual self-delusions! To recap: Mansplaining is never okay. It’s explaining something to a woman you already know she knows. Lecturing is annoying and often gets confused with mansplaining. Read the room and release your hostages. Challenging is perfectly acceptable, because public forums literally demand it. Refute charges of mansplaining by defining it via Rebecca Solnit and restate why you challenged what she said. I hope this makes it all clear. Please spread the message far and wide, gentlemen; you don’t have to tolerate female tantrums if you truly haven’t done anything wrong. The blueprint’s pretty easy: Skip to the point, wrap it up, or challenge her wisely. You’re not responsible for her feelings beyond that. She’s a a big girl, whether she knows it or not. NSFW!!! Or if you must watch this at work, turn down the sound. Rather a lot. 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!

Liberalism has become a zombie movie. You never know who will get infected with the woke mindvirus and turn on you. Image by Grae Dickason from Pixabay I understand why so many rational people find themselves drifting to the right. Or maybe, should I say, persistently pushed. I met up with a liberal single guy this summer. He slipped into the conversation, “I’m very supportive of LGBTQ,” I think to see how I’d react. “Live and let live,” I think I said. Didn’t seem like the right time to observe Skrmetti got it right. His comment gnawed at me. Even if we saw eye to eye on my squarely normie view of ‘trans rights’, how do I know he won’t flake on me eventually? How do I know he won’t go woke? Is it something in the avocado toast? What if he comes to believe I’m a fascist for believing drag shows are for adults , not children? What if he becomes an intolerant illiberal? What if he gets bitten by a transwoman??? Who can I trust anymore? Liberal friendships are fragile; loyalty has become conditional—subject to ‘high’ standards of performative ideological purity. No matter how much one liberal might agree with another, one might be found unworthy of friendship because he pish-poshes reparations. Or thinks #MeToo has jumped the shark. Conversation with liberals is like tiptoeing through a mine field; you never know what will set them off. How do I know they won’t succumb to the lure of belonging to a group that love bombs you with affirmation and makes you feel specialer-than-thou by uniting against a common enemy—people who don’t capitulate? So many of my friends, people I’ve known for years or even decades, slip away into the night, their Purity Balls becoming ever-more-exclusive to rational thought or dissent. One was someone close who didn’t just defriend me on Facebook, but blocked me. We hadn’t exchanged a single harsh word. But she got married and we lost touch, and all she knew me by was my Facebook posts, and I’ll bet she didn’t like my take-no-shit feminism. Hers was fairly ossified , whose commitment to feminist activism was texting ‘Happy International Women’s Day’. People become disposable; you can toss them and not think too deeply about how little you value genuine human relationships; how devotion to a narrative is more important to you than that she was one of your bridesmaids who put up with your Bridezilla crap for months or that she’s been your best friend since second grade. Lifelong loyalty becomes a used napkin you leave for the waiter to pick up. To be honest, I deserved a few blowoffs. My mouth runneth over, along with my ego. Sometimes I am possessed by my former know-it-all 21-year-old. I own that. I am absolutely an arrogant asshole sometimes, even as I’ve worked on that for years. I reconnected with one ex-friend by not being an asshole anymore. There are a few others I have to find emails for. The ones who struck first, with whom I never exchanged harsh words, I bid, as Pagans say, Go in perfect love and perfect trust. After all, it takes an ideological arrogant asshole to defriend one. A few came as a relief. They ended tiresome late-night phone calls regurgitating self-aggrandizing social justice mind dumps. Wokies are in love with the sound of their own voice. I cherish the peace and quiet. Research agrees: Liberals are more intolerant Consistent research, the most recent coming from the Skeptic Research Center , supports my experience of the intolerant left and liberals’ greater willingness to defriend and defamily. It’s most prominent among Zoomers and Millennials but liberals in all age groups admit they’re more likely to cut people off for their political views than those in other political groups. It’s not just me; the anecdotes proliferate online. A Democratic operative who worked closely with the biggest progressive stars speaks of her shunning after announcing on TikTok that she was breaking ranks and voting for Trump, and went viral. A former Pro-Palestine activist speaks of longtime friends who blocked her when she left the movement. And, leaning into the whole women-are-bigger-political-bitches-than-men angle, you’re less likely to get blocked or deplatformed by your male conservative opponents than by women on your own side. They can’t trust liberals either. They’re vicious when you break rank. Which is not to say that conservatives always open welcoming arms to political deviators. The SRC found the stronger one’s views, either side, the more likely one is to cut the cord, and the ‘very conservative’ were more likely to wave bye-bye than more mainstream liberals or conservatives. Millennial conservatives were more likely to go no-contact than moderates on either side. But overall, ‘very liberal’ towered over all the other groups in the intolerance bar chart. Telling your friends you just defriended another ‘toxic person’ virtue signals higher status to your group, since the less -ist you are about anything, the better a human being you’re considered to be. By casually dismissing the person as a ‘right-winger’, ‘Kool-Aid drinker,’ or a ‘transphobe’, the woke progressive reassures the group her moral purity is never sullied by differing views. Stick within your safe little bubble, as a recent conversation with a progressive I had did. She told herself a pretty little lie about a ‘stolen’ election that didn’t go her way from a fake news site. She didn’t ask herself whether she was reacting with the same denial as Donald Trump’s followers in 2020. We’ve all lost our social skills over the past mobile-driven decade. Zoomers have almost none, tallying their likes vs negative comments with the calculated efficiency of a CPA. We’ve become angrier, but some of us are working on it. One woke friend I almost defriended when he screamed abuse at me a few years ago apologized sincerely when I finally told him why I wasn’t comfortable with one-on-one get-togethers. He must have done some self-reflection, as he’s not screamed since, when we’ve disagreed on something. On Halloween, we stood together on a dance floor swaying back and forth to the band with our arms around each other. I felt close to him. There’s hope for those who genuinely value friendship over tribal moral contempt. Why aren’t there more of them? Can’t we develop a vaccine for illiberalism? No Tyrants! (Except our own) I’ve written about my multiple takedowns and bans by ‘woke progressive’ blogging platforms and social media. They don’t like it when you don’t bend the knee. I met a woman at Toronto’s No Tyrants rally with a T-shirt that read “NO BOOK BANS!” I said, “Great shirt, I hate them too. I’m curious, are you against all book bans or only some ?” Of course , she approved of book bans if they ‘harmed’ people. “But who decides who’s being harmed?” I asked. This is the gotcha with wokies. Like their comrades-in-arms on the right, they think they’re the arbiters. She proudly informed me she supports all of Canada’s hate speech laws. “They’re censorship,” I pointed out. “You can get in big trouble just for stating scientifically that transwomen are men.” And her mouth took off. I eventually walked away from her verbal diarrhea , but she came up to me a few minutes later. She asked, sincerely, “Why are you even here?” waving her arm around the crowd as though she couldn’t imagine what I might have in common with these people. “Why are you here?” I asked. “Since you’re authoritarian yourself!” Bad answer. In retrospect I should have challenged her (typical) authoritarian blind spot by saying: “For the same reason you are: I hate Trump’s authoritarianism. I’m quite certain we agree on that. Where we disagree is whether all authoritarianism is bad, or just some. And frankly, someone who wears an anti-book-ban shirt while supporting book bans and speech suppression is an authoritarian hypocrite.” Clearly, she thought everyone at the protest was just like her. But I know something she doesn’t: Not all conservatives are Trump-loving sycophants. The MAGAs can’t agree on him. Plenty of his voters experience buyer’s regret. His historically low poll numbers indicate he’s less popular than $9 a pound coffee. I’d bet there were several conservatives present that day. But they often feel they can’t speak up, as their side has never been particularly tolerant of internal criticism, either. And God help them if the book ban dictators find out they’re there. Who can I still trust? I love my liberal peeps. I’m not a closet Republican slouching towards Candace Owens, and don’t believe I’ll lose my liberal views if I hang out more with conservatives. Rather, I might get a word in edgewise. People who lean left like me are the Silent Majority. I know I’ve found a comrade in arms when we both question wokeness, after proceeding cautiously, like two strange cats, testing the other to see how much heresy she can handle before she leaps for attack. They’re the keepers: They can handle differences of opinion and believe diversity is only skin-deep. They don’t lecture like the No Tyrants lady. They haven’t adopted hypocrisy as a virtue. They haven’t abandoned compassion as so many liberals have, and which the Republican Party abandoned decades ago. They don’t get huffy when you condemn all antisemites and fascism fans, rather than just the other side’s. Their skepticism, critical thinking skills, and ability to ask hard questions aloud provide natural immunity to the zombie’s bite. I’m not worried about turning Republican. I’m worried that when enough liberals embrace illiberalism, they will eventually realize how much they have in common with the other side and realize The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Right now, we normies outnumber both the far right and the far left, but if they unite against us that could change drastically. Remember, Hitler sent intellectuals and freethinkers to his concentration camps, especially in Poland. We see that same pattern repeat itself over and over in totalitarian regimes whether they’re fascist or communist. We question authority and challenge corruption, we stand up for groups marginalized by the ruling party. We weaken their control. They respond with persecution, pogroms, incarceration, torture, and execution, often public, often cruel, to serve as a stern example to others. Progressives and liberals think they’re ‘not like that’ yet many embrace antisemitism, the world’s oldest hate crime, which sounds terrifyingly far-right. Yes, I fear ‘progressives’ could turn on all of us. Yes, I think they might one day re-embrace concentration camps. And they’ll start with us, the moderates and freethinkers, so there is no one left to defend their ultimate scapegoats. We are the resistance, which Hitler understood. Once you eliminate us, you can do as you please. No, I don’t trust liberals anymore. And this is why. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

"The Great Feminization" illustrates why women shouldn't run everything, either. What we need now is a Great Social Integration, led by us Normies. Photo by August de Richelieu on Pexels My friend Sam called me a few weeks ago. “You know Roberta So-and-So, right?” he asked. Yes, I told him, we’re connected on Facebook, but I haven’t talked to her in years. Sam wanted to vent. It seems our Ontario premier in all his buttheaded glory wanted to end rent control and Roberta, ever the progressive activist, posted that the working class should launch a day-long strike. Sam agreed completely with her dislike for the housing proposal, but pointed out that a strike simply wasn’t feasible for many working class people—like immigrants who would lose their status if they didn’t work. Or dog walkers—doggies gotta exercise and poo, even during hurricanes. Or au pairs—children, same thing. Or people who depend on whatever peanuts they’re paid and couldn’t afford a self-imposed day off. Or to get fired. Roberta didn’t like the challenge. She got a little snippy with him. Sam invited me to review the exchange. He’d kept it polite but called out her rudeness as well as her illogic. She accused him of ‘mansplaining’ to the ‘silly little girl’. I’ve known Sam for about fifteen years or more and he’s a good debater. He quotes facts and sources and can be sarcastic sometimes but he’s no mansplainer, ever. “Did you point out how she’s speaking from a position of privilege?” I giggled. The housing proposal (now tabled) would adversely affect Roberta, a self-employed artist, and her partner, an actor, but they can both arrange their schedules to include a strike. When I returned to the thread to make sure I was attributing Roberta’s words accurately, I found all the comments removed. Roberta had played the pouty child and whined ‘misogyny’ at someone who merely observed her lack of situation consideration in a public forum—then erased the evidence. Her immature reaction was oh-so-woke: Getting mad, playing the victim, and shutting down the conversation. All hail the Matriarchy? Just earlier that day I’d read Helen Andrews’s viral essay for Compact, The Great Feminization. She argues that women’s success in breaking several glass ceilings are the cause of wokeness, that it’s the result of female social and relational dynamics subsuming formerly male cultures. She notes that once sex parity occurs in a culture, the imbalance flips. The men leave, she speculates, because they don’t like a dominant culture that treats them as the enemy and complains to HR if they make a rude joke or state a controversial opinion. Men will talk over each other, bust on each other, and self-promote in a way that women aren’t socialized to do. Women, she says, introduce themselves and then proceed with the business at hand, guided by the female dynamics of consensus and cooperation. It’s not that either style is bad, they’re different, and both exist for good reasons. You don’t bring an olive branch to a knife fight, for example, and you do, in fact, catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Andrews doesn’t believe women are simply outperforming men to explain the new lopsided F2M disparity; she credits, instead, affirmative action and DEI; ‘the thumb on the scale’. Andrews’s connection between wokeness and female psychology isn’t new; it emerged in non-woke forums for the last couple of years. I disagree with her that female dominance is the reason why wokeness arose, although she’s correct that it maps in the same direction. I think it’s one, rather than the reason. She has a point about the ‘thumb on the scale’; DEI panders to increasingly deteriorating ‘marginalization’ and has introduced real doubt about certain suspiciously woke-candidate public figures, but there’s no question women are also rising because of genuine competence, motivation and ability. It’s hard to blame DEI when men don’t enroll in university as much as they once had, or come to class as much, or drop out more often. Women graduate with impressive degrees and run businesses because many men have ceded the glass ceiling to play video games and and worship Nick Fuentes. Women are also running the show at college campus protests, which, love them or hate them, are early hands-on lessons in leadership, which will carry into the world beyond. I certainly understand why men wouldn’t want to attend classes with hostile chickie-boos who collectively shout down anyone without a pre-approved progressive opinion, but men have been falling aside also of their own accord. No snowflakes, please! Andrews’s article is one piece of the complex puzzle surrounding the rise of wokeness, rather than, as she assumes, the sole explanation. Especially as we watch the rise of the clearly male-dominated woke right . The connection between wokeness and the now-obvious female characteristics—gossip, ostracism, inclusivity, non-offense, and a Nazi-like devotion to agreeableness—is so glaring I’m surprised I never noticed it myself. I, who was subjected to so much female toxicity in school. On then-Twitter, it was hard to know who you were actually engaging with in a faceless anonymous world. The LGBTQ gang blurred the lines further and you never knew which cyberbullies were male or female between the ears, where it really counts. Now it seems clear, biological women have been leading that Charge of the Indict Brigade. Other writers have argued similarly. The serious chill on free speech, the authoritarian desire to coerce agreement, the obsession with inclusion for anyone except conscientious objectors, the love affair with hurting rivals via ostracism—that’s eighth-grade girly crap, inside and out. Can I borrow your sparkly unicorn lip gloss? We normies don’t want to see a matriarchy replace the patriarchy. I’d much rather explore how we can now dial it back a bit and make it safe for men and their style, too. What could we accomplish if we weren’t so busy fighting over ‘sex parity’ in a way that would sound stupid if we suggested ‘eye color parity’? A failed experiment I explored how men and women can combine the best of their strengths earlier this year in Better DEI Will Teach Women How To Handle Conflict With Male Employees. I argued that women aren’t taught properly how to handle conflict like adults, and that if a woman has a problem with a male colleague, she needs to bring it up with him first, rather than drag HR or the U.S. Supreme Court into it. If thousands of years of patriarchy is a bad idea, so, clearly, is the emerging Matriarchy. I already feel oppressed by woke progressive women and their panting male lapdogs, and it’s only been fifteen years so far. I absolutely, positively, cannot abide another 11,985 years of this bitchy high school shit. What can we do to teach males and females to treat each other as respected colleagues rather than chromosome-based enemies? I’ve found various exercises that can be incorporated into the workplace, activist groups, academia, and elsewhere to foster better communication methods and reduce interpretive friction. Like taking a workplace statement, “The project deadline needs to be moved up,” and take feedback on what participants think was said. Was the person frustrated? Blaming? Withholding information? Another exercise forces people to shift from blaming and accusing language to focus on why something needs to change, without, I hope, putting too much emphasis on feelings, of which there’s already too much. (Thanks, ladies. Not.) Another confronts the assumption that one’s preferred style on how to handle a particular decision—a restaurant or a picnic in the park for the annual company summer social?—or whether meetings are best held in person or on zoom—to force participants to understand others’ differing approaches and to consider ideas that aren’t necessarily their own. Others focus on collaborative problem-solving, and handling conflicts, like two demands for an employee for the same time. The exercises don’t address male and female work or communication styles specifically, but still challenge certain gender-related habits and styles, and to temper one’s inclinations that don’t foster greater collaboration (like the notion that one’s opinion is superior or that we always need to arrive at a group consensus, which often actually means others aren’t satisfied but assent just to get the hell out of the meeting). I think it’s good to push women to stand up for themselves more, say, with salary negotiations. It’s good to expect men to consider others’ feelings, to contemplate the impact of a given action on others. We can debate and discuss, but sometimes, consensus rather than arbitrary rule is the best way. It’s good that men take risks; it’s good that women point out how many people might get hurt if a particularly risky plan goes awry. The Great Feminization screams for a course correction. Its companion wokeness, as one writer argues, poisons at a very young age. With it now on the chopping block, powerful men and women can change imbalanced policies and force recalibration of existing toxic workplace styles to offer more adult conflict management and resolution. I hope one day to see the HR ‘profession’ eliminated entirely. Or simply devoted to finding the best corporate insurance plan. With DEI largely purged from decent society (yes, thank you, Donald Trump), the world may one day become safe again for grownups. What This Country Needs Is An Enema—And It’s Getting One Men needed First Wave feminism to recognize how difficult paternalism and mindless sexism was for the other half. Today complacent entitled women need a similar bottom blaze. If we’re strong enough and genuinely good enough to make partner or lead a project team to build something new, we’re strong enough to conquer our own humophobia , and understand the difference between mean-spirited jokes and humor that builds camaraderie by making it okay for all of us to laugh. Helen Andrews made some good points, although some are a little weak (feminization won’t destroy Western civilization), and a few of her critics haven’t effectively rebutted her either. As the future’s female leaders leave the cossetted campus environment and encounter the Real World, it will be critically important that we un-teach the negative and counterproductive thought patterns and beliefs they learned at school, and remake them with a new workplace style more inclusive than they would have tolerated back at Harvard U. We’re the Normies. We’re the true progessives, seeking human, not gendered, progress. United we stand. 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!