One of the things I fig­ured out only too late in my blog­ging career was to respect ALL the writ­ing I do. I would write for two hours a day on my pub­lic Face­book pro­file, and then it would­n’t “count” towards the arti­cles I was doing for the week.

So it is time to restart an old tra­di­tion. One post a week will be ded­i­cat­ed to all the gems of the pre­vi­ous week (and maybe some­thing juicy from the archives). All of the very best posts that seem to have res­onat­ed. And maybe one or two oth­ers among my favorites.

I won’t be putting these in a menu or keep­ing a link to them. You can find them if you real­ly look, but they are most­ly top­i­cal and grow stale faster than most cook­ies.

So I’m putting this here with my com­men­tary because I already spent a day whack-a-mole-ing shit­ty big­ots by the HUNDREDS who called gen­der vari­ance men­tal ill­ness. At least here, I can set com­ments to friends only, and I don’t have to put up with every ran­do fas­cist who says, “What’s going on in THIS thread?”

But feel free to share—in fact, I’d love it if you did.

The meme did EXACTLY what the meme was sup­posed to do. It got peo­ple to admit that they knew how sin­gu­lar they worked.

See… most peo­ple go there first. It’s the first refuge on the path of: “I don’t agree with your lifestyle and I refuse to respect you.” But peo­ple know that’s big­otry, so the first thing they say is “Gol­ly gee. I just love every­one and respect them SO MUCH, but I can’t wrap my head around that awful­ly dif­fi­cult gram­mar.”

Except they can. This proved it.

And a thou­sand com­ments on the post also proved it. Because imme­di­ate­ly the goal­posts moved. Now it was­n’t: “I can’t fig­ure out how to do this.” Now it was: “Well, if we know their sex, why WOULD we use sin­gu­lar they?” Let’s be gram­mar purists (except that all the style guides now accept sin­gu­lar they). All of a sud­den, that super con­fus­ing con­struc­tion they just could­n’t POSSIBLY parse was not the issue any­more. Now it was the integri­ty of gram­mar.

Point out that Eng­lish (and real­ly all lin­guis­tics) is descrip­tive? Oh, well, I just real­ly want to go with what the author­i­ties say.

Point out the style guides? Oh, well, I want to go with a more accu­rate form.

Point out that it’s actu­al­ly NOT accu­rate? Well, it is if you know the sex.

And there it is. You had to get them into check­mate, but they final­ly admit it. The real issue—all along—was always always ALWAYS respect­ing the wish­es of any­one who stepped out­side of the gen­der binary—couldn’t have that.

And of course, most of the com­ments I erased—hundreds upon hun­dreds of them—said the qui­et part out loud: “Why should I respect the pro­nouns of the men­tal­ly ill?”

See how it works? Peo­ple know bet­ter than to start with “Fuck you and your fuck­ing non male/female gen­der. You’re men­tal­ly ill and I hate you for dis­rupt­ing the com­fort of my sta­tus quo by mak­ing me think about the world in any­thing oth­er than the bina­ries I learned in ele­men­tary school.” They start with some­thing that sounds a lit­tle less like they’re fuck­ing Archie Bunker and then work from there.

But it’s there. Dri­ving their “log­ic.” Con­trol­ling their “ratio­nal­i­ty.”
It’s always there.

The Democ­rats are doing every­thing you think they should be in terms of mes­sag­ing. What they failed to do—that the Repub­li­cans did— was tell you that it was OK to be a big­ot. They didn’t dou­ble down on male white suprema­cy.

Oh, they’ve sin­gled down for sure. We are a deeply racist and misog­y­nis­tic coun­try, and few (none for high­er office) can get elect­ed stand­ing vocif­er­ous­ly opposed to big­otry. That is just the soci­ety we live in, and why it is par­tic­u­lar­ly frus­trat­ing that left­ists think they can “real­ly win” some movie-mon­tage vio­lent rev­o­lu­tion in a plu­ral­is­tic soci­ety that sees equi­ty as the deal­break­er (not big­otry) with­out either gen­er­a­tions of ground­work, incre­men­tal­ism, and win­ning hearts and minds OR run­ning their own left-wing form of anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic author­i­tar­i­an­ism and a lot of vio­lence.

I’ve been social­ly aware in this soci­ety for about 35 years. I watched them call any­one who want­ed some basic respect and empa­thy a “snowflake.” I watched them repeat­ed­ly tell us, “fuck your feel­ings.” And I lit­er­al­ly watched them cheer a can­di­date who comes up with a shit­ty lit­tle per­son­al insult for each indi­vid­ual who oppos­es him on any­thing ever and calls every­one who doesn’t love him (the way his dad­dy didn’t love him) the “lunatic fringe left” in EXACTLY the same elec­tion where the sug­ges­tion that big­ots were deplorable was met with thir­ty-five thou­sand news cycles of croc­o­dile tears, white fragili­ty, rend­ing gar­ments, and con­ser­v­a­tive fee fees.

This isn’t a mes­sag­ing issue. There may be some buyer’s remorse as the leop­ards start to eat people‘s faces, but don’t for­get that approval rat­ings are still pret­ty high on immi­gra­tion — which is where we’ve arguably behaved the worst in the last three months. But the mes­sag­ing is sol­id.

So we don’t need to infan­tilize them by say­ing Democ­rats (nev­er “us,” always Democ­rats) just need to explain it even more gen­tly. They get it.
You’re look­ing at a demo­graph­ic that let some real­ly real­ly hor­ri­ble peo­ple get into pow­er by telling them it was okay to be a big­ot. And that it was the left’s fault for mak­ing folks who did­n’t want to intro­spect about their prej­u­dice and the gears and levers of pow­er in our soci­ety feel bad by point­ing out white male suprema­cy.

They don’t need it to be explained to them. They’re not stu­pid. They know what they’re doing, par­tic­u­lar­ly when they say “fuck your feel­ings” about inequal­i­ty, and frankly, they’re tired of a cul­ture that ever told them it wasn’t okay to be open about call­ing us lib­tards, fem­i­nazis, and snowflakes for NOT uphold­ing white male suprema­cy.

You have to plug full-blown malig­nant nar­cis­sism into any analy­sis of Trum­plethin­skin to make it make sense. He does­n’t say what he means—he says what advances him on an imag­i­nary board towards pow­er and nar­cis­sis­tic sup­ply. And this is key because HE KNOWS WHEN HE’S ABOUT TO GET IN TROUBLE. (For all his glar­ing cog­ni­tive dif­fi­cul­ties, he has a pre­ci­sion instru­ment for read­ing the room, and he knows exact­ly when the next step will be him hav­ing to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for some­thing “bad.”) He knows when his syco­phants are off script or some­one isn’t fawn­ing prop­er­ly.

That’s why he will so often go absolute­ly cal­low in the face of a tough ques­tion and start talk­ing like he does­n’t know what’s going on, he’s nev­er heard of peo­ple in his inner cir­cle, he has­n’t heard today’s news (of course he has!), won’t take respon­si­bil­i­ty for an econ­o­my that sucks (where­as he did when it was good), or has absolute­ly no pow­er to do any­thing com­pared to White House lawyers.

He’s a bul­ly. Which means, ulti­mate­ly, he’s a COWARD. And the buck does­n’t stop with cowards—it nev­er stops with cow­ards. Noth­ing is ever their fault.

It’s just fright­en­ing to me that a third of our coun­try wants white suprema­cy SOFA KING bad that they looked at a per­son who won’t demon­strate the slight­est account­abil­i­ty, respon­si­bil­i­ty, or integri­ty and who is basi­cal­ly not actu­al­ly any­thing more than an open­ly cru­el and deri­sive big­ot and rapist… that they looked at this per­son thrice—including twice after they knew EXACTLY that he was going to use exec­u­tive pow­er for per­son­al gain, grifts, and ret­ri­bu­tion— and said, “That’s what I want! He’s the guy for me.”

I would like to draw your atten­tion to a break­down in the 100-Day Approval Rat­ing. 43% is over­all. It’s actu­al­ly 22% on econ­o­my and 48% on bor­der pol­i­cy, accord­ing to Reuters. Peo­ple think Trump’s han­dling of the bor­der is great.

ICE agents break­ing into hous­es in the mid­dle of the night with­out war­rants? Great.

Even if it’s the wrong house? Eh.

Human traf­fick­ing to El Sal­vador? Awe­some.

Anti-immi­gra­tion raids? Sounds good.

Peo­ple try­ing to immi­grate legal­ly being deport­ed uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly?
Won­der­ful.

Even the spous­es? Works for me.

No due process? That’s not for them.

Child labor to replace the lost work­force? Yeah, we can do that.

Pros­e­cute any­one who tries to ques­tion what’s going on, ask for ID or do any­thing that might dif­fer­en­ti­ate an ICE raid from a ran­dom street kid­nap­ping? Got­ta get out of the way—let ’em do their jobs.

But my 401k tank­ing? I can’t sup­port this. Yours, they couldn’t care less. Theirs, now, that’s anoth­er mat­ter.

This is why Democ­rats can’t win on left­ist eco­nom­ic agen­das. It’s not because the eco­nom­ics need to be mes­saged bet­ter. It’s because we live in a DEEPLY racist coun­try that has con­vinced itself it isn’t. Peo­ple might pre­fer more social­ist eco­nom­ic poli­cies, but what they want even more is white male suprema­cy.

Let me be blunt:

Depend­ing on how you count long-dis­tance peeps I haven’t seen in a while, I have five part­ners, and that’s down from last year. And if you’re sort of will­ing to include peo­ple who I have a great rela­tion­ship with, but we’re not real­ly in each other’s orbits right now (but if we were, we would prob­a­bly be bang­ing), that num­ber goes up. If I’m being hon­est… con­sid­er­ably.

Now, maybe you don’t know this, but I’m in pret­ty dire finan­cial straits right now. And I’m cute, but I’m not “break your neck when I walk into the room” cute. And I am not over­ly mas­cu­line— in fact, I’m non-bina­ry. So all the rea­sons these dudes think they can’t score (not rich, not hot, not man­ly), I prove inac­cu­rate.

The male lone­li­ness epi­dem­ic is not real­ly a thing. It is dudes who might be lone­ly, but it’s most­ly because they want to do NO work on them­selves, and they are being so shit­ty that no one wants to be with them. Then, instead of admit­ting that it might be them, they’re try­ing to use the priv­i­lege (that, iron­i­cal­ly, they don’t acknowl­edge they even have) to guilt women into fuck­ing them to avoid the threat of being alone. Or to guilt the rest of us into cre­at­ing a world where women have no choice.

It just turns out that being with THEM is more of a threat than being alone. And many women would rather be alone than suf­fer being with these hor­ri­ble guys.

So these dudes try to roll back equal­i­ty to an era when women need­ed men to sur­vive and would put up with WAY more shit. They would rather break all sem­blance of equi­ty and every mea­sure of social progress over the last 60 years—ushering in a regres­sive regime in order to force women to require their finan­cial and social protection—than maybe go to ther­a­py, treat women like peo­ple, do some fuck­ing emo­tion­al labor (for them­selves and each oth­er), and stop being sloven­ly ass­holes who don’t clean their but­t­holes well enough.

Last­ly, I spent a month writ­ing up a major arti­cle about what to do to resist fascism/authoritarianism with an eye on the fact that not every­one can do the same thing orhas the same capac­i­ty. That was sup­posed to take a week­end or MAAAAAYBE a week. So come check it out.