#Marxism founded on hate

[apocalypselog]

nngh ran into more I/p discourse. Why does everybody make it so hard. I read this stuff and can’t tell fact from fiction. At least until I step back and remember 18000 murdered civilians

#serious #tw genocide #the stuff I found was basically the ‘uhh all protestors are super terrorists who love Hamas and also decolonization = bad’ #which like. a bit of that is real. I’m not touching the Hamas thing w a ten foot pole in not qualified #*i’m #but like. one of them basically said using the word settler-colonialism is a red flag #like?? that’s an actual thing??? yes? by definition??? #the more I think about it that article was full of shit #they didn’t realize that the ppl within a settler colonialist state are capable of condemning it. WITHOUT condoning genocide #it kept whining about Marxism too. which. there are valid criticisms. that aren’t ‘Marxism = absolutely evil anti intellectual forever’ #anyways hate all of this. hypocrites the lot of them. #and to the antisemitic leftists out there- you are the scum of the earth

[baixueagain]

Couldn’t help but notice this reblog in a certain recent “queer is a slur” discourse post.

Beyond being ahistorical, it is significant in its third paragraph, which is almost entirely made up with TERF and alt right dog whistles. For anyone who has even a basic idea of what to look for, this blogger has just outright shown their hand.

Let’s start from the beginning of the text I’ve marked in blue:

“a pedophilia and incest apologist”

This is a very handy tactic especially prevalent in alt-right rhetoric these days. It stigmatises anything it is attached to, in this case the person who coined the term “queer theory.” Topics like pedophilia and incest are extremely taboo and emotionally laden, and attaching them to a subject will cause many people to automatically distance themselves from that term out of a semi-instinctive desire to not associate themselves with such things. Spread this attachment widely enough, and you can push entire groups into abandoning terminology, praxis, and people.

For the record, I’m not sure of the source for this claim. The woman who coined the term “queer theory” was Teresa de Laurentis, and I’ve never seen anything by her which tries to excuse pedophilia or incest. She certainly wrote about the gendered nature of incest, but this was in no way laudatory. This may also be a reference to the work of Gloria Anzaldua, who helped further popularize the term. She spoke frankly and openly about her sexual fantasies, many of them of a taboo nature, because of her firm belief in de-stigmatizing discussions about human sexual behaviour. Not only are such fantasies extremely common, they are in no way apologetics for real life abuse, nor do they predict real life behaviour.

“a straight woman with a fetish for gay men”

We’ve gotten to the transphobic dogwhistle now. This is an accusation frequently used against trans men and nonbinary AFAB people, especially those who pursue relationships with men. With the current surge in transphobic public rhetoric, it has received a new breath of life, and trans mlm are currently facing a slew of accusations of being straight women/girls who have just fetishized gay men to the point that they’re trying to “become” gay men/boys themselves (CW: link leads to transphobic hate site genderhq.org). These accusations are even being used in queer circles--including by trans people--to gatekeep who “gets” to write fiction about mlm. Just a week ago, for example, queer writer Alex Marraccini accused indie trans mlm author Ana Mardoll of fetishizing mlm, claiming that Ana’s “fetishistic” writing isn’t nearly as groundbreaking or liberating as the work of real cis gay men.

I’m not sure who the blogger is referring to here as there’s no real consensus on who first used the term “queer studies.” However, I think they may be referring to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who was most certainly not a straight woman. She was queer and came out as a trans man, though as far as I know continued to publicly prefer she/her pronouns (hence my own pronoun use here).

“use intentionally over academic language”

Ah, good old anti-intellectualism. If I can’t understand you, you must be using over-academic language just to confuse me on purpose. This dogwhistle not only gives people an excuse to dismiss anything they don’t understand straight away, it pushes the conspiracy theory that we academics are part of an ivory tower conspiracy to Queer Everything for...reasons (see below).

“to obfuscate that their founding texts and members are Marxists”

Aaaand here we are, the full show of the hand. This blogger is either alt-right or well down the pipeline to becoming one. The old chestnut that These Academics We Disagree With are all secret Marxists is one that is, you guessed it, strongly tied into antisemitism and Nazi conspiracies that push the belief that Karl Marx, Marxism, and Marxists are part of a global Jewish conspiracy that seeks to destroy the West.

And of course we have one more “incest and pedophilia” whistle to round things off, just to doubly ensure that people understandably disgusted by those things attach them to queer theorists.

Anyway, once again I beg the good people of Tumblr to please pay close attention to TERF rhetoric, where it comes from, how it’s used, and the other movements that it is tied to. I am not being a paranoid conspiracist when I say that “queer is a slur” discoursers and “pedophilia and incest” scaremongers and their ilk (including anti-kink discoursers) are tied to TERF rhetoric, which is itself allied increasingly with the alt right. They are telling you this for themselves. Listen to them when they tell you who they are.

#queer #queer discourse #discourse #lgbtq #transphobia #terfism #dogwhistles #terf rhetoric

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

If you are not a close follower of American college campus politics, you are likely to be unfamiliar with a woman who has been making headlines for over a month in the US and increasingly around the world. The lady in question, one Claudine Gay, was President of Harvard, one of the most renowned educational institutions in the world, until earlier this week when she resigned over plagiarism allegations.

Why does or should anyone care about this? Well, Gay’s decision to step down is the culmination of long-running efforts to address the cancer at the heart of Western societies: the idea that the way to fix injustices of the past is to commit injustices today.

Following her resignation, Gay’s defenders were quick to emphasise the racial dimension of this story. Ibram X. Kendi, for example, tweeted that “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism”.

And while his claims of this being a racist campaign are absurd, it is true that Gay was not targeted solely for seemingly adopting the personal motto: “I came, I saw, I copied”. She became a focus of major Harvard donor concerns and a media campaign led by Christopher Rufo – a man I would approvingly describe as the diversity industry’s greatest enemy – in the light of her mind-boggling testimony in Congress. Her statements, given alongside the Presidents of MIT and UPenn, revealed the core of the ideology the entire Western education system is based on in all its glory.

The oppressor vs. oppressed mindset which is - no matter how uncomfortable this may make some readers - cultural Marxism, says simply that white people and “over-performing” minorities like Indians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese and Korean Americans should be discriminated against in hiring and student applications in favour of “underprivileged groups”. As a result, college campuses on which regular meltdowns have occurred for a decade over such “hate speech” as dressing in a Mexican costume for Halloween found themselves with nothing to say about pro-Hamas demonstrations and the harassment of Jewish students on their campuses in the wake of the October 7 attacks.

But even that is not painting the full picture. Yes, Gay, a darling of the diversity industry, was targeted for her plagiarism following her complete failure of leadership in recent months. But she was also partially targeted because of the assumption, if not outright conclusion, that the reason she was appointed in the first place was, to put it mildly, not merit alone.

After all, Gay’s primary achievement is not stellar academic work, exemplary managerial skills or even charisma and force of personality. She was appointed President of Harvard following a distinguished career in fields like “improving diversity” and researching “race and identity”. To put it bluntly, many people believe that she is a diversity hire and the reason she pushed the DEI ideology that eventually led to her appalling testimony in Congress is that she is herself a beneficiary of it.

To be clear, she has not been forced out for being black. She has been forced out for being placed in a position for which she had neither the skills nor experience to succeed and then failing in it. This is the rotten legacy of affirmative action, which, as Thomas Sowell explained decades ago in 90 seconds and in many of his books since, hurts the very people it is attempting to help:

If allowing students to enter universities in which they are destined to fail for the sake of diversity harms them, then what might be said about hiring people for leadership roles in major institutions in which they are destined to fail? This harms not only them but also the people who work and study at those institutions.

To be clear, I have no evidence that Claudine Gay was hired ahead of better, more qualified candidates. But it is not hard to imagine that a position holding the prestige, reputation and nearly $1-million-a-year salary the role of Harvard President commands could have been filled by someone with more executive experience, academic achievements and other relevant expertise.

This is the other curse of the counterproductive attempts to artificially increase the presence of “underrepresented” groups in employment and education. Because everyone knows that some people are routinely given unfair preferential treatment, it becomes easier and easier for the rest of us to suspect specific individuals of being there for reasons other than merit.

So here is the truth: we must return to pursuing the goal of a colour-blind society immediately. There is no such thing as positive discrimination. All discrimination is wrong. And because it is wrong, it will create precisely the kind of resentment that Claudine Gay is now facing. She is seen as the standard-bearer of the DEI industry and is being treated as such by people who have had enough.

All of us must be treated on the content of our character. When we refuse to follow this principle, we hurt everyone: white, black, hispanic, Asian, Jewish. A healthy society relies on the equal treatment of all individuals. The fact that we have to say this out loud in 2024 is a sign of how far we’ve fallen.

DEI must be dismantled. This will take years, perhaps decades. But, in recent weeks, for the first time in a long time, we have grounds for optimism.

#Claudine Gay #DEI #affirmative action #positive discrimination #harvard #diversity #education

[thebestpartofwakingup]

Note: this does NOT have to be the sociologist/writer you AGREE with the most — obviously this is the #marxism website — but the one you personally found the most interesting or enjoyed writing about the most.

I was always the odd one out in my sociology classes because I ADORED the constructivism lens I just thought it was a really fun way to analyze different writings and films (I ended up in a lot of sociology classes that liked to assign like. Film reports? That’s how I learned I hate film-based classes having to watch a film for a grade is so much worse than reading a book for a grade)

Yet most of my professors and other classmates treated Durkheim as the “hard” intro writer and the constructivism lens as the “hard” lens to write for even though I always found it the easiest to universally apply (because it’s just like. Social symbolism? A thing present in all forms of media related even tangentially to culture or human experiences? How is this not the easiest lens to use for every sociological “use 1-X lenses to analyze this story/article” assignment ever?)

ALSO: NOT including an “other” category because I want to keep this focused on these three in particular since, at least in the US, they are more or less taught as the first three “specific” or “initial” lenses of sociological analysis (which is why Marx isn’t my favorite because I got real sick of having to read the first section of Das Kapital the start of every semester since he it was ALWAYS assigned as a “warm up” in EVERY FUCKING CLASS)

#sociology #social science #college #Karl Marx #Marxism #poll #polls #tumblr poll #social experiment #sociological imagination #max Weber #the Protestant ethic #the Protestant work ethic #Durkheim #Emile Durkheim #constructivism #constuctionialism #sociological analysis #Marxist theory

[nostalgicamerica]

A Re-Declaration of Independence

Jeff Goldstein 

Be it so understood:

I refuse to “unpack white violence.” I reject the idea that my existence “perpetuates white power structures.” I will not — and in fact cannot — “examine my implicit biases.” I’m an individual. I refuse to grant determined interpretive communities authority over my being. My meaning is mine. It is what makes me me.

I’m not taking any “journey” to “discover” the impact of my “privilege” on “black and brown peoples.” I will not become “anti-racist” or “anti-fascist” to satisfy your demands. I reject Cultural Marxism. I am an individual. I’m not defined by my color, my religion, my sex. I’m Jeff.

I will not “respect your pronouns” or “celebrate” your “queerness.” I am hostile to your sexualizing of children. I reject your neologisms, your “triggers,” and your desire to control my speech. I know who and what you are: you are my presumptive master, or else the Useful Idiot who empowers him. But I will grant you and your ideology no power over me.

I reject “equity” because it is collectivism disguised as virtue. I reject “inclusivity” because it is inorganic, superficial, and contrived. I reject mandated “diversity”: I will not surrender to the Crayon Box Mafia, nor to the gender changelings who pretend I am a construct answerable to their whims.

“Cultural appropriation” is merely culture: it expands to include, and it makes up the very fabric of a pluralist society. There’s no such thing as “digital blackface.” My whiteness is not “violent”; my sex is not “oppressive”; my religion doesn’t concern you; and my children are not yours to mold. Your beliefs will not be imposed on me. The State will not parent my sons.

“Queer theory” is “critical race theory” is “critical consciousness” is the Marxist rejection of the individual as individual. Cultural Marxism is determined to raze norms, sow chaos, tear families asunder, and reduce being to collective conformity. I reject its premises as fully as I reject its adherents. I will not comply.

I will not mouth your slogans. I will not denounce on command. I am not your tool, and you are not my minder. I reject your social hectoring. I find abhorrent your authoritarian urges. I laugh at your disingenuous outrage. From me you will receive no apologies. I reject your premises entirely, and I hereby reclaim my time.

My speech is my own. I reject each of your excuses to silence me. I don’t ask for your protections. I can filter information without your interference, and I despise your presumption to protect me from myself.

I am your sworn enemy, as you are mine. I will not perform for you. I will not read from your script or dance in your follies. I utterly reject your revisionism, your ahistorical impertinence, your presentism, your self-appointed expertise. I will not bow before your theorists, nor admire your social prophets.

I am not a disease. My existence doesn’t “warm the planet.” I’m not interested in your “sustainability” concerns. I am not yours to manage.

I won’t eat your bugs, live in your pods, surrender my cars, or without consent be packed into your cities. I reject your charity. I unmask your intentions. I know what a woman is; I know that any member of any racial group can practice racism; I know that 2+2=4, regardless of how contingent you wish to make reality. I despise your ideology. I refuse your relativism. You are not the Elect, and I am not answerable to the various neuroses you wear as badges of honor.

I know you better than you know yourselves. You are conditioned. Programmed. Automatons who believe themselves sentient beings. Your intolerance of “hate” is not a virtue. It’s a ruse. An excuse to practice your own intolerance and luxuriate in your own hatreds. You are a self-fulfilling prophecy. You are that which you claim to despise, and I am that which you claim to be.

I see you. Clearly. And I aim to misbehave.

I strive to be self-sufficient. I honor the founding ideals of my country, and I work to live up to their measure. I recognize the great fortune of my birth. History does not frighten me. I reject your blood libels: I am not responsible for that which I didn’t do, nor are you victims of what was never done to you. I will not proclaim your goodness while knowing your evil.

I am a free man. You wish to take me from me. You will fail. I will win. And God willing, I will live to spit on your graves.

*This is copied verbatim from https://jeffgoldstein.substack.com/*

[mightyflamethrower]

Most Americans have been shocked by recent images of violent anti-Israel and anti-Semitic protests on college campuses. Jewish students at America’s top universities, including Columbia, NYU, and MIT, are being physically attacked and intimidated. Jewish students are fleeing Columbia University because campus police cannot guarantee their safety.

How can this happen in America in 2024? Why are we seeing the return of the vile prejudices and hatreds of the 1930s at our leading universities? Who is responsible for this?

The leadership of America’s colleges and universities bears most of the blame.

Many of these student protesters are not high-minded crusaders for justice but lazy, ill-informed morons who know little about Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East. They are also cowards who are hiding behind masks because they don’t want their anti-Semitic and anti-Israel radicalism to prevent them from getting high-paid jobs in corporations and law firms. These student protesters are afraid that heroic organizations like Canary Mission will put their names and faces on mobile billboards and list them in databases to hold them accountable for their hateful extremism.

Anti-Israel/anti-Semitic professors are the source of much of the violent protests and are egging them on. On Monday, hundreds of Columbia University faculty members staged a walkout to protest the school’s decision to have police arrest student protesters. Also in New York City, police blamed faculty and professional agitators for causing heated standoffs after university officials asked the police to remove a protest encampment and arrest 120 protesters, according to the New York Daily News.

One has to ask: if these student protesters are actually demonstrating for justice and peace, why didn’t they begin their protests on October 7, 2023, after Hamas terrorists waged the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust—slaughtering babies, raping women, burning whole families alive, and taking hundreds of innocent Israelis hostage? More than 1,200 Israelis were killed. The Hamas terrorists also took about 240 hostages and imprisoned them in tunnels in Gaza. Israel believes about 100 of these hostages are still alive.

Where’s the outrage on college campuses over the rapes, murder, and brutality committed against innocent civilians in Israel on October 7? Where are the demands that Hamas immediately free its hostages?

It is important to recognize that the recent outburst of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel hatred on college campuses were not spontaneous or organic events. There are clear signs—such as students setting up dozens of identical tents at Columbia—that these protests were organized and well-funded by radical leftist organizations. Journalist Ira Stoll claims in an April 25, 2025, Wall Street Journal op-ed that some of the student anti-Israel protesters have been paid with funds from Rockefeller and Soros Foundation grants.

But even more important, U.S. college and university leadership are directly responsible for the outbreak of violence and hatred on their campuses because, for years, they have incubated and tolerated extreme left-wing ideologies that led to the current anti-Semitic and anti-Israel protests.

Our colleges and universities have been taken over by far-left professors who have imposed radical and divisive concepts like cultural Marxism, intersectionality, “diversity equity, and inclusion,” and hatred of America into the curriculum.

A 2023 survey found that 50% of professors identify as liberal, 17% as moderate, and 26% as conservative, with 58% of conservative professors self-censoring themselves for fear of retribution if they express thoughts that go against their schools’ reigning far-left ideology.

This has turned colleges into hotbeds of far-left and intolerant extremism. A conservative University of Iowa student recently told a congressional committee that “students who hold opposing views are often subjected to frequent, violent threats and other forms of harassment with no accountability.” Conservative speakers on campus are unwelcome and routinely canceled or shouted down. Conservative students are forced to pretend to support their professor’s far-left views to get good grades and avoid being harassed by other students.

Major universities have long tolerated professors who hold and teach far-left, hateful ideologies. These include professors who enthusiastically praised the genocidal Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023. Some examples:

Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad called the October 7 Hamas attack “awesome” and a “stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.”

Cornell University Professor Russell Rickford called the Hamas terrorist attack “exhilarating” and “energizing.”

Yale University Professor Zareena Grewal said after the October 7 terrorist attack, “My heart is in my throat. Prayers for Palestinians. Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity.”

On the other hand, conservative professors who spoke out against the October 7 terrorist attack or criticized the recent protests have been ostracized.

Columbia University Professor Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, recently was barred from campus because of his outspoken criticism of the student protesters.

University of Southern California Professor John Strauss was suspended last October after he said about the Hamas terrorists who committed the October 7 attack, “Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are killed.”

Aggressive efforts are needed now to protect Jewish students on college campuses. There must be no tolerance for violent anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonstrations by college administrators or local, state, and federal officials. The National Guard must be sent in to break up these demonstrations when they turn violent or threaten Jewish students. Violent student demonstrators and those who threaten Jewish students must be expelled and prosecuted. Foreign students who engage in violent protests or threaten Jewish students should have their student visas pulled and deported. Radical professors who promote anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hate should be fired immediately.

But these are short-term fixes. Intolerance and violence on campus, like the current anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations, will continue and grow until there are fundamental changes to banish the radical and intolerant radical ideologies that cause them. This will be a huge undertaking that will require major initiatives to reform college curriculums and culture—including hiring moderate and conservative professors—that college administrators and faculty will fiercely resist.

Parents and potential students should boycott colleges and universities that refuse to implement reforms to deradicalize or condone intolerance, anti-Semitism, and anti-American ideologies. If a school employs anti-Semitic radical professors like Joseph Massad, Russell Rickford, or Zareena Grewal, college seniors should apply elsewhere.

Donors to schools that refuse to reform should redirect their donations to other schools committed to providing students with a meaningful education and teaching about character, citizenship, and freedom. (Some good examples: Hillsdale College, Liberty University, New College of Florida, Brigham Young University, Franciscan University of Steubenville, College of the Ozarks, Pepperdine University, and Grove City College.) Federal tax dollars should be cut off from colleges and universities that promote radical-left ideologies, intolerance, and hate.

I don’t see any prospect right now of forcing America’s colleges and universities to implement much-needed reforms to deradicalize and end anti-Semitism and left-wing radicalism. But this may change next January if there is a new president in the White House.

[goldkirk]

Yikes

I'm going through old files trying to consolidate things and guess what I've started finding? Old work from high school religous-culture-wars training.

Examples:

tw for homophobia and mentions of abortion and religion

Prompt: Think forward to your life as a college student. Imagine an encounter with Americanism on campus. Describe it and how you can deal with it. This is one of the things I struggle most to recognize. I’ve grown up, very luckily, in a family where loyalty to the Church teachings has always been held above loyalty to worldly authority (etc.—morality above government, y’know?). So in regards to the major moral issues like abortion and homosexual acts, I don’t have trouble recognizing the Americanism when people say religion has no right to interfere with law/society at large/the government, etc. But a lot of times it’s not that blatant, and since I’ve been bombarded with “SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE!” since I was little, it’s often really difficult for me to notice. I’ll work on that in college, for sure. It’ll be a good habit in general to look at everything I hear more critically, too, not just for Americanism.

Yikes.

[cups hands around mouth] THEY WERE LYING TO YOU!!!! THE COUNTRY WAS FOUNDED WITH SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE ON PURPOSE, IT'S A FEATURE NOT A BUG

tw for racist statements, victim blaming, discussion of communism, and BLM bashing

PROMPT: Describe a time you have personally observed Marxism in action. It’s everywhere, isn’t it? It’s pervasive in all western society now, as hard as our cultures fought in the last century to eradicate it. It just shifted, slinked off to the shadows to find new and more insidious ways of invading. It crept into discussions, education, homes. Any group of people that felt angry, unfairly treated, still angry over past wrongs…it wormed its way in and planted seeds in those hearts until now it’s everywhere. Even without realizing it, we, as a culture, employ the same philosophy that we claim to hate. We accept it now. Many even cling to it. It’s in the Occupy Movements, the Mike Brown (and assorted others) protests, the demand for more government encroachment, the societal entitlement, the political games, the first grade classrooms. It’s everywhere. PROMPT: Think forward to your life as a college student. Imagine an encounter with Marxism on campus. Describe it and how you would deal with it. Maybe it will be a student or professor spewing the ideology (though I doubt it in my case, I won’t be taking many—if any—classes where it would come up as a topic), or—more likely—it’ll be a pervasive undercurrent in a lot of peoples’ reasonings, opinions, and beliefs. I’ll have to always be looking out for it (just like the other “isms”, especially Americanism) and recognize when it’s rearing its head. Honestly, the best rebuttal to Marxism is usually just plain old common sense, and if you actually start thinking about it hard, it’s not difficult to get back to a healthier perspecive on the issues.

YIKES. Yikes on trikes.

Ah yes, modernism, the greatest of heresies:

tw for homophobia and moral judgements

PROMPT: Describe a time you have personally observed Modernism in action. Every :) single :) debate :) involving Church teaching :) and gay marriage :) ever :) Also divorce :) and sex outside of marriage :) and basically :) EVERY :) SINGLE :) MORAL/THEOLOGICAL TOPIC :) THAT CAN POSSIBLY :) BE :) DEBATED :)

YIKES :) YIKES :) YIKES :)

#this is painful #I remember (and it's clear in my writing for many of these documents) that I hated this “course” and didn't agree with a lot of it but #I knew I had to say the right things #and also most of it even if I didn't like it or it didn't sound/seem right #I still didn't have any counter-information or missing pieces or real facts #so I spouted a lot of stuff. most of it bad #thank god we can learn and change and grow!!!!! thank god a lot of strangers and professors and friends and relatives didn't give up on me #or shame me as I learned and before I learned!!!! #oof tag #shh katie #ex fundie #ex Catholic #ex cult #cult escapee

[thelovelygods]

Tim Dunn was fascinated by bees. When he was a teenager, he spent hours studying a colony near his home, learning how it functioned. Each bee knew its role and embraced its work. Scouts found pollen. Guards prevented unwelcome outsiders from entering the hive. He even discovered that the larger drones didn’t sting, creating an opportunity for amusement. “I’d tie a piece of thread on them and walk them like a dog,” he said in a folksy West Texas accent.

His audience, the adult Sunday school class he teaches at his church in Midland, was gathered inside a gray-walled room lined with stackable chairs. Dunn went on, explaining that there was a lot to learn from the hierarchy of a bee colony. “When everybody does what they do best for the hive, it prospers,” he said. “If you’re a guard, then be a guard. If you’re a scout, be a scout.” Dunn then contrasted the cooperation of the hive with the inexorable tumult of modern politics. “Why do people hate politics?” he asked. “Everybody’s making it all about themselves,” he said. “Does it create harmony? Are people there trying to serve the body with their gifts? That’s why you hate it. It’s an example of what not to do.”

You may not think about Tim Dunn. Indeed, unless you’re a close observer of Texas politics, it’s likely you haven’t heard of him. But Dunn thinks a lot about you.

He grew up in Big Spring, about forty miles northeast of Midland, with three older brothers in a cramped house. He now lives in a mansion, hidden within a roughly twenty-acre walled compound on the northern edge of Midland. Nearby is the nondenominational church where he regularly delivers sermons as a lay minister. The Dunns are one of Texas’s wealthiest families, having acquired inexpensive leases in the Permian Basin years before fracking made it possible to extract oil and gas from fields previously thought to be in decline. As a political power broker, he mostly operates behind the scenes, routinely writing six- and seven-figure checks. This money is only the visible portion of a political operation that shapes the agenda in Austin and is feared by many Republican elected officials.

Throughout its history, Texas has seen plenty of influential men who have shared their message from the pulpit. And a steady march of rich men have opened their wallets to get politicians to do what they want. But we’ve never seen the two archetypes merge in quite this way. Dunn has said he believes we’re in the midst of a holy battle that pits Christians against those he refers to as Marxists, who he claims want to control all property and take away freedom. Marxists “are increasingly becoming bolder and more brazen in their quest for tyranny,” he has warned. “It is becoming clear they want to kill us.” The founder of Marxism, he argued, wasn’t Karl Marx. It was Satan. 

For Dunn, politics, work, and religion all run together. “I have very deliberately unsegmented my life,” he said in 2022 on a podcast hosted by Ken Harrison, the chair of Promise Keepers, a national evangelical group for men. “I don’t have one approach in business and another approach in ministry and another approach in church . . . I work for God, and God has given me a bunch of jobs to do.”  

In the past two years Dunn has become the largest individual source of campaign money in the state by far. Until recently his main tool for exerting influence has been the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, to which he has given at least $9.85 million since the beginning of 2022. This is nearly all the money he contributed to Texas races over that span and the majority raised by the committee. The political action committee targets Republicans, many of them quite conservative, whom it deems insufficiently loyal to the organization’s right-wing agenda. Dunn is not a passive donor who will dole out a few thousand dollars after a phone call and some flattering chitchat. The funding machine he has built is designed to steer politics and control politicians. 

Its methods are deceptively simple. A Dunn-affiliated organization lets lawmakers know how it wants them to vote on key issues of the legislative session. After the session, it assigns a number, from zero to one hundred, to each lawmaker based on these votes. Republicans who score high, in the eighties or nineties, are likely to remain in Dunn’s good graces. But those who see their scores drift down to the seventies or even sixties—who, in other words, legislate independently? Their fate is easy to predict. 

They’ll likely face a primary opponent, often someone little known in the community, whose campaign bank account is filled by donations from Dunn and his allies. This cash provides access to political consultants and operations that can be used to spread false and misleading attacks on Dunn’s targets, via social media feeds, glossy mailers, and text messages. “They told you point blank: if you don’t vote the way we tell you, we’re going to score against you,” said Bennett Ratliff, a Republican former state representative from Dallas County. “And if you don’t make a good score, we’re going to run against you. It was not a thumb on the scale—it was flat extortion.” Ratliff lost in 2014 to a Dunn-backed right-wing candidate, Matt Rinaldi, who scored a perfect one hundred in the next two sessions and quickly amassed power: Rinaldi now serves as the combative and divisive chair of the state GOP.

According to several sources involved in Texas politics, what Dunn demands from his candidates, even more than electoral victory, is fealty. He tends to win, sooner or later, one way or another. Sometimes his preferred candidates win the primary and, given the gerrymandering that favors Republicans in most districts in Texas, waltz into office. But even when his candidates lose, the reelected incumbents have been battered by negative rhetoric and have begged and borrowed to raise funds to counter the attacks. Many are left wondering if it’s worth fighting back. Some have chosen to get out of politics entirely. Notable recent retirements include former state senator Kel Seliger and Representative Andrew Murr, both of whom were centrist Republicans who commanded respect from colleagues in both parties and acted as brakes on Dunn’s agenda.

As his wealth has grown, Dunn has used it to support private companies that align with his goals. Through his financial vehicle Hexagon Partners, he recently invested in Christian Halls, whose chief executive says his vision is to create Christian community colleges and trade schools “in every county of the nation in the next ten years.” Also through Hexagon Partners, Dunn invested $7.5 million in a company affiliated with Brad Parscale, who worked in San Antonio targeting swing voters with digital advertising before he became manager of Donald Trump’s failed 2020 presidential campaign. That firm plans to build a “Christian-based” advertising agency that will use artificial intelligence to precisely target consumers with commercial and political messages.

In the past several years Dunn has become involved with multiple online media operations. “You can’t trust the newspapers,” he wrote in a 2018 letter to voters. But apparently you can trust Texas Scorecard, a political website that is often critical of politicians who don’t support his agenda. Texas Scorecard was published by Empower Texans, a group largely funded by Dunn that then became a separate organization in 2020. It continues to publish articles that are generally critical of candidates Dunn opposes. 

He has also been an officer with Chicago-based Pipeline Media, which maintains a network of websites designed to look like independent local media outlets but that churn out often-partisan articles that amplify stances taken by special interest groups. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University found that this network has attacked renewable energy and advocated for property tax cuts. Further, Dunn is a longtime board member of the Lucy Burns Institute, publisher of the website Ballotpedia, which provides information on federal, state, and local elections. It recently launched an “ultra-local” initiative, publishing updates on candidate positions and endorsements in areas that have become news deserts after the closures of local newspapers. The site reported more than a quarter billion page views in 2022. 

Dunn generally steers clear of news outlets he doesn’t control. He did not respond to multiple requests for interviews with Texas Monthly, nor did he or his attorney respond to a detailed list of questions. Many of those closest to Dunn declined to be interviewed, and many elected officials refused to speak about him, often out of fear of reprisal. To report this story, I spoke with more than thirty people who know him or work in his orbit; listened to hundreds of hours of his sermons, speeches, and Sunday school lessons; and conducted an exhaustive search of corporate records and tax filings, among other documents.

Dunn’s voluminous political enterprises are all sidelines to what has long been his main gig. He is chief executive of CrownQuest Operating. While not well-known outside oil-industry circles, it controls a significant portion of the Permian Basin. In 2022 it was the eighth-largest oil producer in Texas. It operated wells that pumped out about 35 million barrels that year, worth more than $3 billion. In December, Occidental Petroleum agreed to purchase the company’s wells and oil reserves for $12 billion, including assumption of debt. Dunn and his family own about 20 percent of these assets. They stand to collect a windfall worth a couple billion dollars. Once the sale is completed, Dunn presumably will have more time—and more money—for his political interests.

Some of Dunn’s critics are quick to note that he and the candidates he backs have posted a poor overall record of electoral success. While there’s some truth to that claim, it misses the point. Yes, Dunn has, in essence, single-handedly financed the campaigns of inexperienced, extremist candidates who have failed to connect with voters. Nonetheless, these campaigns—and the promise of future, amply bankrolled, mudslinging challengers—have led incumbents to either acquiesce to his agenda or retire. Even when Dunn loses, he often wins. 

Moreover, he is a major donor to some of the most prominent politicians in Texas. He was instrumental in helping Dan Patrick get elected lieutenant governor, arguably the most powerful office in the state. When Patrick first ran for that office, in 2014, he entered a runoff against incumbent David Dewhurst. In the final days before the election, Empower Texans gave Patrick $350,000 and secured for him a $300,000 loan from a Houston bank. The money helped pay for a last-minute blitz of advertising on television and on Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

Dunn is also a longtime backer of Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and helped him escape impeachment last year for abuse of public trust and other corruption-related charges. Prior to Paxton’s trial, Jonathan Stickland, the head of Defend Texas Liberty, made it clear he was ready to spend Dunn’s money to go after any official who voted to oust the attorney general. “There will be one helluva price to pay,” he warned in a tweet, and then added: “Wait till you see my PAC budget.”

That wasn’t the only step Dunn took to protect his ally. Before the impeachment trial in the Texas Senate, Defend Texas Liberty gave Patrick—who chose to preside as judge in the proceeding—$1 million in campaign donations and a $2 million forgivable loan. This is thirty times more than Defend Texas Liberty gave Patrick in 2022, when he was running for reelection. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a bribe—it was all perfectly legal under state law—and Patrick has denied any quid pro quo. 

Still, as soon as the final votes to acquit the attorney general were cast, Patrick discarded his veil of impartiality and delivered a caustic rebuke to the House leadership for wasting everyone’s time. Despite abundant evidence of Paxton’s corruption, Patrick argued that the House should never have impeached the attorney general. Representative Ann Johnson, a Houston Democrat who served as an impeachment manager, told Texas Monthly that this tirade made it clear the fix had been in from the moment Patrick grabbed the gavel. 

Later, the Texas Tribune reported on a meeting between infamous white supremacist Nick Fuentes and Stickland, who prior to leading Defend Texas Liberty was a state representative to whom Dunn had contributed handsomely. Patrick was quick to condemn Fuentes but slow to criticize Stickland and the PAC. He never returned the money he’d received from the group. Instead he invested it in Israeli bonds, which his campaign treasurer could presumably sell at a later date or simply collect interest payments on for years. 

Increasingly, Dunn is active in politics outside Texas. In October 2022 he gave $250,000 to the new Stand for Freedom PAC, nearly all of the money it had raised since its inception earlier that year. The so-called super PAC, which is based in Georgia and can raise unlimited funds, spent $190,000 on congressional races across the country that fall. It supported nine right-wing candidates. A couple of days before the election, it spent $10,000 on text messages in suburban Atlanta, half of them in support of the Republican challenger and half attacking a Democratic incumbent.

Dunn also gave $1 million in the summer and fall of 2022 to the Conservation Action for America PAC (out of $1.05 million it raised). The PAC gave $500,000 to another PAC, which supported right-wing candidates in Senate races in Alabama and Missouri. But for now, most of Dunn’s time and fortune remain focused on Texas.

Dunn is up-front about his desire to use politics to pave the way for a “New Earth,” in which Jesus Christ and his believers will live together. (“When heaven comes to earth and God dwells with his people as the King,” Dunn has said.) Until then, he remains a key player in the growing Christian nationalism movement, which rejects the importance of pluralism to American identity. Instead it contends that only devout Christians are good Americans. 

Last August was even more sweltering than usual in Midland. It did not rain and the sun was relentless, the dusty earth baked by triple-digit heat. But on the final Sunday of the month, as usual, Midland Bible Church was welcomingly cool. A few parishioners sat with computer monitors in the back of the sanctuary running the audio and visuals. A video message played on two large screens on either side of a large wooden cross. “Jesus is better than the angels,” said a soothing female voice. “Jesus is better than Moses,” said a male voice. 

When the video faded and the lights came up, Dunn was standing on an elevated stage with a few loose pages of notes arranged on a four-legged metal pulpit. Behind him were the praise band’s instruments, including a six-string guitar and an electronic keyboard. The altar’s backdrop consisted of distressed wooden slats and hanging Edison bulbs that wouldn’t look out of place in a barn renovated by Chip and Joanna Gaines.

Dunn greeted the congregation with the ease and comfort of a man in his element. He has been a member of the church for more than two decades. About a decade ago the congregation moved into its modern home, a $12 million building with seating for five hundred in the sanctuary, which you enter through wooden doors from a large common area furnished with couches and sided by a wall of glass. After services Dunn can be found standing outside the wooden doors, coffee in hand, greeting friends and well-wishers. Across the street from the church stands a stone wall that surrounds Dunn’s family compound. Around the corner, just out of view, is the private K–12 Christian school Dunn founded in 1998.

That Sunday, Dunn was dressed in a short-sleeved lavender polo and gray slacks. He’s a few inches taller than six feet and has the lanky, fit build of a former basketball player. His white hair was neatly parted. He wore a lavalier microphone that reached from behind his left ear, giving him the appearance of a corporate executive ready to fire up a roomful of salespeople.

He started with a joke about a church elder’s mustache (“Is that Wyatt Earp?”) and then began to talk about the book of Hebrews. It can be difficult to understand, he says. “The Jewish culture is not the same as ours,” he notes. “I have a lot of Jewish friends,” he said, and they are like cactus fruit: “sweet on the inside and prickly on the outside.” 

This wasn’t the first time Dunn had opined on Jews. In 2010 he attended a private breakfast meeting with Joe Straus, the first Jewish Speaker of the House in the Texas Legislature. According to Straus insiders, Dunn told him that only Christians should hold leadership positions. When Texas Monthly first reported that encounter, in 2018, it shocked many in Austin’s political class. Dunn’s influence has grown since then, and his worldview has sunk even deeper roots in Texas. 

Dunn’s sermon that August day came at a crucial juncture in Texas politics. A few months before, a bipartisan majority in the state’s House of Representatives had voted to impeach the attorney general for abusing the power of his office. Dunn had responded in late June by donating $150,000 to Paxton and $1.8 million to Defend Texas Liberty, which turned around and gave Patrick that infamous seven-figure donation and loan. It’s not clear whether the events unfolding in Austin were on Dunn’s mind as he drafted his sermon, but one of his principal messages involved a religious and political battle.

He retold a portion of the biblical story of Exodus. In popular culture—think of The Ten Commandments, with a strapping young Charlton Heston as Moses—the story focuses on the Israelites’ rebellion against the pharaohs, their escape from enslavement and departure from Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the reaching of a covenant with God in the desert. Dunn picked up the story from there. Moses, Aaron, and the rest of the Israelites who fled Egypt were still in the desert, but they were eyeing the fertile region adjacent to the Jordan River, in what is now the Israeli-occupied West Bank. So they sent scouts to see what was there. 

The reconnaissance party reported that it was a bountiful region, a “land of milk and honey,” but there were obstacles to settling there. “The spies came back, and the spies said, ‘Ooh, this is too hard,’ ” Dunn said. “It is a really good land, just like God said, but man, there’s giants and walled cities. I don’t think we can do it.” Yet God urged them onward, Dunn said. Failure to fight, he suggested, would mean disobeying God. In his telling, it was a story of righteous conquest, not of escape.

He continued: “Everyone unwilling to fight did not get the reward. It’s a very poignant picture. No fight, no reward.” Here he paused briefly. He’d been looking to his right. He turned to the left, his hands gripping the pulpit. As he continued, he formed a fist with his thumb extended and pointed it at his chest. “Our giants and walled cities are a culture that hates everything we stand for. Are we willing to fight? If we are, we can’t lose, even if we die.”

Parts of his message can be heard in churches across Texas every Sunday. But how many such sermons are delivered by lay preachers who write $1 million checks to politicians and political action committees? How many are delivered by billionaires who are building an army of influence? Whose power and connections make them insiders even as they see themselves as outsiders trying to overthrow entrenched interests? How many believe that only Christians should lead Texas, to the exclusion of millions of Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and secular Texans?

Dunn holds several views that veer outside the mainstream. In late 2022 he delivered a sermon titled “How to Truly Love Your Spouse.” Before he began speaking, he played a brief video quoting from the First Epistle of Peter. It advises women, who are “the weaker vessel,” not to braid their hair or wear too much gold jewelry. They should “adorn themselves by submitting to their own husbands.” When the video ended, Dunn was at the pulpit. He praised the narrator’s deep bass voice, noting it was that of his eldest son. “Don’t you love Lee’s voice? Sounds like God reading us scripture, doesn’t it?” He later talked about his view that men’s brains are structured differently from women’s: men are superior problem solvers, while women tend to be more articulate. 

Dunn advised men to invite their wives into their professional lives. His wife, Terri, homeschooled their children for sixteen years. When their youngest was in college, playing basketball for Texas Tech University, they would take long trips to watch his games. She would read Dunn’s emails to him as he drove. She liked feeling involved, Dunn said, so he gave her the password to his email account. She also listens to political talk shows, something he doesn’t like to do, and keeps him up to speed on what pundits are saying. This “helps her feel like a part of everything I’m doing,” Dunn explained. “Women were designed as helpers.”

Chris Tackett neverintended to become the foremost chronicler of Dunn’s political influence. But sometimes curiosity charts an unexpected course. On a cool fall day, I met Tackett at a hip coffee shop a few blocks south of downtown Fort Worth. He wore blue jeans and a maroon T-shirt from a New York City bookstore and carried a MacBook Air loosely with one hand. In his early fifties, Tackett is fit, with thick, graying hair. By day, he works in human resources for a food processing company. In his spare time he has built a tool to track how a rising flood of money is reshaping Texas politics. 

Just a few years ago, he was the volunteer director of a youth baseball league in Granbury, about forty miles southwest of where we met, when he decided he could do more for his community. So he ran for a school board seat. It was one of those life decisions that seemed innocuous at the time but turned out to be momentous. 

He won the nonpartisan election and, by dint of his new responsibilities, became more involved in state education issues. The board communicated its priorities to Mike Lang, Granbury’s state representative, and Tackett assumed that Lang would be an ally. But when the school board asked Lang to vote for certain bills that protected the district’s funding, Tackett says Lang took the opposite position. Lang took other votes that Tackett felt were not in the best interest of local public schools. The board opposed vouchers, for example, which would allow taxpayer money to be used for private schools, potentially diverting needed revenue from the public school system. Yet Lang supported pro-voucher amendments. Curious about why, Tackett decided to look at the sources of Lang’s campaign contributions. “I mean, what else would it be other than money?” he recalled thinking.

He downloaded campaign finance reports from the state. They were bulky and hard to decipher, but years of working in corporate jobs had made him nimble with spreadsheets. To his surprise, most of the money Lang received wasn’t coming from constituents in $50 or $100 amounts. Instead, he’d collected a $2,000 check from Dunn and nearly half a million dollars from Farris and Joanna Wilks. Farris is an oilman and an elder in the Assembly of Yahweh, a church run by his family near Cisco, about fifty miles east of Abilene. The Assembly of Yahweh was founded by Wilks’s father and grandfather, and it blends elements of Christianity and Judaism. 

Tackett also found a $25,000 contribution from Empower Texans’ political action committee. When he looked up who was giving to Empower Texans, he found six- and seven-figure checks from the same names: Dunn and Wilks, both of whom have worked to undermine public education in favor of parochial and other private schools. (The PAC ultimately gave Lang more than $150,000.) “Holy cow,” Tackett thought. “This is why no one is listening. This is why this legislator isn’t listening.”

After we ordered coffees, Tackett opened his laptop and logged on to the rudimentary website he’d built, called Chris Tackett Now, to publish what he’d turned up. Soon after launching it, his wife, Mendi, a florist, got involved. What began with Lang’s contribution data has grown exponentially. Texas has electronic records for campaign contributions going back to 2000. Tackett grabbed everything, more than 300,000 individual records. Anyone can download files from a state website to see who gave money to, say, Governor Abbott in the first six months of 2022. But that’s a bit like focusing on a single star through a telescope. Tackett brought all the records together so he could look at the entire night sky. He may have been the first person to see it all, the entire campaign cosmology.

I asked Tackett to guide me through what he’d found. We started by looking at who has given the most money to Texas politicians since 2000. The answer, surprisingly, was Tony Sanchez, a Laredo oilman who largely self-financed a quixotic $58 million run for governor two decades ago, creating a feckless orgy of political spending in a few months. After him, there’s a drop and then three more names: grocery magnate Charles Butt, an avid proponent of public education, and Houston homebuilder Bob Perry—and then Tim Dunn. (Pennsylvania billionaire financier Jeff Yass, a school voucher advocate, gave $6 million to Abbott in December, but he still falls far behind the cumulative spending of these four and others.) Perry died a decade ago, and Butt has reserved most of his political contributions for his education PAC. Meanwhile, Dunn has sped up.  

We looked up Dunn’s contributions since 2000 and found he had given $14.3 million, a figure that struck me as low. Tackett told me to wait. He plugged in name variations: Tim Dunn, Timothy Dunn, Tim M. Dunn, TIM DUNN, Timothy M. Dunn, and so on. The number kept rising until it topped $24.5 million. He gave nearly $11 million—nearly half his total—just between January 2022 and the end of 2023. 

Under state law, contributions to nonjudicial candidates and PACs aren’t capped but must be disclosed to the Texas Ethics Commission. But there’s another category of expenditure, to “social welfare organizations,” that is called dark money because the donors can remain invisible. These groups cannot give money to a candidate, but they can produce “voter guides” that explicitly point out that only one candidate is, say, a “strong Christian conservative” (however that may be defined). In other words, there are means to push voters’ buttons in ways that are hard to track. As in cosmology, what we can see in the night sky is only part of what’s out there.

Still, what was visible told a story. From 2000 until 2015, the big donors in Texas politics tended to be pro-business. They wanted to make it harder to sue corporations—Texans for Lawsuit Reform was still at the height of its power—and they lobbied to spend taxpayer dollars to attract out-of-state companies. The business of Texas, these donors believed, was business. Dunn and other megadonors shared those views, but they had other priorities. The schism came to a head over the 2017 “bathroom bill,” which would have targeted transgender Texans by requiring them in some instances to use restrooms associated with the gender listed on their birth certificate. Dunn backed the bill, but the business lobby opposed it, fearing a backlash that would’ve harmed their companies’ profits. The old guard prevailed. 

Since then, though, Dunn and his allies have racked up victories, including passing a ban on abortions (before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision) and another bill prohibiting minors from receiving gender-affirming care. Nowadays, the business of Texas is to promote not just business but also a right-wing Christian worldview. “There’s a handful of billionaires trying to pull the strings across the state and pull Texas all the way to the right,” Tackett said.

Dunn has deviated from the pro-business camp in other ways. The previous generation of big donors often supported public schools in the interest of training the future workforce. Dunn has long advocated for drastically cutting property taxes, which are the major source of funding for public schools, police, and other essential services in a state that collects no income tax. He backs private Christian schooling and was involved in a recent failed effort to defeat a $1.4 billion bond for Midland public schools.

The fight over school vouchers became perhaps the most contentious policy issue during the 2023 legislative session, a key reason why Abbott called four special sessions. Dunn recently said he is “basically uninvolved” in the effort to pass voucher legislation, but he’s underplaying his influence. He gave $37,500 to the Texas Federation for Children PAC, a leading proponent of vouchers. Advocates from the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the America First Policy Institute, organizations for which Dunn has served as a board member, testified last year in favor of voucher bills, as did Matt Rinaldi, whom Dunn backed as a state house candidate and leader of the Texas GOP. What’s more, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, the Dunn-affiliated lawmaker scorecard, has consistently given high marks for votes that allow use of public money to help pay private school tuition. (These grades are not just given after the fact; a lawsuit turned up extensive evidence that longtime Dunn ally Michael Quinn Sullivan communicated to lawmakers before the votes how each would be scored, arguably telling them how to vote if they wished to avoid a well-funded backlash when the score came out.) 

Tackett sees the voucher push as an attempt to undercut public schools and bolster Christian education. “This was all part of this broader agenda that was to inject religion into our government and erode trust in the government,” Tackett said. He and Mendi are six years into this project and have no plans to stop. “There are days we feel burned out,” he said. But then he uncovers more evidence that Dunn is leading an effort to buy public officials, subvert the state’s democracy, and bend it to his ideology, and that energizes him to keep going. “Democracy is much more at risk than I think most people realize,” he said.

Many of Dunn’s convictions can be traced to his childhood. Back when he was playing with that beehive as a boy around the late sixties, his hometown of Big Spring was experiencing a growth spurt. Webb Air Force Base trained military pilots. Regional oil companies were headquartered there. Big Spring was home to the largest oil refinery in the region, a Sears, and a bowling alley that offered babysitting while parents got in ten frames. There were about 45 churches, half of them Baptist, in a city of some 30,000. Thirty of them sent singers to annual summer gospel concerts, held in an outdoor amphitheater, organized by Dunn’s father.

Joe Dunn sold insurance to farmers and ranchers and was active in a local Baptist church. In 1961 he added his name to a resolution asking President John F. Kennedy not to serve alcohol at the White House. His wife, Thelma, was a homemaker. Both grew up on farms near Lubbock and moved to California’s Central Valley in search of work during the Great Depression. They met there and married in 1937. Joe worked as a farm laborer and later at a cotton gin. They had three sons in the span of six years while in California. Ten years passed before they had their fourth and final child, Tim, in 1955. By then, they had returned to Texas and would soon settle in Big Spring.

Tim Dunn excelled at both academics and athletics at Big Spring High School. The local newspaper listed him as six feet three inches tall, and he started for the varsity basketball team. He was outshone by a classmate named Tom Sorley, who played quarterback for the football team and would go on to play for the University of Nebraska. Both were members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Dunn was second in charge; Sorley was president. Dunn was a “class favorite”; Sorley was “Mr. BSHS” and “School Beast.”

Like Dunn’s colony of bees, Big Spring High operated as an ordered society where students mostly played their assigned roles. Members of the football team’s female booster club, called the Golddiggers, spent a week feeding and pampering the players. “Golddiggers became slaves to the varsity squad for one week,” explained the 1972 yearbook. It ran a photo from an event in which a Golddigger “serves her master” by preparing him a plate of food.

Dunn shared a love of music with his father, Joe, who sang at Baptist revivals and played the fiddle. Years later, retired and living in California, he led a band called Joe Dunn & the Foothill Seniors. While in high school Tim Dunn played guitar in a band called Scrub Brotherhood. The Big Spring Herald reported that it played a combination of rock, country, and “cuddle” music. Ron McKee, the drummer, told me they listened to a lot of Grand Funk Railroad and played covers as well as some original songs written by Dunn. One song McKee recalls was titled “My Prayer.” 

McKee, who attended school with Dunn from elementary school through college, said his friend was religious and straitlaced, and held strong opinions and beliefs. “I don’t believe I ever heard Tim Dunn say a cussword in all my time around him. I don’t ever remember him getting into a fight or taking a drink,” he said. Dunn was nonetheless fun to be around. One time in high school they got bored and took the handlebars off two tricycles and attached upside-down drum stands so they could steer while standing up, as on foot-propelled scooters. They piloted them to the Sonic and back, a roughly five-mile round trip. “We had cars, but we wanted to come up with something silly to do,” McKee said. “No one got arrested or hurt.”

Dunn attended Texas Tech University. He studied chemical engineering and wound down by watching episodes of Laverne & Shirley. He was wed on May 14, 1977, a year before he graduated, to Terri Spannaus, the daughter of an Air Force colonel stationed in Big Spring. They remain married and have six adult children. At least two of the kids inherited the Dunns’ musical talent: David records Christian music in Nashville, and Wally sings and plays guitar at Midland Bible Church.

A month before Tim and Terri married, he wrote a letter to the Texas Tech student newspaper about the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed change to the U.S. Constitution that would enshrine equal protection for men and women under American law. The letter is remarkable for its certainty, and it appears to be Dunn’s first public airing of his political views. He opposed the ERA, writing that the amendment would give “homosexuals equal protection under the law . . . Public schools and, yes, even private Christian schools will not be able to refuse to hire a teacher because he is a homosexual.” (His desire to keep private Christian schools free of government regulations remains intact, as does his animosity toward LGBTQ rights.)

After graduating from Tech, Dunn worked at Exxon for two years, in Houston. In 1980 he was hired by First City Bancorp, which traced its lineage to 1866 and was one of the largest banks in Texas. In the mid-eighties the bank moved Dunn to Midland, where he served as the head of commercial lending. In December 1984, First City ran a nearly full-page ad in the business section of the Midland Reporter-Telegram. “We Know Oil & Gas,” it read. “We know Midland!” It featured a drawing of several bankers. Prominently positioned in the middle was a confident, smiling Dunn.

Like many Texas banks, First City boomed when strong oil prices buoyed the state economy. But during the final months of 1985 global oil prices began souring. Texas saw massive job losses and a surge in bankruptcies. First City had “aggressively expanded during the early eighties to capitalize on the energy-driven Texas boom and found itself particularly vulnerable,” said Sorin Sorescu, a professor of finance at Texas A&M University who has studied regional banks. In September 1987, First City needed a nearly $1 billion bailout from the federal government. It was, at the time, the second-largest bank rescue ever. Dunn appears to have left the troubled institution right before the bailout; the bank’s financial condition couldn’t have been a surprise to anyone paying attention. 

In July, two months before the bailout, a new oil firm was registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Based in Midland, it was focused on drilling in Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. It was called Parker & Parsley Development Partners, and Dunn was a general partner. He remained a top executive as the company grew. By 1995, however, it was foundering and announced a series of belt-tightening measures and a shuffling of its management. Dunn stepped down from the board and took on the role of managing operations in two of the company’s most productive regions. Only one executive remained on the board: Scott Sheffield, who would go on to lead the company for years. Parker & Parsley later renamed itself Pioneer Natural Resources and became a top oil company in the Permian. Last year Exxon Mobil agreed to purchase it for $59.5 billion, in one of the largest oil field deals in two decades. 

A year after leaving the board, Dunn cofounded his own Midland-based oil company, which would become one of the largest producers in Texas, although one fourth the size of Pioneer. As he built his company, Dunn inched into politics. In 1996 he served as a delegate to the state Republican convention. By this time he and Terri were beginning to construct a private cocoon around their family. They homeschooled their children, developing a curriculum that emphasized reading great books from the Western canon. The Dunns approached like-minded families, recruiting the parents of fifteen students and founding a new school, Midland Classical Academy, that met behind their church. Students attended classes two days a week and studied at home the other three. 

Ron Miller, the dean of students, told a reporter in 2001 that Christianity was incorporated into every classroom and lesson. “Here, I’m allowed to speak my mind about Jesus Christ,” he said. “Everything we do is centered around the role God has in our life.” The school eventually moved to a new multimillion-dollar building on the north side of Midland, where the homes give way to scrubland dotted by an occasional pump jack. Parents were encouraged to volunteer. Dunn served as the assistant girls’ basketball coach.

The first substantial campaign check Dunn wrote was in February 2002: ten thousand dollars to Free Enterprise PAC. Its legislative wish list, according to a report it printed at the time, included bills that would “prohibit homosexual marriages and adoptions” and “require a super majority to increase taxes.” The PAC printed a ranking of most-to-least conservative legislators, a strategy later adopted by Dunn-backed groups such as Empower Texans and Texans for Fiscal Responsibility. 

In the period when Dunn contributed, Free Enterprise PAC spent nearly $66,000 supporting Republican candidates for the state House, with most of that going to those it deemed most conservative. The biggest beneficiary was a little-known lawyer running in a five-way contest for an open seat in Collin County. It was his first electoral victory. His name was Ken Paxton. 

Free Enterprise spent even more on mailings attacking six Republican incumbents—half in the House and half in the Senate—each of whom scored low in the group’s rankings. Several days before the primary election, acting lieutenant governor Bill Ratliff, one of the six, denounced Free Enterprise PAC. Its mailings, which featured a photograph of two men kissing and another of two grooms cutting a wedding cake, claimed Ratliff supported a “radical homosexual agenda.” His alleged sin was voting for a hate crimes bill named after James Byrd Jr., a Black man who in 1998 was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck by three white men in the East Texas town of Jasper. The bill allowed heightened penalties for crimes motivated by the victim’s identity, including race or sexual orientation. 

All six of the incumbents targeted by the PAC won reelection, but Ratliff was incensed by the group’s tactics. “This type of hate-mongering is reminiscent of the Nazis. This type of hate-mongering is reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan,” he said. “This type of hate-mongering is now being practiced by the al Qaeda and the Taliban.” The negative press and attention from prominent Republicans didn’t deter Dunn. In 2006 he gave another $10,000 to the group right before the general election. Since that first check in 2002, he has made more than 225 donations of at least $10,000.

Dunn’s campaign cash washes through multiple political action committees and helps support various bands of right-wing political activists. The Texas Voice reported that shortly after Thanksgiving a little-known group called the Texas Family Project blasted out text messages that attacked select Republican lawmakers. The messages claimed that those legislators voted in favor of funding to help transgender Texans transition from the gender they were assigned at birth. This was hogwash. 

All of the targeted Republicans voted for Senate Bill 14, a law passed last year and signed by Abbott that banned gender-affirming care for transgender youth; further, it required Texas to revoke medical licenses for doctors who didn’t comply. Their apparent transgression was not voting for an anti-transgender amendment on an unrelated bill, creating a gossamer thread of truth to the text message’s claim. In reality, these Republicans were singled out and castigated not for their position on transgender Texans but for having the gall to vote independently. (In late January, the same outfit sent anti-Muslim mailers assailing several Republicans in the Legislature.)

Dunn’s connection to Texas Family Project is labyrinthine and apparent only after some digging. The group was created in 2022 by Brady Gray, a pastor turned political activist from Weatherford, about thirty miles west of Fort Worth. On the same day in April, he founded two groups: Texas Family Project and Texas Family Project Foundation. One is a nonprofit charity and the other is a dark-money “social welfare group.” Both can keep their donors anonymous, making it nearly impossible to determine who is funding the organizations. 

Before running these outfits full time, Gray was chief executive of Pale Horse Strategies, a Fort Worth political-consulting firm run by Stickland, who was simultaneously leading Defend Texas Liberty. Pale Horse, named after the line from the book of Revelation in which Death rides a pale horse, thrived on contracts from Defend Texas Liberty. In 2022 and 2023, Defend Texas Liberty paid Pale Horse $829,260 for consulting services.

Gray also runs a political action committee called the Texas Pastors Coalition, which was created in May 2022 and has so far been inactive, neither raising nor spending any money, according to state campaign-disclosure documents. But it shares a Fort Worth post office box with the Tarrant County Patriots PAC, which is run by Cary Cheshire, a former Pale Horse adviser who has worked for Dunn-supported groups on and off since 2014. This PAC has raised $80,000 in the last couple of years—all of it from Defend Texas Liberty. 

This is a typical pattern in Dunn’s orbit. A new organization emerges that attacks Republicans who are conservative but not sufficiently obedient to Dunn and Defend Texas Liberty. The groups, which spread misinformation and sow division, share the same pool of political operatives and funding. 

Among the lawmakers targeted by the Texas Family Project’s text messages was Stephanie Klick, a longtime nurse and Republican who has represented the northeast Fort Worth suburbs since 2013. In the 2022 election, a former military policeman and Republican Party operative named David Lowe ran against her, claiming she was too moderate. He described himself in campaign material as “an army veteran, a constitutional conservative, [and] follower of Christ.” When Lowe made it into a runoff against Klick, Defend Texas Liberty gave him $177,608—the majority of the $269,467 he raised during the head-to-head campaigning.

When I reached Lowe, who is running against Klick again, I asked him what he believes Dunn and Defend Texas Liberty want and why they are supporting him. “I think they’re strong Christians,” he replied. “They’re trying to lay the foundation to make Texas more conservative.” 

What that means, he said, is not yet clear—even to him. “The truth is, you don’t really know what they want until Texas is conservative,” he said. I replied that it was already quite conservative. He ticked off a list of additional legislative goals: increased militarization of the border, preventing abortions that are accomplished through medications received in the mail, punishing anyone who helps a transgender child receive gender-affirming care, and abolishing property taxes.

For Dunn, influencing government is a sacred mission. “When we go into governmental politics, we’re going into the darkest places,” he said in 2022. He was giving a speech in Orlando, to the Convention of States, a Houston-based organization (Dunn has been a board member since its founding) that calls for a constitutional convention to limit the power of the federal government. “And we have the opportunity to make disciples in the places that need it the most. It is a high and holy calling.”

To achieve this mission, Dunn has supported some candidates who are morally repugnant. In 2018 he got involved in an East Texas statehouse race. The incumbent was Dan Flynn, an Army veteran who had served as a brigadier general in the Texas State Guard. He first came to office in 2003, at which point he was considered quite conservative. Yet as the lower chamber moved further to the right, he was increasingly viewed as a centrist. Empower Texans donated nearly half the money raised by his 2018 primary challenger, a former youth pastor named Bryan Slaton.

What did Flynn do to raise the hackles of Dunn and his allies? Mark Owens, an assistant professor of political science at the Citadel who formerly taught at the University of Texas at Tyler, where he studied Texas politics, described Flynn as a principled, independent conservative who believed in limited government spending. Empower Texans’ attempt to create a cohesive, hard-right voting bloc didn’t sit well with Flynn. “He wasn’t on board,” Owens said. 

Flynn still won the 2018 primary and coasted to victory in the general election. Before those votes were cast, Dunn sent a letter on Empower Texans letterhead to Flynn’s constituents, urging them to “hold Flynn accountable” for his votes in the upcoming legislative session. “Why was I involved in Texas elections? What do I want,” Dunn wrote. He claimed he was fighting against corporate lobbyists, with nothing less than American democracy at stake. “If we lose this fight . . . representative government will die, and with it the American dream.” 

The letter was notable for its omissions. He described Empower Texans as a “non-profit service organization” but didn’t mention that he had given $2.63 million to the Empower Texans PAC the previous year. Dunn described himself as a champion of the little guy, helping voters fight back against politicians co-opted by Austin lobbyists. He never mentioned that he’s a whale in the campaign-finance ocean, or that he uses his political clout to promote his own worldview.

Two years later Dunn and Slaton took another shot at Flynn. Dunn personally gave $225,000 to Slaton—nearly two thirds of Slaton’s entire war chest. This time Slaton prevailed. After the election Dunn continued supporting him, giving his campaign another $50,000 in 2021. At the end of the session, Slaton received the highest score, 98 out of 100, on the Texans for Fiscal Responsibility’s index. He was an obedient anti-LGBTQ rabble-rouser, and Texas Monthly gave him the “Cockroach” award, reviving an old legislative term for a lawmaker who annoys members of both parties, makes a lot of noise, and accomplishes little. Despite these dubious accomplishments, Slaton was reelected in 2022, with more than half of his contributions coming from Dunn and Defend Texas Liberty. 

But his time as a lawmaker was cut short. The Texas Voice reported that last year Slaton was enlisted to speak at a networking meeting for “business leaders dedicated . . . to preserving our culture, protecting our children and promoting self-governance over tyranny.” According to the schedule, Slaton took the stage immediately after a talk by Dunn. 

Later that night, at 10 p.m., he invited two nineteen-year-old capitol aides and two of their friends to his Austin apartment. He mixed rum and Coke in a large Yeti thermos cup and drank until the early hours of the morning, by which time all but one of the aides had left. The one who remained was intoxicated, and according to a subsequent investigation, they engaged in sex. The next morning, she went to a drugstore to obtain Plan B pills to avoid getting pregnant. Several weeks later, in May, Slaton was expelled for “inappropriate workplace conduct,” the first member of the Texas Legislature to be removed in nearly a century. 

Texas Right to Life, an antiabortion group, withdrew its endorsement of Slaton, saying it held its endorsees to a high moral standard. Dunn, on the other hand, hasn’t made a public statement about Slaton’s behavior or his own role in electing him.

Why would Dunn ally himself with someone like Slaton? It’s a question that perplexed Bob Deuell a few years ago. He’s a family physician who served as a state senator from Greenville, northeast of Dallas, for more than a decade. A Republican, he was known as a staunch conservative with an independent streak. In 2014, after receiving a low score on a Dunn-backed scorecard, he drew a primary challenge from Bob Hall, a retired Air Force captain and recent transplant from Florida. During the campaign, Hall suggested that Satan controlled Deuell and bizarrely claimed that the incumbent intended to follow a United Nations imperative by adding bicycle lanes to Texas highways. Deuell shook off these outlandish statements but said he was deeply troubled by court documents in which Hall’s ex-wife claimed she was “physically, sexually and verbally abused for most of our marriage.” (Hall denied these allegations.)

Hall ran a relatively low-budget campaign, spending an average of $52 a day through the primary, mostly on signs, T-shirts, and door hangers. When he made it to a runoff with Deuell, Dunn-connected money rained down. Hall’s spending jumped to more than $2,100 a day, and he began using Facebook advertising and a direct-mail campaign generated by an out-of-state consultant. He attacked Deuell for voting like a “liberal Democrat” even though he had endorsements from the National Rifle Association and some right-to-life groups. “It was a bunch of lies,” Deuell told me. “His whole campaign was a bunch of lies.” 

In the middle of the election, Deuell decided to write Dunn a letter. He told me that its message was simple: “Mr. Dunn, I’m not sure why you’re wanting to have me out of office. Certainly, you don’t want to put somebody like this in office,” referring to Hall. Deuell never got a response.

Hall eked out a victory by three hundred votes and has served in the Texas Senate since 2015. In the past three sessions, he has scored highest among senators in the Texans for Fiscal Responsibility’s index. Deuell told me he learned one lesson from this experience: “As long as they get their puppet, they don’t care what the qualifications are because they know Bob Hall’s going to vote with them.”

For all his talk of Christian piety, Dunn’s tactics and beliefs have put him at odds with many fellow believers. “To see billionaire pastors, which should be an oxymoron, take over our state and turn it into an authoritarian theocracy is terrifying,” said James Talarico, a Democratic state House member representing North Austin and surrounding suburbs. Talarico is a former public school teacher and is studying to become a pastor at the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. “Without this ecosystem built by Tim Dunn, we wouldn’t see the extreme far-right policies coming out of Texas that we’ve seen in the last decade,” he said.

Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, lives in Dallas. She has observed the rise of Dunn’s dominion. He already wields control over the Texas Senate through his influence over Lieutenant Governor Patrick, and I asked her what Texas would look like if he managed to do the same in the Texas House. “I think it could create a second-class citizenship status for anyone who doesn’t agree with the elected leaders and their religious views,” she said. “And that looks like discriminatory laws and policies if they don’t align with a fundamentalist reading of the Bible. I also find that it would be profoundly undemocratic.”

She said Dunn is an ambassador of Christian nationalism, not Christianity. “I believe the central message of Christianity is the gospel of love,” she told me. “And Christian nationalism is a false idol of power.”

Summer Wise has also watched Dunn’s rise with dismay. She comes from an old Texas family and is distantly related to Angelina Eberly, a bronze likeness of whom presides over Congress Avenue, in downtown Austin. One night in 1842, Eberly famously took it upon herself to ready the town cannon and fire the six-pounder to prevent the records of the nascent Republic of Texas from being taken from the capital. Wise has engaged in a different sort of public service. She sat on the State Republican Executive Committee from 2018 to 2020 and has appeared as a delegate at seven state conventions. She lost her post in 2020 as part of a takeover of the party by Dunn’s allies. She told me she is deeply uncomfortable with the toxicity in some factions of today’s Texas Republican Party.

Many of her friends and former allies have given up their activism or left public office, creating what she told me was an exodus of talent and passion. It’s hard to fight against people who command vast resources and who believe their eternal salvation depends on the outcome, she said. She fears that Texas is moving away from a representative republic. In its place is a system driven “by ideology and the ideologies of a few. That is not how government is intended to function.”

We spoke several times over a few months. In one of her final emails to me, she lamented the state of the state but vowed, like her ancestor, not to surrender. “I cannot think of a time when we have seen the very integrity of our political system so tested,” she wrote. “Dunn has a misguided belief that he is fighting for souls, but I’m fighting for the soul of Texas.

#politics #i love texas in many ways but i'm glad i don't live there anymore

[evilbonehag]

Dorris/The Shadowy Dame Headcannons Because She’s Obviously My Favorite

(Please note, I’ve found next to zero info on her and I have not played The Outlast Trials, I’m just consuming everyone’s let’s plays of it, so some of this info might be wrong. Feel free to add or correct.)

• I love that Dorris is living proof that it is in fact possible to retire from doing trials. She got here by force of will and pure batshit insanity and is mildly popular around the Sleep Room because of this

• People tend to avoid her wherever she goes but not because people don’t like her, its just to avoid suspicion. She appreciates this.

• a fucking BEAST during the trials though. Easterman’s one mistake was letting a Native New Yorker into the facility. She runs fast and fights like an animal.

•By the end of her career, some of the ex-pops actually began to recognize her, making her a target in some cases, but giving her an advantage in others (I’d be willing to bet some of the grunts actually run in the other direction upon seeing her).

• “But Hemlock why would they do that?” She’s known for knocking out teeth idk what to tell you.

•Mildly afraid of Coyle but in a confrontational way. Will throw bricks and bottles at him because few hate cops more than Dorris.

• Gooseberry however, terrifies her. She avoids her at all costs when she can. She believes in evasion first with Phyllis, don’t confront.

• you can always tell where she is because she’s fucking shrieking like a banshee the entire time

• Coyle on Dorris: “That cheatin’ bitch in the slippers”

• post trials, totally different demeanor. Appears to be very nonchalant, but theres a deep haunted look in her eyes. Very often looking over her shoulder.

• checks everywhere for everything. Checks her food for foreign objects, checks her room for cameras, checks her bed for thumbtacks, etcetera etcetera.

• “Emily Barlow keeps her private life private” Yeah because she’s sapphic and Dorris has been subtly courting her for at least a year despite being pretty certain she’s married. It’s very much an ‘exchanging longing glances’ kind of relationship.

•Dorris sources some of her contraband through Emily because literally no one suspects her.

• Dorris and Emily tease each other in a way that makes everyone think theyre not on good terms.

•Dorris teases Cornelius in a way that makes him think theyre not on good terms. He’s actually one of her favorite people but she won’t tell him that.

• Jewish!!!

• I like to think her scar is from the Pouncer. Dorris specifically has nightmares about that, mostly because she feels uniquely sorry for almost fucking murdering the poor girl.

• Mildly interested in Marxism and alternative systems of economics and government, but cannot be vocal about it because she knows she’ll be targeted.

• was known for helping her teammates/dragging them out of danger while swearing at them the whole time. “Move your ass, kid. You don’t get to bleed out and die here unless I fucking say so.”

• Lesbian :)))

#the outlast trials #outlast #dorris outlast #headcannons #bonehagramblin

[drbased]

People are using the social justice language of less than a decade ago to argue points antithetical to the original goals. The SJWs may have been pro-trans but it was also basic understanding that women should be allowed and encouraged to hate men, that black people should be allowed and encouraged to white people, that gay people should be allowed and encouraged to hate straight people etc. It was uniformly understood that oppressed people need a voice in this world, and that that voice isn't always going to be kind or friendly. And that 'hating' your oppressors has little to no real-world impact outside of hurt feelings.

Now one of the most widespread and oldest oppressor groups in the world we're not allowed to 'hate' because it means you hate their other intersectioning identities. The language of intersectional social justice is being evoked to argue for a hyper-individualistic and flaccid anti-politics.

It's startling to me that you could make this point for hating 'cis' people, able-bodied people, straight people, white people. Why even differentiate 'qu**r' people out if under this exact same logic we're not allowed to hate cis gay people because some of them are black? But that's the point, isn't? We're not allowed to hate person of x oppressor group because they're also of y oppressed group, but then we're not allowed to hate the oppressors of y either because they might also intersect with x. In the end. there's nothing to differentiate what makes an oppressor and oppressed because anyone could be any of them at any time. And, with gender, anyone could secretly be nonbinary and therefore part of the only group that's publicly allowed to get away with talking about the evils of their oppressor class!

The anxieties of the social justice era, of 'pop feminism vs gamergate', of black lives matter, of gay marriage, of increased representation of 'minorities' in the media, is rapidly coming into view. We're in an era of backlash. Like an abuser learning therapy language to be a more effective abuser, the apolitical centrists and worried masses have found an effective way to silence those who truly wish to enact change. Feminists, gay rights activists, BLM protestors and beyond were never going to be given the benefit of the doubt, our movements were never going to be seen as 'fair'. That's part of the whole reason we decided 'actually, we're allowed to 'hate' our oppressors and say 'male/white people tears' etc.' They're stealing that from us. The concept of the terf has been the perfect in-road into destroying all the gains that have been made. Literally every uncomfortable leftist politic will eventually be tacked onto the terf umbrella.

Fortunately, my hope is that this is fundamentally unsustainable. The red scare was a period in politics where being a 'communist' was seen as a catch-all term for anyone wishing to 'destroy america', whatever that means - but in reality, it was anyone who advocated for progressive politics and said things that went against the conservative status quo. The current right-wing have dredged up the same argumentative style with phrases like 'cultural marxism', but the left have found something similar with the 'terf'. If you may notice, even the right wing have started to use the phrase. Right-wingers and left-wingers alike will absolutely use the terf boogeyman when they need to. Eventually, the word terf will be so comedically meaningless whilst trans politics will be so unavoidable that regular people should be able to reasonably escape the term simply by sheer number alone. But that is a while away yet. In the meantime, I simply watch and brace myself for the next braindead post like the above that pops up on my feed due to using the 'radfem' tag.

#my writing #theory posting

[magnoliamyrrh]

You’re posts have really opened my eyes and resonated a lot with me and I now find that I am in agreement with more radical feminist writings than I previously thought. I am interested in reading more and learning more about these topics, and I am someone who subscribes to trans inclusive feminism, but how do you walk that line and own your status as a radical feminist without people trying to group you in with TERFs?

hmm, maybe you wont find this answer too satisfying. people do all the time, i just dont care that much

because, heres the thing. in many regards its much like the "swerf" thing. you disagree with sex work or you question things and youre an evil bitch who hates sex workers and wants a genocide against sex workers and youre a prude and a conservative and also somehow youre a racist white supremacist too lmao and a fascist and a nazi andddd - ive fucking heard it all by this point. ive heard it all. i think its obvious by now that all that is bogus, and that "swerfs" dont exist, that im not any of these things and i dont want any of these things. i think its obvious now that these are baseless and exagerrated and insane accusations thrown around by people who lack the ability to understand or bear another viewpoint, lack critical thinking abilities, and find it much easier to throw around a whole bunch of shit to shut you up instead of coming with any half real damn argument or discourse. ive come across an incredibly small handful of radfems over the years who shame "sex workers" and i and many don't even consider them radfems, because how tf can you call yourself a radical feminist and shame women who are just trying to survive. every group has their looneys, every forest has its dry patches

thing is, as ive said many times on here before, liberal feminism is the way it is because it is postmodern and because it is quite literally a psyop of the cia to wreck class conciousness, which it is doing very well. when you fully get what postmodernism is, how it functions, and WHY exactly the cia found it to be the complete anthises of marxism and why it was "unconventional warfare at its best" and "an subtle covert operational carried out at the highest intellectual level" - the words of us government officials, many things about current day liberalism and wokeness and western culture and whatever the hell else click into place. m a n y. im not willing to shut up and play the cias game. i refuse. im not willing to shut up just because mostly priviledged western liberals who claim to be so open minded lose their absolute shit when you say anything at all outside of the narrative. ive lost friendships, ive had people threaten to beat me up over the "sex work" shit, had plenty of ppl online tell me i should kill myself or be raped lmao, i am very aware that quite literally at LEAST on a good day 40-50% of my university campus and probably more actually thinks i should be beaten up or whatever the fuck for not supporting "sex work." i dont give a shit. im still vocal about it both on here and at uni and wherever else. my women and girls are currently, as i write this, being trafficking and raped and some are even being non-sexually tortured and killed because of this ideology. a significant amount of my women and girls are stuck in slavery because of this, everyones priviledged 0-class-conciousness delusions detached from material reality aside. and ive personally been through way too much fucking bullshit and horror. i dont have the privilege of silence, no matter the sheer aggression, hostility, and violence that the western liberals have been deluded into

there are many things ive said on here which would instantly get me labled a terf. many. being a lesbian really doesnt help with this lmao. i use the word female, i use it to refer to the female sex - including trans identified females such as nonbinary ones or transexual men, i still know biological sex exists which even that is controversial to some, i acknowledged that transexual women are male, i acknowledge that the opression of biological women is directly linked to biological sex, i dont use the word cis etc. i still call myself a homosexual. i critique femininity and masculinity - social gender - for what they are - social constructs of stereotypes assigned to the sexes build in a patriatchal system which are particularly made to opress the female sex. i have said before i want the abolishion of gender. yes, this makes me gender critical. im not willing to spend 90% of my time talking about endless individualistic relativity and language politics and "does such a thing as woman even exist at all ¿?¿" because this is postmodernism. all of these things ive said on here before one way or another and all are already enough to get me called a terf by plenty of people - because most of these dont mesh with queer theory at all (postmodernism) - i just stopped giving a shit. because this is feminism in 99% of the world outside of western liberalism. because we need to be able to have language which allows us to talk about important shit. because postmodernism be damned we need to be able to deal with the issues we have in Material Reality. because as far as im concerned only privileged westerners have the ability to sit around endlessly spending most of their time going on abt how "WoMeN DoNt ExIst" "FeMiNiTy is OpReSsEd nOt FeMaLeNesS" and calling this feminism. because frankly a whole lot of this was accepted even in trans circles like less than a decade ago before queer theory (postmodernism) took off

you say any of the above, and to many youre already a terf. you dont 100% agree with modern day queer theory, youre a terf or a transmedicalist or both or whatever the fuck else. you dare to question anything ever, and youre a terf. you dare to be 0.5% critical, and youre a terf. sure, whatever. im not playing this game and im not dancing to this tune. i dont care about performativity and i dont care about virtue signaling. what the fuck am i supoosed to do exactly, never be able to make the most basic feminist statements accepted everywhere else on this planet? nah. similarly - am i supposed to shut up abt that whole sexual slavery thing bc im gonna be called an evil swerf? nah. this is not a healthy culture, this is not a healthy discourse, this is not a healthy mindset or society or community. open discourse and critique is necessary. everything should be up for questioning, everything should be up for critique. when this stops being the case, we have an issue on our damn hands

no, i dont believe in queer theory for a long list of reasons. no, i do not agree with 10000% of modern day trans ideology. no, this does not make a genocidal fascist maniac. no, this doesnt make me a racist - this concept is ridiculous anyway because a) theres plenty of nonwestern cultures who never had, even before colonializism, any concept whatsoever of a third/other gender system, b) the nonwestern cultures who have third-gender systems (the balkans being included in this frankly w the sworn virgins tradition, which comes from sexism btw, most known in albania but spanning several balkan countries including my own) dont traditionally believe in modern day western liberal queer theory, and in fact i think its cultural colonialization and the importation of western ideas to lable those ppl and ways of understanding things by modern western understandings. theres Plenty of nonwestern third-gender people who straight up speak against this,,, and who speak against queer theory- sooo,,, yea..things are really more complicated than baseless accusations being thrown around. theres plenty of nonwestern/woc who are critical of queer theory so, yea, more complicated than baseless accusations being thrown around

does this mean i "exclude trans people" thus the (te)rf? or that i hate them or that whatever else? no. i identified as nonbinary and agender and demiboy for a good while there, i understand where people are coming from, i understand the workings of the ideology. i just dont believe in it now for a long list of reasons. this doesnt mean that i exclude female people who are trans-identified from my feminism, nor that i exclude transexual women bc as ive said in another post, while they do not experience opression on the basis of being biologically female, and while theirs is a different experience from being female, a transexual woman especially one whose passed for many years does experience a form of misogyny, and we do have shared experiences and struggles in common. as ive said before, sex dysphoria can be a very serious and debilitating and painful medical condition ive experienced myself especially when i was younger, and i have sympathy for those who are trying to cope and live their best lives.... why is it than i must agree 10000% with the new woke ideology which has barely existed for less than a decade and changes every 5 days or i somehow want people dead, apparently? hell, theres plenty of transexuals, especially older generation ones, who dont agree with it, and i get why, all my sympathy to them because they cant even talk about their Own issues without being dogpiled

again, i dont believe in postmodernism. i dont agree with completely rupturing class consiousness, completely denying material reality, and spending 99% of the time talking about hyper-individualism and language. do i hate people who believe in queer theory? no. in fact, i have several friends who still do whove ive had very open, very long conversations with on being gender critical, and guess what, we were able to hear each other out and disagree on some things and agree on others and see eye to eye and either fucking way, they understand that i dont hate them or want them dead or exclude them or whatever the hell, simply because i hold another point of view. some have come to agree with me alltogether, some havent. either way, all got that its stupid as hell to call me a "terf," because sometimes, nuance still exists on this planet.

do i think there are radical feminism who are genuinely transphobic? yea. have i come across them yea? yea. i dont engage w them, i dont engage with anyone whose throwing around slurs or etc. do i think and know a whole lot of those women who get called ~terfs~ are just, get this, not transphobic but women (and some trans ppl frankly, there are indeed trans ppl who are radfems) who dare to even question shit or have a different opinion, but dont want anyone dead, or harmed, or see anyone as less human or deserving of saftey and care etc? yea, yea they are

so, to answer your question, i walk the line by not giving a shit anymore, and saying what the hell i think, because by this point if i didnt i wouldn't be able to say most things ive ever written abt feminism on this blog. radical feminism is not inherently trans exclusionary, it is not inherently transphobic, material analysis is not transphobic, most of radical feminism has a whole lot more to focus on than this particular issue anyway, and daring to have any sort of different opinion isnt trans exclusionary, either

[mostlysignssomeportents]

All the books I reviewed in 2022 (Part IV: Nonfiction part 2)

VIII. Adventure Capitalism by Raymond Craib

The history the Libertarian Exit movement(s), separatist projects that seek to find a truly empty land, or a land that can be non-coercively acquired (through a free purchase from a rightful owner) and undo the original sins of property. When all you’ve got is John Locke’s hammer, everything looks like empty lands.

The thought-experiment of a coercion-free life where the marketplace of free exchange produces the most wealth and freedom our species can create always founders on reality’s shores. The original sins of property — genocide and enclosure — can never be washed away. The desire to found a land where your luck (of achievement and/or birth) is untainted by coercion is understandable, but doomed.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius

IX. Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff

The wealthiest, most powerful people in the world understand on a deep level that they way they live has a good chance of causing civilizational collapse, mass die-offs, and terminally poison the only planet in the universe known to be capable of supporting human life. Our society, our lives, and our planet are viewed as the booster stage of a rocket — a disposable thruster made to get us into orbit before it is discarded. We might wipe out our planet and civilization, but they can retreat to islands. Or orbit. Or Mars. Or the metaverse. Survival is an inquiry into the origins of this bizarre and suicidal impulse, asking how psychedelics, cybernetics, and techno-liberation movements could have resulted in this bizarre embrace of the end of the world

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

X. The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas

A fantastic, energizing and exciting book about what it means to really change peoples’ minds — how, on an individual, institutional and societal scale, new ideas take hold; and what can and should be done about the proliferation of conspiracies and hate. Giridharadas offers series of case studies of remarkable “persuaders” — people who are doing hard work to change minds at every level.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/narrative-warfare/#giridharadas

XI. A Spectre, Haunting by China Miéville

Billed as an “introduction” to *The Communist Manifesto* — though it is substantially longer than the work itself — it is brilliant, even dazzling. Miéville sets out to prove that the *Manifesto* is no historical curiosity — that it remains relevant today, not merely as a foil for arguments about Marxism’s role in previous struggles but as a vital guide to present-day ones.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html?unlocked_article_code=idh9E6LUl7SWxUFjxz3VD2t0_0BTvosKQl4YDTcaQcnY6Pwm6c76rS1QF_iX-WcS7cybJUagf8fgdE2ahx4klABBiJgTVdAehfBaaYl7iSCxQRzacc_cRkfSwjrAevC6jxz7npEMLUCxzVjdEcT1Gmjq0I_5cPcetzpLe6R6s8l6SG6ZgZ72j1vnKQH0gfl1RpI1WE4nxrohLUL35OKqVL34lcz-xAXGmcAjYUNTDAmKObzEJ0oK3_clHL9US0g5qe7NuiyuBAmP-HXD2jFCAREGqNcTVu4ODLVvGuoxPBAhgI_L_HSVqqqf1nPrlbKwp7jlYeo1dg5Eh0Im1lbq0RMw0_azjVDltGrBChv1UA&smid=share-url

XII. Tracers in the Dark by Andy Greenberg

A fascinating, horrifying, and complicated story of the battle over Bitcoin secrecy, as law enforcement agencies, tax authorities and private-sector sleuths seek to trace and attribute the cryptocurrency used in a variety of crimes, some relatively benign (selling weed online), some absolutely ghastly (selling videos of child sex abuse). In theory, if you are careful about not linking a wallet address to your real identity, then your transactions are not traceable to you. In practice, this is really, really, really hard.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/15/public-immutable-crimes/#andy-greenberg

XII. War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson A. Denis

For generations, Puerto Rico was a classic imperial periphery, the place where eminent families sent their failsons for a second chance. The most rapacious corporations in American – along with the US military – established operations in PR and staffed them with a clown cavalcade of idiots and sadists, who, by dint of birth, were put in a position of power over the people of Puerto Rico.

Each of these men came to Puerto Rico to seek their fortune, and, by and large, they found it – extracted it, rather, from the sweat and blood of Puerto Ricans. They committed gaffes, scams and atrocities and then went back to the mainland, where they were celebrated. These are the antagonists of Denis's narrative, with the failsons serving as foils, villains, and color.

Apart from their Puerto Ricanness, the protagonists of this story would make great American folkloric heroes, Horatio Algers who came from humble beginnings, succeeded through thrift, tireless striving and indomitable will, devoted themselves to justice, and stood up to bullies – and paid with their lives for a righteous cause.

But because the bullies they stood up to were operating as agents of America, they are forgotten. Not even reviled – erased. On the American mainland, the Puerto Rican revolution isn't even a footnote. Indeed, Puerto Rico itself is often forgotten by America, despite the many sons and daughters of the island who have fought for its military.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#que-viva-albizu

Next up: What’s coming in 2023

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/702452433144676352/all-the-books-i-reviewed-in-2022-part-v-next

Image: Matthew Petroff https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George-peabody-library.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: Interior of the George Peabody Library in Baltimore.]

#pluralistic #book reviews of 2022

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

Your blog is a wonderfully thought out and respectful place! I have been looking for awhile, but I have not been able to find much about the origins of the current gender identity movement, or the possible reasons for the radical shift in the feminist movement. Do you think there is some force pushing these things to where they are? Or is it just the echo chamber of social media run wild? Would love to know your thoughts!

Well, the present concept of gender itself, as being separate from sex, mostly goes back to very shortsighted feminist ideas back in the 1970s like "Gender Is A Social Construct", which I presume was so eagerly adopted and unexamined only because it appeared to remove any societal expectations or career barriers from women.

But of course once feminists pushed those concepts through into actual law, they inevitably ended up leading to where we are now, with biological males being able to enter any female spaces/sports and take on the identities and traditional privileges of women, and become an even more protected class than women themselves: It's basically the biggest own-goal in modern political history, and has seismically split all of feminism into two brand new groups: the most man-hating ones, who have had to come out and acknowledge biology and the superior strength and athletic ability, etc. of men - the complete opposite of feminist rhetoric from back in the 70s-90s, when the slogans were things like "women can do anything men can do, but even better, and in heels" - and the other, more mainstream group: all the younger, empty-headed and more easily-manipulated drones, who have simply been indoctinated by the third-wave onwards to nod along with anything they are told, no matter how impossible and idiotic, and believe they are some sort of rebellious underground resistance for doing so.

"Do you think there is some force pushing these things to where they are?"

I think there are people acting under multiple belief systems at loose in the world, and anything that arises that they feel will individually benefit themselves or their causes, they will promote. Sometimes completely opposing "sides" will both support some new development, for different reasons, and so that makes the new development much more visible and culturally entrenched.

In this case, Marxism, Capitalism, Globalism, Liberalism, Feminism and a bunch of other mind viruses have all found something they feel is of use to their causes in the gender ideology nonsense. And so none of them see any reason to stand in its way.

My point is I don't believe there is any one individual, nation or organization "behind" all world events, though there are certainly some more influential than others, and millions upon millions who want to be.

[reflections-on-self]

On Choosing a Career

The next most difficult question, after determining whether or not I intend to have children in this world, is the question best phrased in the title of Vladimir Lenin's What Is To Be Done?

What is to be done?

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a jet pilot. I was terrified of jets. They were loud and I hated loud noises as a child. But there was something magical about them: they were in the sky! They were with the birds, but they flew much, much faster than the birds. And the planes were all beautiful to my childhood eyes: it is difficult to describe the feeling evoked when one witnesses a pass of America's Blue Angels in their signature blue-and-yellow F/A-18 Hornets. Being a kid at the time, this especially had a big impression on me.

I must not have been a completely clueless child, for, from an early age, I was aware of the relationship between the jets I saw in the sky and the US military. But you could imagine that, lacking any kind of serious adult influence to convince me otherwise, I truly believed that the jets I saw in the sky were defending that vague idea I knew at the time as "America."

So, for the first quarter of my short life, I believed I wanted to be a fighter jet pilot. Through middle school and early high school, I prepared myself to join the US Air Force or the US Navy. I joined the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) and went to a private military school for the first half of my freshman year of high school. I wanted to become a cadet at one of the military service academies, which I hoped guarantee me a job as a pilot.

Sometime in high school, I believe my sophomore year, I took an introductory psychology class. It was my first exposure to the concept of psychology. I immediately found the topic interesting, so I switched from wanting to join the military and become a pilot to wanting to join the military and become a psychiatrist. I think I remember at the time that I believed I wanted to help people and serve my country.

This was a dramatic shift, and it reflected the fact that I began to believe in high school that I would not qualify to become a pilot as a result of my eyesight.

I performed relatively poorly in high school. Public high school in the US, as I would guess any reader who has had the misfortune to experience it might agree, can be a nightmare for self-discovery. By the end of high school, I still had no idea what I wanted to do except the vague notion that I wanted to serve the public in some way. I'd won the school's election for senior class president, which boosted my confidence in believing that I could perform well in some kind of government-related work. It is perhaps here that I decided that I wanted to become a foreign service officer, shortly after a tour I was given of the State Department headquarters in D.C. with a group of CAP cadets.

I enrolled at a nearby college and began taking political science courses. My professors were brilliant and honest. They were not shy about the realities of the wild history of the United States, with its many political contradictions and class-based internal conflicts. This was at the height of the Trump presidency, so debates about the state of what we collectively understood as "our democracy" were frequent.

Around this same time, I was very lucky to meet one of my closest friends, who first introduced me to the basic ideas behind Marxist political-economic theory. We were both employees at a movie theater, so we had many opportunities to discuss these dense, generally philosophically-heavy concepts with each other while ushering theaters together. Looking back, it's all quite serendipitous. Had I not met that friend, I doubt that I ever would have taken Marxist ideas as seriously as I ended up taking them. That would come to be both a blessing and a curse, though, I'm happy to say that, even now, it is more of a blessing that I discovered Marxism when I did.

Being a Marxist-Leninist throughout college made choosing a career in the United States in the early 2020s rather challenging. I lived near a military base, so any job that paid a decent salary was associated with the military-industrial complex that I had come to despise, and therefore, out of the question. Obviously, there was no hope of joining the military and "defending my country" anymore: there was no "country" to defend at that point in my eyes, only class interests. To protect the class interests of the bourgeoisie – which I was not, to my understanding, a part of – seemed like one of the biggest wastes of my life that I could manage. Eventually, this kind of thinking would lead me to further conclude that a job as a foreign service officer working with the Department of State would be just as bootlick-y as joining the military, or working as a civilian for a military contractor.

This idea was intensified when I accepted an offer for a journalism internship with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which is the most left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C. During the summer of 2019, I conducted research and wrote articles for IPS. The work confirmed my Marxist tendencies, and, perhaps even more frighteningly, it seemed to confirm my Leninist sentiments, as well. D.C. is a beast. That's really the only way I can think to put it.

I returned from the experience and decided to switch my major from Political Science to Philosophy. What an idea. I believe it was one of the best and possibly worst decisions I'd ever made for myself. However, it was also the perfect major to become easily distracted with irrelevant problems. Luckily, I think that this is all part of the journey.

At this point, I was with a romantic partner with whom I can only guess the universe introduced me to so that I would learn a handful of important lessons that I will not go into in this essay. All that I think needs to be said about this chapter of my life is that I became very focused on little else but the relationship I was in with that person, and, looking back, this was one of the biggest mistakes I believe I've ever made in my life. I think I became very preoccupied with trying to make a stable life with that person.

One of the mistakes that I made in trying to make a stable life with that person instead of focusing on my own goals: I took on an internship for an Elon Musk-run company. I won't get into details, but needless to say, it was one of the worst experiences I'd ever committed myself to. I was lucky that it was only for a few months and that I was able to get out of the situation almost as soon as I'd realized how poorly the place was ran. It was there that I experienced firsthand that, wherever I work, the people who work there must be valued for their labor in ways that matter to them. No shortcuts around that.

I had a decent enough resumé that I was able to find a job back home at the institution I graduated from. I was a web developer for a little over a year between 2022-2023. Most of that year was spent recovering from the experience I'd had working at Musk's company. Then I met the person I wrote about in my first essay, which would completely change everything for me.

Had I not learned? Perhaps. It was a romantic relationship that pulled me out of my daily routine in September 2022 and would make its mark on my heart that, to this day, occasionally stings. When I met her, I suddenly didn't care about money anymore. To be fair, she, too, seemed to be a Marxist, and seemed to find this whole thing that we're all experiencing just as troubling as I did. Nobody else seemed to see that or feel it.

But, for this, I will cut myself some slack. I did fall in love, whatever the hell that means. Shortly after we met, I had this brief fantasy that we could both abandon the madness that was the world around us for a while and serve in the Peace Corps together. I wouldn't be rich, I wouldn't be quite "at home," I probably wouldn't even really know what I was doing – but I'd be working to help somebody, the work would be good work, and I'd be with her. That's all I wanted. That is, even now, all I want.

Well, anyway, the relationship was too brief and she was too whimsical (she was an accordion player) to realize how seriously I felt, how serious what we'd both stumbled upon seemed to be. She was too scared to be honest with me that she loved me, I could tell. I tried very hard to give us the space, the time, whatever it was that was needed for us to grow into something. But something went wrong. The fires in Canada, the distractive nature of our modern society, my stupidity in facing a real situation, shit, I don't know. If I could ask her, I would. But I am not interested in being toyed with, I'm not interested in someone who won't be just a tad more vulnerable and show me that they care.

For a short while, I resolved that I would live my life as if she were here anyway. The idea seemed beautiful to me. I thought it might honor best what I truly believed was supposed to be the big one. I even went through most of the process to join the Peace Corps, alone, and was bound to leave for Botswana later this year.

But I dropped out of the process. Not because I don't want to serve in the Peace Corps, not because I'm bitter about what happened between her and I and I'm taking it out on a life-changing journey in Botswana, but because the 2-year commitment feels just too long for me right now when I barely know what I want to do today. I believe that someday, if I can orient my life in that direction, I can live the dream of serving in the Peace Corps with someone that loves me, and that I love. That sounds wonderful. But I have a very, very hard time getting over this feeling of loss that was induced by the failure of that relationship. It seems fair to say that I should just wait on the Peace Corps until I'm in a much better place.

In the wake of her absence, sometimes, I've been both determined and distraught. I at least put some thought into the future I hope to build for myself, career-wise, before signing up for the Peace Corps. These reflections also had important implications for the decision I made to ultimately postpone Peace Corps service for a later time in my life.

At the end of the day, I don't believe that I ever wanted anything different from what most people throughout history have wanted: peace, community, love, purpose. That these attributes of life are stable, always accessible, and observable in my day-to-day experience. That, whatever I'm doing, I'm helping support those things, in my life and in the lives of others. This all with the deep understanding that others are me. A deep assumption. I could never claim to know such a thing. I want to stand up on a table and yell, like I'm Socrates, "I don't know anything!!!" – but I know that this would cause some trouble in the library I write this from. I assume that others are me in the deepest sense of being that I can express.

So the first thing I thought I wanted to be when I cleared her from my life's plans was a neurosurgeon.

Neurosurgery seemed (and sometimes still seems) like the coolest field in the world to me. We, humans, have managed to create a whole subject, a whole library of understanding, for manually fixing the most mysterious material "thing" in existence: our very own brains. God, what kind of things about reality do neurosurgeons know? How do they see this world? I have wanted to know. The immediate interest goes back to the very purpose of this blog: explorations on selfhood. What, I thought, could be more self-exploratory than learning how to fix problems that involve the nervous system and fixing them with my very hands?

Still now, it pains me to write that paragraph and wonder these days if that is truly what I want to do. Because it does sound interesting. I believe I have the intelligence, coordination, and patience to make a successful career out of it, if I were to really dedicate myself to it.

Community, love, purpose. I am just about certain that a career in neurosurgery would allow me to live with all three. But peace...

Neurosurgeons work, I've been told, absolutely horrific hours. That alone may not be such a deterrent, except for the fact that I'd be working in such high-stakes situations for such large amounts of time and that the risks could involve not only the loss of a patient's life but also legal ramifications were I to make a serious mistake. I am aware I do not make serious mistakes very often, but that is no reason to jump into a very difficult career path in my hubris.

My initial feelings about neurosurgery were likely influenced by the profound loss I felt that I'd experienced with her. I wanted to know what, at the source, was the cause of all of this pain. I could only point to my own brain and say that, somewhere in there, the intense suffering that I had felt and sometimes feel when I think about what happened between us is created. I have no illusions that neurosurgery can solve such problems. But the idea that I could know the brain so intimately so as to be able to work it, fix it, through my very own physical activity, seemed really awesome.

I briefly read the beginning of Dr. Henry Marsh's Do No Harm, a book about a British neurosurgeon's experience. Now, I think that it's just because he's British, but the book was quick to sour me on the idea of becoming a neurosurgeon. The guy had such a negative view of life and his career, although, the writing was outstanding. Marsh even said that he chose to jump into the medical field because of an unrequited love situation. I thought, what!? That's not me! and I began to consider alternatives.

Neurosurgery is awesome and I am not certain that I won't still try to pursue it.

The thing is, I happen to live near one of the best medical schools in the country and, supposedly, in the world. When I started to really think about what I wanted to do with my life, I believe I dove straight for neurosurgery because of a handful of reasons:

Being a neurosurgeon would give me an excuse to completely dedicate myself to my own work. Nobody could tell me I couldn't do this or that, because in the end, if I'm doing it for my career, then I'm doing it for the benefit of both myself and the patient in the long run. I can see this being quite the emotional barrier to put up between myself and the rest of the world.

Again, the surface-level prestige. The kid who wanted to be a pilot when he was a boy grew up and began to claim that he would like to become a neurosurgeon. Between these two positions? Lots of fame, public attention, a kind of fascination, even. At least that I've noticed in American society. This is not a good nor a bad thing in my view.

But also, the deep internal prestige. I work on fixing people's brains with my hands. Man, if I could say that to myself and know that it was true, I'd feel like the coolest guy in the world.

Financial security for myself and my future family (if I have one). As a neurosurgeon, if I wanted, I would imagine that I could move and set up shop just about anywhere in the world.

Being the leader of a diverse team. Neurosurgeons operate in contexts in which they work with fellow surgeons, other doctors, residents, nurses, health techs, etc. I'd love to feel that I am part of a community that values my work and are individual professionals in their own right.

In the end, good reasons, but not good enough, in my opinion. Prestige and isolation should not be the primary reasons to take on a job, I would think. Of course, there are situations in which perhaps that would be the best career path for an individual. I won't deny that I seriously believed for a while that this seemed like the only way I could feel "useful" to the world after losing her. But I am not Dr. Marsh, I'm not depressed, I should not make decisions about my career solely based off of the failure of a romantic relationship. No matter how hard it hurt me that it didn't work out, my choice to become any particularly laborious and intensely challenging role simply out of feeling emotionally invincible post-breakup simply doesn't feel good enough a reason anymore. The path to becoming a neurosurgeon is long, arduous, bound to cause immense suffering on my future self and the people whom that being will love. Lately, it has seemed a path worth letting go of.

I still believe I would like to become a medical doctor of some kind. First, because I feel an obligation to my fellow human beings on a fundamental level. Without a community of human beings to raise me, be patient with and properly reprimand me when I've failed myself or others, to educate me in various matters, and provide me with various desires and needs as well as the means to fulfill them, I believe my life would have been a very negative experience overall. Other people try. A deep assumption of mine is that I need to try, too. Perhaps what little practical applications of Marxism that are left in me are found in this core idea. I was not raised alone, but by a massive, perpetually changing village of human beings, mostly Americans, all with their own lives, yet, at times, so genuinely preoccupied with the state of mine.

I hate to admit, so beautifully preoccupied with the state of mine. At times.

I don't denote that the community that raised me is American to justify that I would inevitably become a doctor through the American healthcare system, which, with what little I know about that behemoth, I understand to be a very complex and likely flawed system. Rather, there is a more obvious and "unshakeable" crime that my people have committed that has resulted in my beginning to seriously question whether or not I should become a doctor anywhere in the world.

I must wonder, as I type this, if any potential reader is already beginning to catch on to what I'm about to begin writing about. That this crime is so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche now, that I haven't even got to type the words yet, and I believe there's a chance that someone who manages to find this and read it already knows I am talking about the war crimes committed by the Israel Defense Forces and supported by the United States government at the al-Ahli and al-Shifa hospitals in the Gaza Strip.

Anyone who is aware of what has happened to hospitals in Gaza might appreciate my reluctance to dedicate myself to medicine in the West in the aftermath. For a while, I was very angry with the world as the news poured in daily of Israeli airstrikes on civilians in the Gaza Strip. I work near people in positions of power in the United States, and there seemed to be no real sense of remorse, regret, indignation, no real sense of what was even going on, among just about every single person I interacted with. I still find myself seriously disoriented and often demotivated to do anything serious with my career after all of that. How can I take this world seriously anymore? Over 30,000 killed. More than thirty thousand people killed in five months. There are no words.

The truth is, I don't take this world that seriously anymore. I have come to value my own direct experience of life more than everything else. I used to want to change it all: I used to dream of a Red American future – housing, food, and meaningful labor for all; a single, tolerant, peaceful Palestinian state spanning the Jordan to the Mediterranean; a healthy Earth; a world that functioned in a kind of mutually-assured peace and harmony, without real borders. I still believe it's all possible, even probable, in due time. But I don't think I'll bother to waste my precious life energy toward any of those goals in particular anymore. I just don't feel the urgency of a burning world. I don't feel urgent about anything anymore. That was a world where she stayed, and while I'm sorry about how that sounds, I'm just about certain of my feelings on it and I wouldn't dare apologize for that. The world is not perfect. Its imperfection is most obvious right now when one calls to mind the suffering endured by human beings in and around the Gaza Strip.

Still, I must choose a career, as I don't intend to commit suicide (R.I.P. Aaron Bushnell). Since I don't intend to commit suicide, I must work with this body that I am expressing myself from and the situation that I have found myself in.

Becoming a medical doctor is still an attractive career path to me, because at the very least, no matter where I am, I am helping someone. Briefly, recently, I considered the path of the MD-PhD, or the physician-scientist. This is in keeping with my interest in studying the "self" through studying the brain, and I'd also get to be involved in clinical settings where I'd be helping people in my community. All of that sounds pretty neat to me.

Physician-scientists, however, are also victims of a system in which they work intense hours. They often compete for scant grant funding. While I'm sure I could succeed there, too, I ought to be honest with myself about the very real need for me to have time, real time, to pursue artistic interests on my off-time. Something tells me that MD-PhDs do not have a thing called "off-time," and it might be a really good idea to just pursue an MD or a PhD in a field that interests me, have that be my full-time, and do stuff like this, writing (and other forms of content creation), on the side.

To that end, I believe, that I have chosen as my primary plan to become a neuroradiologist and manga artist. For now.

A successful career in neuroradiology seems to provide me the ideal balance between working in a role that helps people directly, provides financial stability and a community of fellow professionals, allows me to work for established institutions, and lets me work relatively (to other medical professions) normal working hours. Also, brains. This will provide me with enough of an income to have my own place and, if, somehow, I manage to fall in love with someone else and we agree to start a family, assist in providing for them financially. And if I'm alone, well, I'll have money to travel.

On my off-time, I'm a manga artist. This is the funniest part of all of this: I know that, deep down, if I had all the time in the world and no pressure on me to do anything in particular coming from anywhere, I'd just become a 漫画家 (manga-ka) and write my dream manga. Since I was a kid, I'd always been into anime and manga. But early on, I was discouraged from drawing. My drawings were ugly as a kid. For a short time, I was involved in the Maplestory sprite animation community in my pre-teen days. I made some embarrassingly bad "Maplestory Music Videos" to Avril Lavigne and Breaking Benjamin. I gave up pretty quickly and turned my eyes skyward, bringing us back to the whole pilot ordeal.

I'd pretty much forgotten about all of that until I was with my friends one day, years ago, watching One Punch Man. I became inspired with an anime idea that was initially loosely based off a similar premise. Then, with a close friend of mine, we read Berserk by Kentarō Miura (RIP) together. That was the most inspiring graphic work I ever read at the time, though, it's important to note that it was my first real experience reading a manga. I began to form the dream as I read along of creating my own artistic masterpiece of Miura's level someday, his creative and visually artistic genius were truly impressive. I decided, eventually, that I would make a manga someday, no matter what. I haven't done any work at all to advance the original idea, but having let it simmer in my mind for about as long as any other important project, I believe I could create something truly interesting.

My drawing skills, in the current moment, are about the same as my childhood drawing skills. I'm 24 and turn 25 next month. I haven't even begun practicing again! I know that any artists who happen to read this will probably scoff at my treatment of this dream. I should be giving up that neuroradio-nonsense and throwing myself at the pencil and paper all the time! I should. I know I should.

But I can't. I feel better going for both. Even if I somehow fail, well, I'd rather have failed attempting to do both seriously than dedicate my life to one and become bored, deathly bored, with it. Besides – and I'm truly sorry to the soul that happens to read this and becomes exhausted at the amount of times I say something like this – this is all extra content to me since she left. I really wanted to not exist not that long ago. I love this world and the people in it, but that is true as well as the fact that I still feel completely lost without her. Completely lost. So, perhaps this is a symptom of that feeling of loss that I cannot seem to rid myself of. But that's all okay to me. As long as I'm allowed to process it the way I see fit, which is all of this, then I have nothing to complain about. Nothing at all.

So, here's what I think. I'm going to read the brain scans and I'm going to draw the cool characters and settings and tell some cool stories. To me, this all sounds perfect because it involves the use of my visual faculties so much. I love to see, to watch, to observe. To dig deep into a detailed piece of art with a mixture of my eyes and attention and extract that beautiful, vague idea that periodically appears, sometimes called meaning. I love that, and I'm not sorry for loving it enough that it keeps me on this often wretched-seeming Earth. Even if I'm an American.

I believe the path is there for me to make. I know I'll have to do some cutting. These days, anything goes. I no longer intend to look back, though I inevitably will again.

#essay #march 2024 #career #text

[ikeameatballspoisonedme]

Been thinking about DE politics. You don't see it cuz I cannot put it into words so I only post the old men yaoi. I will sound very dumb so be aware. Revachol Revolution is very similar to Indonesia. Communist takeover then it all crumbling down. People from old regime were killed, but after communism fell the communists were massacred by the Coalition. Similar to 1966 genocide.

Where Revachol diverged from Indonesia however is a horrifying fascist dictator. It seems like what happened in Revachol mirrored post-USSR countries: westernization, moralist group, hyperinflation, poverty. All those things of course happened in Indonesia, but Revachol didn't have a leading figure that made sure any semblance of leftism is squashed systematically. Marxism still runs deep within Revachol. Town's belong to the union. Joyce admitted that she's a bourgeois. Within Soeharto's regime all or those shit are systematically censored. Unions are weakened. Etc etc. And then after Suharto fell everyone searched for new identity to latch on. With communism literally wiped out, only one thing remains. Religious fascism come to the rescue!

I am speaking for this as someone privileged and currently is in STEM major. My experience is different from those in universities more oriented in political science. They definitely have the DE commie reading club and probably more exposed to grassroots movement. STEM's political leaning tends to be more... apolitical. Clueless about shit outside of the populism. Moralist. Things that DE fucking hates. Maybe I should get better friends, but I can assure you that I'm the only communist in my class (consists of like 40 people so not much, but my exclusion feels more intense). I'm not a communist either at the same time. I rarely read books, I don't understand the theory. Maybe I should continue reading Das Kapital. Guess I'm just a person leaning to the left, but communist is easier to say cuz people irl will see me as a communist SJW anyway. When my friends go to shalat I avoid them, saying that I prefer doing it at home when in reality I don't like shalat. It reminded me of how their perfect God is punishing queer people like me. Anyway. My point is, I do not see my country being particularly communist anytime soon. People are poisoned to religious fascism. I wish I could see the hope of DE, as terrible as Revachol is people there still remembered communism as something. My country has destroyed it all systematically. Thanks to religion.

I saw the anti-LGBT Canada protest. Most of them are Muslims. I just feel, broken. Indonesia used to have a Muslim communist figures, before they were killed or exiled. Tan Malaka, for example. I cannot say for certain that being a Muslim communist will erase the prejudice against queer people, but I know for certain that none of these people are left leaning. Muslim communists (actual communist, not people that just happen to hate Ridwan Kamil. those people are pieces of queerphobic shit.) I met online are cool and they do support queer people. Thing is, the people in those anti-LGBT protests represent the majority of my country. Hateful, bigoted fucks. I'm happy for Muslim queer out there I love y'all, but in my experience I cannot sholat without thinking that people that do this routine hate my existence. The staff at my internship, I love them they're so kind, but they also said Cocomelon is LGBT propaganda because one of the video has 2 dads. I prayed with those people. It sickens me. I cannot do anything about it either. So all I can do to denounce this irl is to just stop shalat altogether. Quit Islam in private. I still wear hijab, I liked it because I don't get to comb my hair, but I do wish that I still can show my hypothetical blue hair without shame from people that knows me. I want to wear cool cargo shorts. I... found out that I hate dress actually, but cargo shorts? Baby that's my shit, but I cannot wear them.

Okay this is why I stick to old man yaoi. I have so much thoughts but at the end they came out as a jumbled mess. I didn't even talk about DE at the end. Kim Kitsuragi kiss time

[panzershrike-pretz]

Does anyone else have a teacher that's so fucked up you wonder how the hell that they even got a fucking degree?

Cuz my sociology teacher is the fucking devil, man. My guy has so many hot takes that I don't know how he isn't behind bars-

I'll be puting it bellow the thingy 'cuz I'll talk about torture and dictatorship (and other stuff)

So,, for context, in Brazil we had a military dictatorship a couple years ago (from 1964 to 1985) and it was hell

About 191 died, 243 disappeared (and most have not been found to this day) 1918 prisioners were tortured with 283 different methods (that range from r*ape to using fucking crocodiles aparently???)

ANYWAY, it was a horrible time. Military groups uses to go to universities in middle of the classes to get Philosophy, History and Sociology teachers that were opposed to the government - and it was entirely fucked up

SO, back to my teacher, he had the guts to say that he misses the dictatorship and that Brazil was a better place back then but like- is he fucking insane???? Does he not know how much this country and the people in it suffered during thos 21 years???

You can't just go around saying that you miss something so horrible and brutal, like????? Fuck him this is an exposed

Some other things he's done are (but not limited to):

- racism

- religious intollerance

- xenophobia

- homophobia

- Misoginy

- My buddy there really said that if he was a business owner, he'd NEVER employ women cuz we can get pregnant (and that's why he doesn't have a business-)

- He said that he suffered more than minorities cuz one time he went to the hospital and the woman there asked what he ate (I wish I was kidding) (he really thought that it was because he's a white cis straiggt man) (it was actually because he's poor, he got it all wrong lmao)

- Apparently people are poor because they choose to be poor (why am I not a billionaire yet??? WHY??? I'M NOT CHOOSING THIS FUCKING SHIT WTH)

- If you're atheist you're wrong and also Darwin was delusional and the BigBang is a bitch

- Karl Marx bad (and his reasoning is because Marx's dughters commited suicide) (like, he hates the man and isn't even capable of giving a good argument against marxism- like when you don't know what to say and attack someone's personal life instead of their arguments)

- He hates that the government helps poor people because "they don't deserve it" 🫠

- Dictatorship is awesome guys let's do it again, shall we???

- He knows more than everyone and we're all pussies for talking back to him (the lord of all truth)

#dictatorship #torture #tw #trigger warning #I'm lucky its my last school year #if I see him in the street i'll stab him just like people stabbed his favorite president #at least I know that if hes got somehere in life my chances are high #AND THERE'S PEOPLE THAT AGREE WITH HIMMMM #fucking hell