In the postmodern world where we invent reality hour by hour, depending on how we feel, being gay now includes heterosexual sex — and by far the biggest group in the “LGBTQIA+” umbrella are bisexual women in relationships with straight men. At some point, gay men will wake up and realize that they have abolished their own identity — indeed merged it into its opposite. But they have another tea dance to get to and another Instagram vacation pic to post. Most are pathetically uninformed, or programmed by tribal insecurity to follow the queering herd.
Andrew Sullivan, yet again.
The madness of being called “LGBTQ” still makes my head spin (how can I be gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender?), but stranger still is how prevalent it is among fellow gay men. Many seem to have internalized this language — this ideology — part and parcel.
And good luck saying as much out loud. I’ve been chastised, yelled at, lectured, ignored. The groupthink on this runs deep.
The endgame is unclear. Reoccupation? Mass emigration? Who can say? Yes, Hamas can be physically destroyed. But support for it has soared since the war began; and I know of no person more committed to revenge than a parent whose child has been murdered. We were right to note how tight-knit Israeli society is, and how deep a trauma October 7 was for so many. Can we even imagine the psychological impact of 9,000 dead children? The Gazans are humans too. Am I being too sentimental in talking about infanticide rather than just civilian deaths? Not when the vulnerable population is so disproportionately young; not when just war theory would demand safety for every single one of them.
This is how it is when wars are launched swiftly, overwhelmingly, and in an understandable spasm of justified rage. Think of the position of Israel on October 8. The true evil of Hamas was exposed; most of the decent world grieved with Israel. Think of the long-term goals the Israelis could have achieved if they had taken a breath, thought deeply and strategically, and acted deliberately, in consort with their recently acquired Arab interlocutors.
Now look: a wasteland of death, a charge of genocide at The Hague, a huge propaganda loss in the wider world, 132 hostages still out of reach, and no coherent idea of what to do the day after, if the day after ever comes.
Andrew Sullivan, doing his damndest to answer my question, "Who do I want to be like when I grow up?"
This war between Gaza and Israel has been brutal. Old personal relationships have resurfaced, only to be ripped away. The subject feels incredibly fraught and tender, full of strange bedfellows and unexpected allegiances. My long-held opinions have been shaken as I watch people who had no interest in the region suddenly espouse strong and often vitriolic opinions of their own. Like anything in America, the Middle East has become a proxy for our culture wars.
A hundred days in, I find myself back where I was immediately after the attacks: Israel cannot call itself "civilized" if it permits the people of Palestine to suffer as it does. Really — what did Israel think would happen after years of an active blockade of Gaza? Sure, Egypt is party to blame, but come on. Let's not bullshit each other.
Over the last hundred days, I've been more persuaded by the principles Zionism than ever before. When I once thought the pluralism of America was proof enough that Israel did not need to exist, I now see that very pluralism threatening to fade away. And in a world with plenty of nations are explicitly and officially Muslim, why not one that is Jewish? Yes.
But this status quo cannot hold. Israel is losing — and perhaps has already lost — any moral high ground it had on October 6th.
How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?
The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.
This resonates with my own experience in academia over the last decade. What was at first a slow drift became a sudden lurch toward the Left on so many cultural issues. Generally, that’s something I support. But with that lurch, all good sense and reason was thrown out the window.
I joined an MFA program where many people thought literature by white men, straight or not, was explicitly ‘less than.’ Where I was called a fascist for not introducing myself with pronouns, a white supremacist for merely editing a paper of a fellow student (yes!), a conservative because I argued that every person, regardless of their color and class and belief, is deserving of compassion.
Nevermind that the program chair — and his successor — were both white men. And really, really nevermind that the program chair was an admitted alcoholic known for his, um, terse and abrasive communication style. Now I’m not one to get on someone for being an asshole — pot, meet kettle — but I’m also not in charge of an academic program. (Some personality traits, believe it or not, should be disqualifying.) The performative outrage and yet complete inaction on issues of race and class is maddening. I was once told, and I’m not kidding here, that I was a “colonial apologist” because I would not give a land acknowledgement at the beginning of an in-person class, nevermind that I am leaving the land I own to the local tribe in my will.
What in the actual fuck.
What pains me most about this stuff is how much of a mockery it all makes of what I consider the most venerated institution in our culture. Academics are defined primarily by their ability to think, to make sense from nonsense, and yet they fully embraced the bullshit.
I’m as guilty as the rest — I fell for it too, at least for a while. I let my natural do-gooder tendencies take me beyond the realm of common sense. I’m both embarrassed by it and not — I really do think that much of this stuff comes from a place of good intentions — but we cannot abandon logic and reason in the name of wanting to do good. And especially not in academia.
It’s almost as though our time spent on computers has deprived us of the ability to think with nuance and forced us into these false binaries.
I have watched a strange rise in antisemitism (not mere anti-Zionism) among my leftist friends. Why? I don’t quite know, but it’s unsettling.
It wasn’t just women of color who decided that Jewish women were too domineering, too successful, too white, too obsessed with the Holocaust, and too interested in their newfound ethnic identity as a way of dominating the newly identity-conscious feminist scene. New-Age feminists believed that Judaism had killed goddess worship, and white Socialist professors equated Jews with capitalists. But Jewish women had once considered women of color to be their natural allies, and now that the feminist theories and alliances of women of color were the most influential, it was their antisemitism that Jewish feminists called out most often. Women of color resented this criticism and said that it was racist.
I’m so glad to be a gay man.
In Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory, queer scholar Heather Love wrote that queer theory’s politics “are split between the liberalism of the civil rights movement and a lumpen appetite for destruction.” This new “queer” identity destroyed identity categories themselves. Love wrote that the vagueness of the term “queer”—sort of about sexual practices, but also not—coupled with the idea that everyone understands it but you, “creates a desire to be ‘in the know.’” Like the cultural ephemera it often turns to as its intellectual objects, queer theory thrived on the transgressive frisson of the unexpected and the illegitimate.
“What is happening at TikTok is it is creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis,” Mr. Cohen, who does not appear to have an official TikTok account, said early in the call. He criticized violent imagery and disinformation on the platform, telling Mr. Presser, “Shame on you,” and claiming that TikTok could “flip a switch” to fix antisemitism on its platform.
How is everyone liking their corporate rule?
TikTok has real power. Facebook (which owns Instagram) has real power. Google has real power.
This is not okay.
I hate these companies, all of whom, at their heart, are advertising companies. They run social media platforms so they can sell you ads. That’s how they make their money. That’s the whole point.
People want to blame their phones, as I am wont to do at times, but the smartphone is merely a tool. You don’t have to use it for social media.
Fuck.
What on earth are people thinking when they use social media?
Oh right, they’re not thinking — their neurology has been hijacked. They’re addicted.
Children. We let children use TikTok. We’ve let our children become addicts, just like us. How is this okay? Why are we not filled with rage each and every time we see a parent hand over their phone to their child?
Yes, I’m blaming addicts for their addiction, but we’ve let our children become addicts, too.
Instagram has become a particularly active arena for pro-Hamas propaganda. At last count, the hashtag #freepalestine had appeared on over 5.8-million posts, exceeding #standwithisrael’s 220,000 by a geometric factor of more than 20. Similarly, #gazaunderattack has amassed 1.8 million instances, an order of magnitude more than #israelunderattack’s 134,000.
I used to think numbers like this were bullshit. “Likes” and “views” and “engagements” have never felt like salient measurements of, well, anything but the ego of some large social media companies.
Of course I was wrong.
I love when people tell me that advertising “doesn’t work” on them. As if their mind is so strong that it can’t be swayed one way or the other.
In response to their claims, I yell, “_HOT DOG!_”
“What are you thinking about now,” I then ask.
Surprise: they’re thinking about hot dogs.
Advertising really is that simple. Our neurology isn’t that complicated. We like to think we’re exceptions to rules, but rules are rules for a reason.
A few friends that lived through the 1960s and 1970s like to say “advertising is propaganda.” I’m inclined to agree. Of course it is.
Yet if all advertising is mere suggestion, then it makes absolute sense that in capitalism, the money flows to the most persuasive, even if those of us being persuaded don’t fully understand how persuasion works.
…we weren’t allowed to point out the clear danger of the moment because the media decided early in the cycle that any questions about Clinton’s electability were simply a stalking horse for misogyny. The party and its loyalists insisted that it was sexist to call a spade a spade and acknowledge that Clinton had severe vulnerabilities in basic public sentiment; here’s a version from the NYT. Under the conditions of 2016, with the incumbency advantages and Trump’s unique issues, you would have wanted to elect someone who simply didn’t have the level of negative baggage that Clinton did, someone who the country generally saw as inoffensive. Yglesias nominates Martin O’Malley, but of course Bernie Sanders fit the bill as well. Sanders beat Trump in poll after poll, and cleaned up with independents, which would seem to be important in a presidential election. Clinton apparatchiks have always scoffed at those polls, asserting without evidence that Republican oppo would have sunk him without caring much that Republican oppo was already sinking Hillary.
Bernie, of course, also would have energized the youth like no other, setting up the Democrats for durable gains down the road with that demographic.
I know several people still litigating the issue. All of them, liberals to their core, insist that Hillary lost only because she was a woman.
This has never made sense to me. It starts from a place of assuming the absolute worst about people (that everyone, even fellow liberals, are complicit in misogyny) and ends with zero introspection about one’s own political biases. It’s lazy thinking.
Ramping up the rhetorical and social stakes leaves us incapable of calling bullshit bullshit. As is always the case, the rise of identity politics in disability discourse has created a state of constant emotionalism, threat, and fear. People are afraid to engage because they expect, correctly, that saying anything that contradicts the activist crowd will simply result in them being called bigots. This causes problems all over our debates, but appears most glaring when it comes to the stupidest issues. For example, despite dogged insistence to the contrary, it is not the case that there has been a sudden massive increase in the prevalence of late-onset Tourette’s syndrome among adolescent women with TikTok accounts. There has not been some sort of incredible change to the epidemiology of Tourette’s, and essentially no one really believes that there has been. Instead, a lot of young woman started pretending to have Tourette’s syndrome out of a desire to belong and to differentiate themselves from their peers in the marketplace of attention, and as they were rewarded in that marketplace others responded by doing the same thing. Similarly, there has not been a sudden increase in dissociative identity disorder among very-online adolescent women, given that DID is a controversial diagnosis and the disorder known for its extreme rarity. Pretending to have multiple personalities is fun and edgy so some teenagers have done it a lot recently.
Kids do dumb things and I’m not particularly mad about it. I do, however, think that if it goes unchecked this stuff could have serious negative consequences for how our culture views mental illness. What’s striking is how scared many people seem to be about calling this obvious bullshit out as obvious bullshit. When I talk about this, I press and probe and ask people if any of it passes the smell test. And just about nobody says “Yes, it’s credible that there are more authentic cases of dissociative identity disorder in my TikTok feed than there have been confirmed cases in medical history.” Nobody’s that dumb. But they’re unwilling to just say, yeah, that’s bullshit. They ummm and they uhhhh and they tiptoe around and they dance, and they do so because they’ve absorbed the attitude that criticizing anyone’s specific claims to disability means that you’re somehow callous towards disability in general. They also won’t call bullshit on bullshit because they’re afraid of being tarred with the “ableism” accusation. The whole thing makes it harder for us to think and talk intelligently about how to best accommodate disability in our society.
This resonates. In my masters program, this is all terrifically common. I’ve been afraid to call out bullshit when I see it precisely before I’m afraid of being called out as ‘callous.’ More worryingly, I’ve seen professors and administrators — at multiple universities — be cowed into silence, afraid the DEI office might come from their job should they speak out.
To say this is depressing is an understatement. Academia should be the one institution in American life immune from irrationality, from illiberalism. And yet it’s embraced them with abandon as students, now ‘customers’ in a capitalist model, have become empowered by social media.
The young, myself included, don’t always know best, and it hurts watching people that know better say nothing.
“Am I changed? Is she changed? Was there any point to this?” Ms. Minkin said she asked herself. “I don’t know that her overall opinion has changed, and I don’t know that my overall opinion has changed. But maybe if we’re all softening at the hard edges, that’s enough?”
Her voice made clear it was a question, not a conclusion.
The results show Mr. Biden losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of three to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll found.
Being a citizen of this country feels like standing on the rails, watching a train barrel down the track right at you. You want to move, but none of your limbs seem to agree on what to do.
And I’m becoming angry.
It’s hard not to be angriest at the people most like you, which is why the Left seems to be eating itself alive. It hurts to watch people you know to be kind, caring, and compassionate succumb to the hate, the vitriol, the judgment, the division that’s long polluted the Right.
And it’s hard not to take their succumbing as a betrayal. They so easily gave up on all the shit they claimed to believe in, which only fuels my rage. I’ve known for a long time that the Right was only about power, never about morality or religion or “family values.” But the Left, too?
But watching the hatred consume Liberals has been agonizing, though not unrelatable. I get it — I really do. It’s so delicious, so righteous to hate the people that hate you. I’m guilty of this very thing.
But it’s easy. And unoriginal. And only makes a bigger mess of things.
The idea that members of the religious right form an “infinitely diverse and contradictory group” and were in no way “hyperpartisan” is now clearly absurd. Christianism, in fact, turned out to be the central pillar of Trump’s success, with white evangelicals giving unprecedented and near-universal support — 84 percent — to a shameless, disgusting pagan, because and only because he swore to smite their enemies.
Andrew Sullivan, once again seeing through the bullshit.
The fusion of Trump and Christianism is an unveiling of a sort — proof of principle that, in its core, Christianism is not religious but political, a reactionary cult susceptible to authoritarian preachers. And Christianism is to the American right what critical theory is to the American left: a reductionist, totalizing creed that “others” half the country, and deeply misreads the genius of the American project.
The submission to (male) authority is often integral to fundamentalism, which is why it isn’t actually surprising that self-professed Christians came to support a man who cultivates greed, gluttony, pride, lust, envy, sloth and anger more assiduously than Satan. Trump was an authority figure, period. He was a patriarch. He was the patriarch of their tribe. And he was in power, which meant that God put him there. After which nothing needs to be said. So of course if the patriarch says the election is rigged, you believe him.
What I do know is that, unchecked, this kind of fundamentalism is a recipe not for civil peace but for civil conflict. It hasn’t gone away, even if its actual policy prescriptions are unpopular, even if it represents only a fraction of Americans, as wokeness does. It’s a mindset, a worldview, as deep in the human psyche as the racial tribalism now endemic on the left. It controls one of our two major parties. And in so far as it has assigned all decisions to one man, Donald Trump, it is capable of supporting the overturning of an election — or anything else, for that matter, that the patriarch wants.
At the time of his suicide I would have thought that, though he once attained a level of literary celebrity that was rare then and hard to imagine now, he would in short order slip gracefully into the realm of respected but little-remembered dead writers. Ah, but he has his champions: people who want everyone to know they hate him.
Young people now arrive at elite colleges with the assumption that not only will they be seen, heard and meticulously cared for, but also that their own politics will broadly align with those of the institutions they have chosen to attend. They have been given little reason to think otherwise.
With universities run as for-profit business, why are we surprised that students are now insisting “the customer is always right?”
To be clear: the customer is not always right.
Yet we’ve let this attitude persist in the larger economy for at least as long as I’ve been alive. Let’s not act surprised when this attitude follows capitalism everywhere it insists on going. Academia is no exception.
The naivety of some grown adults — in this case, college administrators hell-bent on making ever-more money off their students — is astonishing. If you use people, expect them to use you in return.
…it’s a profoundly weird (if surprisingly common) rhetorical move to say “I support you for your independence, but you wrote something I disagree with, so I’m not supporting you anymore.” It should go without saying - saying stuff that you don’t agree with is an expression of my independence, and it’s strange to endorse independence in the commission of telling me that you expected me to adhere to your own views. Subscribe or cancel as you will. But are you really out to support independence of thought if you don’t support it when that independence results in an opinion you don’t like?
Since Hamas attacked thousands of its citizens last week, the Israeli government has started a sweeping social media campaign in key Western countries to drum up support for its military response against the group. Part of its strategy: pushing dozens of ads containing brutal and emotional imagery of the deadly militant violence in Israel across platforms such as X and YouTube…
Many of us at Tablet believed strongly, and still believe, in the possibility of creating a better world. But something bothered us from the very beginning about these ideas, and the people pushing them. Every time we pressed on one of the newly mass-embraced policy proposals or narratives—intersectionality, decolonization studies, the Iran nuclear deal, Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, critical race theory, COVID lockdowns—a weird thing would happen: The idea itself fell apart at the seams within seconds of contact with reality, and yet its defenders got more sure of themselves, more performatively boastful, more passionate and gleeful about smearing anyone who dared to question them.
The more we listened to freshly minted universal experts, the more we were struck by the increasing lunacy of their pronouncements on every topic under the sun, always backed by “studies” and “science”—where COVID–19 came from, how many genders there are, which skin tones and personal experiences qualify a person for protection status and which do not, whether it was OK for a Syrian dictator to bomb and gas 500,000 of his people, whether the U.S. should ally itself with a Holocaust-denying medieval theocracy, whether the president of the United States was secretly a Russian agent, whether large American cities should let drug addicts and violent schizophrenics get high on the streets and steal stuff—and more. Indeed, over time, we were struck by how little the ideas themselves seemed to matter; what so many people seemed most attached to was power.
“Free Palestine”—the slogan, the fantasy, and the policy—has always consciously implied the mass murder of Jews in their towns, streets, shops, and living rooms. Few are willing to say so openly, but in many intellectual, professional, and popular circles in the Middle East and the West, the idea of Palestinian national liberation has long been framed in terms that condone or necessitate the indiscriminate killing of Jews.
We are walking in the footsteps of previous generations of modernizing, secular, intellectual Arabs. They too wanted nothing to do with their native lands, which they saw as having none of the power, prestige, or respect they craved. In their egotism and intellectual narcissism, they didn’t want to belong to “backward” societies. So they sought in foreign, mostly Western ideologies a refuge and a hiding place from backwardness. They joined the progressive secular movements and trendy revolutions because they offered an escape hatch from the drudgery of slow, marginal, local change. They became revolutionaries because they were afraid and insecure. Like Edward Said, they were anti-Zionist and anti-American “humanists” because they did not want to be, or could not be, “Arabs.” Their obvious cultural chauvinism was simply an urge to self-annihilate, to disappear into universalism. Their lives were a hopeless quest to shed their own skin.
On Saturday, as the raping and murdering and kidnapping were happening in Israel, Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue, posted on X: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
…
What would this death cult do if it could do anything? We have glimpsed that over the past 72 hours. We know what they are capable of, and we know that they have many defenders here at home. Those who imagine themselves fomenting the long-awaited revolution. Those who know that the beloved academic language of decolonization means nothing if you’re unwilling to see it enacted in flesh, and especially blood.
This is a fascinating time to be watching the politics of academia.
The question of what constitutes humanity is at the heart of Constantino’s attack and the tensions in Portland, a city buckling under the weight of its ostensible benevolence. Few U.S. cities have offered as fertile an environment for drug addiction and homelessness to take root, via hands-off policies and the idea that a moral society is a tolerant society – all of which might have stood a fighting chance, had the riots and violence of 2020 not kneecapped a city already struggling under COVID.
I voted, in 2020, for Measure 110, the ballot measure decriminalizing the possession of many controlled substances, i.e. drugs, below a certain amount. When I did, I was thinking of my experience with drugs like mushrooms, molly, marijuana, all of which I’ve used and enjoyed. (And not just recreationally — having suffered in the past from severe, debilitating, and suicidal Depression, these drugs have helped me immeasurably. It’s not an understatement to say I owe them my life.)
But slowly, over the last few years, I’ve come to regret my vote. I did not understand the potency of these new synthetic drugs like fentanyl, sent in from China via Mexico.
I voted as I did in hopes that people with mental illness would not be jailed. I still feel this way. But I recognize it’s not compassionate to leave people on the streets either, left in the grip their addiction.
To leave someone to their addictions is not compassion. It is at times necessary, but it is not love.
I think I’ve accepted the rhetorical framing of the L.G.B.T. community simply because it is widely adopted in our politics and in our discourse. But I tend to agree that it’s not necessarily a legitimate concept in that I’ve never really felt a part of any community. I’ve never felt welcomed. In fact, I’ve mostly felt rejected or attacked. I also think that I’m completely supportive of the rights of transgender adults to live their best lives however they see fit. But I’ve never truly understood the lumping in or connection of transgender issues and gay rights issues. They always have seemed to me to be somewhat distinct.
It doesn’t sound like Mr. Polumbo and I have much in common politically, and while I can’t agree that “I’ve accepted the rhetorical framing of the L.G.B.T. community” (I have not), I really feel his sentiments about community.
In my humble opinion, gay culture has far too warm an embrace with hedonistic capitalism, with empty consumerism, with the vacuous pop culture of Instagram and People magazine and Bravo. Put simply: we sold out. And to express this sentiment openly is to be labeled a traitor to “the community.”
Don’t worry, this article is only a touch about Vivek. Much like the man himself, I encourage you to skip over that part and get right to the take-away line:
Ron DeSantis was right when he said at the debate that America is a nation in decline and that decline is a choice. He just wasn’t right in the way he meant it. We’re in decline because a spirit of lawlessness, shamelessness and brainlessness have become leading features of a conservative movement that was supposed to be a bulwark against all three.
It was TikTok, in Robinson’s eyes, that was driving the sudden rise in pediatric DID referrals. “It’s possible that social media is revealing new ways for individuals with genuine DID to express themselves,” he said in his lecture. But he also issued a warning: “however, it’s also very possible that social media and internet trends are contributing to increased DID claims that are not genuine.” That is, people claiming to have DID might be mistaken, confused, or simply faking it.
Robinson — a member of McLean Hospital’s trauma research program, which delivers specialized care to people with dissociative disorders — said he could not accurately diagnose anyone through social media at the outset of his talk. Still, he used TikToks to illustrate his points. He started with a clip of a rainbow-haired DID system purchasing a personalized cake to celebrate their official DID diagnosis, something Robinson thought was “surprising,” as it contrasted with the typically “hidden” nature of the disorder. He shared footage of a system cycling through eight elaborate neon outfits — complete with wigs and cat-like paws — attributed to their different alters, “overt changes” of appearance that Robinson felt were “not characteristic” of the DID patients clinicians see each day.
Kraft — whose alters include JA, a man-hating lesbian, and Kaleb, a hat-loving teenage boy — says Robinson’s presentation was distressing to her system and the other influencers he featured, who faced waves of abuse off the back of his lecture. “I have screenshots of someone coming onto my page to tell someone they shouldn’t believe me because this doctor says I’m faking,” she says. “People were given a license to hate.”
DID creators and their fans lashed out at Robinson in response. They felt the lecture discredited their experiences and further entrenched stigma against people with the disorder. Actress AnnaLynne McCord, who came out as a DID system in 2021, called the lecture “asinine” and “crazy.” Systems began to “review bomb” McLean Hospital, where Robinson works, leaving comments on Google about the “unethical” and “disgusting’ presentation. A petition was circulated calling for a “formal apology” and “reparations” from McLean Hospital as well as a wide range of trauma experts; another petition called for Robinson’s license to be revoked.
In the end, McLean removed all videos of Robinson’s lecture from its owned channels.
I’ve long suspected that many things like this are functions of social media. My experience of human nature is that many people will do absolutely anything for attention, and what is social media if not a tool designed explicitly to garner attention? (You only once have to be in a gay bar when a bachelorette party walks in to realize people love to co-opt identities that make them feel special, and will be absolutely shameless about doing so.)
Anecdotally, this is rampant in high schools. Teachers, kids, parents… I’ve had countless of each say, “yeah, lots of girls say they’re queer or trans to get attention.” Yet no one seems to say this in public for fear of reprisal.
Our culture has lost the ability to talk in nuance, so I feel the need to explicitly say: this does not mean I think trans people or people with DID don’t exist. They do, and have a right to, just the same as all of us.
I’m merely skeptical of the numbers we currently see on or infer from social media. I resent any wing of culture that says my skepticism, a hallmark of liberalism, is somehow “hateful” or “invalidating.”
Beware of anyone that says skepticism is “hateful.” They’re trying to shut down critical thought and conversation, not encourage it.
I guess I can take some small solace in knowing that even without affirmative action, there will still be a lot of white rejects out there who will die mad.
What a line.
As I approach 40, I must remind myself that I’m glad I’m no longer young. This country — my home — seems to be tearing itself apart. If all we expect is the worst from each other, haven’t we lost the republic?