Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was the penultimate act in driving your doctrinaire radical feminist off the rails. Roe v. Wade is gone, and the feminists are irate.

And as I have always hated feminists, I enjoyed the spectacle. 

No, I’m not talking about hating the sort of “feminist” who express a general solidarity with the female gender in getting a fair shot in the race of life. That sort of feminist is ¾ of all the women I know, and I have no problem with them. They will claim that men will be happier when women are happier, and together the two sexes should work for greater equality and understanding in a shared future. It is hard to argue with that.

No, I’m talking about the ideological feminists who have more than a bit of the air of grim dogmatism about them. The air bubbles with perpetual and seemingly unbounded anger when they are around and aroused. Yes, I’m talking about the feminists who have libraries with the writings of Judith Butler, bell hooks, and Catharine MacKinnon in them. I’m talking about those radical feminists who have an iron-clad ideological attachment to The Cause. “Men are the enemy!” “All sex, more or less, is a form of rape!” This is how they earned the appellation “man-hating feminist.” You will not often encounter such a creature in the wild because they are not numerous or evenly distributed in nature. They cluster together, and stay close to the other members of the Sisterhood in selected locales. But they are out there, oh yes. Bell hooks recently died, but Judith Butler and Catherine MacKinnon are still extant: the former is a professor at UC Berkeley, and the latter at the University of Michigan. Berkeley and Ann Arbor are climes where the radical feminist is endemic.

And you saw them come out of the woodwork since Trump was elected back in 2016. And you for sure see them now with Roe v. Wade being overturned. They are out and about! It is like someone stepped on an anthill and the creatures are out and running furiously hither and thither.

I first encountered the “radical feminist” genus in the “women’ studies” departments at UCLA as a student in the mid-1980s — the feminist professors whose lives and careers revolved around “fighting the patriarchy.” I gave these ideologues and their classes a wide berth, in the same way I would stay biting distance away from a rabid dog. Any man who would sign up for classes like that I would look at extremely askance. This was angry ground, and enemy territory, for anyone who did not share their strident politics. Caveat emptor.

I thought it much the same with all the “grievance studies” — Chicano, African American, and most sociology and education courses, too. It was not so much disinterested scholarship as it was partisan advocacy — these professors seemed like entrenched political activists as much (or more) as they were university researcher/educators. Their scholarship appeared to be tendentious, one-sided agitprop which could never be financially self-sustaining outside tenured professorships. An elderly Ambrose Bierce famously wandered off into revolutionary Mexico in 1913 never to be seen again — “Ah, to be a gringo in Mexico… that is euthanasia!”  The same could be said of a Republican in most humanities departments in today’s academia — for all two of the conservatives who will admit to being so. Republican professors in places like that keep their heads down like a non-binary vegan chef from Portland at a Texas BBQ cookoff. 

Now, dear reader, you don’t have to deal with left-wing busybodies too often in the real world. There are not that many of them. They are like what, 5% of the population? But if you work in certain fields — public defenders, non-profits, public education, university professors, big city journalism, book publishing, the entertainment industry, public health — you come into spaces where they are largely represented, if not the majority. So I read with interest the recent Ryan Grim article in The Intercept about how organizations with large numbers of “progressive Democrats” have almost stopped operating because of intense ideological fights inside the workplace. Inflamed political passions lead workers to become insufferable assholes who spend almost all their time fighting against co-workers who have relatively minor differences of opinion about race, gender, power, or whatever. The infighting is internecine and prolonged. The Washington Post and New York Times newsrooms are said to be riven by internal conflict between factions who, while all liberal, fight intensely and endlessly. They snipe at each other on Twitter and say mean things. Slack channel conversations on the sly electronically with co-conspirators, then tense face-to-face meetings with hurt feelings in a larger group, with the organization’s dirty laundry eventually aired online publicly, and next to nothing resolved with respect to liberal ideals, even amongst an almost homogenous political grouping. The ACLU is riven by such internal power struggles, Grim explains. The same with the National Audubon Society and The Sierra Club, among many other non-profits with almost exclusively “progressive” staff. The Guttmacher Institute, which specializes in research on sexuality and reproductive rights, almost came to a complete halt in its operations because of widespread staff unrest, Grim explains, even as Roe v. Wade was on its last legs. Yikes.

Wow, did that article hit home. 

I have seen this dynamic up close, unfortunately, and it is not pretty. The after-hours gatherings of aggrieved workers meeting to fight against “injustice.” The rival factions and the infighting; the angry tears and feelings of betrayal. Original group solidarity breaks down into rival blocs, with “deviationist” thought bitterly denounced as heresy, in a phenomenon not unknown to the late 18th century French Revolutionaries or early 20th century Bolsheviks. The emancipatory Left once again, turns against and devours itself: if you are seen as not sufficiently committed to “race, gender, and diversity,” you risk being denounced as a racist, sexist, or whatever. The groupthink involved, and the pressure to conform, are intense. Judgment is rife; emotions run hot. In the end, nothing much changes, while there is enormous negativity generated. I would stay as far away as I could from such a dynamic as I can get in a workplace. The best way to do this, in my experience, is to avoid any employer with a sizable number of partisan political activists (of any stripe) on the payroll. The ride will get rough, believe you me.

Why?

Well, it is because if your average radical feminist was a pain in the ass pre-2016, it got much worse after 2016, in my experience. Ryan Grim describes it as if something “broke” in your average “Progressive Democrat” with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and then it got worse after the arrival of Covid-19 in 2020 and the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer. This confluence of events seemed collectively to send them over the edge. Over the past few months I have often heard leftists lament that the USA is a “broken country.” I disagree. I would argue that it is the many “Progressive Democrats” who are “broken.” And it was the election of Donald J. Trump which started this breaking. 

I even wrote a post two years ago offering up Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for the perennially ailing progressive who could not seem to shake off anxiety and/or the blues. (The therapy did not seem to stick.) It almost seems like political passion to a “progressive Democrat” nowadays is like whisky to an alcoholic which should be avoided at all costs but can’t be. Politics ruins them — or, better put, it “breaks” them. Nevertheless, 18 months after Trump left office, liberals still seem broken. And after the Supreme Court reversed itself and threw out Roe v Wade yesterday, these people seem more broken than ever.

If the caldron was simmering in the United States, it now seems to be boiling over. 

Yesterday Roe v. Wade was thrown out by a supermajority of six conservative Justices who sent abortion law back to the states to be legislated one way or the other – wow. 

It was quite the spectacle.

Last night I watched feminists in the full throes of enraged agony, and I marveled. I watched protests with women left sputtering semi-incoherently into the camera with outrage, not unlike that harpy Elizabeth Warren a few weeks ago, who looked for all the world unhinged –

Or, 41 years younger than Warren, the inimitable Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as she gives out marching orders in front of the Supreme Court for the next generation or two of sociopolitical combat, ugh —

The protesters, they can’t believe it. INJUSTICE!

Look at them —

 — they are nearly undone by despair, rage, panic, tears — almost overwhelmed by events, next to insensate from extreme emotion — like Othello in Act IV, Scene One — I regard all this and am amazed. The political left in America is unmoored —

The Furies are unleashed! The emotion seems almost unbounded. The gender war rhetoric is hot and heavy. Ah, the pathos. The enemies of reproductive rights will suffer! There will be revenge.

Beyond urging Americans to march in protests and vote in elections, there are calls for a “mass mobilization” towards a “national day of action” by women to re-claim reproductive rights, and even a “sex strike” in the style of Lysistrata of Aristophanes (which is funny both in the context of the Peloponnesian War and Dobbs v. Jackson equally). It is amazing to witness.

I have seen it go even further, too. I have heard some urge angry confrontation with offending judges and politicians, and even acts of violence against them and others. There is even talk of a “civil war.”

“Fuck the Supreme Court!”

“This decision shall not stand!”

“This country is a hellscape!”

“Burn it all down!”

“We will fight!”

“This will be a summer of rage!”

Let them rage away! I thought to myself. But I will be paying next to no attention. With their vitriolic anger, they poison themselves most of all. So let them do that.

I have even heard a few promise to remain celibate forever, or to sterilize themselves voluntarily so they will never find themselves in a position to need an abortion and be unable to procure one in a post-Roe v. Wade world. “Go for it!” I say. Your terms are acceptable. Problem solved. 

Others have claimed to want to emigrate “tomorrow” away from the United States to a “less sexist and racist country!” Absolutely nobody is stopping you, ma’am. 

I read with amazement that female workers at Amazon “demanded” time off to “grieve” the Supreme Court ruling, and was even more amazed that the company acceded to the request. Or that workers would “demand” their employer agree with their politics, and insist that action be taken to support a particular cause. With a bitterly controversial and divisive issue like abortion, what could go wrong? Might a company get caught in the middle of a brawl and get savaged?

Almost all the protesters I see on camera are white, female, and very liberal. It always seems this is the demographic that is the worst and talks the most shit. It is the “pussy hat” brigade all over again. Yuck.

Well, passions certainly are running high in America, I thought to myself as I watched the news.

But are we in a “civil war”?

Nah.

The “social justice warriors” can’t do real damage, despite an endless outbreak of angry verbiage. The “Identitarian Left” are like horse-flies which annoy as they buzz around, and maybe they’ll sting you but they won’t do any real damage. Keyboard warriors from Brooklyn to Berkeley are fine for making a proper stink on social media and “raising consciousness,” but it does not translate into anything concrete; they might make a lot of noise, but there is no real action. The “woke folk” schedule protest marches and host endless meetings, but nothing really changes. Devotees are over-educated and under-armed, for the most part. The hard left is fierce but feckless. It is scary only on Twitter, which doesn’t really count.

These guys on the far right, on the other hand, are scary. On June 11, 2022 local law enforcement arrested 31 individuals, wearing identical clothes with bandanas over their faces and bearing shields, after they all climbed into a rented U-Haul truck with the seeming intent of heading to a local Gay Pride festival in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho where they would proceed to riot. Check them out below – 

I strongly suspect the guys above, allegedly belonging to the “Patriot Front” militant group, do own weapons and know how to use them. They might, in fact, kill you! When I read the accounts and viewed the photos of heavily-armed police arresting them, I was astounded. The above photos, to be honest, frighten me.

After some research I realized only one of these individuals was actually from Idaho, and none were from Coeur d’Alene. “They came from out of state. They are organized.” Scary. Keep guys like that far away from me, please. Later I read a few skeptics claim that each and everyone of those “extremists” arrested in Coeur d’Alene was in fact an undercover federal agent, and the entire event was a fabricated non-event authored by the government. Maybe. But I doubt it. There are dangerous people out there on the far right. I don’t doubt that.

But I know almost nobody here in California from the far right. I am not so lucky on the other side of the aisle: I work almost entirely with liberal and “progressive” Democrats in public education, so I have to suffer from that side of the political spectrum, ugh. 

What exactly does that mean? you might ask. You mean someone urging you to “decolonize your library” and uncover your “internalized settler racism” while they threaten to denounce you online? Yup. Mandatory meetings and company-wide emails about sexism, racism, classism, ableism, transgenderism, “equity,” “implicit bias,” and “social justice”? Yes. Have you ever heard someone say something like, “We must define our organizational approach to intersectional BIPOC activism in the face of white supremacist heteronormativity”? Well, it is as tedious as it sounds, my friend. 

People like that have perfected a political pose of such imperious condescension and unearned, unwarranted moral superiority that half of America can hardly stand to be in the same room with them. For my part, I can think of five or six loud liberal white women where I live who I would not cross the street to bring a cup of water to if they were on fire. Ten years ago we were friendly, but now they are as persona non grata. If they got ass cancer and died, I would feel nothing. I put the memory of them in a box, locked it, and placed it in some obscure corner of my mind. Go figure. In fact, writing these words might be the cathartic, final act of forgetting they exist. Enough said.

So I will enjoy the “rage” of those upset with the Roe v. Wade reversal, even as I wall myself off from it. Schadenfreude.* It is as simple as that.

And this summer I will have a great two months of vacation. There will be relaxation, and a grounded sense of peace — that is the best response to naked spite. 

The best reaction against your enemies is to live happily and to be successful. In practice, it is to ignore them.

I will not counter hatred with any similar response which is emotionally costly to me. Instead I will be indifferent. 

So if irate feminists plan to have a “summer of rage” while hitting the pavement of America streets in protest, I will have a “summer of international travel” while relaxing with friends and family.

Who between us will be in better shape come this September? Who will have shed fewer tears of frustration and/or “rage”? What will happen if Republicans take one or both houses of Congress during midterm elections in November of 2022, as predicted? How about the elections of 2024? Who has thrived, and who has not, since 2016? What about in 2026?

America is not “broken.” But some Americans seem to be. I won’t be one of them.

So let the summer begin!

I have big plans.

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HOW DID YOU SPEND YOUR SUMMER?

THE FIRST WEEKEND POST-ROE v. WADE

My daughter’s soccer team wins their tournament down in Irvine, California:

while feminists like Jessica Valenti are besides themselves:

The protesters in the “Summer of Rage” protested. On the other hand, I did this…

I spent a good chunk of June in Costa Rica. But enraged progressive protesters spent much of that time in the streets protesting and disrupting — trying to “shut down” Washington D.C. I paid next to no attention to them, as did most of the populace.

While politicians and activists gnash their teeth and rend their clothing, I spent time creating memories with my daughters!

I had a wonderful 2022 summer full of vacation travel and family bonding. My household is ready to go back to school and start another year of learning and growth. Jessica Valenti, on the other hand, has been in perpetual crisis mode, constantly monitoring reproductive rights developments in GOP-controlled states.

Five years from now, let’s see who is doing better. Jessica and her family? Or me and mine?

If you were a betting person, do you see happy mental health outcomes for young people who are politically inflamed progressives? Those venting and emoting in their “summer of rage”? Or do you see the opposite?