On American Sadism, Ladyballs,
and the Twitter Cesspool
“There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women." — Madeleine Albright
Concerning American Sadism (thank you Chris Hedges), the covers have been pulled back on the rot of American history and because of it, the beast has been unleashed and all Hell has broken loose. Kae Tempest calls it 'colonial bloodlust', White fear gone berserk, resulting in the terrorist occupation of the Capitol on January 6th. The televised Capitol insurrection showed us in glaring detail how the most vile and violent White racists enjoy undue privilege, including the ex-dictator and the elected senators and congress-people remaining in office, those who aided and abetted the terrorists committing treasonous acts meant to overthrow our legally elected President. Working class White people are terrified about the harsh inequities in the workplace and the rise of a new culture that is increasingly reflective of who we are as a people. They're being radicalized by Republiklan lies to blame their miseries on POC, immigrants, LGBTQ+, and 'others' instead of the corrupt politicians directly responsible for creating their misery—officials they elect who couldn't give a flying f about them, gaslight them repeatedly. Obstructionists who block every good move that could elevate their lives into more comfort. Lies. Republiklan lies leading to Republiklan terrorists smearing feces on the walls of Congress, killing and beating Capital policemen... terrorists who threaten to murder elected officials who don't agree with their cracked conspiracies.
We are living through the Fall of the American Empire. If the earth survives past 2050, history will not be kind to this country.
The ugliness of harm extends to the left's egregious bullying. On to the cesspool that is Twitter. To begin, you never know anyone's true identity and most of the bigger-mouthed bullies are anons. The Twitter mob thrives on bullying, on the left as well as the right. Many authors and artists I respect have left that platform and are happier for it. In the heat of the initial Cuomo accusations, I was jumped by a crazed gang of anon faux-feminists for saying that when a man asks a woman for a kiss and you're not feeling him, get your ladyballs on and tell him to fuck off. This happened when the accusations about him were looking extremely benign, as in asking for a kiss, or touching a woman's face at a wedding (as Italian men of his generation do.) Little did I know that I'd tossed a piece of red meat on to the twitter hyena pack. I was 'called out' as a 'victim-blamer, misogynist, Trumpist, woman-hater, Karen, ableist, White-privileged, someone to pity, plain old stupid for not knowing the rules of Twitter (? I fought back. How dare I ?) and much more. When I stated the mob would be hard-pressed to find a more radical feminist than I, the fur really started flying from anons who have no idea about my life, work, past, activism, etc. This take-down happened on a celebrity 'feminist's' feed who chimed in, obviously petrified not to by her anon followers. She claimed I couldn't be a radical feminist and say the things I was saying. Correction: What she meant was, I couldn't be a radical feminist because I didn't ascribe to her Twitter feed's vicious brand of identity politics. Who are the real fascists here? All this while her followers appropriate trauma over a flirt or a face-caress. Of course I believe it's inappropriate for a boss to attempt these obnoxious flirts in the workplace, I understand the power dynamic. I also understand that as creepy and wrong as it is, sexual assault it is not. Since then, allegations of harassment have come down hard on old Cuomo from eleven women and I do believe he's a sexual harasser. But for those who attacked me for saying women need to stand up for themselves when a man comes on strong and you're not feeling it, try being held hostage with a gun to your head and repeatedly raped for three days, then come back and tell me a man asking for a kiss is abuse. Unfortunately in our current upside-down world, the more minor sexual harassment accusations distill and diminish REAL violence against women, the femicide going on daily in homes across this gawd-forsaken country and across the world. During the Covid lockdown, the numbers of women who were beaten and murdered in their homes spiked off the charts. And as harsh as it feels to state this truth, one of the fundamental reasons femicide continues unabated is due to women being at each other's throats instead of joining together as warriors to arrest the beast.
The dangerous conservatism present in this holier-than-thou sanctimony of women attacking other women is shameful. Talk about shocked... the experience felt as if I'd accidentally wandered into a Proud Boys forum wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt. I was shamed, blamed, bullied and called a litany of absurdities. I guess they learned many lessons from our ex-faux-president Twitler. One fool started calling me a racist because I mentioned I'd grown up with Black culture, had written a book about my favorite warrior women in music (Labelle) and when it came to Bruno Mars and attacks on him as an appropriator, I called BS. When I explained to this anon that she was engaging in libel (was it even a she?) by calling me a racist, the once-Latina with the ridiculous tag suddenly became Black, and partner in a law firm. (She's changed her tag from 'Latina Lawyer' to 'Afro-Latina lawyer'. I love screen grabs and I got 'em.) The snarky mob (90% anonymous) were outraged that I defended my statements, some saying 'she won't back down so let's go for her'. Shame on me for not handing over my self-respect on a platter. Little do they know of my particular battle scars. You won't find any White fragility here. Ask anyone who knows me—call me fragile or racist and you'd be laughed off the globe. I pity the poor teenage girl who dares express an opinion contrary to these faux-leftie bullies. No wonder suicide and self-harm among girls and young women is so rampant; you can't even trust other women on a supposed feminist feed to be protective of your rights to speak your truthful opinion. This is ugly, my friends. It needs to stop.
I'm hardly 100% PC, certainly have my blind spots around the new lexicon we're all supposed to adhere to, but I'm not myopic to the toxicity of this dangerous post-modern/ queer theory/ transgender ideology cult seeking to silence feminist voices, close down female spaces, accuse anyone fighting for women's rights as a TERF. One of the funniest moments—the mob went nuts over my referral to 'ladyballs', like mean girls at a slumber party. I could have sent them Elizabeth Gilbert's interview on IG with the fabulous Iyanla Vazant, who went on at length about how women need to get their ladyballs on and stop expecting men to change overnight, unless they help that process by showing up for themselves. Iyanla is a formidable Black powerhouse. She goes for it about an hour into the conversation.
After an hour of mean-girl twit absurdity, I decided that abandoning the twitter death ship felt like the better option. You can't argue with idiots. The women or trolls or whatever they be on that particular 'feminist' feed play right into a patriarchy banking on women being weak and cannibalizing each other. My stance is hardly about victim-blaming, or expecting women be responsible for rape and violence (which I was being accused of). But I'm with Iyanla; men are never going to unlearn misogyny when women work to take them down for flirting. Is it wrong for a male boss to flirt with a woman on his staff or to touch them inappropriately? Of course! but the dude is no Bill Cosby. Listen to the messages we're receiving right now. Bill Cosby walks. Brittany Spears, who is sane enough to pull of the production of extraordinary concerts and earning gargantuan fees for her hard work, had to fight for years to be in control of her own life because her father and a court of men said so. Breonna Taylor's killers have waltzed away scot free. Texas is the next season of The Handmaid's Tale. Ghislaine Maxwell is the only person (woman) standing trial for an international network of powerful men who paid top-dollar to rape girls. Kyle Rittenhouse is the new American hero. Kellogg's is threatening to replace its striking workers by shipping their jobs to Mexico, where the pay is 97 cents an hour. And the type of battle you want to rage around, like a dog with a steak bone in this hyper-critical moment, is taking another woman down for saying there are levels of sexual harassment and women need to protect themselves?
It's about time women stand together as warriors, speaking up, fighting for our fundamental rights—which we STILL do not own, understanding and planning how to fight together against this punishing system. Stop being afraid of cancellation and think— who are these people behind the push to cancel every voice that doesn't ascribe to a particular ideology? Women fighting together across the divides of race, nationality and class is precisely what the White male power structure fears most.
Can we stop allowing the White patriarchal power structure to divide us? Nowhere is this intention toward divisiveness more apparent than in academia. Shackled to their insularity and identity politics, they arrogantly call out people then run like scared rabbits from any whiff on Twitter of possible cancellation themselves. Academia contributes to and upholds the propaganda that divides us hook, line, and sinker— divide and conquer! their unconscious mantra. Or maybe it's not so unconscious. Where is the cognizance on twitter around the right wing and Russia's successful social media disinformation campaigns? How easily bent are the minds of sheep? While the 'new left' is tearing at everyone's throats, stoking the 'narcissism of minor differences' into 3-alarm fires and endlessly screaming 'there's a Jew under the bed', the right is laughing, gleefully goosestepping all over the country. We can trace cancel culture to Stalin's brand of Soviet communism, and before that, the Roman Catholic Church. Remember excommunication? Well, here we are. I will never concede my self-respect or my right to think, to express an opinion, or concede my individuality to a dangerous, Stalinesque mob of faux-lefties.
We're witnessing the closest call America has ever experienced to a full-on fascist takeover. The ongoing threat continues to be upheld by a media that thrives on stoking fear in the populace. All the screen time, the narcissistic competition of social media, the constant barrage of a poisonous news cycle. Our brains are being scrambled into an omelette for fascists. It's too late for the Republiklans to ever return to being anything other than what they've become; the party of grifting racist fascists. We need to bury these fascists beneath a fresh news cycle that upholds the resistance. The 4th estate has to step up into serious pest control, call it like it is, and STOP promoting fascism by pumping it full of oxygen due to greed over ratings. Will social media platforms become responsible to delete the vicious propaganda they continually allow to run rampant? Not with the billions they're presently raking in. We're looking at another potential lock-down due to misinformation about Covid due to predatory algorithms that thrive on poison and outrage, from platforms feigning innocence when they know exactly what they're doing. (Thanks a lot, Facebook and Twitter.) Our ugly wounds need exposure to new, clean oxygen for a healing, for a revolution, not the continuous stoking of toxic fascist fumes and Stalinesque gag-orders in the name of 'wokeness'. It's high time we apply the technologies of goodness. TRUTH is a good start. Compassion. Empathy. And it's a-okay to wield these attributes like swords. As the late great Toni Morrison stated, "Evil has a blockbuster audience; Goodness lurks backstage. Evil has vivid speech; Goodness bites its tongue." It's time we kick evil's ass and bring Kindness center-stage, standing proud in all its wild complexities, heartbreaks, and valiant beauty. Goodness requires critical thinking. Evil is banal. Easy. Pick up an insult or a gun. "They got the guns but we got the numbers", sang Jim Morrison in the 1960s, when we rose up together against colonial bloodlust. We need connection. We need to stop the bullying. Whether left or right, bullying and its accompanying violence is rot, is a toxic compost feeding our current sadistic American mindset.
The earth and its people are screaming. What about the earth's children? Will they even live to see 2050? Not at the rate we're going in all aspects of our lives... the environment, economic disaster, the gaslighting from social media and news outlets, the way we treat one another... there are over 65,000 homeless people in LA County alone and to quote Gil Scott-Heron, "Whitey's on the Moon". All of it, lies, bullying and fear-baiting posing as civil public discourse, is destroying the beauty we could all be living and breathing. It's not enough to remove ourselves from the toxicity to protect our individual selves, to save our psyches by quietly avoiding the roiling tide. We must also act in whatever way we can toward taking back our earth, our safety, our goodness and sanity together. Can we fight for renewal and for each other? Make a pact to do whatever we can to speak up, fight back, claim our freedoms, help others less fortunate—like, now? Or shall our eyes remain glued to our phone screens, hearts and minds frozen in an entertaining horror-show march over the cliff?
Moby and his animator see clearly:
We are living through the Fall of the American Empire. If the earth survives past 2050, history will not be kind to this country.
The ugliness of harm extends to the left's egregious bullying. On to the cesspool that is Twitter. To begin, you never know anyone's true identity and most of the bigger-mouthed bullies are anons. The Twitter mob thrives on bullying, on the left as well as the right. Many authors and artists I respect have left that platform and are happier for it. In the heat of the initial Cuomo accusations, I was jumped by a crazed gang of anon faux-feminists for saying that when a man asks a woman for a kiss and you're not feeling him, get your ladyballs on and tell him to fuck off. This happened when the accusations about him were looking extremely benign, as in asking for a kiss, or touching a woman's face at a wedding (as Italian men of his generation do.) Little did I know that I'd tossed a piece of red meat on to the twitter hyena pack. I was 'called out' as a 'victim-blamer, misogynist, Trumpist, woman-hater, Karen, ableist, White-privileged, someone to pity, plain old stupid for not knowing the rules of Twitter (? I fought back. How dare I ?) and much more. When I stated the mob would be hard-pressed to find a more radical feminist than I, the fur really started flying from anons who have no idea about my life, work, past, activism, etc. This take-down happened on a celebrity 'feminist's' feed who chimed in, obviously petrified not to by her anon followers. She claimed I couldn't be a radical feminist and say the things I was saying. Correction: What she meant was, I couldn't be a radical feminist because I didn't ascribe to her Twitter feed's vicious brand of identity politics. Who are the real fascists here? All this while her followers appropriate trauma over a flirt or a face-caress. Of course I believe it's inappropriate for a boss to attempt these obnoxious flirts in the workplace, I understand the power dynamic. I also understand that as creepy and wrong as it is, sexual assault it is not. Since then, allegations of harassment have come down hard on old Cuomo from eleven women and I do believe he's a sexual harasser. But for those who attacked me for saying women need to stand up for themselves when a man comes on strong and you're not feeling it, try being held hostage with a gun to your head and repeatedly raped for three days, then come back and tell me a man asking for a kiss is abuse. Unfortunately in our current upside-down world, the more minor sexual harassment accusations distill and diminish REAL violence against women, the femicide going on daily in homes across this gawd-forsaken country and across the world. During the Covid lockdown, the numbers of women who were beaten and murdered in their homes spiked off the charts. And as harsh as it feels to state this truth, one of the fundamental reasons femicide continues unabated is due to women being at each other's throats instead of joining together as warriors to arrest the beast.
The dangerous conservatism present in this holier-than-thou sanctimony of women attacking other women is shameful. Talk about shocked... the experience felt as if I'd accidentally wandered into a Proud Boys forum wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt. I was shamed, blamed, bullied and called a litany of absurdities. I guess they learned many lessons from our ex-faux-president Twitler. One fool started calling me a racist because I mentioned I'd grown up with Black culture, had written a book about my favorite warrior women in music (Labelle) and when it came to Bruno Mars and attacks on him as an appropriator, I called BS. When I explained to this anon that she was engaging in libel (was it even a she?) by calling me a racist, the once-Latina with the ridiculous tag suddenly became Black, and partner in a law firm. (She's changed her tag from 'Latina Lawyer' to 'Afro-Latina lawyer'. I love screen grabs and I got 'em.) The snarky mob (90% anonymous) were outraged that I defended my statements, some saying 'she won't back down so let's go for her'. Shame on me for not handing over my self-respect on a platter. Little do they know of my particular battle scars. You won't find any White fragility here. Ask anyone who knows me—call me fragile or racist and you'd be laughed off the globe. I pity the poor teenage girl who dares express an opinion contrary to these faux-leftie bullies. No wonder suicide and self-harm among girls and young women is so rampant; you can't even trust other women on a supposed feminist feed to be protective of your rights to speak your truthful opinion. This is ugly, my friends. It needs to stop.
I'm hardly 100% PC, certainly have my blind spots around the new lexicon we're all supposed to adhere to, but I'm not myopic to the toxicity of this dangerous post-modern/ queer theory/ transgender ideology cult seeking to silence feminist voices, close down female spaces, accuse anyone fighting for women's rights as a TERF. One of the funniest moments—the mob went nuts over my referral to 'ladyballs', like mean girls at a slumber party. I could have sent them Elizabeth Gilbert's interview on IG with the fabulous Iyanla Vazant, who went on at length about how women need to get their ladyballs on and stop expecting men to change overnight, unless they help that process by showing up for themselves. Iyanla is a formidable Black powerhouse. She goes for it about an hour into the conversation.
After an hour of mean-girl twit absurdity, I decided that abandoning the twitter death ship felt like the better option. You can't argue with idiots. The women or trolls or whatever they be on that particular 'feminist' feed play right into a patriarchy banking on women being weak and cannibalizing each other. My stance is hardly about victim-blaming, or expecting women be responsible for rape and violence (which I was being accused of). But I'm with Iyanla; men are never going to unlearn misogyny when women work to take them down for flirting. Is it wrong for a male boss to flirt with a woman on his staff or to touch them inappropriately? Of course! but the dude is no Bill Cosby. Listen to the messages we're receiving right now. Bill Cosby walks. Brittany Spears, who is sane enough to pull of the production of extraordinary concerts and earning gargantuan fees for her hard work, had to fight for years to be in control of her own life because her father and a court of men said so. Breonna Taylor's killers have waltzed away scot free. Texas is the next season of The Handmaid's Tale. Ghislaine Maxwell is the only person (woman) standing trial for an international network of powerful men who paid top-dollar to rape girls. Kyle Rittenhouse is the new American hero. Kellogg's is threatening to replace its striking workers by shipping their jobs to Mexico, where the pay is 97 cents an hour. And the type of battle you want to rage around, like a dog with a steak bone in this hyper-critical moment, is taking another woman down for saying there are levels of sexual harassment and women need to protect themselves?
It's about time women stand together as warriors, speaking up, fighting for our fundamental rights—which we STILL do not own, understanding and planning how to fight together against this punishing system. Stop being afraid of cancellation and think— who are these people behind the push to cancel every voice that doesn't ascribe to a particular ideology? Women fighting together across the divides of race, nationality and class is precisely what the White male power structure fears most.
Can we stop allowing the White patriarchal power structure to divide us? Nowhere is this intention toward divisiveness more apparent than in academia. Shackled to their insularity and identity politics, they arrogantly call out people then run like scared rabbits from any whiff on Twitter of possible cancellation themselves. Academia contributes to and upholds the propaganda that divides us hook, line, and sinker— divide and conquer! their unconscious mantra. Or maybe it's not so unconscious. Where is the cognizance on twitter around the right wing and Russia's successful social media disinformation campaigns? How easily bent are the minds of sheep? While the 'new left' is tearing at everyone's throats, stoking the 'narcissism of minor differences' into 3-alarm fires and endlessly screaming 'there's a Jew under the bed', the right is laughing, gleefully goosestepping all over the country. We can trace cancel culture to Stalin's brand of Soviet communism, and before that, the Roman Catholic Church. Remember excommunication? Well, here we are. I will never concede my self-respect or my right to think, to express an opinion, or concede my individuality to a dangerous, Stalinesque mob of faux-lefties.
We're witnessing the closest call America has ever experienced to a full-on fascist takeover. The ongoing threat continues to be upheld by a media that thrives on stoking fear in the populace. All the screen time, the narcissistic competition of social media, the constant barrage of a poisonous news cycle. Our brains are being scrambled into an omelette for fascists. It's too late for the Republiklans to ever return to being anything other than what they've become; the party of grifting racist fascists. We need to bury these fascists beneath a fresh news cycle that upholds the resistance. The 4th estate has to step up into serious pest control, call it like it is, and STOP promoting fascism by pumping it full of oxygen due to greed over ratings. Will social media platforms become responsible to delete the vicious propaganda they continually allow to run rampant? Not with the billions they're presently raking in. We're looking at another potential lock-down due to misinformation about Covid due to predatory algorithms that thrive on poison and outrage, from platforms feigning innocence when they know exactly what they're doing. (Thanks a lot, Facebook and Twitter.) Our ugly wounds need exposure to new, clean oxygen for a healing, for a revolution, not the continuous stoking of toxic fascist fumes and Stalinesque gag-orders in the name of 'wokeness'. It's high time we apply the technologies of goodness. TRUTH is a good start. Compassion. Empathy. And it's a-okay to wield these attributes like swords. As the late great Toni Morrison stated, "Evil has a blockbuster audience; Goodness lurks backstage. Evil has vivid speech; Goodness bites its tongue." It's time we kick evil's ass and bring Kindness center-stage, standing proud in all its wild complexities, heartbreaks, and valiant beauty. Goodness requires critical thinking. Evil is banal. Easy. Pick up an insult or a gun. "They got the guns but we got the numbers", sang Jim Morrison in the 1960s, when we rose up together against colonial bloodlust. We need connection. We need to stop the bullying. Whether left or right, bullying and its accompanying violence is rot, is a toxic compost feeding our current sadistic American mindset.
The earth and its people are screaming. What about the earth's children? Will they even live to see 2050? Not at the rate we're going in all aspects of our lives... the environment, economic disaster, the gaslighting from social media and news outlets, the way we treat one another... there are over 65,000 homeless people in LA County alone and to quote Gil Scott-Heron, "Whitey's on the Moon". All of it, lies, bullying and fear-baiting posing as civil public discourse, is destroying the beauty we could all be living and breathing. It's not enough to remove ourselves from the toxicity to protect our individual selves, to save our psyches by quietly avoiding the roiling tide. We must also act in whatever way we can toward taking back our earth, our safety, our goodness and sanity together. Can we fight for renewal and for each other? Make a pact to do whatever we can to speak up, fight back, claim our freedoms, help others less fortunate—like, now? Or shall our eyes remain glued to our phone screens, hearts and minds frozen in an entertaining horror-show march over the cliff?
Moby and his animator see clearly:
