A Bitter, Jagged, Red Pill

On leaving a club that never wanted me as a member anyway - Part 1

Yes. I had always wanted to change the world, but changing the world sometimes changes you.

Though to me it really doesn’t seem that long ago, it turns out to be something like 40 years, I was a loud and obnoxious radical feminist, socialist wannabe. Oh, geez, I confess that had I not been so sheltered, ignorant, and ill educated I would have been the kind of chick that joins Antifa to date nonbinary guy-gals - a second stringer who hands you the milkshake instead of throwing it. I’d be out there with all the other unhinged borderlines harpies screaming at Brett Weinstein hurling epithets that would curl my hair and straighten his.

Let me see…I was one of the first members of PFLAG and supported gay marriage (we called them civil unions then, because marriage was about the patriarchy you understand) long before it was okay to mention such things in public; I was part of a coalition of women who organized the Chicago contingent for the first March for Women’s Lives back in 1986. I fought for women’s reproductive rights for decades. I took days off from work to protest against apartheid in South Africa. In fact, when I got married the first time, I insisted that I have a silver wedding ring without a diamond. Diamonds were from South Africa, and well, you know. Never mind that in those days I never ventured to the South Side of Chicago, much less South Africa.

And, then there was the time when I worked in a civil rights law firm that had visits from the likes of Bill Ayers and William Kunsler, the defense lawyer who represented the Chicago Seven, and Arthur Kinoy, the man who took Joseph McCarthy down, not to mention various luminaries from the Southern Poverty Law Center, and even the young Barack Obama raising money for his campaign to be a state representative.

In fact, one of my old bosses defends the likes of people who are actually are part of Antifa movement in Seattle. No really, I am not making this up.

Later on I protested the war in Afghanistan alongside the likes of Kathy Kelly, a long term pacifist who did time in a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky for planting corn at an ICBM missle silo. Kathy Kelly - who would go to war zones in order to document the real casualties in places where even the UN and the media feared to tread, yeah that Kathy Kelly.

Through my participations in such movements, and rubbing shoulders with true luminaries of social justice, I know how to start a movement and organize a protest and can easily find the right lawyers to represent me if it gets wild. There was a time when I would be able to drop the right names and doors would open. And, if I really had a problem with you, I could take you down politically, as well, because I had the resources and connections to do so.

Further, I am not claiming that I am sort of Whittaker Chambers ready to repudiate past connections and friendships and recant everything I used to believe fervently. Hardly. For me, all is forgiven and I have no regrets. I mean, I still think women should have access to safe medical abortions (but how I feel about that access has changed and is much more measured); you don’t have to subject me to a course in Critical Race Theory for me to acknowledge that we do have systems that are based on race and slavery, like our legal system is based on common law from the middle ages and is in serious need of reform. But that reform should not come by burning down a courthouse IMHO.

My time on the left made me a cosmopolitan, sophisticated human being. I got to see and witness things that I never would have had I traveled a more traditional path. I’ve seen history happening and it was exciting. And it made me a humble, if not cantankerous person. I had to confront a lot of reality in a way that most people who do not include political activism as part of their life’s experience do not.

You don’t have to tell me to check my privilege, but trust me I hate it when you do, if only for the fact that we are all privileged to live in one of the best (note I did not say the best - we all have work to do to be sure) countries in the world.

But all of that wisdom and experience came with a huge price and left me scarred for life.

Today’s pundits decry the “cancel” culture and “woke” activism as something to laugh about. Sure, in the beginning it was just another thing to ridicule when it was on the fringes of society, but now folks are beginning to see that this is a true war being waged on multiple fronts not some “trend.” When you bring umbrellas, tear gas masks, helmets, and clubs to a protest you are not doing that to be fashionable.

What is happening to parents at school board meetings is merely an extension of leftist activism in action. Totally textbook. Right out of Rules for Radicals. If you are fighting your local school board, I suggest you read it.

First they cut your mike, then they throw you out. When that fails to work, they will seek to demonize you as troglydtes and luddites for not accepting your complicity in the oppression of black and marginized peoples. They will smear you and your reputation. Eventually, they will disappear you. Oh, they won’t send you to the gulag - yet. But just try to set up a Gofundme to get donations for your legal defense. Nope; you’ll have to get checks in the mail, and pretty soon you’ll be driven so far underground that you’ll need someone else to pick up your mail from a post office box in some godforesaken small town in the middle of Texas.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

It’s not that much of stretch to think this way, though, and it’s very disconcerting to me only because I experienced it myself. Me, in the 1980s I was cancelled by an influential Leftwing radical feminism organization, and that is a story for another time. Thankfully, I wasn’t that big of a deal. I just walked out the door and flipped the bird as I left the collective meeting, never to return. But I did lose friends, made some enemies, and I was shunned in Chicago feminist circles for a long, long time. I know what it is like to go to a social event where tables of people turn their backs on you and the only person you get to sit next to is the black blind autistic guy who has Tourettes syndrome.

I’ve been right of center for a long time now. I took up the mantle of centrist Libertarianism for real over two decades ago. Disappointed by both the Democrats and the Republicans - especially the Republicans - during the onset of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, I felt I needed to find a polical alternative and Libertarianism seemed more in alignment with my values and my thinking.

Libertarians want peace and to be left alone. Who knew?

Also, I wanted a political philosophy that supported the Enlightenment principles, of liberty, equality and fraternity like the French themselves are struggling to reclaim now-a-days. Back in the 1990s I saw postmodernism to be a true existential threat to reasonable political discourse and coherent public policy. I’ve been fighting postmodernism’s hyper-relativism with every fiber of my being for over twenty-five years now. Hey, where were the rest of you?

Today I am politically inactive, impotent, and marginized; a has been and an aging armchair activist who throws crumpled papers at the TV set when I am frustrated with watching imbeciles named Joy.

Still, I like to kibitz about politics. Lately though I find myself retreating from discussions that would have energized me. I’ve always managed to find ways of conducting civilized discussions about hot topics both on and off social media. Not any more. I no longer conduct them online, much less in person. In the beginning of this year I participated in some Braver Angel’s events, finding myself the only “red” on the call or in the room. I am often given the hook before I can make my point, but I am stubborn and I persist to invade so-called liberal spaces because it has to be done to remind them we exist IRL.

I am no longer merely called an idiot and libtard by my left-of-center friends, I am called much, much worse things both behind my back and in front of my face. If I had a dime for eveytime I was piled on this past year and a half, and told to sit down and shut the fuck up, just for saying something sensible I’d be rich.

Recently, I’ve even had a colleague called me a racist when I said that I didn’t think increasing border security was a bad idea especially in the middle of a pandemic. He started to rant on about how Trump was a racist and a bigot, and anyone who voted for him and his policies are one in the same. Before I could tell him that I had been married to a man who himself was in deportation, that I know intimately upfront and personal the plight of immigrants who are at the mercy of the system, he had blocked my number and froze me out of social events he used to invite me to after work.

Fortunately, he left the Agency and has gone to work somewhere else in Levithan. While I have suffered worse forms of social rejection, what made this different was that I wasn’t even given an opportunity to complete my sentence, and I was judged solely on the basis of merely hinting at the incorrect point of view. Now, that is scary.

The irony is I’ve always been a never-Trumper, that is, until now. I am beginning to reconsider the facts of his Presidency and it’s not because I had to pay nearly $75 last week to fill my car tank with gas, or think Brandon should go anywhere.

In 2016 I voted for Rand Paul in the Illinois primaries because I did not want Trump in the Oval office, and Senator Paul had more experience in Washington than the Libertarian candidates running at the time. [I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life up until that point, so I was tickled when I received a call from the Board of Elections in Chicago who asked me to be a Republican precinct captain and poll watcher, as I was the only registered Republican in the entire 45th Ward.]

Though Trump became the nominee I could not bring myself to vote for him, however.

The only other viable candidate was Hillary Clinton. But, after canvasing with a bunch of Hillary supporters in Iowa for one weekend before the election, I wrote in Rand Paul at the last minute. I could not bear to make the Hobbesian choice of voting for someone whose policies I could not stand. And then there was that incident in Benghazi. Oh, and the blue dress. That damn blue dress.

Two main concens I had about Trump were: that he would unnecessarily divide the country and he had not the political resources or appropriate contacts to deal with an international crisis. And I was right about one of these two things.

First, I was wrong about Trump dividing the country. The country was already divided when he started running for office. Second, I was right about Trump being ill equipped to deal with the Covid pandemic but not for the reasons you think.

*****

Recently, I watched a documentary called The Red Pill about the Men’s Rights Movement. The documentarian started out by being a staunch feminist, and by the end of the film she states plaintively, “I am not a feminist.”

She took the red pill apparently.

Though this documentary is not without significant flaws - e.g., I think she should have done a deeper dive into the real misogyny going on online, maybe she could have co-authored or collaborated with a male documentarian, etc., - it does accurately depict a transformational journey. The kind of journey you take when you have your eyes opened not only to see, but to really look; to have your ears opened not only to hear but to listen. As she interviewed these so-called enemies of the women’s movement she had learned that not only did the mens rights movement start as a response to fight the many ways men are ill treated by society, and the courts, they were, in fact, human too.

Yes. She wanted to change the world, but changing the world changed her.

That is not to say that the concerns of women aren’t valid, or that we women should all go back to the kitchen. Bitch please. It is, of course more complex than that. Also, there is some serious masculine assholery going on in the world. I mean take a look at Afghanistan under the Taliban as Exhibit A to that point. But just because some men shot up a women’s school and the women therein outside of a Kandahar or whereever, they are not the same men who want better treatment in the family courts in the US. It’s high time we teach the young ones that there is a difference between the two groups, one is not like the other, don’t you think?

Not to mention the fact that we are missing a serious opportunity to build trust and make progress on the issues that matter to all of us (think: climate change) if we continue to demonize each other for the most inane things.

Another thing that I thought that was interesting in this documentary are the clips of MRAs’ conferences being shouted down, participants being called names, cancelled and marginalized all for saying, “Houston, we have a problem.”

These scenes looked familiar.

Deja vus, all over again.

I recall seeing these “actions” several times on YouTube. Protests, even violent ones, of people taking a different tack, not out of malice or spite, but because each and every one of them came to a different if unorthodox conclusion after analysing the data. People like Ben Shapiro being shouted down at various universities, of Jordan Peterson being ambushed by angry social justice warriors because he did not want to be compelled to use preferred pronouns. People like Abigail Schier whose books were banned from Target’s shelves and burned at some universities. Radical feminists philosophers like Kathleen Stock being deplatformed, their lives threatened in real life and on social media for stating things, like “the sky is blue, and the emperor has no clothes.” Gay rights activists who but five years ago were advocating for gay marriage, are only now to be told when they attend an LGB Alliance conference that they are both nazis and transphobes and kicked out of the movement that they founded. Regular dads and moms being branded as terrorists because they don’t want their kids to be reading Derrida and pornographic horseshit when they are only eight years old, and so on.

People are being run roughshod and sidesaddled out of Dodge, tarred and feathered, friendships ended, jobs lost, suffering social ostracization of the worst kind for…what? Hitting the “like” button to something silly ten years ago? For circling January 6th on their kitchen calendar?

Look, I’m not dogwhistling Dixie here. It’s not like I’m walking over severed heads rolling fresh off the guilliotine on my way to work, but something really, really weird is happening here, and I am beginning to think that it has nothing to do with social justice versus the capitalist patriarchy.

No; today we now inhabit what used to be the realms of madmen from just a few years ago. A true virtual reality. A Brave New World. One that may have a simulacrum of a social justice utopia future etched and advertised on a can of Coke served by a robot.

This is a problem that goes beyond politics and media blatantly lying to us, but rather, it has to do with who (who, more like what) controls and manipulates culture to shunting all of us to a space where we no longer see each other as human, and calling it a safe space.

Battle lines are being drawn at such trivialities that they defy comprehension. Are the Squid Games just fiction, or are they a in fact a sinister preview of what is to come? A potential future? Why read Science Fiction when we are already living in a simulation right? If so, I finally got the memo. Thanks.

That we are witnessing this phenomenon in real time, frame by frame, post by post, tweet by tweet is very frightening to those who inadvertently stumbled into the Matrix and swallowed the red pill.

And if you see a baby faced robot heading straight towards you - run.