At first I didn’t understand what the group was — it seemed like it was an off-shoot of another page that had been about travel, but after a while I realized it was fascinating, and a good place to do a little informal research about women I might never meet. There were roughly 35,000 women in this group from across the United States, from many different backgrounds. The topics were as far-reaching as you might imagine (these are not actual questions, but things like):

“I’m going to a wedding this weekend, should I wear dress A, B, or C? Please be kind, I had a baby six months ago and feel self-conscious. I am breastfeeding and my boobs are huge and I’m bringing a pump, and I hate pumping. This is the first night I’ll be away from my baby.”

Then there’d be 942 votes on which dress to wear, but not just votes, women saying, “You look fantastic! I can’t believe you just had a baby. Wear that dress, and I hope you know how beautiful you are!” And, “I hated pumping, too, but try to enjoy yourself, your baby will be okay! Dance, breathe, and have a fun night out. Also, your boobs look GREAT.” All supportive stuff.

There might be a parenting question that would get people riled up — “Would you let your seventeen-year-old daughter sleep at her boyfriend’s house if his parents are okay with it?” Or one where everyone would be supportive, and I’d feel relieved:

“My mom won’t accept my transgender daughter, and I don’t want to spend the holidays with her this year as a result. It makes my daughter so miserable, and ruins the holiday for her and for me. I have tried talking to my mom many times, but she refuses to listen. I have sent her books, podcasts, everything I can think of. I have broken down in front of my mom and tried to be patient with her, but I can’t do this to my daughter, it isn’t okay. Now all my grown siblings are upset we aren’t coming, the cousins are upset, my dad is upset, too, and my mom isn’t speaking to me. What would you do?”

There’d be design questions, “I’m redoing this room, do y’all like this paint color?” Or travel, “Hey, I’m heading to New Orleans for the first time, please give me all your tips!”

I used to like it. Once in a while a woman would post a recipe that was fast, easy and delicious, right as I was wondering what to make for dinner, or someone would post about the grief they were experiencing because they’d lost someone and didn’t know how to function — just as I was feeling knocked sideways by the intensity of missing my mother.

People would often share things they wouldn’t share on their personal pages because they didn’t want their close friends or family to worry, but they needed to tell someone. Cancer diagnoses, fear about their very depressed teen, a divorce they hadn’t announced to their inner circle yet.

Women were kind to each other, and if they weren’t, they got sorted from the bunch, quickly. If they didn’t get the warning the first time, they were removed from the group. I was impressed with the moderators. I liked that there was such a huge cross-section of people from across the country. There were women with husbands, women with wives, transgender women, women who were single, women who liked to swing with their partners, women who were divorced and dating again for the first time, women who were widowed.

There were women of every color, size, and socioeconomic background, as far as I could tell. Some posts were about sex toys, sex positions, sex questions. No one judged. If you weren’t into something, you moved on. No one seemed to feel the need to comment on posts that didn’t apply or appeal to them.

It felt like an online coven, and that’s what I started calling it, even though that is not the name of the group. In my mind, it’s “The Coven”, or it was. You could dip in and out, but there was always a little magic afoot. It was a small source of joy and support during the pandemic, and during the time my mother was dying and I didn’t want to burden anyone in my life.

There were by-laws when I joined the page. This was a good fifteen years ago, so I don’t remember all of them, but it was the basic stuff. Be kind, be respectful, don’t sell anything here, no politics. Fifteen years ago “no politics” meant something different than it does today.

Like everything, times have changed and most good things have frayed around the edges.

Now women post because their husbands are looking for jobs, but it’s been six months and they haven’t had any luck. Does anyone have any leads in the finance/tech/transportation/manufacturing industry? Someone will write back and say maybe your husband should run his resume through ChatGPT and see if it can be updated to highlight his skills in a more appealing way. Someone else will say Claude is better for resumes than ChatGPT. A third woman will respond that AI is horrible for the environment, and there are human beings who could look at his resume and advise.

It’s ironic that someone is suggesting her husband use the tool that is very likely responsible for his firing in the first place, is what I’ll be thinking, but I won’t write that, because I’m sure it’s considered “politics” — as it should be. Everything is political.

Then someone else will say “Her husband is OUT OF WORK and it’s insensitive to suggest he pay someone, he can’t afford it, and ChatGPT is free!” Another woman will like that comment and respond, “IKR?! Google uses water, too [eyeroll emoji].”

And yes, it does, especially now that Google has made it a lot harder to opt out of AI Overview — a thing many of us find aggravating enough to find alternatives. I switched to Ecosia, where you can turn off the AI feature in settings, and they plant trees every time you search. Is it going to solve everything? I wish. But there are ways to be mindful, even with the search engines we’re using, and why wouldn’t we use the one that plants trees?

There are people who don’t want to think about the icky part, though. They want to pick up their devices or open their laptops and do what they need to do in the most expedient way, and so be it if that makes huge AI data centers inevitable, because AI itself is inevitable. The horse has left the barn, they’ll say, so just deal with it and let Claude write your grocery list, or plan your vacation, or tell you how to talk to your monosyllabic teenager, or have it summarize the complicated story you’re trying to tell. Why tax your brain trying to think too hard?

One reason might be that people who live near those gargantuan monstrosities like Musk’s Colossus in Memphis, have horrifying, undrinkable, unusable brown water coming out of their taps, and they listen to massive explosions underground for months — the kind that leave cracks in the foundation of the houses they worked for years in order to buy — and they hear a constant buzzing noise, and the lights from these AI data centers stay on all night, glowing ominously.

Their energy bills have tripled because electric companies pass on the costs to working class customers, and the local water supply is compromised — when we are already facing droughts across the country. Far too many of their children suddenly develop asthma, while their parents suffer from COPD or other lung disorders. They can’t open their windows anymore, because the air quality is so awful, because xAI is using an insane number of unpermitted methane turbines.

These data centers get pitched to local governments by corporations owned by billionaires. They head for marginalized communities first, or communities they know are hurting, as if the marginalization happened the way rain happens, like it wasn’t by design.

Then they head toward communities that are in trouble. As if farmers can’t afford diesel and fertilizer, and who knows why?

They promise millions in tax revenue and jobs, at a time when these communities are desperate. The majority of the jobs are construction jobs, though — they last until the centers are built. The billions invested by the corporations are easily recouped when they lay off thousands of employees they can now replace with robots. Who cares if the community is full of people with cancer, asthma, and COPD when the project is complete? You don’t think the corporations care, do you? The board members? The billionaires? Erin Brockovich is on the case, thankfully.

I don’t say this on The Coven, and I don’t go there much anymore. It no longer feels magical to me, and I’m on screens enough when I write. The only people I want to talk to on screens are my actual family and friends who are far away, and those include the people who read my stuff and want to engage. I’d rather see my family and friends in person given the choice. Other than that, I’ll talk to my dog. He’s very smart.

Just for fun, I’ll show you something. It’s the current word count of my memoir. I have an entire draft in a drawer. I really started writing the book I’ve been wanting to write after my mom died. It’s going to need a monster edit. I know that. I know exactly what I want to do. A lot more than half of what I’ve written won’t make it into the book, but I need to write it the way I’m writing it first. I’m sure there’s an “easier” way. I could not be less interested.

When did we forget — the struggle makes us stronger? I’ve had to work my ass off for pretty much every worthwhile thing in my life; certainly for my peace of mind, and definitely to get to a place where I know who I am, and don’t chase after love or approval. I don’t want to struggle all the time, but don’t you know people who’ve had everything handed to them just a little too easy?

Pete Hegseth comes flying to mind, and my facial muscles do a thing when I write his name, like I’ve smelled something that’s gone bad. The president comes to mind, too, and he makes me so ill, I never write his name, and I never capitalize president.

They’re the kind of people who expect to get what they want all the time, because that’s how it’s always been. When things don’t go their way, it isn’t pretty. I’m sure you’ve seen the Meet the Press interview by now. There’s the president, spouting his lies about the 2020 election for the eleventy millionth time, and there’s Kristen Welker saying no, you have no evidence of fraud. You’ve never presented any evidence. The election was certified. There were recounts. None of them changed the outcome. Joe Biden won. The end.

He doesn’t like that at all. He talks over her, and starts in about California — and the thing that is deeply upsetting as someone who lives here, is the absolute disregard he has for the harm he could cause. He’s done it before, as we all saw. Actual human beings could get hurt (again), and he does not care. He knows how to incite his base. That’s what makes me furious.

When Republicans win, the elections are perfect. When they lose, elections are rigged.

Heads I win, tails you lose. That is a game children play.

This man is stomping his feet and turning red and storming out of interviews, because the very Blue city of Los Angeles rejected a preposterous MAGA d-list reality tv star — to be mayor. Shocker! Almost like we knew how that would turn out. If he’s going to get that upset over something so small and obvious, he’s too emotional for the job. He should try smiling more.

He does know how it works out here. He’s confused about many things, but he’s not confused about this. This is how we do it in California every election.

We’re to believe the president thinks our election was rigged, but only for mayor of Los Angeles? The governors’ race where Hilton came in second was not rigged, but the mayoral race where Pratt did not advance, was rigged? What a very specific and odd kind of rigging we’re doing!

I have lived here since 2001. When I moved, I had to go to the DMV to get a new Drivers’ License, which is when and where I registered to vote. They use your Drivers’ License number, your address, your signature, and the last 4 of your Social Security number.

If I’d grown up in California like my kids, I would have pre-registered to vote like they did. You can do that at 16 or 17. At 18, every citizen born in California is automatically registered to vote, using their Social Security number, and the DMV if/when they get their license.

We have voter ID requirements, and we have a very thorough, painstaking backup system (which is slow but accurate). What we don’t have is people who understand the voting laws in California, but that’s because they don’t live here.

Los Angeles did not want that Prattdaddy, crystal-selling, Sandy Hook denier/ conspiracy theorist running the city. It was never going to happen, and it isn’t a mystery.

I wanted to share all of that about our voting system here, because now the president has demanded Republican senators pass the “SAVE America Act” which is even more “Handmaid’s Tale” than the SAVE Act. So the House passed it, and now it’s heading to the Senate. It’s about how “only Americans should vote” — and funny thing, only Americans do vote. Which they know.

Here’s something else everyone needs to understand. He cannot cancel the midterms. They are going to happen. He knows sane, alert Americans are FURIOUS and unhappy. He knows if he loses control of the House and Senate, the grift of the century is over — and that’s the best case scenario for him. He spends the last two years as a lame duck president, watching all the bs he’s done come undone.

No more coverup of the Epstein files, and who knows what happens, then? They sure seem worried, so it can’t be good. No more ICE terrorizing the immigrant community. No more pay-to-play presidency. No more pardoning his cronies. No more backdoor deals and Nvidia trades.

Worst case, he’s impeached, convicted, and hauled off to federal prison. They’d probably put him near Ghislaine, but he doesn’t want that. It’s not like he’d go to Pilates class.

He does not want to die in any jail. The people around him do not want to go to jail. Their motivation to avoid that scenario is hard to quantify. Everyone needs to be meeting this moment with the same level of desperation they would if they thought losing in November would land them behind bars. Not theoretically, literally. How would you behave? Please do that, because whatever freedom you think you have is very much on the line.

If he can’t cancel the midterms, what can he do? Exactly what he’s doing. He can keep screaming “Crooked!” and pretend we have a problem with free and fair elections in this country, when we do not. He can send his DOJ to sue states for their voter rolls if they don’t want to lose access to mail-in ballots — even though the Constitution gives STATES the right to control and manage their own elections. The federal government is not entitled to demand state governors turn over voter rolls. Please note, this means the state would send the DOJ your name, address, DOB, Drivers’ License number and/or last 4 of your Social Security number, and more.

I want you to think about Musk and the DOGE boys for a minute. “Big Balls” and the five other twenty-somethings he sent into the U.S. Treasury with flash drives, who took everyone’s most sensitive financial information, and walked out the door. Then those same six kids ran code to find “fraud and abuse” and also cancel funding for anything that had to do with “DEI” — and as a result, hundreds of thousands of people DIED, because along the way they canceled USAID.

They also canceled countless programs we needed, funding for cancer trials, and tens of thousands of essential, highly-trained, irreplaceable human beings. Then they desperately tried to re-hire them weeks later, and wreaked havoc we are still paying for all the time. Maybe you’ve heard about the screwworms?

Aside from the fact that they are not legally entitled to it and want to use the information for nefarious and disgusting reasons (i.e. to remove eligible voters from voter rolls, to scream fraud when there isn’t any, to cast doubt on elections when that is perhaps the only thing we do really well in this country), these people cannot be trusted with our personal information.

In the “Agreement” the administration is demanding states sign if they want to continue to have access to mail-in ballots, there’s a whole section about how the voter rolls will be transferred to the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ (they surely aren’t protecting anyone’s civil rights these days) using their “secure portal” and only a “small number of employees” will be able to access it, and they’ll have to use 2-factor authentication, and oh, if there is a security breach it will be rectified asap.

Sounds as good as getting a case of Athlete’s Foot. I can already see the letter offering a free year of security monitoring on the dark web after the data breach. No doubt the free monitoring will target you for ads when you sign up.

Additionally, in a move that is so abhorrent I barely have the words to describe it — after actively and successfully gutting the VRA, these despicable creatures are now citing the Civil Rights Act in their legal case to demand this information. They have no shame, not that this is anything we didn’t know. To me, however, it is an ever new low.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

These really are the most Fuckery of Times, but this is the moment to dig deep, friends.

What else can we do in the face of people who come up with a term only they could?

Cage Match Diplomacy

I am astounded to report “cage match diplomacy” is a Memo of Understanding — which sounds like a concept of a plan, but is actually a formal, but not (yet) binding agreement that Marco Rubio signed with Dana White, CEO of the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) today. Rubio called the UFC “The United Nations of Fighting” which sounds super diplomatic. Maybe — and this is just a thought — but maybe someone should tell the Secretary of State what “diplomacy” means?

“The MOU signing will mark a new public-private partnership to enhance sports diplomacy initiatives and collaborate on the global growth of mixed martial arts,” the State Department said in a press release.

Cool, cool. Totally get why this would be a priority and wouldn’t be rife with conflicts of interest. It has something to do with making seven different mixed martial arts part of our “new diplomacy outreach policy” with other countries, and y’know, finding common ground. Things we all enjoy doing together, like watching two grown men beat the ever-loving shit out of each other in a cage.

So strange, but you could not pay me to watch, and that’s the kind of thing I would never have let my children watch when they were little, and not-so-little — and it’s the kind of thing I’d hope they would choose not to watch now (and feel sure they would not enjoy). They’re also selling VIP packages for $1.5 million dollars! Who needs health insurance? As long as the president and his family are happy!

Maybe Iran will send a fighter since the president cannot seem to end the war he started that no one wanted or asked for. Maybe the Iranian fighter can duke it out with Stephen Miller until gas is back to Biden-era prices, could we do that?

One thing we can be sure of, in all of this manosphere-style diplomacy, billionaires will make more billions.

I can see it, can’t you? There will be some kind of Paramount+/CNN/CBS/Skydance streaming package “proud patriots” can buy to watch the fights, and I feel certain they will build this insatiable beast a throne and give him a crown and let him decide who wins.

American fighters will enter the White House Lawn Diplomatic Cage Match dressed in gold “presidential” merch ($99.99 on the UFC site, no doubt), and fighters from other countries will enter after kissing the ring and kneeling at his feet, and the last fighter standing will be the winner. This display will lead to greater diplomacy, somehow, and other words I can’t make my brain formulate because it’s such a mindbogglingly bro-stupid idea, but I’m sure his supporters will defend it. Even the ones who call themselves Christians. Who cares about rules, lies, grifting, or violence if the right person is doing it, I guess. I didn’t think that’s what Jesus said, but maybe I missed that verse.

Perhaps when the president gets angry with his Cabinet members, or when Republican senators don’t lick his boots enough, that’s where they’ll have to go to be humiliated. Head to the Diplomatic Cage like real men! That would probably clear them out, fast, actually. This really is their Roman Empire, and I think they should all stew in it. You want to know why I’m not too far off with any of this? If you go to the UFC website right now, you can buy a presidential medallion in honor of the United States of Corruption. Price? $12,000.

Me? I’m opting out wherever possible. Maybe just like AI, we can type -Roman Empire in the search bar. -Idiocy. -Violence. -Lies. -Corruption. -Fuckery.

I want to +Love. +Art. +Kindness. +Good friends. +Digging my toes in the sand. +Compassion. +Poetry. +The Night Sky. +Holding Hands. +Time together. +Laughter. +Say fuck no to all of the nastiness.

I know we can struggle through this together and come out stronger, and not in the cage match way, in the way of the heart.

Who wants to meet for lunch?

Sometimes people wait so long for the perfect time to embark on an adventure like this, they never see the places they always wanted to see, and then it’s too late.

It was partly because Texas Highways kept sending her out on the road to cover stories, and Lauren likes to drive. But also, it was because the internet had “broken her brain.” In Monster of a Land: On the Road in Search of Modern America, Lauren captures the experience of being chronically online, and what it’s doing all of us. Things you can’t do while driving: scroll on your phone, answer texts, check Twitter.

It’s easy to dehumanize people on a device, we all know this. It’s another thing to be on the receiving end of a wild lack of compassion when you’re going through a tragedy — personally or collectively. If you live in places like Texas, Florida, California — any state with extreme weather that is also hated by “the left” or “the right” — then you know how it feels.

It was brutal to be in the midst of wildfires in California, for example, watching them devour entire neighborhoods overnight, while people online were saying, “Whatever, those celebrities will just buy new mansions next week.” Haha, super funny. Let me check the app again to see if I need to evacuate with my kids and my dog, and the artwork from their childhoods and the photographs I can fit in my trunk.

We’ve all had our less-than-compassionate moments, though, it’s a sign of these times. I’ve had so many conversations with the kindest people I know, and that is the worst lament of all — “I’m a good person, I’ve never wished ill on anyone, I don’t want to be this enraged all the time. I don’t want to feel hate in my heart.”

Lauren crosses America with Woody in tow, and meets all kinds of people along the way — because, Woody. People you might dismiss or even disparage online, but in person, everything changes. In Monster of a Land, you see the country with Lauren, and the people in it through her eyes, and realize maybe all this rage is misdirected. The ideas you might have had about how a place would look when you got there, or how the people would be if you stopped to chat…what if they were all wrong? What if the enemy isn’t who you think it is?

What if we could solve everything by being a lot kinder to one another … and opening some local pubs? Checking on our neighbors? That would be crazy, wouldn’t it?

We had such a great conversation. Lauren very generously read four passages from her incredible book. I hope you enjoy the talk. I know you’ll enjoy the ride. Monster of a Land: In Search of Modern America comes out June 16th, but you can order it now! It’s the road trip for our times.

Badreads

Essays, bad jokes, rants, and unsolicited advice from New York Times bestselling author Lauren Hough, and a dog named Woody Guthrie.

By Lauren Hough

When I got to the hospital, I did all the things you do. I left my belongings in a locker and put on the robe with the open back, which I pulled forward and clinched so it would cover my ass. Then I followed a nurse into another room where I got onto the table where the surgery would happen. She asked me some questions, verified allergies and confirmed I wasn’t on any medications. Then the anesthesiologist came in.

He was tall with dark, curly hair and had a mask on, so I could only see his eyes, but he smiled at me and told me his name. He confirmed my weight and asked if I knew how I normally responded to anesthesia. I told him in the past I’d always been very sensitive. He said he was giving me twilight medication, I would be breathing on my own, and able to respond to questions. He said if I felt uncomfortable at any time to let him know.

Then the doctor came in and he went over some things, too. He made the same jokes he undoubtedly makes before every surgery. He was a specialist I’d only met a few times, but he seemed like a decent guy. He and the anesthesiologist had a nice rapport. The next thing I knew I was counting backwards from ten, and then I was waking up in the recovery room. I was covered in a few blankets, but freezing, anyway, and I could hear someone sobbing. I realized quickly it was me.

A nurse came in and said it had taken me a lot longer to wake up than usual, my blood pressure had been lower than they’d expected. The friend who’d come to drive me home had been waiting patiently for over an hour. I called my kids on the way home. All I wanted was to get back and snuggle with them.

The next day I was hobbling around on my leg, the site of the surgery. My phone rang, it was the anesthesiologist. I sat down at my dining room table. My daughter, two at the time, was hanging off of me. My son was coloring with crayons. I was surprised the anesthesiologist was calling to check on me and not the doctor, but then I thought maybe he was concerned because it had taken me so long to recover.

“I hope you don’t mind, I got your number off your medical chart…” he began. That struck me as odd. Was he not supposed to make sure I was okay? “You were really funny during the surgery. We were cracking jokes back and forth, and I thought there was a vibe. I wanted to see if you might want to have dinner with me.”

I froze. I was completely stunned. I did not remember cracking any jokes, I did not remember anything. “I’m sorry…what?” I asked, “I was funny? I have zero recollection of anything that happened after I got to the number seven.” My kids both looked up at me. “Oh. Really?” he sputtered. “Okay. Yeah, I thought there was flirting, I’m sorry.”

“No, there wasn’t. I literally could not tell you anything at all about anything that happened. There’s just a blank space where hours of time from yesterday have disappeared. There was no vibe, because you drugged me for my surgery, a thing that is your job.” My hands were shaking and my voice was shaking a little, too, but I tried to smile reassuringly at my kids. I didn’t want them to be scared.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called you, this was a mistake. Could we please keep this between us? I could get in a lot of trouble. I’m sorry I bothered you.” He hung up.

My son asked me who was on the phone and why I was upset. He asked why my hours from yesterday had disappeared. Then he drew pictures of disappearing hours. I drew pictures too, but my mind was racing. The anesthesiologist got my phone number off my medical chart to ask me out because he thought there was a vibe. Wtf. He had drugged me.

When my kids were immersed in fun again and no longer asking about the man on the phone, I looked up the most common twilight medications. I found they usually give people some combination of propofol, midazolam, and fentanyl, and temporary and anterograde amnesia is a common and desirable effect — something the anesthesiologist must have known. No one wants to form memories of a surgery in progress, a thing I could have asserted, because I woke up during general anesthesia once.

I had a terrible feeling about the whole thing. Here’s a man tasked with putting people under, literally holding people’s lives in his hands. Too much medication and he might kill someone. This is a man whose judgement I shouldn’t be calling into question over something that ought to be obvious to any decent guy — if you have access to a woman’s number because of the work you do, but she didn’t give you her number, don’t “shoot your shot.” You aren’t owed a shot. Clearly, he had no sense of boundaries with his female patients. There was no way he hadn’t violated my privacy by accessing my medical chart.

But if I called my doctor’s office to tell them what he’d done, he’d probably get fired. If I called the Medical Board of California, I felt sure he’d get in serious trouble. My old wiring was firing up, the motherboard that sent messages like, “This is a bad thing he did, but you don’t want to be responsible for getting someone fired, do you? You don’t want to be the reason this man has his license suspended, right?”

My dad had taught me from the time I was a little kid, my job was to take care of him. I was supposed to keep his secrets and be his sounding board and his little wing-child when he took me on after-school dates with lady-friends. It was my job to let him sob in my arms because all these awful women — women who included my mom and later my stepmom — kept asking him to be faithful, and my poor old dad just wanted to be free to spread his vasectomy-safe seed far and wide. It was the seventies, man.

As I got older, the messages kept coming. My job as a young girl was to be kind and polite. Don’t talk back. Don’t be sad. Don’t be angry. Don’t be loud. Don’t be so quiet. Don’t make things uncomfortable. Put a smile on your face. Don’t be rude. Say please. Act like you’re having fun. Say thank you. Boys act that way because they like you. He didn’t mean to hurt you. Don’t cry. Don’t eat too much. Boys will be boys.

He said it was consensual, and I believe him.

It took me a couple of hours, and maybe it helped that my daughter was wanting to be held, wanting to be picked up, wanting to rub my earlobe between her thumb and index finger — a habit she formed when she stopped nursing. Whatever it was, I realized if I called to tell the doctor what had happened and the anesthesiologist got fired, it wouldn’t be because I called. It would be because the anesthesiologist called me. He was responsible for his choices and his actions.

I couldn’t live with the thought that some woman might get hurt because I was worried about protecting a man like him. Why would I protect a man like him? I called the doctor’s office and he got fired. I called the Medical Board of California and filed a complaint. I don’t know what happened after that.

We all have choices to make, and ultimately our choices define us.

I have a hard time with people who make choices but make them slant. Last week when we were in the lead-up to the jungle primary out here in California, I saw the comment of a man who said he’s voting Republican because his family is Republican and he’s always voted Republican, but he’s not a MAGA Republican, and doesn’t like MAGA policies. He believes in equal rights for women, he supports the LGBTQ community, he doesn’t want ICE rounding up anyone’s great-grandmas, he thinks the anti-DEI stance is wrong, and he believes in climate change and science.

That’s the kind of thing it’s hard for me to walk by, because it makes me want to bash my head into the nearest wall. If you’re voting Republican, you’re voting for the current Republican Party, led by the current president who is the head of MAGA and all related policies. It’s his party, and there’s no opt-out circle you can fill in, nowhere you will find: “Republican, but not like that.”

I know they’re trying to mess with the time-stamp rules at the USPS, but there’s no time warp with the ballot. It’s not like you vote Republican and somehow your vote is retroactively cast for Richard Nixon in 1969. It’s amazing how Watergate seems so quaint these days. I remember growing up hearing, “It wasn’t the crime, it was the cover-up.” Nixon used the FBI and CIA to try to obstruct justice and block the investigation into the burglary at the DNC.

The harder he tried to hide it, the worse the crimes he committed. Articles of impeachment were drawn up, and he resigned, throwing his famous Victory signs in the air for the last time. This is not that picture.

No one resigns today, though, and no one gets impeached. Crimes happen in broad daylight, and are announced on podcasts. Ivanka and Jared dive off the boat of friends and just happen to “discover an island in the Mediterranean.” They swim to its shore and hike barefoot to the highest point, becoming captivated. LOL. It’s Sazan Island — a former Cold War military base off the coast of Albania in the Adriatic Sea — and the “peninsula” she’s talking about is a wildlife and bird sanctuary. Of course they want to build a luxury resort there.

People in Albania are making their choices, too. Protests are massive and ongoing, and The Special Prosecution Office Against Corruption and Organized Crime (SPAK) is investigating the deal.

But let’s circle back for a moment, because we all have choices, regardless of party, regardless of gender. There’s a mess in Maine four days before their primary election, because Democrats stuck with Graham Platner when they could have had Governor Janet Mills. No matter how many scandals came out, they just kept giving the guy more rope because he’s handsome! He has trauma. He has a redemption story if you look at it in the right light and upside down and through a sheet of glass in the rain.

Remember Governor Janet Mills at the Governors’ lunch at the White House? Remember how the president tried to intimidate her in a room full of governors because she wasn’t throwing transgender kids in Maine under the bus when he threatened to withhold funding? Remember how she said, “See you in court”? I do. Did the people in Maine forget? Did progressive women around the country forget? Do we all have amnesia?

After the exchange, Mills released a statement saying, "If the President attempts to unilaterally deprive Maine school children of the benefit of Federal funding, my Administration and the Attorney General will take all appropriate and necessary legal action to restore that funding and the academic opportunity it provides. The State of Maine will not be intimidated by the President's threats."

Oh. And then she won in court.

Anyway, we have to flip the Senate. If I have to choose between Graham Platner and Susan Collins (and I don’t, because I’m in California), I’d pick Platner. It’s just stupid that’s the choice. I’d rather vote for Mills.

I don’t know what to tell you my progressive feminist friends (and the men who purportedly care about us), but if we want things to change, I think we need to make better choices, too. Starting now. It’s like we all have retrograde and anterograde amnesia. Like the anesthesiologist has visited except for some unknown reason, he’s convinced us there’s a vibe. It’s the same vibe every time. If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’ll keep getting what we’ve been getting.

Personally, I’d love a world where we have a lot more time to make memories, because we aren’t so worried about trying to survive and keep each other safe.

We’d love for that to change.

When girls and women accuse “upstanding” young white men of rape — men like Brock Turner, Jesse Mack Butler, Mason Lee Gipson, Christopher Belter, Reuben Vanstiphout, Steven van de Velde, and Jacob Walter Anderson to name a few — judges will focus on their “promise and potential”, leaving the girls or women in the courtroom (and the ones watching from elsewhere), to wonder about the intrinsic value of their own lives, and if there might be anything special about the future that lies ahead of them. You wouldn’t think so listening to these judges, or looking at the sentences they give out.

Media rags will describe these violent young men as “baby-faced” and put them on the cover for weeks if the cases are high profile enough and it will help them sell papers. It’s been happening for as long as I can remember, back before Robert Chambers, though he was on the cover of newspapers for months on end. “The Preppy Murder” they called it, and even at fifteen, I wondered about Jennifer Levin’s mother, and how she must feel.

They described him as a “handsome altar boy”, but that was a narrative painted by his legal team. The truth was a lot darker, but it didn’t matter because he was selling papers. If he hadn’t been so arrogant, I have no doubt that judge would have been talking about his promise and potential eventually, but he got drunk at a party and decided to act out the murder on a Barbie and laugh about it. So he went to jail. That’s how far a guy has to go to pay for what he did. He has to strangle a Barbie on camera and laugh about it while he says, “Oops, I think I killed it.”

That’s when a judge will think twice about saying he has “promise.”

We talked about what it feels like to know as a girl and as a woman, this is what’s in store if you come forward, and, importantly, we talked about how to change things at home, in the judicial system, and in the world at large. Parents, aunties, anyone who has children, preteens and teens in their lives, please take note (without those young ears around). We talked about rehabilitation in the context of incarceration.

Huge love to the fabulous Dina Honour, you can find her brilliant essay on the topic here. My essay about this heartbreaking reality is here. I would be so appreciative if you would sign this petition started by award winning Criminal Behavioural Analyst Laura Richards to Investigate Judge Nicholas Rowland and Introduce Judicial Accountability Framework Now. We really can’t go on this way, it isn’t good for anyone.

Sending you lots of love, friends. Thank you to all who were with us live, and thank you to those who listen later. It is so wonderful to be in conversation with you.

Ally and Dina

Share

Sometimes you’re doing your day, and then suddenly you’re doing strange math, or strange maths if you happen to be in England, which I do not.

When I saw the news that a judge in the United Kingdom had decided three teenage boys — two of them now fifteen years old and one of them fourteen (they had been 14, 14 and 13 at the time of the assaults) — would not serve time for gang-raping two teenage girls in two separate incidents with 10 counts of rape between them — teenage boys who filmed these assaults, laughed as they did it, and then posted the “content” on social media for their friends to see — it took me two days to land on a single word for what I was feeling at all.

Sometimes my sixteen-year-old self rises to the surface and swallows all the words, because she believes they don’t matter. Then my inner attention goes toward protecting her in ways I couldn’t when we both shared a sixteen-year-old body that was violated by a man who didn’t care about the single word No. He didn’t care about the words Stop or Please. He didn’t care about any of my words or sentences.

I have not said a word to my sixteen-year-old daughter about this case, still; I am hoping she has somehow missed the news. The fury I feel is incalculable.

The judge found the teenage boys guilty as charged, and when their guilty verdicts were announced in court, their families let out audible gasps along with their tears. The boys also broke down and looked to their families for support. The boys wore white button-down shirts and had their hair slicked back as the verdicts were read, and I know this because it is, apparently, newsworthy. I read these details in multiple accounts. It seems to have worked on the judge.

Crisp, white, button-down shirts and slicked back hair? In that case, of course. Just a slap on the wrist for you, boys. Make sure you understand consent moving forward. Let’s get you fixed up and back out there. “No one needs to go to jail today.”

Here’s a question or five: If their parents gasped, is it because they were expecting a Not Guilty verdict? Is it possible all the families of all three boys have convinced themselves what their sons did is not rape? Or have they decided rape is not that bad? Or is it that rape is terrible, but not when my son does it? Or is it, Rape is terrible, of course, but my son was only fourteen so he shouldn’t be held responsible, Your Honor. Let’s not ruin his life over it, he’s just a kid, he didn’t mean it, his friends egged him on, he has so much potential, surely you can see that?

The teenage girls were fifteen and fourteen at the time of their separate assaults. The girls did not know each other. The first girl met one of the boys on Snapchat and believed they were in a relationship when he asked her to be his girlfriend. When she traveled to meet him, she thought they were going on their first date. When his two friends suddenly appeared, she was scared. It was clear this was the plan. It was “three boys against one girl” in an underpass, and they threatened to throw her in the river if she didn’t comply. They took turns for an hour-and-a-half. They filmed it.

After they asked “why she looked so sad.” They bought her a drink, left her at a bus stop, and blocked her on social media. When they shared the video online, she got messages from other kids calling her all the names you’d expect.

The second girl was attacked two months later in a field not far from the same underpass. The boys managed to separate her from her friends. They cut her pants off of her. They raped her at knifepoint. She was fourteen. They took turns there as well. There is a video of her lying motionless in the field with her face “buried in her hands.” The boys laughed. They encouraged each other.

The thought of her in that field, holding her face in her hands makes me cry. The parents of those boys should be crying because their boys have no compassion.

The videotapes were played at the 5-week trial. There was a screen between the girls and the rapists. The boys said the girls were lying. They said the first girl was flirting with one of the boys. They said many things that made it necessary for those tapes to be played and for those girls to relive the worst moments of their young lives in front of a room full of strangers in an effort to get some kind of justice. The court agreed the girls were physically overpowered and could not have consented to the attacks.

The first survivor read a poem at the trial that included the line, “All I want to do is die, I no longer have fear for when that time comes.” She said she feels uncomfortable in her own body, suffers from flashbacks and nightmares and is no longer the person she was before.

In his sentencing, Judge Nicholas Rowland mentioned one of the teenagers had ADHD and longstanding anxiety, another had ADHD and a very low IQ, and the third had a mild cognitive impairment.

I have ADHD and I’m in perimenopause. Got my patch slapped on, I’m taking progesterone at night. That should do it, right? Plus grief and anxiety from waking up in a country where we now hold cage fights on the South Lawn. If this is all we need to get away with despicable crimes in the judge’s eyes, I’d love to meet him. I have a list of men I’d like to meet, actually.

“I should avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily and understand the effects of their behaviour and support their reintegration into society.”

He added that, “peer pressure played a large part in what went on.”

I see. He felt it would be better to rehabilitate them and reintegrate them into society than have them enter the justice system. He praised them for doing a good job in court and following the rules. You read the part where I said they called the girls liars, right? That happened during the trial. After everything they’d done, they conducted themselves in court in a way that made it necessary for the girls to re-traumatize themselves if they wanted some justice, and the judge praised their behavior. The girls heard him, of course.

In a statement read on behalf of the second victim, she said her school attendance had suffered and added: “I often feel overwhelmed, anxious and emotionally exhausted to the point where sitting in a classroom becomes unbearable.”

She described suffering nightmares and struggling to sleep, adding: “I feel ashamed, insecure and uncomfortable in my own body.”

“The person I was before the incident has completely gone and sometimes I feel like I am grieving the person I used to be.”

The judge praised the bravery of the two girls and told the first victim: “I hope when you look back on today’s date you will take some comfort from the fact you have shown that courage in coming along to court.

“You and [the second girl] have shown great courage in coming along to the trial and speaking as you did.”

He added: “The sentence I am going to pass cannot possibly undo what happened to you.”

It’s true, the sentence he passed, whatever it was, could not have undone anything that happened, but it could make things worse. He had an opportunity to make those boys understand in real, painful, and immediate terms that what they’d done was not acceptable and not a thing anyone can do and expect to carry on with life while they attend classes for a year, or eighteen months, or three years — classes scheduled around school and whatever else brings them joy.

He could have offered a sentence that would have made those girls feel their lives mattered, and were — at the very least — equally valuable to the lives of boys who could behave that way. That he’d seen and heard what happened to them, and was horrified, and that he would not let it stand. That he would make sure those boys paid a price and suffered enough that they would never forget the way they made those girls suffer. Sometimes suffering is a gift. It teaches you empathy, a thing these boys lack in spades. They think all they need to do is dress the part of upstanding young men, and they’ll be off and running, and the judge proved them right.

He could have sent a message to other boys and men: If you rape girls and women, you will pay in a way that will be more than “inconvenient.”

The message he sent instead is, “Girls, I’m sorry this happened, and you were brave to come forward. I am not going to criminalise what happened to you, though, even though rape is against the law. We’re going to let the punishment slide, because these boys are not the kind of boys we want to put away. You understand, don’t you, girls? They have all this promise and potential, and we don’t want it to get squandered in jail. They’d probably be ruined for life that way, and what good will that do? It won’t fix you. Sorry you can’t sleep at night, and have a hard time sitting in a classroom or existing in your own body. That sounds hard. But I’m going to let these boys go home with their blubbering parents today.”

I wish I could say this is some kind of outlier judge who favors boys, or a thing that is unique to the U.K., but this is so common the strange math happens everywhere. I don’t even have to search the internet for another example, I have them at the tip of my brain.

I could whip out names like Brock Turner who was tried here in California for assaulting Chanel Miller (more of that upstanding white boy promise and potential), or Mason Lee Gipson (no jail time for raping a fifteen-year-old and getting her pregnant because he was drunk, you know how it is — just paid the girl $690 and took some parenting classes, because he got paternal rights to the baby she had to carry to term as a result of the rape. There’s no exception for rape in Arkansas.)

Then, of course, there’s “up-and-coming baseball star” Jesse Mack Butler. That’s a case I’m sure you’ve heard of if you pay attention to cases like this, and you probably do if you’re a woman. You definitely do if you’re a survivor of assault.

It’s the kind of thing you keep an eye on, because it gives you a sense of how the justice system is feeling about women and girls, and that’s a thing that will matter to you if you care about women and girls — and also children and any people who aren’t straight, white men — not that you don’t care about them, too, because you do. Just not all of them — not the violent, misogynistic, entitled ones. You’re always hoping things might change, because there is some tiny part of your heart that broke at some point when a thing was taken from you that we could call innocence or trust.

Living with a broken heart is fine. I’d argue it’s part of the human condition. If our hearts weren’t meant to break and open, then carry on, and break and open some more, then carry on, we wouldn’t all be here fighting for the world to be better than this. It’s the hardened hearts that have always scared me, not the broken ones.

But sometimes if you’re in that broken open place and the world breaks your heart again before you’ve had time to recover — especially if you’re just a kid —

for example, if you’re in a place where maybe you can’t stand being in your own body for a while, or you hate falling asleep because you have nightmares about what happened, or you can’t stand to be in a crowd or to be near strangers, and you don’t even feel like yourself anymore —

maybe somewhere in there you manage to protect a tiny pool of hope. Some elemental part of you still alive from the Before Times that you cover over with the rage and shock of every young girl who has ever had her faith in the world stolen from her.

I don’t know how it happens. Maybe there’s a particular vibration, like the sound that only dogs can hear? Maybe there’s a sound that only our grandmothers can hear when some man has decided we’re nothing but a body to overpower. Maybe our grandmas are there on the ceiling with us — because I know I left my body and watched what was happening like it was happening to someone else — and I know if she could have, my Nanny would have come and wrapped herself around me any way she could. Maybe when I returned, I brought something otherworldly and molten along, just enough to gather up a drop of who I was, so it would still exist somewhere. Just in case it was ever safe to come out again.

I can feel it when I get quiet. I can feel it when I meditate. It’s like an iron thorn in my heart. I can live with it and I can love with it, and I surely do, but it’s in there and it hurts, still. Even now, all these years later. I know if only this world would fucking show up for girls and women and children — and every group of people who feel vulnerable because of the angry white men who feel the need to dominate and overpower everything, it might melt and unfurl something tender and sacred. It might release a thirty-nine-year-old howl that would turn the sky scarlet.

Jesse Mack Butler likes to strangle girls until they’re unconscious, and then rape them. He was a high school kid in Oklahoma, a big star on the baseball team. His girlfriend broke up with him after it happened one too many times and she started to be afraid he was going to kill her. She went to the school counselor and school officials to let them know what had been happening.

An ex-girlfriend of his reached out to her when the rumors started swirling. It turned out she’d almost died when he strangled her, too. She’d needed surgery on her neck. But Jesse Mack Butler’s mom was with him all the way, and still is. She just wants him to stay strong and say his prayers. Check out the body-cam video of his arrest. She’s a real #boymom.

No time served for Jesse because he’s got “youthful offender” status. He’s just a good boy who made some baaaaad decisions. I mean, multiple strangulations and rapes are pretty bad, and I don’t think “saying your prayers” is really gonna get you there, but maybe I’m wrong, because he’s home with his mama.

It’s the same in Belgium, in case you wondered. In 2023, a gynecology student named Reuben Vanstiphout, twenty-four at the time, was at a party where he saw a woman who had become extremely drunk. He offered to get her home safely, she could not walk without assistance. She left with him. He was a med student, her friends thought she’d be safe with him. Instead, he took her back to his student accommodations and raped her.

Sounds like the kind of OB/GYN we all want, doesn’t he, ladies? Apparently the judge thought so, because it was Reuben’s first offense, and he had this “promising medical career” ahead of him. So no jail time for Reuben.

The survivor appealed the verdict, but the decision was upheld. Just in case there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about whose life was valuable in the eyes of the Belgian courts. Disappointing doesn’t cover it.

I don’t know if I can get across how often women and girls see and hear these stories. They’ve been happening for as long as I can remember, and they happen everywhere. It’s the same story every time, assuming the rapist is white. Here in the United States, if the rapist is Black the judge will not show all this incredible compassion if he happens to be fourteen, or if he has ADHD or anxiety. Judges don’t have a hard time criminalizing young Black teenagers or Black men in this country. Matter of fact, unarmed Black boys get killed just for being neurodivergent — they don’t have to commit any crime at all. Unarmed Black people, not just boys.

It’s like we have two different justice systems — one for white boys and men, another for the rest of us. And let’s be very clear, white girls and women fare better than girls and WOC.

I wrote an essay awhile back and it struck a nerve. It has a lot of comments underneath, mostly from women who relate, some from thoughtful men who are horrified, and a few from men who can kiss my ass. The comments still come in every so often because that’s what happens with essays that get a lot of views, you’ll get comments weeks later. I got one the other day from a man who said, “Don’t lump all of us in together. I love women, I have amazing women in my life. I would never be violent toward a woman, men who do that make me sick. Also, one of the details you mentioned in passing is wrong, you should have said it differently. I will stand with you, but I am not part of the problem. Signed, ‘A man who values women.’” I’m paraphrasing in case he comes back for seconds and says I misquoted him — I have no desire to go find the particular comment or call anyone out by name (George Grevend).

I’m kidding, I have no idea what his name is. I was and am too tired to tell him he is part of the problem, though I did point out I never lumped all men together, and I never will. I’m a fan of men, but guess what? NOT ALL MEN. See how that works? There was also a woman who asked me why I met a strange man alone at a bar, and then went on to explain how much smarter she is because she would never do that. I didn’t, lady. Maybe re-read the essay, I am too tired to do whatever it was you wanted to do with your shaming retort. We have to conserve our energy these days. There is much work to be done. We cannot sit around telling every Tom, Dick and Harry, “Not all men!” to soothe their damn egos every time they feel uncomfortable because there is a whole chorus of us howling at the moon together. We are exhausted out here.

I see men on this very platform saying feminism is the problem, and feminists are angry and want to blame men for everything and there’s no evidence of bias against women. There was a male writer who was saying that in the comments of a writer whose work I love. He posted links to his own essays claiming they refuted her assertions, so clicked on a link because I am open-minded, and realized I never need to read another word he has to say. I can’t take anyone seriously if they haven’t bothered to read a little history. Please note that it’s called HIStory.

Women never tried to stop men from having the vote, they never tried to stop men from owning property or having a bank account in their own name or a credit card, either. They never tried to pass laws telling men when they could ejaculate for fun, and/or when they could ejaculate to make a baby, and if they ejaculated for fun but a swimmer got through, that fertilized egg now meant more than any plans they might have had, it didn’t matter if it posed risks to the men’s own lives, it didn’t matter whether they could afford it, and if they tried to not have that baby, we could kill them.

Women never tried to pass laws that said if a man wears a condom, that counts as trying to prevent an egg from being fertilized and how dare he, and that’s basically attempted murder of a potential fetus, so we can go ahead and kill him, too.

There are no companies paying white women $0.15/hour more than white men just because. Just because they are women. Just because they have a vagina. That’s a weird thing to do, because your vagina doesn’t earn the degree and neither does your penis, your brain does, so you should be paid according to your brain, the end.

If women were making the laws, I can guarantee none of the above things would be happening. People would be paid equally. Then working parents could decide together who would stay home with the baby, if they decided to have a baby, which they would be a lot more likely to do if we had things like affordable healthcare, affordable childcare and paid time off — which we would if women were writing the laws.

Whatever, lame man on the internet, crack a history book or three before you write embarrassing articles that are really about how much you hate women, or just own it. Call your ‘stack I Hate Women SO Much They Really Piss Me Off and at least have some integrity. Believe it or not, we’d respect that more. By the way, feminism is the idea that everyone should have social, economic and political equality, full stop. If you are not a feminist because you need men to be on top, that’s a you problem, and you should probably get some help with it.

I have to talk to all the women right now, and when I say women I mean that inclusively (men feel free to keep reading). I am in California and we are having a messy governor’s race. It’s par for the course in 2026 I guess, but it would have been nice if one thing could have been…not insane. No point lamenting. Things started off with a bang because of a predator, Eric Swalwell. It came to light that he had a Snapchat account for years and was whipping his dick out on the internet and harassing young staffers, but also drugging them and raping them. Allegedly. Putting that there for my legal protection, I believe women.

Before he dropped out he was the frontrunner, the Golden Boy. Crisp, button-down white shirts and all that. Katie Porter was polling at 10%, Swalwell at 14%, Becerra 3-4%. Then Swalwell spontaneously combusted, and Katie Porter should have taken the lead, but a wild thing happened. Becerra suddenly became the “chosen one” and shot up right next to Katie Porter, and then billionaire Tom Steyer was right behind her. I thought, surely, people will rally behind Katie Porter. She has as much experience as Swalwell, she’s smarter than any other candidate (I’ll die on that hill), she’s more progressive, she’s not a billionaire, and she’s great on the environment. Also, she’s the only candidate who has talked about reproductive rights, free childcare, and two free years of community college. Huh.

We keep saying we want women to lead because women are going to care about women’s issues (which are everyone’s issues) as if their lives depend on them, because they do. Men are not going to care in the same way, and they have shown us that for a very, very, very, extremely long time. They have had an open runway and all the green lights and decades and countless chances, so. Yeah. Personally, I’ve seen enough.

Women — we absolutely have to agree that we are going to be ready for the smear campaign when a woman shows up to run. That’s the play.

A competent, smart, ambitious woman runs for office, and all she has to do is step a tiny toe out of her prescribed gender line in any direction, and it’s over. She’s already in a precarious position for having the nerve to step onto a public stage. She’s already letting her intelligence and ambition lead the way. Nonetheless, they will criticize her appearance and a million other details no man has to think about. We are going to have her back, or we aren’t, but they will go in for the kill. They’ll disqualify her because of her emails, or because she laughs too joyously, or because she won’t throw her boss under the bus while he’s still her boss — or if she does, then she’s a terrible person who throws her boss under the bus…see how it goes?

In Katie Porter’s case, it’s her “temperament” (read: she’s a bitch, how original. You realize women in the workforce have been hearing that for as long as women have been in the workforce, right? It’s another way of saying, You should smile more.) She told a staffer to “get the fuck out of her shot.” This was five or six years ago while she was filming something over zoom. The staffer didn’t even blink. She told Katie Porter she had a detail flipped, what she needed to say was X, Y and Z, and then she continued going about her business. Porter apologized to her as soon as the zoom was over. They kept working together for another four years.

Over 30 of Porter’s past and current staffers wrote a heartfelt, passionate letter in support of her, but the narrative stuck. If that’s all it’s going to take, we are never going to have enough women in positions of power to fight for us. Never. Also, it might surprise you to know, some women throw around the f-bomb. I KNOW.

If you followed me around with a camera twelve hours a day for six months, I am very certain there would be something along the way that could be used against me. A moment when my dog barked his head off at the mailman and I told him to please calm the fuck down. He doesn’t mind, I swear. He knows how much I love him. But if you saw a ten-second clip like that and didn’t know me? You might think I was an asshat who didn’t love my dog to the ends of this earth. I dunno.

Maybe you’d take issue with the way I sometimes pretend not to be me when I answer the phone and someone is trying to sell me something. I might “take a message for myself so I can call back later.” I might even forget to give myself the message. If men have this bar that is so low it’s in Hades, and women have a bar that’s so high you can’t even see it, we are screwed.

I have reservations about the top two Dems for different reasons. It sucks to choose between two men I’m not excited about when there’s a woman running circles around them, but we can’t have a MAGA Faux News host running the state, who thinks it’s brilliant to keep calling the fourth-largest economy in the world “Califailure.”

Sir. This is a Wendy’s.

I have been waiting until the last minute to see how things were going to shake out, because if Hilton pulled ahead, I would have voted for one of the Democratic men regardless of my reservations, just to make very, very sure one of them would be in second place. Thankfully, Becerra has a comfortable enough lead for me to feel sure he’ll land in the top 2, so I cast my vote for Katie Porter and I felt fucking good about it.

Meanwhile I am watching all these people wring their hands — many of them (supposedly) progressive, feminist women — because they don’t want to vote for either of the men for various reasons, but have overlooked Katie Porter for weeks and months, like she wasn’t electable. She’s not electable if you won’t elect her, this isn’t complicated. Your internalized misogyny is, though.

This won’t be the last time a wildly competent woman shows up to run for office. She will be attacked. Our job is to be smarter than that. Our job is to say, “I am not basing my opinion of this person on a couple of video clips, I’m basing my opinion on their decades of work and the policies they’ve laid out.” I literally had a woman out here tell me she didn’t like Katie Porter because “she’s not nice and she’s on Ozempic and she lost a lot of weight and now her skin looks saggy in her closeups. We don’t like to admit it, but we care about that in California.” No, honey, you care about it. Also, Katie Porter looks great in her closeups, NOT THAT IT MATTERS.

I filled out my ballot this week and put it in the ballot box yesterday. I spent a few hours last weekend looking up every judge and digging into who they are, because it’s amazing what you can find on the internet these days. The judges matter so much. They decide cases like the ones I’ve been talking about. They can listen to a couple of young girls talk about how their lives have been upended and shattered, and decide that’s sad, but the boys who assaulted them matter more — or they can look at those boys and say: “You’re not going to be wearing those button down shirts for X amount of time. You’re going to whatever the equivalent is of juvenile detention, and you’ll be going to rehabilitation classes every day, there. Christmas will happen there. Spring Break will happen there. Your crying families will visit you there.”

Maybe it’s a year at their age, I don’t know. Maybe new systems need to be developed, new programs, new options for minors who commit heinous, heartless crimes. I know jail isn’t a good place for rehabilitation, but telling boys rape is basically okay isn’t the way forward, either. How do I know? Because we’ve tried it this way for forty, fifty, all the years. It’s not working for anyone.

Girls need to be told their lives are worth something. Their promise and potential matter. They are special and worth protecting. I suspect if we started doing that, there would be hearts broken open all over the entire globe with tiny thorns that suddenly came free, and the hope that would unfurl would light up the whole entire sky.

It’s true that nothing can undo what has happened in the past, but the past does not have to determine the future unless we let it. Let’s please not let it. Kindness matters. Fighting the good fight is always worthwhile. Words matter.

Good sentences are everything, and not just to writers.

Instead, I’d felt funny during my ballet class that afternoon, a little lightheaded and fatigued, and also crampy. When I got home and told my mom, she went and got me a box of tampons from her bathroom. She told me there were directions inside. I won’t go into much detail, I’ll just let you know when you’re fourteen and you’ve never had your period before, you might not be able to manage the directions on your own. They weren’t great directions, and I was nervous and uncomfortable.

Maybe you’re thinking there’s no way to mess it up, though, and I’m here to tell you there absolutely is a way, and it has to do with imagining the entire tampon — including the cardboard applicator — stays inside you. I left the bathroom in a lot of pain. My mom looked at me with no discernible sympathy and said I’d get used to it. I spent a few hours in agony, wondering how women possibly did this, until a friend of hers came over and saw me perched on the edge of the couch. I was unable to sit in any comfortable way. She asked me to take her through exactly what I’d done.

She was horrified and asked my mom why she didn’t go into the bathroom with me. My mother got annoyed, shrugged and said, “She can read!” I went back to the bathroom to rectify my mistake, feeling embarrassed and ashamed.

I cursed Judy Blume with all my heart. It was easier than cursing my mother.

Today I went to the pharmacy to pick up my first estrogen patches and progesterone pills. I met with a doctor yesterday, and I have seven of the ten symptoms of perimenopause which include things like never knowing when or if you’ll get your period, hot flashes, insomnia, fatigue (because, insomnia), worsening migraines, increase in ADHD symptoms, anxiety, depression, mood swings, not an ounce of energy left for Mansplainese, and the urge to go live in a cliffside cottage in the Irish moors.

The thing about perimenopause is that it tends to coincide with huge life changes. If you have children, they probably hit puberty when you hit perimenopause, which means an adventure for the whole family. At the same time, if your parents are alive, they will likely start to need you in different and alarming ways. Maybe there’s a concurrent global pandemic for good measure. Maybe your mother — who has never been sick a day in her life — is suddenly diagnosed with ALS and decides you are to blame. Anything can happen.

How are any of us supposed to know if the changes we’re feeling are due to grief or hormones? I certainly couldn’t figure it out. At one point, about six months after my mother died, which was also six months after I had the first panic attack of my life, I went to my then-physician. I told him I’d been feeling exceptionally down — which wasn’t like me at all — but that I’d also lost my mother. I asked if we could check my hormones because my period was a little irregular and I was trying to figure out if any of what I was feeling was due to perimenopause, or if it was all grief. If it was all grief, I’d let it run its course, but if it was hormones, I wanted to know.

He smiled and nodded, then casually asked, “Would your family say you’re unpleasant to be around?” I didn’t understand his question and thought I’d misheard. I asked him to clarify. “If I asked your kids,” he said slowly, “would they say you’re unpleasant to be around?” I thought about it, and burst into tears. He said he could put me on a low-level anti-depressant. I said I just wanted a hormone panel.

In the end, I left and never went back, but that moment stayed with me. How his first concern was not for me, but for everyone around me. Was my grief an inconvenience for my family? Was I being unpleasant? My god. My mother had died in the most horrific way imaginable and there hadn’t been a thing I could do to stop it. Was I not allowed to not be okay?

I thought about women going to see him who might really be in trouble.

What are women to men like him? What is the point of us? Are we to be useful caretakers, drugged like Stepford wives if necessary? Must we be pleasant at all times? Do we matter at all as people in our own right?

I have a new doctor now, a woman. I love her. The first time I went to see her I went with a list I whipped out, because I was afraid I’d forget to ask something and I expected she’d be rushing. Then I realized she was listening. Not in a, “I know how to look as though I’m listening” way — genuinely listening. Leaning forward. Pausing. Asking questions. A doctor hadn’t listened to me like that in years. I said that to her, and suddenly there were tears all over my face. She wasn’t bothered by it, she just nodded, and handed me a tissue. She’s the one who referred me to the OB/GYN I spoke to yesterday. She also listened. There’s a common denominator here somewhere.

When I picked up the new meds at the pharmacy, I asked for a consult. The pharmacist didn’t tell me anything the doctor hadn’t, though. I should pick a place for the patch — there were options laid out in the directions — and use alcohol to wipe down my skin before I pressed it on. Change the patch once a week at the same time. Progesterone pills at night. Cool.

I got home and thought I’d put the patch on right away. Lately I sleep every other night, and you might think I’m kidding, but I’d be funnier than that if I were. I get a decent night of sleep one night, then the next night I’m up until 5 or 6am. Then I take a “morning nap” for a couple of hours and do my day. Then I sleep for a night, and so it goes. So I’m kinda over it, even though the sunrises are beautiful. I need sleep.

I looked at the directions as one does.

If you look at Step 3, do you see where it says there’s the patch, and it’s attached to a thick, hard-plastic adhesive liner, covered by a clear plastic film? And then they start talking about the silver foil-sticker? Yeah. Okay so the silver foil-sticker has no business in the conversation. It’s just there as this thing to throw you off, like we’re doing an Escape Room. And the part where it says: “You will see that Climara is an oval shaped clear patch….covered by a clear plastic film”…? Even in the figure it looks like you peel off a top layer and the patch is underneath. Nah. The patch is the clear plastic film. So if you try to remove a clear plastic film because you assume the patch is underneath it and they are giving you directions they want you to follow as if they’re…y’know, directions? That won’t go well.

I got furious, which is not a thing that happens often. You really have to work at it if you want to see me lose it. One thing that will do it are things that should be easy but are not. They could just say, “The patch sits on top of the hard plastic shell. Peel it off and slap it on, bitches.” But nooooooo. So I texted my bff and she FaceTimed me back. She’d just had a core biopsy of a lump in her breast hours earlier. It is nonstop fun being a woman, let me tell you.

I tried to position my phone so she could see the patch while I read the directions to her, because not every patch is the same. Then she assured me the thing sitting on top of the oval was the patch, so I peeled it off and stuck it on and positioned my phone again so she could see where I put it.

We discussed the merit of placement in all of this. She told me she currently has a “seventies bush” and doesn’t worry about shaving or waxing. We’re letting it all hang out today, friends. This is what women do when they’ve known each other forever. I went from being furious to laughing my ass off. Eventually we talked about feeling like everyone is hurting right now. No one feels safe.

I guess my expectations of people must be too high. Not all people, haha. We have to qualify everything these days, right? Thankfully, there are a handful of people who exceed my expectations all the time, and when I tell you I treasure them, you can take that to the bank. Maybe don’t take it to the literal bank, though, because banks don’t care about us.

You know those bank commercials with the smiling young guy in khakis or the young professional woman? They’re always in the middle of some scenario that would never happen — a couple and the banker sitting around a desk nodding with excitement as they look at pictures of the couple’s first home.

Or if it isn’t the young couple (and she’s usually pregnant, because of course that’s when you go to buy a house) then it’s a small business owner outside her bakery talking about how her bank was there with a line of credit when she needed it.

Maybe I should do a commercial about Citibank! They were my bank of over 25 years when they sent me a letter during the pandemic to let me know they were converting my line of credit into a standard loan … because they could. It was in the very fine print when I opened my business in 2009. In my “other life” I have a yoga website, I’ve been teaching for 30+ years. I’d used some of my line of credit a few times when there were projects I wanted to pursue to expand, but I’d always done them with bank approval, and always put the money back. My credit score is good. I work my ass off.

I begged them not to do it. I sent an email to the guy in charge of those decisions at my local branch, and told him it gave me a tiny bit of peace and relief to know that line of credit was there if I needed it. I reminded him I had two kids he’d met many times, and said they were home doing zoom school like everyone’s kids. I was working 60 hours a week. My mom had a terminal diagnosis on the east coast. Could we get on a call or zoom to discuss? He didn’t even answer, I just got a statement in the mail informing me my line of credit was now a loan and the first payment was due. So, I paid it back.

That would be some commercial, wouldn’t it?

Banks do what’s good for banks. There was a pandemic, they didn’t want to take a chance that businesses would go under, so they converted lines of credit into loans and leaned on small businesses to pony up. Nothing personal. It was silly of me to think they’d care about my kids or my mom, or that they meant it when they said they liked to support small, woman-owned businesses. That’s just a thing that sounds good to say.

Why am I talking about banks? Because banks and billionaires go hand-in-hand. We know this, or I hope we do, but half the voting public seems to think the guy turning the Oval Office into Vegas, D.C. is not a massive, outright grifter, and they continue to think that as he’s trying to steal taxpayer dollars for tacky-ass vanity projects, and to… what was it, again? Oh yeah. Reward insurrectionists right before the midterms. It’s all so insane it’s hard to keep sorted.

I wish we could get through to the people who still think woke libs with their woke tears are the problem, or immigrants are the reason things aren’t good, or it’s women with their “toxic empathy” who shouldn’t be voting, or feminists who have ruined everything, or queer people or Black people, or “men on women’s sports teams” or pick your marginalized group.

If I could stomach Faux News I would have turned it on, because I just cannot fathom how they’re presenting the things that are happening right now in any way that could make sense to anyone. How can this level of blinding corruption be confusing?

Charles Edward Littlejohn leaked the president’s tax returns. Littlejohn was an independent contractor who worked for the IRS, and he stole the returns (along with the tax returns of 405,000 other business entities) and leaked them to The New York Times and ProPublica because he thought he was serving the public interest by revealing how the wealthy avoid paying taxes — and because every president in the history of ever — except the current one — has voluntarily turned over their tax returns so the voting public can see they have nothing to hide, and to avoid accusations of conflicts of interest.

Littlejohn was convicted and sentenced in 2024 to five years in prison — the maximum sentence allowable by law. Justice has been and is being served, full stop. Nonetheless, the president decided to sue his own IRS for $10 billion dollars of taxpayer money. Pause and think about that. The man who committed the crime is in jail, he’s been punished — but that’s not enough for this president. He is willing to take $10 billion dollars from the American people he’s supposed to serve because he’s angry. But why should we pay? We didn’t steal his tax returns. What kind of president would take $10 billion dollars from hardworking Americans for a crime that had nothing to do with them?

It was an insane amount of damages to go after in any case — and it never would have stood up in court — because the case never would have made it to court.

Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution includes the “Case or Controversy” clause. In a federal case, there must be a plaintiff with a claim against an “adverse party.” In other words, two distinct litigants who want different things. When the president of the U.S. sues the IRS, an agency of the government he’s in charge of, demanding they pay him money from the Treasury he also controls — even the president himself knows he’s playing games:

“And they do say that, you know, it’s never been a case like this,” the president said at a rally this December, taking on the animated voice of a newscaster. “‘Donald Trump sues the United States of America. Donald Trump becomes president. And now Donald Trump has to settle the suit.’”

The judge, Judge Kathleen M. Williams of the Southern District of Florida, appointed independent attorneys (court-appointed amici) to argue whether this lawsuit met the “adverse party” requirement. The deadline for their briefs was last week.

Before that deadline arrived, Todd Blanche, Acting Attorney General — and Don Donnie’s longtime personal lawyer — filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with Prejudice under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure — which means, essentially, the case is dropped instantly. The court no longer has any jurisdiction, the judge doesn’t sign anything nor does she rule on anything. The case is withdrawn, over, dismissed — done before it’s heard. Todd Blanche knew they would not win.

I’m going to guess Faux News is not mentioning that part. Todd Blanche pulled the case himself and announced a “Settlement Agreement.”

I don’t know about you, but when I hear “settlement agreement” and something about the IRS case and the other lawsuit the president has against his own DOJ, I’m thinking it’s a legal agreement. I’m thinking a judge weighed in. That’s what I thought at first and I was stunned.

You know about the other lawsuit, the $230 million dollar case he brought against the DOJ? That’s the one where the president is suing because they had the audacity to investigate him over obstruction of justice when he refused to return classified documents he was hiding in a bathroom, ballroom, and office at Mar-a-Lago, and because they investigated him for Russian interference in the 2016 election, and then of course, there was the whole insurrection thing!

So basically, he sued his own Department of Justice for doing its job under the previous administration, and the takeaway is, if you don’t want to be investigated, don’t do illegal shit. But that isn’t the takeaway, because we live in a simulation.

(Also, let me save myself time just in case we encounter people who like to talk about Biden, who also had classified documents in his home. He sure did! He took his personal notebooks just like this other president…let me think. Oh! Ronald Reagan, that’s right. Anyway, here’s the whole-ass report about it, including the part about how Biden cooperated with investigators, invited them into his home, and returned any materials they wanted, instantly — whereas the current guy lied, obstructed justice, enlisted others to destroy evidence, and hid the records. Not the same! Yikes.)

The IRS case has nothing to do with the DOJ case, but they’re presenting them like they’re connected. A little smoke-and-mirrors, flood-the-zone, sleight-of-hand weave if you will. A settlement agreement makes it sound as though the IRS is trying to “settle” with the president, like they thought he might win this $10 billion dollar lawsuit. As if his case had merit.

My guess is they think his supporters are blindly loyal and they’ll believe whatever he says, so it doesn’t really matter. If he tells them he decided to drop the IRS case and agree to a much smaller settlement to make up for the “longstanding harm he’s suffered at the hands of the DOJ and the way it was ‘weaponized’ against him under the Biden Administration” — their answer will likely be, “Take my money!”

I don’t know how to get past January 6th, though. I don’t understand how anyone with any kind of integrity or love for this country can pretend that day was not horrific, heart wrenching and unconscionable. The man refused to accept the results of a free and fair election, and he incited an insurrection. We all saw it. Now he wants $1.776 billion dollars of taxpayer money to reward the “loyal patriots” who were willing to hang Mike Pence on his behalf? Are y’all serious? I’m no fan of Mike Pence, but I don’t want him hanged from a noose, and I don’t want to reward the people who would have made him swing, thanks.

I’d rather have affordable healthcare, groceries, free lunches for kids who need them, gas that isn’t $6 dollars a gallon, and a world where we aren’t allowing children to be casualties of our selfishness, violence, stupidity, and rampant greed — at home and abroad. I’d rather have my tax dollars spent on education — hiring more teachers, and paying all of our teachers well, so they aren’t exhausted and stressed out and spending the little money they have on supplies and snacks for hungry kids whose families were THROWN OFF SNAP BENEFITS.

I’d rather have my tax dollars spent making sure no one is sleeping on the streets. I’d like tax money to be spent on pediatric cancer research, and all cancer research, because I am tired of losing people, aren’t you? I’d like it to go toward green energy initiatives and every other way we can think of protecting this gorgeous planet and all the animals who share it with us.

I’d love for more funding, not less, to go toward women’s health in every area, because I slept like a baby last night, and I might have tried HRT a lot sooner if we all hadn’t been told we shouldn’t, because of one study twenty-four years ago.

Maybe there’d even be a little money left over to improve the directions on the box.

It asks the questions, how do we love what doesn’t stay? How do we give people grace when they can’t choose us, they can’t choose themselves, or they tell us goodbye for other reasons? Is our love still valid and worthwhile?

How would life be if people were their best and highest selves when life handed them curveballs — even painful ones? What would that look like, and what could grow if forgiveness was the soil? What if we didn’t hold on so tightly to our vision of how things should be, and instead allowed something wild and unexpected to take root and flourish?

Is it possible we’d be amazed? Is it possible everyone under the tree would blossom?

As if to answer those very questions, Katrina’s book, Hurricane Lessons: A memoir of betrayal and becoming is about the unraveling of her twenty-year marriage, and the reclamation of her true self. Sometimes you walk into a Pilates studio thinking you’re there to strengthen your core, and it turns your life inside out. The experience blows through your family like a hurricane.

You will be rooting for Katrina every step of the way, but you probably know that just from listening to the talk.

We talked about grief. We talked about complicated grief, and how relationships don’t end when people die. We could have talked for hours.

I cannot recommend these books enough. These are strange times in our country. There is a persistent and intentional attack on women’s rights, on the LGBTQ community, on women who have decided not to have children, and women who have children, but no support. There are systemic issues like the gender pay gap, a lack of affordable childcare, PTO, affordable healthcare, and a continued pressure for women to carry the mental load for everyone.

These are the stories we need in the world right now. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did (the joy) and I hope you will order these incredible books if you can!

Also, big shoutout and so much gratitude to everyone who showed up to be with us live! thank you for making us laugh, pretty sure the thumbnail attached here is thanks to you, and thank you for this incredible Jack Gilbert poem you recommended when we were talking about reframing relationships that end. A divorce is not a failure. It’s simply a relationship that ended.

Life at the Bottom of the Canyon

Thoughts, free-writes, a poem or two, an essay here and there, upcoming book chapter previews. Live, from my little adobe at the bottom of the canyon.

By Kate Mapother

Surrendering to Sappho

Thoughts from a late-in-life lesbian.

By Katrina Anne Willis

Get more from Ally Hamilton in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Share

For those of us who grew up with chaos, uncertainty and violence, and learned hyper-vigilance as a tool of survival, waking up in this country day after day feels all-too-familiar. It’s an ongoing assault on the nervous system to hear the voices of smug men spewing contempt toward women, Black people, brown people, the LGBTQ community, the immigrant community, survivors of abuse, or anyone who doesn’t please them, for any number of reasons — from the highest offices in the land.

Of course it’s not just their words, it’s the real-life consequences that follow. We knew when they overturned Roe women and girls would suffer, and — in many cases — lose their lives. Maternal and infant mortality rates have gone up in every state with restrictive abortion bans because that’s how it works.

Then they started talking about the SAVE Act.

The president canceled all funding for DEI programs in the government and in public schools and universities, refused funding for schools teaching critical race theory, and demanded all red states racially gerrymander their maps so he could try to retain his tiny majority stronghold in the House and Senate. Of course he didn’t say the quiet part out loud.

Now the Voting Rights Act is gutted.

The Epstein survivors get no justice, but the perpetrators of heinous crimes get their names blurred. Women couldn’t get a credit card or bank account in their own names until 1974, landlords could refuse to rent apartments to single mothers until 1988, and female senators were not allowed to wear pants on the Senate floor until 1993. We still have a gender pay gap.

I believe in my heart there are more of us who want the world to be a kind and loving place than there are people who are cruel and depraved, or pathologically self-serving. And I know there are many of us wondering what brought us to this precipice where we now find ourselves, and what do we need to do to gather everyone up, and head in a much better direction?

I don’t know how we do anything if we can’t communicate. I have had conversations with men who think if you’re a feminist it means you “hate men” and that is not correct. Feminism means you believe in equal rights and opportunities for all people politically, socially and economically, regardless of gender. It means you want to dismantle the patriarchy because you realize it’s making us all very ill — even the men and boys it was set up to serve.

And while we’re here, “down with the patriarchy” does not mean “erasing male voices” — it means we make a circle where we put the most vulnerable people in the middle — the kids and the elderly. We make sure they’re safe. The rest of us are in that circle shoulder-to-shoulder, no one is on top.

White supremacy, patriarchy, and technocracy are the ties that bind. They are an intertwined beast. That’s the systemic part of teaching boys not to cry, not to be vulnerable. Painting ourselves into these corners where men can’t ask for help or show emotion is not helping and it’s not realistic, and telling women they are not allowed to be angry is the fastest way to be dealing with an angry woman.

Dina and I talked about intersectional feminism and what it is, patriarchy, white supremacy, the wide range of normal human emotion, and Somebody, Somewhere — among other things.

Not sure exactly how or why, but we end up laughing a lot. Which is good.

I hope you laugh, too. I hope you do whatever you need to do, all emotions are welcome. Please let us know how you’re feeling in the comments, and if you have any questions .

Sending you lots of love,

Ally and Dina

Share

Get more from Ally Hamilton in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

This happened one of the first nights I spent at my dad’s new apartment after he left me and my mom in the apartment I called home. He hadn’t said goodbye when he left, I’d just woken up one morning to find my mother sitting at the dining room table. She told me my dad wasn’t going to live with us anymore, he was going to find his own apartment, and when he did, I’d go visit him there.

Months went by where a lot of things happened that made even less sense. I didn’t see my dad or talk to him, and then my mom picked me up from daycare one evening, and told me I was going to spend the night at his new place.

I think I’d become a kid who’d lost faith in object permanence by then.

I couldn’t quite remember what my dad looked like, which seemed strange because he was my dad and it hadn’t been that long since I’d seen him. My mom had taken all his pictures down, except for one in her bedside table that I’d found, and would look at when she went out sometimes. It was an older picture of them from when I wasn’t even born. They looked happy. My mom didn’t look happy anymore. I didn’t want to go to a new place I’d never been.

I didn’t have the kind of parents who got down at eye level to ask how I was feeling, or if I had questions about anything, I had parents who told me what was going to happen. “Your dad is coming to get you, you’re going to sleep at his new apartment for a few nights, I’ll pick you up Friday after school. Here is your bag, there are clothes for the next few days. Your dad will buy you some things for his house soon.”

That’s how it was and how it had been. This was seventies parenting, and maybe this is why Gen X is Gen X. I brought my doll Suzy back and forth with me on transition days. She had to stay in my bag at school, but I couldn’t sleep without her so there wasn’t a way around it. On the night of pajama-gate, I think Suzy and I had done the back-and-forth routine two or three times. I was struggling with all of it.

I was in the loft with Suzy, trying to fall asleep. My dad’s new apartment was a big open place. No walls. There were two loft spaces for sleeping on either side. My dad and his girlfriend N were in the other loft, I could hear them murmuring to each other. N’s reading light was on, it gave off a little glow which I liked. Otherwise it was really dark in the apartment, and scary if I woke up while my dad and N were sleeping. My dad had gotten me a couple of sets of pajamas a few hours earlier.

It hadn’t been great. He couldn’t get me from daycare, he picked me up from my mom’s, and when he got there, she handed me a bag that only had my doll Suzy in it. When he asked where my other stuff was, my mom said she’d told him to get me clothes and pajamas and a toothbrush so I wouldn’t have to keep dragging a huge bag back and forth. She said, “She’s there half the time, I told you to buy her some things, I gave you her sizes. If you haven’t done it yet, you’ll have to do it on the way.”

My dad got angry then, and banged his fist into the kitchen counter. He asked her to just throw some goddamn things in a bag and he’d make sure I had what I needed next time, but my mom said no, she’d asked him four times already. My heart started pounding when my dad’s fist hit the counter, and I felt a lump forming in my throat watching my mom’s face get twisted when she looked up at him. Her eyes flashed like there was electricity behind them. For a second it looked like my dad was going to push his way past her to get my stuff himself, but he shook his head, grabbed my arm, and pulled me out the door.

She didn’t hug me when I left, and I knew if I cried they would both get angry.

My dad talked about my mom while we walked to his new place, so I didn’t have to say anything. This was good because I couldn’t have spoken, I was trying to breathe and having a hard time. It didn’t seem like it was just because my dad was tall and walked fast so I had to run to keep up, I felt like there was something heavy on my chest and I couldn’t get enough air. We stopped at Woolworth’s on the way and picked up pajamas, a pair of jeans, a package of underwear and socks, and some t-shirts. My dad said I could wear some of his sweatshirts if I got cold, he hadn’t been planning to spend all this money.

He was in a bad mood from the fight and called my mom lots of words I didn’t understand but knew were bad. I didn’t know if she was right because he should have gotten me things for his place, or he was right because she should have put some of my clothes in a bag. I just knew I wanted to disappear.

When I started crying about the tag that night, I’m sure it wasn’t just the tag. I said the tag was itchy and I couldn’t sleep, and my dad told me from his own loft that I was fine. I tried to pull the tag off myself, then, as hard as I could, but it wouldn’t budge. I wanted to sleep so I wouldn’t have to think about missing my mom, and my grandma, too, because I always missed her the worst at night. She had died right before my dad left. I held onto Suzy and cried into my pillow, trying not to make any noise. After about ten minutes my dad exploded, “OH FOR GOD’S SAKE, ALLY!”

I heard him coming down the ladder. “Alan,” N said, “don’t yell, she’s just little.” Then he flipped on the lights. “She’s old enough to be able to handle a goddamn tag,” he growled. I peered over the loft. I wished I’d been quieter. My dad was banging drawers open and then he went to the kitchen island for scissors. He took the t-shirts we bought out of the package and cut the tags off one at a time. Then he grabbed my new jeans and did the same. He went to the drawers under my loft, I heard them sliding open, and came out with the other set of pajamas. He cut the tags out of the top and bottoms. Then he started coming toward my loft again.

His face was purple and he was holding the scissors, and not the way you were supposed to, with the pointy side down. I didn’t want him to cut the tags off my pajamas anymore. My dad appeared at the top of the ladder. I said it was okay and I was sorry, but he insisted, and I knew I’d make him even angrier if I didn’t do as I was told, so I crawled over to where he was.

He shoved my hair out of the way, and yanked the collar down so the back of it was inside out. I could feel the front of it digging into my neck. It hurt, but I wasn’t going to say anything. I could feel him tug the scissors along the tag, and then he let go. “THERE!” he said, louder than he needed to, but not as loudly as he’d been yelling. “Hold on, let’s do the pants before I go back to bed and you start crying about that.” He grabbed the waist and cut the tag there, too, then went back down the ladder. I was relieved it was over.

“Thank you, Daddy, I’m sorry,” I said, and crawled back to my pillow and Suzy. I was shaking. When I breathed in, it came in two short, heaving breaths. When I let the breath out, I tried not to make any sound.

There are a lot of ways to teach a little kid to say thank you for not hurting me worse. It doesn’t take long to learn never to complain about anything, and to be afraid of men. Even the ones who are supposed to love you.

I started fixating on small details with people. The sound of my mother’s sigh, whether it was forlorn or furious. The way the space between her eyebrows looked, smooth or crinkled. The way my dad’s face fell and his eyes turned a darker shade of blue if I said something he didn’t like, and the way I could fix it if I said the right thing, which was usually something good about him. I’m sure I started noticing the small things because I thought if I was vigilant, I’d be safe.

I’ve been trying to figure out how we ended up here.

My guess is every one of us has been that kid, tiny in a big world, trying to make sense of what is happening around us. I saw a man on instagram the other day. I don’t follow him, or know why he was in my feed, just that I opened the app and there he was, and he was distraught. He said it was the hardest video he’d ever made, but his wife had died in childbirth two days ago. His lip quivered and tears were spilling out of his eyes. I could see the shock and grief just pouring out of him.

Their baby survived. He is in the NICU hooked up to machines. They’re trying to heal his brain, because he was denied oxygen during the labor, for some amount of time. They also have a two-year-old little boy, and a four-year-old. He said he was trying to keep it together for his boys, that they’d seen him crying, and he was fine with that because he wanted them to know it was okay to be sad, but he wanted to be strong for them, too.

Then he said his four-year-old had asked him that morning whether Mommy had her phone in Heaven because he really missed her and wanted to call. That was it for me, I just sat there bawling my eyes out. Then I noticed this man’s mother was answering comments. She said the grief they were all experiencing was unimaginable. She was thanking people for their kindness. I felt comforted that grandma was there, and so heartbroken for all of them.

I suggested Patrice Karst’s The Invisible String because it’s a beautiful kids’ book about grief and losing people, and how they’re never really lost to us. I thought it might comfort the four-year-old, maybe the two-year-old also. Maybe all of them a little bit. I wanted to send it to them myself, but we don’t give our addresses to strangers on the internet.

Some man in the comments said the kids would be fine, all of them, that they wouldn’t remember, but the husband needed support and he should take everyone to church. I miss my grandma every day of my life, though, and she died the week before my fourth birthday, the week before my dad left. I remember.

I remember her smile and her laugh and the way she smelled and I remember how I felt in her lap and in her arms. I remember her house at the Jersey Shore, and our walks to the beach before anyone else was awake. I remember riding the ferris wheel with her, sitting in her lap while she read me books, and the feeling of her fingertips making circles around my eyes, my forehead, my cheeks, my chin, to help me fall asleep at night. I also remember riding in the bucket seat of her car, the feeling of her arm flying across me if she had to stop short, the smell of her cigarettes and her tomato sauce.

I wanted to say all that in case there were any mothers dealing with terminal diagnoses or grandmas in those comments thinking maybe children don’t remember. I wanted to say that when I read Tatiana Schlossberg’s gorgeous essay and she wondered if her son would remember her.

That man on the internet has no idea what those boys will remember. I have no doubt he meant well, but sometimes it’s good to say less. He has no idea what this family’s beliefs are, either. Why would anyone presume church is a place that’s comforting to everyone? Why would we assume anything except kindness always helps?

It’s been hard lately. I don’t want to dwell on heartbreaking and enraging things, I wish the world was better than this, and that more people would recognize what a wild thing it is to open our eyes here on planet earth every morning. Not everyone gets to do that, sometimes things happen and suddenly you are ripped away from people you love more than life and you don’t even get to say goodbye — or they are ripped away from you, and then it’s too late. It’s too late.

You just have to hope you showed them how much you loved them every single day and that they carry that knowledge in their heart and in their bones. You have to hope you lived your life, and didn’t waste it screaming at people on the internet, or keeping lists in your head of all the ways you’ve been wronged.

I know people like that, we all do, and there’s nothing for it. Some people hold onto their anger and feed it until it’s a beast that consumes them and no one can get close. Then they get enraged because no one can get close, or because people who love them stop trying out of self-preservation. It isn’t loving to ask people to go up in flames with you, though. It isn’t loving to be venomous.

You have to hope you were good to people, that you didn’t spend your one, precious life being violent and angry, pounding your chest like you owned the place, grabbing children, using them any way you wanted to, grabbing girls and women, thinking they owed you something, thinking you were better than someone because of the color of your skin or the stubble on your chin.

Thinking the planet was yours for the taking, along with all the animals that fly through the sky, or walk across its surface, or swim below sea level. Thinking the land was yours if you wanted it, the mountains and the redwoods and the airspace, too — and if anyone tried to stop you from taking what you wanted, you’d kill them. I can’t even fathom a mindset like that, and I’m thankful.

I spent Mother’s Day with my kids, it was kind of a fever dream weekend because I didn’t sleep last Friday night. I was writing until 3:30am. I don’t have any kind of hold on time right now, or my place on the timeline. My circadian rhythm is not rhythming and sometimes I have no idea where the day went or how it could be over, because there are so many things left to do.

I get a surge of energy at 2am or 3am, and I have tried meditating and every other thing, believe me, so I just work instead. I sleep when I can, I seem to get a decent night of sleep every other night. I have a meeting with a doctor to discuss HRT (hormone replacement therapy) because I suspect that’s the culprit, or a big part of what’s happening, anyway.

Women have to be their own detectives and their own advocates, a thing any woman in your life will confirm if you ask, especially if she’s in perimenopause, which I am. I was told I wasn’t a good candidate for HRT a few years ago, because my maternal grandmother died of breast cancer. This information was based on a study that has since been called into question for a thousand and one reasons, but good luck to all of us because, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” — a quote attributed to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and many other men — thus proving the point because no one knows where the quote came from originally.

The fun part is if you have children, perimenopause usually (not always) hits around the same time your children enter puberty and your parents are aging, which is why they call it the sandwich generation.

You are sandwiched between caring for your teenage children who suddenly have massive amounts of hormones surging through their veins, and your parents, who may be on different coasts, all while your own hormones start to fluctuate wildly. It’s fantastic. And you are carrying the mental load for everyone — which has never been a problem before because you were trained for that your whole life — getting texts about where someone’s keys, homework, or favorite sweater is, while maybe you are meeting with a team of doctors telling you your mom won’t make it if they have to perform CPR, they will break her ribs in the condition she’s in, and it would be better if she signs a DNR. And your half-sister calls to say your dad needs to be moved into an assisted living facility near her because he just kicked her dog across the kitchen.

Then your mom will die after the most gut-wrenching month of your life, but at least you will be there, stroking her hair and telling her not to be scared when it happens, even though you are sadder than you have ever been because you finally had the mom you always wanted — but you only got to have her for three weeks. Before long you will move your dad to be near you for the last year of his life, because your half-sister will die of a stroke six months after your mom dies. When your dad goes, you will cry, but you will not miss him. He wasn’t a great dad. Sorry, Daddy, RIP. I wish I missed you. I wish you’d given me more reasons.

Anyway, the point is you won’t know if it’s grief or hormones, or both, you’ll just know you’ve never felt this way, ever. You’ve never been so untethered. That’s all of us, to some degree. The details change, not everyone has kids, not everyone has all the loss one right after the other. Some people lose their parents when they are so young it hurts to think about, as mentioned. This is why you can never go wrong if you assume everyone is grappling with some kind of loss, and kindness is never wasted.

The Lyft came at 5am to take me and my daughter to the airport Saturday, so there wasn’t any sleeping for me. We flew to UC Davis for a college tour, then rented a car to drive to my son who is in his second year of college about two hours away. By the time we got to the hotel, I napped, a thing I rarely do. The three of us had dinner Saturday night, we went for pizza.

I suppose I knew we wouldn’t live under the same roof forever, because there was always a part of me mourning, even as I was soaking up all the joy when they were tiny, scampering around saying profound or hilarious things. My daughter at three asked me if I was there when the egg broke, and when I asked her which egg, she said, “The egg, Mommy. The egg that was my body before my body became my body. Were you there when it broke?” Uh … yeah? Lol.

Or my son, when he was four, suddenly realizing if his friend’s mom could die, then I could die, too, and asking me out loud from the backseat if that was the case, his little voice quavering. The way his eyes looked when I met them in the rearview mirror. He already knew.

I was reminded while we were at dinner about when they were little and we’d go out to eat — how many times the servers would comment when my daughter finished her food. It used to make me furious. This started as early as you can imagine, when they were two and four, three and five, four and six. My daughter is younger. I used to follow her around handing her food because her little knees and elbows jutted out all over the place.

Once in a while she’d clean her plate, though, and I’d be relieved. But if it happened when we were at a restaurant, nine times out of ten the server would say something like, “Wow, someone was hungry!” But nothing to my son, who’d also cleaned his plate. It wasn’t lost on any of us, and I could not allow that to be normalized, even though I’ve never been the person to “make it uncomfortable.” I guess motherhood cures some of us of that, because I started responding, “Yes, she was, and so was my son! Don’t forget to congratulate him, too!”

Are girls not allowed to be hungry? Are they not allowed to enjoy food and eat with enthusiasm? Is it so noteworthy if they do, that complete strangers feel comfortable commenting? This is rhetorical, of course. I grew up knowing I was supposed to be very careful with food. How much of it I ate. Whether my body was small enough. Small enough for what, though? Small enough to be easy to grab in a stairwell at thirteen? Small enough for a man to overpower me at any time?

Small enough to not take up too much space in a room? Small enough to not be intimidating? Small enough to prove I’d defer to a man? Small enough to know my place and stay in it. What is it we’re training girls to believe they’re allowed to enjoy? What kind of women do girls become with that kind of training?

I just read this article by Sara Szal, MD, about women and sex, and got to a part about the clitoris and how it “was not correctly mapped in a peer-reviewed medical publication until 1998, when Helen O’Connell, an Australian urologist, published the first complete anatomical dissection using modern technique.” And later in the article, “Even flibanserin, a drug developed specifically for female sexual desire, was tested almost entirely on male animals during preclinical development.^7” FFS. I don’t have words for how stupid that is.

In the cis-het world, women are not supposed to enjoy sex, we’re just supposed to be chaste and have babies. We’re under-babied in case you didn’t hear. Men get to enjoy sex, they can have as many partners as they like. We might roll our eyes and call them “playboys” or “confirmed bachelors” or say they have “Peter Pan Syndrome”, but we don’t call them whores and sluts and cast aspersions on their character.

There’s a certain kind of man who respects men like that, who is envious. There are far too many of them. They look at their single guy friend, out there at forty-five, trying to date twenty-year-olds, “living the life” while they’re tied down to the “old ball and chain” (haha, how funny), and think about greener pastures where no one is talking about bills or trying to manage childcare and a fulltime job, feeling unseen.

Women are supposed to keep their body count low. We all know about body count, right? We’re not talking about dead bodies in this context, we’re talking about the number of men a woman has had sex with, that’s her body count. Although, any man talking about a woman’s body count should stay very alert, because women my age have had it with their crap.

These are the same men who talk about “high value women” — a high value woman has a low body count. She’s feminine and soft, she takes good care of herself (she works out and is thin, her nails are done, she is waxed, she prioritizes “her man”). The second you hear language like this, you know you’ve landed in the incel funnel and you should run, fast. This is the world where men will tell you, “women only date men with money.”

I read an essay by a male therapist who said that, so keep your eyes open, and don’t assume letters after someone’s name mean they aren’t a misogynist. Imagine being a woman, paying that man to help you. When a man says women want men with money, he is saying he believes women are for sale. They are superficial. They can be bought. How lovely.

These are the men who hate women. Before long you’ll be hearing about the tradwife life and how great it is to churn butter.

You might remember I’ve been wondering how we got here. By here, I mean all of it. I’m wondering how we go from sweet little boys who love their mamas to men who disrespect and hurt children and women.

How we go from sweet little boys who love their mamas to men who hate people because they are Black.

How we go from sweet little boys who love their mamas to men who work to overturn Roe, destroy the Voting Rights Act, and dismantle democracy. (Currently there are too many people I could tag here. They include every man in the administration, every Republican senator and congressman who has not stood up to this president, every Democratic senator and congressman who has not fought hard enough, and every man on the Supreme Court who decided to back John Roberts in his twisted endeavors. Also, Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Thiel, Yarvin, and The Heritage Foundation. This is an incomplete list.)

Of course they can’t do it without women. It’s systemic, it’s white supremacy, it’s patriarchy, it’s technocracy, it’s rampant capitalism…but underneath all of that you have to be able to dehumanize people — to not care about them, genuinely. You have to see a certain kind of person as not being worthy of your compassion.

I think to get to that place, you must not have an ounce of respect for yourself.

What is grinding my gears like an itchy tag at the back of my neck is the consistent effort made by the people with power in this country to give cover to the perpetrators of heinous crimes while hanging the survivors out to dry. I feel positive if CNN did an undercover report and found women were drugging, assaulting, and filming their husbands and uploading that content to websites so other women could pay to watch or learn how to do it, too, the FBI would be pounding down their doors. Those women would be behind bars, their faces would be splashed across every newspaper and magazine, we’d know their names, their husbands would have book deals and movie deals and interviews … but not in reverse.

Just like the Epstein files get released and the perpetrators’ names are blurred and survivors’ names are in the public domain, even the ones who wanted to remain anonymous. These people are brazen in their lack of care. Ghislaine Maxwell shows no remorse from her prison camp in Texas where she goes to pilates and eats organic meals. The women inmates who had the audacity to tell reporters she was getting special treatment were moved to higher-security facilities in retaliation. For what? Why are they being punished for telling the truth?

At brunch on Sunday, we got “French Toast for the table.” If you’re a fan of Somebody, Somewhere, you’ll get the reference right away, and if you aren’t, you’re welcome, it’s one of my favorite shows ever. Pretty sure you can watch it on YouTube with a subscription, I watched before we were boycotting everything. French toast for the table is exactly as it sounds. It’s like an appetizer order of French Toast and I don’t know why this wasn’t a thing before.

The French Toast we ordered had mascarpone in the middle and berry compote on top and it was insane. My son’s fantastic girlfriend was there, and my daughter of course, and my son, and our server was a woman. She was ecstatic about our appetizer, and very encouraging of everyone’s full and enthusiastic participation in savoring every bite. I loved her.

My son was talking about how vision is two-dimensional, and we’re filling in the rest with our minds. That we’re basically seeing two 2D images, one from each eye, and because there’s distance between our eyes, we get depth perception, and there are shadows and light, and then there’s our brain, filling in the blank space. (He’s studying cognitive science.)

I brought up that debunked thing everyone used to say about how people only use 15% of their brains, and he was saying you might use 15% at one time or another, but obviously unless something has gone wrong or there’s an injury, we’re all using our entire brains. I wondered aloud if maybe what people really meant is we’re only understanding 15% of life. After all, we’re on one planet, in one solar system, in a vast universe, and no one knows what happens next.

I said when I get really down, I try to remind myself that we have no idea about any of this. Maybe we are a really young species and that’s why we’re so unfathomably dumb and cruel (not all humans). This was a few days after the idiot-in-chief had the Pentagon release the alien/UFO footage, which was maybe the heartiest laugh I had last week.

Our whole lives we’ve been hearing “people can’t handle it.” They can’t tell us about UFOs and aliens, because we’d have an existential crisis — and here’s this absolute buffoon, making such a colossal mess of things and underestimating people’s intelligence to such a degree he’s like, “Release the UFO shit, they won’t even notice we’ve spent $29 billion so far on the war no one wanted, the $6-dollar-a-gallon gas prices, the gutting of the VRA, the way we’re going after reproductive rights even in blue states, or the fact that I’m awarding myself $1.7 billion dollars in taxpayer money from the IRS I now control because someone leaked my tax returns so the public would know about my finances which is a thing everyone who runs for president always does, and they had the gall to investigate me and my blindly loyal followers for actually and factually causing an insurrection!” If you think he isn’t directing that money back to himself after awarding the insurrectionists, might I interest you in a gold phone?

So we were laughing because it was Mother’s Day and I didn’t want to cry, and I said maybe we see in 2D in a 3D world because if we could really see everything that’s going on we’d freak out. Like maybe there are portals to other timelines right in front of us. Staircases to other dimensions and the people we love who’ve moved to the next level are right there, keeping an eye on us, hoping we can feel them. Hoping we’re all going to be okay down here.

Maybe there’s a world where we don’t have to work so hard for the really basic things, where it’s a total given that whatever the color of your skin, whatever your gender, whomever and however you love, you are always worthy of compassion and dignity and the same rights to freedom and peace as anyone else. Maybe there’s a world where people take care of each other, and everyone eats, and no one ever sleeps on the street because, maybe in that world they don’t cover the grass with concrete, or pollute the skies with emissions of every possible kind.

There aren’t people sleeping outside, because if someone needs a place, they’re invited in like family, or the village builds them a place of their own. Maybe there’s a world where people share what they have, and trade the things they don’t, where sick people are always cared for, and you don’t even have to vote for it because no one needs to be told the things any four-year-old could tell you, and would, if you sat down to chat.

Maybe we could build that world right where we are. There are more of us, after all. Maybe we could even build it without itchy tags.

What about the justices who rule on the merit of those laws?

Or the people who work in your local sheriff’s office and police department, who enforce the laws — what would they say about the value of your life? Your daughter’s life? Your son’s? Your partner’s or your best friend’s?

Let’s take it closer to home. How do you know if your neighbors believe your life and your children’s lives are as precious as their own?

Pencils down. These are all trick questions. The minute people with power are deciding what rights you have, you already know your life is not considered as intrinsically valuable as theirs. If you take it for granted that you have rights — the right to vote without worrying about whether you changed your name when you got married, the right to marry someone you love, the right to lifesaving healthcare no matter what state you’re in or what the circumstances are, the right to go jogging whenever you feel like it and wear a hoodie if you’re cold, the right to drink too much at a bar and know the worst that’s likely to happen is a bad hangover the next day — you are a straight white man. I’m not psychic, but I know that.

For the rest of us, the only power we have is in trying to make sure our voices are heard when the laws are getting written. You want someone in the room saying, “Wait a second, the people in my community — people just like me — need a few things, that’s why they sent me here to represent them. These are the issues that are most pressing right now, most devastating, most dire. This is where they need protection, or improvements or funding for research. Their tax dollars are in the pot, too. Their needs matter.”

That’s representational government, that’s how it’s supposed to work. I don’t have to agree with all the things you want for yourself or your community, but you still get to send people in to try to negotiate on your behalf, and I trust my representatives to battle it out and compromise. You don’t have to like all the things I want for my community, either. No one gets everything, everyone gets something, and presumably in the year 2026 we can all agree on very obvious human decency issues that shouldn’t need to be litigated — like Black people deserve to have civil rights and representation, and so do women. All people deserve to have lifesaving healthcare when they need it, and bodily autonomy.

[ Me running through the streets naked, screaming every expletive imaginable, because NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Apparently, we cannot agree on those very basic, kindergarten-simple things because some crusty old white people just love their white supremacy and their patriarchy and their technocracy. Way to go, you are literally ruining the timeline. You will go down in history as the people who laughed from the doorways, the halls of power, the ballroom bunkers, the rockets to Mars, the giant AI data centers, and your hideous mega-yachts while people were weeping and hungry and heartbroken. Congratulations on being the worst, you win!]

If Justice really was a blindfolded woman, fair and impartial — holding scales in one hand and a sword in the other — the last two weeks would have been different. Life would be different. We’d better make her a Black woman in this fantasy, though, so we don’t get one of those white women who thinks proximity to power will keep her safe. Of course, if Justice was a Black woman, this would not be the conversation we’d need to have.

You’ll agree with me if you’ve been paying attention to the disembowelment of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, often called the “crown jewel” of the Civil Rights Movement. The jewels are scattered all over the ground at the Lincoln Memorial, but don’t get all weepy-eyed over Abe. He didn’t think Black people should be enslaved, but he didn’t think Black people were his equals, either.

If you’re starting to formulate thoughts like, we need to judge men in the context of the time in which they existed — you sound like the PragerU video about Christopher Columbus — and no we do not — we judge people based on their character. Look around right now, we’re existing in a period of time and you can clearly see how some people are behaving, and what their beliefs are. You can go ahead and draw your conclusions right now, you don’t have to wait.

If the jewels are scattered, the crown is being tossed like a frisbee between smirking old white men and some truly awful women in Tennessee at the moment. Seems like Virginia will be next. They’re wasting no time showing us who they are. I feel physically sick, and I don’t know where to put all my grief. The Speaker of the House, Cameron Sexton, Republican, TN, called a special session so they could redraw the congressional maps after the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the VRA last week. Then he told the sheriff to remove citizens who were there to protest.

Citizens are allowed to go to the Capitol, though. They’re allowed to sit in the chamber as long as they reserve a seat. But if the Speaker tells the sheriff to remove people, that’s what the sheriff is going to do. I watched him and his men telling white-haired grandmas they were being disruptive and had to leave, and I heard white-haired grandmas say they were sitting quietly, it was the sheriff and his men who were being disruptive.

I felt my heart swell. I wondered if those men had ever sat at those grandmothers’ tables as little boys, drinking lemonade. I wondered why they were taking orders from a Speaker with no heart or ethics, instead of listening to those grandmas who’ve lived long enough to know what matters. They said they were sorry as they dragged people away. They knew they were on the wrong side.

I watched Tennessee Democratic Representative Justin Pearson hugging his brother KeShaun, twice, long and hard because KeShaun got arrested, and was escorted to a van by eight men dressed in tight khaki sheriff’s department uniforms. I heard the Pearson brothers say, “I love you,” while they hugged, and Justin said he’d call the attorneys in Nashville as KeShaun stepped into the van. I cried watching them hugging like that. I thought about their parents, and wondered if they’d feel scared, angry, proud. Yes, probably. This is all so embarrassing and horrible for our country.

KeShaun Pearson is Executive Director of Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP). He did nothing wrong. He just cared about his country, his community, his brother, his life. Normal things. He’s also spoken out against Elon Musk’s gargantuan AI data center in Memphis, and the incredible harm it’s causing in the community. The lack of permits and environmental protections, the sudden spike in asthma and COPD cases in the area. You want to know why the GOP wants to disenfranchise Black voters in Memphis?

Please watch this 17-minute film, I beg you. You won’t be confused for long. That’s KeShaun in the thumbnail here:

The Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 following the Selma to Montgomery marches. The VRA was created because southern states had continued to defy the 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which was ratified in 1870. That Amendment said “no citizen should be denied the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude” and was meant to protect the voting rights of newly emancipated Black men after the Civil War; a war fought to determine what kind of country we were going to be — the kind that thought Black people could be owned, that some people were more worthy of dignity and self-actualization than others — or the kind that truly believed all people were created equal.

Well, men, anyway. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. White women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920, and everyone else — Black women, Native American women, Asian women, all Indigenous women and Women of Color continued fighting for the right to vote until 1965, along with all men who were not white men, particularly in the southern states — thus the VRA.

There are two main sections of the VRA you’ve probably been hearing about — Section 2, just gutted, and Section 5, which was hollowed out in 2013 — also by Chief Justice John R. Roberts and friends. I took the liberty of adding the “R.” because he’s earned it. He deserves a hood, too. Here are the most basic things to know:

Section 5 of the law required jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination to obtain approval from the Department of Justice or a local court before changing any current voting rules — a process known as “pre-clearance.”

So a state like Mississippi, which has an ugly history of voter suppression laws, would have had to reach out to the DOJ or a local state court before they could change any upcoming election rules — like shortening early voting timelines, or decreasing the number of polling places, or changing the available locations so they were harder for certain voters to access, or messing with mail-in voting, or essentially any rules that might make it harder for people to vote. This granted oversight to make sure every citizen’s right to vote was being protected fairly and equally, and no rules were being enacted to “deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language or minority group.” The formula they used to determine whether a state was engaging in racial gerrymandering was laid out in Section 4(b).

Shelby v Holder changed all that in 2013 when Chief Justice John Roberts and his Supreme Court dealt their first blow to the VRA.

Roberts argued that southern states were no longer trying to restrict the voting rights of Black citizens the way they had been in the 1960’s — notwithstanding the 15,000 pages of facts, figures and testimony attorneys presented to the contrary — and Roberts said remedies for current suppression of the Black vote had to reflect current conditions. Then he wrote a lot of other words that led to his conclusion that Section 4(b) was unconstitutional, so “leave it to the states.” Without Section 4(b), Section 5 was dead.

Roberts also said hey, Section 2 is still intact, so it’s cool. Nothing to worry about, Black people! Okay, he didn’t say it like that, he said, “Section 2 is permanent, applies nationwide, and is not at issue in this case.” Turns out “in this case” was doing a lot of the foreboding-type of heavy lifting, though anyone who cares saw the writing on the wall. They haven’t been hiding it.

Even with the Shelby decision he acknowledged southern states were still engaging in voter discrimination.

Section 2 of the VRA applied to all 50 states and ensured voting laws were not designed to make it hard for minority voters to participate in elections. It gave voters and organizations a clear path to sue in federal court to challenge discriminatory voting practices. It banned laws that resulted in discrimination without requiring the burden of proof that discrimination was intended, because any state official can say, “This is partisan, not racial” even if everyone with eyes can see it is absolutely racial.

Section 2 was often used to challenge redistricting maps that broke up minority communities to limit their voting power.

The VRA “debate” began in the Senate in early 1982, where South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, a longtime civil rights critic, was chairman of the Judiciary Committee. “No ‘pattern of discrimination case’ may be filed unless there is clear proof of an intent to discriminate,” the Heritage Foundation recommended in January 1981.

Y’all, the Heritage Foundation has been playing the long game. You don’t bust out a 920-page document overnight. They wanted this to happen, they’ve been working toward it for decades. When the Shelby decision came down, civil rights attorneys were appalled.

If you’re wondering whether Section 2 mattered, look how fast the GOP in Tennessee drew up a new map, breaking up the one Black-majority Democratic congressional district they had — gleefully and without shame. It took them days.

Here’s a fact for people who might have skipped most of history class or slept through it or something. Guess what sprung up in the south right after news of the Emancipation Proclamation spread?

The Ku Klux Klan. Holy shit! I KNOW. This was not a coincidence. Also, Republicans used to be the liberals, and Democrats used to be the racists.* It will help you to know that when you read the next quote. It’s gonna be weird, so just get it in your brain for a minute, that for this quote you’re about to read, Republicans are liberal, and Democrats are conservative. Opposite Day!

Founded in 1865, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) extended into almost every southern state by 1870 and became a vehicle for white southern resistance to the Republican Party’s Reconstruction-era policies aimed at establishing political and economic equality for Black Americans. Its members waged an underground campaign of intimidation and violence directed at white and Black Republican leaders.

Though Congress passed legislation designed to curb Klan terrorism, the organization saw its primary goal—the reestablishment of white supremacy—fulfilled through Democratic victories in state legislatures across the South in the 1870s.

After a period of decline, white Protestant nativist groups revived the Klan in the early 20th century, burning crosses and staging rallies, parades and marches denouncing immigrants, Catholics, Jews, African Americans and organized labor. The civil rights movement of the 1960s also saw a surge of Ku Klux Klan activity, including bombings of Black schools and churches and violence against Black and white activists in the South.

A few months ago I sat across from a person I used to consider a friend. I would have said he was a close friend for twenty years of my life. His clear blue eyes sparkled. He looked the same as ever. I met him for coffee because I had seen some strange posts on social media and worried he must be losing his mind. Sign of the times.

How else to explain he’d become a fan of the man who said, “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously”? I was devastated because I had always known my friend to be compassionate and fair-minded. I thought there had to be some kind of misunderstanding on his part, that he must not have seen or heard the more despicable things this “influencer” had said, like the quote I just mentioned.

I was wrong. He sat there and told me he was against affirmative action and DEI policies because, “It’s racist to suggest Black people need help getting hired.” My head imploded. I asked if he knew white women benefit from DEI policies more than any other demographic. Veterans also benefit, as do our friends in the LGBTQ community. DEI policies simply mean corporations and employers make sure new job opportunities are offered to a wide range of people from all different backgrounds. Then they pick the most qualified candidate. I said there is no “context” in which it is okay to say the above quote about Black women, full fucking stop.

Anyone who proudly states they are against diversity, not in favor of equity, and anti-inclusion is not a person I can have in my life. *Racists come in every flavor, so do misogynists. They cross party lines, they are equal opportunity offenders. I haven’t spoken to him since that day. He broke my heart profoundly, I would never have guessed this might happen, but I will not collude with that. I will not look the other way or excuse it.

Take that burning toxic waste, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out, because if Black people aren’t safe with you, and brown people aren’t safe with you, then women aren’t safe with you and queer people aren’t safe with you and neither is anyone who isn’t a straight, white man. Not sure they’re especially safe with you, either. Enjoy “teaching yoga” I guess. Enjoy never worrying about whether you are safe, must be nice.

You have to willfully ignore American history to be against affirmative action and DEI policies, or to be a white person and look another white person in the eye and call those policies racist.

Jim Crow Laws were racist. Segregation was racist. Making a Black mother explain to her tiny, beautiful children why they could only drink from the water fountain marked “Colored” was racist.

Hey Becky, try to imagine what it would be like the very first time you had to explain to your sweet little girl why she has to sit at the back of the bus with you, while her little friend with different colored skin sits up front. Really picture that for a minute, flip it around, feel it in your heart. White people in the back. What would you even say to her while she blinked up at you with her trusting eyes. Better she hears it from you, right? The world is gonna break her heart soon enough.

That’s racist. You, explaining to your child that a lot of the world will think of her as “less than” because of how she looks. That a lot of the world looks at her mom that way, and her dad, too. Her beloved brothers and sisters. That’s why you have to go in the back door. That’s why you can only use certain bathrooms. That’s why you go to the school with almost no resources.

Doesn’t that make you feel sick in your soul?

The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as “Jim Crow” represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. The laws affected almost every aspect of daily life, mandating segregation of schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains, restrooms, buses, trains, and restaurants. “Whites Only” and “Colored” signs were constant reminders of the enforced racial order.

Jim Crow Laws made it hard for newly emancipated Black men to vote, no matter what the 15th Amendment said, because there were plenty of southerners who didn’t want them to have a voice or a say, and they were angry and mean. They came up with voting rules to make things impossible — literacy tests even though they knew full well slaves had never been taught to read, because slaveowners had forbidden it. They knew, because they’d been the slaveowners.

Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Massacre? It’s hard to describe the depravity here, and if you’ve ever wondered about the level of cruelty people can inflict on an entire community if they decide certain people exist outside their circle of compassion, look no further. This is racism and it is painful and ugly and very much a part of our history.

It’s why you never want to be the white person raising your hand in the comments section of a Black writer or the zoom conversation of a Black activist saying, “I’ve never done anything racist, I don’t want to be lumped in with all those awful racist people from the past, or the racist people in my neighborhood. I’m one of the good white people.” Just don’t. Trust me on this, truly, pipe down. If you need it decoded, that’s the white-person-version of the men who say, “not all men.” You don’t want to be that guy, and you don’t want to be that white person. Just be quiet and learn or there are going to be bears everywhere.

The gall of arrogant white men getting upset about affirmative action and DEI policies is breathtaking. What kind of unbelievably fragile men are these who can’t handle the mere suggestion of a more level playing field and the teensy tiniest attempts to acknowledge there are going to be repercussions when you stand on the necks and backs of a particular group of people for hundreds of years? Oh jeez, so sorry. Did you want to pretend none of that happened and isn’t still happening? Did you want us all to dance around and make babies and buy your favorite cheese while our neighbors are gunned down in the streets and they take our rights away one at a time, and you … what are you doing, actually? Telling me what I’m getting wrong?

Not all of you, obviously.

If you are not sure about what happened before and during the Civil Rights Movement and the VRA, or why so many people died fighting for their rights, it is important you understand, in your bones. Here are restored photos taken by James “Spider” Martin who was there in Selma on “Bloody Sunday.” It wasn’t called Bloody Sunday at the time, it was just a protest when activists like Martin Luther King, Jr, and the late, great John Lewis, and Amelia Boynton attempted to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way to Montgomery.

What kind of a man must John Roberts be, aside from what he’s made so evident? I’m surprised he didn’t take the bloody entrails of Section 2 to William Rehnquist’s grave to celebrate. Maybe he did. He’s had it in for the VRA for decades. Imagine your legacy could be walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, risking your life for everything good and decent in this world — or you could be remembered as the guy who tried to undo all that work.

He will not succeed, though, not for long. He’ll be an ugly little footnote in the history books.

There are other voices, beautiful voices, the voices of people who do not want things to be this way — and those are always the voices we remember. There are videos everywhere of people locking arms with their neighbors and refusing to move. People putting their bodies on the line. It’s been happening all along, but I think something in the collective just clicked. Maybe people are starting to understand we really could lose our country.

These people in power? They do not care about any of us. They don’t think our lives are of equal value to theirs, but I’ll tell you what. I’m done trying to convince anyone of my worth, aren’t you? I throw my head back and laugh at the wild audacity of mediocre men to think they get to ascribe a value to any of us. Markwayne, please. Take all the seats.

I’m with her:

Senate Democratic Caucus Chair London Lamar (D-Memphis) was visibly tearing up on the floor before she admonished her Republican colleagues for bending to the whims of Blackburn and Trump, rather than defending voting rights.

“This is how democracy dies in our face. It’s not always with violence in the street. It is those secret meetings you have in the back of your rooms,” Lamar said of the lack of transparency and process around the redistricting.

“You may have the votes to pass this map, but you don’t have the moral authority to do what’s right.”

There’s one kind of authority, like the kind a mean drunk might wield. It could be someone you run from because you know you’re not safe, but they call the shots. They have authority because you’re a kid and they pay the bills and make the decisions about your life, and what are you going to do, you’re stuck. A lot of us feel that way about the president. Like we’re dealing with an abusive parent and we wake up every day trying to duck and cover, but also figure out how to show up for our people, find some joy, check on our friends, make some art.

Then there’s moral authority, and that’s a whole other thing. That’s a thing you feel in your chest, like those grandmas sitting in the chamber, telling those sheriff’s boys that they’re the disruption. That’s moral authority. You feel it, you don’t have to think about it. That’s the team I want to be on.

There have been a lot of devastating decisions coming down from this Supreme Court lately. It breaks my heart as someone who grew up thinking the Supreme Court was this hallowed place where the justices would follow the Constitution to the best of their ability, and not allow partisan politics to muddy the waters. But like the other two branches of our government, their ethics have been compromised.

It’s a real shame to see, but if you want moral authority, you won’t find it there. I worry about what may happen Monday, what they’ll take from women and girls next, how close to Gilead we’re going to get before we rise, but worrying won’t change anything, so when I’m done worrying, I think about what we do.

If there’s any silver lining in all of this, I am hoping it’s that the group of us who have always had to fight for our rights (and I am in no way putting us on a level playing field, just — there are Straight White Men of Some Means — and the rest of us) will finally understand we will be a lot stronger if we fight together. Our fates are tied and they always have been.

Have you ever loved someone with your entire heart, but also been able to see they are deeply flawed and need help? If you have, you know the only way they can heal is if they get honest with themselves and look at the mistakes they’ve made and the people they’ve hurt along the way, try to make amends where possible, and do better moving forward. Sometimes (often) the most loving thing you can do is hold up a mirror. That’s how I feel about our country.

It’s time to hold up a lot of mirrors, and get ourselves seen and heard. We tried being good, polite, nice. Look where it got us. They are not going to listen willingly, that much is clear. Arms locked, breathing fire, that’s where I’m at. I’ve seen a number of Black people in my feeds saying they really hope white people are going to show up this time. It reminds me of how I’ve been saying I really hope the good men are going to show up. Anyway, I will be out there, out front, everywhere I can be. We sure can’t save the country from our couches.

It has been brutal, but I am not without hope. We will not let dark-hearted, mean-spirited soulless people win.

Sending you a lot of love.

Huge thanks to everyone who showed up live to join for this conversation, and to everyone about to listen. This talk is for any woman who has been reeling since the CNN report about the “rape academy.” Much has been written in the last few weeks, especially by women trying to get our heads around the idea that it isn’t just desolate parking lots and dark streets where we aren’t safe, it isn’t just that we have to worry about what time of day we’re going running, it isn’t just that a man could slip something in a drink if we’re out with friends — it’s that now, it could be our husbands slipping something into our last cup of tea for the night. (Not all husbands.)

There’s a larger conversation to be had about what is happening when girls and women are not considered as intrinsically valuable as boys and men. (And it should be noted, and it was, that little boys are also victims of sexual assault). When that sentiment is weaved into the fabric of the stories we grow up with, the films we watch, and the messages we’re receiving everywhere we go, it’s the system that needs an overhaul.

This is also a talk for the men who are devastated, who love and respect the women in their lives, and who don’t want things to be this way. We wondered if some of them might not know how to help right now, or what to say, or what questions to ask. It’s a talk for the “not all men” men, and the ones who get furious over the “choose the bear” conversations. It’s a talk for anyone who would like things to be different, and so much better than this.

Here is Dina’s linked essay that we referenced, A Willing Suspension of Disbelief, and here are links to The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (which was initially published in a magazine in 1892, so shoutout to me for randomly retaining bizarre facts in my head, but not remembering things from last week), and Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates (do not read before bed or if you are feeling overwhelmed by everything already, it is very sad and very disturbing, but excellent. It has stayed with both Dina and me for 40 years, so do with that what you will). Here is my essay we were referencing, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Where do the motherless daughters run?

I would not say that we found answers or even that we were looking for answers today, but I would say we found the comfort and relief that comes from being together, and naming things — calling things what they are. Pulling the monster out from underneath the bed so it stops tormenting us, and making it sit down where we can all see it clearly and talk about it.

That’s a lot less scary to do with a whole group of people there with you, and it’s a start. Dina and I had such a marvelous time together, and it was such a joy to be with everyone in attendance. Amazing that we could be talking about such dark things, and come away feeling so much connection and joy. We hope you feel that as much as we do.

Love to every single one of you,

Ally and Dina

American Woman

This woman's words

By Dina Honour

She was so attached to the benefits bestowed upon her as a result of her beauty — the proximity to power, the wealth, the lifestyle — and so concerned her seven-year-old’s budding beauty might threaten that power, she was ready to have the Huntsman kill her own child. Maybe she thought of her daughter as an extension of herself. Extension Children are supposed to sparkle just the right amount, and reflect back on their creator, making her shine more brightly. They are never supposed to outshine her altogether.

Snow White would not have been the first daughter of a narcissistic mother, but most of them kill you with words, slowly.

When the Huntsman failed, the Evil Queen set out to do the deed herself with the poisoned apple. Seven years later, the “handsome prince” found Snow White, fourteen years old and comatose in a glass coffin where the Dwarfs had preserved her. There was no kiss in the original tale, the prince just saw her and had to have her, so his servants took her coffin-encased, unconscious body back to the castle and lugged it from room to room. He insisted on being able to see her at all times.

One day an exhausted servant dropped the coffin, dislodging a piece of the poisoned apple, and Snow White woke up … and got to begin a terrifying version of “happily ever after” with a prince who probably said she wasn’t anything like he thought she would be once she began expressing needs like living girls will do. Just a guess.

Maybe he took her on a hike or a boat ride. Maybe she just disappeared one day.

Before Snow White bit into an apple that changed the course of her life, there was Eve, and according to medieval folklore, before Eve, there was Lilith — Adam’s first wife in the Garden of Eden. God made Lilith from the same dust as Adam, not from his rib — Lilith was his equal. She refused to be subservient (she liked to be on top), and Adam wouldn’t have it, so Lilith fled the Garden and planted a garden of her own.

In response, she was banished from the Garden of Eden, which is kind of funny, because she’d already left. Pretty sure she yelled, “Boy, bye!” over her shoulder as she slammed the gate.

There are horrible things that happen after, it’s an ugly breakup story and Lilith takes a lot of punishment, but we’ll leave it there. Lilith has become a post-modern feminist icon, symbolic of women who rebel against the idea that our desire and disobedience is the problem.

After Lilith took off, God created Eve from Adam’s rib — but even Eve couldn’t listen. If only she hadn’t been tempted by the Serpent. If only she had not taken a bite out of an apple from the Tree of Knowledge — thereby condemning all of humanity to be exiled from the Garden of Eden for the rest of time — life could have been so sweet. Dammit, Eve!

It’s always desirous females and the men who can’t control us ruining everything. Adam gets exiled, too, after all, because he should have stepped in. He should have stopped the Serpent. He should have gotten his woman in line for her own sake, and everyone else’s. He should have led like a man must, women aren’t up to the task and can’t be trusted to make good decisions!

Sounds very much like the men who think women should not be allowed to vote, and — sadder still — the women who trust them.

Let’s stick with Lilith for a minute, though, because I finally watched the Lilith Fair documentary last night — named for the Lilith in question, of course — and cried through so much of it. Lilith Fair, for anyone who may not know, was a music festival created by Canadian singer-songwriter and absolute badass Sarah Maclachlan, to showcase an all-female line-up of musicians — and push back on the rampant, toxic sexism in the music industry at the time. It was a traveling festival, and they went on tour for three years starting in 1997. I was there the first year at Jones Beach, and the entire world should be a Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery Tour right now. It would do us all so much good.

Did you know radio stations used to avoid playing female artists back-to-back because they thought listeners would lose interest? Rock-n-roll was man’s work, and you couldn’t have too much of that “chick music” because it wasn’t serious. It wasn’t hardcore. It wasn’t for real musicians. Venues and promoters were loath to take on an all-female music festival because they were certain ticket sales would be abysmal. No one would buy tickets to The Gorge Ampitheatre, for example, if there weren’t any dudes in the lineup.

I wonder how many times in history women have been told they can’t do something because, well, actually, things don’t work like that. Sarah Maclachlan’s own mom told her not to dream too big, because nothing ridiculously amazing was going to happen. No doubt she said it as a way of shielding her daughter from disappointment, but not every child will rebel against a shield like that, some will surrender behind it without even trying to fight.

Guess she showed her mom and all the music promoters and venues and music industry insiders, too. Those tours sold out for three years straight, and every town they played, they donated $1 dollar of each ticket to a local charity. The festival grossed $60 million dollars over those three years, and $10 million went to nonprofits supporting causes that benefit women, including domestic violence education and prevention and Planned Parenthood.

Along the way, the women on tour had their own lives changed — not just professionally — though they watched in awe as their albums climbed the charts, many of the headliners found themselves nominated for Grammys, and incredible new artists were discovered on the “village stages” — but also personally.

Some of them had babies during the tour, and those babies would be breastfed backstage before a set and handed to one of the other musicians, or they’d go out on stage with their moms. There’s a moment in the documentary where Erykah Badu is singing to 20,000 people with her baby in her arms like it’s the most natural thing in the world, because it is. It can be.

The tour provided healthcare to everyone, roadies included. Grown men were brought to tears because they could send their kids to the dentist. Life is pretty good when women run things — maybe we should vote for them. After the Indigo Girls joined the tour and started asking who wanted to collaborate, it became the norm for the headliners to close the shows together.

The tour attracted a largely female audience, it was a famously queer-friendly community, and there were plenty of good men in the mix. Dan Levy, who produced the documentary, was 14 or 15 when he went to Lilith Fair as a closeted teenager. He said the experience of being there in a crowd of accepting, loving people made him feel safe, and that it felt like a “quiet revolution.”

There was relentless pushback, lest you imagine this was some kind of utopia. No matter how successful the tour, they had to keep proving it. There were daily press conferences where the women endured the same uninspired questions all the time:

“Why do you hate men so much?”

“Isn’t this ‘women in music thing’ just a passing trend?”

“How do so many women get along without cat fights and jealousy?”

“Do you all have a big sleepover together every night?”

“Isn’t it divisive not to have men in the lineup?”

Yes. It’s so divisive to have one thing in the entire world other than our gynecological exams — and god knows there are plenty of men trying to control those, too — where men are not centered.

Which brings me to this thing that’s been circling like a mind-shark lately. I kept feeling like I was forgetting something important, but I wasn’t forgetting, I had just shoved an unpleasant thing somewhere deep, the way we do so we can exist. And it wasn’t a thing, it was a he.

Andrew Luster. He’s the thing I didn’t want to write about — but someone should be writing about him at this juncture, and I don’t think anyone is. Maybe his name is familiar to you. He is the great-grandson of Max Factor, and an heir to the Max Factor cosmetics empire.

He’s also one of the first men to serve time for drugging women, raping them, and filming the assaults. His assaults (the ones we know of) occurred from 1996-2000, pretty much the same time Lilith Fair was happening. Long before Dominique Pelicot, and long before the men uploading 20,000 “sleep content” videos to the porn site Motherless — let alone all the other sites hosting content like it.

Luster grew up in Malibu, CA, went to the prestigious Windward School in Santa Monica, attended Santa Barbara City College, dropped out — and never got a job. Grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth and venom in his heart. He’d go to Mexico to surf and fish, but spent most of his time surfing, fishing, and hanging out at the huge compound he bought not far from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

At night, he would go clubbing at places near the college, slip GHB in the drinks of college girls, bring them back to his compound, rape them while they were unconscious, and film himself while he did it. Sounds familiar, and I think it is important to mention because I am starting to worry that this has been going on a lot longer than we think. Here’s a quote from a BBC article about the case at the time, and I pulled this quote for a couple of reasons:

When detectives raided his home, they say they found 17 videotapes of Mr Luster having sex with apparently unconscious women, many of whom have yet to be identified.

Detectives were reportedly investigating whether he could have been part of an international ring of playboy millionaires said to be known as the Bachelors, who trade film of their date rape attacks over the internet.

Several years ago a British woman claimed that she had fallen victim to such a gang, telling police she had been raped in a London hotel after GHB was slipped into her drink.

The first reason I pulled the quote is the part where the BBC journalist says “Mr. Luster was having sex with apparently unconscious women…” No one is “having sex” with unconscious women. That is not a thing that can happen, just like no one can “have sex” with unconscious men. I think we know this, but there are a lot of things I thought we knew.

If women were drugging their partners until they were unconscious and snoring audibly — lifting their eyelids so other women could see how fully knocked out they were — and then sodomizing them with strap-ons or other objects they had on hand, filming this depravity and uploading it so other women could pay to watch, I think we can feel sure no one would say these women were “having sex” with the men they were violating.

I bet Congress would suddenly spring into action and amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act right quick. I bet they’d be using Palantir and every other tech-bro billionaire spyware/malware/AI thing they have to hunt those women down and arrest them, don’t you? Maybe test out the new/old firing squad they’re so excited about. Bring back a little burning at the stake, even. But men posting videos raping their unconscious wives? Nah. Still up there, still making money.

There is no part of me that could debase and demean another human being that way, and I want every man to understand how fucking pathological that is. The men who read my stuff already know, that’s why I said every man, and it’s also why I flipped genders — for the kind of man who wants to talk about math right now. Maybe it’s good for that kind of man to imagine falling asleep in his own bed and not feeling sure he’s safe.

We live in a culture that objectifies girls’ and women’s bodies so much and so often it’s become background noise, but there are men who have gotten to the point where they just see us as “a body” for their use. Men in those chat rooms who paid to watch were making suggestions about what those husbands should do to their wives next. I made the mistake of looking at some of the screenshots of text messages. There is a certain kind of man who gets off on robbing us of any tiny scrap of dignity.

Men like these, also from a BBC article:

Boxing champion Mike Tyson served three years of his sentence for raping beauty contestant Desiree Washington in an Indianapolis hotel room in 1991.
He denied harming the 18-year-old because, he said, her eyes were not blackened and no ribs were broken.

In 1993, solicitor Angus Diggle, 35, was given a three-year sentence for the attempted rape of a woman solicitor after a ball. Her friends found him wearing only frilly cuffs and a luminous condom. He told police: “I spent £200 on her. Why can’t I do what I did to her?”

On April 13th — just a couple of weeks ago — a 14-year-old boy body-slammed a 15-year-old girl to the ground in New York City, and stomped her head with his foot while his buddies filmed it, laughing and egging him on — allegedly because she would not give him her phone number. I am not linking because the video is so horrifying I can’t get it out of my head and I don’t want you to be similarly haunted.

The girl is now home from the hospital, and the boy has been arrested. She will need physical therapy for her neck, she is dealing with debilitating headaches, a concussion, potential brain injuries, and, of course, trauma. Her mother is pulling her out of school, as this boy has been harassing her for some time and the school has not stepped in. It is far too hard to get help from our schools, the police, the legal system. They wait until we are hurt before they intervene. Sometimes they wait until we’re dead, and then it’s too late.

I will tell you, I am amazed and grateful her daughter is alive. Seeing the video, I was not sure she would be. Having a sixteen-year-old daughter myself, I am still sick to my stomach.

The mother of the boy is defending him to the press, and anyone who will listen.

I am at a loss. I have a son and a daughter and I love them to the ends of this earth and beyond. This is not the correct response and I imagine that goes without saying. No one could watch the video of what happened to that girl and defend it. Talking to the press is not what you do right now if you are his mom. What you do is figure out if there’s any hope of deprogramming your extremely violent and seemingly sociopathic son. You spend your time right now trying to get him help, not defending his actions. The same goes for the boys who were filming and laughing. None of them are well.

This is the kind of “teach girls who the boss is” ideology Andrew Tate preaches. I don’t know if this kid and his friends are fans, but it would not surprise me at all.

The other thing I wanted to point out in that BBC quote above is this weird aside about Luster being part of “the Bachelors”? Whatever happened to that investigation? I can’t find anything about it, though when I Googled “the Bachelors, billionaires, international date rape ring” — the recent case of the Alexander brothers came up — which started to make my head hurt.

Two of the most successful luxury real estate brokers in the country (twins) and their younger brother, who covered security for them, all convicted of sex trafficking, drugging, and rape, after eleven women came forward to accuse them.

The Alexander brothers are now, allegedly, seeking a pardon from the president. This president really seems to like rapey sex traffickers. These are irrefutable facts at this point. It’s not only Epstein and Maxwell, it’s the Tate brothers. And potentially the Alexander brothers, who happen to have sold Ivanka and Jared their $24 million dollar mansion in Florida in 2021, and were reportedly “longterm brokers for the couple.” After a while, you have to recognize a pattern of behavior.

Back to Luster. He was caught because a young woman remembered what happened the next morning and went to the police.

They raided his house and found the 17 tapes. One of the women who had been filmed while unconscious went on to move in with Luster for a few months and have a full-fledged relationship with him, because she had no recollection of their first night together. She didn’t know what had happened to her for years. She just had a lingering uneasy feeling because he had a wall of photos of his “women friends” in bikinis, and he added her photo to the wall one day.

When she read he’d raped someone and police were asking women to call if they had information, she reached out. When she went to speak with them, they recognized her as one of the women in the videos. That’s how she found out.

In addition to the videos, police also found 13 illegal firearms, and illicit drugs. They arrested Luster, bail was set at $10 million, and he awaited his trial in jail. When the trial began, his attorneys asked that bail be reduced to $1 million so he could go home for the holidays with his family, under house arrest with an ankle monitor.

Let’s pause. In what world is a man who has been caught with tapes where he has clearly drugged and raped multiple women — oh, and also unregistered firearms (one of them an AK-47) and illegal drugs — going to have a judge let him go home for the holidays?

We all know the answer. A world where the legal system makes exceptions for billionaire white men — and where judges (and others) practice “himpathy” — a term coined by brilliant writer and philosopher Kate Manne. This tendency to feel concern for “good boys” and “good men” who’ve just taken a “bad turn” or made a “bad choice” that shouldn’t effect their whole lives, after all — happens in rape cases on such a frequent basis it’s a wonder we haven’t burned this whole thing to the ground.

The prosecutors argued Luster was a flight risk and asked the judge to please take into consideration his vast financial resources and connections. The judge would not be dissuaded and lowered the bail, which Luster paid promptly. Andrew Luster went home for the holidays. At some point he disappeared. When he did not show up in court after the holidays, police went to his house, then his mother’s.

She said she hadn’t heard from him. Some miraculous way, his German Shepherd was there with her, though. Meanwhile, the trial continued without him, and after a couple of months of brutally painful testimony from three of his victims — and the footage of all the others — he was convicted and sentenced to 124 years in absentia.

I guess this is the part where I will tell you I was assaulted when I was sixteen years old. I was assaulted by an adult I thought I could trust. When I told my mom (something I did not do right away because I was kicking myself for having had too much to drink, and “making bad choices”), she confronted this man.

He said it was consensual. She believed him, not me. That is the most abridged version of one of the most painful betrayals that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost more excruciating than this man robbing me of my own agency over my body, or any sense that I mattered as a person at all. As I was trying to gather myself up and try to think of reasons to hang on, she walked into the middle of that mess and broke my heart in a way that it still hurts to think about.

Maybe that’s why it continues to break my heart so profoundly when women hold up the system that harms them. I would probably be more devastated than furious if it weren’t for the fact that it harms all of us, and our daughters, too. If you want things to change, you can’t vote for people who don’t respect women. You can’t vote for people who hurt women. You can’t defend men and boys who demean or assault girls or women. You can’t laugh when they tell jokes, you can’t make excuses for them, or ignore it when they say demeaning things. Not if you care and want things to be different.

During those five months when no one knew where Luster was or if he’d ever be seen or heard from again, I went to a big dinner party with family and extended family and family friends. This was 2003 so I was 32. I had been paying attention to this case the way I always pay attention to cases like this, the way every survivor of assault pays attention to cases like this whether we want to or not.

Maybe we are hoping people will stop asking, What was she wearing? Or judges will stop putting such a high value on the “promise and potential” of the rapists who stand before them at the expense of the trust and value of the girls and women sitting in the courtroom who have been violated, betrayed, attacked in more ways than the one, and have — nonetheless — remained brave and resolute long enough to make it to the moment of sentencing, where they are hoping to get a modicum of justice and respect.

So, here we were at dinner, sixteen years after my mother had looked me in the eye and said, “He told me it was consensual, and I believed him.” A thing I had swallowed like a handful of glass, even though I knew the second the words left her mouth she had broken something between us that I wasn’t sure we were ever going to be able to fix. Even kintsugi has its limits.

Luster was “on the lam” a thing you hear in films from the thirties. I was sitting at this table and suddenly, I was hearing snippets of conversation about the trial, which people were talking about everywhere at the time.

A man I knew well was a few seats away. He was saying it made no sense, Andrew Luster was heir to the Max Factor fortune, and a good-looking guy on top of that! He could have any woman he wanted. He didn’t need to drug and rape anyone — obviously these women were gold-diggers.

I was frozen in my seat. My heart was racing and I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. My fork clattered to my plate. With all the noise and conversation, no one heard but my mother, who was staring at me. She was also frozen, with a look on her face I couldn’t place.

“There are tapes! There are seventeen videotapes of women who are unconscious because he drugged them and filmed it while he assaulted them! Actual tapes, not just their accusations. Proof! What more do you need!”

I got up too fast and my chair fell back and I was running away from the table because I couldn’t breathe. I was gasping trying to get air in my lungs. I hadn’t even realized I was the one who had erupted, the words were flying out of my mouth before I knew I was speaking. It was not like me to make a scene.

I’d been raised to be polite and never to talk back, and even though I was a grown woman, I would still avoid confrontation like that at a family event. Now people would wonder why this was so upsetting to me. Some of the women would probably figure it out.

Tears were flying and I wished I’d rented a car, because this dinner was outside the city and now I was stuck. I made it around the corner and out of sight, but I had no clue where to go. Suddenly my mom was behind me. At first I thought she was angry I’d upset the night, but she shocked me. She put her arms around me, something my mom did not often do.

I didn’t like to cry in front of her. I’d learned not to tell her things she could use against me the next time she was drunk, which was never too far in the future from whatever time it was currently. I’d learned not to let my guard down or let myself be vulnerable, but now she was being vulnerable and it threw me. I was sobbing, so at first I didn’t hear what she was saying, I just realized she was saying the same thing, over and over again, the way you might when you’re comforting a child.

“I’m so sorry, I believe you,” is what she was saying to me.

Andrew Luster’s mother has always been sympathetic to him. She has believed in his innocence regardless of the videos and the testimony she heard. Luster says the tapes were consensual and the women were making pornography films with him. His mother still believes it, or chooses to, even though you can hear and see some of the women snoring in these videos.

When interviewed she said, “I just felt that they were acting out sexual fantasies and private behavior that they never expected anyone else in the world to see. And something that people do in the privacy of their own home suddenly becomes international news.”

Andrew Luster’s sentence was reduced from 124 years to 50 years because the original judge did not specify why he should serve consecutive sentences instead of concurrent ones at the time of sentencing — a thing California state law requires. But because of a loophole that opened in 2013 which reclassified rape of an unconscious person as a nonviolent crime (a loophole that has since been closed by Governor Newsom, but not in time to effect Luster’s release), he will go home on Halloween, this year. October 31st, 2026. He is sixty-one.

I can’t think of too many things scarier than that. But I’m sure his mother will be happy.

In this episode, I read the essay — a thing I don’t always do — and then talked about some of the issues we are all grappling with — what has happened that we’ve gotten to a place where something like this could occur? Why is it that such an alarming number of men from all walks of life are dehumanizing women this way? How do we get more of the good men to be part of this conversation, actively and loudly? Ultimately, how do we change things — because this is not sustainable or okay.

If you want to skip the essay part because you’ve read it, you can jump to minute 36. If you haven’t read the comments under the essay, I would encourage you to do that — there are so many women sharing their own stories and perspectives, and so many men who genuinely want to help. In almost 200 comments, there is only one mansplainer, and I feel pretty certain he used AI to help him write his response —which is so on-brand if you wrote it into a TV script, you’d get a note back that it was too “on the nose.”

There are a lot of stories right now that are difficult to process. My heart is absolutely shattered for the Elkins/Pugh families in Shreveport, Louisiana. My heart is also broken for the children of Cerina and Justin Fairfax, who now have to live without both of their parents, because their father killed their mother and then himself, while the kids were in the house. Their sixteen-year-old son made the 911 call. In both cases, the wives had asked for a divorce. It is worth noting the most dangerous time for women in domestic violence situations is the time period right after they try to leave.

There were some who misread the CNN report about the Rape Academy and the 62 million views, and thought that meant there were 62 million men who watched. It could be there were 31 million men who visited the site twice a day. It could be they went to the site to watch other content, and only some percentage watched the unconscious wives who had no idea they were being raped and filmed.

However many men, it was is too many. If there were 70-plus men who took part in the Pelicot case in France for years — in addition to Gisele’s husband, and there are women in the U.K. and Canada and Poland and the U.S. whose husbands are also doing this, I think we need to assume it’s happening everywhere. There are multiple sites hosting this content, not just the one. There is a chat room for men who want to learn how to do this to their own wives.

Trying to make this conversation about math right now is not the move — unless you want to out yourself as a man who genuinely doesn’t care, and likes things the way they are. I am happy and thankful to say there aren’t any men like that in the comments section, or anywhere in my life. Nor will there be.

I am hopeful that men who have been saying “not all men” will take this opportunity to start having conversations with the boys and men in their own lives, and to reflect on how they feel about women, genuinely. We have a systemic problem. If you aren’t clear on that, please educate yourself about rape cases in the U.S. generally. Please educate yourself about custody rulings when there has been abuse and a mother asks for supervised visitation. Please educate yourself about marital rape laws, because while marital rape is illegal in all 50 states, in 30 of those states, there are loopholes. As in today, right now.

When more than half the population in a society is being devalued, disrespected, demeaned, degraded or abused, that society is in jeopardy. There is no “male loneliness epidemic” but there is a male violence epidemic that needs to be talked about, understood, and rooted out — and we definitely need the good men in this conversation, talking to the men and boys in their sphere of influence.

We don’t need you to save us, we aren’t damsels and I think every one of us can look around and see this isn’t a fairytale. Even a Grimm fairytale is less dark and twisted than whatever this is. But we do need and want you to get involved. We all deserve a better story.

Sending love to all, old friends and new.

When my marriage ended, my son was four years old and my daughter was eighteen months old and still nursing. I had no desire whatsoever to go sit in a restaurant and order a drink and — oh my god, are you kidding me — try to have a conversation with someone about where they grew up or what they liked to do on the weekend. My head was not in that game at all.

I was in business with my not-yet ex, the kids lived with me full-time, and all I cared about was making sure they were okay — that they felt secure and happy and loved, and our house was full of laughter and joy. By the time my mom started wondering how I would meet anyone since I only ever worked or was home building couch forts — and it wasn’t likely someone was going to show up on my doorstep in a bow — the divorce had been final for a few years, the kids were thriving, and I had started to think maybe it was time to put myself out there again. So I stuck a toe in the dating app waters.

I made a profile the way you do, put up recent pictures, said true things about who I was and what I wanted and didn’t want, didn’t answer any of the sex questions because wtf, why would anyone tell the entire internet about that, and hit publish. I don’t know how to explain what happened, and I don’t have to if you’re a woman. To be clear, I had never been on a dating app before. I had social media profiles and I’d been blogging since 2009 (back when we blogged), so I was no stranger to being a woman on the internet, or having people “slide into my DMs” in the parlance of the oldish days — but I was not ready for this.

I’ll skip all the messages you can guess, the ones with zero creativity and no punctuation, the dudes who wanted to ride over on their Harleys and head up the PCH for lunch like I’ve never seen Dateline. We don’t have to discuss the men who were way out of my stated age-range (on both sides of the spectrum lol) messaging me at 11pm on a Saturday night wondering if my kids were asleep and if I wanted some company. As though I’d ever allow some guy I don’t know to have my address and come to my house — let alone while my tiny children were asleep in the other room.

Then there were the dick pics, and there were a lot of them. I both do and don’t want to talk about this. I do not get it, that’s the only part worth discussing. Did someone on reddit say this was a good idea at some point? I instantly blocked, because that’s the kind of guy who thinks having a dick makes him special I guess. Why else lead with that? Not even hello, just — bam, here’s my dick — like he’s taking advice from Louis CK.

If you’re a guy, I am kind of assuming you have a dick, and if I want to see it, you’ll know. If I haven’t asked, I do not want to see it. Super easy. I won’t speak for all women, but every woman I know feels this same way, and I know a lot of women. Maybe part of it is we are always dealing with dicks whether we want to or not, so it gets old and boring and — oh yeah, it’s a violation. There isn’t any consent if you whip out your dick in person or online. Just boom, dick in your face. Not great.

Eventually, I went to meet a guy for dinner. He seemed interesting, funny and smart. He even used punctuation. I got to the restaurant first, which was fine — I was early, and he was driving from the other side of town during rush hour. I went to the bar and ordered a glass of wine while I waited. It was a popular place, but not hopping yet. There were plenty of people having dinner outside, and three men a couple of barstools away from me. The bartender was getting ready for the night ahead, moving around, making sure the bar was stocked.

The three guys started talking to me. They seemed like they’d been there for a while, they were speaking more loudly than necessary. I was polite, but not friendly. I am pretty well-versed in the land of dealing with people who’ve had a lot to drink. One of the guys, the one closest to me, came over and put his arm around me and asked why a woman so hot was alone at a bar on a Friday night.

I slipped out from under his arm and slid off the barstool, said I was waiting for someone and was going to the restroom. I smiled the way women do when they don’t want to die — but I was aggravated. His buddies laughed. He said he hoped I was waiting for a hot girlfriend to join me. I said, Sorry, not your night, and went inside. I didn’t need the restroom, I just wanted to get away so I could strategize. My date texted he was stuck in traffic, but almost there. No worries, I texted back. I thought about asking if we could meet somewhere else, but couldn’t think of a place nearby. Plus, I could handle this. I’m from New York City.

I returned to the bar. The three guys were still there, but now they’d moved down the bar right next to where I’d been sitting, and they’d ordered a round of shots. One for me, too. I said thanks, I appreciated it, but no thanks, and asked the bartender if I could be seated. “Oh, come on!” the handsy guy said, “lighten up and have a shot with us. Your date is late. His loss, not smart to leave a woman like you waiting!” The bartender looked at me then, like he was understanding what was going on for the first time.

“Hey fellas, she said no,” he said, “I’ll do the shot with you when I get back,” and he came out from behind the bar, grabbed my wine, and brought me to a table. “Sorry about those guys,” he said, “they’ve been here for a couple of hours. That one guy is a real asshole.” I nodded, sat down, and texted my best friend. Told her what was happening. Had a little more of my wine.

Then the guy came over and sat down at the table like we were playing a game. “Listen,” I said, “I need you to go back to the bar. I’m waiting for someone, this is not cool.” I looked over, hoping the bartender was on his way, but now a man and woman were at the bar where I’d been sitting, and he was getting their drinks. The other two guys waved at me — clearly, they thought this was funny. “Why are you being such a bitch?” their friend asked, and his eyes flashed in a way that was familiar and made my heart pick up the beat. “Your date is really late, and I’m into you. Why don’t you just hang out with me, instead?”

It was clear he wasn’t going to leave, so I got up, but as soon as I stood, everything got hazy and I collapsed back into my chair. My knees knocked together. The room had gone sideways, and everything looked grey. I felt like I might pass out. I gripped the table. I thought maybe I’d stood up too fast — I have low blood pressure, and sometimes that happens. He laughed, reached forward and put his hand on my thigh, squeezed it. “Don’t fucking touch me,” I growled, batting his hand away, but my words came out like one word, slurred together, Dontfuckingtouchme. I sounded like my mom, after a bottle of wine.

He grinned. “Are you okay? How much have you had to drink? Do you need a ride home?” I looked at him carefully. I felt sick. I have no tolerance when it comes to alcohol, but I’d only had a glass of wine, and it wasn’t a large glass. There’s no way I could be this woozy. “I’m fine,” I said, “I just stood up too fast.” I had to focus on enunciating every word.

I got up carefully and looked toward the bar which seemed very far away now, and this time the bartender saw me. I walked toward him unsteadily, trying to find the floor underneath my feet with each step. It was like walking on a boat at sea in heels. I must have looked scared because he walked out from behind the bar and met me halfway, grabbing my elbow. “Something isn’t right,” I said to him, “I think he spiked my drink, I don’t feel well. I’m going to call a friend to come get me. Please don’t leave me alone with him or let him pull me outside.”

“Oh my god,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the guy, “Do you want me to call the police? Do you want an ambulance?”

I didn’t want any of that. I wasn’t positive I was right, all I wanted at that moment was to get away from the whole situation and get back to my house. I sat down at the bar and texted my best friend, asking her to come — not the kind of thing I’d ever done before. The bartender got me some water and called the manager over. The manager went to talk to the two guys still at the bar — their friend had gone outside. Apparently they apologized their friend had “bothered” me, settled their tab in cash, and took off.

My girlfriend pulled up in front of the place as my date was walking in. By then I felt certain something had happened — either that guy put something in my drink, or I had food poisoning from something I’d eaten the day before — though I hadn’t eaten anything my kids hadn’t eaten, and they were fine.

I told my date I was sorry, but obviously I needed to reschedule. He said it went without saying, and helped me into my friend’s car. He asked my girlfriend if she could stay with me overnight. She could and did. They exchanged numbers and he asked her to keep him posted.

I went home and vomited violently all night, until it didn’t seem possible there was anything left. I had a blinding headache for 18 hours. I had tears streaming down my face from exhaustion and from my stomach cramping like it was in some kind of vise grip. I was pale and shaky and miserable. Much of the night was a blur. When I wasn’t vomiting, I’d pass out again on the cold bathroom floor because I needed to be near the toilet. My girlfriend told me things in the morning I did not remember at all, and still don’t. I came out of the bathroom naked at one point and told her it was because my clothes hurt and my skin needed to release the poison.

The poison is everywhere. I think it’s important we all realize this now. When the Swalwell stuff started coming out I was dismayed like everyone. Disgusted. Especially when I saw his video denying the allegations, saying this was happening because he was the Democratic front-running candidate for governor, and he would fight back legally if necessary.

There was something about the way he was squinting, rocking his body forward for emphasis, like he had to use momentum to get the words out, and the way he was breathing — that shallow chest breathing. It was all the body language of a caged narcissist. A man who can’t quite believe it’s over, who thinks if he says it forcefully enough, he can bend reality to his will.

He must have known what was coming. Maybe he made that video so he could wake up in the same house with his kids a few more mornings, to see them look at him with all that love and trust before their world falls apart because he turns out to be an absolute monstrosity. Allegedly. I put that there for my own legal protection, not because I have any doubt.

People challenging the women who’ve come forward have no clue how hard it is to step into the arena and accuse a man of assault, especially when time has gone by. Not that it’s easy at the time, either, especially when he’s a powerful person and you are not — like a big-time congressman, and a twenty-one-year-old staffer.

There is no good time when every time a woman comes forward to say she’s been assaulted, people doubt her, men and women alike. They want to know how much she had to drink. Why was she having drinks with the guy if she didn’t like him. What she was wearing. Whether she said no.

Also, why did she keep working for him after it happened, if it wasn’t consensual?

When you are in your early twenties right out of college and you get your dream job as an intern working for a congressperson or a senator or an ad executive or a novelist or an attorney or a spiritual guru — and this person you admire so much is paying attention to you and making you feel special — and then the interaction starts to get a little strange, but you aren’t totally sure — you probably won’t want to ask anyone, because what if you’re wrong?

You won’t want to say anything to your mom, for example, because she’ll freak out, and if you’re making “something out of nothing”, maybe you’ll mess up a really great break you’ve gotten for yourself. What if she calls the office or shows up or does something embarrassing? Surely it’s all okay. So many people admire the person you’re working for, this is a huge break. People would kill for this opportunity. It must be you, misreading things.

Maybe those disappearing Snapchat messages are not so inappropriate, and maybe having drinks with your boss is a grown-up thing to do. By the time you know it isn’t okay you’re in over your head, and you try to manage the situation on your own, and somehow keep your great job.

Maybe you can just flirt and walk the line, and that will satisfy him. And then one night if your boss slips something in your drink and you end up in his hotel room, well. Is anyone going to feel sorry for you? Why didn’t you say something sooner? Plus, you don’t know he slipped something in your drink, you think you just drank too much — another reason to feel ashamed. You won’t know he slipped something in your drink for years, until another woman comes forward and describes meeting this person for drinks in the same way. You’re too young to know this isn’t your fault, and he — the grown man — is the one who should be held accountable for the real and conscious choices he made. You were prey, you just didn’t know it, and the people around him didn’t warn you.

When two different women said they’d met Swalwell for drinks, woken up in his hotel room the next morning, and felt confused because the “night was a blur” I felt ill. Alcohol alone does not do that.

Lots of people second guess themselves and talk themselves out of their feelings when they’re young, especially women. We’ve been trained to be polite. We’ve been taught no one will believe us or back us up. We kick ourselves for being so dumb, for putting ourselves in a vulnerable position in the first place. Ask me how I know. Do you think we don’t see what happens when women come forward?

Representative Tony Gonzalez (R, Texas, Uvalde) also lied when his sexual misconduct came to light. He said it wasn’t true, and then he avoided the media and refused to answer questions about it for months while he ran for re-election. He has six kids with his wife, Angel. His family figures prominently in his political persona, he describes himself as a “conservative, religious, family-values man.” Uh-huh.

His personal life became a topic of investigation when a former aide, Regina Santos-Aviles, took her own life. She was married with an eight-year-old little boy. Rep. Tony Gonzalez harassed her, took advantage of his position as her boss, pressured her for nude photos, and sent sexually explicit texts. A second aide has come forward to say he did the same with her. Very family values. Very upstanding.

It’s noteworthy that Mike Johnson and Republicans in the House demanded that Gonzalez drop his re-election campaign when this came to light, but did not require him to resign from Congress — because they held only a 2-seat majority over the Democrats. It’s a game to these people. Once Swalwell resigned, it cost them nothing to do the right thing. That’s why both resignations happened on the same day. Why does it have to cost them nothing before they’ll do the right thing?

Or, to put it another way, why isn’t integrity worth anything?

It should be noted, it was women who made it happen, on both sides of the aisle:

It took the voices of female members of Congress–particularly, Democratic Women’s Caucus Chairwoman Teresa Leger Fernández and Republican Rep. Anna Paulina of Florida–to lead the charge to take out the trash.

“Two Latinas, I would point out,” Leger Fernández told The Independent. She said her leadership was helpful in her push to kick out Swalwell.

“What we had was we had Republicans refusing to move against against Gonzales,” she said. “But we needed the votes, and that’s what both Anna Paulina and I could do is we knew we could deliver the votes for the expulsion, because we needed two thirds votes.”

Still, that is a stinging indictment that accountability comes if neither side experiences political pain or consequences for ignorance or looking away.

Luna–a pro-Trump conservative who nonetheless works with Democrats on legislation to ban members of Congress from trading stocks to ending nonconsensual deepfake AI porn–sounded even more adamant.

“Both sides on leadership didn’t want to call on them to resign,” she told The Independent as she walked into Johnson’s office while pushing her son’s stroller. “I felt like I was willing to metaphorically shoot the hostage.”

Luna pointed out that constitutionally, Congress has the right to set its own rules. But that lack of oversight and external protocol allows for fertile ground for creeps of all political stripes.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy went on ABC’s “This Week” and said, “Every member in Congress knows not to let any young staffer around Swalwell or Matt Gaetz, it’s not a secret there.” Lovely.

Former San Francisco Mayor Wille Brown said he wasn’t surprised because there have been “rumors after rumors after rumors” for years, and, “that’s what Adam Schiff said, and what Nancy Pelosi said.” So it would seem it was widely understood Eric Swalwell and Matt Gaetz were two predators, and you should never send young female staffers to be alone with them, because young female staffers would not be safe due to all the trafficky and rapey things they do.

I saw a video on instagram with a clip of Kevin McCarthy saying all that, and a woman expressing her utter disdain, asking why men do not call this shit out. How it is really ironic the way men like to think of themselves as “protectors” and how pissed some men get over the whole “choosing the bear” thing, but this is why. And this is also why it was infuriating to watch the Olympic Men’s Hockey Team laugh at the shitty misogynistic “joke” of the demented old man in the Golden Oval, because if you laugh along, you’re part of the problem, and if you say nothing, you’re also part of the problem. It’s all the same problem.

But some guy in the comments chimed in with, “How is this not Kevin McCarthy calling it out?” and my head exploded a little. I don’t think I need to explain this to anyone who reads my stuff, but if you’ve been walking around Congress for years knowing some guy is not to be trusted with young female staffers because everyone has heard despicable rumors — like maybe he sends dick pics on Snapchat or she might wake up in his hotel room and not remember what happened, or he seems to like underage girls — and your solution is to warn people with a whisper and a wink?

That is not calling it out. That is upholding the system that harms young girls and women as if there’s not another damn thing you can do about it. Calling it out is calling the po po, or calling your reporter friend or telling the bastard yourself it’s time to quit or you’re telling your buddy at the FBI or walking over to the DOJ. I mean, you’re right there, my god. How is this not Kevin McCarthy calling it out?

Here’s another one. Let’s say you live in France, in a small town in southeastern Provence, and somehow you hear about this website where men drug their wives and rape them and invite other men to come and rape them, too. You don’t decide to become one of the men who does that, you appelez la police.

Turns out that is not a French thing, not that I thought it was. Men drug, rape, and film their wives in the U.K., in the U.S., in Poland, in Canada, in France — at this point I think we have to assume it’s happening everywhere. There are sites set up specifically for this, and coded hashtags, and chat-rooms, and an academy where men can learn how to do it, too. Rape Academy.

Men upload their “content” — videos of them raping their unconscious wives — and there’s a big audience waiting to watch and happy to pay. One of these sites had 62 million visits in February alone, and its core audience is in the United States. It’s a real brotherhood of men who absolutely despise women, who have no respect for them at all. I could cry. I am somewhere between rage, despair, and nausea.

I want to encourage you to prepare yourself if you click on that link above. It’s not that there are pictures or videos or anything. It’s that there are casual screenshots of men telling other men what they gave their wives to knock them out so they can try it, too. The mothers of their children in many cases. The women who tell them where their keys are, and buy the cheese they like, and do their laundry. Those wives. Who usually also work and do the lion’s share of the household cleaning and childcare. Now I am crying. I don’t understand. What is the issue? What is the fucking issue?

I was absorbing/processing all this and watching people here in California scramble to figure out who they were going to support now that Swalwell dropped out of the governor’s race — quick note, how come we’re all talking about how women really need to take over, but not that woman? Every. Time.

I literally watched a woman I know scrunch up her nose and say she didn’t want to vote for Katie Porter because she’s “mean” and she’s probably taking Ozempic. That she’s lost a lot of weight, and now her closeups don’t look good because her skin is sagging, and even though we don’t like to admit it, that stuff matters here in California, wink, shrug! Omfg.

A woman said that to me, a woman. She probably uses the hashtag women supporting women, unironically.

I’ll tell you one thing Katie Porter isn’t doing. She isn’t whipping her dick out or harassing any of her 21-year-old staffers for nude pics as far as I know. She isn’t drugging young interns and assaulting them. I know it’s a low bar, but look at what people do — that’s my point. When the “scandal” of the two Katie Porter videos came out — one where she told a staffer to “get the fuck out of her shot” and another where she almost walked out of an interview — she apologized and said she could have handled the interview better. She’d already apologized to the staffer. I can’t remember the last time we saw a male politician apologize for anything, can you? There isn’t a single candidate who is perfect, but I’m voting for Katie Porter.

We have to stop this thing of saying we want women to lead, but then disqualifying every woman who shows up because of her emails or her joyful laughter or because she’s “mean.” Maybe her interpersonal skills need some work, but I bet I’d be feeling pretty mean, too, if I was surrounded by a bunch of men failing upward all the time, and everyone knew, and I had to keep performing at some ridiculous standard while they could go to Vegas and act like the human embodiment of flesh-eating bacteria.

Anyway, I was integrating the latest shitstorm of news and feeling thankful that at least I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday, because who doesn’t want the golden healing lightning that shoots out of their doctor’s hands while they fly around the room and angels sing? My doctor is a woman and she doesn’t usually show up in robes, but I figured, maybe this was the day. Maybe she’d even tell me to say three Hail Marys and call her in the morning.

But I signed onto Substack in the waiting room, my sweet corner of the internet where at least I know my writer friends are creating essays and poems that will make me laugh or cry or nod or think about something in a different way, and this incredible community of readers will add comments that are so interesting or funny or thought-provoking, that sometimes it’s all the hope I need … and I saw that Andrew Tate had been allowed to join the platform, and not only that, he’d imported his huge email list, so he’d shot straight to the top of the new bestseller’s list.

Andrew Tate, the joke of a man who tells women he loves raping them, and if a woman is assaulted she “bears some responsibility” and women are “inherently lazy” and there’s no such thing as an “independent woman.” The man who said, “I’m a realist and when you’re a realist, you’re sexist. There’s no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist.” Andrew Tate with active, pending, human trafficking cases, and trafficking of minor cases, and criminal charges of organized crime and multiple charges of rape in the U.K. and Romania.

He’s been banned from Meta platforms and YouTube and Tik Tok and Twitter — though Elon reinstated him when he made it X because he loves his bros and he has no problem with hate speech or misogyny. Which is not the same as free speech, in case anyone needed to be reminded. Most platforms draw the line at: Communication that encourages an audience to condone or inflict harm, often by dehumanizing a target group. Like women, for example.

I call him a joke of a man, because when Lucy Williamson interviewed him in Romania with the BBC, he didn’t look her in the eye and own the things he’d said. That’s what a real man would do, right? He’d be calm. What is there to get upset about if you’re just being asked about the things you’ve said and the things you believe? He got combative and tried to talk over her, though, and denied saying those things at all. He said she’d, “found quotes on the internet.” Hahahaha. She did. They were his quotes that he’d put on his own damn site. He folded like the weak little scaredy-boy he is. “I never said that. I never did those things.” He might as well have said, “You’re not my Mommy, you’re not the boss of me, you can’t make me.”

There’s a reason preteen boys are his target audience. They’re feeling as uncomfortable and uncertain as they ever will, and he gets in there and tells them how to be a man. He says “feminism” has ruined everything, and strong women are the reason the world is messed up and unfair. The world was better when women knew their place, and girls know this, deep inside. They like a boy who takes charge. They like a man who tells them what to do and keeps them in check. They like money. They like fast cars. Because they can be bought, see? Like property. Here’s how you make money, boys. Here’s how you get muscles. This is what strength looks like.

But he gets furious and defensive instantly when an intelligent woman asks him to show his work. He can’t handle it. That isn’t strength.

I suppose it was naive to think Substack would be different from any other platform, though there are tons of accounts reporting and blocking him (mine included) and he clearly imported his own email list — it’s not like the Substack community is interested in his toxic waste. It looks like his list is full of bot accounts. I don’t expect he will find many people who will engage with his “ideas” and that is as it should be. No one needs to debate whether women bear responsibility for being assaulted. Some things simply deserve no oxygen, and that’s where I’ll leave this. Perhaps his stint will be short-lived. One can hope.

You know what, though? Women can fix the bigger problem with him. Because the bigger problem is not where he is, it’s that he is. We need some nineteen or twenty-year-old woman with a big social media presence to talk to boys about girls and what they like. Who would know more about that, after all — some 40-year-old man who’s been arrested for hurting girls — or a young woman who was a girl not long ago, and knows how girls think and what makes them laugh, and what they hope a boy will say or do?

I know boys are smart and kind, and if you give them a chance, they’ll listen. I know because I raised one, and he turned into a wonderful young man who respects women and genuinely likes them, too.

We need to get more intentional in so many areas. I think about the fairytales we were raised on, the brave, charming, handsome prince who was supposed to rescue the damsel in distress, the evil stepmother, the banished witch, the mean step-sisters, the fairy godmothers, the lack of representation for anyone who isn’t white in any of these stories, the way — even here — people with money are safe and people without can be taken advantage of, even if they’re kind and they do everything right — unless some magical spell is cast or broken.

I don’t know what is going on with far too many (mostly straight, mostly white) men, but I suspect it’s the same poison that’s harming so many of us girls and women, people of color, members of the queer community, anyone who is not part of this club that isn’t even kind to its own members. It’s this patriarchal chest-pounding flag-planting bomb-dropping planet-eating ideology where they are at the top of the food chain and the rest of us are existing in their world and at their mercy and for their pleasure. We are not theirs for the taking, though, and neither is this planet. We’re all just visitors here, and we are all deserving of dignity.

It isn’t normal to want to dominate and harm people, in case that needs to be said. I no longer know what needs to be said. It isn’t normal to take pleasure in hurting people you claim to love. It isn’t normal to get off on watching people suffer. It isn’t normal to treat human beings as expendable — any of them. It isn’t normal to whip your dick out unless someone asks you to do that. It isn’t normal to use up 5 million gallons of water a day so you can chat with your phone, it’s criminal. It isn’t normal to think we can afford to use 32 billion gallons of water annually so Claude can write your grocery list — and that’s the water usage projection for 2028. The billionaires don’t care.

They’re at the very top of this broken food chain, and a lot of straight white men think they’re in the club because they bought a red hat. Meanwhile, they would not even let them mop the floor. Look at the farmers bemoaning the fertilizer crisis. Conservative women who are confused, please note: Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi. You will always be expendable in the Boys’ Club. They don’t even want us to vote, and some of y’all are like, “Oh, no problem, here’s my vote, my husband can do it for the household!” Your grandmothers are not resting in peace, ladies, and your daughters will grow up to loathe you if you don’t get ahold of yourselves. No one wants to live in Gilead, watch the show if you need to. The wives are not safe, either. FFS.

It isn’t normal to join a chat room to learn how to drug and rape your wife, but I guess if the men you listen to are telling you women are the problem and immigrants are the problem and queer people are the problem, and men on women’s sports teams are the problem, maybe you’re so pissed the rage is coming out in all kinds of dark and horrifying ways. It isn’t normal to join a site where you can watch other men raping their unconscious wives and think that’s something to emulate.

It isn’t normal to take advantage of the young people who work for you, or anyone who works for you — if you are someone’s boss, you have power over them and you should not date them. If you can’t handle that, you should not be anyone’s boss. It is not normal to want to have sex with minors if you’re an adult. Get help, and stay away from minors.

Maybe some less obvious things, because I did not know there was a Rape Academy. I am now going to say if you are a man and you have felt upset and found yourself saying “not all men”, I hope now you are starting to understand how dark and bleak things are for women. Please help. I’m really asking, from my heart. Please make your position clear. Don’t let us women be the only people loudly and passionately calling this out. We have been alone out here. We have gotten used to it, but that doesn’t make it okay.

Please don’t laugh at sexist jokes anymore, or even let them slide. Start teaching your buddies today. Your sons, your nephews. Please stop yourself from making the, “she’s nagging me again” [eyeroll] comments. Please stop doubting your female friends’ lived experiences if you have been. If a woman friend tells you someone makes her feel uncomfortable, or something is happening “because she’s a woman” don’t tell her she’s wrong. Vote for women when possible. Don’t rule them out because you don’t like their laugh. Don’t ever vote for a rapist. Don’t ever vote for a man who says he grabs women by the pussy and try to look your daughter in the eye. Ever.

Feminism just means you believe women and men are equally valuable human beings, intrinsically. It doesn’t mean you think women are better. Wanting to be done with the patriarchy doesn’t mean “erasing male voices” which is what a man said to me a while back. It means we make a circle, and men and women (and I am including everyone when I say men and women) are in the circle, no one is on top. The most vulnerable people are in the middle of the circle, being lifted up.

Once Upon a Time there was a princess in a tower.

She liked the views from up there, but it was getting late, so she walked down the stairs and through the forest…

ass/u/me

Nonetheless, I’m going to guess that those of us who grew up with a certain kind of chaos, violence and uncertainty are feeling pretty exhausted right now. If you were the kind of kid who learned to scan the environment, to read the signs so you could see the danger coming and ward it off, duck-and-cover, or cajole it away, what we’ve been going through over the last few days in this country — and globally — feels all too familiar.

There are few things worse as a child than feeling powerless and knowing you’re not safe. There’s nowhere you can go and nothing you can do. You don’t have the means to get yourself out of the situation you’re in — someone else is calling the shots, and no matter what you do or say, or how hard you try, they can destroy you. They can hurt you physically and emotionally. They can obliterate everything you care about.

We are not children anymore. This awful man is not our mom or dad, but 77 million people gave him the keys to the car, and we’re all buckled into this vehicle. If he drives us off a cliff — and he could — there isn’t a lot we can do about it if the people who are supposed to stop him refuse to act. So far they are refusing to act.

It is the year 2026. Okay, so no flying cars like the Jetsons, but we just had people on the far side of the moon, further from earth than anyone has ever been. It is shameful and pathetic that we are still bombing/shooting/killing people to get what we want like a bunch of Neanderthals. Maybe we aren’t using clubs, but is this our idea of evolution — bigger, more technologically-advanced weapons that can kill more people? What an epic failure.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 9 countries combined. We’re a freaking war machine. Why don’t we have a Department of Diplomacy instead of a Department of Defense — let alone a Department of War?

Why would we choose to head further in the wrong direction, led by the wrong people, with all the wrong ideas? A bunch of billionaires in red hats pretending to be Republicans, surrounded by white Christian nationalists spewing wildly misogynistic, racist, bigoted bro-speak, led by an adulterous friend-to-pedophiles and adjudicated-rapist-convicted-felon, suffering from dementia who thinks he’s a king. Fantastic.

I don’t want to go off a cliff with a crazy mad lunatic, thanks! Doesn’t sound fun to me.

I don’t want robots thinking for me, and I don’t want to give up farmland we need to build huge AI data centers — which are using more water (large AI data centers use roughly 5 million gallons of water PER DAY) — and prolonging our dependence on fossil fuels. At least 17 fossil fuel generators that were scheduled to close are delayed or at risk of delay, and there are 20 new fossil fuel projects being planned.

Guess who benefits? I think you know. The billionaires who own the oil companies, and the billionaires who own the AI companies. Guess who suffers first? I think you know. Low-income communities across the country.

When people from these communities start talking about their kids who suddenly have asthma and other respiratory problems, or they start showing up with disproportionate numbers of cancer cases, or they can’t sleep at night because the hum from these data centers is so loud or the light is so bright … no one cares and no one listens until it’s too late and too many children have died. We’ve seen this film before. Do we have to wait for Julia Roberts to win another Oscar before people care…again?

I know a lot of you love your ChatGPT and your Claude, but please, for the love of your kids, or your friends’ kids, please educate yourself about what you are doing. We need to pull it together. I don’t expect other people to feel the way I do about everything, but I do expect people to face reality when it’s shoved right up in their faces.

I’m tired and sad and utterly sick of this ride. I wish there was a pull cord like they used to have on the public buses I rode in New York City as a kid. It was this plastic-coated wire that ran along the windows and you’d pull on it and it would activate a spring-loaded striker to ring a bell to let the driver know you wanted to get off at the next stop.

The driver of the bus we’re on wouldn’t care, though. He’d yell, “Quiet, Piggy!” and drive wherever he wanted. Not that he’s driving anywhere himself, he’s got a driver who can’t afford health insurance or groceries and has two other jobs just to keep the lights on at home.

I know there are people in other countries watching and wondering why we aren’t fighting harder. Part of me agrees, though I’m not sure everyone understands what we’re dealing with here. If we want to fight — but also keep it legal and constitutional — our options are limited.

We’d need Republican senators to find their morals and ethics, and it seems they lost them a long time ago. I’d love for them to prove me wrong, but what is it going to take? The president openly threatened to commit war crimes with our military on Easter Sunday. His “tweet” was so off the rails I thought it was fake when I saw it. Me. A person who thinks this man is absolutely unhinged.

I went to verify it because I could not imagine he’d hit “post” on something that vile and openly in violation of Geneva Conventions — let alone an on-the-record threat to commit genocide. You don’t go after civilian infrastructure — power plants and bridges? But it was real. He said it. He doubled down on it the next day. He said, ”A whole civilization will die tonight.”

He gave his deadline of 8pm, like it was some kind of reality tv show, and I guess it is. We’re all extras in his reality tv show now, because of 77 million people, in a country of 340 million.

It’s true, we have choices. Those of us in despair could go to the Capitol like a bunch of wild animals and attack capitol police officers with flagpoles and bear spray, and bring a noose and scream for Mike Johnson and break down doors and make our way onto the Senate floor. We could defecate there, and rub feces on the walls. We could run through the halls looking for Nancy Mace’s office, we could demand that this lawless administration be removed, or try to remove them ourselves.

Here’s why that will never happen. The MAGA people who support the current president do things like that, and/or turn a blind eye when their fellow MAGA “compatriots” do. If they weren’t there that day being violent and breaking laws, they defend what happened, or they are absolutely silent on the events of that day. It is very strange, because they are the exact same people who will comment under posts about Liam Ramos and his family, and smugly declare they are getting what they deserve, because they broke the law. Even though they broke no law.

People who do not support this president would never attack the Capitol building of the country we love. I felt sick to my stomach watching what happened that day, I watched with tears in my eyes and my hand over my mouth. My heart raced. We would never attack the capitol police. But you know if we did, ICE would shoot us on the spot, and the supporters of the president would say we got what we deserved and you can’t break the law, shrug. We should have stayed home minding our own business. They’d laugh at our friends crying their lib tears. They’d say we should have thought about our kids, not realizing that’s why we were there, risking our lives in the first place.

What do you do with that kind of hypocrisy and heartlessness? What do you say when people like that throw a little salt at you by professing to be “Christian”? You can’t be pro-life and also support a man who just threatened to wipe out an entire civilization, but if you’re too blind to see how that math doesn’t math, I can’t help you. If you say you’re a Christian who believes in God and thinks Jesus is the son of God, why do you imagine God only cares about the white babies? How do you not know that Jesus was brown? Why don’t you realize Jesus would throw himself in front of every ICE agent with a gun to save every child? To put it really simply for you — wtf?

I think those of us who can, should be in the streets and not just once every few months. I think we’ve passed the breaking point now and we should stop trying to go on with our normal lives. There’s nothing normal about any of this. I think we ought to be at state capitol buildings and our senators’ offices and anywhere and everywhere we can be. I think anyone who can go to D.C. should do it.

I think we absolutely keep it nonviolent because I don’t think they’d hesitate to shoot us, sorry to say. They’ve made that clear. I believe in nonviolence, anyway. The only time I’d change that stance is if you came for my kids, or anyone else’s. All children belong to all of us — the grown ups in charge — and I’d put my body in front of anyone’s baby. I’d do it without thinking and without hesitation, and that’s not a flex. That’s a normal baseline of humanity.

Making phone calls to our reps and boycotting Amazon and Target? Yeah, that is not enough. I know very well “getting out in the streets” is not going to be possible for everyone. It’s not like I can be in the streets every day, I have two kids to feed and a business to run and a book I’m finishing and a dog to love and bills to pay. I get it. I’m saying, as much as possible. As often as we can.

This president is not well. Anyone pretending otherwise at this point is willfully putting themselves and everyone else in danger. Just a real quick recap, since he’s now declaring “victory” and his merry band of soulless enablers is backing him up:

The Strait of Hormuz was open, and ships from all over the world passed through with no issue until this president decided to go to war with Iran without provocation, congressional approval, or the will of the American people. He just did it.

It has cost America — meaning us, the American taxpayers — $47 BILLION dollars so far, and that is not including the estimated $8.4 to $10 billion more Americans have spent on gas since February 28th because of this mess. American bombs have killed 170 Iranian school girls, and thousands of civilians in Iran and Lebanon. At least 13 U.S service members have died, and another 381 have been seriously injured. There are unconfirmed reports that those numbers are much higher. There is no regime change in Iran — the people who have taken over are more radical than the people who were in power before.

So what is this “victory”? In exchange for the very fragile two week ceasefire, the man who managed to get the Strait of Hormuz closed — throwing the entire world into a state of economic disarray while accomplishing nothing but death and economic mayhem — has now agreed to work with the 10-point plan Iran has drawn up to reopen it.

Iran will control the Strait of Hormuz, but now all ships passing through will pay $2 million each to go toward repairing the damage the U.S. just caused. All primary and secondary Iranian sanctions will be lifted. The U.S. will withdraw from the Middle East. There will be an end to the attacks on Iran and its allies, and a release of Iran’s frozen assets.

My god, the winning! What’s next, gonorrhea for everyone?

There are some people who are making a lot of money off this war that is costing countless lives and billions of American taxpayer dollars, though, and everyone should be very clear about who they are: Jared Kushner is making billions for Affinity Partners, Vladimir Putin is a lot richer than he was five weeks ago, and America’s Top Oil Executives are raking in the dough.

No affordable healthcare for Americans, no childcare, no Medicare or Medicaid according to this president — the federal government shouldn’t be expected to provide any of that. More Billions for Billionaires. That should be the name of his show.

He can’t say he’s putting our military at risk and killing Iranian school girls and thousands of civilians because it’s good business. That’s too dark and evil, and anyway, this whole thing spiraled out of control. It was supposed to be easy, like Venezuela. It wasn’t supposed to affect his ratings.

He’s got midterms to rig, and he can’t rig them if his ratings are lower than they’ve ever been. It has to look plausible, and now there is a bipartisan conversation in earnest about the 25th Amendment. The Democrats just tried to pass a war powers resolution, and of course the Republicans defeated it, instantly. People are talking about Article II, Section 4 which allows for the removal of the President, Vice President, and all civil Officers upon Impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors. They meet the standard, but who’s going to enforce it?

A quick lesson about the 25th Amendment and why I don’t hold out a lot of hope unless we, the people, get so loud our representatives have no choice but to listen. The VP and several members of the cabinet have to get together and decide their feckless leader has lost it. They undoubtedly already know. Then they have to put it in writing, and the VP has to deliver the missive to the Mad King, and also Mike Johnson.

I don’t think JD possesses the columna vertebralis for that job. I don’t think his legs could walk him to the Golden Oval, but let’s say he managed it. Maybe Peter Thiel holds his hand on the way there and the couch gives him strength. JD gives the man known as “Loser” in Iranian LEGO animation videos this missive, along with a copy for Mike Johnson. JD takes over as president while Loser reads and understands what he’s reading, at which point he could just tell Congress he’s fine — all his doctors say they’ve never seen anyone pass cognitive tests the way he does — unlike sleepy Joe with his auto-pen — which we know he would.

He’d have to put that in writing, but you know he has a Sharpie at the ready. Then the VP, Speaker and Cabinet members can say, yeah … sorry sir, we just don’t think so (in writing), and run for cover. Then Congress has to decide, and vote by ⅔ majority in the House and Senate, whether the President is incapacitated or not, and while they decide, JD takes over again, unless he’s made the mistake of eating anything or leaving the house, lol. So, yeah.

And Article II, Section 4 requires impeachment in the House of Representatives, and a trial in the Senate, presided by the Chief Justice acting as judge — that would be John Roberts who does not hesitate to tell this president what he thinks — but the Judicial branch does not like to get involved in legal matters having to do with impeachment because of our supposed separate but equal three branches of government — which this administration threw out the window long ago. So, I dunno. Neither of those eventualities seem likely, but we can’t go on this way, either.

We need the pull cord, friends. It’s time to get off this ride.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes. Carl Sagan, who urged NASA to have the Voyager 1 turn its probe around and take a picture of earth from space on February 14th, 1990. He thought it was an essential photo, since most of us will never see earth from this vantage point. Although we should, from space, or from right where we are, under the stars:

Can you imagine speaking about yourself like you were the most amazing person ever to grace planet earth — meanwhile you’re just a mean old windbag who thinks Hannibal Lecter was an asylum seeker? Someone pass the fava beans.

This week I read the essay and then talked about lying. It fascinates me when people lie with conviction, or knowingly support people who lie — without a hint of remorse or hesitation.

There are reasons good people might have a hard time saying true things, and I talked about that, too. Ultimately, though, if you want to have meaningful relationships, calling things what they are is part of the deal. It’s also grounding if you grew up with chaos and violence, or spent time trying to make everything okay for everyone all the time.

The truth isn’t always easy, but dealing with things as they are is a lot easier than pretending things are okay when they aren’t — or pretending this president should be compared to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. That was not a typo.

“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Sending you a lot of love, friends. Happy Easter if you celebrate. Happy Sunday if not. Either way, thank you for your kind attention to this matter.

A year and change ago — which feels like 94 years ago — my neighbor did a project in her backyard. Her backyard is directly behind mine and her street sits higher — two things it will be helpful to know.

She’d come over with her gardener one day and and asked if we could talk in my backyard, explaining that she wanted to replace the fence along the back wall of her garden. The way it was described to me was that some vines over my studio (directly below her new fence) would be “trimmed and cleared away.” Her gardener would come over after the fence went up to remove anything that might land on my side.

No problem. It’s not like she needed my permission to replace her fence, it was nice of her to let me know. We exchanged numbers so they could tell me when they were going to do the work. It was all very friendly.

As it turned out, I was back east when her fence went up, so I wasn’t there and no one texted. It was not the greatest homecoming.

This was a few months after the massive wildfires — so basically, they’d left an outrageous amount of kindling on my roof. As we learned, it doesn’t take much — strong winds, dry heat, and a spark. I was amazed anyone would be that reckless after what we’d lived through, but I thought it was possible my neighbor didn’t know the mess had been left behind.

I took pictures and and texted them to her, and then I called. I was friendly all things considered. Said I’d been away for the weekend, had come back to find this situation, and was worried about the fire hazard. Did she know when the gardener was planning to come by?

She said he was supposed to have cleared everything from my yard, and she’d text me his number. I admit I didn’t love this response. I would have preferred she called him herself and let me know the plan, but who has time to get worked up about “how things should be” anymore? Or “what people should do”?

You can make yourself sick that way.

The gardener — we’ll call him Fernando because that’s his name — picked up on the first ring. I said hi and reminded him we’d met when he was in my yard. He’d been terrific at the time. I explained about all the branches, which seemed unnecessary because he had to know, and asked when he was planning to come by.

He said, “Anything on your side is your responsibility.” I started laughing because I thought he was joking, but he didn’t join in. “Oh. Wait, are you not joking?” I asked after my laughter trailed off into awkward silence, and I realized it was not because we’d lost the signal.

“No, if it’s on your side, you take care of it,” he said.

“Umm, I think maybe you should call Gloria? I just spoke with her and she feels certain hauling the branches away was part of what you all talked about. I know that’s what we said the day you were here.”

“Text me some pictures,” he said. I texted him the pictures I’d taken. “That will be $450.”

“Just so I understand, you want me to pay $450 to haul away the branches that are in my yard because of a project Gloria did, when part of what she paid for was to have the branches removed?”

“Listen! You need to speak to me respectfully!” Fernando yelled.

“I’m sorry, what?” I said. I was starting to wonder if I was being punk’d. “I am being respectful, but there is enough kindling on my roof to start a wildfire, so I’m anxious, and very interested in having it removed as soon as possible. Telling me ‘If it’s on my side it’s my responsibility’ is like letting your dog crap on someone’s lawn and then telling them they should clean up the mess because no one wants to smell it, and someone is going to step in it.”

It’s kind of like … I dunno … starting a war no one asked for, and then when the Strait of Hormuz gets shut down, telling the other NATO countries you’ve been alienating and insulting for months it’s their responsibility to help secure it and get it open again.

Except in the case of the fence, at least they asked first, haha. Maybe I should have been happy Fernando didn’t tell me to “just TAKE it.”

“Grab that fence and cherish it.”

I got someone else to come clear the branches, and Gloria paid for it.

I would think it must feel horrific, shameful and deeply embarrassing to have started a war that has cost about $35 billion dollars at this point — and so much worse, the lives of 170 Iranian school girls and 13 U.S. service members — knowing Americans have spent an estimated $8.4 billion dollars more on gas because of this insanity — while you’ve cut more than half of all federal funding for gun violence prevention and gun violence is the number one reason children die in this country — millions of people can no longer afford healthcare and are struggling to feed their families — and all you’ve managed to do is close the Strait of Hormuz and throw the world into total economic disarray. Spain, France, Italy, Austria, and Switzerland have restricted base access and/or their airspace to U.S. military flights because they oppose the war in Iran. And now you star in Iranian LEGO animation as a guy named “Loser.”

I don’t think I’d be able to leave the Golden Oval.

But not this guy. He just gets up in front of the American people and says the war will be over in 2-3 weeks maybe somehow probably, says that talks are going really well (Iran refutes this claim), now we have regime change (except there is no regime change — the people who have replaced senior leaders are equally as hard-line or more militant, so…) it isn’t a war, but if it is a war we need to be fighting wars because America is large … So we can’t afford to pay for childcare. Because large countries can’t pay for childcare I guess, the states have to do that, shrug — and Medicaid and Medicare, too — and we in America don’t need the dumb Strait anyway, we are completely energy independent — even though we definitely are not. Also, NATO sucks, the Supreme Court sucks, birthright citizenship sucks and mail-in voting sucks even though he just mailed in his vote.

It’s so weird to me, because if I was going to lie to someone (let alone a whole country), I would have such a hard time looking them in the eye. I don’t think I could do it at this point in my life, it is so not the person I want to be. When I was younger, sometimes I would avoid telling the truth if it would hurt a person’s feelings, but I learned along the way that’s a form of disrespect. Obviously you want to say what’s in your heart with as much compassion as possible, but you do no one any favors by sparing them the truth out of pity or your own fear. If it’s a thing that doesn’t need to be said, that’s another story.

When my kids were little, I remember teaching them how powerful words can be — how they can make people feel so loved, safe, and understood, or they can make a person feel hurt and alone. I taught them the mindful communication concept often attributed to Rumi: Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates — Is it true, is it necessary, is it kind? Somehow my son thought one of the gates was, Is it funny? But that’s because he’s my kid. I happen to think that’s a legit gate.

I can’t imagine a worse job than getting up in front of the entire world and saying a bunch of things you know are absolutely not kind, true, necessary, or funny, but I guess this president is stuck — not that I believe he cares. I think he cares about losing face. A narcissist will never admit they’ve made a mistake, it’s in the handbook. They don’t say they’re sorry, either — if something goes wrong it’s always someone else’s fault.

Then there are the people who will bend a narrative to make it fit their worldview, no matter how far they have to bend it. I don’t know if you heard about the anesthesiologist who allegedly tried to throw his wife off a cliff in Maui for having an “emotional affair”? Swell guy. He has two older kids from a previous marriage and two young sons with his wife.

After a year of therapy spent working on their relationship, he took her on a birthday hike in Maui and brought syringes full of a heavy sedative. I guess it was that, or a bottle of water. When he allegedly failed to launch her off the cliff, he hit her on the head with a rock multiple times and was only stopped by two hikers who heard his wife screaming for help.

Then he called his nineteen-year-old son and told him to take care of the younger kids. He told his son he’d tried to kill his wife — the boy’s stepmom — but had not succeeded, and now he was going to take his own life. His son told him not to do that.

Somehow this man is pleading Not Guilty, and saying his wife attacked him, and he hit her in self-defense, and I don’t know what possible reason he’s going to come up with for bringing sedative-filled syringes on a hike — but I’m sure he’ll come up with something. He seems very sad in court, but it’s hard to say why. Is it because he’s probably spending the rest of his life in prison? Sad his children will know this is who their dad is?

He’s saying his wife grabbed him by the testicles and wouldn’t let go, and he hit her in self-defense — with those pesky pre-filled syringes in his pocket. Then he called his son and said he tried to kill her, but now he’s saying his son misunderstood that part.

His kid got up and testified as to what happened. Didn’t sound like there was any room for misunderstanding.

People in the comments were saying some wild and terrifying things. She provoked her husband by having an emotional affair. I see. So … it’s okay that he tried to murder her? Really trying to wrap my head around that, and wondering if the same rules apply if a woman tries to push her husband off a cliff for exchanging flirty texts with a coworker. Is that where we are? If people are sending too-familiar texts, have we decided as a society that the appropriate punishment is death by cliffside hike? Or is that just for wives?

Then there were comments about the poor son who was going to have to live with the guilt of having betrayed his father for the rest of his life. No. No he won’t. He did not betray his father. His father betrayed him by putting him in that horrendous position. His father betrayed the entire family by not managing his feelings in a normal, rational way. Get a divorce, man. I am truly starting to feel men are too emotional to be holding down important jobs.

Oops! Not all men.

There are a lot of people out there who love to throw stones, and are certainly not thinking about the three gates before they speak. I saw a video of a woman named Karen who has an instagram account for her company, Rapha Farms. They make Goat Milk Skincare but I started following the account because baby goats are pretty much the antidote for everything. She said recently someone had commented that her house didn’t look very clean. Y’all. She is running an entire business out of her kitchen, but she didn’t even say that.

It turns out her daughter died eight months ago. Her voice broke when she said it, and I was crying with her in 0.5 seconds. She didn’t offer this in an angry or defensive way, she shared it as a reminder that you never know what anyone is going through. Ever. It’s a safe bet almost everyone is going through something. She said when her kids were little and they wanted to go swimming or read a book, she always let the cleaning wait, and she never regretted it. I was sobbing by the time she was done.

People like Kristi Noem really ought to take a page out of that book, though I don’t hold out a lot of hope. She has caused so much pain and suffering for so many people. Countless people, and so many of them in the LGBTQ community. She has made life miserable and less safe for transgender kids everywhere. She is loudly and passionately opposed to same-sex marriage. And look what happens, friends. Her own husband must have been in pain all these years, in his own personal hell, living a life of secrets and feeling like he couldn’t share his feelings with his own wife, who claims to be this “traditional family values upstanding Christian woman” — meanwhile she is sending human beings to exist eighty-people-to-a-cage.

It doesn’t work that way, though I know anyone reading this already agrees with me. You can’t claim to be a good and decent person, and also hurt people, and lie and cheat and shoot puppies because you have no patience or empathy or decency. It’s always the people who are screaming the most loudly about how other people should live who have the most work to do on themselves. Always.

You can’t lie and be a mouthpiece for the most despicable human beings doing the most horrific things and think that’s somehow going to be okay. Bye, Pam Bondi. May the suffering of every Epstein victim you did not serve haunt you in your sleep for the rest of your life. Notice it’s the women being thrown out of the club first, to no one’s surprise. No one like me, anyway. Conservative women always think proximity will keep them safe, but the shark will always eat your face when you stop being useful.

I may have started this essay by asking what would happen if we all started stating preposterous things as if they were true, but there are plenty of people doing that these days. Even if there weren’t, there are those of us who grew up being told that our perception was faulty, and what we thought was happening was not happening — we were overly sensitive or dramatic. For people who relate, calling things what they are is grounding. Naming the monster takes the power away from it. It’s reassuring. It makes you feel sane and calm, even if the truth breaks your heart.

It’s okay if your heart breaks — it’s the hardened heart you have to fear. A hardened heart can lie with impunity. An open, loving heart is strong, it’s meant to break, and heal, and break again. If it wasn’t meant to do that, none of us would still be here, shining away, fighting for the world to be better than this.

I

Anyway, I found the stats, but then I was like, I have no clue what a good number of downloads would be for a podcast episode in the first 7 days, so these stats don’t help me. Then I remembered Google, and it seems like I should keep doing this, apparently. So thanks to those of you listening to me spouting off about this crazy time we’re living through, and I hope it makes you feel less alone if you feel alone sometimes, because I know I do. There are days I feel defeated, and other days I feel enraged — and on good days I feel determined, resolute, hopeful, full of the productive kind of fire, and ready with a side of gallows humor.

Seemed like a good time to say thank you for crying with me, laughing with me and spending some of your precious time with me. I don’t take it lightly. This episode is about cleaning out my childhood home, having a different definition of being “ready to move in three days” than my brother, finding letters from my dad that elicited some big feelings, and letting those feelings flow. It’s also about Sara Bareilles, dead carcasses in strange places, Plato, and why we need to send all the billionaires packing. Sending you lots of love, friends.

These days, there’s just one of my kids in the house and she’s sixteen, and I see the back of her walking out the door with my car keys most of the time. I run to get a kiss and hug and ask questions like, “Do you have a sweater?” As if that might keep her safe from harm, and me, too. Then I watch her location move around on my phone to make sure she gets where she’s going in one piece.

I had to add her as a driver to my car insurance policy recently, so now both kids are on it. I was Googling different discounts to see if there was any way to save, and saw that if they take defensive driving courses it’s 15% less annually to cover them. I texted my son about it. He’s in his second year of college and also works, and I didn’t want to put too much on his plate, but he was ready to take a course anytime. I said maybe it would be fun, and he said he doubted that, but not to worry, he’d definitely do it.

In my head, I thought a defensive driving course would be an in-person course you took with a driving instructor, like when you first learned to drive — only this time it would be more advanced. Like you’d go on the freeways and if someone tailgated you or a truck started veering into your lane — or a pickup truck was in front of you two car-lengths away and a pipe came loose and started flying toward your window Final Destination-style — the instructor would yell, “THINK FAST!”

And then give you feedback or tips based on what you did.

My son said he was pretty sure it was an online course, though, and sadly he was right. I think we can agree my idea is much better. Unhinged, yes, but at least it would be fun.

Fun still matters. Hummingbirds, too. People whose locations you watch on your phone, who carry your entire heart with them wherever they go on the map. Friends you go to bat for, who also have your back.

I was out with some of those friends last night, and we were talking about this feeling like there’s a tear in the space-time continuum and we are straddling whatever the world normally is — and Hades.

For example, I opened instagram a few days ago and saw Sara Bareilles discover decrepit carcasses in a pillar of her house, and dig them out with a shovel into a PETCO paper bag — calmly. Just as I was yelling, “At least get gloves!” she was like, “I should at least get gloves,” so I think we had a Dionne Warwick Psychic Friends moment. As she was shoveling she said, “I watch ‘Alone’ and you have to be tough.” She said it unironically, and I nodded seriously. You do have to be tough these days.

I think she should star on CSI, or get her own spin-off — or head to Congress with her shovel. I’d meet her there in a hot second, I think we could get rid of some decrepit carcasses together.

A rip in the space-time continuum would also explain the video I saw of Melania at some presser in the “East Room” — since her husband demolished the East Wing — with a humanoid named Plato (no doubt rolling in his grave), suggesting everyone should just homeschool their kids, and let robots teach them about critical thinking and “independent reasoning abilities.” Yes! Fantastic idea. Why pay teachers more, or invest in education or the arts or free school lunches or universal healthcare?

Just keep the kids at home and let a robot teach them about reading, writing, arithmetic, classic literature (the stuff that isn’t banned, of course), history (the kind that isn’t upsetting for white children), and also life. Who cares about empathy or having a soul? Who cares about learning to work things out with other human beings? The AI company can program the robot with an appropriately patriotic and decidedly un-woke curriculum, and you’ll have plenty of time to churn butter while your husband does the voting, ladies! What could go wrong?

Funny thing, naming it Plato. It’s true Plato was distrustful of democracy, so I see why they thought they were doing something. Plato believed democracy was vulnerable and could be toppled by the uprising of unchecked passionate group-think — and looking around right now, I’d have to agree. I mean, we had guardrails in place to protect us, but I guess if the group-think is strong enough and the spines of senators are weak enough, billionaires can enter the building disguised as Republicans and that’s how we find ourselves in The In-Between.

Maybe if any of these people had read Virgil’s Aeneid or Homer’s Odyssey — or even Project 2025 — they would have seen it coming, but whatever. Coulda, shoulda, woulda. They don’t believe in education or the arts or even souls, apparently, which is funny for people pretending to be Christian — but who has time to pay attention to details anymore?

Plato distrusted democracy after his teacher, Socrates was imprisoned, put on trial and sentenced to death for “corrupting the youth” of Athens and teaching them to question authority. I must add a footnote here and say Socrates learned his oratory skills from the scant-mentioned Aspasia of Miletus, partner to Pericles.

Pretty sure we all learned about Socrates and Plato … but not Aspasia. Because why teach children about important women in history? Then they might know women are intelligent, important, strong, interesting, just as capable of being in leadership positions, more than baby-making machines, not here to shrink themselves, et cetera and so on.

I think we can feel sure Aspasia won’t make it into the AI Plato curriculum, since she didn’t even make it into ours. And still, these toxic men (and the women who love them) don’t want women — and so many other Americans — to vote or have a voice. They are anti-diversity, anti-equity and anti-inclusion. I spelled it out that way in case anyone wants to ponder how abhorrent it is to admit to any one of those stances. Imagine proudly stating you are against inclusion. Let me please not sit next to you at a wedding, or anywhere.

This president and his administration went out of their way to wipe women, BIPOC, and the LGBTQ community from government websites celebrating their achievements because that’s too WOKE, boohoo. How fragile do you have to be to run code trying to wipe all important people from the history books if they aren’t straight, white men? As if we ever have had diversity, equity or inclusion as a thing we could count on.

This same breed of men (and some women) show up in our comments sections. They tell Black writers not to make it about race. They tell women they hate feminists, and writing about women’s issues is divisive.

I wrote about growing up as a girl and then a woman in this world recently, and a man in my comments asked me to write about some good men next time, instead of all the “deviants” I’d mentioned. That was his response. Sir. When there are tons of men demeaning, harassing and/or assaulting girls and women all the time, everywhere, that is not deviance — they are the norm. It’s children, too, not just girls, but I was speaking to my own experience. These men are average. They are common. Deviance happens with the men who are not like that, sad to say — and you failed to be one of them. You might not be predatory or violent (I have no idea about that), but you are no ally. Good men don’t leave comments like that, and they don’t need to be coddled.

Back to Plato — he thought society should be ruled by Philosopher Kings (Our King’s philosophy: “Whatever is Good for Me and the Rest of You Can GFY!”) and he believed certain people were better suited to certain jobs, and therefore belonged in different social classes: Guardians (rulers/philosophers), Auxiliaries (soldiers/warriors), and Producers (farmers/artisans).

How would children be sorted into the correct category, you might be wondering? The education system! Bwahahaha. Kids would go to school and they’d all receive the same education and testing, and the Guardians (philosophers, teachers) would sort them! Kind of like The Sorting Hat meets The Hunger Games which feels like where we are heading if you throw in The Handmaid’s Tale, too.

Grab your magic wand, your bow-and-arrow and your cake knife, friends — the road ahead looks gnarly. See? Maybe you can learn defensive driving online.

If they weren’t smart enough to be rulers (guardians, philosophers), or courageous enough to be auxiliaries (soldiers), they’d become producers (workers, farmers). But I guess the AI humanoid can do the sorting now, assuming MAGA parents continue to be “all in” on whatever King Conman wants to do next. I truly feel sorry for historians of the future, assuming we can pull ourselves out of this tailspin and find our way to a better timeline. How would you ever make sense of this insanity?

“...On January 6th, 2021, for the first time in American history, there was no peaceful transfer of power. Instead, supporters of the former president, a man who refused to accept the results of a free and fair election, attacked the Capitol…”

You realize, of course, these people would sell all of our souls — if they believed in souls — to the highest bidder. That’s not a question. It’s all about money and power.

It’s so weird to me how this president’s supporters will scream about Nancy Pelosi’s net worth and ask how it’s possible when senators only make so much money — but somehow they are totally mum about billions of dollars when the president and his family are cashing in at the expense of the American people.

Why are they not bothered that the president and his family have made billions off crypto currency? Or that the president has not divested from his business dealings? Or that he issues pardons to people who donate to his ventures? It’s all a matter of public record.

Now this president and his family are putting our military at risk as if our military is just another asset they can use to do their personal business. Why not use the military, I guess. They treat the DOJ like their personal law firm.

Even Republicans in Congress are frustrated because they can’t get straight answers about why we’re in Iran, what the goals are, what the timeline is, any of it. Half the time the administration pretends it isn’t a war so they can get around the fact that the president did not have congressional approval or public support (aka he violated the Constitution again). And of course, what are they supposed to say? We’re there so Jared Kushner can make a few more billion dollars? So his partners at Affinity are happy?

I’ll never get the appeal, or what his supporters are getting out of it. Do they just like hearing him bluster about men being men, and “no men on women’s sports’ teams”? When he says his dumb word salad thing about “liberals wanting transgender for everyone” do they think that’s true and that it means something?

Do they believe the lie that “immigrants are stealing their jobs” — and not realize it’s billionaires who are doing that, through AI and a total lack of empathy and ethics — and that it will continue to get worse? Do they want women back in the kitchen? I guess it is the culture wars stuff, because that’s all they’re getting. AI videos of the president shitting on liberals. Seems like they’re pissed about the price of gas, though. Everyone has their hard line.

As soon as millionaires and billionaires started making decisions for the rest of us, we were screwed, and it didn’t and doesn’t matter which side of the aisle they’re on. We need to get dark money out of our government. We need to overturn Citizens United. We need to rethink the requirements for members of Congress and federal officials so they have to disclose all their investments. If you want to be a public servant, you have to be willing to be financially transparent. If you don’t like that, do something else.

“There’s no loyalty amongst thieves” as the saying goes, and that’s the way to think about the people in power. They’re playing a different game. When we’re talking about the president and his family, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel — they aren’t thinking about the country, they’re thinking globally — the global market. The deals to be made. This president has no loyalty to America or Americans or anyone.

He doesn’t care. It’s just another grift, but dang is it a good one. All he ever wanted was to play with the big boys, and 77 million people decided to give him the keys to this castle. In his mind, it’s all leverage, and it’s all for him. The East Wing? He’ll knock it down if he wants to, it’s his now, and the Kennedy Center, too. He’ll slap his name in tacky gold letters anywhere he pleases.

The midterms? Yeah, he’s probably concerned. He doesn’t want to have a bloodbath in the streets, that wouldn’t be good for business, but he certainly doesn’t want to lose control of this cash cow, either. I have no doubt he’ll use any and every method available to him to retain power. I don’t know what they’ll do. Almost every special election is going wildly blue, even in deeply red districts. Even in Florida, in the district that includes the garish Mar-a-Lago where a certain octogenarian spends most of his time. Sorry, sucker. A Democrat won, and that Democrat is a woman. Two things you hate, pass the ketchup!

The blue flipping and winning is no fluke, that’s a rebuke. It also means we are still having free and fair elections for now. What happens next? Maybe we’ll finally march on Washington. I think we should have done that the day Musk entered the Treasury with a kid named Big Balls and his frat-boy friends, because that was the first sign we were totally off the rails. It was even more bizarre that our representatives told us about it on instagram lives from their couches at home because it happened on a Friday evening. That was a five-alarm fire and the people we sent to Washington to represent us could not be bothered to turn around immediately and ask as many of us as possible to join them. We would have. We wanted direction, fire, leadership.

Now we know we have to lead ourselves. We have to “be the change we want to see.” I know a march on Washington is hard. Where do we sleep at night? How do we get there? How do we pay the bills if we’re in Washington and not at work? Who is watching the kids and walking the dog? Who is paying for this trip? How long are we staying? Not everyone can go, but I bet a lot of people could and would. If this war in Iran isn’t stopped, it’s likely going to take care of itself, because no one will be able to afford gas or food or groceries or anything. Food arrives at grocery stores via trucks, and some of the time it gets to the truck after it’s been on a boat.

I’m thinking we should get to D.C. before they create an army of AI robots who shoot us dead and teach our children we were enemies of the state. Maybe we can all start walking there if things get nuts, like the monks did. Maybe people will feed us along the way.

Maybe Sara Bareilles will come with her shovel, and also sing. Stranger things have occurred. I’ve given up predicting, I’m just trying to stay calm, trying to fight back, trying to help every way I can, trying to be kind, trying to give people slack because everyone I know is struggling at least some of the time.

If you can, get out there tomorrow. People saying the protests don’t do anything? They don’t do anything as far as changing policy, that’s true. I don’t believe the majority of people attending protests stop there, and sit on their hands until the next one. Protests are another tool in the toolbox, and they’re good for morale. They make all of us feel less alone. They tell the rest of the world that millions of Americans are not okay with what’s happening here. They help organizers build email lists which may come in very handy one day soon. They show young people that there are adults in the room who don’t want the world to be like this. They are not the be-all end-all, no one action is. But they show that you care, and if good people stop caring, then we’re doomed.

Defensive driving is about predicting hazards. Developing techniques to stay safe regardless of what other drivers do. It’s about learning how to minimize risks and pay attention to the weather so you aren’t caught unprepared. It’s about knowing when to pull to the side of the road because you need a rest. It’s probably about knowing who to call when you need help. I bet we’re all better at it by now than we realize. See you in the streets, friends. Please stay safe. Take a sweater. I’d watch your location on my map to make sure you got where you wanted to go any day.

Don’t give up.

Which is another way of saying that when I arrived last Thursday evening, the contents of the apartment where I grew up were in no way ready to be hauled across the country to their new home Monday morning.

Technically, I guess it’s my amended/blended Family of Origin. My brother and I have the same mom, different dads. His dad is my stepdad, the man my mother met when I was seven, and married when I was eight. I have always called my brother my brother, though.

My mother and father are gone, though very much alive in my mind. I found a letter my dad wrote to my mom as I was cleaning out the desk where she used to sit and pay the bills — and another he wrote to her mother, my Nanny, when my parents were entangled and he was trying to plead his case. I say “entangled” because he was married with two teenagers when he met my mother, and she was twenty years his junior.

There were other issues, too, not that there needed to be more — additional reasons my Nanny would not have wanted her beloved daughter to go down this particular path — but my dad made an impressive effort to acknowledge every one of those objections and concerns by naming them and admitting to them openly. I almost didn’t recognize the man. It made me think he genuinely loved my mother, that he could not face living without her, even if it meant hurting his wife and kids. His wife had polio, just to add a little extra horror to the mix. His teenage kids still needed him. He said as much.

How do you hurt all those people and ask the mother of the nineteen-year-old you then go on to marry to extend some kind of faith in you — and then turn around and hurt her daughter, too, because you can’t keep your dick in your pants once she’s pregnant? With me.

I mean it honestly. Is it that fucking hard to just not stick your dick in someone else? I guess I must be furious. I’ve been packing and unpacking for six days straight and have slept about three hours each night, so I didn’t know that until now, sitting in this gigantic bus flying over the continental United States. He broke something in my mother that never healed, and that fault line went straight through the center of our relationship. Mine and hers, hers and mine.

No wonder she didn’t want my grandma to know her marriage was ending. No wonder she left me at a farm instead of taking me to her brother’s house where I would have felt safe and where I’d been a million times before. I always wondered why she didn’t take me to my aunt and uncle and cousins when she needed to grieve after her mother died and my dad left. My heart hurts writing that. I feel so devastated for my mom. I’m sure she felt ashamed. I wish I could have told her it was my dad’s shame to carry, not hers. He blew up our lives, I didn’t see him for months, and then when I started seeing him again he told me everything was my mother’s fault for being selfish and unwilling to share him. I believed him because I was four.

When I was a little kid, I thought he was the greatest. He loved that I adored him. I guess he didn’t want to muck that up with the inconvenient truth, or maybe by then he wasn’t bothering with it, or it’s possible he couldn’t face himself anymore. I don’t know. I do know he never took responsibility for the pain he caused again. He never said he was sorry when he made a mistake — or even acknowledged it. I guess I can give him credit for one thing — there is no point in saying you’re sorry if you’re going to keep doing the same thing over and over again.

My mom forgave my dad in the last years of her life, though we didn’t know they were the last years at the time. She asked me for his address and said she wanted to send him a letter to that effect. He was ninety-three and living with his fourth wife in North Carolina.

I didn’t share this with her, but I thought he’d probably shake his head and be dismissive of a letter like that, as if there was nothing much for her to forgive after all the grief she’d given him over the years. She hadn’t, that was his version. Things were acrimonious between them when I was growing up, and when I was little it made pick-ups and drop-offs hard and school events awkward.

There were screaming matches on the telephone, and I’d find my body at one house or the other feeling like there was lead in my stomach and feet, and not enough strength in my knees — but for the most part my mother kept her feelings about my father to herself when it came to direct conversation with me.

I’m not saying she hid her feelings well, I was not confused, I’m saying compared to the amount of grief she could have given him, or the way I have seen some mothers actively try to turn their children against their fathers, he had nothing to complain about, she never did that. And as the years wore on and I got older, there were fewer reasons for them to interact, and by the time I graduated from college, they could be at events together and be social.

I gave her his address because she asked for it, and not long after she said he’d called and they’d had a nice conversation, and she was glad she’d done that. She said it was a long time ago and she didn’t want him to die thinking she was still angry with him. It was a kind thing to do and I said that.

Then she went and died first.

She forgave him years before she died, but she didn’t forgive me until the bitter end when she was in the ICU unable to speak or swallow or walk. And what was my crime? Being the daughter of the man who broke her, or being the reason he broke her in the first place?

The last year of my dad’s life, while the loss of my mother was fresh and raw and constant, I’d go to the assisted living facility where I’d moved him so I could make sure he was okay and take him to his doctors’ appointments and make sure he had his stock of Motts’ Apple Juice and sculpting clay, he’d sometimes forget the way the dots connected and start talking to me about “the secretary” — not realizing he was talking to me about my mother. She was a secretary when they met.

In the last weeks of his life he had anxiety dreams about her, and would wake up distressed, wondering where she was. Maybe there’s something in here about cleaning up the messes we make while we’re lucid and while there’s time, or not spending the tiny amount of time we get absolutely destroying people.

I found another letter in that desk, one I wrote to my mom when I was nine, the day after a night I’d made her very angry. I don’t know why she saved it, and I wish she hadn’t. I apologized to her for making a mess. I said I didn’t think she was my maid, I just didn’t think, period. I was stupid and terrible and lazy and she deserved a better child than me, and I would try to be better. It made me cry, reading it. I thought of so many nights when I tried to avoid her fury, backed up against my wall, arms trying to cover my head and face. It made me want to save every kid in the world who pays the price for adults who have lost the thread.

There seem to be so many of them.

One thing that happened over the last week of packing and unpacking a million boxes and driving 738 miles in a U-haul — through a tornado because why stop with just an insane amount of chaos when you can go for full-on Wizard of Oz pandemonium — is I barely had time to look at the news. I still haven’t, I just got back to Los Angeles.

Last I checked we were still at war with Iran and by day 12 it had cost us $16.5 billion. Terrific. But no affordable healthcare for anyone, no free school lunches, Medicaid is gutted, and Social Security will run out in 2037. Now the president wants $200 billion more to fund the military. I don’t believe there have been any Epstein arrests, correct? Still no?

I read that Cesar Chavez turns out to be another man who abused girls and women. And I saw a clip of the president making a joke about Pearl Harbor to the prime minister of Japan in the Oval Office. The expression on her face is every one of us. Honestly, I’d rather pack and unpack a million more boxes than immerse myself in this timeline. I wish I could pull those of us who feel the same way onto a different one. I know there are people who say this is the one we’re on. This is the work. It’s true, this is it. I guess the question is how we forge a better path.

I am aware the only thing I can control is what I do. I can’t control what other people do, or how they feel or what they want. I know this is impressive, but it only took me eleventy gajillion tries to figure that out. I make an effort to extend the benefit of the doubt as much as possible, and do my best not to take things personally. When people make outrageous choices — like the man who called his wife and put her on speakerphone at full volume to have a lengthy conversation as we taxied down the runway today — I attempt curiosity instead of contempt, and think about what kind of story I’d write about a person who would do something like that, even if it is absolutely bonkers. Sir, this is not a Wendy’s.

I don’t keep lists in my head of ways I’ve been wronged, and I don’t have close people in my life who do, because it’s exhausting. I forgive easily whenever possible because life is too short, and I also make mistakes. I always appreciate a little grace. But I have not figured out how to forgive people who hurt children, or any of the most vulnerable members of our community — especially when it seems as though they take pleasure in it.

There’s a point where forgiveness can be interpreted as permission or complicity, and I will rage against that machine until my dying breath. I’ll do it from the air and from the land, from the oceans, or whilst flying over them. I’ll rage until the cows come home, because rage is good fuel, and all children deserve to feel safe and loved in this world.