In Which I Resign from Political Commentary
announcing a major change to this Substack
One of the consistent claims I used to read on social media was that TERFs and the authors of TERF literature — mostly second-wave feminists, women in their 60s and 70s now — are responsible for violence against transpeople.
This always struck me as flagrantly silly. Violent men who beat up transwomen do not read feminist philosophy to decide who deserves to be beaten up. They never believed that, of course. Not really. The point, which they were savvy enough not to admit in public, was to make people afraid to say their real thoughts out loud. To inculcate a culture of fear that served their ends.
There’s a new dynamic happening on the right that is similar to that, but it’s a lot more scary to me, and it’s caused me to make a decision.
I’m writing this post to let my paid subscribers know that I’m going to limit myself to writing about mathematics, creativity, spirituality, PTSD and recovery from it, deafness, drawing, painting, reviewing books, and other non-political topics going forward.
I’m done writing about culture war issues and politics.
If you want to cancel your subscriptions, I completely understand and you can do so by clicking on the three horizontal lines in the upper right corner of my Substack homepage, and choosing “Manage Subscription.”
Your paid subscriptions have helped me make a lot of progress on paying off my student loans, and I will be grateful for the rest of my life. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
I am changing my topics here and putting culture war and political topics off-limits because, as of the last few days, I’m officially cowed into silence.
I’ve spent the last few days reading justifications of what has happened to the Home Depot lady — who had lost her job before any of us even knew she existed. She was an old woman who probably made minimum wage, who worked on her feet, and whose only power over anyone was to, perhaps, send them to aisle 4 instead of aisle 15 for a can of wasp spray.
On Facebook, she said she was sorry that the shooter missed Trump, and she hoped someone would try again before the election.
Revolting comments. Morally indefensible, and truly sick, words.
Words.
She was then confronted at work, on video, and the video spread on Twitter. As a consequence of which, besides unemployment — and almost certainly increasing welfare rolls now — she has become the object of this week’s Two Minutes Hate on the right.
To my knowledge, nobody has any evidence that she ever participated in any cancellation mobs, got anyone fired, or has otherwise ever done anything to anyone, except say words that angered people on the right. If such evidence appears in the future, it will serve as a post-hoc justification of going after her, because it wasn’t apparent for the first several days of the jihad.
She is simply a member of the wrong tribe now, the tribe it’s morally good to destroy without concern for the level of power, complicity, or guilt of individual members.
Several articles defending what happened to her, including one with a very vivid quote about the imperative of forcing liberal (not leftist, liberal) women to taste, gag, and swallow excrement until they’re traumatized and begging for the torture to stop, are going around Substack. From the comment sections, these notions are receiving hearty approval. I’m singling that quote out for its vividness and because it’s the one I’ve seen the most, but there are plenty of others, all justifying this turn of events as good, righteous, necessary, and something that should be both celebrated and escalated.
I’m repeatedly seeing, with very little disagreement, the notion that the proper punishment for words is public degradation, humiliation, and infliction of trauma—a notion being celebrated by people who, I’m pretty sure, do understand unintended consequences.
Who understand that the power of social media is completely uncontrollable and that Elon Musk can’t empower them forever, or in all domains.
Who understand that the actual power lies in the media, politicians, tech companies, and elites, not in old ladies who happen to hate a former President.
Who would probably, if pressed, admit that if every old woman who hates Trump and earns minimum wage were fired simultaneously—if absolutely all of them moved from working for minimum wage to being on welfare before the sun goes down tonight—nothing would meaningfully change, except the number of applications for food stamps.
Convenient Conclusions
My therapist is always pointing out how convenient certain things are that I bring up in our sessions. He typically says this when I find justifications to do what I want to do anyway, but he’s consistent in pointing out how they’re always strategic justifications that I convince myself will serve some noble higher goal.
He is absolutely right. I’m very good at that kind of rationalizing, and it’s something I have to think about all the time—to try to catch myself in the act, a character defect I need to stop myself from indulging.
I heard his voice in my head over and over as I read the praise heaped on these articles today—this praise for heaping more derision and punishment, as vicious and humiliating as possible, on an old lady who’s already been made unemployed.
How convenient that strategically perfect justifications just happen to line up with raw, bloodthirsty revenge.
Revenge, as vicious and degrading as possible, is now the right thing to do—because this time the left will decide to reign things in, instead of escalating.
This time inflicting degrading, humiliating, public trauma will result in a moral lesson learned and repentance. (Although that kind of thing didn’t work to turn members of the right into Wokists…)
And, apparently, it will do so without making the character and psychological issues that attracted those people to the worst elements of the left any worse. In fact, it will cure them.
People on the right believe these things now, and that these things represent moral high ground.
I am not anywhere near good enough at conforming to a tribe to be safe on the right. That’s not a humblebrag—it’s got fuck-all to do with my being self-possessed. It’s because being part of a tribe requires relaxing a little, letting your guard down, and believing yourself capable and worthy of authentic connections with the other people in the tribe. And I’m just too fucked up for that.
Why I Have To Change
I’m not built to fight on a team where it’s been made explicitly clear that I had better be exceedingly careful not to piss off my teammates, unless I want to have excrement forced down my throat until I cry and beg for mercy while other people on my team pump their fists in glee and cheer.
So I have to face the truth: I am too much of a coward to continue to write on cultural issues.
Yes, I am giving in to my fear of what may happen if I piss off the people I mostly agree with.
Yes, I am admitting that my fear is stronger than I am capable of overcoming, at least right now and with the psychological resources I have available.
Yes, I am a coward.
Granted. Owned. Acknowledged.
I wish I had more capacity, but I don’t. I need what energy I have for more pressing pursuits, and more interesting ones, than trying to make sure I stay on the good side of the people on my team and fearing what they’ll do to me if I don’t.
I have enough work to do in therapy to try to recover from my past. I don’t have the mental energy to monitor myself closely enough to make sure my words stay well clear of the line that will make it my turn.
I can hear some of you saying, “But we’re talking about lefties! You’re not a leftie, you’ll be fine! We won’t hurt you!”
If you think about that justification—really think about—you’ll understand why people who are a lot less fucked up than me are needed for the fight.
Topics Going Forward
I’ll be writing more about math, spirituality, drawing, painting, and other things that are unrelated to politics or the culture war.
I hope at least some of you will stick around, but I’ll understand it if you don’t.
Thanks for a good ride. It was fun.
Edited on July 19, 2024 to add: I appreciate the sentiment behind the emails begging me to reconsider, but I can’t. A faction of the right that includes many of my readers, which is the crucial point here, has decided that the solution to flying monkeys is not to kill the witch. It is to publicly traumatize, degrade, humiliate, and punish, as brutally as possible and without mercy or pity, all the flying monkeys they can find. They have concluded that this is not just morally correct, but that enjoying and reveling in inflicting this trauma is part of holding the moral ground. I have sufficient experience with what humans are like when they decide that inflicting trauma is righteous to know that I cannot talk anyone out of this. I couldn’t when I was a cute, lovable little kid and I can’t now, as a fucked-up, damaged adult. As my past political commentary is more than enough to forever make me a member of the class, “liberal women,” that has been identified as equivalent to flying monkeys, my only hope to avoid, or at least delay, my turn for this punishment is to STFU. I am done, and if you can’t agree with this, I ask you to at least please respect it.