Just like their adversaries on the right. Even I didn't think they'd embrace violent extremism this quickly. And it's gotten pretty racist. Let your anti-Semitic freak flag fly. CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED Creative Commons image of a protest at Trafalgar Square by Alisdare Hickson on Flickr I’ll admit, when I predicted earlier this year that the far left was showing early signs of a growing willingness to adopt violence as political expression, I didn’t expect it to take the penultimate, all-at-once giant step, like, before Thanksgiving. An armed lefty went gunning for Brett Kavanaugh last year but lost his will to kill him. While some point to this as evidence the left isn’t as violent, it might also offer evidence it’s becoming emboldened, taking a cue from the right and embracing gun violence as political expression. Our side just isn’t very good at it. Yet. - Me, It’s Getting Hard To Tell The Left From The Right Anymor e - March 2023 I thought it would be several baby steps toward standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their then-distant MAGA-capped competitors, the Jan. 6th insurrection gang, but no, it was only two—one very long stride and now, and we’re waiting with held breath, just another quick hop over the line. The left’s incomprehensible love affair with Hamas and their deeply flawed pawns, the Palestinians, expose further its facile Holy Dogma that the world is divided into two camps, oppressors and oppressed. Ye shall know them not by the color of their hats but by their biology: White skin (the bad guys) and dark skin (the good guys). Hamas’s little cheerleaders’ brains have been been baked with imbecilic critical race theory’s obsession with biologically-assigned power and hierarchized victimhood: The more weak-ass ‘marginalized’ groups you can self-claim, the more paradoxically powerful you are. This is why we’ve got fake racial white people - pseudo-African Americans and ‘pretendians’ like Joseph Boyden , Jordan Peterson , and Buffy Sainte-Marie , along with appropriated men and women. The horrific support by so-called ‘social justice’ warriors for the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7 has laid bare the truth about woke ideology: It’s no better than Trumpism. And they’re every bit as vicious and racist and lacking in compassion as MAGAs. Whether one’s sympathies lie more with Israelis or Palestinians, it should be an unequivocal no-brainer to condemn Hamas’s vicious attack on civilians, and to stay faaaaaar away from associating one’s self with this demonstrable vicious, soulless, fanatical and genocidal death cult. One with no compunction against using Gazans as human shields and locating their command center or a weapons cache under a hospital or a school because they score soooo many brownie points when Gazans die after the IDF bombs a hospital to eliminate the terrorists. (Did Israel bomb a Gazan hospital or did Hamas do it? Was it even in Gaza? Or in 2023? Liberal media, drink the Hamas Kool-Aid!) Mindless, witless ideologues lap it up from uncritical legacy and social media like grateful doggies, wagging their tails with gratitude. You’d think the ‘progressives’ who claims to favor racial equality, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and who are fond of comparing everyone who disagrees with them to ‘Nazis’, would find fault with a terrorist group whose original charter explicitly called for the extermination of Jews and whose 2017 update sanitizes the language by fuzzing the goal of ‘eliminating Israel’. Never mind that charter or not, Hamas leadership has many times since called for the killing of Jews. Just like, you know, the you-know-whos. That’s how you get a young man calling to brag to his father, “I killed ten Jews today!” Social justice warriors woke up to their inner Nazis. Pro-Palestinian protests around the United States have been peppered with violent calls to action. This has resulted in a steep rise in hate crimes against Jews and to a lesser extent, Muslims. And speaking of Jan. 6th, the Democratic National Headquarters had to be evacuated on Nov. 15 when a rally of pro-Palestinian protesters turned ‘chaotic’ and six police officers were treated for injuries - this from a crowd of about 150. Well, at least they didn’t try to hang the Vice President. The role of woke racism and ‘anticolonialism’ Protesters, especially on college campuses, are bleating on about ‘decolonizing’ the Gazans so they can ‘live free’ or some such bullshit. Blissfully un-self-aware how their support for burning people alive, #MeToo_UNless_UR_a_Jew , turning children into unrecognizable mounds of bleeding meat, terrorist-documented atrocities on video uploaded to Israeli families’ Facebook pages, applies a yardstick North American Indigenous might utilize against Canadians and Americans if they cadged terrorist tips from Hamas. Colonizers, settlers and other left-wing oppressors waving their Nazi freak flags to support eliminating an Indigenous population while supporting a death cult 10,000 times more toxic than the Trumpanzee gang is about as 180-degree, anti-liberal as they can get. The left’s New Nazis never tolerate Christofascism from America’s Bible-thumpers, but they’re all squooshy-wooshy for Islamofascism. The Oct. 7 attack was not, as the Loony Left would have you believe, because of ‘colonization’ and ‘oppression’ and checkpoints and yaddayaddayadda. This shit has happened before, before the existence of Israel, with many strong similarities to the Oct. 7 massacre, primarily the sheer brutality and desire to inflict as much human suffering as inhumanly possible on Jews: The 1929 Hebron Massacre . Including rapes, beheadings, torture, castrations, and burning people alive, no matter the age. When Palestinians hate you, they want you to die screaming in prolonged agony. How much can you hate another people so badly you would commit, or support the commission of, brand new Nazi-worthy atrocities like Oct. 7? I don’t know. Ask a college student. They understand this stuff better than people with morals. Jews, the left’s new white people, are in the left’s cross-hairs as these increasingly racist Hamas groupies and Palestinian apologists ramp up hatred that may soon expand to other white people. Woke racism plays a substantial role in uncritical support of the Islamic fanatics. The anti-Western ‘postcolonialism’ madness has inflamed many academic departments and germinated the culture wars of the last fifteen years, particularly with the help of race-baiters like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo: White supremacy is everywhere, only white people can be racist because they have all the power, anyone who says otherwise is a racist. For them, white people possess near-magical powers of domination while denying personal agency, resilience and strength for everyone else. Lord Voldeblanc vs Harry Pathetic. In fact, Kendi believes that in order to balance the books, POC should discriminate against white people. Kendi redefines ‘antiracism’ to be, paradoxically, racist. Since the dark side of antiracism has already established appropriated innocence by stating that ‘black people can’t be racist’, it clears that path for the real agenda: Anti-white racism. Directly in contradiction to how Martin Luther King Jr. fantasized in 1963 about his four little children etc. etc. For so-called ‘antiracists’ like Kendi, people who believe that shit are, in the parlance of King’s time, ‘chumps’. For today’s kaffiyeh-clad protesters on North America’s college campuses, painting Jews as ‘colonizers’ ignores their indigineity to the land and that many of the Palestinians’ ancestors, coming from the historically imperialist and oppressive Isl amic empire, settled and colonized the land themselves in the seventh century. Members o f both groups have existed there uninterrupted for thousands of years, regardless of how or when the newer residents got there. It ignores that non-Native Americans and Canadians, including nearly every single loudmouthed protester, regardless of color, is an eeevull colonize r who should be pushed out of North America, by their own standards, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Let’s repeat: Palestinians and Jews have been there in one capacity or another for 3,000 years; and they share DNA . Empty-headed college protesters, with near-zero understanding of history or other human societies, or Middle Eastern genetics, blanket-ascribe white skin color to Jews in general and darker skin color to Palestinians. Remember, oppressors are white and oh-pressed are not in Ignorantland. Let’s review more recent history, like why that part of the world is so jam-packed with Jews. Many of Israel’s inhabitants came from Europe in the last century, but the Middle East also pushed plenty of population there too. While Ashkenazi Jews fled post-war Europe, nearly a million Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews were pushed out of their birth countries by hostile Muslim governments in Africa and Asia. Today’s college kids know the least about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, with the sheer arrogance of youth (I remember it well), think they know everything about it. Their puerile critical colonialism theory ignores volumes of historical data on the oppression and imperialism of Indigenous cultures and societies who dominated whoever they could. Including and especially the 1,400-year-old Islamic Empire, founded by a military commander. For a non-magical explanation for why white Europeans emerged to dominate the world, consult the Jared Diamond book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies to understand why some human societies ‘evolved’ farther than others; and why the latter didn’t develop technologies to our level or move past hunting/gathering or farming culture. The short answer is not all human societies grew up with the same resource advantages: Early regional ‘privilege’ was accorded to those living in Mesopotamia’s Fertile Crescent, from whence white people emerged, and the fewest to the Australian Aboriginals still living in the Stone Age when Europeans landed. There simply wasn’t much to work with on a largely desert continent. The greatest insight I received was the realization that humans from Mesopotamia to Australia were remarkably innovative no matter where they landed; they made the most of what they had and evolved and progressed as far as they could given the resources haphazard birth fate dealt them. White people came to dominate the world not because we were the smartest but because we began with the most animal and farming resources available to us; human civilization would likely have been little different had anyone else emerged, instead, from there. So not all Jews are white, some Palestinians are, and the Mizrahi Jews are darker overall. Yet WokeWorld identifies oppression not by the content of anyone’s character, actions or values, but by what they look like. And ignore the ones who don’t fit. Which is how they can condemn the Trumpers as ‘Nazis’ while jumping up and down with excitement for genocide. Just like so many Germans eighty years ago. Wokeism’s big lies and their hard-on for people who hate them Palestinians are some of the most homophobic people on the planet, and there is no sight more ludicrous in America today than the alphabet soup gang waving their multicolored signs and flags in support of people who think nothing of decapitating a gay man . Then there’s the classic Middle Eastern misogyny: Gazan women face not only the threat of violence from Israel but also from their own men : Patriarchal norms and intense misogyny define their lives. Wokies who bitterly criticize conservative Christianity clearly have no idea what conservative Islam looks like, especially fuelled by the mindless violence ideology of groups like Hamas, where the noblest act one can commit is dying in the cause of killing others, especially Jews. Six dozen virgins await one in the afterlife. It’s why the rest of us have woken up to wokeism’s Big Lies: That they’re liberal, progressive, or socially just. They’re self-boiled frogs; they slowly moved toward extremism and radicalized themselves, and they can’t even see it; they now believe their illiberal beliefs and values are progressive. They’re not; they’re regressive. And reactionary. They’re not antiracist; they’re racist. Not KKK, neo-Nazi, lynch all the blue-eyed white devils racist—yet. But they’re flirting with it. If those of us closer to the center, whether right-thinking righties or levelheaded lefties, challenge and stand up to these illiberals and their proto-left fascism, we can perhaps rein them in before they form their own Proud TransBoys. They’ve got the far-right’s blueprint for violence, including a few more recent lefty-ish mass shootings from the LGBTQ set . Sure, today most mass shootings are committed by right-wingers, but remember when they were exclusively white? That was awhile ago! Eventually, mass shooters and other domestic terrorists may not be exclusively ‘cis-het’, or right-wing. Hell, lefties just cos-played Jan. 6th at Democrat Central. Don’t be too surprised if future racist murders target Jews, and not by Team MAGA. I don’t worry about my white ass walking down the street; I live in Canada. But I wonder whether, for white Americans, the day will come that my Jewish friends in both countries now face: Fear of being identified as THAT ‘OTHER’ when you go to the grocery store and get chased out by a bunch of violent left-wing bigots. Today the Jews, tomorrow the you’s. 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!

In order to reduce domestic violence, one must first recognize and challenge the source, and those who agree to it. The latest campaign misses the mark, as usual. Royalty-free photo from Pickpik “Women have been carrying, through community-based organizations, the burden of protecting women almost exclusively for far too long,” a man on the Mass Casualty Commission commented regarding ‘femicide’, the first problematic word I found connected to a new Canadian campaign to eliminate violence against women. The Commission just issued a report investigating a 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia committed by an established domestic violence perpetrator, although his rampage wasn’t about women specifically. Related: ‘Private’ Domestic Violence Is Now Everyone’s Business There’s a place for men, for sure, in preventing and reducing primarily male domestic violence, but a new campaign launched by grassroots women’s non-profit Aura Freedom International to bring attention to the ‘femicide’ problem in Canada typically fails to address the primary role women can and must take to end domestic violence. Same Ol’ Shit Different Campaign. They offer no recognition of the real female power to leave early, or better yet, avoid abusers in the first place. The ‘reasons’ given for violence against women and domestic homicide are the same old tired excuses: Patriarchy, male entitlement, male privilege, colonialism, oppression. What are they going to do about it? Fuck all, as far as I can tell. Nothing new to see her. Aura’s campaign fails to understand that victims drive change, not perpetrators, which is why they should be targeting women and their power, but never do. Anti-abuse advocates customarily deny that intimate partner violence, or IPV, is one area where women possess an ability to take back their power to change the world themselves simply by making better choices. Related: What If Women Refused To Have Sex With Abusive Men? Like not allowing abusive partners into their lives. Like getting rid of them the moment they turn abusive. Like recognizing that controlling behavior, called ‘coercive control’, a behavior Canada is considering criminalizing , is an early warning sign to a woman that her partner may be or could turn abusive. Laying down the rules early to a partner exhibiting ‘coercive control’ determines whether he’s a keeper. Is he willing to respect your boundaries? If not, find someone who does. Enough already with ‘Don’t blame the victim’. I want to hear more, ‘Don’t BE the victim’! I will keep asking the irritating question, “Why doesn’t she leave him?” until so-called feminist activist groups and non-profits recognize the power women have to avoid domestic abuse. The earlier she gets out, the easier it will be, and less dangerous. This ain’t 1970 anymore. Aura Freedom International is dedicated to ending violence against women including human trafficking. It employs all the usual emotion-laden words, and offers Indigenous women, who suffer IPV at much higher rates, nothing more than hand-wringing. There are a few ways this campaign could have been so much more effective. What is ‘femicide’, exactly? Let’s start with Aura’s misunderstanding of ‘femicide’, which they define as ‘crimes committed against women and girls purely for the crime of their gender’. Women in domestic violence environments aren’t killed because they’re women, but because they’re the physically weaker domestic partner. Homosexual male couples suffer the same dynamic, as do lesbians. ‘Femicide’ more appropriately describes Canada’s previous mass shooting record-holder, Marc Lepine, who gunned down fourteen female engineering students specifically because they were female in Quebec many years ago. He forced all the male students out first and mowed the women down like Al Capone, screaming about how feminism ruined everything, believing they were there and not him because of affirmative action, rather than that they might all have been better engineering students than he, a frustrated failed male. Alex Minassian, the incel who attacked women with his car in Toronto a few years ago is another example. And what is an ‘epidemic’? Another closely related Aura exaggeration is calling the rise in Canadian domestic violence—which did occur during the pandemic—as an ‘epidemic’. By their statistics, a woman is killed by a domestic partner every 48 hours in Canada, which works out to 182.5 women a year. Not good in the slightest, but it constitutes .0005% of the population in a country of 40 million people, roughly half of which are females. It’s troubling, but hardly an epidemic, and I confess I can’t feel the urgency because I always have, and always will, regard IPV as being quite distinct from stranger danger - women choose their domestic partners but not their stranger rapists and killers. If domestic violence is an ‘epidemic’, then it’s one 182 Canadian women a year agreed to every step of the way, for many complex reasons, rather than get out early enough. It’s why I’d like to see more campaigns organized around prevention, and specifically women’s power to say no to abuse, to refuse a partner who starts to act like an asshole. We see near-zero focus on the woman’s right, power, and agency to refuse abusive treatment, long before he comes to think he ‘owns’ her and can do whatever he wants with her. Don’t abandon your Indigenous sisters Aura refuses, with classically far-left cowardice, to call out the root cause of domestic violence for Indigenous women. Do identity labels really matter when we’re talking about IPV? What if the problem is less ‘intersectional’ than we think? It illustrates exactly why we need to retire these antediluvian so-called anti-female violence campaigns: They too often dance around the real problem. Statistics Canada reports that Indigenous women are the victims of 21% of IPV, despite constituting only 5% of the national population. Indigenous domestic violence rates are, in keeping with the required narrative of the day, attributed to prior genocide, colonization, mistreatment and forced assimilation. Never do we hear Indigenous ‘patriarchy’ suggested as a potential cause. That would ‘stigmatize’ Indigenous men, who constitute 80% of physical or fatal attacks on Indigenous women, but the illiberal left only cares about white rapists and gynocidists. Now, we don’t know what pre-Columbian domestic violence rates were here on Turtle Island, although archaeology and anthropology reveal North American Indigenous societies bore all the earmarks of traditional, male-dominated, patriarchal values and behavior, so let’s just stop pretending to care who’s raping and killing Indigenous women and show we care by naming the culprits: Yeah, these guys. Image by Mohamed Mahmoud Hassan on publicdomainpictures.net Indigenous men who batter, rape, and murder women are no different from men in other cultures. They primarily kill their intimate partners and family members. They do it for the same reasons all other abusers do: Because they can. Because women are weaker, and men feel entitled to their bodies, and to ‘make her’ do what he wants if she resists his coercive control or fails to treat his needs and wants as primary. It’s patriarchy, plain and simple, but liberal anti-violence campaigns are shy about calling out non-white rapists, batterers and murderers for a lot of stupid, identity-driven reasons, which serves Da Indigenous Patriarchs very well, thankyouverymuch. Grow some labia, girls! All such campaigns outside Indigenous culture aren’t going to offer Indigenous women any support apart from the usual virtue-signalling. White feminists are NOT going to call out Indigenous men on their patriarchy and misogyny. You can shut them up pretty quickly with the whole oppression rap, as most white feminists are suffering from morally debilitating ‘white guilt’. They will, as ‘progressive’ feminists are wont to do, throw their Indigenous sisters under the bus where they can continue to suffer because their white sisters won’t address the primary cause of assault and murder among Indigenous women: Indigenous men. Cultural history matters, but not when an Indigenous man makes the decision to smash his fist into a brown face, when he shoves his dick up an unconsenting Indigenous woman’s vagina or down her throat, when he picks up a blunt instrument and smashes her head with it. We shouldn’t give a flying fuck whatever his excuses - residential schools, hundreds of years of genocide, the Sixties Scoop, irritating sports team mascots or personal trauma. Those are topics for his therapist. First and foremost, he needs to take responsibility for his personal agency and choice to harm his partner or family member, who isn’t responsible for any of that. There are no excuses for male battery. No, not even for Indigenous men. Patriarchal domination is the primary cause of IPV, no matter what the culture or skin color. So what is Aura Freedom Foundation doing to address this? With a typically but ultimately useless gesture to try and maybe kinda sorta get women to think about what the campaign should be screaming from the rooftops: DON’T WAIT. GET OUT NOW. AND NEVER ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN AGAIN. EDUCATE YOURSELF! We see a similar dynamic in the shoddy excuses so-called ‘feminists’ use to excuse the gross slaughter and mass rape of Israeli women on Oct. 7. Ask them why Hamas was so horrendously cruel to women and they’ll give you their standard bullshit about ‘colonialism', ‘oppression’ and ‘settling’. When in fact Hamas is a vicious, psychopathic terrorist group steeped in misogyny, as are, it seems, many ‘feminist’ groups and the United Nations, which currently refuses to condemn these war crimes against women. Let’s be clear: The primary cause of IPV is men who make the decision to harm or kill, not their personal sob stories. Don’t conflate transwomen and real women Marissa Kokkoros, the executive director spearheading the Aura campaign, cited “an increase in homophobia and transphobia…an increase in misogyny and hate in general,” and made the mistake of including transwomen. Transgender people do suffer an increased risk of IPV, particularly with a male partner (go figger), but it’s inaccurate to include them with violence against women statistics. Transwomen are not the same as natal women, regardless of how they ‘feel’. Their lives are no less significant, but if Aura’s campaign doesn’t include gay and lesbian domestic violence, it should recognize that transfolk are a different class of people too - their lives no less important, but they’re ‘women’ with male bodies and brains who are in a better position to defend themselves against violence, if not always successfully. (After all, men are the biggest killers of other men, once again go figger). The reason why women as a class shouldn’t be erased is because men and women are different and all the surgery in the world can’t change that, or the maleness that remains between the ears. The challenges transfolk face from largely male partners are similar, but without the physical weakness challenge real women face. If one wants to argue, “But transgender women are primarily assaulted by males just like natal women,” then include gay male domestic violence as well. Take a cue from Nancy Reagan, Aura! Aura created a video to make some sort of a point about violence against women. Hey, makes a nice Christmas gift for the relentlessly clueless friend of yours who zeroes in on a bad man like a bloodhound on an escaped convict hunt. Gender-based violence increased 14% in Canada over the pandemic, as women and girls were trapped with their abusers in lockdown. I wonder how effective a campaign might have been had it been offered at the end of lockdown, which in Ontario was the second quarter of 2022: Get Out Before The Next Pandemic! Kokkoros complained to CTV News about the lack of proper data for “ underlying sociocultural or systemic factors”, adding, “Prevention efforts really must be focused on the root causes.” Anti-IPV advocates love examining tangential ‘root causes’ because it excuses them from having to address what they can do to protect women better from men who don’t give a damn about the cute pink body bag campaign. If they feel entitled to hit, slam, rape, and even murder their partner, no anti-IPV campaign will stop it. They won’t even watch. The people who will pay attention to it are women, and, hopefully, the ones who need it most - those who are or have been victims of IPV. What if Aura and others organized their campaigns around a new message? Kokkoros wants more men to speak up and be part of the change against male violence. I agree, but I don’t think Aura is serious about wanting to push it. They’re willing to do anything except encourage the people with the most power to Just Say No to abusive partners. That goes for everyone - not just female partners of domestic violence, but also for male victims, lesbian victims, and transgender victims. In the end, we need to work together to eliminate intimate partner violence no matter who the victims or perpetrators are - all lives really are equal and even when females perpetrate domestic violence, the dynamics are frightening similar to traditional M2F violence. I’d like to see fewer irrelevant labels and more recognition of female power. Like I said, this is 2023, not 1970. Not all victims agree to abuse. But after the first strike, if they stay, they’re a volunteer. 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!

Because the rainbow flag gang has been cheering for their enemies since Oct. 7. Killing off identified LGBTQ people has been a thing in Gaza for many years Don’t pull this shit in Gaza or you will know the *true* meaning of the word ‘genocide’. Photo by Ketut Subiyanto The colorful folks who lose their minds when Republicans and conservative Christians enact anti-transgender laws give genocidal, homo-hating psychopaths a free pass because, I guess, at least Hamas hates Jews as much as the other unleashed bigots on the left . If there’s one thing that doesn’t exist in the West today, it’s ‘trans genocide’. That’s a fantasy cooked up in brains housed in overprivileged, unmarginalized, mostly male bodies desperately seeking cultural relevance. If anyone implemented an actual genocide campaign against the genderfluid set, evidence so far indicates it would miss their gaydar. It’s true that transfolk are at higher risk of violence than other groups, but it hardly approaches the level of ‘genocide’, a very much-abused word that used to mean something super-serious, like the conscious attempt to exterminate a group of people based on certain characteristics. We’ve seen it in Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Chinese Revolution, the 20th-century Russian attempt against Ukrainians in the ‘30s, and of course the ‘gold standard’ for the most systematic attempt ever to eliminate Others, Nazi Germany. Pre-Columbian Indigenous groups everywhere occasionally attempted genocide too; and it was a lot easier back then when tribes and bands were a few hundred members at most, rather than today’s cities, states and countries. The most recent example of a limited attempt at genocide was Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel in October. It’s linked and locked to genocide because Hamas’s charter is quite explicit on their mandate to eliminate Judaism from all of what is now Israel. ‘From the river to the sea’, that’s what it means. Don’t let Hamas apologists tell you otherwise. Hamas’s 1988 Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement is pretty plain-spoken: Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory). It quotes the Koran: "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem). There’s more anti-Semitic genocidal crapola, but let’s not get off on a tangent. In case you’re wondering if Israel’s uncomfortably disproportionate defensive response, which has killed a ton more Gazans than Israelis on Oct. 7 is ‘genocide’, as the Islamofascist cheerleaders on North American campuses insist, Time Magazine weighed in on the matter in November. Defining genocide gets very tricky without the evidence of a specific intention to destroy the group, it says, but notes, “That can be a high bar because very often people contribute to genocidal policies, even if that's not their direct intention.” That renders allegations of Israeli genocide of Palestinians a little less abstractly. While Israel’s explicit purpose is to wipe out Hamas, they’re taking a helluva lot of civilians with them, and with the Gazan death toll now estimated around 20,000 since October 7th, the carnage can no longer be blamed solely on Hamas’s use of the civilian population as human shields. With a massive human rights crisis of displaced people and countless neighborhoods reduced to rubble, Israeli forces are squandering whatever moral righteousness for response they possessed for October 7. When defining genoicide, most experts refer to the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which created the definition in 1948. If the Israeli government has genocidal intent toward the Palestinians themselves, they’re less explicit than Hamas, or many other antisemitic genocidists of the Arab/Muslim world, for whom the elimination of Jews and ergo the State of Israel has been boldly stated for generations. In North America, the last genuine genocide attempt was the centuries-long effort to eliminate ‘the Indian’ from what they called Turtle Island and what we call ‘the United States’ and ‘Canada’. There have been no genuine genocide attempts here since, and the ‘trans genocide’ one sees repeated ad nauseum on social media is merely hypervole rooted in very few expressions of a few sick individuals who either genuinely would like to eliminate all trans people, or just crank them up. Either way, there’s no concerted effort to eliminate them, and the violence against them isn’t remarkable compared to many other groups. The Human Rights Campaign notes that last year in the United States, 32 transgender people were murdered , 81% of them non-white, 59% of them black. They claim to have documented 302 violent deaths of transgender and ‘gender non-conforming people’ since 2013. Those numbers aren’t good, but they’re no evidence of genocide. A fair chunk of them may be genuine hate crimes (although there could be other reasons, like a john who doesn’t want to pay his transgender prostitute). Like so-called ‘hate crime’ hoaxes against black people, when you drill down to the meat of the story, you often find that there was less evidence of a hate crime than initially alleged in the legacy/social media. Some transfolk are killed by police (go figger), some in prison, and a few in ICE detention centers. About 2 6% are killed by intimate partners . Welcome to WomanWorld, fellas. This is what you signed up for. Happy to join you in the fight against intimate partner violence, everyone has the right to not be murdered by a partner! I can’t find statistics specifically for Canada on transgender murders. The U.S. numbers do seem to be going up, but whether that’s a response juiced by ‘anti-trans’ information in the media, as transactivists allege, or other reasons (it’s hardly uncommon to get murdered by the police or in prison) is unclear. It could be that trans numbers grow every year as more jump on the Trans Train. I can’t help but wonder whether violent, aggressive transactivism has something to do with it. “Can we just start stabbing transphobes?” Transactivists are pretty famously aggressive and violent against women, particularly in Europe where they’ve been documented physically attacking feminists at public protests, in the time-honored tradition of men attempting to shut down women’s speech. La plus ça change, n’est-ce pas? Some things never change. Feminists were also violently attacked by transactivists and Antifa in Portland, Oregon in November. But I suspect transactivist woman-haters have little to do with it. Partner violence, prison violence, sex worker violence - also, la plus ça change. But the LGBTQ cheerleader section for Hamas makes me wonder if they’d even notice if anyone launched a genuine trans genocide. While even Gaza isn’t guilty of a concerted, systematic effort to eliminate transfolk or other LGBTQ people, they sure do love to push them off buildings when they identify someone who doesn’t adhere strictly to Islamic dictates about who and what to shag. It’s a little better on the West Bank where homosexuality has been decriminalized since 1951 (yes really!). The status is far more confusing in Gaza, with a patchwork of laws covering who may do what with whom. Homosexuality is not specifically banned, but don’t expect any help from the police for homophobic or (genuine) transphobic violence in action. Prison is the customary punishment for gay activity, but can also include the very occasional flogging for ‘adultery’. Not sure what you get when you murder gay or trans people in Gaza. High fives? People do get killed there for partaking of Oscar Wilde-style love. This includes a Hamas commander executed for allegedly partaking in an act of ‘moral turpitude’ (their euphemism for gay sex) and theft, although some allege he was tortured into making a confession. This sounds suspiciously like what happens in other parts of the Middle East all the time for women - ‘honor killings’ executed by family members, or stoned by the community, on rumors of alleged non-chaste behavior with a male, no evidence required. Wagging tongues get women killed all the time in the Middle East for such alleged sex crimes, just as they did in medieval Europe for alleged witchcraft. Gay Palestinians can avoid getting murdered by turning informant for the authorities (including Israeli authorities who blackmail them to become Israeli collaborators). Still, Israel has actually become a bit of a gay retreat for Palestinians trying to escape Gazan homophobia, and is the only place in the Middle East where one will find Pride Parades. If you’re going to be gay in the Middle East, Palestine is one of the worst places to do it. And Israel is the best. Even so, Palestinians aren’t attempting anything approaching ‘trans genocide’, or even ‘gay genocide’, but if it was to start anywhere Palestine would be in my top three guesses. And I wonder: Would Western transactivists even notice? And if they did, would they dare, with typical Regressive Left cowardice, to call out dark-skinned homophobes and transphobes? Would Western condemnation of Gazan homophobia be regarded with embarrassed looks as ‘cultural imperialism’? If they can’t identify the rampant homophobia and genuine transphobia in Palestine, and they cheer for the equally homophobic Hamas, I’m not sure they’d recognize an actual genocide if fluorescent-dressed corpses started dropping on their heads. It’s possible the rise in trans murders in the West is a consequence of rising violence and murders overall. The numbers may also be rising because more people are ‘going trans’, so there are simply more of them to run afoul of others, whether it’s due to transphobia, ‘trans panic’, or police arrest. But it’s certain the West’s claims of ‘trans genocide’ is an effort to inflate the emotionalism of the debate, as so many movements are wont to do (including on the right). We see the same inflation from the ‘antiracist’ set when they claim black deaths by police are ‘the new lynching’ or ‘genocide’ against blacks. Ironically, more trans people (and white people) are killed every year by the cops than black people. And interestingly, the Black Lives Matter website has fuck all to say about Israel, whereas on Glenn Loury’s Substack , they’ve discussed the anti-Semitism problem in the black community, not to mention in the DEI industry , where most DEI consultants are black women. What’s worrying is how much violence against everybody is growing, not just transfolk. Whether they’re murdered for their lifestyle choice or for the common reasons so many others are murdered, it’s not okay. But it’s not genocide either. And I’m not sure any of them would notice if it turned into one. 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!

Are you voting for someone with a fuzzy grip on reality? Or against your own interests? Independents will never win, but why not send a message? Image generated by Poe AI, after a lot of effort to get Biden to not look like Trump, and to grasp the concept of ‘two devil horns each’, not each with one devil horn “I’m voting for Trump this time.” Really? “I guess I’ll vote for Biden again, anything’s better than Trump.” Are you sure? I mean, I’ve got food in my fridge older than these two codgers! (Okay, maybe it’s time to throw out the meat loaf.) Acting grand-dadly is the latest fad in D.C amongst the 75+ set. Mitch McConnell ‘freezes’; Trump and Biden have both been scrutinized for potential dementia, and not only by their adversaries and critics. A Washington pharmacist claims he is regularly filling and hand-delivering prescriptions for treating Alzheimer’s disease—to many members of Congress. Anyone who’s a baby boomer is already pretty damn old, but our two truly serious candidates from the two biggest parties are from the friggin’ Silent Generation . Or maybe Trump is a very early boomer. Born in 1945, he’s on the cusp, although no one has ever accused him of silence. A guy who worships dictators and admits he wants to be one himself is the worst possible choice ever, with or without his cookies. He gave us four years’ experience with his petty and morally corrupt presidency, incapable of telling the truth, obsessed with his own petty grievances, issuing crazy directives ignored by his staff , spending more time tweeting than running the country, and insulting and disrespecting everyone, including military veterans. Except deplorable dictators, with whom he may have shared sensitive American intelligence—and kept it unsecured in his bathroom. Remember the days when Republicans lost their shit when someone burned a flag? Now they wipe their shit with the American flag. I think Biden is a somewhat less demented choice in both senses of the word but—I’m not voting for him either. God/dess help us if he dies in office. President Kamala Harris: Another reason to Just Say No to Joe. I expected the former San Francisco district attorney to set fire to her enemies the way Congresswoman Katie Porter does when she traps a hapless CEO in the Senate chambers hot seat. Harris has a glare that could melt steel but not, apparently, her critics. She’s too Hillary Clinton: Stiff, robotic, unwilling to speak her mind and there’s no way she could ever utter an actual sarcastic zinger. Not publicly, anyway. She’s a bright, smart woman, but too hyper-conscious of her burdensome identity labels: Female, black, Asian etc. and first Vice President to be all that stuff. I think most of us would like to see someone younger than either of the two acuity-challenged Methuselahs. I mean, I want a President I don’t have to explain the difference between a boy and a girl to. And ffs, Donald Trump thinks Nikki Haley is Nancy Pelosi! We bitch about shitty candidates but how is this not our fault? We get what we vote for in the primaries. The Republicans run in fear from any candidate with a brain because their voters do . The Democrats scream on sight at any candidate who isn’t woke because hating all the people the Republicans don’t and wanting to censor as many library books as Moms for Liberty is what passes for ‘progressivism’. And who do we vote for? Whoever we think is the lesser of the two evils. Even when they’re both against our own interests. So I wonder. Why vote for either? What if those of us fed up with both extremes voted for some independent candidate we know will never win but at least doesn’t stand in contradiction to our own interests, and who possesses more conscious thought than a jellyfish? I’m not alone. Bari Weiss’s The Free Press recently covered how voters from both sides are switching in The Great Scramble . It reminds me of Afghanistan before 9/11. Their choices were only the Taliban and the Northern Alliance; voters constantly changed the reigning party and received brand-new violence, same as the other. Would you prefer Mao or Hitler? Sound familiar? The article mirrors exactly how I feel: Politically homeless, abandoned by the party I voted for all my life (Democrat). Not wanting to see either side win. Seeing violence and repression no matter which doddering old man leads his younger, toxic party to victory. What message would it send if a whack of Americans voted, but not for either major party candidate? What if the winning geezer won with, like, 38% of the vote? Even though all those independent candidates came nowhere within megaphone-shouting distance of winning? I asked that question on Quora recently and most argued against voting indy. A fellow named Mark Stinson described how the states’ elections require a plurality of the vote and how even a 38% winner (the person with the most popular votes) wins all that state’s electors, and how, in the current state of Congress, the Republicans would probably get the votes needed to win in the 26 primarily Republican House delegations. His full answer is here (you have to scroll down). But we’ve got to do something. There aren’t a lot of declared Democratic challengers to the incumbent’s reign, who’s widely regarded as the only person who can beat Trump, since he did it once before. Elections are about many different issues, but at the core we care about our own, and our tribe’s, interest. In my position, my tribe under threat constitutes half the country. The same threat I perceive from the right, although expressed differently. I don’t consider the Democrats pro-women’s rights anymore. Why should anyone vote against their own interests? You’ve got abject whackjobbery in the GOP, and abject wokejobbery in the Dems. As a feminist, I find myself increasingly resistant to voting for any candidate or party who’s not. The ‘woke’ Democrats are in thrall to a transgender religion which signals a much deeper problem so-called liberals have with women’s rights. The Squad and other woke-ass-kissing politicians are willing to put women in serious danger in service for the votez for sexual fetishists cosplaying womanhood for the wanks. Sorry, Dems, but supporting women’s right to abortion is no longer enough to prove feminist credentials. I believe the unquestioning loyalty too many in the party express towards ‘trans rights’, a subject on which I’ve spilled many words already, exemplifies a pervasive left-wing misogyny no less threatening than historical conservative hostility to women’s rights, and I wonder whether the pledged allegiance to restore Roe is mostly Democratic efforts to distract female voters from an uglier agenda: Namely, the right to say no to aggressive men. I’m not at all sure misogynist souls are any different riding an elephant or a donkey. Men seem pretty willing no matter how they vote to protect male sexual interests, even if it’s not their own. Help out a bro’, could you, buddy? Roe seems to be the only policy point on which Democrats aren’t actively trying to harm women. The only policy point on which the Republicans support women is by resisting the transgender cult, including ‘gender-affirming’ care. But I can’t vote for them, either. Not when culty Trumplove is the intellectually deranged equivalent of ‘Transwomen are women’. Got this for Christmas. It explores how the left is moving toward the right, the very people they claim to fight. Women are half the population, and our safety, equality and interests far outweigh what suspiciously predatory men want. Wokeness = misogyny, exemplified by disbelieving Hamas’s own documented livestreamed rape and atrocity videos. The Squad’s refusal to support Israeli rape victims makes the Epstein-friendly pussy-grabber look like Harry Styles. And denying that men who grow their hair long don’t possess any physical advantage over their female teammates demonstrates conscious stupidity on the same level as that Biden stole the election because it’s simply impossible not enough Americans voted for Trump the last time around for him to lose. Even as Republicans don’t support ‘transing’ children, they’re the ones who destroyed Roe, and many are want to eliminate birth control , like Clarence Thomas, who’s also against gay marriage (I wonder how he feels about returning 1968’s anti-miscegenation law? ). Republicans also voted against the Violence Against Women Act. There’s so much wrong with both misogynist parties, but Donald Trump ? Again? With all the other lib-hating, reason-averse, censorship-happy, misogynist, racist, homophobic, but more mentally acute candidates Republican voters have to choose from, why does it have to be the dictator-lover who clearly hates democracy? What does it tell us about what’s really wrong with this country? Hint: It ain’t Trump. I know there’s a lot more to an election than women’s rights. Trump is killing the Democrats, rightfully, on immigration . One of the massive delusions of the illiberal left, as I’ve pointed out many times before, is its unwillingness to just say no to anyone. Not just sexual fetishists seeking to bend women to their will, but to any old Mexican rapist who wants to immigrate to the U.S., because guaranteed, there will be rapists and other ‘bad hombres’ as Trump has put it, when you allow unfettered access from any place on the planet. Related: They’re Black Democrats. And They’re Suing Chicago Over Migrants. - The Free Press Voters have plenty of economic concerns too, and I also recognize I don’t live in the U.S. anymore so I don’t have to live with whichever bad decision y’all make. What does bother me is that the only decent Republican candidate worthy of considering was the guy who entered not to win but to try and warn Americans about what an unqualified human being Donald Trump was to allow into power again. Chris Christie knew he had no chance of winning; and it’s a shame because he was the only candidate with a brain not addled by ideotology. I’ve liked him ever since he ate a doughnut on Letterman in response to his many fat-shamers But every time I think about holding my nose and voting for the sort of less toxic party, I feel ashamed. I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t. Fuck it, America. I’ll ‘throw away’ my vote on some candidate or party who has no hope of winning. I can’t, I won’t, vote against my own interests. Ranked voting There’s a better way to conduct elections. It’s too late for 2024, but we should start talking about it now. Someone answering my question on Quora pointed out the idea of ‘ranked voting’, which sounds like a better way to elect a candidate rather than by which one drools the least . With ‘ranked voting’, a voter ranks three or more candidates from most to least preferred. Vivek Ramalamasalami was still in the race when I designed this Ranked voting is a little more complicated, but Rankedvoting.co , which believes it’s promoting a more pro-democracy electoral reform, claims ranked voting “determines the candidate with the strongest support, encourages civil campaigning, reduces wasted votes, and eliminates the need for multiple elections.” In other words, your vote does count, since you’re not just voting for your fave, but the ones you’d rather see if s/he can’t win. It’s already in practice in some states and municipalities. In 2022, Alaska’s new non-partisan primary system offered all candidates on a unified ballot. Voters ranked who they wanted, which advanced the top four candidates to the instant runoff. Supposedly, it reduced extremism and encouraged greater cooperative governance. Voters are believed to have made more nuanced decisions rather than strict party-based ones. After all, no one knows who will make the Final Four or whether any will be Your Party Humanoid. I could sneak in a rank for Chris Christie. Because the elections were more ‘meaningful’, meaning “ballots cast in competitive elections that are not effectively pre-determined based on party affiliation alone,” a higher percent of Alaskans (35%) cast them, more than any other state. The ‘cooperative governance’ comes into play when campaigning candidates have to cooperate with each other after an election ends, as it did in Alaska last year, with an unusual bipartisan majority coalition in the Alaska Legislature’s two chambers. The result is that lawmakers have to work together now, and when they run again have to appeal to a broader swathe of voters rather than just playing to their base. That bit interests me even more about ranked voting. It’s an interesting idea for creating greater voter engagement, and other options if you’re not that keen on the candidate of your own party. And we could all do with more ‘civil campaigning’. It’s ten months until the U.S. federal election. What are your thoughts or opinions? Since we won’t have ranked voting, will you vote for one of the Paw-Paws or will you send a message to Washington? I might still try writing in Lyndon Larouche , Ross Perot or Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf . Yeah, I know they’re all dead, but if I’m asked to rank three of the candidates in the poll at the top of this article my choices are: Death by chocolate Death by George Clooney-shagging The bullet. 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!

THIS is how they can take back their power from their accused rapist in court--and win! Trump image public domain photo; Carroll image CC0 4.0, both from Wikimedia Commons Yanno, Donald Trump could have saved himself a total of $88 million dollars if only he’d chosen to prove his innocence. E. Jean Carroll, who’s accused him for decades of having raped her in a New York department store changing room, kept his salvation in an evidence drawer somewhere. It was a you-know-what-stained dress. Trump could have exonerated himself in a heartbeat and made this aaaaaaallll go away years ago, and even more importantly, saved himself $88M. He merely needed to provide a DNA sample that failed to match the DNA on the dress, at a critical juncture in his life when he’s about to lose a substantial portion of his real estate assets, may be permanently barred from the real estate industry in New York, and will need all that’s left of his dough to pay off the lawyers, since his legal troubles may outlast his life. And they’re doing such a fine job for him, aren’t they. I mean, even Tacopina has dropped him. When the guy who looks like a Sopranos reject leaves you alone with the blonde who’d rather be pretty than smart (Tee hee, giggle giggle! Mission accomplished, Barbie!), you are, well, rhymes with ‘tucked’. “She’s lying!” said Trump. “He’s lying!” said Carroll. “And I’ve got the dress to prove it!” So of course, like any innocent man would do, Trump refused to supply a DNA sample to settle the case without all this courtroom drama and $88M + lawyer fees. (Although granted, they’re probably working for free and just haven’t figured that out yet. They should ask any New Yorker .) There’s a very strong, powerful lesson here for rape victims, especially future victims, feminists, anti-rape advocates and others who bemoan the very real problem of victims not being believed and not receiving justice in court: PRESERVE THE EVIDENCE! There’s only one other semen-stained dress more famous than Carroll’s and I suspect it forced another President into an embarrassing admission. Monica Lewinsky famously kept her dirty dress, not to prove rape—she made it very clear her affair with Clinton had been consensual, and instigated by her—and he stopped claiming he’d ‘never had sexual relations with that woman’ after America began debating whether he should be forced to provide a DNA sample. And you don’t even need a little plastic cup for it; a blood sample will work just fine. So here’s something a rape victim—or her friend or roommate dealing with the immediate aftermath—can do. Put the evidence in a plastic baggie! Semen evidence on clothes can apparently last for decades, so the victim doesn’t have to report it immediately if she’s distraught, ridiculously traumatized and too ashamed to admit what happened, although it would be better for her case if she did. But still—evidence in a baggie weeks, months, or even years later is a lot better than she said/he said. Granted, if she files charges the man will invariably claim the sex was ‘consensual’, but DNA evidence proving something happened between them is better than her word alone, and will refute, “I’ve never even met the woman!” By the time many women get around to reporting, the bruises are gone, her memories may be fuzzy or dissipated, witnesses in the vicinity scattered, and there’s no point in conducting a rape test now. A suspect who refuses to provide a DNA sample for comparison looks an awful lot like he’s hiding something, and that will sit quite differently with a jury. THIS is how we bring justice to rape victims. THIS is how victims only have to take twenty seconds to protect their interests when they’re sobbing in a fetal position. THIS is how rape victims can take back their power. Take off whatever provides incontrovertible evidence that Mr. X had sex with you, put it in a plastic bag, seal it up and put it somewhere safe. This is something women’s activists need to broadcast from the rooftops: PRESERVE THE EVIDENCE! PRESERVE THE EVIDENCE! 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!

Since progressive feminists no longer #Believe[All]Women, let's talk about actual false rape allegations vs denying documented rapes By UK Government - Foreign Secretary James Cleverly visits Israel, 10/11/23, CC BY 2.0 by Wikimedia Commons There’s an overtly antisemitic Palestinian professor at NYU telling his compliant, passive classroom that Hamas atrocities aren’t true, especially reports of beheaded babies and sexually assaulted women. No, his #MeToo-generation students aren’t trying to cancel him. Since ‘progressive’ feminists around the world have joined incels, men’s rights activists, misogynists and certain Palestinian professors in believing that ‘some women lie about rape’, even when their brutal rapes were livestreamed, recorded, and uploaded by the perpetrators to Facebook, now seems like a good time to talk about what heretofore had been a taboo topic for many— actual false rape allegations vs the feminist New Thang: Denial of actual rapes. Until recently (like, October 8th), fem-babes heavily downplayed or outright denied some women lie about rape. Their battle cry was #BelieveWomen, like, to the point of Catholic Inquisition-style witness-or-else sacred holy writ. AI-generated image from Poe.com. Man, AI-generated images have a long way to go ;) Bill Maher pointed out that a better hashtag was #TakeAccusationsSeriously . Investigate before judging, he encouraged. Women don’t lie about rape as much as men think they do, but they lie more than women think they do. Progressive feminists who #BelieveWomen never required much, if any, evidence at all. To question an accuser was verboten . Period. If she said he did it, that settles it. Some even thumb their noses at the notion of due process for accused rapists and sexual harassers. The problem is, false rape allegations sometimes happen, and it even make the news on occasion. I myself have known two women who made them, one of them against two separate men. It happens. By refusing to address that small percentage of women who really have lied about rape, feminists hurt women, and especially real rape victims. False allegations are estimated to be around 2%-8%, so, if 100,000 women claimed they were raped, an estimated 2,000-8,000 could be lying. That’s claimed, because many women believe they were raped but don’t tell anyone. So the number of overall false rape allegations could be much, much lower, but it’s hard to quantify when you can’t count the ones who keep mum. In the wake of October 7th, some ‘progressive’ feminists have found a new way to hurt rape victims - the sort of bass-ackwards ‘false false rape allegation’. It’s denying or downplaying verified reports of Hamas’s mass rape and hideous torture of sexual assault victims. This, despite global investigation with documenting video and forensic evidence, the former often recorded by the Hamas animals themselves in the act. To put this in perspective, denying Hamas’s mass wartime rapes requires as much suspension of disbelief as it does to think January 6 was a peaceful protest. Women’s groups globally are finally getting around to admitting, well, something may have happened that day, maybe even a lot of somethings, hobbled as they are by the idiotic and racist notions that all Jews are white, all Hamas terrorists are not, and that ‘colonizers’ and ‘oppressors’ always deserve what they get. These rapes were awfully embarrassing for the progressive narrative that everything is all about dark oppressed and white oppressors. It’s convinced some feminists that maybe ‘blaming the victim’ isn’t so bad after all, when you don’t like the victims. Like, Jews. What more, besides Hamas perpetrator confessions, recordings, and brutal videos, would convince these women’s organizations they don’t need better evidence to be, you know, really really Really Really REALLY REALLY sure. “I can’t hear you! I can’t see you! No, no, no rape victims here!” Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels (Whispering) Yes, some women really do lie Women who actually lie about rape are, to paraphrase the immortal words of Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde, “The feminist crime that dares not speak its name.” Feminists preferred to keep mum about it, deny its existence or discount its importance. Hamilton rape allegations false 10 Years Later, the Duke lacrosse rape case still stings Rolling Stone & UVA: A Campus Rape — What Went Wrong? UCSB student sentenced for fake rape report Woman recants Conor Oberst rape story: ‘I made up those lies’ The Hofstra date rape that didn’t happen The Tawana Brawley case Police say woman made up story of rape at Campus Lodge apartments ( This one lied “as a lesson to women in the area that an attack could happen to them.”) Incident at GW (George Washington University) — Rape hoax Woman falsely accused trooper of sex abuse in CT Lena Dunham’s mis-identification of an alleged rapist Myrtle Beach woman faces felony charges for falsely claiming rape Woman jailed for ten years for making series of false rape claims (This one got an innocent man jailed) Emmett Till’s accuser admits she lied. Now his family wants the truth This notorious lynching of a black teenager accused of whistling at or touching, although not raping a white woman in 1955 was one of the catalysts touching off the modern American civil rights movement. Feminists have swept under the rug that a few women do lie, because every admitted falsehood, they believe, makes it easier for men to deny rape occurs much at all. The narrative is a direct response to an appalling historic record in which women were and still are regularly not believed when they allege sexual abuses committed against them. We see our past mirrored in less enlightened countries where women are blamed for their own rapes, accused of ‘asking for it’, and otherwise treated with a skepticism that wouldn’t greet, say, someone alleging their house had been robbed. The biggest rape liars are men. They always say they didn’t do it. But feminist excuses or distractions from the severity of the false allegation crime fuels the perception once again that women can’t be trusted to tell the truth, that ideology and claimed victimhood trumps evidence. It makes it even harder to ‘believe women’ when otherwise guileless feminists who never met a rape victims they didn’t believe turn around and deny rapes that clearly occurred, and even worse, actual documented mass rape. Sometimes women deserve rape. Right? Feminist groups at the United Nations, the folks who once strongly condemned mass wartime rape in days of yore, looked the other way, whistled in the dark, and mumbled a lot. “Every new wave of warfare brings with it a rising tide of human tragedy, including new waves of war’s oldest, most silenced and least condemned crime,” said Pramila Patten , the UN’s Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Unfortunately, that was in July 2023, three months before October 7th. She didn’t, according to the website, get around to issuing any official statement on the Hamas attack until December 8th, with a press release expressing how Patten was “gravely concerned about emerging reports of sexual violence, against both women and men, while they were held in Hamas captivity.” ‘Emerging’? Where the hell has she been? “Special Representative Patten expresses concern for those civilians still held hostage by Hamas, and calls for their immediate, safe, and unconditional release.” Nothing about the rapes that happened to the ones before December 8, especially the ones who didn’t survive to tell their stories. Two frickin’ months. While one might argue that investigations need to happen first - and I agree - this was one of the first massacres livestreamed by the perpetrators, documented on the fly. So, like, what part of this was still in dispute, Ms. Patten? Other ‘feminists’ flat-out denied it happened at all. In Canada, we had Samantha Pearson , who heads up the University of Alberta’s sexual assault center. And Sara Jama , a Canadian Member of Parliament, and Susan Kim , a Victoria, British Columbia city council member, all of whom signed letters calling the Hamas sexual assaults ‘unverified’ or the attack on Israel an ‘unverified accusation’. After the near-constant #MeToo global dissection of rape and sexual assault since the world discovered Harvey Weinstein was a disgusting pig, we were lectured incessantly on how we should #BelieveWomen and that women rarely, if ever, lie. For all the bleating and drumbeating about how rape victims are traumatized further when they’re not believed, it seems today’s progressives would sooner quietly believe that the Hamas rapes were all a big lie, or at least, not as bad as people made them out to be. I mean, come on, it’s just Israelis saying it! “Okay, this is a bit awkward. We can’t help you.” (Satire) What harms women far more than false rape allegations are false allegations of false rape allegations. The Hamas ‘dispute’, if you can call it that, frankly ‘denial’ is a better word, harms all women and rape victims by making it look like feminists everywhere can’t recognize rape when it’s jammed up a screaming woman’s asshole. Video evidence of genuine rape is rare, outside of porn channels , and even rarer is recorded rape by wartime perpetrators. What hurts more than angry men’s rights activists’ denial is when it comes from so-called feminists. Hamas’s rape handmaids, deniers, ignorers, and apologists today strongly suggest or outright state those Israeli women deserved what they got, that all Israelis that day deserved it, because they’re ‘oppressors’. Some women, they believe, do deserve their rapes. I wonder if they realize how much they themselves are colonizers, settlers and oppressors. I guess they’ll deserve it, too. Other articles I’ve written on how women collaborate with ‘rape culture’: How Do Women Enable Rape, Trafficking & Sexual Abuse? When Is Rape Culture Totally Hot? 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!

It's not right vs left, but liberal vs illiberal. Allies on the right are working with the libs to resist public school DEI. And the illiberals can't understand why. Public domain image from Rawpixel I hope it’s a sign of the times, that perhaps, at long last, liberals and conservatives are learning to cooperate again. Not in Washington D.C., of course; that’s crazy talk! But in upscale Newton, Massachusetts, activist parents are partnering with conservative groups similarly self-tasked with bringing a little common sense and maybe even actual education to—well, public education. Certain Newton Public Schools parents maintain that DEI initiatives are bringing down academic scores, while others disagree. The controversy pits those who claim diversity and inclusion are critical for racial equity against those who want to de-emphasize DEI initiatives and social justice politics. Sound like a typical left vs right tug-of-war over children’s education? Think again. Newton is no New England bastion of white, conservative values. According to Data USA , it’s 72% white, 15% Asian, about 5% multiracial, about 3% black, and 2% Hispanic. Unlike their northern neighbors hovering at around 90% white. The median income of this average-age-forty suburb is $164,607, with nearly 72% property ownership in an area where the average house price is a little under a million. And Massachusetts, in a new study, finds the state ranks first for the best U.S. school systems. A group called Newton Families for Improving Academics or also ImproveNPS, has circulated a petition calling for empowering parents to advise educators more on school policies, practices and curricula. Their wild-eyed extremist aim? To, quote, “Provide a culture of fairness and understanding with an emphasis on common humanity above group identity.” Their pro-DEI adversaries paint them as ‘right-wing’, which they’re largely not, and cozying up to conservative activist organizations (well…somewhat). Maybe the pro-DEIs are getting their information from sources like Boston’s PBS-affiliated WGBH radio and TV. The WGBH headline I found is Right-leaning groups opposed to diversity efforts find unlikely allies in Newton parents . WGBH’s website states, “True journalism is driven by the hunt for the truth,” but the article reveals a fair amount of bias and not much investigative digging for alternative interpretations or points of view. The website also claims a commitment to science, which is noticeably missing in the their search results for ‘gender-affirming care’ for kids which don’t appear to address growing documentation of the lack of evidence behind it . Not exactly promoting a balanced-sounding approach. The activist parents are concerned about how much DEI ideology has crept into the system. The resistors aren’t screaming, red-faced, red-capped MAGAs; Newton is a moderately liberal town in a solidly blue state from which Senator Elizabeth Warren hails. The Newton DEI fuss seems to be more of a face-off of what I hope to see more of in this new year: Not liberals vs conservatives, but hard-left illiberals challenged by traditional liberals and conservatives. Last year, the Newton Public' Schools Statement of Values and Commitment to Equity was amended to call for ‘racial equity’. The parents fighting back say they’d prefer a more humanist, universal approach to education. To the extremist illiberal mind, unquestioningly committed to a diversity model now under attack for many very good reasons, a more moderate, truly inclusive approach looks threateningly right-wing. One of the external organizations the activist parents are collaborating with is no right-wing think tank. WGBH’s description of FAIR , the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, subtly suggests it might be conservative, noting that, “Almost all of FAIR’s legal and political advocacy has been directed against DEI and anti-racism efforts across the country,” and that its work “is based on a philosophy that equates diversity, inclusion and equity policies with what it calls ‘neo-racism’ — a new twist on the idea of ‘reverse racism’.” The Elect: The Threat To A Progressive America from Black Antiracists - John McWhorter , author of Woke Racism What WGBH doesn’t mention is FAIR’s commitment to, according to their What We Stand For page, ‘defending civil rights and liberties’, advocating for those ‘threatened or persecuted for free speech’, ‘respectful disagreement,’ ‘that objective truth exists,’ and that they are ‘pro-human’, committed to ending (non-color-specific) racism. All classic, traditional liberal values. FAIR and other critics challenge DEI and other ‘antiracism’ efforts because that’s where they find plenty of intolerance and racism. What it also doesn’t tell you is that FAIR’s Executive Director is Monica Harris, a black lesbian feminist who some writer colleagues and I wrote about last year when she got censored by blogging platform Medium for quite politely criticizing transactivism that she claimed harmed women, lesbians and gay men. Not exactly a screaming white supremacist Proud Girl. On the other hand, WGBH claims to have taken part in a FAIR Zoom meeting for outreach and recruitment in which the staff facilitator claimed they had united in common cause with the far-right group Moms for Liberty, an allegation I can’t yet confirm. The cooperation may have been circumstantial rather than intentional as the FAIR facilitator said, “There’s been a few cases where we have been on the same side of them to support each other in some town hall kind of situations.” This is what I call the Murky Middle , where you don’t always like the company and allies you keep. Where you find yourself suddenly toe to toe with some political hack you think you can’t stand, but then you realize she also groks Jordan Peterson’s personal responsibility rap, or you find not all libs drink the trans Koolaid. Or the Bible-toting Christian lady shares your concerns that her kids might die in a Uvalde-style shooting, and she wants saner gun laws too. And she finds you don’t want to repeal the Second Amendment, either! This is where social and political ‘salvation’ for all of us lies—putting aside our differences and working together for common goals. Perhaps even borrowing, stealing, or revisiting some of the other side’s better ideas. One Newton pro-DEI parent interprets FAIR’s website with the same suspicion and trepidation I once associated with conservatives protesting a Playboy-carrying 7-11, terrified they might see a naked nipple. “It’s a lot of dog whistles on [FAIR’s] website. The language they use is very lovely, but when you look at it basically it is an ‘All Lives Matter’ kind of narrative, it’s coded language. They can’t come out in Newton and say, ‘We don't like these programs that are focused on Black kids, kids of color .’” I wonder if Monica Harris realizes she’s just one declined antiracism workshop away from embracing white supremacy or something. It highlights just how far some have strayed from actual liberalism. FAIR’s value commitments really are out of the liberally libby-lib Great Book of Liberalism. And ‘All Lives Matter’ has sounded a lot less right-wing and more necessarily universal since the DEI-disoriented brought antisemitism and calls for Nazi-reminiscent genocide back into fashion. DEI consultants’unwillingness to address antisemitism after it exploded last fall as quite arguably the most pressing racism problem we face now, is exactly why traditional liberals are turning to the right who have been calling attention to DEI excesses for years. ‘All Lives Matter’ is what I want to yell at any kaffiyeh-clad protesters, since it’s quite clear that Jewish lives don’t. The article quotes a Harvard (oh no!) history and race professor as saying that FAIR and similar groups are trying to ‘de-legitimize’ antiracism efforts and position them as morally wrong. The comment exposes the lack of self-awareness and the self-satisfied, dogmatic self-righteousness with which the far left comes to resemble their sworn enemies on the far right. No, we can’t possibly be wrong, we have all the answers! Wokeland, Wokeland über alles! The professor simply can’t fathom that the criticism and resistance woke antiracism receives is because so many of us can point to its blatant unexamined racism and promotion of divisive perpetual conflict between identity group human constructs ever-further defined as ‘marginalized’. Maybe he should read FAIR ’s guest article, How our treatments for ‘racial trauma’ already make the problem worse by Dr. Tara Gustilo . This explains why us libby-libs want to dial back DEI and ‘antiracism’ initiatives as much as our conservative counterparts: Because they make our racial problems WORSE, not better! Maybe then, the Harvard professor and all of Newton’s terrified parents might understand why others don’t always perceive them as ‘antiracist’ and ‘socially just’ as they think they are. Before I moved to Canada and became a liberal gadfly—for liberals—I spent more than twenty years talking with, debating, and arguing with conservative Republican Christians. I see the same sort of rigid, faith-based, slavish devotion to a morality begun with good intentions but corrupted by humans’ relentless ability to make it all about themselves—how good and virtuous they are—and how deplorable Those People Are. I do it. You do it. We all do it. But if we’re honest, we try not to do it, and if we continue to, we at least have the decency to feel quietly hypocritical and ashamed of ourselves. ImproveNPS has pointed out to their ultra-lefty neighbors that many black intellectuals support a more universal antiracism return to an emphasis on working hard and downplaying structural racism allegations. Like Cornel West, Coleman Hughes, Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell. Something for these parental illibs to think about on the next Martin Luther King Day. Another terrified parent, and a Brandeis University professor, claimed it was all about ‘ white supremacist politics ’, not higher educational standards. Because, you know, all those Newton DEI critics wear their sheets at night rather than sleep on them, amirite? So what’s the deal with racists and academic scores in Newton? Are Newtonites super-racist? Are they woke-crazy social justice warriors? The details are murky. In 2016, a group of Newton High School students caused a scandal when they drove a car around with an unfurled Confederate flag. Others allege racist and antisemitic attacks, and Principal Henry Turner said some felt like others ‘didn’t want them to succeed’. A different group involved in Newton, Parents Defending Education , definitely owns more conservative cred than FAIR. PDE was founded by Nicole Neily, an operative affiliated with the notoriously right-wing Koch Network. In Newton, PDE tried to shut down a scholars program they claimed only allowed ‘underrepresented’ students, except it didn’t—it was open to all. PDE also targets antiracism and pro-LGBTQ policies. Still, a liberal like me is with them at least partially; they state classrooms should provide ‘rigorous instruction’ in ‘history, civics, literature, math, the sciences, and the ideas and values that enrich our country’. So yeah, there may be some ugly right-wing and even racist elements in Newton. But there may also be efforts to reduce academic standards a bit, which might lower Newton’s scores, in service to students who just may not be cutting it. Why remains a mystery. Some point to Newton eliminating something called mathematics ‘tracking’ which groups students by ability, IQ, or achievement levels, which some say is discriminatory. Others point to Newton’s declining Advanced Placement college prep courses, which were opened up to include more black students. Some accuse changes made to the AP program since the pandemic, and others claim it’s DEI. It’s unclear whether there’s been any investigation to determine why fewer students are enrolling, and not scoring as highly. Is it DEI, or something else? Or is DEI a contributor but not a cause? One giant suspect: Pandemic lockdown , which has been disastrous for child and youth education, and which today has resulted in high levels of absenteeism across North America. There’s concern in Newton, perhaps not without just cause, that right-wing groups might use these kerfuffles as excuses to push ‘anti-woke’ education efforts. And unchecked anti-DEI is just as anti-educational as unchecked pro-DEI. Consider that ‘anti-CRT’ activists usually want to replace the left’s simplistic, overtly racist message of white oppressors vs darker oppressed with an equally simplistic and racist sanitized history of the Civil War and why it was fought in the first place, and, as Nikki Haley demonstrated recently, a remarkable inability to mention the s——-y word . Are the pro-equity parents afraid their adversaries will return common-sense education and a universalist humanist approach to race issues that have become highly unfashionable for today’s identity-obsessed antiracists? Maybe their adversaries are afraid their kids will catch the ROGD ‘trans virus’ so many are bringing home from school after the successful permeation of American education by LGBTQ activists, and particularly transactivists . What I hope to see come out of this, and education battles across North America, is liberals and conservatives working together to bring about a better education system, hopefully diluting each side’s more extreme education inclinations. Maybe on a different battleground, conservatives and liberals can work together on, for example climate change, just as I hope ImproveNPS can keep the worst excesses of Parents Defending Education in check. The Newton Public Schools controversy holds out hope that maybe red and blue can come together, after all. And that the ‘enemies’ of liberty, free speech and diversity of ideas come from the extremes, not the Murky Middle. MAKE AMERICA GRAPE AGAIN!!! Image by Ali Zifan on Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International li 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!

It's probably not politic to bitch about politics, or anything else, during Christmas Week, don't you think? Happy holidays to all of my subscribers! Image generated by Poe AI I fully expected to have a good Christmas this week, despite my mother passing away two days before. Dying at Christmas is A Thing in our family; Mom is simply the third. My sister-in-law’s sister succumbed to everywhere-cancer in 2006; my father passed away a week before in 2011; and Mom cut it close. But dying in December isn’t as uncommon as one might think. Facebook friends offered their condolences and sometimes memories of their own families’ Christmas deaths. When my brother and I Facetimed with the funeral director, he mentioned that November, December and January were their busiest months, and it was A Thing for funeral directors everywhere. ‘Tis the season to be depressed and commit suicide, right? Or drink yourself to death, or super-shoot heroin, because you have no family left, or you can’t stand them, or they can’t stand you? Suicide is indeed seasonal, but it’s a myth that it increases during the holiday season. Suicides, for some reason, are more popular in warmer weather - spring and summer. December-January deaths are attributed to the cold, winter season. People die of heart attacks while overexerting themselves shoveling snow or trying to dig the car out, often exacerbated by nicotine and alcohol. Flu season, the Seniors Killer, is during the winter. People die on the roads when the weather is bad, although auto accidents go up a lot more during vacation season, once again the warmer months. Or they live in those parts of the South that aren’t yet used to the New Climate Change that now dumps more snow on their streets than they’ve ever seen before (or at all). But my mother passed away not due to Killer Christmas but because a week and a half ago, she and my family and the care workers at her retirement home agreed to put her into hospice. Mom made the final decision, while not having much idea of what was happening as we debated her future. Her hearing is shot and you have to speak directly in her ear. “Let’s ask Mom what she wants,” I said. “She’s of reasonably sound mind, right?” Everyone agreed she was. “What do you want, Mom?” my brother asked. “Do you want to continue physical therapy, to try and get better, maybe be able to get around with your walker again?” (Mom broke her hip in early September). “Or do you want to ‘rest’, as you put it to me earlier?” “I want to rest,” Mom said. “I think this is the end of the road.” That was a pretty clear signal. She was ready to die. We agreed with clear minds and clear hearts; we remembered the countless times over the decades, even when we were kids, that Mom said she didn’t want to be a vegetable; pull the plug on me! She didn’t want to be kept alive needlessly. She didn’t want to live in a hospital bed. If she couldn’t lead a quality life she’d prefer to die. Hell, we gave her the opportunity in late October; we pulled the plug on her, with the best data we had available at the time, and she lived. She would have been 92 in April; she doesn’t owe anyone anything. She died not because it was Christmas but because when you go into hospice, you give up. My brother called me two days before she died. “Just to warn you, I think Mom will pass in a few weeks.” I hoped to get through the holidays but I’ve been on Death Watch for months, so after I got home from dinner and a movie with a friend, I opened a suitcase and started throwing things into it. And then the 3:15am call came, Saturday morning, with the news. I’ll be in the States by the time you read this, and I’m good. I’ve lost my mother at 60; she lost her own at 28, and for my uncle at 23, far too young for people to lose their mothers. But that’s life. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut said. I guarantee you, Heaven just became a much funnier place. My mother was famous for her sense of humour, her wisecracks, her ability to lighten up a somber moment. I just hope she doesn’t tell Jesus that joke about the buxom newly-deceased woman and St. Peter. :) The year ends on a somber note with a new war in the Middle East (Oh no! Again?) begun with a horrific attack on civilians, with a level of cruelty that must have dead Nazis rolling over their bright red coals yelling, “Dammit! Why didn’t WE think of that?” As if the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine wasn’t already depressing enough. Now the number of dead Gazans far exceeds dead Israeli Jews and those of us of sound mind don’t know who to blame anymore. It’s the Middle East. And as Kurt Vonnegut said… But there are silver linings shining bravely through the dark clouds, and the one I hope will eventually shine brightest in 2024 is an end to wokeness. It’s clearly past its sell-by date, like a carton of milk. Social justice, fresh and new, is good for us but at some point it turns stale and then downright rotten. We’ve already explored Everything Wrong With Wokeness this year, maybe now it’s time to explore how we can bring reason, rationality and honest, nuanced discourse to a world sorely in need. With wokeness can go the Trump cult, and MAGAs, wokies’ equally-toxic brothers and sisters. I’m not at all sure what the next election holds for Trump, the most-indicted ex-President ever, or the U.S. if he wins. Whether he’ll be permitted to hold office. Whether he’ll do it from jail. Whether someone will find an unprecedented solution to keep the least-qualified President ever out of office (again). Which may or may not be the Supreme Court, depending on whether they ever get around to deciding the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision, and pending decisions from about a dozen other states, as to whether Trump can be kicked off a ballot in accordance with the 14th Amendment. The MAGAs are just as fact-free, reason-free, rationalism-free, or dismissive of universal human rights as the wokies. What can we do to save those who’ve not yet chosen extremism? What can honest conservatives do to bring their family members, friends, colleagues, and associates back from the brink of a wannabe dictator who’s now boldly quoting Hitler? What can honest liberals do? How do we bring back the working relationship between us grassroots and laypeople that once functioned in Washington DC attheendoftheday? We can’t fix Washington but we can fix ourselves. Those of us to the left and right still in possession of our critical faculties can find plenty of common ground, even if we never agree on everything. Maybe we can even begin to identify the best of both worlds, and the worst of both worlds, be honest with ourselves about what we’ve been pushing from our side that clearly doesn’t work, and seeing how we can smoosh the best of the best all together and whether that, perhaps, leads to a better, more equitable world in which everyone is happier, wherever they’re doing it, whatever they’re doing, and even whoever they’re doing ;) Thoughts? Comments? Vile, computer-melting flames? Let me know what you’d like to see me focus on in 2024, (or less). If you don’t feel comfortable leaving a comment, you can email me at n chardenet at gmail dot com. And I hope you will have a happy holiday, whatever you celebrate, and if your holiday is over already, hope you enjoy your time off thanks to some other god, and if you don’t believe in that religion stuff, thank Darwin for the time off you got thanks to everyone else’s Imaginary Superfriends. :) I leave you with my all-time favorite Christmas TV commercial (2007) from Virgin Mobile, about as politically correct in a very funny way as you can possibly get! 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!

Not to mention make it harder for other alleged victims to be taken seriously. Photo by Mo Eid on Pexels Look, I don’t know what really happened and neither does anyone else. Only two people do, and anyone who hasn’t talked to them doesn’t know much either. When a woman reports a rape we need to take the allegations seriously, meaning it needs to be properly investigated before passing judgement. A woman has accused a well-known writer of having raped her in June of 2021, and that must be, I repeat, investigated before we pass judgement on the veracity of the accuser or the accused. Celeste Marcus, a managing editor for Liberties Journal, has accused writer Yascha Mounck of the alleged crime. The only problem is, she hasn’t reported it properly. Instead of filing a report with the police, she took her accusation to The Atlantic, where Mounck was a freelance writer until they ‘severed ties’ with him because of the allegation. No police report. No lawyers. No formal accusation except on X, Marcus’s unnamed testimonial on Liberties Journal, and that which The Atlantic reports. Let me be clear. I am passing judgement on neither party. My goal is not to persuade you as to innocence or guilt; I don’t know nor do I have an opinion. At least, not yet. But the way this story broke bothers me greatly. Marcus didn’t go to the police; she accused first on X. Her post included an email exchange with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, in which she named Mounck. Hours later, Mounck was cut loose from The Atlantic. No trial, no jury, and as I must remind you, no police report. Marcus’s essay on Liberties Journal (there’s a paywall) in which she claimed she didn’t report it to the police because she was ‘feeling broken’ and could ‘barely function’, is a pretty common response to being raped, but it proves nothing. I render judgement instead against Marcus’s lousy judgement in how she handled this. She’s had two and a half years to think about it. If she has the labia to publicly call out her accuser, she has the labia to file a police report. Even now is a perfectly fine time to do it. But you DON’T report a rape first in the court of public opinion since, if Mounck is ever brought to trial, it will be extremely difficult for him to receive a fair one. Due process: I know it’s unpopular with feminists and the more extreme #MeToo corners, but it applies to everyone, even accused rapists. Even , I would remind us, to a certain ex-President. Full disclaimer: I subscribe to Yascha Mounck’s Persuasion newsletter on Substack. I listen to his podcasts sometimes. I like him, but I’m in no way Taylor Swift-level superfan. If I replace Mounck in my brain with someone I really can’t stand—say, Alex Jones—I would still write this commentary. Because questionable ways of reporting an alleged rape for the first time, and compromising one’s credibility up front, hurts all rape victims, and no one deserves to be maligned in the public forum without due process. No, not even Alex Jones. Image by kalhh from Pixabay It makes it look like there might have been a political motive behind it—Mounck’s accuser strongly appears to have set out to get him let go as an Atlantic freelance writer, which is a very prestigious website to write for. It sets a bad precedent for women who want to report, but are afraid of the backlash. She’s said on X, “I will not be raped with impunity.” She succeeded, but she harms the believability of rape victims and herself in the process. This wasn’t the way to do it. She probably doesn’t have much of a court case after two and a half years and no forethought to save anything that might genetically link him to the alleged crime. If she really was raped, she has the highly understandable desire to not let him get away scot-free. Whether he’s guilty or not, Yascha Mounck’s reputation is now permanently linked to a rape charge online, whether proven or not in a court of law. If he’s not guilty, she’s potentially created a new enemy for rape victims, and Goddess knows they have a hard enough time being believed. Some will take her accusation as sacred writ. Thou shalt not disbelieve , especially on hyper-polarized social media and office water cooler discussions. But she’s just invited a whole bunch of angry males fed up with unsubstantiated rape accusations to move closer to the far right, where all women are lying whores, and unless she takes Mounck to court, they remain unsubstantiated. Not all her new enemies will be right-wingers, men’s rights activists, incels, and other hyper-partisans who already uncritically believe Mounck didn’t do it as uncritically as some women believe he did. One side requires no evidence, the other won’t believe it if it exists. Some recruits will be those with serious doubts about extremist feminism and willy-nilly rape accusations. Certainly Jeffrey Goldberg and The Atlantic gang didn’t require any evidence, just one woman’s say-so. This is how people got horribly murdered in medieval Europe: Unsubstantiated accusations of crimes, which people just believed, and countless people were hideously jailed, tortured, and executed without a shred of evidence against them, just ‘witnesses’ who testified to the most outlandishly unbelievable ‘satanic’ acts of offense against their neighbors. From which we get the term ‘witch hunt’. This is how black men got hideously lynched in the South for many generations: On the evidence-free accusations of white men or white women, ostensibly for having raped a white woman or some such other nonsense. This is how people get murdered in the Middle East today, customarily called ‘honor killings’. Its victims are mostly women accused of some sexual impropriety which could be as minor as talking to an unrelated male. Or vicious gossip by other women who want to ruin or eliminate her. Men uncritically believe what they say and let the stoning begin. Or, in other places, pushing accused gay men off buildings. Here’s the thing: We don’t know what happened between Mounck and Marcus, as it was two and a half years ago. It sounds like something happened, however consensual or not, because Mounck responded, “That wasn’t rape,” not what you reply when you haven’t had any sexual contact with the alleged victim. Image by Jean Beaufort on Public Domain Pictures Whether Marcus was raped or not, and I emphasize yet again I don’t know and neither do you, if she can’t prove her claims she will be forever linked to what some could call a spurious rape claim, another black mark against rape claimants. If you’re inclined to excuse her ruination of Mounck’s reputation because you think he probably did it, or he’s a white guy so he must have done it, or so what because so many innocent women are raped, remember: Unsubstantiated allegations work both ways. While I don’t expect too many men will accuse biological women of raping them, there are many other he-said-she-said crimes of which they could be accused. Like issuing threats to him or his family. Or fraud. Or physical assault. Or abusing their children. Once something’s online, it’s forever. If you want to get back at your rapist, if you want to punish him for his crime, there are far more responsible ways to do it: Report it FIRST to the police. Preferably shortly after, but if you don’t, BEFORE you make it public. Take him to court if you can. Even if you don’t get a conviction, rape trials are pretty damn punishing and shaming, and not just for her. Keep any DNA evidence in a plastic bag. You never know when you might change your mind about going to the police, and your credibility will be much higher. It’s not what women and rape victims want to hear, but denying a person their due process rights by making unsubstantiated allegations in the public forum is dead wrong. If feminists are serious about wanting to end rape, there’s no way out of properly reporting it and going through the legal system. Yes, it’s very hard on the victims, but it will never change if more don’t do it and we don’t hold the legal system accountable and force them to evolve with each case. But we must remember: Due process is for everyone. No immunity from it for people you don’t like, like accused rapists. That, too, works both ways: No immunity from it for you , either. Taking it to the public forum first looks very, very bad for the accuser. It lacks seriousness and reduces her credibility. Learn from this. Do it right the first time. Even if it’s years later. Don’t harm other rape victims. If you’ve been raped and don’t know what to do next, please call your local rape crisis hotline. The (U.S.) National Sexual Assault Hotline (24/7 & confidential) is 1-800-656-4673. In Canada it’s 1-844-750-1648. For First Nations and Inuit it’s 1-855-242-3310. 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!

Almost-but-not-quite International Women's Day is 'inclusive' of all but one type of woman in Peterborough, Ontario Photo by Sarah Cervantes on Unsplash Here’s what’s not happening in Peterborough , Ontario today for International Women’s Day 2024. The INSPIRE International Women’s Day Event, which promised to ‘Inspire Inclusion’, the theme of this year’s global event according to the main IWD website, had been scheduled for today, but was cancelled in February due to—non-inclusion. Or ‘postponed’ as they put it, which is a bit weird as who the hell is going to come to an International Women’s Day event after the actual commemorative day? By ‘postponed’ I expect they mean ‘cancelled until next year’. Seems some women are less welcome than others. Image by Daniel Ullrich on Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-sa-2.0-DE INSPIRE rescinded the invitation to their scheduled keynote speaker, Leah Goldstein, who, as it turns out, has a ‘problematic’ past. Seems thirty years ago, when she was living in Israel, where she was raised after being born in Vancouver, she spent her military service in the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force. Goldstein served in training only, not combat. Before she moved back to Canada, she served as a police officer in the late ‘90s. So what does military service during the Yitzhak Rabin years have to do with Goldstein’s Israel-free keynote speech today? “In recognition of the current situation and the sensitivity of the conflict in the Middle East, the Board of INSPIRE will be changing our keynote speaker,” they told the media. Although Goldstein’s ethnicity is easy to guess by her name (she’s not married), one wonders if perhaps learning she’d served in the IDF was that left-wing dog whistle calling the anti-Semites to arms. It was, according to the National Post, “a small but growing and extremely vocal group”, who had a problem with Goldstein’s military service. It’s always a ‘small and extremely vocal group.’ ‘Social justice’ activists are like chihuahuas: The littlest ones make the most noise. Goldstein, presumably, was hired to speak at this event because of her accomplishments - she won a 4,800 km bicycle race in 2021, becoming the first woman to win the solo category of Race Across America, one of the longest in the world. She was also going to speak about becoming a 17-year old World Kickboxing Champion, along with “bravery, growth and overcoming sexism.” She sounds like a perfectly badass powerful motivated feminist chick, exactly the sort of role model one might want to promote on International Women’s Day. It takes some real labia to serve in the military and then move on to police service, and then to bike 3,000 miles across North America - and beat everyone else. But, the whiniest wokes yapped and scrapped, so INSPIRE caved like wimpy corporate CEOs and did what the chihuahua mob demanded. Inclusive, indeed. The festival’s organizer sparkies asked Goldstein to provide a statement about Israel prefacing her speech, although she hadn’t intended to address it at all or make it political. One wonders how much INSPIRE would have liked it if she had. Now INSPIRE may be investigated by the city’s DEI office, as has been asked by one of Peterborough’s city councillors. INSPIRE hadn’t asked Goldstein what she planned to speak about at the event, or to see a draft of her speech. But they wanted to make sure she held the woke-approved ‘correct’ irrelevant opinion, whether she intended to bring it up or not. I could perhaps see some concern about divisiveness if her speech touched upon the war—perhaps organizers might be concerned about a day devoted to inspiring and motivating women devolving into a crazy political free-for-all—but it doesn’t appear they asked to see her speech, or what she intended to speak about. According to the International Women’s Day website, under its call to commitment to ‘inspire inclusion’, it says, When women aren't present, we must ask: "If not, why not?" When women are discriminated against, we must call out poor practice. When the treatment of women is not equitable, we must take action. And we must do this each time, every time. What did INSPIRE do to respond to their failure to meet the standards for International Women’s Day 2024? They battened down their website and their Facebook page. You get a ‘private site’ message and a request to log in. I wonder how controversial INSPIRE’s keynote speech might have been had the speaker been a Palestinian woman describing getting bombed and displaced every day by the IDF, with nary a mention of Hamas or Gazan votes for. Would anyone have objected? At any rate, the Maneschevitz hit the fan once word got out about INSPIRE’s cancellation. The mass media got involved. Social media got involved. People flooded City Hall and INSPIRE, along with a few beleaguered unrelated women’s groups, with supportive comments, mostly for Goldstein rather than the wokemonsters of INSPIRE. As always, ‘progressives’ demonstrated their commitment to ‘inclusion’ stops at anyone with the ‘wrong’ political opinions or with ties to a group they don’t like. Maybe they should have invited instead a less controversial speaker—like a man pretending to be a woman, as the Hershey company did last year. You know, someone whose major life challenge is deciding which bathroom to pee in. There will be other rallies and events in Peterborough for International Women’s Day, but not for the Judaeophobic unINSPIREd. I hope they spend the day, rather, reflecting on just what ‘inclusion’ really means, and why ‘diversity’ never seems to include differing political ideas. Or why the hell someone’s military service decades ago matters. Or if it’s only with a military service they don’t like. Or why they felt the need to ask Leah Goldstein about her views on the war. Were they going to dictate the ‘statement’ they wanted her to make first? Would they have approached a Palestinian speaker this way, or, indeed, anyone other than a Jew? The whole thing just has a highly distasteful odor about it. The stench of antisemitism sandwiched within ‘progressive’ politics. Don’t judge the City of Peterborough from this sorry affair. It’s a lovely small town in the Kawarthas, a chain of lakes in south central Ontario. Peterborough is rustic and country and drop-dead gorgeous during the fall. Every town has its bad apples, and obnoxious, snappy little human chihuahuas. Hopefully they’re chastened at the demise of an event they themselves have wrought. Anyway, I hope you all have an awesome International Women’s Day! Go forth and be a badass, no matter what your politics! International Women’s Day: It’s for all women, not just the ones you like. Public domain image from Rawpixel Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I know, it's two days late! 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!

We TERFs hate to say "I told you so," but--goddammit, people! Will you believe us gender critics NOW??? Royalty-free photo from Pxfuel Transgender medicine is largely built on lies. It can be defined in three words: Conscious medical malpractice. One of the most ‘respected’ organizations (I’ve never understood why) supporting transgender medicine and ‘gender affirming’ healthcare is WPATH, the World Professional Association For Transgender Health. It was founded in 1979 and sought to create a network of ‘professionals’ specialized in treating transgender variance. A shocking leak of documents called The WPATH Files released early this week, compiles WPATH chat forum and email screen shots and Zoom videos in a new report with extensive documentation. Written by journalist Mia Hughes and released by Michael Shellenberger at Environmental Progress, it provides jaw-droppingly clear evidence WPATH’s ‘expertise’ is transactivist quackery despite a number of actual medical practitioners on staff. It’s about as ‘evidence-based’ as a Superman comic. It demonstrates a complete lack of respect for the scientific method, and proper research trials. It’s. Just. Horrifying! Michael Shellenberger , the activist who also brought us the Twitter Files, can be found on Substack along with a video he’s assembled of WPATH’s most horrifying Zoom hits. The full video is here . The WPATH Files PDF can be downloaded here: The WPATH Files: PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC SURGICAL AND HORMONAL EXPERIMENTS ON CHILDREN, ADOLESCENTS, AND VULNERABLE ADULTS WPATH has transformed itself into a leading ‘scientific’ authority on transgender health and medicine, particularly in the area of ‘gender-affirming’ care (GAC) of children. But The WPATH Files validate what both conservative and liberal gender-critical voices have been calling out the entire field for for years: That WPATH clinicians and healthcare providers know their GAC could or does cause incalculable harm to their patients, including children. They treat their patients with unproven methods for which there is little to no research; without knowing or much caring whether puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones lead to infertility, sterility, loss of orgasmic capability, brittle bones, cognitive impairment, and even death. They experiment: And they call it ‘medically necessary’ so insurance companies will pay for it. WPATH ignores the clear signs that some of these treatments are linked to cancer in their young patients, that many have psychological problems unrelated to their alleged ‘gender dysphoria’; and they even have embraced ‘nullification’ for those who want ‘non-binary’ genitals or who desire to get rid of their penis. Yes, these so-called ‘doctors’ discuss castrating even children . And some of them confess to having performed these surgeries in private chats captured by leakers who are probably in the Witness Protection Program now. And here’s a new one: Some of their patients want dual genitals: Both a penis and a vagina. Some WPATH ‘experts’ dismiss concerns about long-term outcomes, acknowledge that most children and teens are too young to understand and appreciate the potential future problems they might have, like not having children, a concept too far into the future for any of them to think, and whose reaction is often, “Oooh, babies, gross!” They acknowledge that even parents don’t have the medical understanding of what’s being done to their kids. They know these children and adults aren’t making informed decisions. That they can’t, given that the healthcare providers themselves don’t have enough data, or even any in some cases, to support it. WPATH knows. WPATH knows. THEY KNOW! Where’s the evidence? As a result, WPATH’s claims to provide ‘evidence-based care’ are a pack of lies. This will come as less of a surprise to those of us who’ve been following the slow-motion derailment of the Trans Train for years. Especially after the revelation last year that systematic evidence reviews out of the most liberal/progressive countries in Europe indicate there’s little to no scientific evidence to support the transgender industry’s claims that transitioning children immediately must occur to prevent them from committing suicide. The transgender suicide myth was addressed in a Finnish study just published in BMJ Mental Health (2024), Suicide Mortality Among Gender-Dysphoric Adolescents and Young Adults in Finland: The finding of low suicide rates and no evidence of benefits of gender reassignment continues to challenge the practice of youth transitions. In which was noted, “…the study found no convincing evidence that gender-referred youth have statistically significantly higher suicide rates as compared to the general population, after controlling for psychiatric needs.” [Italics mine] NewsNation scores highly for factualism and rated in ‘least biased’ category on Media Bias Fact Check Although we should note post-transition patients do have a high suicide rate, about which transactivists are strangely silent, so let’s understand that evidence indicates that the rate has to do with pre-existing psychological co-morbidities, which are routinely ignored and unexplored by transgender healthcare professionals [See: Tavistock scandal , England]. The lack of evidence that gender transition reduces the risk of suicide leads to hideously inverting the emotional blackmail with which GAC clinicians routinely terrorize resistant parents and caretakers: Would you rather have a dead daughter or a dead mutilated daughter? This report on WPATH’s gross medical negligence is merely the tip of the rainbow-hued iceberg. GAC gender woo has been problematic from its inception, especially when it focused on children. I have read the report; it’s 242 pages, 71 for the report and the rest the documenting screenshots and image captures of doctors speaking in direct contradiction to what they tell the public: What they don’t know, and must speculate on, as they confer with each other on the next experimental treatment for a patient. They make it clear they support and have performed surgeries on pre-teens and teens regardless of what the public is told about how that ‘almost never happens’. The report is well-written, in plain English, with a lot of highly-qualified footnotes if you want to get into the weeds. They speak of the detransitioners including those around age 32 who regret sacrificing their fertility, and if they could do it over again, would preserve eggs or sperm. One WPATH expert stated there’s a 27% regret rate . One professional acknowledges being ‘stumped’ by a 9-year-old grappling with ‘fertility’ issues. They discuss children and adults with intellectual disabilities, schizophrenia and homeless people; all are deemed worthy of consent to these life-altering, body-destroying practices. In defiance of their Hippocratic Oath to ‘take care that [the sick] suffer no hurt or damage’, they regularly advocate for a practice the very height of harm: mutilating and removing perfectly healthy tissue , because their uninformed, often clearly mentally disturbed and/or immature patients demand it. As I read with growing horror it occurred to me the only difference between these people and Nazi concentration camp doctors was consent. The male sexual fetishes and fantasies The horrors mount, one after the other. WPATH’s Standards of Care, most recently SOC8, removed the lowered age requirement to ‘avoid lawsuits’. In 2021, a systematic evidence review of the earlier SOC7 rated it as ‘low quality’ and ‘do not recommend’. SOC8 introduced advice for handling surgical ‘non-binary interventions’, part of the aforementioned ‘nullifications’ including castration. If you’re not familiar with the more horrifying male sexual fetishes out there, The WPATH Files document their discussion of a growing ‘Eunuch Community’ of men and the non-medical professional castrators they hire. It’s against the law, but so what if no one complains? The report mentions the ‘Eunuch Archives’, a website that caters to adult men who detail their child castration fantasies . WPATH doctors also debate the ethics (What? What are those?) of inducing lactation in an adult male who’s not interested in nursing a child, but just wants to experience it. Lactophilia, by the way, is a growing fetish among trans-identified men well-detailed in Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy ’s recent amazing discussion with two other feminists about the horrifying implications for infants being suckled by suspiciously pedophilic men who are turned on by getting their nipples sucked. Ironically, the WPATH doctors’ discussion of the wannabe ‘chest feeder’ ends with the decision that this particular patient’s desire for induced lactation (yes, it can be done for males and they will produce breast milk) ends with the decision that it’s not ‘medically necessary’. This patient is the only one to whom they said ‘No’. Some of the WPATHologicals exhibit some discomfort at the realization that at least some of these desired surgeries are in service to male sexual fetishes, primarily autogynephilia which throws the whole ‘gender dysphoria’ explanation up for debate. It’s HORRIFYING! The whole time my brain kept screaming. “WHY? WHY? WHY?” I read this terrible report with my mouth hung open mouthing the words, “What the fuck? What the fuck? What the bloody fucking fuck?” One of the many aspects of the whole transgender craze I’ve found unfathomable is the abandonment of evidence-based science-backed healthcare by medical professionals. It’s like social justice aliens turned doctors and clinicians and therapists into Pod People. How could this happen in the 21st century? The WPATH Files’s section on the history of ‘pseudoscientific hormonal and surgical experiments on children and vulnerable adults,’ answers how this could happen. In fact, again. The medical profession has looooong had a weird obsession with fixing psychiatric illness experimentally by removing or damaging healthy tissue—especially genitals and reproductive organs. It begins with the infamous lobotomies of the mid-twentieth century, then backtracks to the ovariotomies of the 19th century, in which every psychological malady that affected ‘hysterical’ women were attributed to their ovaries, and, like transgender patients today, they begged doctors to remove theirs, which the doctors were happy to do. It wasn’t until doctors started removing healthy ovaries from female prisoners that the public began resisting. Not surprisingly, doctors who resisted ovariotomies were attacked for being ‘wanting in humanity’ and ‘guilty of criminal neglect of patients,’ not unlike those attacked for being ‘transphobic’ or hateful today. It’s like the medical profession never learns that psychiatric distress happens between the ears, not the legs or hips. Is it the money to be made? Do they really believe they’re saving the world? What I still don’t understand is how they can remove healthy flesh and think they’re helping rather than harming. But I guess if parents can resist asking the obvious question Where were all the trans kids when we were growing up? it’s not hard to shut your mind off from the part of the Hippocratic Oath that prohibits that. Transgender healthcare is patient-driven, not doctor- or evidence-driven, and for the underaged, it’s kid-driven. The WPATH professionals routinely talk about their ‘experiments’ with trying to help patients receive the results conforming to the body image they want, despite being told that while people can be ‘non-binary’, hormones are not, and that each one comes with a package of changes, not all of which may be desired. Outside criticisms of their work, when they discuss it, are dismissed as conservative transphobia and hysteria. If you’re wondering what the trans community’s reaction is to this report’s release, guess. Just guess. The left-wing media, at least at the time of this writing, is near-silent on the subject. Nothing so far from the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Toronto Star, the Huffington Post, NPR, MSNBC, CNN, the Daily Beast, the Intercept, Washington Post, Politico, Time, or Newsweek. Nada x 13. One exception this morning: The Guardian. The collusion and collaboration with a scientifically bankrupt medical practice spreads far and wide, a filthy web littered with money, discarded breasts, mutilated genitals and the misguided intentions of progressive social justice activists who believe quite passionately they’re on the ‘right side of history’ when in fact they must know, not too deep down, that history may well judge them harshly, but hopefully after they’re dead. WPATH is considered one of the primary, perhaps the primary go-to for reliable, consistent, reviewed, scientific and evidence-based policy and practice for treating people with ‘gender dysphoria’, a term invented in 2013. It is none of these things. It’s the big pile of poo the entire field of transgender healthcare is rooted in: Lies. Unapproved, unethical medical experiments. Low- or no-quality research. A complete disregard for the clear harms they’re doing to their patients and except for the wannabe ‘chest feeder’, an otherwise utter lack of ability to say no to any surgery consumers demand, no matter how outrageous or inhumane. Dear God and Goddess, what have we become? CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 image by Peter Thoeny on Flickr 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!

Social justice is laudable. But privileged and luxury belief-laced extremism has turned to the same evils it claims to fight. Can it be saved? Pretty, serious-looking brunette young woman in the foreground, walking down a hall, the other people blurred In the late ‘90s I was on the Internet Usenet forum alt.support .childfree, for those who’d chosen the no-kids life by choice. It was a great support forum, for awhile. Later I complained to my then-partner, “It’s gotten very anti-child. We’ve always had a few of those nutters there, but now even the reasonable ones sound extremist about kids, and put down expectant mothers. They don’t seem to understand that kids are human beings too.” ‘Stork parking’, the spaces reserved for pregnant women at shopping centers, had just become a thing and many asc’ers were outraged. “Unfortunately that seems to be the way of discussion forums,” he replied. “Eventually the extremists take over if users don’t moderate.” I left a.s.c the day a friend with children scrolled through and was appalled at the nastiness. Embarrassed to be seen in such company, I didn’t offer a farewell or a reason for departure; I simply stopped contributing. The natural gravitation toward extremism Liberal feminists have achieved many fantastic victories. Women’s education, Roe v Wade, Title IX, better if not yet equal pay. Men no longer have the right to rape their wives, arguing that ‘We’re married, she has to give it to me.’ Black civil rights progressed down a close similar path, and, thanks to progressive liberals, only in red states now is gay marriage considered a scandal and an offense against God. Now, most of the progress to de-marginalize further lies with individuals’ responsibility to step up and ‘do the work’ of improving and developing themselves, trying harder, asserting themselves more, refusing victimhood. It’s up to you , baby. But social justice needs new mountains to scale, and because of the last half-century’s successes, activists must climb higher to find new forms of ‘oppression’ they can fight. They have to exaggerate and catastrophize because on some level they know their current projects are fairly weak. Hence the rise of ‘microaggressions’ and ‘intersectionality’ to find ‘marginalizations’ people didn’t know they had, and who are too privileged or too young to know what real discrimination feels like. These ideas have come to be known as ‘luxury beliefs’, those you need to be wealthy and educated enough to support. Rob Henderson, the author of the newly-published Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family & Social Class , argues that luxury beliefs are the new status symbols, in an age where almost anyone can afford luxury goods, or cheaper knockoffs, or you can just steal them. They’re beliefs people higher up hold that benefit themselves, but harm the classes below them . Social justice activism tends toward extremism on the other side, too. Conservative activism has moved toward a cult of personality and MAGAism after getting much of what they wanted—an end to Roe, unfettered access to guns, the end of affirmative action and a more conservative Supreme Court friendly to rolling back other liberal successes. Activists and the ‘chattering classes’ demonize the opposition and compete for attention expressing ideas and opinions ever more extreme, just as my compatriots once did on a.s.c. How privileged do you have to be to think the protected speech of ‘misgendering’ is actually a crime, however much you support trans rights? Those who police and criminalize protected speech that offends their delicate sensitivities and succeed demonstrate just how marginalized they aren’t . That goes for those supporting ‘Don’t say gay’ Ronald DeSantis or insurrectionists pitching a tantrum because their side lost. These, too, are luxury beliefs. What once was called ‘wokeness’, a commitment to social justice and correcting inequities in the system, is now primarily a well-to-do luxury brand for the non-marginalized of all colors, fast-tracking toward the authoritarianism they claim to fight. Twenty-four hours after the October 7 attack, students at academic moron factories celebrated antisemitism and a vicious terrorist cult, when they would have better served genuine human rights by encouraging Palestinians to stop murdering gay and transfolk . Regressive Left feminists turn into good little Handmaids for the Patriarchy when sly sexual predators claim the fake-ass ‘gender dysphoria’. Woke social justice activists claim to fight homophobia while ‘trans-ing’ any kid unfortunate enough not to fit the rigid gender stereotypes they condemn the right for, and favor ‘de-colonizing’ everything except men in women’s bathrooms , changing rooms and prisons. But still… Wokeness, the extremism that once properly called itself progressive and liberal, is rooted in pre-civil rights black social justice and originally referred to staying aware of impending violence and systemic racism at a time when it was still unofficially okay to lynch a black man. After the Ferguson, Missouri riots in 2014, it elevated the meaning of awareness of dangerous cops, a caution important for white people too. Is it possible to be ‘woke’ and ‘not a fasch-hole? On another note I also wonder: How many conservatives are tired of their political beliefs and ideologies being twisted by a narcissistic psychopath and his mouth-breathing miscreants? I use the word ‘woke’ somewhat less as I realized it was offensive to people who are ‘woke’ but not crazy-ass extreme, including some of my friends. The most extreme, I expect, have defriended or unfollowed me by now and the rest ignore me. I’ve taken to referring to wokeness as ‘illiberal’ which makes a very important point that some so-called liberals aren’t. It does seem a shame, on some level, for ‘woke’ to have been misappropriated as badly as it has been. Or ‘colonized by white activists’, if you want to wokely honest. I’m not sure it’s as effective anymore as a term solely for black awareness when there’s less racism in America, regardless of what you’ve heard about the prevalence of ‘white supremacy’. There’s something to be said for being ‘woke’ to injustice, if only we could agree on what that is. Is injustice really some old white lady who said ‘Negro’ because she was young in an era when that was a perfectly polite way to refer to black people, or is it better focused on the practice of ‘carding’ by some police departments, randomly stopping people and demanding identification, asking questions, who are often disproportionately black? When did ‘woke’ become so weak? It’s not as though the world lacks for oppression to eliminate. A black President drew out bald-faced American racism on the right the way Hamas’s attack on Israel vomited the anti-Semites and whitey-haters on the left. Maybe social justice is just weary after fighting so hard for so many genuinely progressive projects and they want easier assignments like de-’whitewashing’ Hollywood. Somewhere along the way it became the problems it tried to solve, and refused to look within and ‘do the work’ it demands of others. Marginalized = sinless, apparently. How is Ibram X. Kendi prescribing black racism against white people not 100% bloody racist himself? He’s a non-starter for many liberals because he’s the problem he claims to want to solve. It strikes me that the next iteration of ‘antiracism’ in America—2.0—should be examining and coming to terms with anti-white racism, which sounds right-wing and ‘yabbut’ but genuine antiracists can see how unserious woke ‘antiracism’ really is because it supports racism. Yeah, we can see where that’s going. If there’s one thing you can count on with humanity, it’s to exploit others. Will Kendi eventually advocate for 400 years of white slavery to ‘atone’ for a past we turned our back on 160 years ago? Wait for it. Woke social justice craziness isn’t over yet. I suspect ‘social justice’ will get worse before it gets better, especially if the Republicans and their golden god prevail. (Where are the statue puller-downers when you need them?) Unless those wokes who haven’t yet given their brains over to the dark forces of extremism join other level-headed liberals to fight to take it back. ‘Woke’ can be rehabilitated only if enough level-headed liberals grow the labia and balls to do it, and make it clear that illiberals are hardly ‘woke’ to racism, sexism, and homophobia when they’re pushing it themselves. Woke social justice warriors don’t listen to the right, so they have to hear critiques from their own, which is risky. The ‘woke’ are famously intolerant of those who fail to hew strictly to social justice doctrine, but the times they are a-changin’, and it may soon become less socially acceptable to identify as ‘woke’ in 2024. DEI, one of the main engines of toxic wokeness, is under fire. Colleges and universities are slashing their DEI budgets and the legal system is examining whether it’s constitutional to demand pledges to political narratives like ‘antiracism’ to get or keep a job. It’s becoming clear that DEI, as it’s implemented today, is creating and encouraging racism and other bigotries rather than alleviating it. ‘Don’t Call Me Karen’ Doesn’t Go Over Well At Uber The DEI industry could save itself, I suspect, if it embraced a universal social justice commitment to reducing all racism and discrimination. Like if it told the full story of slavery rather than treating it as though Europeans singularly invented it in 1619. It would enjoin POC to examine themselves along with their white cohorts and ask themselves whether they’re treating white people unfairly (or men, or ‘cis-het’, or whatever). Because tribalism is universal, and racism is tribalism, and anyone who hasn’t lived all their life in a cave knows it’s not just restricted to white people. Or men. Or cis-het. I don’t think DEI will do that, though. Illiberal fundamentalism has seized the far-left soul and I already know from twenty-plus years of arguing with Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. that you can almost never change the fundamentalist mindset. Ibram X. Kendi said it and I believe it! A Man’s Suicide Started With A DEI Consultant’s ‘Antiracism’ Workshop We have to hold these people to account, just as we do the crazies on the MAGA side—demanding facts, evidence, and rational theories pertaining to others’ suspected motivations, not conspiracy theories and blanket ‘they hate us, they hate America, they hate democracy’ condemnations. That’s whether they’re on the right or left, or you are. Hold your own as accountable as you do the other side. I have a formerly progressive friend who, over pandemic lockdown, fell down the rabbit hole of left-wing conspiracies. He gets really, really mad when I challenge some of his crazier assertions. It’s QAnon crap for the left. We need to make more ‘illibs’ like him really really REALLY mad. I’ve begun by challenging the broader, wokenized definition of ‘white supremacy’. Systemic racism exists, but if we hadn’t made progress black people would still be using separate fountains, feared for ‘contaminating’ swimming pools and Clarence Thomas would have picked pubic hairs off his Coke can on a park bench rather than a law office. White supremacists are the KKK, not you or me or even the guy who cracks a racist joke. White supremacists are racists, but not all racists are white supremacists. What can you do to challenge social justice extremism, and bring ‘woke’ back to some semblance of normalcy, not to mention social justice? Or the crazies on Team MAGA? I do suspect Americans are getting fairly tired of both, since voters are famously switching sides for the forthcoming election and I honestly don’t think anyone has a clue which candidate will win. We in the Murky Middle are the new Silent Majority, although maybe with the decline of power on both sides, we won’t have to be afraid to speak up anymore. 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!