The Native Guide Compass
how to navigate mass delusion and global gaslighting
Most women have had the experience, at least once or twice, of explaining the flagrantly obvious to a clueless guy friend.
No, friend, your colleague isn’t having you go to the supply closet with her and carry the reams of printer paper back because ten pounds is too much for her to carry. Women carry thirty pound toddlers on one hip and get stuff done with the other arm, remember?
She’s engineering a moment of shared effort, appealing to your masculinity, and trying to spend time with you — because she likes you, you moron!
There are endless versions of this. Growing up in the South, I got a lot of fun mileage out of explaining to bewildered Yankees that “bless your heart” is not a kind sentiment — it’s a polite way of calling someone a fucking idiot.
And because mathematics tends to attract men on the spectrum, I’ve had even more practice than most at this role — which I will refer to here as being the “native guide.”
“When your wife asked if her ass looked fat in those jeans, she wasn’t seeking your assessment of her bodily proportions. She was asking for reassurance. This time: apologize, find some way to make her feel loved. Next time: say no, call her beautiful, hug her, whisper something dirty in her ear, and move on.”
It can be funny, being the native guide.
The slack-jawed look when the light bulb ignites; the sudden shift from confusion to recognition.
The hilarious moment where what was murky becomes embarrassingly obvious.
This week, though, I’ve been the one in the fog. And I’ve needed my own native guides to help me stay sane — to reassure me that the whole world hasn’t gone mad, and that I’m not the only one seeing what I’m seeing.
The Glenn Greenwald Affair
A tape of Glenn Greenwald indulging in a humiliation fetish — dominated by a male prostitute — was recently released. Greenwald now claims that he wasn’t the one who released it.
Obviously, I can’t know he did it. Only Greenwald himself — and maybe whatever gods he believes in — know for sure.
But the evidence is compelling. My friend
went back and examined the replies to the tweet where the tape first surfaced — the one Greenwald briefly retweeted before deleting.The replies had all the telltale signs of a now-deleted tweet — people tagging him directly, reacting as if he had posted it. You can’t fake that kind of reply pattern retroactively in any manner I’m aware of. And in this Twitter space, starting at about the 55 minute mark, Gator lays out the technical evidence that Greenwald retweeted the tape before trying to memory-hole it.
That’s what launched my spiral — not the content of the tape, but the surreal insistence that up was down and down was up. The pretense, seemingly shared by damn near the whole world, that it wasn’t what it looked like.
That it wasn’t exactly what it looked like.
Both my inner circle and my wider friend group include a lot of based gay men — the kind my late friend Adam was proud to call his tribe. They all share the same sharp eye and zero tolerance for bullshit. Some vote Republican, some don’t vote at all.
But each and every one will look you dead in the face and say, without blinking, that no, the “T” has nothing to do with “LGB.”
As Adam put it: “I am a man who loves and has sex with men. What in the everloving fuck do I have in common with a man who seeks to take cross-sex hormones and have his dick surgically inverted in the hope that he can deceive everyone into believing he is a woman?”
That’s a plainly-put truth.
The sexual universe of gay men is the sexual universe of men without the civilizing, restraining influence of women. To paraphrase one of my gay male friends: “It’s the most dirty, piggish, nasty, lust-driven world imaginable. Orgasm as a purely physical function and the desire for it as a purely physical need, no more meaningful or important than digestion or excretion.”
This is not a politically acceptable thing to talk about, but it’s still the truth.
So when some aspect of the reality of that world is in the news, these truth-tellers are the men I listen to. These are my native guides now.
They’re the ones who helped me keep my grip on reality this week — who affirmed the obvious while everyone else was busy pretending not to see it.
Reactions to The Greenwald Affair
I’ve needed my native guides because the reaction to the Greenwald affair has been so off-the-wall, it borders on hallucinatory. It’s triggered the fuck out of my PTSD — dredging up memories of my mother insisting, with icy calm, I got those bruises from falling down. So calmly, in fact, that I started to wonder whether I’d imagined what happened the night before.
I’ve watched otherwise sane people defend Greenwald — some with awkward hesitation, others like zealots guarding a shrine. A few have expressed mild concern about the meth paraphernalia visible in the video, but most have deflected entirely, spinning out conspiracy theories so silly they’d be funny if they weren’t being taken seriously.
My favorite: he’s being punished by Mossad for not giving in to blackmail!
As if criticism of Israel is so rare, so dangerous, so earth-shaking and destabilizing, that the international order had to mobilize to frame one gay journalist in Brazil. My God, what if someone listened to him? Israel might be disliked or even hated!
Another piece of idiocy: it’s an attempt to get us to distrust Greenwald’s journalism!
As if exposing this kind of perversion would do anything but boost Greenwald’s profile — or win him more fans.
It used to take a campus protest or a workplace cancellation to earn martyrdom and loyalty from the anti-Woke crowd. Now, apparently, all it takes is dragging the entire world into your kink without asking for their consent to participate.
There was never any real risk of cancellation here — not in the Western world of 2025, where shamelessness is armor.
From the moment it dropped, it was obvious: the response would be protective. That he would be cast as the misunderstood victim. That critiques would be dismissed as puritanism, bigotry, or right-wing hysteria. That the very extremity of the content would work in his favor — making anyone who dared acknowledge what it was seem cruel, unhinged, or deranged.
The idea that this would “destroy” him was never serious.
The real bet — and a smart one — was that it would cement his status as a martyr.
And so far, that bet has paid off, at least from everything I’ve seen.
Even more appalling, the responses are primarily concerned with avoiding “kink shaming.” His defenders mouth the usual leftist pablum about the sacred inviolability of all acts between consenting adults, or worse, imply — or state outright — that Greenwald is being framed and controlled, including falsely claiming that the video was real in his statement, by the evil Joooooooos.
People. This one isn’t even difficult.
How did it happen that the entire world has now seen a humiliating scene starring a man who happens to have both a humiliation fetish and a platform large enough to nonconsensually involve the entire world in it, just by hitting tweet?
Gosh. I wonder.
Must be a coincidence!
The gaslighting is so frustrating, so maddening and upsetting, that I will never have words strong enough to express the magnitude of my relief — or my gratitude to the based, non-Woke gays telling the truth.
Men who share Greenwald’s orientation, but not his delusions.
Men unafraid to say how most gay men actually live.
Men who still believe in calling things what they are.
They’ve been the steady voice of sanity. Some laugh — sincerely or grimly — at the spectacle, at the adorably naive straight people, at a culture so committed to its own lies.
But they’ve all affirmed what has seemed obvious to me from the start: the sky is blue, 2 + 2 = 4, and the guy with the humiliation fetish arranged to be globally humiliated.
Duh.
One man’s fetish. Eight billion unwilling participants.
What The Reactions Imply
What does it mean that so many people — smart people, sane people with a moral compass — have twisted themselves into knots to avoid saying what seems plainly true?
That question is harder to answer than you’d think. I spent hours scribbling in the “processing” notebook on my iPad, chasing fragments and fragments of thought. And I’m a mathematician whose deepest love is number theory. Pattern-finding is the one part of my brain that sings in tune, that floods with the cleanest dopamine, that strains hardest toward order when the world begins to tilt.
But a few patterns are starting to come into focus.
First, people will protect the tribe over the truth. The refusal to say the obvious out loud isn’t confusion — it’s allegiance. Greenwald has a long career, a devoted following, and a symbolic role in certain political subcultures, primarily among the enemies of Israel. For many, defending him isn’t about what happened — it’s about who he is.
Truth doesn’t matter. Loyalty is the real currency.
Second, consent is conditional and selectively applied. The same people who insist that every encounter must be mutually agreed upon, down to the finest detail, seem remarkably unconcerned that millions of strangers were forcibly made participants in someone else’s kink. Because when it’s their guy, the rules are flexible. Violated boundaries suddenly don’t matter.
Our consent to watch was never sought — and yet here we are.
Third, people are afraid to name the taboo. Why? Kink is no longer private behavior — it’s a protected identity. Any critique is seen as moralistic or oppressive. That reflexive defense shuts down honest discussion, even when the facts are plain. You’re not allowed to say: “This appears to be a public humiliation fantasy.” You’re only allowed to say: “Don’t kink-shame.”
It’s not about accuracy. It’s about the leftist moral code.
Fourth, social scripts override obvious meaning. Public sex scandal? File it under “respect privacy.” Drugs on camera? File it under “don’t judge.” Mass nonconsensual exposure to someone’s fetish? File it under “consenting adults.” The filing system doesn’t care what actually happened — it cares about preserving the illusion of consistency.
And when reality doesn’t fit, people redact reality.
Fifth, everyone’s performing, and no one wants to break character. And this is where I’ll repeat the obvious: we don’t know for sure what happened. Maybe, despite the contrary evidence, Greenwald was framed. That’s always possible. But most people talking about this aren’t treating it like a mystery. They’re not examining evidence or asking questions.
They’re running the script: “Be kind.” “Don’t shame.” “Ignore it.” “Support him even harder.”
It doesn’t feel like caution. It feels like theater. Everyone knows the line. No one wants to be the first to forget their cue or the first to stop repeating the mantra.
consenting adults…consenting adults….consenting adults….consenting adults….
Sixth, sanity now requires a support network. The fact that I’ve needed “native guides” — friends who can look me in the eye and say, “Yes, you’re not crazy, we see it too” — says everything about the current cultural moment. It’s not enough to be observant. You need backup. You need confirmation.
Because the distance between what we’re told to say and what we actually see has become so vast that basic common sense now requires social proof.
If you say the sky is blue, and everyone else insists it’s a nuanced shade of morally progressive gray, it helps to have someone next to you who’ll whisper:
“It’s blue. It’s always been blue. You’re not the crazy one.”
Finally — and this is last because it’s the most important, and the one I most want remembered: nobody gives a damn about children.
Glenn Greenwald is a widowed father of two young boys. That fact alone should have prompted at least a few hard questions — but almost no one is asking them. No one is asking whether a man who, by his own telling, uses meth and engages in filmed domination scenarios that leave him vulnerable to blackmail is a safe, stable, or fit parent.
No one1 is asking why someone responsible for two children would show such catastrophically poor judgment as to record that behavior in the first place.
And the same people now flooding social media with “focus on his important journalism” or “don’t kink-shame” would already have a custody lawyer on retainer if those two boys were their grandsons, nephews, or godsons.
But they’re not. They’re adopted Brazilian orphans.
So the script rolls on, and the boys disappear into the background.
Because adults have political priorities — and somehow, those never include protecting children.
Those boys won’t have native guides. Only adults who looked away and called it compassion.
They will grow up and have to live in a world where everyone saw the tape.
But no one saw them.
Links for Further Reading
My friend
wrote about this situation, as did (here and here).My friend
, a childless atheist homosexual, is asking. Most of the Christian commentators, including the ones who are parents, are not. Really think about that.