The content we consume normalizes values and beliefs in our brains in ways we don't even know, whether good or bad. Thank Goddess I didn't listen much to Whitney Houston. Treat me right Treat me right Open your eyes Maybe you'll see the light Ooh-ooh Treat me right! Pat Benatar, Treat Me Right, from Crimes of Passion, 1980 My friend Diane and I were in love with Pat Benatar. Her second album, Crimes of Passion, contained several songs permeating FM radio overplay, Sony Walkmans and mall background music - Hit Me With Your Best Shot, Treat Me Right and You Better Run. She was a hard rocker chick with a take-no-shit, take-no-prisoners attitude whose vocal persona demanded better treatment from men. Perhaps Benatar was drawing on her recent divorce from by then ex-husband Nick Benatar, whose name she kept because, I’m guessing, it was a way better rocker name than her own, Andrzejewski. She married her guitarist, Nick Giraldo, in 1982, to whom she’s still married today. I don’t know from where she got all the relationship sturm und drang material since her autobiography didn’t indicate a long romantic history before or between marriages. Maybe she had a lot of romantically dissatisifed girlfriends. In college I listened to and sang along with Benatar incessantly in the car as I commuted to school. I knew all the words and I completely dug her power-chick attitude. I didn’t know much about boys, men, or dating, since I’d been an adolescent wallflower, but Benatar’s treat-me-right message intertwined with the lessons my mother taught me about domestic abuse: I decide whether I will allow myself to be abused or not. Domestic violence, at least as portrayed on TV, didn’t look like much fun, so I decided against it, and Pat Benatar’s music reinforced Mom as I danced in nightclubs and sang along. They drilled it into my brain: Abuse was a choice, whether we realized it or not. I’m 60 years old and to this day have yet to be hit or otherwise abused by a partner. Diane didn’t absorb the same message, and chose a different path. This is your brain on music “What was I listening to in college?” I thought as I listened to a podcast by Dina McMillan, my favorite anti-abuse advocate. I recently found her series named after her TEDx Talk, Unmasking The Abuser. On Episode 23, Protecting Your New Superpower, she speaks of her interview on the podcast Triggernometry, in which the host spoke of his love of gangster rap. McMillan informed him how important it was to protect his brain from toxic influences. How gangster rap glorified misogyny and violence and she explained how listening to such content normalizes its values - even if you’re not prone to violence and misogyny. I remembered my most formative college years as my brain ripped through the plethora of ‘80s songs and full-stopped at Pat Benatar. Well of course, I thought. Although Benatar’s music never addressed physical abuse apart from her PSA anti-child abuse anthem Hell Is For Children, the rest of her albums repeated and reinforced well into her middle age a personally powerful shape up or ship out message for relationships. In fact, by about the seventh or eighth album, I began to think, “Patty, isn’t it about time you abandoned the bad-boyfriend narrative? You’ve been happily married for thirty years!” I then remembered Whitney Houston, the entrancing drop-dead gorgeous woman with the incredible voice. Sometimes she aggravated me with toxic messages, particularly the execrable I’m Saving All My Love For You, about a woman crying that her married lover didn’t spend enough time with her. I hated that song. I didn’t like people who deceived and hurt others with extramarital love affairs, regardless of who was married or not. At 23, I recognized the glorification of an unhealthy dynamic every woman would be better off without. I felt little sympathy for the song’s character. Frankly, I wanted to slap some sense into her. Houston’s mother didn’t like the song either. Houston also recorded countless songs lamenting the loss of a love the persona couldn’t get over, and I didn’t like the message that it was okay to stay at home sobbing into your pillow because someone didn’t love you, or loved you no longer. We’ve all been through that but we didn’t influence millions of teenage girls and young women with our glorified pain. On the other hand, I could easily get behind How Will I Know If He Really Loves Me? and The Greatest Love Of All which begins, “I believe the children are our future—Teach them well and let them lead the way—” That one made me cry, often. Whitney Houston’s music centred human love, also including happy loving relationships. But maybe she too should have listened to Pat Benatar more, since she fell into an abusive marriage with singer Bobby Brown. Later, she ruined her looks with a horrific drug habit and died tragically too young, drowned in her own bathtub with some help from cocaine and heart disease. What your brain’s doing behind your back Dina McMillan had a bastard of a point about the messages we imbibe; we can accept them, as I did, or ignore them, as Diane did. She fell into a string of bad relationships and bad marriages, and several years ago vented her rage on Facebook. The tenor of her posts indicated she’d finally learned that abuse was a choice. It took until her fifties, but finally she got it. McMillan describes exactly what happens between our ears when we think we’re just enjoying a movie or a song espousing values we don’t consciously hold. She notes only 5%-8% of the everyday choices we make are actually made by the logical, rational parts of our brain. Those are the decisions we make when not under stress - when choosing a product in a store, or thinking about what we can do with a free weekend. But our emotional and memory-processing parts, the limbic system and reptilian part of our brain, control our autonomic nervous system, negotiate our environment, and drive our most primal reactions: Fear, anger, hunger and lust. And the logical part, she states, ‘might as well not even exist’. It shows up after the party’s over to offer 20/20 hindsight or retrospective rationalizations to justify our choices. She notes how illogically-operating brains drive social movements and politics, with our limbic and reptilian parts primed to encourage us to stick with the group, espouse what it preaches, fit in, support what’s being promoted in the countless mass and social media messages we receive all day long. They spread ideas, memes, and causes like wildfire and eventually teach us to embrace people, values and beliefs in direct contradiction with what we believe are the ways we should live our lives. Toxic, values-antithetical content is absorbed into a largely emotional brain that can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality like our logical, rational parts do. It’s inaccurately processed as an accurate reflection of the values of your group, even if you don’t realize it. It doesn’t mean watching violent porn will turn you into a sadistic rapist, but it could normalize misogyny, that you don’t even know is there, because you’re not like that guy. Or the vulnerable woman in the Whitney Houston song pining over her married lover. Fortunately, it’s not engraved in stone tablets. When I was in college I loved A Clockwork Orange. The book absorbed me with its message about the criticality of free will, and how bad people often eventually choose good, and shouldn’t have it forced upon them, as it was the antihero Alex, who agreed to a treatment he didn’t understand would remove his free will, then it was returned, along with his desire to harm others. Eventually he chose a better path, at least in the British version of the book, as the American publisher removed the last chapter. Stanley Kubrick’s movie was amazing in so many ways, but now I can’t stand the subtly smirking glorified violence against women, and can no longer explain it away by observing it was released in barely-feminist 1971. I don’t find Malcolm McDowell’s Alex sexy anymore in a way I did in 1983, conscious even then that he was a monster. I’ve spent the last four decades analyzing the appeal of the Bad Boy and how he’s best left in the realm of fantasy. Although even back then I would never have allowed an Alex into my life. In the ‘80s, we had only a few truly strong, powerful, action-oriented female role models like Pat Benatar or the Alien franchise’s Ellen Ripley, a courageous, badass hero in a role traditionally served by men. We caught a shade of Ripley in her predecessor Princess Leia when she ripped the blaster out of Han Solo’s hands, blasted a few stormtroopers, then an opening in the wall, and yelled, “Someone has to save our skins. Into the garbage chute, flyboy!” Later came Buffy, and Xena, and female Ghostbusters that made social media’s Insane Troll Posse’s heads collectively explode with female heroes who didn’t need men to save New York from ghosts and other supernatural scaries. I wonder what happened to all the ladies of the ‘80s who consumed the ‘wealth porn’ of the era. The decade was infused with the Gordon Gecko ‘Greed is good’ fixation; movies extolled horrible romantic and sexual ideals. Like that fat girls were to be mocked (Porky’s), that it was okay to trick women into having sex with you (Revenge of the Nerds), that near-kiddie softcore porn was okay (anything starring Brooke Shields), that an older woman seducing a teenage boy was less offensive than the reverse (Private Lessons), that it’s okay to hand over your drunk girlfriend to another guy (and you’re the cute guy hero Molly Ringwald snags, Sixteen Candles) or that you should end up with a guy who treats you like crap (Pretty in Pink). The very, very worst movie that exemplifies a woman pursuing a clearly toxic relationship and glorifying it was from the ‘90s - the utterly ludicrous As Good As It Gets, with Helen Hunt as a single mother chasing an unattractive, misogynist, misanthropic obsessive-compulsive writer (Jack Nicholson) for which they both won Best Actress and Best Actor Oscars. I left the theatre with my then-partner fuming. “Who the hell could ever fall in love with an asshole like that?” Feed your head In an era of violent porn, truthless social media and sourpussed ‘woke’ movies and books promoting poisonous ideologies bankrupt of any genuine ‘social justice’, we have to feed our brains as responsibly as we do our bodies. I started reading a dystopian non-fiction book called Survival of the Richest, and it was so depressing I gave up before I threw myself off my balcony. I switched to Helgoland, the last of my last-Christmas books, about quantum physics (I’m weird) and it was better but I still felt mired in mental mud. So I put it aside for Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching. Again. It’s my Bible. It starts: Please don’t think that because you are unhappy, because there is pain in your heart, that you cannot go to the Buddha. It is exactly because there is pain in your heart that communication is possible. Your suffering and my suffering are the basic condition for us to enter the Buddha’s heart, and for the Buddha to enter our hearts. I feel better, ready to meet the challenges I’m facing. What I must consider soon is how to be a social activist without allowing the news and the world’s growing inhumanity to ruin me. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing!

Cassidy Hutchinson learned the hard way. Let’s say Rex Heuermann, the accused in the Long Island Gilgo Beach murders arrested this summer, was out on bail and wanted to hire me for something. I wouldn’t take the job. Even without a conviction, he’d be the diciest of bosses ever. Danny Masterson? Wouldn’t work for him either. Even though, in both cases, I’m light-years outside their victim age demographic. How would I know Heuermann wouldn’t try to kill me? Or Masterson to rape me? I mean, these are two extremely sick individuals. Shouldn’t it be obvious that a woman shouldn’t work for anyone with these beastly Google results? Especially when a man is super-famous, and a well-established sexual predator? Apparently it wasn’t for Cassidy Hutchinson. She agreed to work for an infamous self-confessed pussy-grabber. Spoiler alert, Donald Trump never tried to grab her kittykat. But Rudy Giuliani did, during the Jan. 6 mayhem. Not to mention her titty-boo. Thus saith one of the investigation committee’s star witnesses in her forthcoming book Enough. As one might expect, the experience was pretty gross. Hopefully Rudy G didn’t spray—hair dye all over her. Vote with your—kitty Voting for sexual predators is one of many reasons why ‘rape culture’ persists. One can also vote with one’s pocketbook. Just how did R. Kelly get away with what he did for so long? We know a fair amount of white women, and an embarrassing chunk of Hispanic women, voted for Trump in 2016. Few black women did, but their numbers doubled in 2020. And Alabamans voted for famed mall predator and teen kitty hound, Roy Moore, y’all. I wonder if Cassidy Hutchinson voted for rape culture, too. She really shouldn’t be too surprised at what happened. She put herself in danger, old enough to consider whether Trump, or other predators in his administration, might come after her. (And they did). Instead, she seized the opportunity to work close to one of the most powerful offices in the world. I don’t know if she voted for Trump but she certainly supported him for four years. Was she ever on her guard? There’s no excuse for Giuliani’s behavior. The guy who infamously touched his own dick thinking he was about to get lucky with a journalist in Borat’s notorious movie scene bears full responsibility for his alleged actions against Hutchinson. I guess in the heat of the moment he felt the heat of the moment and stuck his hands under her clothes. Yeah, it had to be upsetting and disgusting. I can’t remember anyone ever doing that to me, although I’ve certainly experienced my share of grope-y, leer-y men. I can imagine, and sympathize with her. But damn, I wonder where her damn fool head was at! She’s old enough to know she’s got to be wary of male advances. She’s in her mid-twenties, and I doubt Rudy was the first guy to seek the Holy Grail in her Victoria’s Secret. So what did she think might happen if she was to work for a misogynist old pig like Donald Trump? His lechery, objectifying, and multiple trophy wives are legendary. She’s lucky she didn’t catch his eye. He’s been accused by a dozen women of rape, and a jury found him liable for ‘sexually abusing’ one and awarded her $5 million. No, the worst thing Hutchinson’s copped to so far is suffering the disgusting wrinkled old-man hands of America’s former 9/11 hero and now disbarred leaky ex-lawyer. I wonder if hotcha-hotcha Hope Hicks will ever spill any stories about Trumpian or related advances. I always wondered if she was hired for her skills or her looks. His ex-press secretary and now Governor of Arkansas Sarah Sanders likely has zero juicy stories like Hutchinson’s. The famously fat-phobic Trump brutally fat-shamed Sanders at least once. She collaborated in her own abuse when she agreed to work for the well-established misogynist who fat-shamed beauty queen contestants who failed to score high enough on his wank-meter. Any observant wannabe member of the Trumptourage should have recognized that she’d attract unwanted attention if she’s hot, and unwanted slurs if she’s not. What did Hutchinson think, that a guy like Trump would otherwise pick a bunch of fine, upstanding, mature men who understood that the only body that’s theirs is their own? By January 6th she’d learned he’d paid off a porn star to keep mum about their sexual affair while Melania nursed his newborn son, and E. Jean Carroll was making quite public her allegations that he’d raped her in a department store. St. Francis of Assisi he ain’t. You’re known by the company you keep, as an old college professor of mine liked to say. Hutchinson, along with many others, enabled and collaborated with a sexual predator in an environment that not surprisingly included others. Why did Hutchinson tolerate it? Why did she, on some level, think this was okay? Maybe her hyper-masculine he-man Master of the Universe father had something to do with it. According to Enough reviews, he once left her a ‘gift’ of two warm, bleeding deer hearts wrapped in tin foil in her mailbox. (Big surprise; her parents are divorced.) Daddy famously hated ‘wimps’ and demanded his daughter’s loyalty even as he cut her down at every turn. Maybe Trump seemed just like dear old dad, a fan of The Apprentice. Hutchinson wasn’t, supposedly, super-right-wing, and interned for Ted Cruz’s campaign only because he was the only senator who responded to her request. Hutchinson also admired Senator John McCain, but seemed to fall down the Republican nutbag rabbit hole fairly quickly. It’s possible her political views veered more to the right after putting in time for Ted Cruz, and reinforced her armor for dealing with crazy, misogynist men (Cruz is widely disliked by most who know him). I’ll read Hutchinson’s book when it comes out, but I’ll borrow it. She doesn’t deserve my money. Here’s why. I acknowledge and respect that she displayed a tremendous amount of courage spilling what she observed surrounding the January 6 events. How many of us would be willing to stand up to ‘Trump world,’ and tell the truth? She begged her Trump-addled father for support, which he gave, and put herself in danger of orange revenge. Still, she damn well owed it to the country after what she did. She supported and collaborated with his gutter administration and even was considering continuing his work at Mar-A-Lago until she realized that offer might not be forthcoming. So she didn’t learn much until she realized there was no future with him. (Her mother begged her not to go, noting that Trump would never change.) And what did we learn from this, young lady? We cut young people slack as adolescence lengthens with each successive generation. Millennials and now Gen Z endure perpetual childhood living with their parents, unable to find a good-paying job (defined as one you can live on) and home-owning dreams dashed, with nothing better to do than spew vinegar and venom online. It’s not all their fault; American education standards have slipped to new lows after the pandemic, diminished further by school lockouts and frazzled full-time working parents now expected to monitor whether schoolwork was getting done, and making sure Junior didn’t switch to the YouTube tab from his video class when adult supervision left the room. Cassidy Hutchinson was young but not dumb, getting into a good if unknown university, becoming a trusted aide to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, a man reportedly nonplussed at Capitol Hill rioters’ calls to hang Mike Pence. Trump thought he deserved it, Meadows told her, and that they were doing nothing wrong. She must have been good with political assassination, because she was still dreaming about a job in Florida. She endured what CNN describes oh-so-surprisingly as a primarily male environment of ‘casual sexism’ (I would have guessed ‘overt’), describing some creepy behavior from ex-House Speaker John Boehner and an attempt by Matt Gaetz to get her alone. (Kinda weird; isn’t she way too old for him?) Hopefully she can think for herself more now, and make moral decisions based on better character rather than a plum assignment for a beyond-question psychopathic megalomaniac. Has she self-examined yet to wonder WTF was I thinking? or has she not yet clued in to the connection between misogynist, predatory behavior and ‘rape culture’, especially her own contribution to it? I say the same for women who work for Donald Trump as I say for those who work at Hooters: No one has the right to sexually assault you, but working there gives them tacit permission. Any all-male environment should carry a heightened wariness for women, and in an unfair world they have to be prepared for the ‘cold finger up her thigh’ or the hand down her blouse. But when she’s serving an established sexual predator, she collaborates with that misogynist culture and implicitly suggests she’s okay with it. It’s called ‘rape culture collaboration’. It’s not just a guy thing. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing!

White people can be committed to genuine social justice if blacksplainers stop making it so hard to be allies. I’ve been learning a lot about the relative whiteness—or not—of the United States this year. I’m working on a multicultural-focused sales campaign and before I call smaller regional U.S. companies, I check first to see how diverse their community is. If they say they’re not interested, I’ll have a good idea why. I'm getting a feel for how pervasive the U.S.’s dandelion-seed demographic diversity is, clumpy in some areas, more homogenous in others. It can be crazy-making if you look too closely. A small town like Humble, Texas is far more diverse than I would have guessed, or maybe heavily white, depending on how you look at it. One could argue it’s almost equal parts black, white, and Hispanic, or perhaps white as fuck, with White (Hispanic) at 30.6%, White (Non-Hispanic) at 23.6%, Black at 31.3%, mixed+ (Hispanic) and Other (Hispanic), the rest. White is white except when it’s not? What the hell is a ‘White (Hispanic)’ anyway? If Hispanic is a category, and white is a category, then how are you white if you’re Hispanic, or vice versa? What, because you ‘pass’? Is Ted Cruz not a White Hispanic because he looks suspiciously arroz con maiz-ish? Or does he have to ‘identify’ as white? That won’t work, being white is one of the few identities you don’t get to assume, because you don’t decide if you’re white. Others do, like it or not. Other communities are a massive old-school typo correction fluid spill: South Beach/Florida, Madison/Maine, Presquille/Lousiana and Terre du Lac/Missouri. Rhode Island, our smallest state, is super-pervasively multicultural, not just ethnically but LGBTQ-wise too: Ayuh, wicked good! But on the othah hand, the uppah New England states, ya cahn’t get theah from heah, ayuh, they’re a blizzahd of white people - Vuhmont, Maine and New Hampshah ah all at 92%-ish white. If it weren’t for all the mountains, you could go blind driving through any of these states on a bright summah’s day. We do love our human constructs, don’t we? Progressives argue race is a ‘human construct’; the biology of racial differences only existing because we buggered off from Africa. White people seem like we’re the Lord God Kings and Queens of the Universe because, from the North American perspective, we clearly dominate. Until about 2044 anyway. But we’re fast-tracking to a more multicoloured state of the disunion. Some white people are happily moving aside, while others get a sharp elbow, to make room for more seats at the table, which looks decidedly less Norman Rockwell-ish than decades past. I mean, when three black women are bringing down the most powerful white man in America, it gets grating when certain voices in the ‘antiracist’ movement, clearly steeped in critical social justice theory’s obsession with privilege, slavery and white supremacy, carry on as though we’re still the Masters of the Universe, cracking the whip over Uncle Tom. “I will not be bullied,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James. “And so Mr. Trump is no longer here. The Donald Trump show is over.” When she’s done with him, and she’s put up with some hellacious abuse, racism and threats against her and her family, Fulton County District Prosecutor Fani Willis is waiting in Georgia to follow up on a baker’s dozen of felony counts connected to Trump’s conspiracies to steal the 2020 election. Thank Ms. Willis for that awesome, historical, already iconic mug shot meme bait no white man ordered. After that, Judge Tanya Chutkan is waiting for Trump in D.C. for the special counsel’s election case against him. It’s gotta be killing the half-senile ex-businessman that black women now hold so much power over him, after putting up with former old white lady Nancy Pelosi pwning him for four years. White power ain’t what it used to be, no, not even after Charlottesville. Black Antiracists ‘Splain Things To Me Some black activists love to blacksplain whiteness, white privilege and white supremacy. I may never understand fully what their lives are like, since I’m not on the receiving end of genuine systemic racism and, occasionally, real white supremacy, but they don’t acknowledge they can't know what our lives are like, either. They miss the ultimate intersectionality: The individual. Intersectionality explores the layers of oppression and marginalization people suffer - e.g., white women are oppressed by gender, black women are oppressed by gender and race, gay black women are oppressed by gender, race, and heteronormativity, etc. Take this cumulative song far enough - and the progressive left can always be counted on to ride the oppression train over the earth’s edge - and you’re left with the intersectionality of the lone stranger. No white person can understand the ‘black experience’, and neither can any given black person fully understand or appreciate the unique experience of any other black person, who came to where they are not just by skin color but also by different birth, families, education, immigration, personal tragedies and experiences, religious upbringing or not, neighborhoods lived in, class, economics, playmates, friends, cliques, dates, adult relationships, decisions, life choices, health, hopes and dreams. We really all are, ultimately, individual snowflakes. And if we can’t literally comprehend living another person’s experience, we are all human beings, our default brains differing less than our melanin levels, and, apart from psychopaths, largely skewed towards empathy and understanding for others. Even babies as young as six months show an ability to empathize with another being victimized or suffering distress. A Parenting Science article notes that ‘babies prefer underdogs and do-gooders’ which I find tremendously heartening: The real value of social justice may be ‘baked into’ our brains at birth, hopefully not to be destroyed later by toxic ideologies and idiot compassion. Suffering, marginalization, bullying, discrimination, and tragedy are human experiences we all share. I can feel kinship, as a white woman, with a black man who keeps losing jobs to suspiciously less-qualified white men, since I was looking for a job a few years ago at a time when anyone over fifty was considered hopelessly over-the-hill for any position in information technology. Biological discrimination sucks regardless of whatever reason the Automatic Trash System is shit-canning your resume. White people are not, regardless of what ‘woke’ huckstervists claim, automatic supremacist oppressors by dint of birth. ‘White supremacy’ is real, a consciously-adopted belief that white-skinners are given dominion over all the earth by God, as evidenced by the fact that Adam was white. You have to agree to the belief. When black activists tell us we’re unconsciously oppressing black people, even if we’re not actively doing it by choice, and there’s no way we can ever stop because we’re as hopelessly enmeshed in the white supremacist network as flies in a web, it makes many wonder what’s the point of getting a street gang together armed with broomsticks to tear the damn thing down. Why bother trying to change anything? Why shouldn’t white people just throw up our hands, say fuck it, and leave for the gender reveal barbecue and marshmallow roast? The Color Of Money Not everyone believes in the eternity of white supremacy, or black helplessness. I can even make a case for being more oppressed than Ibram X. Kendi, but it’s as stupid an argument as that I am oppressing black people simply by existing. The most powerful color privilege isn’t found in your skin; it’s the green in your bank statement showing how many zeroes following a whole number exist in your balance. I’m not sure what Kendi’s net worth is but I can honestly swear I’ve never earned $20,000 an hour for a virtual presentation on anything. And Kendi doesn’t even have to know much to make that kind of scratch; he just has to trash talk white people in a way that would get a white person talking about black people cancelled the hell off Elon’s X Twitter. I guarantee you Kendi’s words have far more pull than mine. I may be whiter than he but his bank account is a lot greener. He has clout and influence I don’t, despite being black. Despite having ancestors owned and abused by others. Despite not being part of an alleged racial supremacy secret off-Davos enclave. Of course, by dint of his penis, he is still part of The Patriarchy (dun-dun DUNNNN!) So he does oppress me too, without even knowing it, I guess! Ain’t nobody got time for that! I have no patience with racism. I have no use for Trumpers, and I have no truck with whiny powerful black people teaching other black people to give up on the system, or burn it down, or most of all, to embody the problem they claim they want to solve. I especially circumvent racists who demonize others as irreparably evil because of our skin color. I can ponder genuine justice, and join with those black activists who believe, as I do, that the oppressed must take charge of their own lives, and develop themselves without expecting the Dominant Group (white people, or men) to hand everything to them. Shelby Steele made that point over and over again in his classic work The Content Of Our Character: Black people must continue to fight for social justice, but it’s up to them to develop themselves; white people can’t do that for them. That’s how I feel about Da Patriarchy, which occupies very little space in my brain. The Patriarchy, and white supremacy, have only as much power as we allow them to have. That’s why my website is Grow Some Labia and not Why Men Suck. Because it’s time for all of us to take back our power and join together to make the world a better place than the small minds of extremism and bigotry can conceive. As Sweet Brown famously uttered in her viral YouTube video, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” I heartily concur. We’ve got real work to do. Disempowered whiners, get out of the way! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing!

Step One: Get Over Yourself I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I am still an asshole. Just not the kind that starts wars on Facebook. Anymore. I still lose it sometimes elsewhere, but I’m working on that too, realizing how deeply emotionally and psychologically traumatized so many of my adversaries are, particularly the ‘woke’ with whom I regularly do ideological battle. I’ll admit my reasons for toning myself down are more selfish than altruistic: Life is much more pleasant when you’re not an easily-triggered asshole. I’m still an asshole in many other ways, but I do go through life less prone to ‘losing it’. When I get emotionally triggered the reaction is more choppy-day-on-the-ocean than The Perfect Shitstorm. If you haven’t tried this anger management thing, I highly recommend it. It’s awesome! It takes awhile, I admit, and requires a lot of lurking with assholes. I call it ‘exposure therapy’. The masses call it ‘Twitter’ or now, ‘X’. Hijacked When your brain’s limbic system is ‘triggered’, the more primitive part of your brain (go figger) overrides your more modern cerebral cortex, where logic and thinking reside (or are supposed to anyway). It’s slower to react than the limbic system’s amygdala, the brain’s drama queen that stores a lot of memories of every awful thing anyone ever said and did to you. It’s also where your fight-or-flight instincts reside, and when it goes into hyperdrive, it gets ‘hijacked’ in neuro-scientific parlance, or in layman’s terms, ‘goes totally apeshit.’ So, your stupid sister makes another nasty crack about the size of your ass or some anonymous coward shares a ‘funny’ meme (ha ha) making fun of a breastless ‘transman’ and your amygdala goes into righteous hyperdrive. It literally happens before you know it. Then right after, maybe you feel badly about the way you reacted, if for no other reason than you gave your sister or that other dipshit the satisfaction of knowing they got to you. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just put your cortex front and center, since your amygdala is such a freaking nutcase? I mean, yeah, you need your amygdala’s whip-crack reaction for when a polar bear is about to eat you (probably not a problem in your area, but I live in Canada and they theoretically could come down to Toronto and turn me into human sushi). Your ‘myg keeps you safe, for the most part. Then you get on Twitter or Facebook or you get the latest news on Trump’s alleged and confessed crimes, and you turn into a flaming asshole. So here’s how I’ve been working on reducing my Inner Asshole. Lesson #1: People who disagree with you aren’t necessarily evil Something had to give. I’d started another fight on Facebook, I forget over what. Politics, most likely. I don’t expect others to agree with me but if they say stupid shit, my amygdala goes nuclear. But now I periodically remind myself: I don’t know everything. I’m not the ultimate arbiter of morality. Or reality. My opinions aren’t 100% right just because they’re mine. Once I got over my boundless expertise on everything, I could… Lesson #2: Expose myself (silently) to genuinely stupid people Once I recognized I might not know everything, I had to acknowledge there existed others who were unquestionably, demonstrably, indisputably wrong. This is where exposure therapy to Twitter, Ground Zero for emotional shitstorms and those with the self-awareness of a clam, came into play. I lurked on Twitter but responded to nothing. No matter what I read. I found the people I couldn’t stand the most and read their dumbass, awful, racist, misogynist, soulless, anti-American, scumsucking tweets and tweeted nothing. At first I could only do this for a few minutes. As soon as I was just DYING to set some hyper-moron straight, I went, “Okay, that’s enough, let’s go read a book.” I hung out with terrorists, incels, victim feminists, SJWs, racists, overprivileged black people, gun owners, pacifists, science deniers, tightassed atheists, Democrats, Republicans and Trump groupies. I’m triggered by everybody. We Are The Murky Middle: The enemy to all Eventually I could disengage at the sight of a truly abysmal opinion. My brain rewired to just deal with it. These blobs o’ water and goopy fat between our ears are ‘neuroplastic’, meaning they constantly wire and rewire, and we have more control over that than we know. Particularly in regards to getting angry. It’s a choice, you come to realize. When our ‘myg gets hijacked, the cranial slop controls us, not the other way around. I stopped to think before I posted on Facebook. Sometimes I’d be deliberately provocative, but now I paid attention to phrasing. I’d think, “Am I ready to take the shit for this one?” Who was most likely to get mad? How much did I really stand behind this opinion? Sometimes I’d hit Post and think, “Tomorrow night, remember not to get hijacked by the responses.” The next evening I’d stop, take a deep breath, and think, “Remember, respond calmly and rationally.” I mostly did. One night I got blindsided by an angry comment I wasn’t expecting. My amygDalai Lama reacted, this time with a mildly pissed wave rather than a spike. That’s when I knew I was making real progress. Lesson #3: Rethink the news I concluded something else: The news, which I’d cared about almost all my life, had to go, or at least I had to stop reading CNN. It served little purpose other than to turn me into an asshole about people and events I couldn’t affect. But, I believe we have an obligation as citizens to keep up on what’s happening in the world. Further self-examination into my triggered reactions revealed that my two main news sources, CNN for American news and the Toronto Star for Canadian news, while mostly factual, were both too emotionally slanted and biased, and just reading the headlines could spike both my brain and blood pressure. Really, was it news anymore when Donald Trump polluted social media with his very existence? Even worse, he worked to destroy democratic institutions with cheerleaders in cheap Chinese-manufactured red ball caps, and flags they used at night to wipe their butts when they were out of U.S. Constitution toilet paper. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Except vote, up here in Canada. Bye-bye, CNN and Toronto Star, you hysterical drama queens! I’ve replaced both countries’ news media with less biased, less emotional primary sources. Life without apeshit I still get mad. I still get triggered. I especially can’t stand having to define ‘woman’ for the freaking brain-dead ‘progressive’ left. The benefits of training your brain not to be an asshole — and remember, it is a choice — are multiple: No more anger spikes that leave you pissed off for twenty minutes (the average length of time it takes for your amygdala to just freakin’ chill, dude) or longer if you’re the type who just can’t let something go. Reduced susceptibility to heart attack, depression, high blood pressure, anxiety, and not getting invited to good parties. You choose your words more carefully and start fewer fights. You can virtue signal to yourself that you’re less of an asshole than those other assholes. You get a lot more done and enjoy greater relations with your loved ones when you’re not saying things to trigger them. Random assholes you don’t know don’t bother you as much. Fuck ’em. I still piss people off. I still sometimes say and do the wrong things, or react in anger. Then I think, “Why did you let him/her/them/it get to you?” Good question to ask yourself: Why do I care? For sure, I’m no Pollyanna when it comes to expressing my opinions, which remain controversial in some circles. I’m okay with that. But, I’m not pissing people off as much, and I’m okay with that too. And sometimes, they get pissed off because I stated a truth backed by evidence that contradicts some narrative they hold. Reality. Deal with it, mes amis. Assholery for the masses Being an asshole has become so commonplace it’s practically the national pastime. Our last president was a world-class asshole and we can’t say we didn’t know; he became a popular reality TV star being an asshole who fired people for our entertainment. Everyone who ever knew him or worked with him (or, God help them, for him) in New York knew what an asshole he was. It’s entirely possible his handful of supporters that bothered to show up at the courthouse in New York for his first indictment was only because everyone else was still pissed he’d never paid them. He appeals to a large swathe of assholes in America who’ve collectively decided democracy sucks and authoritarianism is better. They’re challenged and resisted by assholes on the left who hate everything about them but nevertheless agree with them about democracy and authoritarianism. I meet new people and I’m immediately on guard in case they’re assholes. Will they yell at me or walk away for being an asshole who said something they didn’t like? How can you be comfortable with someone when you’re worried they might suddenly turn into an asshole? I mean, assholery is the real pandemic in North America. I’m careful what I say on social media because I’ve been deplatformed three times and counting by transactivist assholes who thought I was an asshole for challenging their narrative. (Assholery is in the eye of the beholder, after all.) And one asshole tried to get me in trouble with my employer. Friendships break up and family members become estranged because some asshole holds a political opinion the rest of the assholes in his family disagree with. But future generations can perhaps avoid this tragedy by reading a book called How To Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes. A new university is fighting back against widespread academic assholery by putting truth before DEI and ‘safetyism’, making honest debate, critical inquiry, and rational thought central to what it aspires to offer: A good education, which should scare legions of student assholes whose constipated view of the universe may now go challenged by reason-wielding assholes. We have to fight the assholes ruining the world. We have to stop the Asshole Revolution, beginning with the Asshole Within. Because we can’t be the problem we seek to solve. I urge you, if you haven’t already, to get over yourself and stop being an asshole, kind of in the way Christians ever-strive to be more like Jesus. We, too, can ever-strive to be less of an asshole than we are. It’s probably unrealistic for me to believe I’ll ever reduce myself to Dalai Lama-levels of assholery, but I’ll settle for Oprah-level. I can die peacefully if I can believe I’m only an Oprah-level asshole. I hope you want to stop being an easily-triggered asshole too. If you can’t do it for others, do it for yourself. Like a selfish asshole! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

When we hold 'merit' beliefs, we can kill our 'little darlings' and change our minds when confronted with newer or better evidence I listened to the experts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Particularly to Dr. Fauci. I supported lockdown, masks, and social distancing (with some initial bitching). Young, badass COVID-19 circled the pre-vaccines globe killing millions, especially those who resisted preventive measures, and I didn’t want to deepthroat a giant metal phallus while I gasped out my last. Sure, I knew global extreme efforts threw billions into uncertainty and chaos. I watched the economy grind to a halt, along with my infant freelance writing business just as my employment insurance ran out. I sympathized with those suddenly unemployed, especially in the U.S. with little left of the safety net, run by a lying, narcisisstic halfwit who thought injecting disinfectant would send everyone back to work after Memorial Day. I survived The Plague and by the time I finally lost my ‘VID virginity, the worst physical affliction was the thoracic muscular fatigue from coughing that lasted longer than the infection. I stayed inside for five days except to take out my garbage, and I was a good citizen and masked up outside my apartment five days after the symptoms went away, in accordance with the latest decrees from Health Canada. Today I listen to skepticism and questioning from all quarters as to whether all those preventive measures, especially lockdown, did more damage to economies, families, children’s educations and our collective future than they protected. It’s hard to sort truth from fiction anymore, and especially fact from hack. I want to read or see a balanced exploration of what we did right, what we did wrong, what we could do differently next time around. Sure, even tell me what Da Right got right and what I got wrong. But one thing I feel confident about. If I was wrong to trust the experts as much as I did—I’ll accept that. And I’ll change my mind with newer, solid evidence. Crony vs merit beliefs Author and scientist Kevin Simler, who wrote The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, compares our beliefs to employees in a company. Some are ‘crony’ hires, maybe nepotistic or as a favor for a friend, so they weren’t necessarily the best possible candidate. That employee might be awesome, good enough or they might be less than stellar. The ones chosen out of a pool of candidates, short-listed and interviewed further, with one designated the ‘best’, were chosen for their merit and are statistically better positioned to be more productive and beneficial to the company. Merit is based in reality. Therefore, ‘merit’-based beliefs are formed from all available evidence, versus ‘crony’-based beliefs—what makes us feel good or look good to others, just as hiring the not-necessarily-the-best candidate might make one feel good that they’re cutting someone a break, returning a favor or helping out a friend. Crony beliefs are more bound to our self-image, and therefore are more likely to be inaccurate, and difficult to uproot if they prove to be wrong. We all hold crony beliefs at one time or another, and on some level we’re aware they’re kinda fragile, laced with contradictions, uncertainty, and questionable origins. We don’t like to examine them too closely and we don’t want to discuss them with those who might come up with an argument we can’t refute. We’re defensive about our little darlings. They serve us, and we won’t give them up easily. Common crony beliefs include the conspiracy theories my lefty friend believes, and who lost his temper when I challenged him, asking for evidence. On the right, crony beliefs frequently connect to Donald Trump - that he’s the world’s biggest victim of political persecution, that the last election was ‘stolen’ from him, that more dead people voted for Joe Biden than appeared in Zombieland. Perhaps the most pervasive, and clearly untenable crony belief of the left is the near-dictatorial public speech freeze on criticizing or questioning transgender narratives: That people can simply ‘identify’ away their birth sex (but not cross-racially), that transwomen are the same as real women, and that Will ‘Lia’ Thomas has no appreciable physical advantage over his teammates. Because, like, he took female hormones or something. If you really want to start a fight with your favorite ‘woke’ progressive, point out there’s no science behind gender-affirming care for kids. There’s a moral apocalypse barrelling down the hill for the progressive left, and I fully expect their response will greatly resemble the clinging religious devotion to its discredited beliefs we now see with the right’s dogged devotion to Donald Trump. While Team MAGA plots Jan. 6th, Part Deux, whether Trump wins in 2024 or not (either way libs are going down), zero evidence also won’t pry the belief from the wokes’ cold dead brains that puberty blockers are just dandy for normal kids undergoing a normal adolescent physical transition. The lure of the virtue signal The number one reason why we cling like barnacles to our unhealthy, discredited, crony beliefs is we hate to be wrong. Especially when ‘those assholes’ are clearly right. The ‘assholes’ for the Donald Trump contingent are the Democrats and their liberal voters, and those for Team Trans are the Republicans and their conservative voters. Now, the right has a long history of antagonism to evidence, as detailed in the book The Republican War on Science. They, like many others, cherry-pick what conforms to their confirmation biases. The Religious Right shares much of the blame for the idiocrasizing of the Republican Party. Fundamentalist religion is almost 100% crony beliefs, at least some of which are demonstrably wrong, like the Creationist story or the tale of Joshua commanding the sun to stand still, based on the erroneous belief at the time that the sun revolved around the earth. Belief in a 100% inerrant Bible requires a hell of a lot of cronyism. It’s why QAnon seized the far right so seamlessly. QAnon appeals to that willingness to believe anything that fits the narrative, rather than any genuine commitment to truth. The left’s comparable fanatical devotion to the trans movement will not likely disappear once the truth comes out about the futility of truly changing gender. Relinquishing their crony beliefs will be intolerable, an admission that those ‘idiot Republicans’ were right and the left was wrong all along, opening them up to the accusation they’re ‘anti-science’ and challenging their conceit that liberals are the science supporters. Mostly, but not always, and less often today. The ‘woke’ are riven with many other crony beliefs but they’re not as virulent nor will they be as subject to direct contradiction as the immutability of sex. The belief that ‘white supremacy is baked into everything’ is a widespread opinion, and will remain so. ‘White supremacy’ is intangible, like ‘The patriarchy’. Both function more as a collective conceptualization of harmful beliefs, values, and a documented history of sexist oppression, and we’ll continue to debate how pervasive it is, but beliefs aren’t immutable. They’re also frequently wrong. To commit ourselves to truth and reality, we must make sure we don’t embody the problem we seek to eliminate. I’m willing to rethink what I believed about the pandemic if I’m proven wrong about how we could have handled it differently without lockdown. (President Obama tried to warn us about the need for pandemic preparedness in 2014, but no one inside or outside the government cared to discuss it.) To change my mind on the lack of vaccine efficacy I’ll require the newest scientific evidence and some logical, rational arguments for what we did wrong. I’m okay with changing my opinion if anyone can provide real evidence. I strive always to kill my little darlings. It’s not about ‘being wrong’; it’s about being as right as I can be given the evidence available. For example, I was quite, quite, QUITE certain the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 election, but Robert Mueller’s final report admitted that while there was evidence of conspiracy, he couldn’t establish it as conclusive fact. He also stated “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Regardless of how I feel about the Russia-Trump Election Collusion, I also know ‘gut feelings’ work best when you’re in danger rather than evaluating evidence you strongly identify with. I won’t state publicly Team Trump colluded with Russia. I may feel it in my bones but I acknowledge the Mueller Report failed to draw a conclusion. Free at last….free at last! The way to self-check for a crony belief is to observe how defensive it makes you feel. Do you want to discuss it with others, especially people more knowledgeable than you? Share it on social media? Do you feel a topic is ‘not up for debate’, and if so, why? Understandable if the premise is, The United States should abolish the 13th amendment and return legal slavery. Less so for Vaccines kill more people than they save. If a respectable source can provide real evidence the Fauci Ouchie has killed hundreds of thousands of people, I’ll listen. But not to Alex Jones or Mike Lindell or a semi-literate Facebook ranter. Very few of our most divisive topics are as truly undebateable as ‘legalize slavery’ so the rest are, in fact, up for debate. Those who want to shut them down are on very shaky ground and they know it. Here’s the beautiful thing about being willing to relinquish your ‘little darlings’; you may not realize how limiting and self-imprisoning your beliefs are until you let them out of their cage. Killing your ‘little darlings’ and moving on to a better explanation heralds a happier, more honest mental outlook. A Substack newsletter I subscribe to recently carried the story of a progressive-minded lesbian who experienced a ‘crisis of faith’ when she realized she’d been wrong to allow her son to transition. “My entire belief system crumbled,” she wrote. “I feared losing my entire tribe, all of my friends. I even feared losing my marriage. I had to slowly pick up the pieces, and reintegrate my sense of reality, my values, identity and beliefs.” But, she rekindled familial connections and rediscovered joys she loved that she’d given up when she was taught they were ‘oppressive’. Crony beliefs are cages. I used to pity on some level the fundamentalist Christians with whom I engaged in verbal battle in a New England community newspaper, sorry that these anti-scientists couldn’t appreciate the glorious universe we’d been given, whether by God or happenstance. I felt badly for the writer struggling with the desire to masturbate because he believed an invisible deity prohibited it for illogical reasons. They’re self-imprisoned, along with the QAnoners, the xenophobic Trumpers and now, more every day, the fading progressivism of the ‘woke’ left with its hidebound, useless, hopeless dogmas. The most oppressed person each one knows is in the mirror. They oppress themselves and others when they believe it’s more important to feel good and virtue-signal than to be factually correct, with a high penalty of feeling bad about one’s self if they’re smacked upside the head with a clue-by-four. Freedom of belief is our cherished First Amendment privilege, but perhaps freedom from belief is the greatest freedom we can possibly know. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Did you know you even have any? And that not all death threats are equal? Or that not all stalkers are serious threats? I don’t know why some women can’t or won’t recognize the red flags of abusive, crazy-ass men, but even when a therapist draws them a road map to imminent, fatal destruction, these women follow their heart rather than their brain, knowing they possess bad judgement. Even after the therapist explains exactly how it’s badly skewed by abuse. Nicole Brown Simpson’s therapist’s road map led to a splattered walkway and a frightened, confused dog. Nicole’s insanity also sucked in an innocent person. Nicole knew it was coming. She updated her will a month before the infamous deed. She also had to suspect the end might come at knifepoint rather than by gun. She’d said she thought dying by knife had to be the worst way to die. One wonders if she shared that with O.J., or someone told him. Despite all her therapy, despite all the books she’d read including one that described O.J. down to the last cell of his narcissistic, violent self, despite clear warnings she was in danger of getting murdered, Nicole walked with eyes wide open to her death. I’m glad he didn’t decide to send the kids along with her - or kill them and not her. Colluding with the enemy I moved from Raging Heart: The Intimate Story of the Marriage Between O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson to Gavin de Becker’s now-classic book The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence. De Becker is a leading expert on violence prediction. His large consulting company advises clients on how to predict and avoid violence, and just as importantly, to determine when one is in, and not, in real danger. Not all death threats are serious. He designed his MOSAIC Threat Assessment to analyze threats to U.S. Supreme Court Justices. De Becker himself was raised in a violent home. Instead of becoming an abuser, he chose the path of violence prevention. The book is a great segue from one on America’s most committed violence victim. It’s quite clear some women don’t understand male violence doesn’t just come from nowhere; they ignore countless signals. Some women simply can’t or won’t learn. Women no longer have much excuse. There’s been too much public discussion of spousal battery, too many publicized deaths, too many talk show discussions, and examples of celebrities suffering or causing abuse. Yet still, feminists and anti-abuse advocates resist exploring ways women can self-protect and self-acknowledge their own personal power. The conversation MUST change from Don’t blame the victim to Don’t BE the victim. It harms women by encouraging helplessness to teach them men are solely responsible for abusive relationships. Men are solely responsible for their own behavior; women bear responsibility for protecting themselves, and their children. It was gratifying to read a major expert saying out loud what I’ve been saying for years: Women are victims the first time a man hits them. After that, they’re volunteers. Thank you! Thank you, Gavin de Becker! Victim feminists won’t listen to me; since they give all their power to men, maybe they’ll listen to someone with a penis. He also notes the importance of mothers in violence prevention for their daughters. He asked one mother who’d most recently suffered three broken ribs from her husband what she’d do if her teenage daughter was beaten up by a boyfriend. “Well, I’d probably kill the guy, but one thing’s for sure: I’d tell her she could never see him again.” “What is the difference between yourself and your daughter?” de Becker asked. The lady offered a lot of silly-ass excuses for her husband’s behavior, in the grand tradition of compliant victims, so de Becker rejoined with this: “The difference is that your daughter has you—and you don’t have you. If you don’t get out soon, your daughter won’t have you either.” Finally the scales fell from her eyes: She lacked the self-protection element she offered to her daughter. Some women have someone in their corner like that, if not a mother. Nicole Brown Simpson’s therapist tried to convince her to stay alive, that it would be suicidal to go back to O.J., but she didn’t listen. Abused women, even before they’ve been abused to the point of compliantly marching toward death, often don’t listen to others. They listen to their hearts—or their egos—rather than their brains. De Becker says it out loud: Staying is a choice. If we acknowledge how much choice women have every step of the way, then they can recognize leaving as a choice and an option, and hopefully sooner than “He’s on the verge of killing me.” Let me quote some of the other things this man says that vindicate me. I’ve never claimed to be the first to say them, but I do feel sometimes like I’m shouting into a maddening crowd of lobotomized feminists. “Whoever we blame, there is some responsibility on both sides of the gender line, particularly if there are children involved.” Yes! Yes! Yes! I’ve refuted the argument over the years that domestic violence is ‘no one else’s business’. Violent men sometimes take the rest of the family, or her family, with her. He can show up at her workplace primed to kill indiscriminately. Or take out innocents like poor Ronald Goldman; if only he’d been ten minutes earlier with those eyeglasses. Domestic abusers are heavily represented in mass shootings. So no, a woman’s private pain is no longer her own. She’s responsible for innocent people’s lives as well. Related: ‘Private’ Domestic Violence Is Now Everybody’s Business The role of rejection De Becker notes that spousal homicide, easily the most predictable, is the kind people are unwilling to predict. A man in Los Angeles accused of killing his wife mystified the neighbors: “He seemed so normal.” “He must be crazy.” “I can’t imagine a father would kill his own children.” What, they never read the paper? Watch TV? Happens all the time. Said individual had already tried to kill his wife three times prior, and had been arrested twice on domestic violence charges. Surely someone at least noticed cops at this family’s door? Heard some shit beforehand? An important violence predictor is the role of rejection, an extremely tough pill for anyone to swallow but when others know it’s worse. De Becker notes how many homicides happen at the courthouse, where now others have become involved. It becomes intolerable when outside parties know of the abuser’s personal ‘failure’ to keep his partner happy. It’s a threat to his identity and self-image, and there’s nothing so intolerable. They sometimes kill others, too, especially the person who made their failure and rejection public. Suicide accompanying murder attests to how damage to one’s self-image is more important than staying alive. “This is war!” De Becker and his firm advise their clients on how to prevent escalation of hostilities. Men are conditioned to ‘win’, to ‘go to war’ when necessary, so if a violent man is convinced that “This is war! I can’t let her win!”, a woman is in greater danger. This is where restraining orders fail. They work best when there’s no prior history of violence with a man, whose fear of arrest is greater than his desire to force a woman to conform to his will. Especially early on, when there’s less emotional investment, like a stalker one didn’t date for very long. But when the stakes are life and death, a restraining order is a declaration of war. For an emotionally invested, entitled man, a court order to leave a woman alone asks a lot of him—to abandon an intimate relationship, his control and perceived ownership over someone else (who has allowed him to assume this), and his self-perception as a powerful man in control. That’s far different from a love-besotted rejected dude who has a future ahead of him that he can ruin in a heartbeat with an arrest if he violates the restraining order (I know someone like this; he doesn’t know I know about his long-ago very bad judgment. I wasn’t his target). Women with dangerous exes or soon-to-be exes must tread more carefully, and with professional help, but women with stalkers are in a stronger position. The hidden power of stalkers’ targets Stalkers are in a related but different class to violent partners. Their targets are in possession of a strength most don’t know they have. Stalkers are less likely to be emotionally invested in a woman, in the sense that they’ve at one time known and engaged with her, like on dates. Some do stalk and terrify public figures, and some famously kill them, like John Lennon’s assassin. De Becker observes that rejecting women often err by saying less than what they mean, in an effort to ‘let him down easy’. It’s how we’re raised, to be nice, to not hurt others’ feelings, and that if we hurt a man’s feelings, he could act violently against us. And that happens. But letting him down firmly and early, making it clear she’s not interested in pursuing any further relationship with him, puts him in less of a position to argue to himself that she didn’t really mean it, she’s just a bit conflicted, he just has to convince her with further contact. And every time she rewards him with contact, even if it’s not responding until the thirtieth phone call, she teaches him that’s the price he must pay to hear her voice again. Stalking is, de Becker notes, a crime of power, control, and intimidation, similar to date rape. In the past, women had less power to determine who would be in her life and hot pursuit more often resulted in what the man wanted. Today, some men don’t understand that women have the power and the right to reject. Some stalkers are truly dangerous, others less so. De Becker believes women can head off potential stalking early just by clearly communicating her lack of interest, and ignoring all further attempts at contact. He warns women Do not negotiate. Any contact afterward will be viewed by the man as negotiation. In other words, if No means No, women need to be loud and firm about it. Don’t tell him you don’t want to talk to him, because you have to talk to him to do that. Any contact is progress in his mind. Show, don’t tell, by not talking. There’s one characteristic of stalking victims similar to what we see in domestic violence victims: A certain willingness on the part of the woman to be the victim. De Becker notes that Men who cannot let go choose women who can’t say no. They’re women who don’t want to be explicit in their rejection. They keep trying to ‘let him down easily’ but refusing to ignore him ‘feeds the beast’. With abused women, too, there is a certain level of unconscious assent to being abused. First time a victim, second time a volunteer. A victim should always seek outside help if she’s being stalked; a professional is qualified to determine just how much of a threat he is. Not all stalkers, and not even all death threats, are equal. Experts can evaluate death threats to determine whether she’s in real danger. She still needs to be vigilant, even if her stalker is evaluated to be likely non-violent. She never knows whether some flukey thing will push him over the edge. She can only follow the Best Practices and take precautions. The gal who told me about my stalker friend said he’d never been violent with her, nor did he ever threaten violence. She never worried he’d kill her. But she still got a restraining order and changed her address and told no one except her closest intimates. It made her feel better to know he didn’t know where to stalk her, and eventually he stopped. He had no violent history, including his previous girlfriend who I also knew. His victim was in far less danger, yet he still scared her and restricted her freedom. But she listened to the professionals, and did what she was told. She took back her power. As can many other women. Because the power dominant, oppressive men have over us is our fear. We can’t help being fearful, but we can refuse to show it. Steal their thunder. Take. Their. Power. If you need help with a stalker, domestic abuser or other violent threat : Gavin de Becker & Associates (I have no association with this man or his firm) National Domestic Violence Hotline (US) iDetermine (Canada) Or call your local domestic abuse hotline. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Are bullying, nasty labels and encouraged pile-ons really the best way to fight 'systemic racism', or was the purpose to galvanize it? A 60-year-old educator for the Toronto District School Board committed suicide last month. He’d spent the last two years of his life shamed and defamed by the fallout from a black consultant labeling him a ‘white supremacist’ and a racist when he politely and logically challenged her claim that Canada was more racist than the United States, in a DEI Zoom workshop in 2021. Kike Ojo-Thompson of the Toronto-based KOJO Institute was contracted to teach ‘anti-racism’ at the Toronto District School Board. She mocked Richard Bilkszto, holding him up as an example of ‘white supremacy’ in action, as ‘evidenced’ by his refutation of her claim about Canada. Not one of Bilkszto’s colleagues defended him against her attacks. The only person who spoke up was an assistant facilitator to defend the consultant. You can hear part of the recorded exchange here. Bilkszto challenged her politely and offered facts and his personal experience - ‘lived experience’, in woke parlance, which is held as almost the highest standard of ‘evidence’ by the progressive left - and she responded by noting there are inequities in the system. Yes, he agreed, but he encouraged his fellow workshoppers to research it so they can see the differences between Canada and the U.S. He acknowledged racism in Canada and admitted there’s room for improvement. Ojo-Thompson responded by shaming him for being white and daring to express an opinion in contradiction of her own. Specifically, “You and your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on with black people.” Ojo-Thompson offered her opinion on the level of race relations in Canada, and Bilkszto, an Ontario principal who’d lived and taught in Buffalo, pointed to Canada’s healthcare system, and greater spending for poor students (including black) than that for American students. But he’d really gotten under her skin, and she couldn’t just let the impudent white man with his damnable facts and logic and greater experience go. She mocked and shamed him again the following week (without him speaking up this time as a catalyst) as an example of ‘white supremacist resistance’: “One of the ways that white supremacy is upheld, protected, reproduced, upkept, defended is through resistance and, like I said—I’m so lucky,” she laughed. She revelled in her opportunity to bully a white man. “Who would’ve thought my luck would show up so well last week,” she crowed in front of Bilkszto and everyone, “that we got perfect evidence, a wonderful example of resistance that you all got to bear witness to, so we’re going to talk about it, because, I mean, it doesn’t get better than this.” Bilkszto took a leave of absence after that and reported the incident to the WSIB, the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, after the TDSB refused to investigate his complaint about her performance. The WSIB found Ojo-Thompson’s behavior to be “abusive, egregious and vexatious, and rises to the level of workplace harassment and bullying.” The TDSB, by the way, paid $81,000 for this ‘anti-racist’ employee abuse. Since it didn’t support Bilkszto’s complaints, he subsequently sued the TDSB, which has allegedly sued the KOJO Institute for breach of contract, for the same amount Bilkszto demanded. Putting the racism in ‘antiracism’ For the KOJO Institute, diversity stops at whites-only racism and bias. In fact, Ojo-Thompson ordered Bilkszto and the other attendees to uncritically accept what she decreed. Her facilitator told Bilkszto, ‘If you want to be an apologist for the U.S. or Canada, this is really not the forum for that,’ and Ojo-Thompson concluded the exchange by informing the class that ‘your job in this work as white people is to believe’—not to question—claims of racism. Shut up, white people. Black skin is infallible. Ojo-Thompson didn’t express regret for Bilkszto’s suicide, preferring to center herself as the victim of a right-wing witch hunt trying to damage her so-called ‘good work’. It’s all about her, the real victim. Now, what about all the good, passive little co-workers sitting silently in their seats while Ojo-Thompson bullied a colleague and ran down their country? Did they agree with her assessment that “At least (the U.S.) had a fighting posture against at least the monarchy, here we celebrate the monarchy, the very heart and soul and origins of the colonial structure”? Did she forget, or is she simply ignorant of the fact, that the British abolished slavery in 1807, fifty-six years before the Americans, over which the latter fought an ugly civil war? This intellectual dishonesty is what makes corporate DEI initiatives so contentious. The far left pretends only the right opposes DEI ‘training’, but they ignore plenty of us liberal critics, who formed our objections in response to CRT-fueled victimist extremism rather than while marching on Charlottesville. Those of us who believe in a more equal, universalist approach to solving human problems, and especially racism, raise our hackles at any racism, not just our or the other tribe’s. We know you can’t be the problem you profess to resolve. Speaking as someone who lived for over forty years in the United States, in three different parts of the country and eighteen years in Canada, I can’t believe anyone can make the claim the US is less racist. One of Canada’s many charms is our more open race relations and easier, if far from perfect, acceptance of immigrants. Maybe that’s just Toronto. Friends who live or have lived in farther-flung parts of the province describe traditional redneck attitudes and racial intolerance, so this city is not necessarily representative of the rest of Ontario or Canada. But we don’t have a lot of the black/white problems the U.S. has. When racist shit goes down in The Sticks, it’s often against the First Nations (Indigenous). I wrote a few months ago about a DEI consultant at Uber who was put on leave not because she bullied white people, but because she made some non-white women feel ‘uncomfortable’ with a couple of talks called Don’t Call Me Karen, exploring the racism behind the label. Unlike other DEI workshops, this one challenged a different group to ‘do the work’ and challenge their own prejudices. Not surprisingly, these women weren’t up for it. Ojo-Thompson doesn’t have the right to demand uncritical white obeisance. She needs to learn the difference between a ‘fact’ and an ‘opinion’ and accept an intellectual challenge with logic and reason, not racist abuse. Maybe the others in Bilkszto’s group didn’t have his American experience. Maybe they felt unqualified to challenge a black woman claiming racist harm. I can understand both reactions, but I question whether some of them could have stood up for their colleague. There’s strength in numbers, as Ojo-Thompson learned the hard way a few months later. How to shut down a DEI abuser Ojo-Thompson’s confrontational approach created problems in the Ontario city of Sarnia, close to the US border. The KOJO Institute was hired for antiracism workshops. Madame ended the first and only workshop prematurely when City Councillor Bill Dennis and several others pushed back, accusing her of promoting critical race theory, describing her as “militant, smug, self-righteous and condescending.” He complained, “It was turned into a radical (session) and if you’re white, you should feel ashamed of yourself,” and described his brief time with her as “a horrible experience”. (What if the TDSB’s good little virtue signallers had challenged Ojo-Thompson?) Dennis’s critique didn’t sit well with some when the imbroglio hit the news media. He complained of ‘horrible calls’ on his cellphone, a threat to his dog’s life, and claims his car got keyed. Some have alleged that he and others went over the line in their pushback against Ojo-Thompson. There may be truth to that, there are no recordings, due to a technical glitch. Does DEI training even work? Toronto’s DEI leaders have reacted with horror at the news of Richard Bilkszto’s suicide: They, too, are more concerned about the backlash as a threat to continuing DEI training. Harvard social sciences professor Dr. Frank Dobbin argues you can’t train away bias, and that in fact such training may activate rather than suppress it. Another professor at Princeton notes that “A lot of our research shows training makes the dominant group – usually white men – feel threatened and fearful of being excluded. They fight back instead of internalizing [the training]”. Hard to imagine why when it treats white skin as an indelible mark of ‘white supremacy’ and they’re told to shut up because, white. Other research in the decades-old DEI field supports that it’s of limited value in changing peoples’ attitudes. Positive effects often wear off in a matter of days, and they can even reinforce stereotypes by bringing them up to the conscious mind. Poorly-executed DEI training can be harmful, as the City of Austin found with a DEI consultant who wasn’t abusive, but inept, inaccurate and occasionally offensive. Related: Why Ineffective Diversity Training Won’t Go Away Resistance also comes from employees feeling they’re ‘controlled’, and in many companies, hiring diversity actually drops, with fewer black women and Asian-Americans in management. A theory is that talent recruiters don’t want to feel ‘strong-armed’ in their hiring, but perhaps also they’re hiring on merit and the POC isn’t always the strongest candidate. Hopefully no one’s getting turned down because they’re a POC with a strong resume but the unspoken ‘quota’ has been reached, or the HR director’s feeling pissy from last week’s DEI workshop. The good little disciples in Bilkszto’s Zoom call nodded like properly-indoctrinated virtue-signallers, but did they really believe the things Ojo-Thompson was saying? One article noted there was behind-the-scenes texting indicating at least some of them thought what she was teaching was wrong but no one had the balls or labia to stand up for their colleague, someone roundly described by those who knew and loved him as a committed progressive. While not all DEI trainers are likely as outrageous as Kike Ojo-Thompson, her training style is ripe for debate. How much of a no-brainer is it to realize you never change minds by berating others for being such awful, terrible, oppressive people? Ojo-Thompson shouldn’t assume just because others bobblehead that they’re necessarily agreeing with her. Maybe they just want to get the hell out of there without suffering vengeful abuse themselves. I suspect a real overhaul could save DEI but I’m not sure the industry has the balls or labia to ‘do the work’. DEI as it’s presented today smells strongly of ‘woke’ ideological indoctrination rather than addressing genuine systemic inequity, so maybe they could abandon the ‘social justice’ angle. DEI can illuminate unconscious biases if everyone is ‘heard’ and no one feels attacked. Dark skin is no untouchable arbiter of truth, and being on the receiving end of racism is no fun for anyone. Would workshops be more effective if they were roundtable discussions in which everyone pitched in their ideas, comments, and questions to try and find common understanding? There’s got to be a better way than training that assumes perpetual victimhood for the ‘marginalized’, encouraging them to think of themselves as helpless, chronically-aggrieved victims, while concomitantly encouraging them to bully others, thereby demonstrating how disempowered they are not. Madame herself renders her own lessons meaningless when she fails to answer challenges with thoughtful responses. DEI can’t be a channel to vent hostility by the emotionally unintelligent. The KOJO Institute lost a separate contract out of this fiasco and has blacklisted the City of Sarnia for any future workshops. Bilkszto’s lawsuit wasn’t resolved at the time of his suicide, and I assume neither has the TDSB’s against the KOJO Institute. I can only hope both lawsuits proceed and succeed, teaching an important lesson from the United States: Nothing forces others to carefully choose their words quite like the growling, snarling pack of hungry lawyers just outside. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Aunt Claire demonstrates how a calm, level-headed woman handled a stranger's caress with the benefit of the doubt It’s just so cute. A man stroked his wife at a Tom Jones concert in Wales in a loving, husbandly way, thoughtfully recorded by her nieces. Just one problem: It wasn’t his wife, it was Aunt Claire, attending with her nieces, with a clear humorous WTF look on her face as she gets more action than she might expect. She obviously finds it funny, looking around and smiling at her phone-wielding nieces, so of course it wound up on CNN. Aunt Claire clearly isn’t offended or frightened by what’s happening. The mistake was understandable. You can see a little of the man’s actual wife from behind in the video, with the same hair color, cut, and blue denim jacket as Aunt Claire. The poor Welsh gent had simply moved behind the wrong woman while enthralled with Sir Tom, who, ironically, was singing ‘Sex Bomb’. It’s fortunate he made his mistake with an older woman, one less likely to be hypersensitive about accidental (or not) male touch. This could have gone down much differently if the pair were younger. Aunt Claire’s Big Adventure Although there was nothing sexual in the nameless man’s touch, it was clearly disconcerting. Some women might have reacted more aggressively, turning around and smacking him one or scolding him. A victim-oriented feminist might have made a huge stink and #MeToo’d him immediately on social media. I thought it was sweet, and Aunt Claire reacted more humorously than I probably would have. I imagine, in her shoes, I might have immediately turned around and said politely, “Excuse me?” Then he and his wife and I would have had a good laugh all around, although it wouldn’t likely have made CNN. No need to get histrionic about it. Mistakes happen. Having a sense of humor certainly helps. The video demonstrates how different a simple mistake like this is for different generations. We Gen X’ers and earlier Boomers don’t always lose our minds when something like this happens, whereas younger women raised in progressive, liberal families where inappropriate touching may have been discussed might have reacted more angrily. When I was a small child my mother warned me only of stranger danger, not inappropriate touching. No one ever considered Dad, Uncle Tom, the neighbor or Father McFeeley might molest the child. They were far more innocent days, before the Catholic Church was unmasked as a haven for pedophiles and incest was believed to be quite rare. It wasn’t adequate training for a child but no one knew much about molestation back then. Fortunately, I never got victimized. Mom talked to me as I grew older about men’s advances and how to handle them. Some of her advice was good, some of it, in retrospect, not so much, but she got right more than she got wrong. She taught me never to tolerate bad behavior from men, and it worked. Today’s young women, steeped in Third Wave victim feminist culture and pumped up by gender studies nonsense (the kind that teaches women to think of themselves as helpless and forever in thrall to ‘the patriarchy’), have been taught to engage in performative overblown hissy fits on social media or blogging platforms, like ‘Grace’ who shamed comedian Aziz Ansari years ago because she didn’t know how to set boundaries with a date (although he respected them when she finally did). As I watched Aunt Claire turn around, smile at her nieces and allow the man to caress her arm, I marveled at how this might have gone down just as easily in decades past, before everyone got so hypersensitive. “We were all laughing, there was nothing offensive about it,” Aunt Claire told CNN. “We just went with the flow.” What’s also heartening is that her much younger nieces also thought it was funny rather than a hegemonic patriarchal phallocratic assault on their auntie. “My auntie is such a character, so it was just so funny when it happened,” one of her nieces commented. Nice to see a young woman not losing her mind over something so minor. Whoever this gentleman was, he’s fortunate he stroked the arm of a much more casual woman than another who might have reacted very poorly. Which could arguably have been from pre-existing sexual or violent trauma, but also perhaps from the post-pandemic craziness that seems to have engulfed the world, when private rage explodes in public violence or just angry tirades against others. Like the woman who pulled a public apeshit at Miami-Dade Airport at Christmas because she’d lost track of her children. Her violent actions and words suggest entitled frustration rather than fear for her children. The tirade erupted not because she couldn’t find them but because they were about to miss a connecting flight. Aunt Claire’s adventure at a concert, along with her nieces’ reactions, are gentle reminders that we don’t have to assume others bear us ill intent, and that sometimes an inappropriate touch is a simple mistake. When I blogged on Medium years ago, I was regularly regaled with articles by women making a huge fuss over minor male interactions, many of which were inappropriate by most people’s standards but which didn’t merit the world-class meltdown these women engaged in, performatively exaggerated so as to elicit the maximum amount of feminist support, outrage and attention. Which they always got, with a lot of overblown hand-wringing and laments about entitled patriarchy and how hard it was to be a woman and men just don’t understand. Because feelings are paramount in Third Wave feminism unless they’re male feelings. Then they can be easily brushed off and mocked. Whereas I might have said to the miscreant who impudently touched a brooch on my chest, “Don’t touch that, it’s not yours!” with an icy stare and turned away. No need to ruin my entire weekend by turning a minor, inappropriate reaction into an Epic Battle With The Patriarchy. Aunt Claire is the kind of older woman I try to be - one who takes something like this in stride and doesn’t react to make the guy feel like a dirtball. It could have been a different story, and events like this have probably played out similarly in other times and places where the man knew what he was doing, especially to a younger, more naive woman who might have been less willing to react, stop him or fight back. But Aunt Claire kept her cool, seeing the humor and showing us that we can make mistakes without shaming the shit out of each other on social media. The gentleman in question commented later, humorously blaming it on Tom Jones and his sexy songs. He and his wife got a laff out of it, as did many others, and no harm was done. A good time was had by all. Hilarity ensued. Aunt Claire did what so many are unwilling to do in these hostile times: Give a man the benefit of the doubt and not assume he was up to evil. His wife handled it well too, not taking it personally that he mistook another woman for his wife for a few seconds. The whole affair was quite sweet and evocative of a simpler, gentler time not so long ago, one that we can return to one day if we make a collective effort to treat each other better, with kindness, rather than violence and aggression. One thing I’ve begun doing is thanking people for their kindness and consideration when they might have reacted badly and don’t. As a career mostly phone salesperson, I often irritate and annoy many. Sometimes I call when they’re on vacation, or in the middle of a family crisis. I’ve called people visiting a loved one in hospice. Or just in the middle of a meeting or Zoom call. Sometimes they’re angry or irritated and snarky, which I understand and accept. But often they’re not, and I apologize for interrupting whatever I did, because I would never intentionally call someone in those circumstances, but I can’t know. “Thank you for being so nice about it, enjoy the rest of your vacation and have a pina colada for me!” I’ll add. I do appreciate their not reacting negatively, even though it’s entirely justified. I try to do the same for others, and remember they may not necessarily be trying to aggravate me. I’m not always kind, but I’m kinder than I used to be. The benefit of the doubt. We’d all do well to offer that more. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Both were underestimated by those around these two laughable buffoons, and both were idiots at running a government It’s fashionable to compare one’s enemies to Nazis, but I was surprised to read how much Hitler’s narcissism, incompetence and shitshow government resembled Donald Trump’s, in a book written before the latter became President. It’s startling to realize how similar they were on an interpersonal level. We think of the Third Reich as a highly-engineered, well-oiled and strictly maintained political machine, but in fact it was anything but. That Hitler’s regime was able to invade other countries and pull off some battlefield successes, and exterminate millions in regimented concentration camps, disguises just what an internal clusterfuck his Nazi regime actually was. Hitler’s hubris is detailed in the highly readable, ridiculously risible book Humans: A Brief History of How We F—ed It All Up by British journalist and humor writer Tom Phillips. You will never read a funnier book containing endless examples of human arrogance, bad judgment and colossal, mind-blowing failure. My fave tale is the sad story of Sigurd the Mighty, a 9th-century Norse Earl of Orkney, whose murder of his enemy Máel Brigte the Bucktoothed resulted in Máel returning the favor posthumously. Siggy decapitated Bucky after double-crossing him in battle by showing up with twice the amount of agreed-upon warriors, and rode his horsey home dangling his enemy’s noggin hanging from his saddle. En route, Máel’s famous buck tooth grazed his bare leg, and a few days later Sigurd died mightily of the infection. Payback’s a bitch, bitch! Phillips’s book was published in 2018. Given the length of the publication process, the book was likely written before Trump won the 2016 election. Phillips couldn’t have foreseen the comparison, before Trump ran the White (Supremacist) House with all the efficiency and productivity of the Third Reich. Hitler and his Japanese buddies never had much of a chance of winning the war, and putting a work-averse, not terribly educated idiot in charge arguably didn’t help. When he failed spectacularly and Germany surrendered, he handled the humiliation as we’re all well-familiar: He and his bride Eva Braun killed themselves after a day and a half of marriage and he likely died a virgin (a detail that sets him distinctly apart from Trump), although conspiracy theories persisted that Braun somehow survived. I remember hearing a news story in the ‘80s that witnesses claimed seeing Braun walking on a beach in Argentina. Hitler’s government was every bit the clusterfuck the Trump All-White House was, but Trump didn’t respond to severe public humiliation with suicide. He lives for another day, and no one knows whether he will get a second crack at destroying democracy. So there’s one thing they don’t share. Hitler was more fragile. Another minor difference is the two men styled their ridiculous-looking combovers differently. Hitler parted his on the side and pasted it to his head with pomade, while Trump brushes his forward and uses hair spray, which I doubt the highly homophobic and gynophobic Hitler would have touched even at gunpoint. The WTFness of it all Everyone around Hitler thought he was a joke, and could be easily controlled by smarter people. He was called, among many other things, a ‘pathetic dunderhead’, a ‘half-mad rascal’, a ‘man with a beery vocal organ’, that he led ‘a society of incompetents’, and was widely regarded as a ‘blustering idiot’. One of his former Reich rogues wrote in his memoir of Hitler, “In the twelve years of his rule in Germany, Hitler produced the biggest confusion in government that has ever existed in a civilized state.” That would make a good high school debate topic: “Who produced the loonier, least effective government? Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump?” Like Trump, Hitler hated to read paperwork and made decisions based on gut feeling, a habit also shared by the infamously information-aversive George W. Bush. Hitler’s aides dreaded policy meetings as they often degenerated into his rambling, self-absorbed whines about whatever he was thinking about at the moment, although there’s no detail indicating that the only way to get his attention was to make something be all about him. (Which is how Trump aides got The Donald to read important papers - they edited them to put his name in them.) Hitler, like Trump, was very insecure about his lack of knowledge. He hated hearing the expertise of others unless they supported his preconceptions and he ‘raged like a tiger’ if anyone corrected him, which the Trumpettes also found. Especially important: Hitler, like Trump, loved making fun of and mocking others but lost his shit if anyone did it to him. He was a Charlie Chaplin fan but banned the Hitler spoof The Great Dictator in Germany and all German-occupied countries and derided Chaplin as “one of the foreign Jews who come to Germany,” despite Chaplin not being Jewish (back then, people lobbed around ‘Jew’ the way today they carelessly toss off ‘racist’). Hitler’s unreliability drove his staff insane, which led to chronic government chaos. No work got done while Hitler rambled, and when his people weren’t wondering if they’d get home in time for dinner - by Friday night, they were fighting each other and backstabbing (sound familiar?) Hitler was and Trump is a minor little fuckup but each had a major talent: An ability to speak to the lowest common denominator of the masses and to move them with his words. Hitler’s speeches, at least, made syntactic sense, unlike Trump’s word salads. "Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you're a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off…” What about having nuclear…? I’m not quite sure how far Hitler would have gotten if he was about as eloquent as Donald Trump. Nineteen-thirties Berlin was way different from 21st-century rural America. Knowing a real Nazi when you see one We like to think another Hitler shouldn’t rise again, and that one can’t rise here, but someone with more similarities than just a fondness for white supremacy, a habit of demonizing others and putting them in concentration camps (Jews for one, immigrants for another) did become President. He arguably might again, although that’s really very much up in the air as a criminally indicted, possibly imprisoned by then President is truly unprecedented and there’s no guarantee he’ll be allowed to serve, regardless of what constitutional lawyers believe right now - it may well take a Supreme Court decision or two to resolve it. Especially as Donald Trump is a massive national security threat. Phillips’s book makes the point that some of the ‘greatest’ leaders in the world weren’t evil geniuses so much as supremely talented fuckups. It’s not the Einsteins or Wright Brothers who take over the world, it’s the petty tinpot dictator wannabes who speak to the right useful idiots in the right ways. Here’s the key to how Hitler, and Trump, and so many others pulled off their black magic: Shame, nationally. There is no feeling more powerful in the world. Hitler arose after Germany’s defeat in WWI and the nation keenly felt the rest of the world’s blame. Hitler offered the Germans a fake enemy to explain it all - it was the Jews, da Jewz, dammit!!! - who were responsible for everything that had gone wrong for Germany. No leader ever rises to power telling his countrymen the truth, that the way out of shame and humiliation is to do some national soul-searching, identify what they did right and what they didn’t, and resolve never to make those mistakes again. Yeah, that would have gone over with Germans like a V1 attack. The United States today is not the Weimar Republic, but many of Trump’s supporters feel the keen shame of being society’s losers and the sting of Hillary Clinton’s claim that they were a ‘basket of deplorables’. Donald Trump speaks to their fading sense of manhood and their ignorant xenophobia just as his forefather did in Nazi Germany. Highlighting the more trivial ways the two despots resembled each other clarifies how one can identify a petty dipshit who seeks unlimited power and knows how to manipulate the masses. Phillips’s book derides other historical leaders we customarily think of as ‘great’ but who also fucked up a lot: Genghis Khan, King James I (the Bible guy), Sultan Ibrahim of the Ottoman Empire, and of course Napoleon. Modern Nazis aren’t everyone who disagree with us or who share a few elements of fascist thinking (the left can be fascist too) but the people who really do hew to Nazi thinking even if they themselves are unaware of most of it (as I suspect Trump is). It’s also important to remember that men like Hitler and Trump are just ding-y dipshits without support from others, especially those who seek to gain from that person’s ‘leadership’. There was no new Hitler to take the other one’s place. If Trump died tomorrow, there would be countless wannabes lining up and fighting each other for the 2024 nomination. The Great Dictator: The film that dared to laugh at Hitler Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

One of O.J.’s wives didn’t tolerate abuse. The other did. On the 28th anniversary of the world's most famous domestic homicide, let's explore the psychology behind the woman who gave O.J. permission. Public domain “Was he worth it, Nicole?” I found myself repeating over and over in my apartment the day of the O.J. verdict. The sonofabitch had pulled it off. They called him innocent. Who the hell else could have slashed up his ex-wife and her friend with all that evidence? “Was he worth it, Nicole? Was he worth the money, the good looks, the fame, the California living? Were the beatings worth it, the times you feared for your life? Were the bruises worth it? The shame? Was he that good in bed? Was he worth it? Was he worth it? Was he worth it, Nicole? Because the motherfucker got away with it!” I’ve thought a lot about the world’s most famous domestic abuse casualty since I read Faye Resnick’s book, Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted. Yes, I know it’s a cheap piece of trash and Faye Resnick is the shittiest best friend ever. But she got one thing horrendously right. Nicole had an opportunity to get out of the marriage at one point and in all likelihood not get murdered, and she blew it. With the worst in her string of colossal bad choices. The Reign of Errors became clear when I watched The Final 24: Nicole Brown Simpson. It started before she met O.J. If he’d [hit me], he would have got a frying pan upside his head. There was just no way that I would allow that to happen to me. — O.J.’s first wife, Marguerite, on 20/20 Update: Marguerite Simpson may have been lying about not getting abused by O.J. According to the book Raging Heart: The Intimate Story of the Marriage Between O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson, while Marguerite has claimed or insinuated that he never hit her, their circle of friends widely believed he was hitting her and noted she wore sunglasses inside and outside the house, a classic sign of abuse. It doesn't prove it but it makes it suspicious that she may have lied about not being abused. Nicole’s bad choices began not when the young restaurant hostess met O.J. in 1977, but a year before during a high school class discussion on potential career choices. When Nicole spoke she said she wanted to marry a wealthy man. Hardly an uncommon aspiration for many young women back then. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, I remember many of my peers saying that. Even when I was young I recognized rich men wanted young women they could control. That an unskilled pretty girl who wanted to marry well wouldn’t own her own life. I often replied, “Why the hell would you say that? We don’t have to do that anymore! We can have our own careers! We can be whatever we want! We no longer have to depend on men!” Nicole’s next bad choice was agreeing to go out with O.J., period. He was married with two children and a third on the way. She was too naive to realize that a man who cheats with you will cheat on you. Many of their epic fights were over O.J.’s numerous infidelities. The violence started on their first date O.J. grabbed Nicole’s crotch and said, ‘This is where babies come from and this belongs to me.’ — Denise Brown Nicole’s chain of bad choices to allow O.J. into her life and keep him there even though he was abusive from the start snowballed. He ripped her panties on the first date trying to get them off. Nicole’s roommate and good friend David LeBon asked why she would let O.J. do this, said he wanted to talk to him, but Nicole said No, I kind of like him. O.J.’s control freakiness began soon after. He insisted she vacate the apartment she shared with LeBon even though they had only ever been just friends. O.J. was, by many accounts, quite jealous, and Nicole knew how to ‘push his buttons’. At a Buffalo Bills game, sister Denise claimed O.J. got upset when Nicole greeted a male friend with a kiss on the cheek and began yelling at her. O.J. once smashed Nicole’s Mercedes. When he learned Nicole was afraid of knives, he terrorized her with them and threatened to ‘slice her up’. Nicole’s multiple police calls when O.J. raged out of control are legendary. In 1989, she ran out of the house half-dressed to meet the police and said O.J. was trying to kill her. Like many domestic violence victims, Nicole always forgave her husband who said he’d never do it again. Of course he did. Nicole’s therapist, Dr. Susan Ford, noted victims ‘always hope it’s going to get better.’ She also noted the benefits of marriage to O.J. outweighed the costs for Nicole, as has been speculated about the more modern-day celebrity domestic violence case of Ray & Janay Rice. In 1992 Nicole had had enough and divorced O.J. Over the next few years he’d stalk and harass her. Faye Resnick claimed Nicole kind of missed the sick attention once it stopped, that she took it as a sign of his love. Resnick isn’t the best source for this interpretation but given everything else I’ve learned about Nicole, one thing is certain: She had as sick and obsessive a love for O.J. as he did for her. Compare this to the women O.J. supposedly didn’t assault in his relationships, like his ex-wife, Marguerite. If her frying pan quote is true, it sounds like he knew he wouldn’t get away with that shit. His longtime girlfriend Paula Barbieri claimed he never assaulted her either. But Christine Prody, who met him the year after the trial ended, did take his shit. There’s an uncomfortable lesson here on romantic cost/benefits analyses and what some men get away with if they think they can. And an even more uncomfortable question regarding the kind of woman who would date O.J. after the trial. Nicole’s biggest mistake I don’t like the dating scene. I miss O.J. I think about him. At some point after the post-divorce stalking/harassment, something critical happened I suspect rendered Nicole safe from O.J. He seemed to have accepted the marriage was over. He’d lost Nicole. He was dating Barbieri and had begun to live his own life. He appears to have psychologically disengaged from Nicole. But she couldn’t leave O.J. alone. According to the book Raging Heart, in 1993 she decided she wanted O.J. back. A friend thought he was finally getting used to the divorce and settling in with Barbieri. Friends asked if she truly wanted to instigate a reconciliation, saying he would never change. They’d cautioned her about his rough treatment from the beginning. Her sister Denise had urged her to leave O.J. in the early ’80s. Nicole, as always, didn’t listen, adding links to a lengthening chain of tragic choices. Nicole’s friends were right. O.J. didn’t change. The beatings began again, the police paid visits, and others, not always Nicole, made more mistakes: According to People Magazine, police often didn’t write up reports. Friends and family never confronted O.J. about his treatment of Nicole. Her father saw the bruised face photo after the 1989 incident in which Nicole had clearly been beaten but he dismissed it. Nicole’s sisters weren’t always clear on the existence of domestic violence in her life. Like many victims, she didn’t talk about it and covered the physical signs with makeup. Abuse in higher economic brackets is often better-hidden, and upscale batterers hide behind their public image. Until June 12, 1994, all of America loved O.J. Simpson and few had any idea he was a batterer. He’s guilty, but she enabled him Nicole’s worst nightmare ended in her own blood when O.J. finally acted on his threats to ‘slice her up’. He also murdered Ron Goldman delivering some eyeglasses dropped at the restaurant where Nicole ate dinner with others earlier in the evening. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (Samsongebre) The tragic death of Nicole Brown Simpson is a lesson to women everywhere, particularly those stuck in violent relationships, afraid to leave or, as in Nicole’s story, unable to abandon their own sick obsession. Nicole’s is the same sad story of millions of others: The cycle of abuse and forgiveness that keeps women trapped, the violence chipping away at their self-esteem until they either don’t believe they deserve any better or are afraid of what might happen if they leave, particularly if there are children involved. A domestic violence victim is at most risk for getting murdered after leaving. Sometimes the abuser kills the children rather than the wife. An abused mother hasn’t just herself to think about; she must consider her children’s lives as well. That said, once it starts, Nicole’s therapist notes: The victim must take the first step and reach out for help. The sooner the better. Unexplored: The victim’s role in the cycle of abuse The choices a woman makes throughout an abusive relationship have gone largely unexplored with the feminist/activist emphasis on holding the abuser fully accountable for his behavior. It’s inarguable the abuser is always responsible for his actions and reactions. Female abusers too. No matter how Nicole ‘pushed his buttons’ or dated other men when she and O.J. were separated or divorced, there’s zero excuse for what he did. Here’s what O.J. said on a Fox News interview in 2006, but only released recently. Although he didn’t say, “I did it,” it’s the closest he’s come since he wrote a book called I Did It and then added an ‘If’ at the beginning for plausible deniability. He did, however, make it clear he was at the scene even as he ‘hypothesized’ how it might have gone down ‘if’ he’d been there — adding details only the killer would have known. We MUST start moving the needle from ‘Don’t blame the victim’ to ‘Don’t BE the victim.’ Nicole Brown Simpson’s critical mistake may have been pursuing a reconciliation with her violent ex-husband after he’d detached from her enough to give up. This has bothered me ever since I read Resnick’s book, just as Nicole Simpson’s relentless choices to allow O.J. Simpson to make her life hell has bothered me since the criminal trial started. I’ve come to believe the perpetuation of the abuse cycle is more than just the abuser/victim relationship. The people around the relationship bear a certain responsibility too. Are You Too Tolerant Of Abuse? In cases when one ends up working with the victim individually, one has to walk the fine line between empathy and collusion. Without blaming, the therapist’s goal is to move the victim from blame to responsibility, from helplessness to accountability, and from hopelessness to empowerment. Victims should never take total responsibility for their suffering; however they must develop an understanding of how they contribute to their own victimization.— Ofer Zur, Ph.D., “Rethinking ‘Don’t Blame The Victim’: The Psychology of Victimhood” Like the police who often don’t do anything once they arrive at a domestic abuse scene, as Nicole often complained about the L.A.P.D. Then again, one must wonder at the frustration the police feel when an established victim goes back to the abuser over and over. Nicole wasn’t always terrorized into staying. She kept wanting O.J. back. She reconciled when she didn’t have to. She was as fatally in love with O.J. as he was with her. Where did this come from? Nicole didn’t come from an abusive family and I’ve found nothing to indicate she had somehow been ‘primed’ for this. At some point, her phone calls to police were a waste of taxpayer dollars because while O.J. was never going to change, neither, it seems, was Nicole. Would there ever have come a day where she realized enough is enough? We’ll never know. What is it in some women’s psychology that allows or teaches them to accept abuse when they aren’t ‘trained’ for it in childhood? We need to explore the role and choices victims make, and make fewer excuses for those choices. Domestic violence is multifaceted. Not all victims are ‘trained’ by abusive childhoods or misogynist religions or ‘the patriarchy’. Some women just have terrible taste in men and some never seem to learn from their mistakes. We need to explore and challenge this more. What about the women who dated O.J. after the trial? Like Christie Prody, who also suffered emotional and physical abuse from O.J.? Who was constantly compared to his dead ex-wife? When O.J. told her Nicole ‘deserved’ what happened to her, why did she stay? How surprised would anyone have been had Prody been murdered too? How many would have thought, “WTF, woman? What did you expect?” What sort of a ‘cost/benefits’ analysis do women like Nicole do to conclude the benefits of marriage to a man like O.J. outweigh the cost? How can we challenge this? What can we, as friends and family, do to recognize the abuse in front of us? Are we challenging women in abusive relationships enough to leave when they can still get out? There’s a danger for those in a domestic violence victim’s circle too. Abusers often target family members or supportive friends. Do victims have a responsibility to them? I’m frustrated when I see photos like Nicole Brown Simpson’s battered face. I’m frustrated that she kept returning to her abuser when she didn’t have to. Did it ever occur to her that one day O.J. might start beating their kids, especially their daughter, when her eventual blossoming adolescence became attractive to boys? I’m frustrated with the cult of celebrity and over-privileged athletes who believe, quite rightly, they can do no wrong nor ever be held accountable. I’m frustrated with people making excuses for bad choices because they don’t dare challenge an ideological dogma that infantilizes women and enshrines them as perpetual helpless little girls. Nicole didn’t have to end nearly decapitated. She was, by all accounts, a wonderful, vibrant, fun, friendly, and even strong woman who challenged O.J. many times and didn’t always take his shit. But that’s not how we remember her. She’s forever memorialized as the world’s most famous domestic violence story, the battered wife, the bruised face, the terrified voice on the 911 call, the pathetic weak victim. He finally did it. He killed her. With a knife, as he’d often threatened. And, as she predicted, he got away with it. It didn’t have to end like this, Nicole. What can women learn from her twenty-eight years later? Have we learned anything from this? What can we learn from Marguerite and Paula Barbieri, the ones who weren't abused? Why? Are these men ever worth it?

If you're going to act like a woke dickhead, do it somewhere anonymously, not under your real name on Linkedin I forget what the LinkedIn discussion was about. I said something positive about Elon Musk returning free speech to Twitter and allowing people to criticize the trans movement, and for being able to state the scientific fact once again that women are women and men aren’t. I wasn’t mean, and I wasn’t snarky. But as we all know, the woke are always on the lookout for someone to cyberbully. Especially commenters backed by science. Some young guy responded back with the usual woke parrot response, ‘You’re transphobic.’ LinkedIn no longer lets me see the back-and-forth comments we engaged in that day last year except for my end-of-the-exchange comment denying his accusation I’d been ‘harassing’ anyone and noted that he had harassed me. He had been a woke little nag all day long in his previous, highly patronizing comments. Unfortunately ‘woke’ influence has normalized misogyny on the left and while, to my knowledge, LinkedIn isn’t super-woke or super-censor-y, woke kiddies have too much power to get people banned, suspended and de-platformed. So I watched my mouth but I challenged the kid. I reminded myself to ‘take back my power’ and stand up to a male bully, especially in front of others, and stuck to the scientific facts about a sexually dimorphic species. At the end of the day I received a message from the tech support folks at a sales agency I worked for. Seems someone had complained I’d been making ‘transphobic’ comments on LinkedIn. 'We just thought you ought to know,” they said. I replied back that I’d merely been gender-critical, but thanks for letting me know. Seems the little shit wanted to make trouble and pat himself on the back for being a good little wokenazi. I figured support wouldn’t say anything to the managers and they didn’t. But man, was I pissed. The next morning, a Saturday, I lay in bed and thought about what the little shit had done. And then I realized something. When I’d gone back for my last comment the previous evening, after learning he’d tried to get me in trouble with my employer, I’d planned my answer carefully and didn’t acknowledge what he’d done. I wanted to end the conversation and forget about it. In his last comment, though, he seemed even more eager than I to end it. His last response was definitely un-wokey. He stated we would just have to agree to disagree on this, and he’s done with this conversation. When the hell does a spoiled virtue-signalling woke kiddie ever admit it’s okay to agree to disagree? Or give up that easily? He was spooked about something. I reviewed our conversation over breakfast. I revisited his profile and located what I figured was the reason for his spookiness. He’d just started a new job. Oh, man, wouldn’t it be bad if he’d done something dumb that could get him in trouble? Ready to rumble! I wasn’t worried about my job. There was nothing pejorative or ‘transphobic’ about my comments. I spent a little time researching the woke kiddie’s company on LinkedIn, and then I reached out to him in direct message: Before I report you to HR... ...Maybe we can resolve this privately. I don't appreciate your bullying, misogynist comments, using me to virtue signal and call me names just because you don't like my standing up for women's free speech rights. How classically patriarchal and misogynist you are to treat male-bodied people as though they were no different, and more important than, the class of people men have been bullying and dominating for thousands of years. How *dare* you dic(k)tate to women as men have always done what constitutes a 'real' woman. You don't know me, you don't know anything about me, and you sure as hell don't know where I stand on trans rights. Nor do you know what 'transphobic' means. You're entitled to your opinions, as I am to mine, but you don't have the right to hurl pejoratives and shut down opinions you disagree with. I shortlisted two or three XXX [his new employer] HR names I could report you to. But it looks like you just started a new job, so it might be more productive to come to an understanding here. Want to reconsider or rephrase anything you said the other day? His response was swift. Sure. I apologize, it's a tough subject and I wish people would be respectful. I should have worded it better. I can delete those later if you'd like. I told him I didn’t care if he deleted them or not (privately, I hoped they’d stay so others could see someone standing up to a woke bully) but maybe he did and that’s why I can’t see the previous comments now. This was a minor kerfuffle, but it created serious anxiety for me to learn this little shit had tried to get me fired. It would have made sense if I’d been as snarky as I am on my blog. Not justifiable, but comprehensible. But I hadn’t been. My initial comment, reviewing it many months later, was pretty straightforward, and I was definitely guarded in my later responses. Woke kiddies (this includes all ages of this self-infantilizing extremism) just can’t ignore a non-woke comment that offends their dogmatic narrative, however respectfully worded. This is LinkedIn, after all, the world’s biggest corporate office. It’s not like people don’t engage in political discussion, with perpetual corners of the platform burning with raging flame wars. I largely stay out of them. But sometimes I take the opportunity to reservedly challenge common narratives. I repurposed an old blog post on pronouns and posted it on Linkedin earlier this year. I made a straightforward and sincere complaint about how the people who need to offer their pronouns the most don’t. There were no flame wars. There were a few positive comments, including one pointing out that people might not want to ‘out’ themselves that way. I pointed out that they must know they’re androgynous-looking and to please help us out. Meanwhile, those whose pronouns are glaringly clear proclaim what we already know. Not to mention, if you can’t tell the world your pronouns, they’re really not that important. Sometimes, we have to step out on a limb and take back our power. Today’s woke kiddies have entirely too much power they don’t know how to wield wisely and for reasons I may never understand, so-called responsible adults bow and scrape to their every whim. Maybe it’s all the Gen X’ers in charge who raised Millennials and Gen Z’s to be protected, undeservedly rewarded, and most importantly, unchallenged. Gen X’ers are used to caving and treating their young’uns as the adults they are not. Mostly, I keep my un-woke opinions to myself on LinkedIn. I never mention my website. I have a second profile under which people, if they wanted to, could find it, read my horrendous opinions and try to cancel me once they revived from their faint. But I expect most won’t. And I’m getting too old to care. I removed the sales agency from my LinkedIn profile. I use a different last name on the phone with my calling campaigns. This is where woke censorship has led. It DOES feel a bit like Nazi Germany, or the former Soviet Union. But one little wokie boy on LinkedIn, I hope, learned an important lesson from fucking with a pissed-off older woman. Take your own medicine, sonny-boy, and be respectful. And if you're going to act like a woke dickhead, do it somewhere anonymously, not under your real name. Amateurs…. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

As I explore t'other sides of the North American political divide, I will not join the Illuminazi Pretty sure my largely liberal-leaning friends are afraid I’m going to join the Illuminazi. That fear is exemplified by the phenomenon of the far-right, Trumpy sort of conservative some former liberals suddenly become. I’ve seen it happen. People tend toward conservatism as they get older, but some go wildly overboard from the left to the far right. A few left-leaning friends told me they’ve blocked friends who became super-Trumpy and anti-immigrant. I de-friended and blocked a Toronto Pagan acquaintance after the 2020 election because she wouldn’t stop harassing me on Facebook about the ‘unfairness’ of Trump’s loss. Then she harassed me with threatening phone calls until I left a screaming voice mail telling her I’d reported her to the police months ago and if I got another phone call I was going after her legally. Do not fuck with Americans. We are heavily armed with lawyers we hate until we need one. The weird thing is, I don’t see it in reverse. While some disgruntled U.S. conservatives left the Republican party after Bush II, or later Donald Trump, I don’t know of any who went from any-flavor-conservative to super-woke. Or even ‘liberal’. They’re just a less crazy flavor of conservative. Maybe MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace, who describes herself as a former ‘self-loathing Republican’, although she may simply be a more moderate conservative - the kind we thought died with John McCain. Still, both sides are suspicious of any member who leaves the political Purity Ball to socialize with t’other side. Anyway, the Illuminazi doesn’t exist. And it’s multi-partisan and keeping an eye on you. Jonathan Haidt and The Righteous Mind Just about every political and social observer/critic I know has read Haidt’s highly influential book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion. I’ve read it twice and will surely read it again. Haidt is a moral psychologist who explores the real reasons we believe the way we do—not the ones we think. He distinguishes between the ‘rider’ and the ‘elephant’, the conscious and the unconscious mind. The rider thinks s/he controls the elephant when in fact the elephant is running the show. We make moral and political decisions believing them to be based on reason when in fact it’s our elephant’s snap decision based on our moral overview, which more often than not goes far more unchallenged than we think. And then we ‘reason’ (i.e., engage in confirmation bias) our view. Haidt distinguishes the conservative, liberal, and libertarian minds and how they generally tend to think, philosophize, and order their moral universe. He lists six moral foundations: Care/harm Fairness/cheating Loyalty/betrayal Authority/subversion Sanctity/degradation Liberty/oppression To oversimplify a bit, conservatives and liberals value each foundation differently. Liberals care most about care/harm, liberty/oppression, and fairness/cheating, in that order. Haidt divides conservatives further into two groups: Libertarianism and social conservatism. Libertarians, he says, care the most about liberty/oppression, somewhat less for fairness/cheating, and don’t bother much with the other four. Haidt notes some have classified libertarians as both liberal (love of liberty/loathing for oppression) and conservative (their love for free markets, which is a mark, actually, of Enlightenment classical liberalism from which they descend). Social conservatives, interestingly, value almost evenly all six foundations, with their most sacred value being the preservation of institutions and traditions that sustain a moral community. Haidt offers his own opinion as to, given what he understands about moral psychology and each group’s level of commitment to each foundation, as to what a healthy mix of liberal/conservative/libertarian policy might look like, based on what he thinks each camp gets ‘right’, i.e., its strengths. Haidt, a former ‘lifelong liberal’, became frustrated with American liberals after watching John Kerry’s ‘ineffectual’ 2004 presidential campaign bid. It convinced him liberals simply “didn’t ‘get’ the morals and motives of their conservative countrymen,” and he resolved to use moral psychology to help liberals win. What he came to realize, instead, was that liberals didn’t have all the answers. They had some very good ones, but they also had some demonstrably bad ones. And he found the same with conservatives and libertarians. ‘Morality binds and blinds’, says Haidt, noting that, when attempting to answer a morality questionnaire imagining how the other political side might answer, liberals were the least accurate in predicting what the other side actually valued. Moderates and conservatives were more accurate in predicting liberal attitudes than vice versa, especially those targets who described themselves as ‘very liberal’. Liberals’ worst inaccuracies came while pretending to be conservatives responding to Care and Fairness questions. Republicans and conservatives, actually, were not the soulless, unimaginative creatures liberals assumed they were. It’s how I know I haven’t been assimilated by the Illuminazi: I still find myself dehumanizing conservatives, but more recently, more the far right. It’s an evolution of rational morality, I believe, but the work isn’t done yet until I’m dehumanizing no one. Not even people with whom I vehemently disagree on almost everything. They’re still my fellow humans and fellow Americans, or Canadians. Haidt’s journey from ‘partisan liberal’ included two turning points: Experiences in India conducting research in which he opened to the vision of broader moralities based on the ethics of community and divinity, and later by reading historian Jerry Muller’s book Conservatism. It distinguished for Haidt the difference between conservatism and orthodoxy, which relies on an external transcendent moral order on which to construct society (i.e, like religious fundamentalism or Communism). Whereas true conservatives didn’t fight Enlightenment thinking and reasoning, but functioned within its main currents. They developed a reasoned and pragmatic approach, a utilitarian critique of Enlightenment. The line that turned the liberal crank away from liberal partisanship for Haidt was this line: What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of reason. It led him to wonder whether perhaps conservatives did, in fact, have something to offer apart from what it seems to offer now: Science hostility, lack of concern for others and a brainless loyalty to established dogma. Maybe those were the orthodox versus conservatives. ‘The fundamental blind spot of the left’ Haidt describes what he calls moral capital in comparison with the identification of social capital which swept the social sciences field in the 1990s. Social capital described what economists had given short shrift: The norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness between individuals. “When everything is equal,” Haidt notes, “a firm with more social capital will outcompete its less cohesive and less internally trusting competitors,” and adds that evolutionarily, multilevel selection shaped humans to be contingent cooperators. United they stood, divided they fell. Social capital isn’t a partisan preference: Everyone recognizes the need for trustworthiness in others. But are trusting relationships enough? If you believe humans are inherently good and will do the right thing when constraints and division are removed, as liberals tend to believe, it might work. But conservatives are concerned with ‘free riders’, those that coast with others without contributing much themselves. Conservatives believe we need constraints in the form of rules, laws, legislation, traditions, and customs to preserve the health and integrity of groups, otherwise people will engage in behaviors and actions designed primarily to benefit themselves. (I believe this is what’s happening with the left’s too-easy embrace of declaring one’s self a woman, which has resulted in numerous, documented cases of sexual predators infiltrating women’s protective spaces.) Then there’s moral capital - the resources that sustain a moral community. Moral capital, he extrapolates, is the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible. This could be a religious community, a gay neighborhood, or a commune. What Haidt found in relation to communes - at least those which survive for decades, versus those that fail fairly quickly - will disturb many liberals. He found that communes valuing self-expression (liberal value) over conformity (conservative), and tolerance (liberal) over loyalty (conservative) will probably attract new members more easily, but with lower moral capital, will be less likely to endure than the commune that suppresses or regulates selfishness via conformity and loyalty. Now expand that to the social macroscosm, like a nation. This may explain why the left can’t seem to accomplish its goals as easily as the right, as exemplified by the Democrats and Republicans. The rigorous, almost militaristic conformity demanded by Republican leadership of the rest of their Congressional army is appalling to those of us with liberal mindsets, but it’s hard to argue: They get shit done. They destroyed Roe v. Wade. They effectively prevent controlling gun violence. The Democrats, meanwhile, waste time with too much emphasis on ‘rights’ for marginalized groups, including trans-activists angling for women’s rights—but for men—the least marginalized of all—claiming to be women, not actual biological women. How soon do you think the Dems will return abortion rights? I’m guessing longer than the 49 years it took to destroy them. Haidt identifies the inability of liberals to consider the effects of moral capital changes on organizations and societies as ‘the fundamental blind spot of the left’. He believes it’s why liberal reforms so often backfire and why communist revolutions pretty much always end in despotism (and, I would add, bearing a strong resemblance to fascist governments). But conservatives make moral capital mistakes too. He notes, Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change. Which leads to periodic financial collapse, uprisings, rebellions, and revolutions. ‘Let them eat caviar’. (Maybe it’s time to rethink the Bible as a government tool, folks.) How might a more politically balanced society look? I have to skip an awful lot of context and background in Haidt’s work to communicate the greatest strengths of real (not extremist) liberalism, conservatism, and libertarianism. Haidt’s identified strengths: Liberalism: Governments can and should restrain corporate superorganisms. Haidt describes corporations as literal superorganisms; like life forms that have come to dominate their preferred niches, change their ecosystems and marginalize or eliminate their competition, so too, he says, have corporations become literal superorganisms. He notes the left utilizes the only force left to challenge the largest corporations: National governments, which can still tax, regulate, and break up corporations when they get too powerful. You won’t find many conservatives or libertarians on board with that. Some problems really can be solved by regulation Liberals correctly embrace, he says, another taboo of the social conservatives and libertarians: Regulation. Some problems really can be solved by it, he says, and argues that successful Democratic regulation to eliminate the harmful fumes emitted by leaded gasoline in the 1970s put an end to the retardation of neural development in millions of children (if you were born after 1973 you are almost certainly a few IQ points higher than your parents). Conservative Ronald Reagan tried to reverse that, of course, since corporate superorganisms complained regulation was getting in the way of what was truly important: Obscene profits. Fun fact: Gasoline suppliers could have eliminated lead in gasoline decades prior to 1973 but not doing to saved them .03/gallon. Libertarianism & Conservatism: Markets are miraculous When you don’t have to take price into account for something you consume - like healthcare - prices spiral, which is how American healthcare has come to the $629 Band-Aid. The working market beloved by libertarians is the best answer, rather a lot, Haidt points out, the way food prices and LASIK surgery function. If you think food prices are high now, be glad we don’t have ‘food insurance’ like we do health insurance. When food prices hurt us we stop buying certain types of food. I’ve stopped buying quarts of ‘egg beaters’, which have doubled in price in a year from $4 to $8/carton, which lasts about a week and a half, in favor of oatmeal, a big bag of which lasts about six weeks and also costs $8. I’ll probably never buy egg beaters again, not even at $4. And LASIK surgery, Haidt points out, isn’t covered by insurance, so competition has driven down prices around 80%. Libertarians’ love affair with ‘spontaneous order’ which happens when people can make their own choices, since they bear both the costs and benefits, is more utilitarian than the liberal response to interfere in the markets, which can cause a helluva lot of harm. (Free market healthcare won’t solve everything; we still need a pooled healthcare system, but not for absolutely everything). You can’t help the bees by destroying the hive Liberals hate exclusion, and implement a ‘big tent’ for victims of oppression and marginalization. Make no mistake; these groups, a subset of bees in the hive if you will, really do need help, but not to the extent of damaging the hive. Because here’s the problem: Political scientist Robert Putnam, co-author with David Campbell of the book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, found that being more religious made people more generous and charitable than those who didn’t customarily take part in religious services. Religious folk gave as much to secular charities as religious ones. (There’s that compassion liberals love so much! Whoda thunk it?) Putnam and Campbell found that how involved religionists were with their co-religionists supported a moral matrix that emphasized selflessness, and brought out the best in them. Haidt notes that Putnam describes diverse people, the liberal dream, as tending towards turtling, or withdrawing from their community, rather than hiving as Haidt describes it, working as a community toward the greater good, with bridging capital, which encourages trust between groups, and bonding capital, which refers to the trust within groups. Liberals stand against oppression and exclusion, and as a result push for changes that reduce group cohesiveness, traditions, institutions and moral capital. Emphasizing differences, he says, makes many people more racist, not less. [All italics mine]. In other words, liberals are trying to help a subset of bees who need help, and destroy the world in order to save it. Or the hive. Whatever. Loving Wagner, even if he was an anti-Semite And this is why I’m not worried about joining the Illuminazi, even if my remaining friends fear for my immortal soul. I don’t know why some people turn their backs on liberalism (which has plenty going for it) and run as though from a fire to hard-right conservatism (which has little to recommend it). Becoming a bit more conservative, or moving away from crazy-conservative? I understand both. Just as I prefer level-headed liberalism to ‘woke jobs’. I encourage my fellow rational-minded friends and acquaintances - regardless of political creed - to explore the ‘other sides’. Whether it’s liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism or some permutation of all, which probably most of us are— it won’t necessarily turn them into trans-flag-waving, dreadlocked, overly-inclusive Illuminazis, or red-capped xenophobic gun crazies. Walk among Them and see if they’re the evil monsters we’ve believed them to be. Never mind what they think about drag queens, gun laws or Confederate flags. As Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh encouraged, find your common ground. We all have to agree on something. Without being a big fan of Hitler, he and I would probably get along if all we talked about is the awesomeness of dogs. We could agree on composer and anti-Semite Richard Wagner, who wrote phenomenal music I can listen to without goose-stepping to the grocery store. Don’t care the Founding Fathers owned slaves. Don’t care that Jefferson’s ‘affair’ with Sally Hemings might not have been as consensual as presented in more romantic histories. It doesn’t negate his incredible, Enlightened brain, nor that of his compatriots. I respect and love their fighting spirit (in true liberal fashion) and their rebellion against oppression (along with libertarians) and the need to keep checks and balances on human affairs and government (in service to conservative values). Imperfect, slave-owning white guys uprooted Greek democracy from a plain in Athens, dusted off nearly two millennia of neglect, and brought an anti-monarchical model to the Western world, which benefits all of us today, no matter who we are. Oh, and those same slave-owning white guys were the first in thousands of years to question whether it was truly moral to own slaves, to consider abolishing the institution (eventually, with a lot of bloodshed, sweat and tears), and then pressure the rest of the world to abandon it too. (Other parts of the world were resistant, especially Africa). You’re welcome! The world isn’t pure, and no group, culture, nation, or human being is morally pure. If I look like I’ve ‘gone Republican’, it’s because some are too mired in their own constipated liberal worldview to recognize what ‘moderate liberalism’ looks like. If I look like I’m a ‘screaming wokie’ because I actually do care about lifting up still-marginalized groups, it speaks more to my critics’ moral tunnel vision than it does about me. I’m pro-religion, while recognizing that religions all must have boundaries, including those set by outsiders, since they tend to turn oppressive and imperialist if they don’t. I can safely assume ‘my side’ doesn’t have all the answers, but that it does, in fact, have some very good ones, and that means so, too, do other social/political models. What if we did what the truly orthodox despise, and pick ‘n’ choose what’s best from each, i.e., ‘salad bar’ ideology? When I walk among the ‘woke’ at Toronto’s Pride festival in a few more weeks, it will be to learn. Not to start fights, but to figure out how we can better speak with those with whom we strongly disagree (for me, it’s mostly about what I consider the negative impact of transactivism on a movement I’ve otherwise wholeheartedly supported). Maybe try out some new discussion methodologies I’ve been reading about. The Freedom Convoy has left Ottawa, so I might have to consult Twitter to find righty extremists I don’t like much. It’s a political adventure, and I will not be consumed by the Illuminazi. On either side. I promise. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!