Missing pets. Missing women. Missing children. When mass murder is alleged, our first question should be: Where are the remains? I can’t identify whether, culturally, Haitians can or have eaten dogs and cats—in Haiti anyway. Some cultures do chow down on chows! Like the Chinese. Even First Nations in Canada have eaten dogs—the Canadian author and Ojibwe playwright Drew Hayden Taylor has written about it . The early Jamestown settlers in Virginia ate dogs, too. In fact only they and the Native North Americans, as far as I know, ever did it here. I have yet to find any documented evidence that immigrants, or descendants of immigrants, or any remaining colonists today eat pets in North America. Apart from a woman in Canton, Ohio, who was recently arrested for allegedly killing and eating a cat in front of others. But she wasn’t Haitian; she was American-born. She did however seem mentally disturbed. I can’t promise pet-eating absolutely, never happens here—especially if it involves someone with mental illness. Or who was literally starving. Or who was a serial killer, with a penchant for animal cruelty. But so far, zero evidence indicates immigrants—including Asians and Haitians—in ‘Murica are killing and eating people’s pets. I don’t care how many Ohioans claim otherwise on Eyewitness News. Because there’s something that really bothers me. Where are the animal remains? Springfield, Ohio should be littered with cat and dog skeletons by now if LieBoy and his couch-humping running mate can be believed. Has anyone checked the dumpsters? Looked for small, shallow graves? Has anyone’s dog brought inside half a hastily-buried cat it dug up somewhere? Whether it’s cats, dogs, or humans, when mass murder is alleged, there have got to be remains somewhere. The evidence can exist for millennia. Look, we know the world’s oldest murder victim was over 400,000 years ago and Otzi Man was murdered 5,000 years ago. I investigated three (in)famous mass murderers, accused of crimes so hideous they’ve been enshrined in the annals of true-crime history, which isn’t always as true as purported. I’ll keep the gory details to a minimum. Google them if you need nightmare material. And also, now, in Canada, we’ve got our own mass mystery—the Hundreds of Buried Indigenous Children Who May Not Be. But first let’s visit some of history’s most notorious alleged sadistic killers. Gilles de Rais A French knight and lord and Joan of Arc’s companion-in-arms, De Rais was accused of torturing, molesting and murdering over 140 children, crimes he ‘confessed’ to under torture. The allegations were as horrendous as a fevered ecclesiastical imagination could, er, ‘coax’ out of him. Countess Elizabeth Báthory The Hungarian 16th-century countess was accused, with four of her servants, of hideously torturing, mutilating and murdering 600-650 women spanning two decades. Over 300 people at her trial described alleged physical evidence and claimed to have seen her horrifically mutilated and dying victims. Many testimonies, like in de Rais’s case, were obtained under torture. Madame Delphine LaLaurie The wealthy New Orleans slave owner allegedly got busted having performed Josef Mengele-style grisly medical experiments on her slaves, many of whom were allegedly found dead and several of whom were still alive, after a fire broke out in her mansion in 1834. The details of her alleged crimes are pretty hideous. I began wondering if these horrendous stories were really true one night and Googled to find mention of remains. Where were de Rais’s 140 children? Where were Countess Bathory’s ex-playthings? Where was Madame LaLaurie’s Crab Girl? When you start asking the hard questions, you find there’s not a lot of there there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein. Let’s start with Madame LaLaurie. Historians claim rumors about her extreme slave brutality had swirled around N’Awlins for years, but there are no recorded complaints or reports from the time. She was allegedly torturing and murdering her slaves above and beyond the call of slave-owning duty in nineteenth-century New Orleans, but the townspeople never noticed the stench of rotting bodies of the dead within, in that chronic heat? Madame LaLaurie’s cruelties may have been real and sadly legal, but it’s unclear as to whether she was more brutal than customary. The tales of her alleged experiments, involving rent flesh and broken bones, grew more explicit in the decades and centuries after her death. To be fair, whatever Madame’s neighbors found definitely shocked even them. The firefighters were so incensed, Madame LaLaurie barely escaped with her life from an enraged mob, and is believed to have died in France. So there may be some truth to the allegations of an excessively cruel slave mistress, but not of her alleged experiments. I can’t find any modern-verified reports of her many alleged victims, including a slave girl who supposedly jumped to her death from the roof of the mansion when her mistress chased her across it to beat her with the brush. Or maybe it was a whip. No one seems quite sure. In particular, I’d like to know where Crab Girl is allegedly buried, as the damage done to her bones would confirm there was more going on than discipline. Countess Báthory’s gory adventures also lack any evidence. Servants claimed in court they’d helped to bury victims but no one, to my knowledge, has found their graves. She was accused of horribly mutilating and murdering hundreds of women purely for sadistic pleasure. Where are they? None have been found in the castle as alleged. None in the church graveyards around the region. And who today can believe torture’s testimony? The evidence at Bathory’s trial was all hearsay with no actual proof. And not a single corpse. The allegations grew more lurid over the years, like a bit about her vampirically bathing in the blood of virgins, considered by modern historians to be B.S. Why would her contemporaries lie about the horrible things they claimed to have witnessed? Would they have said them if they weren’t being tortured? Speaking of politics, greed, and testimony obtained under torture, Gille de Rais’s considerable land and wealth was conveniently seized by greedy nobles. A mock trial of his alleged hideous crimes against children was held in France in 1992 and he was judged most likely innocent of these gravest of crimes. Not a single child’s body has ever been found buried around or near what’s left of his castle to support his alleged murder of many dozens of children. So pardon me if I doubt the word of hysterics in Springfield, Ohio and elsewhere we see on YouTube alleging witnessed pet-napping followed by din-din, with yet no proof apart from hearsay and highly questionable videos on social media. People say a lot of stuff. Even when they’re not being tortured. Why are alleged journalists giving screen time to their ridiculous allegations rather than asking where the bones are buried? Bodies, folks. I’m looking for bodies. Skeletons. Graves. Something we can point to and say, “Yes, this poor creature was tortured in the manner alleged of Mme. LaLaurie or this sick French bastard.” Or that Queenie wound up in the stew pot. Which is why I’m skeptical of all those accounts of cats and dogs killed and eaten by immigrants. It’s a recycled century-and-a-half-old urban legend about Asians, who allegedly sometimes substitute cat or dog meat for chicken in their restaurants. The instances of the native-born alleging horrible pet-related crimes by immigrants are levied at every single last damn group, including Europeans. Immigrant anxiety causes adults to say the darndest things. There’s not a single documented incident of an Asian restaurant serving cat or dog to North Americans. Look, consult Snopes! And if you’ve got real proof of one, email Snopes! It all smells heavily of yet another Satanic-style moral panic. The rule of evidence requires that those making a positive claim, “So-and-so murdered a kid,” or “My neighbor killed and ate a cat,” provide the evidence. Like, say, an actual murdered cat, as in the recent case in Canton, in which they have the remains along with the crazy lady in custody. The conspiracy theorist who alleges pets are disappearing all over a small community needs to produce at least a few skeletons. Meanwhile, up here in Canada… The ‘missing’ and ‘buried’ Indigenous kids We’ve got our own Canadian missing-corpses scandal unfolding over the previous scandal that no longer seems to have happened. Some brief backstory. Canada, like the United States, wasn’t exactly kind to the original owners of the land. One very real thing that happened was the effort to ‘civilize’ the ‘Indians’, by forcing Indigenous children into residential schools for ‘proper’ white education. It was a joint effort by the government and Christian groups, and were, like anywhere else this ‘experiment’ was proffered, an abusive, traumatic failure for the victims. Children were isolated, prohibited from speaking their own languages, their heritages denigrated, and suffered physical and sexual abuse, etc. These schools operated for about a century. In recent years, Native bands claimed mass ‘genocidal’ graves of children’s bodies were found near residential schools, most recently in Kamloops, British Columbia. Scandal ensued. Canadians, who care about, or at least pretend to care about, the victims living and dead of this black mark on our history, wrung their hands and demanded investigations. Which was a good idea, except the Indigenous alleging the crimes of murdered or abused-to-death children hastily buried in a plot of earth somewhere keep getting in the way. A Kamloops Native chief alleges 215 ‘missing’ Indigenous children have been found buried in a field near a former residential school. This is only the most recent of other allegations of mass graves. The ‘evidence’? Ground-penetrating radar (GPR), which surveys sub-surface ground for investigating underground utilities items like pipes, masonry, metals, cables, etc. It can also show that soil has been turned up, dug into, and replaced. One can’t know what’s actually there without investigation, which hasn’t been done on the Kamloops site because the local bands won’t allow it. You’d think they’d be eager to damn existing Canadians with clear evidence that these alleged children were missing and murdered or simply allowed to die. But when some ‘denialists’ tried to excavate it to see if there really were remains, band members stopped them. Okay, these people were trespassing; but why doesn’t the band allow any further excavation? By anyone? Long story short, a 2023 book called Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools) reveals that there’s no evidence for the ‘genocide’ of residential Indigenous children. The particularly damning piece of it is, once again, no actual bodies. It’s fed a narrative preferred by some that Canada is hideously racist and genocidal against Natives. Canada certainly does have a documented racist history and has treated Natives quite poorly but—embarrassingly, for many Native bands, the charges of child genocide at residential schools are shaping up to be a massive hoax. To cadge an idea from the new Matt Walsh mockumentary Am I Racist?, the demand for anti-Indigenous racism greatly exceeds the supply in Canada. Nothing new under the sun Mass MAGA hysteria may be suspected in the wake of Trump’s and Vance’s unverified lies, and of course they, too, have motivation: They want to win an election, and Trump is already a documented chronic, uncontrollable liar. As many critics point out when one is trying to suss out motivations, ‘Follow the money’. Who stands to benefit from this, and why? Pet-eating is just another Republican Pizzagate. If there really are bodies of Indigenous children scattered around Canadian land, let the band who ‘found’ them produce some remains. Otherwise, this is beginning to look an awful lot like the historical elites smeared by rumors, with not much else required for a conviction. But anyway who cares, because the Trump/Vance team is soooo over Lassieburgers and Lasagna à la Garfield. ‘JEZEBEL’ HARRIS PRACTICES WITCHCRAFT!!! , don’tcha know??? Up next on Fox News! 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 podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Wokeness is a collection of elitist, culturally relativist luxury beliefs for the class-privileged. Can it be rehabilitated? Or should we just 'burn it all down'? Wokeness: It used to be a good liberal ideal. The term originates in the 1920s, when black separatist Marcus Garvey exhorted Ethiopia and Africa to “Wake up!”, calling on greater social and political consciousness among blacks globally. ‘Stay woke’, the call to action among activists and virtue-signallers today, was popularized in a 1938 blues song by Lead Belly about the nine Scottsboro Boys accused of raping two white women. At the end he encouraged others to ‘stay woke’. Lead Belly meant it specifically as a caution to black Americans to be wary of racially motivated threats and danger. Other social and literary references later utilized the term, but it didn’t catch on with multicolored America until the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri riots. ‘Stay woke’ has a long and honorable history of genuine social justice on the left, popularized by Black Lives Matter after the police killing of Michael Brown. Woke: The MAGAS of the left Wokeness, once a marker of progressivism, isn’t recognizably progressive anymore. Progressivism is about genuine progress, and since 2014 those who primarily describe themselves as ‘woke’ have deteriorated into an ugly reactionary left-wing parody of the right’s counterpart extremism, Make America Great Again. Ironically, wokies are themselves also trying to Make America Great Again, as they attempt to mold or force America into their own image of what they think the country should be. And also ironically, they, like their MAGA parallels, believe the best thing to do to the country is to ‘burn it down’ and start over. “Yes, we do really want to burn it all down,” an anonymous Trump official told Rolling Stone magazine recently. “Of course we aren’t fucking bluffing.” Meanwhile, on t’other side, a New York Times/Sienna Research survey recently revealed that when asked about the need and extent of reforming the country, fourteen percent of American left-leaning self-described radicals agreed that “the system needs to be torn down entirely.” Surprisingly, the most radical came not from the traditional 18-29 age group, but from Millennials, those mostly unmarried codgers in the 30-44 group. Twenty-one percent claimed they were voting neither for Trump nor Biden (the findings, reported in the National Review, predated the Harris coup d’état ). As my ex-coworker in a Connecticut computer firm used to say, “FDISK and reboot!” referring to the process in the Olden Days to wipe a hard drive clean and reinstall everything when it’s beyond repair. Literally burning or tearing down the entire country is pretty extreme no matter which side you’re on. Social and political movements inevitably devolve toward extremism if radicals are left unchecked and unchallenged, which happened on the right when Donald Trump began demanding to see Senator Obama’s birth certificate. It happened on the left when social justice’s zeal to fight injustice embraced the very systemic wrongs it claimed to fight. What went wrong with wokeness? No good idea or practice remains so without limits. Liberalism’s laudable commitment to inclusion and tolerance brought us civil rights for women, minorities, children and even animals, but instead of recognizing that all proper values can go overboard, it didn’t stop to ask, “Is it possible to be too tolerant? Too inclusive?” An early example of how the faction that would one day be labeled the Regressive Left and today, the woke, had commenced down the extremism path, followed the response to radical Islam in the days, weeks and months after 9/11. As soon as it became known that nineteen Muslims backed by Osama bin Laden pulled it off, the radical right happily launched a nationwide crusade against America’s Muslims. Like 9/11, it too wasn’t coordinated, but rather a series of Al Qaeda-style ‘lone wolf’ attacks. We liberals watched in horror as right-wing nutbags targeted anyone wearing a turban or a hijab for harassment or violence. The Regressive Left responded in a manner not unlike their right-wing adversaries. Just as the right tarred all Muslims as evil, the Regressive Left turned them all into victims above reproach. It became verboten to criticize Islam at all, to ask questions about why there was so much violence everywhere in the Middle East, and whether the Islamic world itself bore some responsibility for the murder of not just 3,000 Americans but the countless victims of terrorist violence, within as well as outside of Islam. Conservative ditz-bomb Anne Coulter quite rightly complained that the American left was blaming America first and withholding accountability from a demonstrably violent religion and part of the world. We see that mindless support and deification of ‘victimhood’ in today’s college student protesters, who now mindlessly support Islamofascism exemplified by the filthy, genocidal Hamas cult. Wokeness is no longer a proud label. Woke is racist The woke fancy themselves anti-racist, and at one time they were—until their hatred for ‘oppression’ metastasized into hatred against all white people just as the right’s hatred for Islam did after 9/11. Black Lives Matter began with the best of intentions, but found itself with egg on its face years later when research revealed only a few dozen black men were killed by police every year, at least some in the process of committing crimes, rather than the hundreds or thousands estimated by themselves and other Americans. Later, scandals erupted around how BLM was spending its money—not on social justice efforts like reforming a highly problematic national police force, but on the leaders themselves. The nadir of BLM’s personal admission that they stood as much for social justice as the American Nazi Party came within days of October 7. Can Social Justice Be Rehabilitated? On The Eternal Whiteness Of Being ‘Woke Racism’: John McWhorter’s Take On What’s Wrong With Antiracism White People Who Hate White People Are Racist Then there’s wokeness’s permeation of DEI initiatives as a way to ‘fix’ racism, but which has since become an outlet for grossly overpaid, mostly angry black women to vent their personal frustrations and lack of talent on white people and now, their new fave scapegoats, the Jews. A Man’s Suicide Started With A DEI Consultant’s ‘Antiracism’ Workshop What If New Hires Had To Take A ‘Snowflake Test’ To Get The Job? Liberals & Conservatives Are Making For Strange Bedfellows In Massachusetts ‘Don’t Call Me Karen’ Doesn’t Go Over Well At Uber Woke is anti-feminist ‘Luxury feminism’ is a term first coined by Ayaan Hirsi Ali to describe woke feminists who can afford to ignore the gross abuses of their sisters in less-privileged countries, because, Muslim. She and Yasmine Mohammed at the Free Press have got some harsh words for how tolerant Canada is of abuse against women and girls when they’re not Western, and their criticisms are every bit as applicable to privileged feminists outside the country too. Unwoke feminists know women’s rights are for all women globally, especially those without voices, not just the ones like us who can afford to speak up without frightening retribution. Ali and Mohammed have lived under real Muslim oppression and demand to know why luxury feminists ignore so much gross Islamic misogyny and support the very worst of the worst Islamic terrorists. We liberal feminists want to know, too. Some Rape Victims Emerge Stronger, Not Permanently Debilitated Feminists Against Women: When They Won’t Say No To Men, They Harm All Females It’s Time To Reckon With The Left’s War On Women What If Women Challenged Male Aggression Like The Bonobos? False ‘False Rape’ Allegations: The Way Feminists Now Collude With Rape When Did Feminists Become Such Tools For The Patriarchy? Feminism’s devolvement to pleasuring, rather than smashing the Patriarchy, leads us to our next exploration of how wokeness went so hideously wrong. Woke gay conversion Perhaps nothing illustrates how horribly wokeness has gone off the rails as its commitment to ‘curing’ gay kids of their homosexuality by pushing them into sex change operations just like Iran does to gay adults. Woke extremists have become so addled by their own tolerance orgasms that they actually go along with science-free ‘gender-affirming care’ despite mounds of research showing that most ‘trans’ kids are gay kids who will outgrow their gender dysphoria. Clinging to ‘40s and ‘50s stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, any kid showing interest in something s/he shouldn’t gets them whisked away to the doctor, often first ‘identified’ by woke-indoctrinated teachers. When you’re as ignorant, as the woke are, to the science showing there’s biological and psychological difference between men and women, and that the tension between the sexes is more evolutionarily than culturally explained, and willfully ignore the lack of science behind transitioning, woke activists fall prey to greedy medical professionals and blithely believe the tired, long-debunked canard that their kids will commit suicide if they’re not allowed to transition. Don’t question. Just do as you’re told, good like wokies. A Dude-y Transactivist Demonstrates How Dangerously Dudeist The Trans Nuts Are Here’s A Running List Why ‘Transwomen’ Don’t Belong In Women’s Spaces Reality Is Not Transphobic Lesbians, I Know That ‘Cotton Ceiling’ Guy Who Called You ‘Transphobic ’ You Can’t Change Your Genes The Horrifying WPATH Files Document Leak Details Appalling ‘Gender Affirming Care’ Malpractice Woke anti-science It’s A Sign Of The Apocalypse When The Right Supports Science And The Left Doesn’t Has The Left Jumped The Shark With The Trans Biology Debate? Complaining About One’s Birth Body Is A Ridiculous Sign Of Privilege Here’s the final nail in the woke coffin of former liberalism: Their phobia of free speech and expression. Censorship: It’s not just a right-wing thing! Woke censorship One of wokeness’s most disgusting conceits is that ‘We don’t censor, right-wingers censor!’ Yes, they do, but so does the left, and both have a very long and ugly universal history of censorship, which is clearly a human defect rather than a partisan one. Censorship, Tyranny, And Science Suppression On Medium Which Online Platforms Don’t Censor Content Creators? Canadian LGBTQ Groups Politely Protest Free Thought At Libraries Banned! What The Left’s & Right’s Censors Don’t Want You To See It’ll be interesting to see what happens if Trump is re-elected. Left-wing censorship may come to an end while right-wing censorship will undoubtedly rise. Again. Should wokeness be abandoned, or can it be rehabilitated? As far as I’m concerned, anyone who describes themselves as ‘woke’ has as much to be proud of as anyone in a MAGA cap. Wokeness has come to be identified, rightly or wrongly, with vicious, destructive extremism, and we real liberals are complicit in what went wrong: We failed to counteract, challenge, and put down our extremists. We failed to curb our dogs. Can wokeness be saved? Rehabilitated, even? Not all who call themselves ‘woke’ are ideologically extreme. Some simply haven’t recognized, or perhaps they prefer to shield their eyes, from the extremism, anti-intellectualism, and refutation of traditional liberal Enlightenment values that has come to infuse wokeness. Perhaps, still engaging their own commitment to reason and rationalism, and capable of handling a challenge to their beliefs and values, they’ve simply missed how critically wrong ‘the woke’ have become. They certainly won’t find much woke criticism in the media, which has embraced a ‘social justice’ approach to journalism rather than the impartiality and facts presentation the profession once stood for and strove for. Too many of the ‘woke’ embrace political violence, domestic terrorism, and a nearly identical Nazi-like dedication to old-fashioned, old-school antisemitism, which they learned in social justice-infected academia. Those who want to return to a healthier definition of ‘woke’ have an extremely difficult road ahead of them. I make it clear to others that I’m liberal but not woke. There are plenty of liberals advocating a return to genuine social justice; intellectuals like Coleman Hughes arguing for a return to racial color-blindness that the ‘woke’ excoriate as ‘racist’. (Hughes’s TED talk was downranked and suppressed by TED when ‘woke’ employees complained about it.) Or feminists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Yasmine Mohammed arguing that feminism is for everyone, not just privileged woke Western women. And the voices speaking up against the trans movement are growing as the WPATH Files, the UK’s damning Cass Review, and countless systematic evidence reviews of the ‘science’ behind ‘gender-affirming care’ (for anyone, not just the young) is near-non-existent. Should we ‘burn wokeness down to the ground’ as they inevitably argue for society? Or should we slowly ‘drain the swamp’, and try to draw these people back to traditional liberalism? What are your thoughts? Comment below! 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 podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

t would have been a truly impressive epic battle had my enemies not possessed a brain the size of an amoeba. But the worst was what happened between my ears. I dropped the note in my property manager’s mailbox (it’s still 1975 where they live where there’s no Internet). “I have bedbugs in my couch! Please help!” Those creepy three-bite patterns had shown up. One as a triangle, another in a row. Bedbugs aren’t exactly the Einsteins of the insect world. They’re not as good at bloodsucking as mosquitoes, which get it right the first time. Bedbugs are kind of like the blood bank trainee trying to find the right vein for your donation. They gotta stab a few times. I found the evidence under the couch cushions, but not in my bed, thank Goddess. I had A Bedbug problem years ago, when I was living with my ex in Connecticut. We began getting the three bites at night, but never multiple times, or both of us together, and had no idea what they were. We blew it off and hoped the problem would eventually go away, and it did. Probably our lone bedbug died of loneliness. We never had a problem again. I expect one of us brought it home somehow. Back then, bedbugs weren’t as common. They were the scourge of our ancestors until about 1939, when a Swiss chemist developed the pesticide DDT, which was outstanding at knocking out bedbugs, roaches, mosquitoes and other insects, but also, as it turned out, American bald eagles, ospreys, brown pelicans, peregrine falcons and California condors. It was banned in the early ‘70s and has been cited by some as the reason why bedbugs made a comeback. Except they’re horrifyingly evolutionary in response to new threats and they’d already begun developing a DDT resistance. They’ve developed it against other pesticides, too, which is why it’s so difficult to get rid of them. Bedbugs evolved about 100 million years ago and may have plagued the dinosaurs. I tried to find an evolutionary reason why they even exist—surely there’s some purpose for them, right? Didn’t everything evolve for a specific reason? Where are they in the food chain? Can humans exploit them somehow for some property they possess that cures infected hangnail or something? I found nothing. Some scientists believe they’re a food source for certain spiders, but I suggest there aren’t enough of those spiders around. As far as I can tell, all bedbugs are good for is poking holes in humans. I Googled to learn what I could do to prevent the couch monsters from finding my bed. YouTube videos showed me how to make little protectors for my bed’s feet for trapping those who depart and those trying to enter. I learned bedbugs supposedly hate peppermint oil, so I bought some, (14 drops of oil for 3/4 cups of water), and sprayed the floor between my living room and the bedroom every night. I also sprayed the door frame. And the bedclothes. I felt like a witch, circling my bed every night with my Magic Potion Mister intoning the hallowed incantations of my ancient foremothers and foresisters: “Get the hell away from my bed you filthy little #$%^&s!” After a couple of days my bedroom smelled like a North Pole cathouse. Taking back my power from the stress Anyone who’s been thusly cursed can testify that bedbugs bring stress and depression. Your home has been invaded by a mostly unseen army and you’re always waiting for the next rash. The property manager scheduled an exterminator for a week hence and I was like, But what if these #$%^&s overpopulate and come looking for me??? Not to worry, one female lays an egg a day, so they’re not like African driver ants which lay 3-4 million eggs a month. Younger me would have broken down in great despair and considered abandoning the apartment, leaving all my worldly possessions to the bedbugs. But, I thought, someone who writes a Substack newsletter called Grow Some Labia really shouldn’t wuss out so easily! It’s all in how you think about life’s slings and arrows, and how you choose to interpret them. The reason why they schedule a week in advance is so that you have time to plastic-bag all your clothes, books, and other possessions in the treated rooms, remove electrical outlet covers and vacuum your own bedbug-ridden furniture. The old me would have put off what needed to be done for awhile and then forced myself, whining and crying that it wasn’t faaaiiir, and why was I being so put-upon by this curse? Why was God being so mean to me? How we react, and our resistance to our plight, is what can make a crisis like this far, far worse than it needs to be. As I walked home from the drugstore with my peppermint oil and trusty plant sprayer, I felt a little more powerful, like a warrior who wasn’t going to submit to my enemies’ demands without a fight. I am taking back my power! I thought to myself. I refused to give in to my familiar inner personal enemy, The Terminator . I shoved a towel under the bedroom door crack. It probably wouldn’t keep the beasts at bay if they wanted in but they’d have to work for it. I’d wake up in the morning thinking, Do I itch anywhere? No, I didn’t. By Labor Day weekend, five days after my bites, my stress heightened. But my Magic Potion seemed to be working. Or maybe my enemies just weren’t hungry enough. Bedbugs can live for months without feeding, some up to a year. If you Google too much you find horror stories of how they’re resilient to just about everything except maybe a nuclear holocaust. I’m not sure if they’ll survive like the cockroaches but I’m not sure they won’t. I mean, they survived the dinosaurs’ killer comet and now they party on pesticides. Can you drown them? Yes, they can’t breathe underwater, but they can hold their breath for hours. Can you flush them down the toilet? Yes, but they’re like little Navy Seals who can come back up from the tank and live to terrorize you further, probably a thousand times more pissed (ar ar). They can track your scent, your sweat, your vibration. They know when the pest dudes are coming, because like they’re psychic or something, and they will amass an air force and parachute into your bed, leaving your drained, dessicated corpse for the exterminator to find. I had to move my sealed plastic bags to the balcony, which looked like a Toronto garbage strike. My Inner Terminator was screaming that this was all for naught, I would never get rid of them, and they would terrorize me forever. “Shut up,” I said, and envisioned myself slipping on a helmet and picking up my  Peppermint Spray Mister O’ Death and meeting the enemy on the battlefield of my living room floor. “Die, you foul beasts, die!” I yelled in my fantasy as I sprayed them with Christmas nightmare. Peppermint oil kills on contact although you have to actually find an invisible ninja to do this. Which is why it works better as repellent. I cried the night before the exterminator came because I was so stressed out. I wasn’t eating much; my stomach was constantly upset. Later, you can’t put all your stuff back; you must live out of these hermetically sealed garbage bags until the exterminator returns in 2-3 weeks to get the recently hatched bugs. My beautiful apartment had turned into a nightmare hellhole, even as I thanked God, Goddess, and Darwin that the little f—kers hadn’t invaded my bed. I lay there that last night, checklisting what I needed to do before I left for work, as my boss had arranged for me to work at their ad hoc ‘office’ in the city. And I felt another mild panic attack. I reminded myself, There are people in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza right now who fear nightly attacks by an enemy far worse than bedbugs. I’ll bet they’d trade for my piddly-ass problem any day. Privilege means our afflictions are often much bigger in our heads than they are in reality. When I got home that evening, all my furniture was upended and I couldn’t move anything back until after I was declared bugless. This was my new, albeit temporary life. Every step of the way was a new source of depression. But then, I noticed—because Buddhism teaches you to pay attention to your emotional storms—that after a day or two I got used to each new step. That Friday night after putting clean bedclothes on the bed, restoring my computer desk to minimum working order, and moving several balcony bags to the living room so everything didn’t mold, I treated myself to dinner at a local Italian restaurant including two glasses of wine, because wine cures all situational depression. I really didn’t give a crap about the bedbugs as I stumbled home with my leftover pizza box. I was a lot safer now. Bedbugs happen What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, unless you choose victimhood. Depression immobilizes you, makes you incapable of action. It’s sort of a parasite of its own, draining you of competence and confidence and telling you there’s nothing you can do to change things. I have to remind myself to snap out of it, to re-frame how I’m interpreting a situation, not to take anything personally, that I was dealing with a problem many people have. I didn’t even have anyone to be mad at. The bedbugs? They’re dumb insects doing what they’re designed to do. The property managers? Bedbugs suck out their profits. God? Oh please. Bedbugs happen, and contrary to mythology, they don’t care about your housekeeping. They only care about you, their human buffet. I reminded myself this was a challenge , an adventure , and as difficult as it was I’d gotten off easy. There was nothing else to be done; this is how you deal with these little ratbastards. You wash or high-heat dry all your clothes, bedclothes, linens, everything. I did multiple loads on my normal washing day and the day after The Grand Steaming, I did several more, and our basement laundry was predictably busy on a Saturday morning. When I finally found a free dryer I raced to the washing machine to pull some stuff out and claim it; but an old lady was already loading her clothes in there. “That’s my dryer,” I told her. “I just saw it and I raced over there to grab some clothes and claim it!” “But I need a dryer too!” “I saw it first. I have a helluva lot of laundry to do.” “So do I, I haven’t done it in a month!” But she compliantly unloaded for me. Later, I apologized. “I’m sorry I was a pissant earlier. You said you have a month’s worth of laundry to do, well guess what, I have to wash everything I own because I just got treated for bedbugs.” Nothing makes people more sympathetic. She was nice about it, and I found something else to be grateful for: An old lady who wasn’t going to hold it against me that I metaphorically elbowed her out of the way for a dryer. Unlike bedbugs, not all people suck. I offered her a blessing as I departed with a huge pile of warm laundry. “May the washers and dryers you need always be free for you!” She smiled. 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 podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

We walk among you. We're silent when you say awful things. But we trash you behind your delusional backs. And we are finding each other. Fear us! I sat on a park bench texting a friend when three pretty little girls, all in various stages of missing teeth, came up and asked in all innocence, “Where are you from?” It was refreshing for someone to ask . I put my mobile down and said, “I’m from the United States. Where are you from?” “Serbia!” they told me. “Really?” “Yes, Belgrade,” replied a younger girl on skates. They peppered me with questions. We were joined by more little snaggle-toothed Serbians—sisters, cousins, friends. A brother walked up but his sisters pushed him away toward a pair of adults not far off. No boys allowed! This is Girls’ Stuff! Eventually I was joined by one of the mothers, and the children hie’d off to the playground. Mom’s name was Sara, 32 years old. I told her I was American and we did that immigrant thing I miss from a less-woke decade, chatting about what we liked or didn’t about our mother countries and adopted country. Sara liked Canada a lot, she said, but she wasn’t sure she would stay. She struggled with whether to continue raising her children (two, with one on the way) here. “I don’t like what they’re learning in school,” she confessed. “They’re learning weird things.” “I know what you mean,” I said. “I don’t like the weird things either.” She struggled to explain herself. She couldn’t articulate it. And she spoke excellent English. “I know why you’re afraid to talk about it,” I said. “I know what the weird things are. You don’t want to say them because people get so upset.” “Yes,” she nodded, eyes wide open, happy to have someone who understands. “And, they should play more.” “Absolutely!” I thought of Jonathan’s Haidt’s call for more play and less work, and especially less mobile time in the book I’d just finished, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Provincial cell phone bans in the classroom are sweeping Canada this forthcoming school year. ‘T’will be interesting to see how this plays out. “I’m so glad you understand!” Sara said, smiling. “There are many of us like you,” I told her. “We’re everywhere. We don’t like what’s going on either. And we’ve been afraid to speak up.” As the sun set I ambled home to make dinner—I was getting hungry although the pretty, snaggle-toothed girls had given me a brownie—but I decided to check my Substack notifications real quick and there was a direct message request from a recent new follower and fellow indy author, MJ Biggs. “I've been binge reading your posts and am loving them. It's a relief to find other non-woke liberals--especially ones who aren't afraid to speak up…If you'd ever like to bounce ideas off someone for future posts or just need a person to rant to about the crazy world we live in, I'm around. Thanks again for sharing your radical common sense and centered philosophy with the world. We need it for sure.” Another one. A Bad Liberal. We are everywhere. And we are tired of fake-liberal nonsensica. We walk among the ‘woke’ One has to be careful when speaking with strangers. You never know whether they’re One Of Us or One of Them. I have to share one of my favorite old movie clips about this. I’ve used it probably too often already, but I love it so much. It’s from Tod Browning’s 1932 early talkie Freaks. Highly politically incorrect, I nevertheless relate more to the ‘freaks’ than the beautiful equestrian and her jerkwad hyper-masculine boyfriend. One minute you’re getting along famously with someone, maybe a stranger you just struck up an acquaintance with or an old friend, gooba-gobbling with them quite happily, and then the next moment they’re standing there shaking furiously, nearly spilling the loving cup, because you said something utterly outrageous like, “I wonder if Kamala Harris will have the courage to support all-female sports teams.” Suddenly, the person you thought you’d known all their lives or the guy who seemed so nice turns into the Shit Demon from Dogma. Or maybe the Alien bursts out of her chest and screams at you that you’re a f—king fascist who hates puppies and kittens and rainbows and the color pink. Or they just cancel you in front of God and everyone. You screwed up. She’s one of Them. (No, not a giant ant. You get my gist. Not to hit the movie comparisons too hard.) But then, you talk to a stranger in the park and find that—they’re one of Us. We walk among the Woke and pretend to be like them, like Donald Sutherland before he turned into one of the Pod People. But sometimes we forget ourselves when we’re working undercover infiltrating the Killer Tomatoes. (Another movie reference. Sorry!) But here’s the thing: There are far more Undercover Killer Tomatoes than real ones. We are the Exhausted Majority, and we walk among the Woke—the Killer Tomatoes—and know that one day, soon, we will turn them all into ketchup. According to Hidden Tribes US, only about 8%— 8%!!!— of Americans actually hold ‘woke’ views. How is that we haven’t crushed these Killer Tomatoes already? Why aren’t we pouring Regressive Lefties into ketchup bottles? We are in the park. We are in your Inbox. We are the people you pass on the street. We seek each other—the Bad Liberals—and huddle together in dark corners whispering to each other even darker heresies. “DEI is racism!” “If blackface isn’t okay, neither is womanface!” “Slavery today is more important than 19th-century slavery!” “Thomas Jefferson was a great man!” “Indigenous Americans were brutal savages before the brutal European savages showed up!” “Antiracism has become antisemitic!'“ “Women should Just Say No to male abuse!” “I have conservative friends!” “Me too!” “Why are ‘anti-misogyny’ laws always about protecting men dressing as women rather than real women?” “Thanksgiving is a moral holiday!” “Transing children is gay conversion!” “No one is born in the wrong body!” “White skin is not a birth defect!” “Neither is a penis!” Here’s a conversation starter to really get Thanksgiving rolling this fall: “I didn’t vote for either Harris or Trump.” Maybe we need a Kerchief Signal , like what gay men used in San Francisco in the ‘70s, a clothing article that signals I’m Not ‘Woke’, Either. Bad Liberals can be hard to detect in a group. They repeat or pretend to agree with some dumbass idea a wokie expresses. One way to detect a Bad Liberal in a progressive conversation is noting whether they just nod and purse their lips at the right times, without saying much, doing the minimum to look like a ‘Good’ Illiberal. Bad Liberals survive by disguising themselves as Illiberals. I have a friend who does this. She just nods along and sort of goes along with what she’s hearing, but then she rants to me in e-mail. Bad Liberal-hunting is hard, because when you get it wrong they do that Donald Sutherland alien scream thing. A few years ago I tested the waters with a liberal, progressive friend whom I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. I’d thought she might be mad at me. Just before the world locked up she got annoyed because I wouldn’t identify as a feminist. I explained I was embarrassed by what feminism had become, that I didn’t want to be identified by all those weak, whiny-ass little women who were near-exhaustion from getting triggered every time then-candidate Donald Trump opened his mouth. “How can you not be a feminist?” she demanded. “How can you not want equal rights for women?” I did favor equal rights for women, I explained, but for the last quarter-century I’d called myself an ‘egalitarian’ because that’s what feminism is about, equal rights for women and men. Except that feminism had come to identify itself with weakness, vulnerability, and lack of female agency. It wallowed in victimhood, blaming everything wrong with women’s lives on Da Patriarchy, rather than their own wussy, shrinking selves. It demanded no responsibility, accountability or self-analysis from women, only men. Grow some labia, girls!!! Over the course of the pandemic, especially after I started writing for Medium, I reclaimed the feminist label for myself, and took back my power by differentiating my own kind— power feminism —vs the whiny young Medium perma-victims. You bet your sweet bippy I’m a feminist now, sweetheart! My friend, over the course of the pandemic, had stopped being a feminist. And a liberal. Although undoubtedly she’d disagree with me. I tested her to see whether she’d remained liberal—someone I’d rarely disagreed with in the Olden Days—since we last spoke. When I got to, “Will Thomas has no business competing on a women’s swim team,” my friend shut me down immediately. “That is NOT up for discussion!” she informed me. I regarded her with dismay. How could this bright and formerly progressive Boomer be so—mind-numbingly pro- men’s rights? And she was a retired LAWYER, fer crissakes! No need for facts or evidence anymore. I wonder what she would have said if I’d condemned science-free kiddie sex change operations. I outed myself as a Bad Liberal. And she outed herself as an Illiberal. What we need to understand is that there are more Bad Liberals than Illiberals. And, combined with our fellow Bad Conservatives on the other side of the aisle, who aren’t any more into Trump and the Republican’ts than we Bad Liberals are with the Democrapic WokeNazis, we can work together to stop the onslaught of woke authoritarianism and hopefully prevent its replacement by Trump authoritarianism. Spotify podcast by Bari Weiss: The Republicans Voting For Kamala Bad Liberals aren’t really bad, of course. We’re definitely on the side of good. Right, just like every other wannabe dogmatic authoritarians, right? Right? How you can tell you’re not evil You’re on the side of good when you’re not advocating harm to someone else. Real harm, not the fake made-up harms generated by the Illiberals. Real transphobia is beating up a man because he dresses and acts like a woman. Fake transphobia is whining about people who won’t use your silly-ass pronouns or who don’t want your dick in their changing room, because they know how hard it is for the boys to control that thing. You’re on the side of good when you’re willing to consider others’ points of view, and recognize that you and your political kin don’t have all the answers, either. You’re on the side of good when you value facts and evidence over ‘feelings’ and highly subjective experience, which is filtered and diluted by one’s own mostly-unacknowledged fears, biases, prejudices, and dislikes. You’re on the side of good when you realize that lifting others’ boats who haven’t had your opportunities doesn’t mean you have to settle for a leaky dinghy. You’re on the side of good when you realize ‘equal rights’ doesn’t mean ‘special rights’. (Conservatives have struggled with this one, too.) In fact, you don’t have to be a Bad Liberal to be on the right side of morality and social justice. You can also be a Bad Conservative. Thinking for yourself—it’s available to anyone who chooses it. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

But rich, successful, powerful men aren't falling all over themselves to marry me. Who do I need to cancel until they validate my self-image and stop hurting my feelings? I need a new law. Many countries have passed laws permitting men to download an application, fill it out, upload it and get a certificate stating they are now, unquestionably, incontrovertibly, absolutely, positively, and no-backtalk-from-you-Missy a full-fledged woman. And if anyone says otherwise she can get that person cancelled, fired, ruined, and possibly assassinated. I mean, that’s her identity, man! I mean woman! And who are any of us to question how she really feels? I have always felt like a really gorgeous rail-thin almost criminally sexy supermodel. When I was three I dreamed of being a princess, and then a hula dancer (I grew up in Florida), and then a belly dancer (it was the ‘70s), and then  a supermodel, which is when they were invented. But my evil awful fascist Nazi hateful bigoted parents said, “Sweetheart, don’t be ridiculous. You need to prepare for a real job. Like, one that doesn’t require you to suck a lot of penises just to get a photo shoot.” My parents were soooooo negative and toxic. They made me go to college for four years but I still really felt like I was really a supermodel. I mean, I’m so freaking gorgeous! How could they not see that? My mother was so unaffirming. She was like, “You’re a pretty girl, Precious, but it wouldn’t be fair to tell you you’re outstandingly gorgeous when you’re not. Maybe you will be once you’re past puberty but I wouldn’t count on it. I’m not Raquel Welch, you know. And your father isn’t Cary Grant. And anyway, what you look like isn’t as important as how beautiful you are on the inside.” Isn’t that just such a Vile Mean Mom thing to say? Okay, so I didn’t have enough money yet to dye my hair blonde and Mom was too cheap to give me the money for it. She went off on another one of her irrelevant tangents: “Your father works hard to keep a roof over our heads and for enough food every week and to keep the lights and water on. We’re supporting two cars along with you and your brother and you don’t need blonde hair, you’re pretty enough as you are.” How was I ever going to become marry a top CEO with a mother like that??? I especially began feeling like a beautiful young supermodel after I turned 40 but that was during my Dead Life, Dead Name time. My real name is Lilac Jade Kinga, Supermodel And Global Star. I really really hate it when people refuse to affirm me. I mean, it makes me so mad I want to take up my cuticle scissors and STAB THEM! Because killing myself would be thoughtless. Why deprive the world of my great beauty and awesome awesomeness just because haters and BURPs (Beauty Uninclusive Radical Pissants) refuse to affirm me? I will make then affirm me! I will get that law passed so I, too, can get a certificate stating that I am in fact a really sexy young woman. I can shove it under rich men’s noses and demand that they take me out to an insanely expensive restaurant somewhere in Europe from their private jet and treat me to a dinner whose price exceeds the average gross salary of the Czech Republic, and that’s not even including the free-flowing Louis Roederer Cristal Brut 3L French champagne. Anyone who doesn’t do it is glamsphobic and needs to be cancelled out of every last dollar he has! You wouldn’t believe  what some of these spoiled, coddled, narcissistic, vicious pricks have said to me! “Lady, if you’re a day under 60 I’ll eat my Nick Fouquet Savage Coast hat. Now get outta my Acura!” The nerve of that guy! I began a campaign to cancel him on Facebook for treating a mega-hottie like me like that, but you know what he did? He cancelled my account! I told him he couldn’t do that and he said yes he could because he owns Facebook. Jerk!!! And then there was the mega-billionaire who laughed  at me when I said we should go take a spin in his rocket ship. He said even Amber Heard wasn’t that bold, and that I should come look him up in my next incarnation but before I’m old enough to buy alcohol. That’s really rich, coming from someone who’s impregnated  half the United States!!! I am grossly offended that Donald Trump has never once attempted to grab me by the you-know-what. And then there are the extremely unkind and non-validating comments I’ve gotten from people about my Dead Weight. I would like to remind everyone that some anorexic supermodels have a few extra pounds around the middle and occasionally a double chin. And that laugh lines are not wrinkles. You are whatever you feel you are. Feelings are incontrovertible evidence. They’re the strongest kind there is. My ‘lived experience’ is that of a globetrotting supermodel with rich men panting for me around every corner. It’s absolutely intolerable that others don’t agree, and clearly they need to be forced. By law if necessary. Let’s be honest: Age is just a social construct. I feel so mentally damaged when people say that if I can talk about living in the ‘70s I can hardly be nineteen years old. That’s not the point. The point is that this is how I identify. If Caitlyn Jenner can be who she is when she wasn’t not so long ago, why can’t I be who I am? The very embodiment of youthful babeliciousness? I live as a supermodel. I’m always walking around in a bikini because I love showing off my beautiful body. And I don’t appreciate the neighbors asking me if I’m pregnant or something. You would not believe some of the persecution I face because I have chosen to be my authentic self and not let the haters in the ‘reality-based community’ define me. I’ve been physically attacked by the police just because I tried to get into a club whose maximum age limit is 25. The bouncer who threw me out said I need to go home and take a good long look in the mirror. I get constantly triggered by identity critics who say I am biologically aging and that my butt sags more than a low-riding teenager’s pants. Or that I’m harming young people with offensive ‘teenface’. Or that I’m destroying beauty pageants because I successfully sued the Miss Teen USA organization to force them to let me compete since I identify as a 19-year-old. And the worst of it is just the day-to-day battle against people who insist that you can’t stay 19 forever, that it’s time for me to acknowledge I’m a grown-up, and that I need to move out of the house since my parents want to sell it and move to a retirement community in Boca Raton. Which I’m happy to do because they’re so toxic and bigoted and horrible about age identity I need to cut them out of my life entirely. I feel so unsafe when people say, “Cut the crap old-timer, I went to school with you and we both had Princess phones!” and “Get out of the frat house, Grandma, we’re way too young for you!” and the worst of all, when a Boy Scout calls me, “Ma’am,” and asks if I need help crossing the street. You have no idea what it’s like to live in a glamsphobic world, surrounded by haters and BURPs who are just jealous because I’m super-hot and they’re not. My life stinks. The world is full of haters. My mother thinks I should become a teacher. I am a gorgeous glamorous drop-dead sexy supermodel, and I can’t get everyone to validate me. People are so narcissistic, egotistical and selfish! 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 podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

It's real. It's worth exploring even for the UnWoke. Its purpose is to open our own eyes rather than beat up others (and ourselves) over birth lottery results. I thought about white privilege before it became the most tiresome selection on the Wokenati’s Most Overplayed Hits list. My self-analysis comes because I get frustrated with men for not understanding women a little better. How freakin’ hard is it to comprehend, for example, that women can’t just make a snap decision on whether we want to date a man by virtue of his looks? We don’t know if he’s a nice guy or a serial killer, and he can’t even talk to me for like five or ten minutes so I can look into his eyes a bit before he moves in for the kill? Or can’t they understand why sexual harassment is not flattery? That it’s scary? Or why we have to treat strange men as potential threats until we get a bead on them? Privilege makes you blind to that which never happens to you. Complaining to myself about men’s cluelessness naturally led me to ponder my own white cluelessness. I try to see what I’m not experiencing the way I want men to consider women’s experience. The world has been inherently unequal since the beginning of time. Hierarchy and power abuse is mostly true too for our primate cousins, with the possible exception of the bonobos. Ideally, levelling the playing field should aspire to equal opportunity . Where the privilege-obsessed fail is by hierarchizing it, and assigning primacy to the wrong category: Race. An article on Quora years ago asked about white privilege; a dark-skinned Indian woman claimed she was more privileged than most white people she knew. She’d been born into a very wealthy family and she went to the very best schools. Wealth and education, she summarized, were the two most important levels of privilege there are. Little else matters. She’s right. So was Martin Luther King, excoriated by the ‘woke’ today the way Malcolm X once did: Just a ‘chump’ who ‘doesn’t get it’ about the so-called evils of white people. Yet King understood the intrinsic importance of class, illustrating it with the story of Lazarus and the rich man in the Bible. “No, the rich man was punished because he passed Lazarus every day and did not see him … and I tell you if this country does not see its poor — if it lets them remain in their poverty and misery — it will surely go to hell!” Not a word about the color of the poor. My writing buddy Radical Radha wrote a devastating analysis of class privilege, from the standpoint of an Indian-American precariat who grew up in poverty, near-poverty, and clawed her way to the top 10% with a lot of hard work and study, who understands a lot more about privilege than most. The high cost of class climbing - Radical Radha at Radically Pragmatic I highly recommend her newsletter. She’s an ex-social justice warrior who ‘woke up’ from wokeness and is now one of its fiercest critics. Her article draws a direct line between the snobby, over-privileged rich girls she was insecurely friends with in school and the vicious, wealthy, mean women of the Democratic woke wing. It reminded me of Rob Henderson ’s Troubled memoir. It’s hard to take the problems of your spoiled, coddled compatriots seriously when their severest moral challenge is avoiding whichever words got struck from the ‘acceptable’ vocabulary list this week. Radha makes perfectly clear which privilege she regards as the most powerful. “My parents are the types of Indians that the narrative of the diaspora overlooks because we are known as the wealthiest and most educated of all the minority groups. This ignores experiences that have everything to do with class and nothing with race. My race didn’t somehow help me get ahead (it hindered me), but affirmative action for women probably did help. I don’t want special treatment or favors because it delegitimizes my hard work.” There’s nothing that genuinely separates us—especially Indians—quite like class privilege. Be honest: Would you rather be black and wealthy or poor and white? I’ve been white all my life and if offered this reincarnation choice I’d pick black and wealthy. Racism is real, but so is the sexism and misogyny I’ve lived with my entire life, and it hasn’t stopped me from living the way I wanted. Class and education enabled it. I’m not even aware of my sex most of the time. That’s right, I’m too busy making my mark in the world to even think about my ‘marginalized’ chickie-boo status. White privilege likely benefited me most when I grew up in Florida in the ‘60s and ‘70s, where and when blacks truly were oppressed, although Orlando already had a black middle class that emerged after former slaves settled the area which whites fought, unsuccessfully. Middle class looks wealthy when you live in a trailer park or on the street. I was surprised, in high school, to find I was considered to live in a ‘rich’ neighborhood. My small Ohio town didn’t have a ‘rich’ neighbourhood. It was split mostly between working and middle class, with a few families that lived only slightly better than mine. They were a few blocks over, but if you drive between my old ‘hood and theirs, neither was ‘wealthy’ as we know wealth today, or even back then. I had family in New York in a well-to-do community and I knew what real wealth looked like. Wealth privilege isn’t just a matter of economics, it’s also about opportunity and perspective . Wealth, for billions of people, means living with a full belly in a home with a roof. It’s when you have options that would seem pedestrian to us, even as we don’t visit Europe every year or own a Testarossa . I am extremely wealthy to many in the world, even though by North American standards my middle class existence is quite modest. Class and education privilege are what the social justice warriors miss, over and over again. It’s easier to bitch via inscrutable academic jargonbabble than to actually address what truly levels the playing field—since it might demand sacrifices from them. Comparison porn Education privilege is wealth’s twin sister, beginning when a child is still in diapers. ‘Wealthy’ homes contain books and other educational materials; parents who have time to read to their kids; museums and other cultural attractions they can afford to visit; and the child is encouraged to make the most of her wealthy-country free public education—or her parents can pay for a better one. If she studies hard she can get into a good college, and a degree will open up doors with important professional and social connections her working class and poor peers don’t have. We compare ourselves to others who seem more successful which creates dissension, envy and depression. But comparison porn works both ways. One can also compare one’s self with one’s peers who didn’t fare so well, perhaps explained by laziness and lack of motivation, or perhaps they simply never had one’s own opportunities. The comparer can feel quite superior. “Look at Joe! What a loser Mr. Big Shot Quarterback is now, and look where I am. I wish I’d known this was coming when he shoved my head into a toilet!” Privilege is mostly a birth lottery. Although I imagine it must be difficult not to blame one’s self for having been born poor. Why me? What did I do to deserve this? Why is that bitch Sandy better off than me? She doesn’t deserve it, I do! Except if the roles were reversed, the muser would probably be the coddled, entitled bitch and Sandy the envious one. Why? That’s what unacknowledged privilege does to many. Class doesn’t always tell. Radical Radha made something of herself and Hunter Biden didn’t. Equal opportunity access holds it own limits. Some are born smarter or more talented; but granting it gives the more economically modest the ability to make the most of their hidden talents and avoid what the NAACP warned in the 1970s: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Of course, lack of motivation or laziness can get in the way of anyone’s true calling, whether to the manor or gutter born. There’s always someone who’s worse off, or better off. Many grow up learning how to fight for what they want and need, while milquetoasts whine that the college administration isn’t feeding them and bringing them bottled water while they tear up the campus green protesting a part of the world they can’t even spell, let alone find on a map. Life is pain, baby. Class and nonsensical privilege categories have wasted billions of minds over the millennia. Where might the world be if our ancestors hadn’t divided themselves between Us vs Them? We still remake their same mistakes as culture evolves faster than our brains. We can challenge our modern-day numbnuts, so petty, so small-minded, so deeply ignorant of the world despite overpriced college educations. The ones who preach that extra epidermal melanin is the real reason you can’t succeed, and it’s not even worth it to try, despite countless counter-examples who took advantage of school, and libraries, and spent more time on the Internet Googling whatever they were curious about instead of scrolling through Instagram envying people who lie about their accomplishments with highly Photoshopped selfies. Failure loves company. Pondering our privilege—and questioning the overblown claims of others’—enables us to be more aware of what must be addressed to truly change society. The idea isn’t to beat ourselves or others up but to understand fixable inequities to become more empathetic citizens. I challenge my own class and education privilege regarding the stereotypes and harmful beliefs I have about those who didn’t ‘make it’, who didn’t hardscrabble their way to the top like Radical Radha. The ultimate intersectionality of one’s own intensely unique experiences and circumstances can prevent an individual from even seeing a way out, rather like a man in a lightless maze who doesn’t know where the exit is. Or even that there is one. All I want is a room somewhere, Far away from the cold night air. With one enormous chair, Aow, wouldn't it be loverly? Lots of choc'lates for me to eat, Lots of coal makin' lots of 'eat. Warm face, warm 'ands, warm feet, Aow, wouldn't it be loverly? - Eliza Doolittle, My Fair Lady 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 podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

He likes Trump and has a massive gun collection. But we're all more than our political beliefs. Including even WWII Nazis. And ex-boyfriends. “I’m now the highest level of NRA member you can possibly be,” George told me over sushi recently in Canton, Ohio. “I’m a Patron. That’s Charlton Heston-level.” As we exited the car going on a ‘hooch run’ afterward I said, “I’m okay with responsible people having guns. What I’m against is idiots with guns. My problem with the NRA is they’re in favor of idiots with guns.” George didn’t respond. I don’t know if he agreed or he just didn’t want to get into it but I suspect the former. He’s heard it before. We’ve been talking for awhile. We dated during my college freshman year. There was an early weird little love triangle between he and I and a friend who had a big thing for him; we vied for his attention and I won, but later, they married, as I knew they would after I broke up with him. I never reached out earlier because I thought I should leave them alone. Now I’m sorry I didn’t because a few years ago she passed away, so I wrote George a condolence letter and a few days later he called me. I wish I could have talked to Diane too before she died. George has changed since 1982. As have I. The partisan divide Some ‘liberals’ believe I should hate George, a Trump supporter, although he doesn’t bring him up a lot. He became a Ronald Reagan fan post-me. As dumbass college kids at a Kent State University satellite campus, we were all mostly liberal and beer-soaked. If he held conservative views back then, he kept them to himself. George has amassed a prodigious amount of guns and in fact, when Diane died, his family and friends worried he might shoot himself. George and I would never have cut it even if I’d been inclined to marriage at the tender age of 19. Diane was his unquestionable soulmate. His young commitment to marriage was perhaps an early sign of his incipient conservatism; I, on the other hand, was an emerging ‘80s hippie chick who romanticized the ‘60s, who preferred to play the field. When I finally was ready to settle down no one wanted either me or marriage anymore. I never saw that coming. Now, forty years later, Americans hate each other with not-so-Civil War loathing, and if you disagree with a friend on anything you’re supposed to disavow and spit on their memory, because differing opinions harbor pure evil. I’ve been working to embrace or at least accept people who don’t agree with me. Grow Some Labia has evolved from helping women avoid or reject domestic abuse and male control to exploring the culture wars and how to bring people together again. Which especially means learning how to come together on what they agree on and leaving the rest at home. Now I encourage my fellow libs to come together with right-wingers—and vice-versa—in service to our own mutually agreeable goals: To limit ‘trans rights’ in places where male bodies don’t belong and put an end to kiddie sex change operations. They’re modest demands, but transactivists aren’t famous for their common sense or compromise. The right isn’t famous for its commitment to science, but it’s on the correct side of it for a change. Instead of defining George as a ‘fascist’ (i.e., conservative), and myself as a liberal angel, I sought common ground. I have a history with George. He was a good guy when he was 19, and he still is, having loved his wife passionately and having raised three fine and all-married sons. The more I explore t’other side of the partisan divide, the more I see ways in which liberal thought and policy has tempered some of the less laudable conservative impulses and treatment of others. I see, too, how conservative thought needs to do the same for the excesses of liberalism, which has resulted in kaffiyeh-clad Nazis terrorizing Jews, and a lack of commitment to marriage and a two-parent family that looks a lot less avant-garde than it was when I was a hormonally-charged college student with a wandering eye. So hanging with my Republican, gun-loving ex-boyfriend for a few hours was an opportunity to spend time with someone I didn’t always agree with, but who wasn’t evil because, well, geez, I don’t date evil people! Mending fences: Start with a friend To work on de-partisanizing yourself (is that even a word?), it’s not advisable to visit a Trump rally or your city’s Pride parade. There’s testing the waters, and then there’s jumping into a political riptide. If George was a hardcore Trumper, full MAGA and screaming about immigrants as though any immigrant sounded the death knell for the white race, I couldn’t be friends with him. It’s near-impossible to be friends with anyone whose disagreements outnumber agreements, although I guess never say never. Maybe I’ll one day be so Buddhist that I can see the good in everyone no matter who they are. I strive for it. To remind myself that we’re all flawed, and we don’t always recognize that. I know I can be judgemental. The first step, as we all know, is acknowledging the problem, like they tell you in AA. Where I may go one day to find common ground is with my bitter, lifelong enemies the Christian fundamentalists. Even so, I’ve been friends with highly conservative Christians. Why? Because I knew them first as friends, and later as Christians. Decades ago I discovered people I ‘knew’ to be ‘horrible’—weren’t, when we met IRL. In the ‘90s I wrote for a small, free alternative newspaper in northwest Connecticut, as did many conservatives and born-again Christians. We regularly did battle in its pages. I ‘knew’ they were horrible, awful people I had to set straight. Then one Christmas, the paper organized a party and I met several of them. They weren’t as monstrous as I’d imagined. Not even Sam, the literalist, women-should-be-submissive-to-men Bible thumper and self-admitted virgin. He was always going on about his struggles not to masturbate and how women should be subservient to men because God sez so. It was harder to hate him when I spoke to a roly-poly forty-year-old dork whose hostility to female independence might not have been entirely Bible-based. He’s married today, with a stepchild, to a Christian, but who I suspect may not take his Biblical shit. Or maybe he’s mellowed. He wasn’t a horrible human being, just a flawed mortal like all of us, and nearly thirty years later likely a much different person than he was back in 1994. I wasn’t such a great human being back then either. As a self-impressed thirty-year-old I often surprised older people with my advanced wisdom about love and relationships but I was also antagonistic, judgemental and unnecessarily sarcastic to anyone who was ‘wrong’ about anything, meaning they disagreed with my superior and mostly-unshakeable point of view. I cringe to remember some of the things I wrote in the pages of that newspaper. When I came across my old articles a few years ago, I was horrified at how mean-spirited I was (this newspaper didn’t censor anything. ) As soon as I saw one headline, Bull Paddy Religion , (a response to Bible Thumper Guy), I threw it in the trash pile. It was my vilest article. I can’t remember what I wrote but I remember it was vicious. I’m still ashamed of it. My world isn’t as us-and-them as it was even five or six years ago. I don’t see all Trumpers as devils, after witnessing the death throes of progressive morality. Even the worst examples of humanity in the media probably aren’t horrible either. Because I know that even filthy Nazis have souls. Yes really. Years ago I read a book a Jewish friend lent me about letters sent back home from Nazi soldiers, leaders, and bureaucrats during the war. They spoke lovingly to children who would miss them at Christmas, or hoped they might yet make it. They expressed genuine love for their wives even as they were working for one of the most loathsome murder machines. But they genuinely loved their families. Yes, even Nazi murderers can feel love. A man who can feel love isn’t 100% monster. We don’t like to acknowledge that. Or that there’s a little bit of monster in all of us. Later, I read Hitler’s Willing Executioners to learn about the everyday Germans, like you and I, who partook in the Final Solution, because they’re closer to all of us than the masterminds or the ridiculously incompetent little narcissist who launched a world war. Some showed compassion to the people they murdered; one man shot Jews who fell into a pre-dug pit. A victim raised his arm and waved for attention; he then pointed to his chest. Someone took pity and finished him off rather than bury him alive. I wouldn’t want to break bread with either executioner but it’s a reminder of what the Dalai Lama teaches: Every single human being has a Buddha nature, a part of their soul that is inherently good. No one is impossible. No one. Remember Daryl Davis , the black man whose best friends are Klansmen. It includes even the filthiest serial killers. We imprison them because we can’t fix them. Maybe future generations will, and they’ll ruminate uncharitably on how we treated these people. Science may one day show how they couldn’t help being what they were and be as appalled at our lack of compassion the way people with mental health problems were treated in asylums of yore. George isn’t evil, and neither am I. German Nazis loved their families, as do the despicable Islamofascists agitating in cities everywhere. If one dares to look closely, one sees how toxic and damaging the left’s Critically Ridiculous Theory is and how academia is teaching and indoctrinating hatred, bigotry, and violent action to impressionable youth the way white nationalist families do. Can we completely blame the kids for what they’ve become? I’m sixty-one; they’re forty years younger and I was a freaking idiot too when I was their age, although I certainly never advocated genocide. Everyone has grains of decency in them. The ones we think are evil may simply not listen to us because they’re as rock-solid in their flawed beliefs as everyone else, or may suspect underneath that you have better arguments than they, and none of us likes to be proven wrong. Or maybe they know how logically fallacious and evidence-free your arguments are, and you don’t. So reach out to people you can’t stand, find your common ground. Become the solution, rather than the problem. And start with a friend. 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 podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

The right's 'Project 2025' is at least partly in response to the earlier social justice project of infusing every level of society with woke ideology. Where's Project 2012? The right’s so-called ‘Project 2025’ seems almost karmic, a right-wing wish list for remaking America the way God, White Supremacy and Da Patriarchy intended. Crafted very likely without input from Trump, but extremely likely with his knowledge, Project 2025 seeks to implement a real-world pseudo-Christian hellhole with the attendant contradictions we’ve come to expect with the Religious Wrong: Don’t abort unwanted babies, starve them to death after we cut money to the poor! They’re coming for your porn, too, with updated rationales other than, “God will make your weenie fall off because He doesn’t want you looking at naked ladies.” Their censorious methodology may sound frighteningly familiar to their sworn enemies, the woke: The New Right may define ‘pornography’ over-broadly just as the woke define their own social pet peeves to include whatever ‘offends’ their oh-so-fragile sensibilities. Project 2025 accuses pornography of propagating “transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” for example, and may view it necessary to imprison anyone who teaches about trans people. The porn prohibition, though, may be the document’s introduction writer’s personal opinion, rather than a real aim of the Project, which names porn only once, in the other 990-odd pages, in relation to child-specific pornography. What is not in Project 2025, despite some online claims includes: Banning birth control Banning abortions without exceptions Teaching Christian beliefs in the schools (Keep an eye on this one; they were trying to mandate this forty years ago, when I was fighting the Religious Wrong in the States, and they will want to replace ‘social justice’ and Critically Ridiculous Theory with something ) Ending no-fault divorce Banning Muslims from entering the country (although Trump himself has called for it) Abolishing the FDA and EPA (Trump supports both of these, and it’s been a Republican wank dream for decades, but it’s not in the Project) To be clear: What is and isn’t in Project 2025 may be confused and conflated with what Republicans have historically desired and activated for. Which is not to say that any of this can’t be added later. Or implemented apart from it. The Republic of Gideon it ain’t, but it’s a good start. Project….2010? 2012? 2014? The more I read up on Project 2025, the more I come to recognize similarities with the successful less-well-outlined takeover of American institutions by the correspondingly smug and holier-than-thou mirror competitor: Woke social justice. If there’s a doorstop of a manifesto for remaking America in the image of a humourless, racist, misogynist, homophobic, drag queen God, I don’t know where to find it. But it’s hard not to see the comparisons between what’s proposed in the event of a Republican victory in November, and what has already ‘successfully’ been implemented in America to remake society according to others’ vision which clearly doesn’t match up with what many Americans say they want. Those ‘many Americans’ are the ‘Exhausted Majority’ in the middle, between the MAGAts and the social just-us warriors. I’m going to name the woke warriors’ scheme Project 2012, because I’m not sure if 2010 or 2014 are too soon or too late. Many others and I have already covered the ‘evolution’ of modern wokeness over the decades, beginning with French post-modernists in the mid-twentieth century. Some if its earliest elements gestated in the civil rights movement, particularly the notion that black Americans were ‘helpless’ in the face of white supremacy that was disappearing as many Americans came to ‘wake up’ and reform the racist reality faced by so many fellow citizens. The pendulum, as my mother was fond of saying, always swings too far. Authoritarianism breeds counter-authoritarianism, and ‘political correctness’, the earliest manifestation of the Holy Bulls that have come to police our social media speech and political expression, emerged in the early Clinton administration after twelve years of Republican White House rule. The Christian Right, which grew greatly in power, fell into disrepute with the unfolding Catholic priest scandals, the equally-scandalous sex lives of television evangelists who mandated purity for their flocks, and the dawning realization that many of the so-called pious were ‘Christians In Name Only’. Meanwhile, on the left, no one noticed the earliest signs of Creeping Authoritarianism. Gender, race studies, and radical fat chicks I took a few ‘women’s studies’ classes in college in the early ‘80s. Humorless and self-serious in consonance with the times, we didn’t dissect patriarchy or misogyny. In one class we explored gender dynamics in our primate cousins based on Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s now-classic The Woman That Never Evolved. In another class, The Female Hero, we read eight books written by women about women, which is where I discovered Jane Eyre and Tess of the D’Urbervilles were awesome, and Tolstoy sucks. At least Anna Karenina did. Women’s Studies birthed the notion that ‘the personal is political’, questioning the primarily patriarchal male views and interpretations of the world and history, and even came for the scientists, revealing a distinctly male lens through which the boys had interpreted anthropological, archaeological, and biological learnings. Women’s Studies remade those same mistakes in women’s own image: Primarily, interpreting artifacts from pre-literate times through a gendered lens when no one truly knows why our cavecritter ancestors created what they did. Are all those chubby figurines truly goddess fetishes? How do they know spirals signified eyes? Its counterpart, Race and Ethnic Studies, developed along similar lines with an emphasis on social change, and a more in-depth exploration of what non-white women’s experiences and histories were apart from what was essentially a primarily white feminist movement. The earliest analyses of race studies questioned whether there truly were ‘races’ and the different experiences of different people, an early exploration of what is now called the ‘intersectionality’ of oppression and experience. What ultimately emerged, though, are movements aiming for social change and justice which identified early with victimization and victimhood and which hobbled themselves with self-defeating notions of powerlessness and non-resilience. Once the identity of ‘victim’ solidified, in the early 2000s the trans movement, quietly operating in the background post-Christine Jorgensen and Dr. Renee Richards, came out of their sisters’ clothes closets and began to agitate for a world in which they were accepted for who they were. I see now the early manifestations of ‘social justice’ in online engagements I experienced in the 1990s. When I first joined localized computer bulletin board systems and later, the Internet, I remember being dressed down by a ‘fat acceptance’ activist for insensitive remarks I made (and they were) about fat people. She was the editor of an activism magazine for fat people and she attempted to educate me. Which she did, both in ways she intended and also did not. She was the second person to dress me down for being a fat-insensitive idiot (and I was) so I paid more attention, and ever since, to my thoughtless words. She educated me about the many reasons people are fat, not all of them because they overeat and are lazy. She was right; there were many valid reasons why fat people couldn’t always control their weight; body type and genetics being just two. Later, I made friends with a large woman with the then-uncommonly-diagnosed condition Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, with which she gained weight or stayed stubbornly where she was no matter what she ate or how much she exercised. Once she was diagnosed and put on the proper medication, the fat melted off her like butter in a saucepan. But I experienced some cognitive dissonance with the fat acceptance lady. She made it sound like no one was ever responsible for their weight. A few years later, when I was on the then-infant public Internet, I delved into the movement when I encountered fat people who denied there were any health problems associated with obesity, which clearly was not backed by reams of medical and scientific research, and their arguments that the medical profession was just trying to make money off the obese didn’t ring true. It was an early lesson in the self-infantilization and excuses of the many ‘acceptance’ and ‘anti-’ movements to come. From theory to application The French philosophers who birthed post-modernist thought never advocated implementing their ideas in real life, but in the mid-1980s social justice activists adopted many of its lessons and moved it into an ‘applied post-modernism’, embroidering it into community and society. They began interpreting the world through power dynamics and various ever-narrowing identities. The early signs of a religious, Christian-familiar framework appeared long before we critics saw it coming; capital-T ‘Theory’ as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay called it in their book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. Social justice disseminated The Truth, and thou shalt not question it, especially of ‘marginalized’ peoples’ ‘lived experience’, however whacky, questionable, and downright delusional they sounded. The Truth, like any other religion, turned its back on reason, rationalism, and evidence. Its framework was that of Western culture’s: Judaeo-Christian, although now we’re seeing an Islamic framework interwoven with the Gazan protests. The history of the long tortured evolution of woke ideology, stemming from traditional liberal thought (later abandoned) is lengthy, and the Pluckrose-Lindsay book provides the best history and analysis of it I’ve seen so far. What’s critically important is that while everyone was stressing over right-wing takeovers, the left was quietly changing society, weaving their vision into all American institutions to the point where you almost can’t escape it. What occurred in a nutshell was the rise in power of the Regressive Left, defined by British commentator Majiid Nawaz in 2012 to describe those lefties who aligned themselves with cultural relativism and repressive Islamic theocracies. The ‘woke’ turned hypocrisy, like their right-wing role models before them, into a cardinal virtue. The primary example today is the LGTBQ supporters for Palestine, people who famously toss gay and trans people off buildings (and the rest of the Middle East, apart from Israel, ain’t any more supportive). Others include feminists who damn Donald Trump for pussy-grabbing or predators like Harvey Weinstein, but turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the terrible conditions of their Muslim sisters subjected to heinous patriarchal violence every damn day. And, pretty arguably, if one is in favor of censorship by one’s own group, but not for your enemies, that’s about as hypocritical as it gets. The backlash is brewing. It’s a coin toss at the moment as to which presidential team will prevail. ‘Wokeness’ has been cited by many disaffected Democrats to explain why they won’t vote for Harris. It’s not the only reason, but it’s close to the top. The conundrum it poses for those in the middle is feeling like choosing between Stalin and Hitler. Not literally, as we don’t anticipate purges or gas chambers, but both sides of the extreme have historically demonstrated a willingness to implement both, so perhaps the fear is, “Not yet.” Project 2025 is frightening, but so too is the woke Project we’re already mired in. As a lifelong liberal I’ve always wanted to see society remade more in accordance with liberal values, which has been highly successful in many ways—it abolished slavery, got us out of a pointless war in the 1970s, and birthed civil rights, and gave women the vote. Just because it’s gone too far doesn’t mean it’s a wholesale failure. Conservatism isn’t all bad either, and will be critically important in rectifying some of the Regressive Left’s mistakes. Biden’s open-border policy has clearly been a failure, and the hippie free-love-for-all from the ‘60s looks far more tarnished today, with male-dominated ‘polycules’ reifying the male sexual playground, which has never worked well for women. And then there are ‘ divorce parties ’ thrown by women abandoning their husbands and families to show that women can be just as heartless, irresponsible, and self-obsessed as some men. The Republic of Gideon can come from either direction. The Exhausted Majority needs binocular bird vision to watch out for freedom predators. Because one has a proposed Project for download and the other has already established theirs. It’s possible the far left was the smarter of the two, because, in the immortal words of Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” Implementing Project 2025 won’t be as easy as many imagine. But it may just need the time Project 2012 has had. 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 podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

It's no longer an oxymoron. Conservative humor speaks truth to 'woke' power, which is what those humophobic bitches fear (and need) the most! Just imagine if the opening ceremony for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics had featured a blackface ensemble re-enacting a slave auction or suggesting Native Americans had it coming. Paris would have been in flames. Radical Wokery, like radical Islam, has no sense of humor, and it’s not afraid to set fire to that which it doesn’t like. Not that the ‘Last Supper’ re-enactment was either funny or appropriate. The Olympics are meant to bring the world together, not tear it apart further with ugly identity politics. Maybe for the 2026 Winter Olympics they can let the Proud Boys re-enact the January 6th attack in drag or the 1968 Chicago riots at the Democratic National Convention, re-imagined with the NRA there to greet the hippies. You gotta wonder what brainiacs on the committee authorized the opening ceremony global debacle. “Hey, mes amis, you know what we should do? Re-enact Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper with a bunch of drag queens, but we’ll pagan it up enough that we can pretend it was a re-enactment of a Dionysian orgy.” Except that Barbara Butch, the plus-sized lesbian in the center of the tableau (she’s a real lesbian, not a late-middle-aged sissy porn-inspired autogynephile), admitted on Instagram it was inspired by Da V, as did a statement from Paris 2024. It was an unforgivable exercise in bad taste and poor judgement, and gee, it didn’t exactly improve the image of drag queens, a formerly fairly obscure peninsula of entertainment most people had zero awareness of until it was dragged out of gay clubs by heterosexual woody wankers on TikTok. Great humor speaks truth to power What will defeat wokeness faster than putting to pasture hoary old Democratic politicians like anti-Semites Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman who are so 2023, will be holding it up for ridicule. There’s nothing the powerful fear more than finding themselves in the gun sights of comedians and critics locked and loaded for calling out social just-us hypocrisies, their pretensions and especially their arrogant but bogus claims of high-minded morality. Left-wing bigotry no longer looks much different from the right-wing brand, just essential disagreement over who to hate. Whether it’s fear and loathing of the so-called ‘oppressor’ groups or xenophobic forgetfulness that everyone’s ancestors came from somewhere else, and didn’t look a thing like the natives, it’s bigotry whichever way they skew. It doesn’t appear conditions for diminishing American freedoms are set to change in January as we will either preserve the wokeocracy tyranny currently in place, or exchange it for a return to Republican MAGA tyranny. Making fun of the powerful will still be difficult, regardless of our new overlords, because the right has begun to embrace ‘cancel culture’ more openly. Publicly stating that one wishes Thomas Crooks had killed Donald Trump can get you as fired as calling a transwoman a man. ‘Cancel culture’ has always existed on both sides since loooooong before the term was invented, but with right-wing populism on the rise around the world, including the United States, the Radical Right has nicked the ‘progressive’ playbook on how to destroy anyone who disagrees with them or ‘offends’ their own pearls-clutchers. The right-wing Libs of TikTok have activated to deplatform and fire those who state or make jokes about Trump’s near-brush with death. Cracking a joke won’t be any less dangerous under Trump Part Deux. Welcome to the world thou hast wrought, Wokies! But the good news is it’ll be less dangerous to poke the woke social just-us set. The tables are turning. Dave Chappelle, your country needs you! I’m a little reticent to call on Chappelle to be our New Savior for taking the piss out of the supercilious insufferables, not because of the kerfuffle over his alleged ‘anti-trans’ remarks a few years ago , but because he’s re-embraced ‘punching down’ by taking on the disabled. I’m not sure what to make of that yet; some of his material is funny, frankly, and he does joke that he’s taking them on because he loves ‘punching down’ (←making fun of his critics) and the disabled are less-organized than the trans set(←making fun of trans power). I’m not sure all disabled folks will hate him, either. Like everyone, some have a sense of humor about themselves and know that exclusion from joshing humor can be as hurtful as a building with no front door ramp. Others won’t like it. That’s the nature of humor. Someone, somewhere, or something is the joke. Don’t watch, listen to, or read it if you don’t like it, but don’t pretend you’re under violent attack because someone pointed out your ideological slip is showing. Chappelle is a damned funny guy, and his trans jokes in The Closer were spot-on, while liberals like Jon Stewart and others struggle to be funny in a tight-assed world where their every joke can be their last. Dave Chappelle is the man who can help us dissect woke values, beliefs and practices ripe for ripping. Stewart has become a hapless wokeweenie. Chappelle might be ready for it. He’s got fuck-you money, just like J.K. Rowling, whom the transactivist community created. Jerry Seinfeld is interviewed by The Free Press’s Bari Weiss on the humorlessness of the woke left Conservative comedy and critique is on the rise and—it’s getting really f’n funny. And on the nose. You don’t have to be conservative to see the humor and desperate need for piss-stealing from the illiberal woke left. Conservative humor is still struggling but it’s beginning to understand that for political humor to truly work, you have to understand the hypocrisy on your own side first. Where can humorists and comedians confront the less-marginalized-than-advertised and take back all our power from our wannabe cultural dick-tators on the far left? Let’s see, there’s Black Lives Matter, which purports to be ‘antiracist’ while lobbing ‘genocide’ accusations at Israel and supporting Hamas, an explicitly genocidal terrorist group. If BLM was any more racist they’d Jawohl. There’s the related resounding ignorance of All Things Middle Eastern among the campus protester set. Call me a cranky old grandma from the post-Sixties if you like, but at least the hippie protesters could mostly locate Vietnam on a map. How about taking on ‘feminists’ celebrating women’s accomplishments almost entirely with men in drag? How about a forthcoming American election fronted almost entirely by DEI picks - like one chosen because she’s female and, bonus, several different race thingies? And she picked a white man for her running mate, to assure the racists on both sides that she’ll have something to temper all that Black Lives Matter Radical Violent Energy white people often imagine is simmering just beneath the surface with black Americans? Not to mention Republican DEI fave J.D. Vance, because who else would Donald Trump pick except a white man? His little toadstool would fall off if he chose a woman. Or even a black guy. Not that there are many to choose from in the Republican party, or who would be willing to put up with him as their boss for four years. (To be fair, most white people don’t want to work for him either. He went through most of us trying to assemble a Cabinet after his first election win.) ‘Colonization’? Let’s talk about non-white colonization, and the black African love affair with slavery still going on! Slavery! Yeah, let’s speculate on how many woke ‘antiracist’ black people love porn and prostitutes, much of it supplied by human trafficking! ‘Colonization’ of Israel: How come campus protesters never talk about the Arab invasion of the land 1,300 years ago? And speaking of ‘decolonizing’, if that means pushing the traditional oppressors out of places they don’t belong, why can’t we ‘decolonize’ males—the Original ‘Oppressors’—out of women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, sports teams and prisons? And as for ‘privilege’, it’s time to highlight and rub in the wokies’ insipid faces that class is the ultimate privilege: It trumps race, sex, culture, religion, sexual preference, and all other so-called ‘marginalization’ pretensions. S/he who has the gold makes the rules. And let’s not forget the most ridiculous woke social just-us community of them all: The hate-all-TERFs trans community. ‘Nuff said. Conservative humor: It’s getting better ‘Offense’ complaints often really mean, “Someone just shish-kabob’ed my hypocrisy.” Was it really ‘punching down’ when Dave Chappelle skewered trans-identified men’s hyper-masculinity when he joked about a transwoman ‘slamming her dick on the table,’ at a board meeting? Is there any doubt this group is one of the most aggressively male—and violent —movements ever? How often do transactivists physically assault feminist protesters? Who has the real power when the transactivists - invariably male - invariably get away with it? Some formerly untouchable humor has already been touched. The comedy duo Key and Peele have made fun of—a slave auction. The Libs of TikTok does a great job of highlighting woke stupidity, although if Trump and his DEI pick get elected, we’re going to need a MAGAs of TikTok. Conservatives are getting better at humor, or maybe it’s just level-headed liberals who can see their side’s hypocrisies, but I suspect far-left extremism has helped conservatives finally see the light of what humor’s main function is: To take the piss out of the powerful, the high, the mighty, and the insufferably ill-humored. Kinda harder to see when historically your lot has been so high on the power apex that you thought the poor were ants. But now, the folks bleating the loudest about powerlessness are clearly the most powerful; their plaintive wails sounding remarkably like conservatives during the Reagan and First Bush Reigns of Error. Conservative ‘humor’ has suffered a well-deserved drubbing over the years for coming across as mean-spirited and ‘punching down’. One early attempt, the conservative comic strip Mallard Fillmore , about a duck who worked as a conservative political reporter, attempted to poke fun at liberals and came across badly because the left hadn’t yet gone completely off the deep end back then, and because so many conservative values themselves were genuinely mean-spirited. It’s hard to find the humor in their dislike of birth control education for children when their idea of birth control was ‘close your legs’ (but only for girls), not to mention their ongoing love affair with enforced childbirth. There certainly was hypocrisy on the left back then, but the right fished around and came up with little better than bait. As lefty comedy gets unfunnier and more boring for fear of being cancelled, right-wing comedy is finding its groove and is getting, well, sorry to break it to you, funnier! As Martha Stewart would say, it’s a good thing. We should welcome the larfs no matter who they come from—as long as they’re genuinely funny and make a real point. You may not agree with it, but if a joke really pisses you off—you probably deserved it. You’re the one they’re making fun of. For good reason. Time to time-out and spend some quality time on ‘self-reflection’. The reason there are so many ‘politically homeless’ voters who comprise the real wild cards for both parties in the forthcoming U.S. election is because we see the hypocrisy and bankrupt morality on both sides. We don’t know who to vote for because neither party convinces us they can do a better job than the other guys. They’re both proven hot messes: We’ve seen a working (ha!) Trump administration and now, with Joe Biden retired, younger, more intentional wokeocrats. But one thing’s clear: The way to take down the powerful far left is, having infected and infested the media, academia, political power, entertainment, sports, and many other arenas and institutions, is to make fun of it. Take the piss out of it. Anonymously, if necessary, and it will be (including protected free speech the Trumpies will surely go after since they don’t value First Amendment rights any more than the wokies). While liberals stress out over the far-right manifesto Project 2025, we all need to ask ourselves whether there’s an opposite version somewhere on the Internet we never found, but which has successfully made itself the new-ish law of the land. Something to think about. And another battle to fight, too. 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 podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Mindless, thoughtless breeding isn't the only way to 'have a stake' in America. And why don't Republicans also damn neglectful, MIA 'sperm donors'? If I was still on Usenet’s alt.support .childfree, they’d be losing their minds over J.D. Vance’s three-year-old Fox News interview in which he asked, “How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” He complained the United States was run by "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too." I am childfree by choice, as we preferred in alt.support .childfree. I’ve owned two cats total, and not at the same time. I am not a Crazy Cat Lady. I’m a Crazy Cat Video Lady. I believe there is no such thing as too many cat videos. Sorry, J.D., I made my choice at eighteen and have never regretted it. It beats being a Pathetic Porno Pud-Pounder, which is what I might imagine some single men are like. Okay, he didn’t make the comment during his nomination acceptance speech. But still, he needed to defend it. So what did Vance do? He went into Woke Snowflake Mode. Waaah waaaah waaah , someone’s holding me accountable! The account-holder was Jennifer Aniston, who knows a thing or two about childlessness. She’s struggled and failed for many years to have a child she now wants after being damned in the media during her heyday because she wasn’t getting pregnant. She cared about her career more! they accused the virgin womb-monster. Which they never say about the millions of men who care about their careers more than they do making babies or, more damnably, the families they fertilized. What did she say to enrage J.D. Vance so? She made a respectful reference to his daughter, so it looked an awful lot like the common snowflakery that characterizes the right as much as the left. “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” she said on an Instagram post. “All I can say is… Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.” Touché. Republicans removed abortion rights and now they’re going after IVF treatments. In MAGAworld, women should be forced to have babies they don’t want, and not allowed to have babies they do. Every child an unwanted child. The Sperm Donors of MAGAworld If one applies Republican motherhood measures equally to fathers, Trump fanboy Elon Musk is one lousy, shitty father. He’s a sperm donor, nothing else. Why Do We Only Judge Successful Men On Their $$$? Musk suffers from the delusion that the world faces an underpopulation problem. He’s got ten surviving children from three baby mamas and he runs (poorly) three large companies. If ever there was a sperm donor who in no way can possibly be anything approximating a decent father, it’s Elon Musk. Republicans agonize over mothers who work rather than take care of their children from home, conveniently forgetting the complex world that now necessitates a two-paycheck household in order to barely make ends meet, and which they themselves helped forge after destroying unions , the primary reason so many Americans were middle-class mid-last-century. They never ponder the long-term absent father effects unless said father is black. All such ‘fathers’ are merely sperm donors. Hop on, hop off, handle it, babe. Musk plays with his bio-toys when it’s convenient. Comedian and television talk-show host Nick Cannon is even worse: He’s got twelve children by six baby mamas. It’s not enough to be rich enough to keep all one’s progeny in a reasonably accommodating style; parenthood, as preachy Republicans remind us when they’re talking about mothers, requires parental attention. They emphasize the importance of a father in the family and the need to bring respectability back to marriage; I agree. But that’s all they think a father needs to do; he can essentially be married to a single mother who raises the kids by herself, and who keenly feel their father’s seeming ‘rejection’ as much as any poor kid with a disappeared dad. They never, ever, obsess over single mothers as long as they’re married to a sperm donor with little time for the family who values his career over being an actual, present father. The only way to induce a sperm donor to do that, it seems, is for some crime or sexual imbroglio to shame him into stepping down from his exalted position to learn the names of his spermseeds. If the Republican obsession with the two-parent family is as all-fired important as they claim, why do they never question the effect of paternal truancy? Because, of course, it’s always been about returning to a patriarchal family structure in which the man makes all the decisions and women submissively comply. “Father deficit” as a public health issue Let’s talk about the countless ways absent fathers—married or unmarried—affect their co-creations. According to a Psychology Today article , the list of pathologies children of sperm donors suffer include (and I’m really editing down here), feelings of emotional abandonment; maintaining an intimidating bravado to cover feelings of insecurity; periodic self-loathing; dropping out of high school; poor academic performance; delinquency, youth and violent crime; jail time; promiscuity and pregnancy; girls may become susceptible to exploitation by men; feeling rejected by their fathers; drug and alcohol abuse; running away; physical problems; mental health disorders; homelessness; lousy job prospects; and early mortality, including childhood. PT calls this ‘father deficit’ a public health issue. The article speaks mostly of non-residential and non-custodial fathers, but as it turns out, the rich aren’t like you and me, they’re much more similar to the poor. According to a Guardian article by a man who’s interviewed many wealth managers of the insanely rich, they have much in common with the opposite end of the economic spectrum. They don’t work; they express insane beliefs; they’re drug addicts and philanderers with a particular yen for other men’s wives; and they’re really quite lazy: Trump’s day when he was President, for example, began at 11:00am. An LA Times op-ed notes that the U.S. is run by crappy fathers (pathetic porno pud-pounders?) who don’t see their children any more than Nick Cannon or a tenement tomcat. Absentee parenting, as it notes, is the price of success. We give the rich a free pass and damn the poor for the same sins: Absentee fatherism. We give sperm donors a free pass to neglect their families but not their egg producers. I’m not arguing for giving mothers a free pass; the PT article notes that American society isn’t set up to support parental fulfillment responsibilities, and notes that at least some of the inequity results from “non-custodial” or “non-residential” fathers forcibly removed from the homes (I’m assuming they’re not talking about violent, abusive fathers). The LA Times op-ed quotes a National Marriage Project spokesperson regarding the toxicity of extensive travel by Dad on children. “There’s no question that the research would indicate — including research on military families, military fathers in particular — that spending long periods away from your children is harmful.” The poor, meanwhile, don’t see their kids as much because they’re working multiple jobs attempting to make ends meet. Rich dads have much more time on their hands, yet often make little time to see their families either. Does anyone think the Trump kids (five children, three baby mamas) seem happy and well-adjusted? Maybe Tiffany, who stays with Baby Mama #2 behind the curtains. Trump is finally making time for youngest child Barron, who’s attained adulthood and who, it appears, is finally interesting. But let’s be honest: J.D. Vance’s new boss is mostly a sperm donor. To be fair to Vance, he noted in his acceptance speech, “My most important American dream was becoming a good husband and a good dad. I wanted to give my kids the things that I didn’t have when I was growing up.” I will pump my fist for him for that, and hope that means his personal time and not just a fat paycheck. I wish he’d acknowledge the problem in his own backyard; crappy fathers are not just the problems of his childhood poverty in Middletown, Ohio. Fathers are either critical to the family or they’re not; and if they’re not, leave working mothers alone, especially since most of them have to work whether they’ve got a residential partner or not. Especially those educated and privileged enough to pursue real careers outside of blue- or pink-collar professions. A mother, for the MAGA bunch, who works long hours at a law firm or hedge fund is far more condemnation-worthy than a high-producing sperm donor. How much time is Vance spending with his children now that he’s campaigning with Trump? I don’t know, or if he’ll have much time if he and the sperm donor win. Given his boss’s aversion to work, he may have more time on his hands than most Vice Presidents. Unless he has to step in if his doddering boss dies or is Amendment 25’ed. The spotlight is on Vance’s family now, and Aniston’s comment isn’t likely to be the worst thing said about his daughter as a running mate and perhaps a Vice President. I strongly encourage him to put her in touch with Amy Carter and Chelsea Clinton. Short shrift for responsible parenthood I never had children for the best of all possible reasons: I didn’t want any. I genuinely believe parenthood is THE most important job in the world. Parents are tasked with raising another human being. It doesn’t matter whether that baby human is a kid in a trailer park or or another one of Elon Musk’s hop-on-hop-offs: Every child should be wanted and valued. If you’re not up the to task, don’t do it! I would have made a lousy mother. I didn’t want to do it. Just as I gave up on radio and journalism work, which I’d thought I wanted to do but changed my mind after I worked for a few radio stations. It wasn’t what I expected. I wasn’t up to the task. Children are not like poorly-chosen careers. The problem is those baby humans depend on you. You are their mother or father. The child is half your genetics. I don’t believe you can abandon a child as easily or morally as a career choice. J.D. Vance, and so many other privileged Republicans, don’t get that. They pay only lip service to the importance of children and raising them properly. If they did give a crap, they’d work with the other side to forge a better society that supports both parents. They’d recognize that not all women want to stay at home full-time; some would like to work a little outside the home but not entirely; and some simply don’t want to do the Mama Thing. A career-driven woman with a ‘barren womb’ is as acceptable as a Master of the Universe with ‘wasted seed’. The drudgery of stay-at-home mothering and housewifery is what drove the Feminist Revolution in the first place: Betty Friedan was the first to name the unidentified malaise and depression driving so many so-called Happy Homemakers to the liquor bottle and prescription drugs. Some men have recognized that, like women, they ‘can’t have it all’; they can’t be a high-powered executive and a good father. They can, however, be a good breadwinner and a good father, as can be his wife. Many men discovered over the pandemic that they loved spending more time with their families; it’s why there’s been so much pushback for companies mandating you have to be in the office when you can do your job just as easily at home. There are more real fathers and fewer ‘sperm donors’ in the world than there were ten, twenty, or fifty years ago. There are far fewer ‘crazy cat ladies’ than J.D. Vance imagines. So many times over the decades I’ve said to myself, “This is why I’m glad I don’t have children.” Procreate only if you’re truly committed. But let’s hold all procreating humans responsible and accountable, and accept parenthood isn’t for everyone. Some are childless by choice while others, like Jennifer Aniston, are not. Let’s support the folks who want to be parents, and stop trying to force the rest of us square pegs into your round little holes. I hope J.D. Vance will walk the parenthood walk rather than just talk the talk, especially if he becomes our Vice President—and, it’s entirely possible, President before January 20, 2029. ‘Coz his codger boss ain’t gettin’ any younger. Or more mentally coherent. 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 podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

The disgraced CanLit author collaborated in her own daughter's hell. Because stand by your man and it's always the woman's fault, eh? Canada mourned when revered native daughter Alice Munro died in May. The renowned short story author famously never wrote a novel. Although I never became a Munro fan myself, I will likely look for her short stories as I’m curious as to what I missed when I was young, dumb, and full of cheap beer. Yes, I’ll read her, even knowing she valued her pedo husband, Gerald Fremlin, over her own daughter when she learned what he’d done to her. Many artists are deeply flawed human beings who nevertheless produce great, moving work. I regard Michael Jackson as one of the greatest dancers and entertainers of all time. His dancing is second to none. Suck it, Astaire! Munro’s dirty little secret is tremendously disappointing: That she Stood By Her Man when she learned how her husband had molested her daughter (his stepdaughter). In the time-honored fashion of juvenile incest victims, Andrea now-Skinner didn’t break the silence until 1992, at age 25, when she finally told her mother. Munro didn’t leave Gerald Fremlin, her second husband, not even when he entered a guilty plea and avoided a trial at age 80 after Skinner filed charges. Munro left him, briefly, in what amounts to little better than an emotional tantrum at the initial revelation; it became all about herself and how humiliated she felt. Others learned of it but one one talked about it. The confederacy of silence extended to the Canadian media, which chose not to report the trial to protect the cherished literary icon. Munro knew Fremlin’s abuse wasn’t just a one-off; friends informed her that her darling hubby had exposed himself to their own teenage daughter. She asked him about it, and, as Meghan Daum notes on her Substack, he denied it, and when she asked if he’d ever done it to her daughter, he claimed ‘She’s not my type.’ Fremlin once drove Skinner to the airport after molesting her and tried to get her to expose herself to him; she refused. He tried to get her to tell him details about her ‘sex life’. She was nine years old. He lost interest when she turned into a woman in adolescence. When Skinner finally told the truth, he, in the time-honored manner of child molesters, blamed Skinner. She “invaded my bedroom for sexual pleasure,” he claimed. He compared her to Lolita and called her a ‘homewrecker’. Munro let it go. She learned of other allegations of exposure in ‘friendships’ with other children. But it was always all about herself rather than her daughter’s insane trauma and the filth she was married to. Munro felt betrayed by her daughter, and suspected her husband had made everyone keep the secret to ‘humiliate’ herself. Munro stood by her man in the time-honored manner of many mothers with pedophile husbands. Everyone protected her. The ‘love of her life’, himself emotionally distant to Munro, was of greatest importance. The public wasn’t told the truth until weeks after her death. “Let me tell you something about the rich. They are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked, and the same is as easily said about the famous, rich or not. When you’re widely loved and revered, your many allies will circle the wagons to protect you from your sins. Alice Munro didn’t know about the abuse as it was happening, but she knew she was sleeping with a practicing pedophile. It’s unlikely she did any more to try and protect others than she did her own daughter, who she must have known was at risk. Her post-crime sin is not uncommon for women of her generation. A man is more important than your daughter’s safety or right to a sane, happy life. Mamas can be such good little allies Andrea Skinner and I both came of age as children of the 1970s, teenagers and young adults of the 1980s. I learned an ugly fact at age fourteen: Incestuous relatives, especially fathers and stepfathers, were far more common than was commonly known. It might have been a small act of God that I should just happened to have read a Reader’s Digest article on incestuous parents during the summer of 1977, just before I entered high school. The article stated that step/father-daughter incest occurred more than people generally understood, and that the percentage of families with this problem was estimated to be as high as 25%. Twenty-five percent??? I talked to my mother about it. Shortly after, it came as less of a shock in my freshman year to find the article’s evidence: I knew girls who claimed they were being molested by their fathers. The late ‘70s marked the beginning of the end of the silence of the lambs. Other articles about the prevalence of incest began peppering the American media and later, in the early to mid'-80s, the Catholic pedophile priest dam broke and the deluge hasn’t stopped since. Incest was happening right where I went to school in my small midwestern town. It began with my friend Paulina who confessed to me in the smoking area that her father was coming to her bedroom at night. Then it was others. And more. I told my close friend Bobby about it. Bobby was the school Rona Barrett who knew everything about everybody. He added two more names to the list of girls I knew, or knew of, who were being molested—if not by a father figure than a brother or cousin or not-so-funny uncle. I learned how prevalent thoughts of suicide were in other teenage girls; my mother and I called the Suicide Hotline together to ask how we could support these girls better. They encouraged us to tell them to tell others. I did. I told Paulina to tell her mother. She did. Her mother called her a liar. Paulina’s family went to church, so I told her to tell her minister. He didn’t believe her either. The confederacy of silence and denial encircled Paulina at the same time as it enveloped Andrea Skinner across Lake Erie, on the other side of the border. I only visited Paulina’s house once, and barely glimpsed her father, who I avoided, but he saw me. He told Paulina—as she repeated with a grin the next day at school, having no clue how sick and screwed-up it was—that he’d said I was pretty cute. I wanted to vomit. She wasn’t the only one who wasn’t believed. I imagine the truth back then seemed too horrific, especially within one’s own family. Adults were still plausibly in denial about this formerly dirtiest little secret. My mother had told me briefly about incest during my pre-adolescent facts of life discussion. She told me—because neither she nor anyone else knew better—that incest was actually quite rare. It struck me as one of the most horrible things that can happen to a kid, the worst sort of betrayal. I couldn’t imagine my own father doing that to me. How could any other? I graduated high school and moved on to college. By then, the mainstream media had latched on to the not-so-rare horror. In fact, it became suspiciously too common; stories proliferated of women divorcing their husbands claiming he was sexually abusing the kids. I began to wonder whether all of them were telling the truth, knowing how contentious divorce is. Some divorced their husbands because of it, others seemed to drag it out as an allegation later as if to convince the court their soon-to-be-exes were monsters. The tales of terror continued from the Catholic Church. Pedophiles, it seemed, were everywhere. Right where you were. I was outraged to learn how many mothers learned about the abuse at the time and did nothing to stop it! They said nothing. They did nothing. Some took out their rage on their daughters, blaming them rather than their loathsome husbands. (It’s always the woman’s fault!) I was especially outraged to learn that some were even a little relieved, as their own burden of sexual duties decreased. How can a mother allow this to happen to her child? Isn’t rape supposed to be, like, a fate worse than death or something? How can mothers look the other way, and why do feminists who damn him, nevertheless defend the guilty collaborator wives with all the classic disingenuous feminist cheesy excuses? She was afraid of him, she was too financially dependent on him, she loves him, it’s hard to believe, she doesn’t want to believe. All understandable feelings. How do you reconcile the person you married with a monster? But this is female collusion. Damning the perps while giving their enablers a free pass ignores the other half of the problem: The women who nevertheless allow this to happen. Alice Munro didn’t know of the abuse at the time, but she should have had a damn good idea her daughter was in danger. Instead she chose to believe Fremlin when he claimed her daughter ‘wasn’t his type’. What more did she need, to find him in bed with her paralyzed daughter? He all but admitted Skinner, and countless other little girls, were in danger from the man whose bed she shared. How can a mother continue to allow it, after the shock is over and she’s had time to process the feelings? Not all wives are in danger for leaving a man. Although back then fewer women were able to carry on financially. So I’ll spot them that. But if she knew it’s going on, if it’s a center of panic in her solar plexus on the verge of eruption, how can she do nothing? How do you have sex with that person, knowing he’s pushed his penis into your daughter? Or your niece? Or the little neighbor girl? Women, even today, have always collaborated in other females’ private hell. One story may be just an allegation, but two or more are wake-up calls to investigate further. Children can lie just as adults can, and some do; but many, many kids are telling the truth and, like Paulina’s adult collaborators, some mothers choose not to believe. I know. Paulina wasn’t the only girl I called the Suicide Hotline about. Skinner’s biological father learned about the abuse from Skinner’s stepmother, whom she told. He ordered another daughter never to leave young Andrea alone with Fremlin when they visited. Skinner’s absent father did something, at least. In the end, the circled wagon owners were many: Skinner’s mother, her siblings, and her extended family. Surely others knew: The neighbors who kept their kids away from Fremlin, but who respected the Canadian Literary Icon too much, or were afraid of the blowback for ‘making a fuss’. At some point after learning the truth about her own daughter’s abuse, Munro fully understood what she was married to, what was sharing her bed. She never gave up on Fremlin, valued his presence more than she did her daughter’s well-being. The private scandal was always about Munro herself; she was annoyed that she couldn’t see her grandchildren across town. Her only ride was her husband, and Skinner had prohibited him from coming anywhere near her kids; not even to drop off their mother. There was no such thing as taxis back then, of course. It outrages me still, fifty years after Paulina, to find people who consider themselves good human beings circling the wagons to protect child molesters, whether there’s a celebrity in the family or not. It outrages me that the Canadian media didn’t report on Fremlin’s guilty plea (he avoided a trial) to the indecent assault charges that had begun in 1976, so that people could know while Munro was still alive that she was a protector of a child molester, that she valued the ‘love of her life’ over her own flesh and blood. Fremlin spent no time in jail because, probably, he was Munro’s husband. Munro died eulogized around the world by those who didn’t know she protected her pedophile. The feminist confederacy of silence and collaboration What message does it send about pedophilia when women collaborate so easily to protect the abuser rather than the victim? Especially their own flesh and blood? Did these women never imagine how it might have felt had their own father come to their beds late at night and threatened them not to tell? It may have been too painful to consider; but if something sparked the contemplation, then they should have stood up and said, “Not my daughter!” How traumatic must we believe pedophilia is, really, when so many women and feminists actively collude to protect both the abuser and the collaborators? Girls aren’t the only victims; plenty of boys are too, especially in the Catholic Church. If we’re going to damn the perpetrator, we must equally hold the feminine collaborators responsible too. Especially today. This is 2024, not 1976. I don’t know if Alice Munro was a ‘monster’, as Meghan Daum and others have alleged. If she was, there are a lot, and you know plenty of them. You just don’t know it. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Because when Queen Elizabeth I is mis-transed, today's intellectually non-conforming children can't be safe from stereotyping sex changes While it’s unacceptable ever to ‘misgender’ a deluded living person who thinks they’re the opposite sex (or no sex at all), it’s perfectly legitimate in the trans cult to misgender dead people. I was wildly offended when a then-Twitter trending discourse suggested Queen Elizabeth I, Louisa May Alcott and others were ‘trans’. Because, you know, it’s simply not possible for a chickie-boo like Lizzie to be a powerful, competent, confident leader whose first agenda item after ascending the throne was to pull England back from economic ruin. Not to mention bringing—who’da thunk this from a female leader???—a 44-year reign of peace to England and Ireland. She even got the damn Catholics and Protestants to stop killing each other, although it resumed after she died. (Blame a dude, James I, who then went on to revise the Bible.) She defeated the Spanish Armada— the Spanish Armada, fer crissakes!— and patronized world exploration and the arts. While it’s quite questionable she was a lasting ‘Virgin Queen’, she had love affairs with her courtiers, but her modern genderqueer detractors theorize Queen Elizabeth was trans, a ‘transman’, or at the very least ‘non-binary’. Because, come on, a girly can’t run a couple of countries all by her pretty little self, can she? It’s simply inconceivable for the gender-addled for a woman to be that accomplished. Only a man, or a woman ‘born in the wrong body’, infused with a man’s warrior spirit, could be as successful and historically iconic as Queen Elizabeth. Then there’s the curious case of Louisa May Alcott , a suspiciously lesbian and feminist American literature icon who has been ‘transed’ by the living because she often wished she’d been born a male and claimed she felt, “I am more than half-persuaded that I am, by some freak of nature, a man’s soul put into a woman’s body.” Alcott was an outlier for sure; she never married, had close friendships and possibly a relationship or two with men several years younger than herself, but unlike certain other female literary icons, left behind no passionate communications with other women. Her most famous literary character, Jo March, was a ‘tomboy’ in modern parlance; headstrong and assertive and would rather write than take care of children. Jo was based on Alcott herself, of course. Alcott deliberately annoyed her chick-lit fans by refusing to let Jo marry Laurie, the handsome young man in love with her. Instead Alcott married her off to an older, bearded, decidedly unsexy man called Professor Bhaer. It’s glaringly obvious that growing up in the highly strictured Victorian culture may have inclined women like Alcott to long to have been born male simply so they could be free to live the full, rich, and less restrained lives men did. After all, men weren’t excoriated for not getting married and making babies, if they chose to sail the seven seas or seek adventure in African jungles. If Alcott was in fact a lesbian—who “always had more sympathy for & interest in them [males] than in girls,” she may not have had the understanding or vocabulary to verbalize what she was truly feeling—“I’m a woman but I fancy women more than men.” Perhaps wanting to be a man was how it felt if you had no idea what a lesbian was. Or maybe she just wanted the freedom. I can understand the latter theory. This is one reason why I had such an aversion to dresses growing up. My parents loved dressing up their little living doll when I was a toddler and I have vague memories of enjoying it, especially for church with my bonnet and gloves—“Mommy, I can’t go to church without my glubs!’ When I entered grade school I was forever enjoined to not get dirty or mess up my dress, but no one worried about the boys’ clothes. The message was clear: Boys had more fun and freedom. Dressing like a girl was the exact opposite. Dresses were stupid. Trans-ing the stereotypes It’s well-established now that for all their pretensions to ‘queering the normies’, Trans World abhors real gender rebels, not the pretenders in service to the cult. They misgender the rebels who traditionally and historically defied gender stereotypes, the strong, capable women, the chicks with brains, and the men who dared to be soft and feminine, who didn’t care to build cathedrals or trouble themselves with athletics or military pursuits . The Facebook group Transing The Dead takes to task the Rainbow Gang revisionists who comb the annals of history seeking to bolster their bogus sex-changing narratives with ‘examples’ of mavericks, deviants, bohos, and dissenters who didn’t live the strictly gendered lives of their peers. I find it repulsive that people get fired for properly gendering living people who can’t change their sex but get a bogus certificate from the government saying they have, yet get away scot-free with misgendering people who are no longer alive to defend themselves. “Fuck off, you pseudo-bitches! I like chicks, not dicks!” - Louisa May Alcott “Why do you think I need a vagina? What’s so terrible about riding the Hershey Highway?” - Alan Turing Homosexuals are being erased from history and modernity just as women are in Trans World. It leads me to wonder if and when the Next Great Transition Craze will commence—for children, of course. What’s the deal with those ‘smart girls’ and ‘dumb boys’? In accordance with the traditionalist, right-wing, uncritical acceptance in Trans World that women are actually created to be dumbly submissive to men and cater to their every whim, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a brain, desire, ambition, and motivation, must be in want of a de-sexing. She was born in the wrong body. As is a man or boy who doesn’t do well in school, nor talk and think about sports and beer, who never aspires to resolve once and for all how the universe will end. If he fills his head with ‘silly little things’ like fashion, he must really have been meant to be a woman. Is this the next phase of trans-ing the world? Restoring males firmly back in intellectual jobs and women back at home and hearth where they belong? I have to wonder. Maybe, instead of trying to drag more girlies into STEM fields, we should turn them into boys instead! Because boys are good at math and science, and girls are good at—doing what they’re told. Being ‘good’. Not fretting their pretty little heads about finances and inventing a better mousetrap. Boys with fluffy brains need to be ‘fixed’ so they can become good, compliant little handmaids. Smart, capable chicks and kind, genteel guys are freaks. Historical figures like the equally brilliant Queen Elizabeth and Alan Turing challenge gender stereotypes and remind us not all girls like pink nor are made of sugar and spice; neither are all boys made of snips and snails or like rassling in the dirt with their mates. While I was never surprised, as some are, to find how misogynist ‘progressive’ politics are, I’ll admit I’ve been hornswoggled in the last few years at discovering in progressivism classic, right-wing homophobia. If it was obvious to others, it wasn’t to me. Especially not on Team Rainbow, which was formed, fer pete’s sake, to fight for gay rights when police attacked public bathhouses back in the day (and which would eventually be destroyed not by the law but by the AIDS epidemic). No, I had no idea the far left hated gayfolk so much they were willing to ‘trans’ even small children showing clear signs of homosexuality before they were in pre-school. The woke left, it seems, are not so unlike their compatriots on the far right. And they manage to stereotype non-conformers worse than Team MAGA ever has. The Christian right has long sought to ‘convert’ gay kids through ‘Christian’ counseling, but at least they never went so far as to advocate sex change and attack their genitals. Not since the Victorian period, anyway. As the far left marches into oblivion (which may come sooner with one helluva backlash if the trans-aversive and now assassination attempt hero Donald Trump wins in November), the transgender medical profession must be scrambling to make as much money as they can from 'transing’ children who fail to conform to stereotypes. And surely, a little girl who aspires to become a CEO is really asking to become a male, right? Since how could a silly woman possibly become successful and make billions if she wasn’t a man? The drive to return society to a more traditional world may differ somewhat in vision for the right and left, but both are navigated by misogynist men, embodied on the left by the heterosexual autogynephiles who ultimately want women to stop with their bullshit and grant them sexual satisfaction by accepting them completely as women, and ultimately to do what they’re told without complaint. Just like their Christian friends on the right. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say. 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 podcasts  of more recent articles there too!