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!

Because we can't wrest democracy back from only one side. We have to kill all the cancer. Image by Alejandro Lizardo  on Public Domain Pictures Democracy is no longer ‘precarious’ in the Ignited States of Trumpistan, but swirling down a golden toilet. One might argue that rather than critiquing the excesses of liberalism, I should instead turn my attentions to Messolooni, currently heaping up a veritable guerra lampo   of gross abuses of power. But the left’s own excesses are what’s also brought us to this place—we, the other arm of the ambidextrous authoritarian monster. “This is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause,” comments Senator Padmé Amidala in Revenge of the Sith. I’m clearly no MAGA Trumpanzee; I love liberty, and I continue prodding my fellow liberals and my not-so-fellow illiberals on their own lack of commitment to it, to the great annoyance of those who still wish to pretend they had nothing to do with this fine kettle of fish. Those applauding now are the far right. Those applauding until January 20th were the far left. We, and they too, are more like them than we know. And now that our side is out of government power, we have to take inventory of our failings, as they say in AA, and make amends, because we can’t fix them  without restoring our own abandoned moral credibility. Who are ‘them’? Too many progressives, liberals, and social justice junkies don’t understand who ‘they’, the problem Americans, are. They’re neither ‘the left’ nor ‘the right’, neither Democrat nor Republican, neither red nor blue: They are, as I’ve discussed before, liberty lovers vs authoritarians. I criticize not just the woke illiberals, but the ‘nice’ liberals, the ‘good’ liberals, and the true progressives unfortunately clinging to clearly flawed policies and values, ‘buggy whips’ they should have abandoned decades ago. If You Still Hold The Same Beliefs Thirty Or Forty Years Ago—Why? Conservatives are much less united behind the Trumpocalypse than the left realizes; the Republican Party has been bleeding the disenchanted  for years. As I see from The Bulwark  articles I get, written by conservative disenchanteds, their gloomy assessments of Trump almost entirely mirror mine and my fellow liberals. Many moderates and disenchanteds don’t speak up because the guerra lampo of hate and danger from our respective authoritarian masters is brutal, online and off. But we are their heretics, their hidden ticking liberty bombs. We agitate for what they don’t dare, by doing and saying what they dare not. We get to know and befriend moderates of whichever side isn’t ours, and develop a respect for their opinions, and are more inclined to listen to them when they say something we disagree with. It’s what’s been missing from the national conversation for decades. We don’t listen; we don’t share a beer with people who don’t go to our church, raise their kids the same way, own guns, vote for who we voted for, or have a distaste for abortion. I critique my own tribe more than the other, even as I feel like all  of us liberty-lovers need to circle the wagons. I take on liberals because too many won’t listen to anyone they fashcast  as ‘right-wing’. You don’t subscribe to Holy Trans Dogma? You don’t think Israel is pure evil? You dare to criticize the less-than-angelic George Floyd? Defriend. I speak to the liberals who haven’t yet given their brains over to the social justice cult. Thanks for sticking around! If you think our side could never do what Trump is doing now, I offer Exhibit A: Venezuela, headed by the now-late Hugo Chavez, who dismantled democracy, one brick at a time. Going after political enemies? Check. Shutting down oppositional broadcasters? Check. Watching the swiftness with which the guardrails are broken; knowing the motherfucker in power doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about you or your problems; politicizing everything, blurring the lines between state, government and society to make it all about him. Check. Check. Check. Check. Chavez wasn’t a right-winger, as many might assume, but a credentialed left-winger: A socialist, a nationalizer of key industries, proponent of welfare programs to eradicate poverty and inequality. You know who loved him? The working class and the marginalized. Sound familiar, mis amigos liberales? It’s the Authoritarians, silly. We purple liberty lovers unite to fight against the Pol Potbellies and Pinheadchets who now battle for control of America. It’s great to see citizens fighting back against the brutal masked ICE Gestapo, while knowing those same ‘warriors’ may well be the far-left authoritarians who simply want their power back. Who, if they’re taking notes, will bring us Woke Trump one day and perpetuate, rather than end, the current horror. Yes, I DO believe our side is every bit as authoritarian as theirs. It just hasn’t matured and emerged from its chrysalis like Sil in Species . Yet. And the little blockheads shall lead them What I never imagined is that my fellow liberals would turn ‘progressive’ into a dirty word, smelling of bad milk and broccoli in the garbage. My increasingly-estranging compatriots embraced a cancel culture censorship for public statements that were often offensive, ill-considered, or downright stupid, but not illegal. Our Regressive Left is what’s compelled us to lose our minds over opinions, but turn away and whistle in the dark when a black man kills a white woman for no reason or the wrong President brings about a ceasefire we’ve been demanding for two years. Lackadaisical liberalism and true progressivism found itself hijacked by our dumbasses—the Regressive Left, who devolved into the ‘woke’ with too much unchecked, unquestioned ‘tolerance’ and ‘inclusivity’ and a serious distaste for open inquiry. They opened the door to our very worst elements the same way Republican small-tentism  led to Trump’s MAGAtry. Both sides’ regressives are motivated by the same nihilism, all-purpose bigotry, itch to manage, fear of critical thinking, the desire to tear it all down, and to remake society to fit their own twisted utopia, by violence if necessary. Authoritarians must control everything, especially education, because freethinkers and intellectuals wonk it all up by asking too many questions . Regressives possess their own built-in seeds of social destruction, showering the faithful with a wide chrysanthemum of stupidity: Christian fundamentalism on the right, encompassing the most dogmatic and bass-ackwards elements of religiosity, and the left’s fetishization of moral weakness and group identity, leading to much the same sort of hate and bigotry as we see now with Jew hatred parity. Once the left embraced exclusionary diversity, Trumpist authoritarianism, rooted in one man’s own mad desire to seek revenge on anyone who ever crossed him, cracked like a whip against anyone to the left of J.D. Vance, boosted mightily by understandably pissed-off once-reasonable conservatives who’ve been silenced for too long. This was explored and explained beautifully in a recent Free Press article, What Shakespeare Understands About Trump’s Thirst For Revenge . The author observes that while the left watches in horror as Trump turns around their own recent ideological actions and takes them three steps further , Democratic presidents exhibit their own authoritarian streak, on occasion, although less, so far,  than Republican administrations. But. The actions are identical: Jawboning political opponents ; pressuring private companies to suppress free speech (Biden with Google/YouTube  and Facebook ); the bipartisan love affair with book bans  and compelling universities to comply with a political agenda (Obama’s extremist #MeToo-driven dictates ). Just because Democratic administrations haven’t lately been ‘just as bad’ doesn’t mean they’re not ambitious. Remember, the Democrats, formerly the ‘white man’s party’, once fought a civil wa r to preserve  slavery. Truth is, we each have our own little Dr. Evil living within. That itch to rule over others because we know what’s best , it seems, is ingrained into the human soul. Unless we consciously fight our own Little Caesar, we ask not whether authoritarianism sucks, but which we prefer. The devil you know 2025’s censorship handover is a prime example of how badly we need to clean up our own mess. It’s so, so, so hard not to roll my eyes at the liberal multitudes suddenly getting woke to censorship, now that the right is in charge of it. Our Joseph Goebbelsism is that one must be the right  kind of liberal, and most importantly, liberal enough, in order to be taken seriously. Progressives hobbled and crippled themselves by yanking the reins on diversity of opinion. Now they whine while the tables turn on them.   The ‘Peace Protesters’ Who Won’t Give Peace A Chance   - The Free Press If the left, and especially the Democrats, don’t exorcise their own authoritarian demons quickly, when they return to power, as they eventually will, they may be as bad as or worse than the Trumpocalypse. Or they might never return, because voters might decide, fuck it, the devil you know, until there are no more elections. At the moment, hand-wringing born-again democracy mavens, the ‘fat generals’ of The Resistance, can’t rally together to strategically wrest democracy back from the tinputt dictator who is destroying the country. Who will one day subjugate even his own airheaded fanboys and fangirls, cheering for their own liberation from financial security and freedom, and for their own destruction. We truly have met the enemy and he is us Liberal, conservative, and libertarian liberty lovers need each other. We who value the original vision of the Founding Fathers need to unite together to fight bi-divisional reality denial, whether it’s transmania or vaccine phobia, the Intifada or de-gunning the least violent citizens. Trump may babble like a maniac about having ended wars between countries who are at peace or flooding Los Angeles with non-existent water, and almost everything he attempts is done in the worst way imaginable, but he couldn’t have done it without our help. He’s primarily an ambassador for right-wing lunacy with a visceral rejection of all true liberals should hold dear: Reality, truth, skepticism, evidence-based policy-making and common sense . For all the talk about what a malignant psychopath Donald Trump is, it takes one to know one. They voted for him, but we  gave   Trump the power to behave much like ourselves. We can remain in denial and pretend we want to fix America’s problems, or we can just sit back and wait for ICE’s stormtroopers to claim us. We’re no longer red and blue. We’re not Republican or Democrat. We are the liberty lovers, who fight all  authoritarians, regardless of which flags they fly. It’s up to us. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

You never know what you're made of until the air raids sound. All. Day. Long. April 1942. The residents of Valletta, the capital of Malta, survey the latest bombing damage by the Axis powers. Public domain image Lt. J E Russell , Royal Navy photographer on Wikimedia Commons Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of England, and Erwin Rommel, the ‘Desert Fox’ head of the German Imperial army, didn’t agree on much, except one thing: If the Axis powers couldn’t subdue the tiny tri-island country of Malta, the Axis was, to put it more bluntly than either of them did, fucked. “Without Malta, the Axis will end by losing control of North Africa,” Rommel warned. “Malta is the master key of the Mediterranean: the battlefield on which the fate of the Mediterranean war will be decided,” said Churchill. I’ve visited Churchill’s bunker too. He had much better lodgings than the Maltese, but he had a fair idea of life underground. I recently visited my aunt in Malta, whom I hadn’t seen in over thirty-five years. She kept encouraging me to visit Mellieha, a town on the northern end of ‘Big Island’, the largest and most central of the Maltese triad, the other two islands being Comino and Gozo. My last full day, I visited the World War II bomb shelter just around the corner. Aunt Nancy was born a year before the war ended, and two years before the Axis’s five year Siege of Malta ended. She doesn’t remember the war or the air raids, but her toys as a small child included broken glass and rubble. Malta, as I heard at least eleventy-hundred times from everyone while I was there, was the most bombed country in Europe. This tiny little island that some people have never heard of—I had to enlighten my Indian Uber driver who drove me to the Toronto airport—was one of the most strategically important points of World War II. My aunt, who lives just a few blocks from her old ‘hood, pointed out some caves, natural and man-made, a short walk from her apartment where she and her friends played. The Axis objective was to subdue Malta by starving the populace and destroying their morale with relentless bombing attacks. Because Malta and Italy have intermingled family ties, Italian pilots ‘missed’ a lot. The Germans, however possessed no such sentimental decorum. A newspaper headline in the shelter mentioned ‘15 attacks in 24 hours’; this must have been sheer hell on those below and the Axis actually came very close to achieving their objective. What they didn’t count on was how resilient the Maltese had become. Given how tiny these chunks of land in the middle of the Mediterranean are, it’s hard to imagine what the big conquest jones has historically been, but pretty much everyone has taken a whack at them over the centuries. When you speak of the ‘Siege of Malta’ you have to specify which one. The French, the British, the Ottoman Turks and the Barbary corsairs invaded, blockaded or raided for hundreds of years; so did the Kingdom of Sicily in 1429; the Normans invaded in 1091; and the Arab-Byzantines besieged them in 870. This isn’t even a comprehensive list! In some respects the bomb shelter reminded me of both the current Russian-Ukraine and Israeli-Gazan wars. Like Mussolini’s military, reports are that many Russians are unhappy with going to war with a country with which they have many blood ties; the Russian Air Force knows they may be attacking their families. The history of the scrappy little country with very powerful friends recalls Israel. And, while watching a short video on the course of the war on Malta, the scenes of destroyed buildings and endless piles of rubble from relentless attacks reminded me of the scenes we see today in Gaza. Mellieha’s tunnels—about 2.1 meters high, seemed terribly claustrophobic. At five-foot-three, I felt how close the ceiling was to my head (the Maltese themselves are roughly my height) and for my non-guided tour were lit by dim electric lamps, which were only available to the wartime Maltese when it was working. Otherwise, the shelters were lit by Italian-imported candles until they ran out, and after that by olive oil lamps which were plentiful as Malta has plenty of olive tree plantations. I imagined how horribly depressing it must have been to live like rats undergound. Not everyone was fortunate enough, even, to live like that; at the beginning of the war, when the air raid sirens sounded, there were only a few shelters that could only hold so many. Malta is largely made up of porous limestone, and mining and digging is as natural as breathing. My aunt’s 19th century church sits atop limestone but the square and the museum are carved out of it. Across the street is the beautiful Our Lady of the Grotto shrine, in a carved cave. It’s quite lovely. Photo taken by my aunt Miners continuously carved tunnels and cubicles all throughout Malta, often without shoes or the protective gear we have today. Early in the war, they created them for their families but as the war progressed the Maltese government decreed they must do it for the public, and later, families could dig their own private rooms. Babies were born here; the injured were attended to and operated on in surgical units; others died. How much will does one have to live when you suffer like this? I honestly don’t know. Food supplies got through but it certainly wasn’t easy or always successful. Malta was in no position to defend itself, and the best it could do is survive. They even managed to preserve some of their most precious artworks and valuables in a space little bigger than a Burger King restroom. And of course, they prayed to the Lady who always watched over Malta. In the end, 17,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the country from over 3,300 air raid warnings; 1,500 Maltese citizens died and over 2,000 were injured, which seems remarkable to me as the population was, in 1940, around 250,000-275,000. I would have guessed much higher casualties. Likely many of them came at the beginning of the war. By its end Malta had more than enough underground space for all its remaining citizens and their refugees. Artifacts in Mellieha from the Siege. What would you do? How would I live underground like this? I ask myself, even though, despite the growing hostilities around the world and Canada’s increasingly unstable neighbor to the south, I don’t, at this time, harbor great fears about invasion. But, I can’t rule it out. I wonder how capable any of us are of defending our respective motherlands. Only our refugees have real-world experience with home-made wars. Not to downplay the very real existential threats many of us face now, but it truly puts the price of eggs in perspective when one considers huddling in a tunnel with unwashed neighbors not knowing when you’ll eat again and worrying about your mother who’s developed a concerning nagging cough. Oh, have to go to the bathroom? Push past the elderly and the crying children and use that chamber pot in the alcove over there. The smell. The disease. The infections. The people you know could have been saved if they’d been treated in a proper hospital. The terror of wondering what you did to make the Germans hate you so much. How your Italian neighbors could do this to you. What must it have been like sleeping wherever you could, reminiscing about your old bed now broken in a pile of rubble you used to call home. Wondering what might happen if a land invasion occurred. If the armies found the people huddled in the tunnels, the mothers clutching their pretty daughters and young sons, knowing they might not be able to protect them from becoming some horrid commandant’s mistress or being forced to serve in the Wehrmacht. We have no idea how spoiled we actually are until we’re faced with danger we couldn’t even imagine before. I imagine that if Toronto was bombed or invaded, our Ukrainian refugees could teach us survival tips and best practices. Other subject matter experts are those who escaped the Communists in North Vietnam; or the slaughter of the Tutsis; or the hellholes of Third World Asia and Africa. Today, these Toronto refugees are terrified by the screaming of fighter jets over the city every year for the annual air show, but at least they can be grateful it’s now only once a year. One wonders how would fare the ‘victims’ of elite overproduction Rob Henderson recently wrote about , furious to have been deprived of the good jobs and higher pay they feel entitled to. They need to take a day off when they hear an idea they can’t handle and can’t define what they think when challenged, and these able-bodied kids are our best defense. What would they do when faced with a drone attack? I don’t know I would handle it with any more aplomb, but I would head for my bathtub. Today’s effete elites— all of us, who’ve never experienced a war on our own soil—would have no choice but to take up arms and fight back. Suddenly, a guy who thinks women should marry, submit to a man, and pop out babies, or a woman who claims all men are sexual predators become insanely irrelevant. Europeans in World War II had already lived through another world war preceding this one; perhaps they were used to it all. I think of my aging self crouched in a hole in the ground, my arthritic knees aching to stretch, and wonder just how much fortitude I’d have waiting for the ‘maybe’ of an invading army. What could I do? At 62, I can’t kick anyone’s ass, but I might be able to improve the morale of sobbing teenagers completely unprepared for what’s unquestionably a horrifically challenging future. I’ve been around long enough to see some shit, even if only on the news, so I know how resilient human beings are. So what if we weren’t tempered by a recent world war like the 1940s Europeans? It’s gotta start somewhere, right? I can write. I can fact-check. I can counter mis/disinformation and remind people what they’re really made of. That’s what I like to think I’d do. I hope I never have to 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! 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Today's T&D Day requires more than blame. Let's explore what the Indigenous, Canada's perpetual children, can do for themselves Photo from  the 2014 Barrie (ON) Friendship Center Pow-wow. Photo by Antefixus21  on Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0  license (Since Truth & Reconciliation Day comes one day before this week’s Wednesday publication date, I’m publishing today instead of tomorrow.) One of the best-kept secrets in Canada is that Indigenous bands claim there are 6,000 graves of children in or around former ‘Indian’ residential schools. Yet, so far, and Canadians are surprised to learn this, confirmed by Google, they’ve found Not. One. Single. Body. ‘Deniers’ who snuck onto a former school property  in British Columbia attempting to find some, were stopped by Natives. The incident exemplifies the growing credibility problem for Canada’s First Nations. While we know children died—usually of common diseases in the pre-vaccine era—and are buried near the former schools, band leaders seem strangely incurious about producing some remains, especially in light of some of their more extraordinary claims of savage murders at the schools. You’d think they’d want to possibly prosecute still-living perpetrators, right? Kimberly Murray, an independent special interlocutor for the alleged unmarked graves and burial sites, claimed ‘denialism’ is “the last step in genocide. Denialism is violence. Denialism is calculated. Denialism is harmful. Denialism is hate." Denialism is what happens when you can’t or won’t provide evidence. ‘Genocide’ accusations are nothing more than an attempt to shut down legitimate exploration of these allegations. Hellacious stories of abuse and neglect emerged from the residential schools during the Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s investigations over a decade ago. These horrors were detailed in a massive government report via former student testimony that made it sound like the entire residential school system was the ninth level of hell. For sure, many of these indignities did occur, sometimes and somewhere. Others felt they got a good education from the schools, but the Truth and Reconciliation Commission  weren’t much interested in their stories. The mass graves/residential school hellholes debate defines much of what we think we know about most things Indigenous. In the woke world of progressive politics, one must never challenge anything an Indigenous person claims. Today is Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada, and we’re going to ask some more uncomfortable questions. Let’s reconcile with some real truths, shall we? Last year for T&R Day , Substack writer Fortissax  at Fortissax Is Typing  wrote a lengthy and well-researched treatis e about how violent pre-European North America was. James Pew , meanwhile, over at Woke Watch Canada , had critiqued the national myth that all the residential schools for ‘Indians’ were abusive hellholes and that no student emerged better, or more educated, than when they went in. (Truth is, many went on to lead successful, happy lives.) And I read two books this year: Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools ) and Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation . One truth is that many Canadian reserves are in atrocious condition, with many living in squalor—substandard homes, unclean water, insufficient or ridiculously expensive food (which has to be shipped from other parts of Canada to remote reserves without airports), high domestic violence, sexual abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, and all the other pathologies commonly associated with poverty. If you ask the Indigenous leadership why, they’ll start droning on about white supremacy and racism and stolen land and ‘genocide’ and the ‘horrific’ residential schools and the Indian Act of 1876. If you ask those living in squalor, many will fill your ears with complaints about how the money the Canadian government has given to improve reserve lives doesn’t seem to trickle down into those communities but man, the local leader sure is driving a nice shiny new truck. Canada cares Most Canadians don’t want to see anyone suffering or living in poverty on Canadian soil, and would genuinely love to see First Nations thrive. Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry describes the problems facing Indigenous reserves customarily ignored in what it is still a primarily liberal-leaning country. Those at fault include Indigenous leaders, for whom keeping their people poor results in a rain of federal manna from Ottawa, and their white progressive allies whose job it is to kowtow, bow and scrape, and never, ever, question any Native claim, however outlandish. But the fault at large lies with the mostly non-Indigenous  ‘industry’, primarily lawyers and consultants, who receive obscene amounts of government money defending the Indigenous in court (land claims are THE best way to get rich), with the help of their kind-hearted progressive lapdogs. Conservatives, liberals and moderates who ask whether that money might be better spent improving life quality on the reserves are immediately smacked down as racists, haters and fascists. The reality is most critics, too, want to see Indigenous communities thrive and prosper. A huge obstacle, unfortunately, is the desire of both Indigenous afraid of progress, and Canadians who wish to preserve an antiquated way of life as a sort of living museum rather than help the people adapt and assimilate into our multicultural society. Any suggestion that the Indigenous need to modernize or assimilate is met with hostile accusations of ‘cultural genocide’. But as the Fraser Institute notes , “Extensive research on both sides of the 49th parallel shows that the American tribes and Canadian First Nations who achieve a higher standard of living do so by getting involved in the marketplace and generating income for themselves— ‘own-source revenue’ in the vocabulary of Indigenous affairs.” Because Canada has, at one time or another, attempted to 'rub out the Indian’ in Natives, and engaged in genuine cultural erasure, ‘cultural genocide’ has become the emotional rather than logical response. It’s not true anymore, and it’s detrimental to Indigenous self-determination to not explore how they can do both—preserve their culture while evolving with the new one, just like all of us have done. We  don’t live like we did even twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, and we don’t want to. Disrobing argues that First Nations need modern education and to give up cultural elements which don’t work for them anymore. First Nations, just like us, already don’t live like their ancestors. Very few reserves, if any, bear no  stamp of the White Man’s Modernism. Even their substandard pre-fab housing is an improvement over the homes of their ancestors. The Inuit at the Arctic Circle don’t feed themselves with hunting and fishing the way their ancestors did. They rely on the White Man’s Groceries flown in, which is why their food prices make current American groceries look like bargains. The rest of the world has moved on and modernized. None of us make our own butter or dip our own candles like our ancestors. We embrace childhood vaccines, unless our parents belong to weird religious groups or listen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Our libraries are in our pockets. And we sure as hell don’t rely only on TV for our news and entertainment anymore. Modernization is how the Indigenous can thrive, which those who’ve embraced it can attest to. Thousands of immigrants from other lands join Canada every year and know they’re expected to assimilate while preserving their cultures however they want. They see the benefits of taking a job in technology, or medicine, or starting their own business, which they might not be able to do back home. They still celebrate Diwali, wear a hijab to work, take the Jewish holidays off, eat what they like. No one is stopping Canada’s Indigenous from doing the same. There’s no sound, rational reason why they can’t live in the modern world, whether by living self-sustainably on reserves without depending on regular government handouts like children , or modernize. No one is stopping them, but they can’t expect Canadians to support them in perpetuity. Disrobing asks the huge question that too many Canadians won’t, at risk of accusations of being a ‘genocidist’. What can Indigenous Canadians do to help themselves? Marginalized groups too often contribute to their own suffering by refusing to release cultural elements that no longer serve them, or question anything they believe about themselves . It’s time to speak freely about what Indigenous Canadians can do: Time to close the museum Disrobing examines this at length. First Nations’ ancestors were still at the level of subsistence living when the European conquerors appeared, more technologically advanced, healthier and stronger. The Natives never stood a chance. Subsistence living has been much romanticized by many generations of freethinkers, hippies, back-to-earthers, and environmentalists. The plain fact is that native North Americans lived shorter and exceedingly violent lives pre-European, exacerbated by ‘kinship’, another ancient tradition they need to bury. It meant higher levels of violence, since if you weren’t related to someone else, a Best Practice was to kill them before they killed you. Today, we live in societies in which we may not even know our neighbors but we don’t suspect them of evil intent, so we  don’t plan murders either. If ‘land acknowledgements’ were honest, every single band and tribe in North America would offer their own, acknowledging whose land theirs belonged to before they stole it. Genuine subsistence living also results in death and suffering from preventable diseases, childhood deaths, and poor dental health. Indigenous leaders must account for government money The First Nations Financial Transparency Act (FNFTA) was passed in 2013 by Parliament to require financial accountability for First Nations band leaders and chiefs after media stories detailed their very nice salaries while their people languished on reserves. Needless to say, this act wasn’t popular with the leaders who argued it was ‘discriminatory’ and ‘unconstitutional’. Justin Trudeau, who never met a special interest group whose asses he wouldn’t kiss, refused to enforce it. Own their non-conquest-related problems The only one of Indigenous problems that originated with the White Man was alcoholism. Already present was the universal culture of patriarchal entitlement to women’s and childrens’ bodies. Unsurprisingly, rape and child rape have always been a part of the universal tradition where men with too much power, to be blunt, fuck women and children without their consent. As detailed by the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley and others, traditional male violence is universal. Rape, sexual abuse of children, women as spoils, spousal abuse—they were as omnipresent in Indigenous communities then as they are today. Disrobing  delves heavily into the sexual abuse and coverups on reserves, identical to off-reserve communities anywhere else. They’re enabled, of course, by their witlessly progressive patriarchal allies who never demand sexual accountability  from any other than white men. Violence and domestic abuse are on the Indigenous, not the White Man. They need to stop blaming us and ‘do the work’. Traditional ‘medicine’ is pseudoscience Not a single one of Native ‘traditional medicines’ will cure cancer or relieve or slow the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease. Instead of embracing modern medical treatments that work, too many First Nations promote long-outdated ‘medicine’ treatments hoping to receive more monetary compensation (of course) for ‘intellectual property rights’ via the uncritical academic institutional support it gets for ‘ethnobotanical’ research. It’s just one of many traditional values that hold them back. Native ‘medicine’ was all their distant ancestors had; today’s aboriginals have a choice, which is to live long or die young, depending on how badly they want to emulate their ancestors. This is another waste of Native time and taxpayers’ money which does nothing to improve their lives. Restore Western education The biggest truth today’s Canadian Natives must acknowledge is that they are, in essence, Canada’s loser kids stuck perpetually in the basement constantly asking for handouts but frittering it away on land claims and other wastes of money that don’t serve them, along with an unwillingness to modernize. Non-native Canadians acknowledge that many gross injustices have been committed against their ancestors but, like nonsensical ‘slave reparation’ arguments, it was a long time ago and no different from how they treated each other pre-European. Perhaps the first step, now that we’ve got a new Prime Minister, is to start enforcing the FNFTA Act. Forcing financial accountability at the top would be a huge first step in evolving the too-prevalent dependency mindset of Canada’s perpetual children. It’s 2025, not 1625. On Truth & Reconcilation Day, Canada’s Indigenous can commit themselves to becoming self-sustaining adults. It’s time to grow up, and move out of their parents’ house. 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!

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

No, he didn't, and they're not even saying it on social media because I just made it up. But for even just a nanosecond, did you believe it? Graphic generated by Poe Image_Creators Until September 10th, all I knew about Charlie Kirk was enough to exclaim the sum total of all I knew about Charlie Kirk: “The right-wing guy?” I knew his name, but nothing about him. Immediately, my social media feeds exploded with gratitude and rage against the ‘Nazi, fascist, racist, misogynist, Satan’s fluffer’ guy. On the right, it was all outrage. So, that at least confirmed Kirk was right-wing. How much, I didn’t yet know. Now that I do, I’m pissing everyone off by denying he was absolutely, positively, no-holds-barred, the worst fascist Trump-cozying Nazi puppy-eating Kamala Harris-abusing asshat in this particular multiverse. My Substack inbox vomited Charlie Kirk headlines. I’m as sick of hearing about him as you, but, what’s one more brilliant or dumbass opinion? Charlie Kirk was a complex individual just like ourselves with whom many of us strongly disagreed,—who also don’t deserve to be murdered for beliefs others find offensive. I find it interesting that so many who disavow much of what Kirk stood for, are still defending his right to exist. One of my favorite Real Liberals™, Helen Pluckrose , even wrote a firm and brilliantly liberal denunciation of killing people whose free speech one doesn’t like. To be fair, Kirk’s critics can point to things he’s said (and have been fact-checked by Snopes) to bolster their arguments that he was often out of step with a fair chunk of America. Or just flat-out wrong, like linking the rise of transgenderism to inflation. The smirkiest I will get about his unforgivable assassination is to note that yes, Chuckles said a few gun deaths were worth the ‘small’ price to pay for the Grand 2A. ‘Collateral damage’ as Timothy McVeigh might put it. I’m sure Kirk would agree. Especially since he already approved of assassinating one’s political enemies. Wonder if he’d make the same plea for Tyler Robinson? There’s plenty to loathe him for and you’ve probably already seen his Top 100 horrendous hits on social media. But…. Where did you agree with Charlie Kirk? Kirk described his parents as ‘moderate Republicans’, which isn’t exactly seig heil territory, regardless of what your college-age niece tells you. He was raised Presbyterian, was a Boy Scout and an Eagle Scout. He rejected university to form Turning Point USA to fight what he felt were the excesses of woke progressivism. This so-called dog poo on your Birkenstocks was pretty sympatico on free speech with myself and many others on both sides of the divide. He said, and he was right, [ellipses not mine]: “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens. Because you start to think the other side is so evil and that they lose their humanity. Marriages break apart when you stop talking, churches fall apart. … And I think what makes this country on the verge of going to a place we don’t want it to go right now, is we’re afraid to go to places like this and have these conversations.” Nailed it! "My wish for the left is that you’ll become liberal again and no longer leftist. Free speech is a liberal value. It is not a left-wing value. …as of today, Lucy Connelly is going to jail for two and a half years in this country [Britain] for a social media post that she apologized and deleted about a migrant hotel. That is not a free speech value at all. You should be allowed to say outrageous things. You should be allowed to say contrarian things. Free speech is a birthright that you gave us and you guys decided not to codify it and now it's poof, it's basically gone." Fuckin’ A, man. Speaking as someone who’s been liberal for longer than Kirk was allowed to be alive, I can tell you that this is what almost all of us libs thought thirty, forty years ago. I was there, man. My free speech views were tempered and forged by atheists and freethinkers I encountered in the early years of online, back when communication all happened in text. No video, no photo images, no downloading anything unless you were lucky enough to be attached to, I don’t know, Microsoft’s server farm. Hold up bad ideas to the light, they said. Let’s examine them. Let’s see what works better. The Constitution does a good job of delineating what shouldn’t be legal. You have to prove what you claim. And you can’t threaten to kill the President, even if he’s an asshole. ‘Hate speech’ was so strictly defined you practically had to be a card-carrying Nazi and David Duke’s BFF to get arrested. If you want to know what un-reined woke progressivism looks like, just cast your eyes east across the Big Drink. You can get arrested for shit even our crazy-ass wokies here in North America can’t pull off (yet). The U.K. is now one of the worst places to be if you have an opinion. At all. You can literally be arrested for talking shit to your friend in a pub that offends someone who overheard you. Maybe it’s safer to go tip a pint in someone’s woodshed. Chuckles the Klaüen and I wouldn’t agree on most everything besides free speech. But a self-defined ‘liberal’ (his word) on free speech at least wasn’t the cardboard Nazi monster your TDS-addled sister-in-law with the nose ring and five divorces behind her tells you. I couldn’t stand Kirk’s hero Rush Limbaugh, but when a liberal acquaintance emailed me many years ago crowing that he was losing his hearing , and isn’t it ironic that he can no longer hear when he refuses to listen to others, I told him I was sorry to hear that because it’s tragic, even for Rush Limbaugh. We love our schadenfreude; wanting to find virtue in the misfortunes of our enemies while damning them when they find the same in ours. The Great Debater. Not. Politico, left-center-biased but highly factual , analyzes Kirk’s influence by observing that his real superpower was “intuiting — and deftly exploiting — the institutional hollowness of the Republican Party under Trump.” He also, they claimed, filled the gaping holes in the campus environment opened up by dogmatic academia. I agree with Charlie Kirk very much that so-called liberals have abandoned free speech. I have to laugh watching him take on dumbass college students who can’t define or defend whatever they just called him. Not that he was a great debater himself. In addition to some of his more illogical comments, he ‘manterrupted’ and often wasn’t interested in actually hearing anyone out, or helping these poorly-educated college students currently bankrupting their future by pointing out the flaws in their logic. But, don’t take on a dude like this if you’re incapable of original thought because he could think on his feet, while most of his biggest critics, I’m pretty sure, can’t even locate their own feet. Love him or hate him, he knew which way the wind was blowing without raising a moistened finger. He embraced social media and podcasting early on. According to Politico, he turned from “Tea Party-era libertarianism in favor of a Trump-inflected populist nationalism.” Apparently with more time on his hands during the pandemic, he embraced conservative Christianity which undoubtedly increased his influence more with the Jesus set. (I do wonder if he became more radical for the likes and Instagram glory rather than evolving personal principles.) I’m not the only liberal who doesn’t believe Charlie Kirk straps kittens to rockets and sends them into space just because some idiot on a newsletter platform suggested it. California governor Gavin Newsom took real grief from the left for being congenial, if not necessarily BFFs, with Charlie Kirk. One point of agreement between them: They both believe transgender women in sports is unfair. Who has the right to play God? I wonder if the shooter consulted anyone else’s opinion on Charlie Kirk before he took it upon himself to decide who lives and dies. Like, maybe, Kirk’s children. I wonder how evil they thought Father was. Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s self-appointed judge, didn’t know what his target would be like ten, twenty, thirty years from now. Maybe Kirk wouldn’t have changed much. Maybe he’d be worse. Or maybe he’d have softened his extremist views with the wisdom of greater experience, like Malcolm X did toward the end. We don’t know. And neither does Kirk, because he got cut down by someone who had no right to make that decision for him. Those who believe it’s okay to murder another human being because they don’t like their political views legitimate those who might want to eliminate them for theirs. Soon you won’t even need to be famous for eligibility. I’m speaking to everyone who defended any assassination by perfunctorily condemning it while adding that hypocritical ‘but’. There are no ‘buts’. It’s either wrong or it’s not. It’s either open season on everyone or not. Laws are for all of us, or none of us. Anarchy now? Or do you want to see your children grow up? Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

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

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

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

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

But what if those questions could set them free? What if it led to greater freedom, happiness, more trustworthy friends and--increased status? Pixabay public domain image I didn’t want to be one of those right-wing bigots , of course. It was my last days of blogging on Medium in late 2021, slowly becoming aware of the toxic transactivism that had consumed the liberal mind while I challenged wussy feminism. I was arguing with a popular uber-feminist writer, more learned about the history and philosophy of feminism than I. She said my remarks about transwomen were harmful to a vulnerable, marginalized population when I voiced obvious questions, and I felt guilty; maybe she and the trans-allies were right? She said they needed our compassion, not our judgement. A few times, I acknowledged that transwomen were women, uncomfortably. I wanted to agree with her, but my knowledge of basic biology precluded it. I said to her: I'm also disappointed in your frankly bigoted approach to J K Rowling, who has been quite supportive of the trans community if you're not an entitled dude in a dress (I don't know if she sees them that way, but I see some of them that way). Maybe we should just start labeling the indisputable facts? People with XX chromosomes menstruate and carry babies; people with XY chromosomes don't. We can accept transgenders for what and who they are but please, don't gaslight us about who can menstruate and who will never carry a baby in their belly, until transgender surgery/treatment gets a helluva lot more sophisticated. “Where’s your compassion?” she asked. “Where’s your common sense?” I countered. How could a highly educated, grown-ass woman assert that transwomen were no different from women? She fancied herself a feminist expert! How could she not see the classic abusive male personalities that simmered beneath transactivist Etsy-sourced frillies? I asked all the glaringly obvious questions she wouldn’t. Five days later, my account was suspended. I didn’t petition to get it back. I was already used to the pointlessness of trying to reason with Medium’s woke unreasonables. I still wonder whether my former feminist foe actually believed her own B.S. Not all Believers are as True as they pretend. They know deep down what they profess is wrong-headed, or maybe even downright harmful to others. But preserving positive self-regard offers less psychic pain than a personal integrity unpopular with the maddened crowd, and so they persist, pursuing their personal poison the way alcoholics and drug addicts obsessively seek that which makes them feel worse rather than better. This article focuses on the cognitive dissonance that tortures the human spirit arising from beliefs and narratives one professes, but which one knows on a deeper level to be untrue, when one’s actions don’t align with them. When intelligence and education isn’t enough For woke progressives and liberals, part of our narrative is that we’re good, empathetic people who don’t want anyone to feel the pain of exclusion, which many of us have felt at one time or another, or perhaps throughout our lives. When everyone else professes X and agrees that’s the correct belief to be a good person, the crowd is always right, right? But I’m addicted to reality. I’ve never been very good at not challenging those who deny what I know to be factual. I try to keep an open mind, but not so much my brains fall out. I knew it was wrong from the get-go to claim that transwomen are the same as women because they claim that’s how they feel. The more I explored trans issues, and encountered transactivists, I realized not only weren’t they ‘the same as biological women,’ but they were about as male and misogynist as the guys I wrote women should avoid on Grow Some Labia. The reality-denying Medium feminist didn’t understand that compassion and inclusion can quickly turn into complicity and cruelty. Where was her compassion for women who felt uncomfortable sharing private spaces with the be-penised? Or for female athletes who had to compete against hulking men like Will Thomas? Or lesbians accused of ‘genital fetishism’ by transwomen with a penis? She may not have known about the growing awareness of medical harms potentially visited on ‘trans’ children, or the sudden spike in trans people coinciding with the rise of gender-questioning content on social media, and the creeping influence of queer theory public education. Maybe she didn’t know about Tumblr’s role as a queer factory for gender-morphing labels, pronouns and ‘microaggressions’ pulled out of thin air to be weaponized against people who didn’t adhere to queer mythology. Maybe she didn’t have friends with teenage kids coming home with weird ideas about whether they were actually the immutable sex they were born with. She would have, though, if she’d asked those glaringly obvious questions, and Googled. On some level, she feared what it would mean about her, her values, the hills she’d died on, the public stands she’d taken, and the testament to her intelligence. Who wants to admit they were gaslit, the ‘expert’ who could cite endless highly-regarded sources in support of feminist theory but somehow missed the angry Twitter invitations to ‘suck my ladydick’? Who frequently dissected ‘the Patriarchy’ but missed the ‘cotton ceiling’ whiners , formerly the entitled heterosexual men of our youth accusing women now of being lesbians if they wouldn’t have sex with them? ‘Trans-allies’ are in for several years of high-level, self-inflicted psychic torture, beginning with the death of sex changes for children. The Trump administration’s HHS has issued a ‘best practices’ report for treating confused ‘trans’ children beginning with therapy first. According to Jay Battarcharya, the National Institutes of Health Director, “We must follow the gold standard of science, not activist agendas.” ‘Gender-affirming care’ is shaping up to be one mother of a medical scandal. Not only will woke progressives increasingly face a hostile mob of ‘normies’ turning accusing fingers, demanding to know how they could let his happen, but also the realization that the Trumpoids were right and they themselves were grievously wrong. They thought the science was settled. They trusted progressive media outlets that turned out to be deeply incurious. They didn’t question, and explore for themselves. They didn’t wonder how a respected periodical like Scientific American could issue a mind-bogglingly brainless article like Stop Using Phony Science To Justify Transphobia, or wonder about the credentials of the author, a dude named ‘Simón(e) D Sun’? Scientific American, like other science periodicals, used to believe in evidence. But now, belief is the evidence. Progressive ideologues eliminated inconvenient science, just like their compatriots on t’other side, the fundamentalist Christians. A social psychologist and the UFO cult Dr. Leon Festinger was an important figure in social psychology who infiltrated a doomsday cult which believed a UFO was going to pick them up and save them from a forthcoming apocalypse. He developed the theory of cognitive dissonance after infiltrating the cult to study the members’ actions, behaviours, and thoughts once the expected continent-destroying flood failed to materialize. He examined the psychological distress they felt and how they coped when reality didn’t align with their expectations. Many refused to acknowledge they’d been wrong and rationalized away what went pear-shaped, instead spreading their message and seeking more Believers, each new recruit vindicating them. Their founder helped them rationalize away their pain and disappointment, by relaying the aliens’ convenient new message that their faith had saved the world and therefore, given humanity a second chance. Others, less committed, left the group egg-faced. Monty Python nails the cult mentality in 1979’s The Secret Policeman’s Ball To achieve cognitive consistency, the opposite of cognitive dissonance, one must rationalize the contradictions away, or change one’s mind. In other words, be willing to acknowledge new data has invalidated the old. Rationalizing is easier than thinking things through. “The experts say that if trans kids aren’t allowed to transition they’ll commit suicide. But why didn’t any do that when I was growing up?” The Pain of Asking — and the Greater Pain of Not Asking A far healthier way to achieve cognitive consistency is through learning a very simple but difficult life lesson: Knowing when to acknowledge one is wrong. The sooner the better. It’s extremely hard on the ego to admit you’ve been misled, or simply haven’t done enough research, but the longer you wait to admit what shames you, the worse your future. Being ‘wrong’ is often just a matter of believing what you do with the best available evidence , until more comes along that contradicts, disproves or simply changes the story. You weren’t wrong before; now you’re demonstrating intellectual honesty thanks to newer or better data. This is the whole foundation of scientific inquiry. The Trump years will be sheer hell for ‘trans-friendly’ progressives. They’ve denied the evidence, refused to ask the glaringly obvious questions, kept themselves as insulated as possible, and blithely dismissed facts as ‘right-wing propaganda’. They’ve rationalized their critics were vile TERFs, carefully sealing their ears, eyes and minds. Many, like Dr. Festinger’s Seekers, will cling to their original beliefs, because it’s awfully late in the game to pretend they didn’t know. The consequences of admitting error are high. Achieving cognitive consistency relieves irritating moral hypocrisy, but introduces the new threat of ostracism by unenlightened friends and family, because if Cousin Martha confesses she thinks she was now wrong about something, by extenuation she damns them all. What awaits the Questioners on the other side? The upside for Cousin Martha, if she chooses honest cognitive consistency, is immense psychological relief. Especially if she can avoid talking about it. One way she can re-reconcile her vision of herself as a Good Person is to work with the group she feel she’s harmed. If her intellectual mistake was to support gender-affirming care, she could help detransitioners facing angry backlash from transactivists for publicly admitting they made the wrong decision and now want out. Martha’s experience with her former community would be invaluable for smoothing the detransition backtrack. She’d bring compassion to her new community who tragically bought into a pseudo-scientific narrative detrimental to their health, their mental well-being and their ego. If Martha is brave, she could publicly speak about her personal journey. She could explore why she chose to believe what she did and why she no longer supports it. If she doesn’t want to do it publicly—with good reason—she can do it anonymously on a Substack or an X account. She’ll receive negative feedback, criticism, and outright flaming, but she’ll be safe from personal or professional ruin. Learn how to admit your errors and correct your mistakes. Recognize that changing your mind in light of new evidence makes you honest, not a ‘flip-flopper’. Few actually realize the power —and the optics —in being strong enough to admit and correct mistakes, especially publicly. We all understand that children blame others and everything else rather than accept responsibility. People who act like what we believe adults to be are the obvious adults in the room. And we admire their courage and integrity. There’s increased status to be found in changing your tribe from the fact-fearing to the Questioners. Achieving cognitive consistency starts with asking those glaringly obvious questions. Realigning one’s sense of self with reality may lose some friends and family, but there’s a whole other community of the intellectually and morally responsible waiting for them. Maybe the solution to losing former friends is finding wiser, truer ones. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!