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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While the world scrolls toward despair, I’m sleeping with dead presidents and Nazi children. Here’s why you should join the insurgency. Image by Thought Catalog from Pixabay Last year on the subway I was reading The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. I held the ‘Okay grandma’ large clunky hardback edition. I noticed the young man opposite was looking at the cover. He looked exactly the age of its subjects, Gen Z. He stared, eyebrows slightly knit. I smiled behind my book, hoping my subversive declaration of intellectual sovereignty encouraged him to read it. (You may owe me a beer, Jonathan Haidt!) Support Local Bookstores: You can find the titles mentioned in this post on my Grow Some Labia page. Every purchase supports independent booksellers (and this newsletter!). The beauty of reading dead-tree books in public is so others can see what you’re reading. My titles alone will make the woke-comfortable squirm, and perhaps encourage the Silent Exhausted Majority to track them down. It sends a message from The Cognitive Resistance: I’m not a mindless consumer of the Attention Economy. I read books that challenge me, that require more than 5-10 seconds of attention. Even when I’m reading an e-book, you can tell I’m not doomscrolling: I stare and swipe. My thumb isn’t in constant motion. Reading isn’t just a hobby, it’s a rebellious act of intellectual sovereignty. The “Pro-Vaxxer” of the Mind I have a greater immunity to anxiety, outrage, and Trump Derangement Syndrome than the Doomscrollers of Despair I wrote about last year. I read. A lot. I read hundreds of Substack’s long-form essays and bang through 12-15 books annually. When I was in college I counted 70 books in one year, only a fraction of which were required, and I did read those, except Anna Karenina which was simply too unfocused and boring. Doomscrolling-filtered, highly biased, questionably- or badly-sourced ‘information’ has led us to where we are: Everyone hates each other, it’s okay to murder your enemies; we’re not having sex; we scream about billionaires after putting a billionaire retarded toddler back in charge of the most powerful country in the world, and no one in America thinks it’s their fault. As if the manchild and the knuckle-draggers in Congress just wandered in and took those chairs. I view politics as surmountable, rather than insurmountable problems because I read. Books are like drugs or The Force: They can be used for good or evil. Subvert the dominant paradigm! Embrace cognitive liberty! Weaponize your brain against the Agents of Algorithms, for whom it’s in their best interests to keep you scrolling, outraged, and dangerously stupid. Treat books not as an escape—eventually you have to sober up, or stop to make dinner, where reality awaits—but as an escape from The Mucktrix. Because when you finish a good book or a really killer longform essay, you feel better. More empowered. Even if all you scroll is silly animal videos and people making cooking mistakes, it’s harmless, but then you realized you pissed three hours away. At worst, you want to kill yourself or someone else—maybe both. When I finish a book, or an idea-packed longform essay, I feel like I’ve accomplished something. I feel better about myself. I feel smarter. I’m a reading pro-vaxxer! I believe everyone should vaccinate themselves against the Despots of Doom by refusing to consume their mental garbage. But I wouldn’t, like, force you into a library and chain you to a chair in front of an open book. I’m not a booknazi. I know. You ‘can’t focus’ long enough to read a book. Bear with me. The dangerous people I’m sleeping with (Ha! You kept reading because of that provocative subtitle!) I just started sleeping with Matt Ridley. (Don’t tell his wife! In fact, don’t tell him!) He’s the author of The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge. His book makes me think, to see past, present, and future slightly differently. Here’s something creepy: I’ll be sleeping with Hitler’s children after I’ve had my way with Matt and tossed him on my Mighty Bookshelf O’ Subversion. I know, Hitler thankfully blew himself off this mortal coil without leaving any bad seed behind. Hitler’s Children is a book by Gerald Posner detailing the children and grandchildren of leading Nazi figures, including how they dealt with their ancestral legacies. And after that? I’ll be sleeping with a DEAD GUY! Thomas Jefferson! I slept with his dead friend last year, Benjamin Franklin. It was electric! (Ar ar!) I read in bed, obviously. Just before lights out and, in the morning before breakfast, on the weekends. And always on the subway! Heaven! Reading is for rebels, not for bland conformists who believe everything their algos tell them to. It’s taking the time to sit down and focus for more than a few seconds and think about what you’re absorbing. It sometimes takes me a long time to get through a normal-length book because it makes me think so much I have to stop and think some more. Or I put it down to Google questions it just brought up. James Lindsay’s and Helen Pluckrose’s book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody was one of them. So was Becoming a few years ago when I was sleeping with Michelle Obama. (Yes, I’m bitextual!) Heterodox thinking is badass. I want to better understand the people I don’t like (wokies, Trumpies, Islamofascists, etc.) as well as ask other points of view. I started subscribing to the right-leaning The Bulwark a few months ago, and found that the conservative columnist Mona Charen, who I hated with every fiber of my being thirty-five years ago, is now my sister-in arms against crazy Trumpism! Intellectual sovereignty means asking yourself what those people you hate the most believe in, and why. It teaches me not to ass-u-me I already know. Heterodox thinking is the most effective reduction in Attention Economy-induced negative outlook. When you look for or listen to other viewpoints, you often get a takeaway or two even if you still don’t agree with the thesis. Viewpoint diversity is The Rebellion. It’s digital inoculation against nihilistic extremism. An hour before I sat down to begin banging out this article, I read one by Eva Kurilova, Contending With The Dark Nights Of The Soul. She pours out the dark stretches of depression plaguing her life, and how she found respite in books. I’m a ‘Five Percenter!’ Here’s something interesting: When I asked Google Gemini what percentage of Substackers actively write, it claimed roughly 5% or less were active publishers. Further, that 44% of publishers ‘ghost out’ after three posts, never publishing again. It also claims many joined for Notes, possibly as an alternative to X and Bluesky, the respective right-wing and left-wing shitholes of humanity. When I asked (because I know you will, you little heterodox insurgent!) where Gemini got its information, it responded, “…by triangulating current platform data (April 2026), industry reports from analysts like Backlinko and Exploding Topics, and Substack’s own growth updates for the first quarter of 2026.” You join Substack for two reasons: Either you love to read, love to write, or both. Substack, with its allergy to censorship, supports others who also subvert the dominant paradigm. Substack is the ‘Tactile Tap’. Social media is the ‘Infinite Scroll’. One is a treadmill, the other a destination. Treadmills are better for building bodies rather than minds. Soul Therapy: Beyond the “Woke” Filter I don’t read much fiction, and when I do, it’s older. Today’s pap is too ‘woke’ and ‘preachy’. Or just—not really good. I bought a novel last year on a lark about a house sort of haunted by puppets and the brother and sister inheriting it who’ve never gotten along. It was—okay. But not very fulfilling. At least it didn’t tell me how to think or feel about Indigenous, Pride, racial, gender, or other political issues. The back cover blurb made it clear what to expect, which few books I pick up in a bookstore can. “K’taelrylny-thyn, the stunning pseudointrapolyhedrasexual with creative pronouns to match every single permutation of feeling ghi has,” invokes a gravity attack that lands it back on the table. I read almost entirely non-fiction. I keep a ‘wish list’ on Amazon, but I buy locally. Heads up: “King Dork” is one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read. If you lived through the ‘80s, and especially if you were or knew a bullied teenage boy who dreamed with his equally dorky friend of becoming a rock star, this is the novel for you! Bonus: It makes wicked fun of Catcher in the Rye if, like me, you don’t get what the big deal is about it. And yes, that’s an old Kobo reader. Not to mention an appalling collection of shot glasses. I read to inoculate myself against my own brain. I keep up on the news, without falling into the dirty laundry basket. I read outside the idiot box. Idle, unchallenged neural synapses are the devil’s workshop. The Sovereignty Protocol (How to Take Back Your Power and Start A Revolution) If you have trouble focusing, remember: You’ve been trained not to. The Mucktrix abhors People Who Concentrate. If you’re not used to reading books, start slowly. Find an interesting book and commit to reading five minutes a day, at minimum. Or, if it has short chapters, one daily. If the book is boring, drop it. Find another. When you find one you like, read for five minutes or until you get fatigued. (Training fiction: James Patterson’s books are super-popular with extremely short chapters.) Then, read in public. Send the silent signal: I’m not one of The Scrollzombies. I think for myself! Embrace heterodox thinking: Read books that challenge you. Not simply ‘books that make you angry’. Those are for advanced readers who’ve built up resistance to outrage. If you’re on the left, read something a little right-wing, and vice versa. ‘Extremist’ books aren’t useful unless you’re trying to understand extremists (a laudable goal!) A really terrific book, in my opinion, is Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. (Two beers, Jon!) There’s plenty of well-researched, well-written food for thought no matter where you fall on the political spectrum. I promise you, you won’t hate ‘the other side’ as much as you did before, and you will notice a reduction in anger. If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,But make allowance for their doubting too;If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise…- Rudyard Kipling, ‘If’, courtesy of The Poetry Foundation Read. A. Book. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

There's a strong connection between suspiciously neurodivergent 'strange kids' in the 2000s' 'Indigo' mini-craze, and today's trans kids driven by parental status-seeking The beautiful white Star Children will lead us into a harmonic New Age. Or not. Pixabay public domain image by cocoparisienne If you were old enough in the ‘90s and ‘00s, when ‘progressive’ was still a respectable rebrand for ‘liberal’, you might remember the ‘Indigo children’ phenomenon. Especially if you were into alternative spritituality, like Paganism or the New Age. The Indigo concept is one chapter in the history of New Age parenting labels that entered the public eye via a whisper rather than a roar with the publication of a book by a self-described ‘synesthete’, one who claimed she could see peoples’ ‘colors’ via their auras. She claimed she’d begun seeing indigo hues around certain children. But two later authors, citing her initial observations, turned Indigoism into a late-stage New Age craze: 1999’s The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived by Lee Carroll and Jan Tober. Support Local Bookstores: You can find the titles mentioned in this post on my Grow Some Labia page. Every purchase supports independent booksellers (and this newsletter!). Amazing psychic abilities were attributed to these supposed ‘star children’, including a more deeply empathic feeling for others; they were said to be especially strong-willed; possessed a high IQ, had particularly intuitive senses, were viewed by others as fairly odd and, my personal favorite, possessed a strong feeling of entitlement and a resistance to authority. The culture arose, perhaps not-so-coincidentally, during the Millennial generation and progressive laissez-faire parenting techniques including an unwillingness to discipline or even say no to their children. ‘Crystal children’ and ‘Rainbow children’ soon followed, the post-Indigo ‘generations’. Believers attributed to these wunderkind telepathic, clairvoyant, and other psychic powers along with boundless optimism and lovingkindness. These ‘special kids’ exhibited certain behaviors: Creative but easily frustrated, delayed speech development, fearlessness; high-energy; optimistic. Claiming one of these children conferred special status in progressive/New Age communities. Pagan author Lorna Tedder claimed that practically every Pagan woman she knew who’d had a child or was expecting a child claimed it was an Indigo. Later ‘generations’, the Starseeds and the Diamond/Golden Others, embraced any child whose parents felt the desire for ‘special’ children. According to one uncritical website, “Indigo children can sometimes find it difficult to integrate into mainstream society, which leads to them being misunderstood, rejected, or misdiagnosed.” Misdiagnosed, indeed. Or, what we could today call ‘neurodiversity.’ The new ‘special children’ “There’s a terrifying conclusion for parents who were wrong: Indescribable psychic pain realizing they allowed their child to harm themselves.” Anyone who has followed the rise and current decline of the kiddie transgenderism craze recognizes the patterns: The status gain and ‘coolness’ factor of having a kid who’s different, outside the mainstream, completely misunderstood, ergo superior to your boring little not-above-average conformist. Instead of ushering in a peaceful New Age of Humanity (how’s that working out so far, Indigos?), ‘trans children’ were expected to usher in a new era of equality, with the smashing of gender stereotypes and the erasure of what they claimed was a ‘human construct’, biological sex. ‘Indigo children’ were said to possess an innate, pure, spiritual truth; ‘trans children’ are believed to possess a similar infallible ‘inner knowledge’. Both movements deify the child’s “inner truth.” They’re ‘aura’ and ‘gender’ become metaphysical. What connects the two cultures most closely is the chronic parental fear of having an ‘average’ child, or worse, one with diagnosed developmental challenges. Many parents from the ‘Indigo Age’ rejected diagnoses that their child had ADHD or a higher seat on the autism spectrum. Recognizing what wasn’t as well-understood thirty years ago hasn’t diminished the Indigo movement; neurodiversity has been incorporated into the spiritual belief system without rejecting the galactic fluff. It may be more difficult, though, for today’s parents of trans kids to do the same. They’ve argued the science is on their side from the beginning, yet now we know it’s not: The earliest ‘science’ was based on an admittedly flawed Dutch study and it’s been established for decades that most ‘gender dysphoric’ kids are gay. Evidence-based critiques of gender-affirming care, numerous global systematic evidence reviews, and especially the UK’s comprehensive Cass Review have all but debunked the transactivist claims to science. The trans True Believers more closely resemble Christian Creationists, clinging like barnacles to their cherished belief system. There’s a terrifying conclusion for parents with a ‘trans child’ they supported who now may be experiencing regret or real anguish: Indescribable psychic pain realizing they allowed their child to harm themselves—and that the gender critical, especially conservatives, who fought it all along, were right. Ironically, Indigoism, however quieter, survived to the modern day because its fundamental strength was faith. The lesson for social justice is that basing it in ‘science’ invites destruction. Plus, no one wants to give up the status in their social bubble. How LGB got their groove back: Welcoming T It’s cooler to be ‘trans’ than, frankly, boring old gay. It manifested in Hollywood, where actors and actresses, after years or decades of success, suddenly announced they were gay, to much media fanfare. Oh, how brave they are to come out in this homophobic world! But the attention began to peter out, especially after gay marriage’s 2015 Supreme Court decision, which ruled the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry and be recognized in all fifty states. With one Supreme Court decision, homosexuality suddenly lost its ‘cool’. Gay married couples proliferated, and homosexuality mainstreamed, about as comment-worthy as last night’s TV dinner. Hollywood, always ready to infect themselves with the latest cultural contagion, applauded actors who ‘came out’ as as ‘trans’ rather than gay. Like Chaz Bono, who us Boomers and Xers remember as Chastity on her parents’ 1970s TV show; Eliot Page, née actress Ellen Page; The Matrix’s Lana Wachowski and Orange Is The New Black’s Laverne Cox. Celebrity influence pioneered childhood gender identity emerging with those who became famous by transitioning: Jazz Jennings, whose mother is widely believe to have pushed her son into it; Shiloh Jolie; and proud (i.e.: Cooler than you) Hollywood ‘trans parents’ Naomi Watts, Robert DeNiro, Jennifer Lopez and Jamie Lee Curtis. Later, Bruce Jenner cemented the ‘coolness factor’ by ‘coming out’ as trans in 2015, advertising for the medical profession by appearing on the covers of Vanity Fair and Sports Illustrated. Alongside the adult influencers, the notion that children were ‘born in the wrong body’, particularly if they were embarrassingly effeminate or butch, gained traction with anxious progressive (and possibly homophobic) parents who ignored the long-established traits of likely incipient gay children to hie them off to the doctor to be ‘normalized’. They called it ‘gender-affirming care’ rather than what it was: ‘gay conversion therapy’. Virtue signaling and the parental status marker race ‘Indigo children’ were said to possess an innate, pure, spiritual truth; ‘trans children’ are believed to possess an innate ‘inner truth’ transcending parental assertion. Parents have always been in competition with each other, to have the smartest, brightest, fastest-developing, fastest-growing, superlatively excellent child. My next-door neighbor playmate was born three months after myself. When my mother reported to Benny’s mother that I had said my first word (on average, around 12 months), Mom heard the husband through an open window coaching his son to ‘Say Dada! Say Dada!” In the first year, infants develop at incredible speed but they have to master one skill before the next. They begin grasping toys around five weeks; they can (but don’t always) stop sleeping through the night around three months; begin eating solid food at six months; teethe at seven. At nine months, most babies can only babble, although a few can manage a ‘mama’ or ‘dada’. If one’s baby is developing later, and parenting anxieties set in, it becomes easier to rationalize one’s seemingly underachieving infant as an advanced, enlightened being. Hence the appeal of the Indigo and trans child with varying personality quirks, neurodiversity, or homosexuality, or who were simply victims of overly-permissive parenting. Like ‘entitlement.’ The culture of the ‘trans child’ confers greater physical ‘proof’ that one’s child is ‘exceptional’. By delaying puberty, administering cross-sex hormones, and letting kids live as cross-sex or who-the-fuck-knows, one’s child is ‘taking charge’ of their life and not ‘consenting’ to puberty ‘just happening’ when they haven’t made up their mind (or maybe they have) which sex they ‘choose’ to be. ‘Trans children’ often enjoy increased popularity in school and an end to bullying; it’s cooler to be a ‘trans boy’ than a lesbian girl. Affirming parents receive kudos and kowtowing as they virtue-signal how wonderfully tolerant and affirmative they are. A commenter on my recent article The Beginning Of The End Of Transgendermania told the anecdote of a woman she complimented on her tote bag who lit up and exclaimed, “My daughter is trans, and I'm just so proud to represent her anywhere I go,” to which another mother responded, “Congratulations!” Tote Bag Mom telegraphs how more hep she is than all those other unlucky moms and dads with gay kids who may yet grow up to give them grandchildren, because Mom and Dad affirmed their budding homosexuality rather than trying to ‘fix’ them. My child is more special than your boring happy-in-her-own-skin daughter or your embarrasingly heterosexual son who brought a girl to the prom. From vanishing labels to irreversible damage The tragic difference between ‘Indigo children’ and ‘trans children’ is that once they grew up and had to confront their own mediocrity, the former weren’t left permanently damaged, especially if they decided they didn’t want to be known as an Indigo any longer; they simply abandoned the label and perhaps chose not to speak of it further. All of this, for the eternal parental status marker race. Trans kids, on the other hand, are left with permanent scars and irreversible damage. Substack’s Aaron Kimberly detransitioned from lesbian to male and back again, only to find himself permanently looking and sounding like a man, and ostracized from the lesbian community (I had no idea just how brutal lesbians could be against those who leave the fold.) Today he’s chosen, mostly out of fatigue it seems, living as a man. (To be fair, he was in his thirties when he began). As detransition lawsuits wind through the courts and the frankly sensible Trump administration (on this issue, anyway) rolls back the special rights lobbied for by mostly transgender biological males, the glitter falls off the trans train, transgenderism loses its coolness factor and the pride of being a ‘trans parent’ may quickly turn dangerous. But humanity being what it is, an eternally status-seeking animal forever in pursuit of ‘better than thou’, it’s highly unlikely the lesson drawn will be, “Be grateful for your healthy, normal child,” with some new fad to latch onto to ‘prove’ one’s child is the future of humanity, and yours is a retro ‘average’ loser. At least until the regret sets in. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

These simple rules will dramatically improve your odds (and save you from unnecessary rejection) CC Image from tao alexis on Wikimedia Commons In this guide, you’ll learn: The 33-Minute Rule: Why your appearance is your best “opening line.” Reading the Room: How to spot facial cues and “stop signs” before you say a word. The Exit Strategy: How to handle rejection (or “drama queens”) with your dignity intact. I don’t fault a guy for trying. Last summer a man ran across the street to catch up with me. I cut to the quick— “If you’re hoping for a date, I’m seeing someone.” His face fell and I added, as I often do, “I think it’s great that you took the initiative to do what you did. It’s flattering. I hope you’re more successful next time. Keep trying!” He saves face, he receives honest praise from someone who just rejected him, and encouragement. His timing was terrible, not his fault: I was on my lunchtime break, and had less than ten minutes to get back to my desk. I hate making snap decisions. If I have to, and these guys always force me, the answer is invariably NO. He was too young for one thing, and, I’ll be honest, clearly from a culture with famously limited romantic skills. Mostly, I’m skeptical of younger men because they’re never looking for a relationship—with me. Had I had a little extra time, I might have chatted for a bit. Women need to get to know you first. This is a major reason why the ‘cold approach’ often fails. But first, let’s start with a dating etiquette baseline for gentlemen wanting to approach strangers they find attractive. You’re not a bad guy for trying to get a date The universal, organic truth about life: It exists to mindlessly perpetuate more life. Unicellular organisms and bacteria split themselves. The other 99% of life on earth is male and female, sometimes hermaphroditic, but always designed to perpetuate life. Males and females, in the flush of youth, are designed to dig each other, and to hook up, fall in love, and make babies. The traditional rules and guidelines may be supremely messed up right now, but heterosexuality persists. For those of you who aren’t hetero, it’s okay, you’re outliers. The human race won’t die out. Don’t listen to J.D. Vance. Life has only one objective, and it doesn’t care about your identity or your politics. Now, let’s talk about you, Hot Stuff! The only two things that actually matter The gentleman who sprinted through traffic sure got one thing right: He was dressed decently, in office clothes. Celeste Davis put it succinctly in her excellent Substack article about why dating is so hard, especially for men who, she argues, backed up by a lot of research, need women more than women need men, and always have. Women spend an average of 33 more minutes per day than men each day on their appearance. But given who should be trying to impress who more, it should be just the opposite. Men should be the ones who take an hour pruning, shaving and beautifying before dates while women should be the ones rolling out of bed a few minutes before. First lesson: Look better Cold approach: This is critical. Work with what you’ve got, even if you’re average-looking. Dress decently, stylishly (for yourself!), get a flattering haircut. Never be the least attractive guy in the room. First impressions matter. This is something I will probably have to repeat until the end of time, even though it’s an easy hack, since most men will never do it. Once you’ve stopped looking like every other faceless Average Joe, there are strategic ways to approach women you’d like to get to know with reduced drama risk. Second lesson: Be aware You must pay attention to social cues. What’s she doing? If she’s scrolling her phone, she’ll likely be less amenable to an intrusion. Is she facing away from others even if not on her phone? Also not an open sign. Is she wearing earbuds? If she removes one and listens to you, move forward. If she brushes you off, move on. Does she look like she’s in a good mood? If she’s frowning or pissed off, don’t approach. Ergo: Pay attention to facial cues You seek that quick smile of unconscious recognition when she first glances at you that she finds you attractive in some way, but don’t fret if you don’t get. It’s why you need to look better. Since Average Joes would be hard to pick out of a police lineup, a fleeting smile leaps the first hurdle. But, she may have a partner already, or she’s not on the market for some other reason. It’s not a stop sign. Try chatting with her anyway, because The Smile might come shortly. Don’t spend too much time if she’s only being polite or exhibits signs of annoyance or discomfort; move on. Now: How to chat her up without blowing it Start a conversation. You won’t always be successful, even if it sounds natural, as it must. It may be difficult, given the environment. Pay attention to facial and social cues. Last year a guy approached me commenting, “Hey, I like your sunglasses!” Lucky for him, I was trying to meet guys with my wild ‘n’ crazy conversation starter. Also, he was cute. If he’d looked like Mr. Blends-Into-The-Woodwork I probably would have kindly brushed him off. I’ve given the Average Joes plenty of opportunity to disabuse me of the lesson they taught me long ago: If they look boring, they are boring. Men who don’t take pride in their appearance send the message they’re unserious or apathetic about finding a partner. If they are serious, they work to make the best impression they can, rather than aimlessly casting their line into the water looking for someone who’s also willing to settle. Don’t comment on her clothes if they’re commonplace. This guy observed a clearly outstanding accessory. If they were average sunglasses I would have said “Thank you,” and kept walking. But if the object of your affection wears something attention-worthy, comment on it! Say, “I agree!” with a big smile, pointing to her slogan button. Or, “OutRAAAAAAGeous shirt!” Sunglasses Guy got twenty minutes of my time before I cut the convo short, and if he hadn’t asked for my phone number I would have asked for his. What men relentlessly don’t understand is that women need a little time to get to know you. I quite comfortably generalize here. It’s not misandry, guys. Danger is our lived reality. It’s mind-boggling how few men understand this. “Come on, get in the car, I’ll take you up to the mall, you don’t have to wait for the bus!” “No thank you,” she says. “What’s the matter? I won’t hurt you!” “Come on, I’m a violent serial rapist! I’ll drop you off at the mall!” said no stranger ever. If she scooches away from you—LET IT GO. It’s frustrating, but it’s better than making her fearful, and it’s not important whether her discomfort is you, wokeness, some past trauma or she has a boyfriend. It’s a negative signal to move on. Make it natural. Ask for directions. You might get that fluttery initial smile. If she doesn’t go back to her book or mobile, crack a joke about how you once got lost in your own apartment. If she laughs and smiles—keep it up. And natural. Don’t try to be super-clever, which is hard to do when you’re nervous. If you can keep the conversation going for several minutes, ask if she’d like to get together again. You might get turned down, or you might not, but you probably won’t get accused of systemically oppressing a female person with your phallocentric entitlement. Neil Strauss advised in The Game that rejection is how you get better at getting a yes. How not to talk yourself out of a yes I will assume you’ve dropped everything by this paragraph and gone through your closet and schlepped to the thrift store anything that makes you look stupid, invisible, or worst of all, like Adam Sandler. I will assume you’ve at least made an appointment for a good haircut. So now, here you are, looking better than you did several sections ago. Congratulations, we can see you better now! You might find you’re kind of cute or handsome, after all. I’ve seen men I thought unattractive appear with a great haircut and think, “How did I miss that? Oh, he was hiding it.” You now have another small leg up on most of your competition, except for the babe-a-ramas. Fortunately, not all women want one. Don’t ask her name upfront She knows what you’re doing. You’ve just informed her you don’t understand the need to chat her up first. She has to make a snap decision. You’ll get a yes only if she finds you attractive at first sight. Don’t start by asking personal questions See the previous paragraph. Don’t comment on her physical looks Ditto. Be wary of ‘woke’ or ‘social justice warrior’ signals. These women can be fairly tetchy, although not all, of course. Research consistently shows that young liberal women report higher levels of mental health distress than other groups, and sometimes expect potential dating partners to tick a lengthy list of ‘acceptable’ political and ideological positions. What if she goes viral-worthy on me? Oh. Them. The drama queens. Here’s how to handle rejection. Don’t pull out your phone and record her. It will just inflame her, and draw attention from others who haven’t heard the previous friendly interchange, and think you’re the asshole. Don’t get defensive or apologize. You did nothing wrong. When dealing with a bad or over-reaction, your job is to remain calm, and the most powerful thing you can do is walk away. Nothing looks worse for a crazy woman than a man who doesn’t grovel for forgiveness, and then shows her his receding backside. Have standards and boundaries. Don’t tolerate bad behavior. “Sorry I’ve caught you on a bad day,” and walking away will encourage anyone who’s watching to respect you more than her. It’s easy to assume ‘the crowd’ is a bunch of wokies in sympathy with her. But they’re a small albeit loud minority. Chances are, the crowd is peppered heavily with normies silently sympathetic to you. Snappy comebacks for drama queens Give her something to think about before you pull your head-held-high retreat. Remember: Finding women attractive isn’t a crime. “Wow. I didn’t think it was bad form to ask for a date when we seemed to be getting on so well, but a simple No would have sufficed.”“Sorry, I wasn’t being patriarchal. It’s my day off.”“I was just being social, not systemic. Have a nice day.”“Thank you for making it clear I just avoided a big mistake.”“You’ve mistaken a polite introduction for an act of aggression. Thanks for helping me dodge a bullet.”“All you needed to say was, ‘No thank you’. But now I have a great story to tell on Facebook tonight about crazy feminists!” Remind her that shaming works both ways. Only offer a snappy comeback if you can walk away after your zinger and leave her. Otherwise, you will be drawn into her drama and lose face. The simple rules most men ignore If this advice sounds pedestrian or common sense, I can assure you: IT’S NOT. Most men will research anything except “how to get a girl to like me”. What if incels stuck in ’80s movies spent their time Googling to better understand women, instead of moaning to each other about hypergamous females and hot chads? I’ll sum it up in three points: Look your best. Start a conversation. Move on and try again. Good luck! And if you’d rather not try, you might well have a future as a career criminal. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

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