I spend far too much time on Twitter which means I see things like the above tweet all too often. The guy who wrote it is apparently an author who fancies himself quite anti-Trump, and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity. However, this tweet is just classic misogynistic troll crap. I don’t care that the object of his misogynistic judgement is a spokesperson for the Trump administration. He’s drifted from criticizing her on her actions and instead brought up the tired old trope of concern trolling about her poor little children because mothers are supposed to be better than all that.

Ew.

In my years on Twitter I have encountered many a troll. The bad news is they’re somewhat frightening because they can be very aggressive and relentless in their 280-character attacks. The good news is they don’t have an original bone in their bridge-dwelling little bodies.

Here’s how trolls work. First, they pretend like they are arguing a point on the merits. If it happens that their argument lacks merit and you, a non-cismale person, have the audacity to point it out to them, they respond by calling you either stupid or mentally ill.

If you continue with the debate after this point, they escalate the insults and start making proclamations about how you look. Commenting on weight is a popular troll gambit but they will also just call a person ugly if they’re unsure about body size.

Next, they try to make you feel really bad by suggesting they would never fuck you. This is particularly hilarious since fucking a troll has never been on offer from me. It’s not like I was on Twitter thinking “Hey! I should fuck this person with a flag and eagle avi and a cover photo of his guns and a can of Bud Light! Oh wait. He doesn’t want to fuck me? I feel sad about that!”

But such is the delusion of trolls that they think their sex appeal is actually that powerful.

The last line of insults from a troll is typically to express pity for your spouse and children over having to live with such an unreasonable, crazy, stupid, ugly, unfuckable person.

Which brings us back to the tweet I posted up above. Read it again. I’ll wait.

Do you see it? He was on the final stage of troll insults, wasn’t he?

Men, even men who are otherwise not misogynist, will default classic misogynist tactics to bring down women they disagree with. It’s inescapable, it’s insidious, and it’s also boring.

Seriously, I am so bored of guys who are so deeply entrenched in old models of thought that they can’t even be bothered to come up with a new idea. Why are you so lazy that you’d rather be a male chauvinist pig think critically? This is a fight most of us are tired of having but we can’;t stop having it until y’all stop doing it.

Lest you think I let that tweet go by unremarked, don’t worry. I responded by saying “Trolls on the internet often come after women by saying they’re bad mothers. This usually comes after calling us fat, ugly, and mentally unbalanced. It’s classic misogyny. Do better.”

Will he do better? I don’t know. All I know for sure is that every time I call out misogyny in a public forum I feel better because at least I wasn’t silent.

I wish I could remember what I was listening to when I learned that I was guilty of White Feminism but I just can’t. It was probably something on NPR. Whatever it was, the speaker noted that Second Wave Feminism was allegedly focused on the right of women to work, but didn’t acknowledge that Black women (and other women of color) had been working all along.

My sickening realization then came that white feminists of the time didn’t consider the work of women of color worth doing.

That was when I had to start looking deeply at my own feminism and figuring out which parts of it were actively racist and how I could kick that racism out of my own head. It’s a process and I’m never going to be done with it.

This article about White Feminism is making the rounds and if you haven’t read it already, you really should. Some of what author Monnica T. Williams is saying is pretty specific to academic circles and the kind of conferences on feminism that most of us never go to. But the rest of it? Hoo boy. Buckle up. The facts are a bumpy damn ride.

The ugly truth is that white feminists have been on a track for financial equality for themselves and, while that is not without merit, there are millions of women of color in America who are still fighting for their right to stay alive. The maternal mortality numbers for Black women especially are a stain on our nation and we should all be walking around with our hair on fire over that. This is America. You should have a reasonable expectation of surviving the birth of your own baby. We have the technology and that technology shouldn’t be reserved for white ladies in labor and delivery.

That goes for everything in medicine, actually.

Ok, yeah, you’re thinking, but what can I do about things like racial disparities in medicine? Well, first you can notice them. Then you can realize that you didn’t notice them until someone pointed them out to you and that someone was probably a person of color. Then you can start making a point of seeking out the opinions and experiences of people of color to more fully develop your view of the world. Because if you’re anything like me, you made the mistake of listening to mostly white feminists and missed everyone else in the process.

Intersectionality is easy in theory, harder in practice. We all have our blinkers. We all have our blind spots. But once you accept that you are going to be wrong about stuff in life – and that being wrong doesn’t diminish your value as a person – it becomes easier to see around your own blinders.

There’s no shame in the words “I didn’t know that before now.” The shame comes in when you say “And I’m not going to accept it now that I do know it because it doesn’t mesh with what I already knew.”

The better response to new information is to thank the person that handed it over and start sharing it and crediting them – that’s how white feminists can elevate the voices of women of color at the most basic level.

Go forth and listen and learn. Find those voices you haven’t tuned into before now, quote them widely. I promise you won’t regret it.

Some absurd number of lawmakers has filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court urging them to overturn Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey. Those, of course, are the two cases that establish the right to legal abortion in America. The lawmakers say that abortion is “unworkable.”

Unworkable? I’ll show you unworkable, asshole.

These people are so fucking stupid. I know you all have heard me say this before but completing a pregnancy isn’t an intrinsic good. There are serious issues once you’re booted out of the delivery suite and NONE OF THESE FUCKHEADS WANT TO FIX THEM.

There are no bills from these people to boost wages. They aren’t expanding insurance regulations to reduce out of pocket costs for policy holders. They won’t subsidize childcare. We don’t have universal pre-k. There’s no cheap aftercare for kids in elementary school. The folks on this brief aren’t addressing housing costs or transportation needs. Never mind government benefits for basics like food. Those have been cut already.

Basically, unless you’re lucky, having a baby is pretty damn unworkable.

We are not a pro-life nation becasue we don’t do the things that contribute to an excellent quality of life. Americans are poor, sick, overworked, under-compensates, and mentally unwell. We have no savings and no way to accrue wealth.

But some lawmakers are right here to make sure you keep that fetus in your belly whether you like it or not, whether you can see a path to raising it or not, whether you consent to pregnancy or not.

They should be ashamed of themselves but instead they’re probably strutting around acting like they kicked Margaret Sanger herself in the vagina. High fiving each other over how super fetus-fetishy they all are.

Look, you wanna ban abortion. We get it. But if that’s all you wanna do? You suck.

Our constitution is supposed to promote the general welfare. If you don’t think that includes the right to choose when or if you have a baby, you should at least learn to believe that includes providing a basic standard of living for every person in the country.

Not helping the born to live is the truly unworkable thing.

You wouldn’t know it to listen to right-wing media sources, but Planned Parenthood isn’t the only name in reproductive health care. I know FoxNews wants you to think there’s a Planned Parenthood set up on literally every streetcorner in Democratic-leaning areas but that’s not the case. Sure, they have a massive presence and provide health care for millions of people, but they’re not the only service provider out there.

Vice did an article this week about independent abortion providers and the way they have been hurt by changes to federal family planning funding. In the old days, when Mike Pence wasn’t thumping his Bible around the entire executive branch, Title X family planning funds could go to any organization that helped people with – wait for it – family planning. Then ol’ Holier Than Thou convinced his buddy the Pussy Grabber In Chief to change the rules so that any organization that talks about abortion is ineligible for funding.

At least I assume that’s how it went down. I can’t see the guy who cheated on most of his wives and reportedly didn’t use a condom with Stormy Daniels being too upset about easy access to abortion. When clinics are federally funded, he can just send a car to take his mistresses to their appointments. If Roe falls, he might have to arrange for a private plane for them, depending on what state they live in.

Anyway, where was I? Oh right. Clinics losing their funding. Now, the money was already partitioned off so it couldn’t be used directly for abortion services, thanks to the Hyde amendment. Funding can pay for things like overhead costs, medical exams, birth control, and what have you but not abortions. But that’s never been good enough for the far right. They want to yank all funding to anyone who even mentions abortion, not just clinics that actually perform them. That means clinics that don’t provide abortions themselves but refer out to other providers are affected.

Now, if you’re a major name with a giant donor base like Planned Parenthood, you can weather this storm. If you’re a tiny clinic that operates in someplace like Baltimore and no one outside the city has heard of you? Ooof. Quitting abortion services isn’t an option. That’s critical to mission. But finding money to make up for the Title X changes is a problem. A big one.

The good news is that a President Any Democrat At All could reverse the rule as soon as 2021. The bad news is that 2021 is a long time away in terms of non-profit budgeting. That’s where we come in. If you have money to donate, think about donating to independent abortion providers. Here’s one list of them for easy reference. You can also check out the Handbook for a Post Roe America site for other abortion-related service providers. Supporting them keeps the doors open and the lights on. If you can help, please do.

Every marginalized group in America seems to be getting their turn to be the punching bag for the angst of the MAGA hat brigade lately. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. There was the Muslim ban back in 2017. Brown people are being rounded up and interned at the southern border. The president still thinks Nazis are very fine people. Trans people get killed on a regular basis and the Trump team has been slowly and quietly removing protections for LGBTQ+ folks from federal regulations. Reproductive healthcare is under a constant attack at the state level. And now we have a disturbing uptick in anti-Semitic violence.

There was a good piece in Forward about how Jewish people are not the ones who can cure anti-Semitism. It’s the anti-Semites who need to be fixed. That is a lesson for all kinds of prejudice and opression: the problem is not with the oppressed.

Chris Rock probably expressed this the best in a 2014 interveiw he did with Frank Rich at New York magazine when he pointed out that progress for Black people isn’t about Black people getting better; it’s about white people getting less bad:

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

So are you ready to be a nicer white person?

There is nothing that groups of Black people, Jewish people, LGBTQ+ people, women, Muslim people, LatinX people and all the other groups of “other” people in America are actually doing wrong. Every person you meet is just getting through their day and trying to be healthy, safe, and reasonably happy as they do it. That’s the closest thing to leading a blameless life anyone can do and living a life like that is perfectly fine. It’s certainly not something that should attract ill treatment from the government or individuals, right?

But it does attract ill treatment, which we see in headlines every day. People are sad and scared and angry that they’re being oppressed.

Then pundits wring their hands about how we will every reconcile the divides in our society as if both sides of the divide have equal responsibility for what’s going on here. That’s not how it is. The people being marginalized aren’t at fault here and they shouldn’t be expected to clean up this mess. It’s all on the oppressors to fix themselves. They’re the ones being giant dicks.

If we want to fix structures of oppression, those of us living at the top of the privilege pile need to lead the charge in making it better because we are the ones who made it bad in the first place – or at least let it get bad through inattention or apathy. Now we need to shed that inattention and apathy and do the right thing by our friends and neighbors. It’s time to do what we can in the spaces where we live and work.

We’re the ones who should shush up white men talking over women and people of color at work. We’re the ones who should agitate for transparent pay policies in the workplace and make sure all our colleagues are being compensated fairly. We’re the ones who should prioritize businesses that treat their workers well. We’re the ones who should show and and ally with marginalized groups when local governments make housing, transportation, and education policy changes. We’re the ones who have to call out the entrenched racism and sexism and all the other bigotries that plague our communities.

It has to be us who stop doing it because we’re the ones doing it in the first place. That’s not a comfortable truth, but its’a truth nonetheless.

In a few hours it will be 2020 and corporate America would like you to know that you can buy all kind of new things for the new year.

They would very much like you to invest in stuff like gym memberships, meal plans, self-help books that promise a new outlook, and other tools that will allegedly “improve” you.

You do not need to be improved.

Never forget that it is in the best interest of the rich and powerful to keep the rest of us preoccupied with our weight, our self-worth, our sexual appeal to others, and whether or not we fit the mold of Ideal Person. They like us off balance and insecure. They want us to be so busy trying to formulate the exact balance of carbs and exercise to sculpt the perfect buttocks that we forget to overthrow systems of oppression.

This year, resolve to tell the corporate-sponsored patriarchy to fuck the hell off with that shit.

You’re fine. In fact, you’re better than fine, you’re great. Super great. Your body is great. It gets you around every day, it totes your brain, it converts food to energy, it makes sperm and eggs and ideas and expels carbon dioxide that your house plants can enjoy. Don’t change a thing about your body.

Except your hair. You can mess with that all you want. Hair is actually a tool for personal expression so changing that is cool.

As for your self-esteem or your state of mindfulness or your levels of spirituality, that is not a job for corporate America to address. Your mind and heart will probably not be made better by anything you can buy in a store. If you need a therapist or medication to deal with chemical imbalances or past trauma, go do that. But don’t go buying books with titles like “Girl, Don’t Be Sad, Look At My Hair Extensions, Be Like Me, Follow My Instagram For Yoga App Ideas #GlutenIsABlessing.” Those books only help the people who wrote them pay their mortgages. They will not provide you any material benefit.

Go read a murder mystery or sci-fi book instead. Reading should be fun. Or read How To Be An Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi. That book actually will help you be better at life and caring for others.

You rock and you have important things to do this year. Don’t let the stupid-ass patriarchy-industrial complex get in the way of that.

2020, folks. Let’s do it.

This weekend, some people were trying to go to a Hanukkah party at their rabbi’s house. That’s all. Then a man broke in and stabbed them.

Nothing comes from violence. Nothing ever could.

Years ago, Sarah Palin put bullseyes on a map of Congressional districts, including Gabby Giffords’. Shortly after that, Giffords was shot. Was that Sarah Palin’s fault?

I dunno. Probably not. But suggesting shooting people certainly never stops any shootings. Nothing comes from calls to violence except violence.

Nowadays, we have a guy at the top of the US power pyramid who regularly demonizes groups of people does nothing to protect those people from further demonization and outright violence.

The people he reviles are just trying to live their lives. That’s all. They don’t deserve violence.

But the worst part is that so many people love all this. They love being allowed to lash out. They like spewing insults and slurs. They are rooting for the violence.

As if anything ever comes from violence. As if anything ever could.

I don’t understand the pleasure they get from harming others but I know this: they won’t give up that pleasure willingly.

You know and I know that someone in American thinks the people stabbed at a Hanukkah party deserved it because they also believe Jews are not as good as they are. They’re the same people who think poverty is a punishment for some moral failing. The same people who think rape victims were asking for it. The same people who still suspect that HIV is a punishment for being gay.

The same people who think being white is better than being any other color. Who think white people have first claim to a safe and prosperous life in America. They are racist and sexist and anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic and homophobic and who knows what else. They’ve always been that way but they used to keep it to themselves. Now? Well…

I don’t know how to deal with a populace who is wallowing in their own worst instincts. I don’t know how to turn off the spigot of ugliness pouring out of the American body politic. I don’t know how to put this ugly genie back in the bottle.

I don’t know if it would even be any better.

The one thing we’ve all had to confront in these Trump years is that the hate never went away. It was always waiting for a chance to come back out.

It’s out now. Now what do we do?

Like my SEO title there? I should get all kinds of hate mail from wannabe-billionaires over that.

In fact, I don’t think all billionaires are useless. I think they should all be more cognizant that they are part of the problem in terms of wealth inequality and they should worry less about paying taxes since they’ll never starve but I don’t believe them to be entirely useless.

But there is one billionaire in particular who is being totally useless on one issue. The issue is impeachment and the billionaires is Tom Steyer.

Remember in 2018 when Tom Steyer was dropping loads of cash on billboards and ads encouraging impeachment? It was his whole thing. Impeach Trump, rah, rah rah.

Well, now we’ve impeached him. The Senate is teetering on the edge of exonerating him without any kind of trial worth the name and where is Tom Steyer?

Running for president and polling at under 3%. Way to stick it to Trump, billionaire bro.

If Tom Steyer wanted to be not useless, he could drop the campaign and hire a grassroots team to push the Senate on impeachment. Hell, he could hire me. I know what we need to do.

Basically, we need to buy lists of registered Dems in states with Republican Senators. We need to write a quick and easy call script (I wrote one yesterday, actually) and hire a company that does grassroots outbound calling to start making calls. The company would call Dems, provide them the script, and then connect them immediately to their Senators so they can ask for a real Senate trial. It’s the kind of thing grassroots groups do regularly, it’s legal, and it’s probably a fuckton cheaper than running for president.

Also? It might work. Unlike Steyer’s presidential bid.

But fuckin’ billionaires are so impressed with their own money piles that they think they deserve to collect trophies. It’s what Trump did in 2016 and look where that got us. With a Twitter addicted dilletante playing president in the Oval Office.

Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg and Andrew Yang and really every billionaire would all be better off learning how to do issue based grassroots work instead of running for office. They’d make a bigger impact that way and actually serve the country they claim to love instead of just masturbating all over it with these vanity campaigns.

Remember how we all spent 2017 calling lawmakers? It’s time to do that again.

As most people know, we are at a crossroads in the impeachment process. The House voted to indict the president on two charges – abuse of power and obstruction of Congress – and now he is supposed to stand trial in the Senate on the same charges. Except Senate leadership doesn’t really want to have a trial. They want to basically have a show of hands about who wants to boot Trump and who wants to keep him. Knowing that more hands are pro-Trump than anti-Trump, Senate Leader Mitch McConnell expects this will be over quickly and he can get back to the important work of confirming pro-business judges and protecting his wife’s family’s business interests.

This is not how trials work in the rest of America.

A fake trial with no witnesses and limited evidence sounds shady because it is and Democrats have been saying so since Moscow Mitch raised the idea. But now we have one Republican Senator saying that she isn’t in love with the idea. Lisa Murkowski from Alaska is being quoted widely as saying she is disturbed by this not-really-a-trial plan. She is the first Republican to break ranks on this issue.

The Professional Left is all over Twitter rolling their jaded eyes and saying that this won’t amount to any actual action on the part of Senate Republicans.

Grassroots activists are saying “OMFG WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU CYNICAL PUNDITS! THIS IS AN OPPORTUNITY! PICK UP THE PHONE MAKE SOME CALLS NOW NOW NOW!!!!”

You see, what’s happening here is Murkowski is sending a message that she’s listening. She’s willing to listen to constituents and – more crucially – she might be willing to listen to other Republicans. If she could find one or two of her colleagues who are also disturbed and would stand with her in favor of holding a real trial, Mitchy-boy might have to back down and act like the Constitution has meaning.

Senator Murkowski won’t act alone and she won’t join with Democrats. She is waiting to hear from other Republicans – which means other Republicans need to hear from you. Yep. You. All ya’ll living in states with Republican Senators need to call them. Right now. The switchboard number for the Senate is (202) 224-3121. Call right now and tell yoru Senator that you want a real trial on the articles of impeachment.

If you have phone anxiety, you can email Senators by going to http://www.senate.gov.

I’ll eve give you a script to use. Here. Say this:

“My name is [Name] and I live in [City]. Like Senator Murkowski, I am disturbed by Senator McConnell’s plans to coordinate the White House on the impeachment trial. That doesn’t seem fair or right to me. Trials are supposed to be unbiased. Please talk to Senator Murkwoski about her concerns and talk to Senator McConnell about doing this the right way. Thank you.”

If your Senator is a Democrat, call anyway. They like praise. You can just thank them for standing up for a fair process.

Like I always say, lawmakers don’t know how you feel unless you tell them. I also say they are herd animals who prefer the safety of numbers. They’re braver together. If we can get a few of them to work together on opposing McConnell, there is a much better chance that we will see something that resembles a trial instead of just a pro-Trump rally on the Senate floor.

The minister at my Unitarian-Universalist congregation used to start services on Christmas Eve with the line in the title: every night a child is born is a holy night.

So every night is a holy night. And every child is a holy child.

Whatever you call the animating force of the universe, it lives in us all. It lives in the families we are born into and the families we create.

Birth, with all its terror and hope, is a holy act and being a parent or a child is a holy pursuit.

But if you couldn’t stay, if you fled your family of birth, that flight was holy. If you pulled together a family of choice, person by person, soul by soul, that act of creation is holy.

If you gave birth or attended birth or welcomed a newborn into the world you have been party to something holy.

If you were born into this flawed and sacred world, you are holy.

Holy things happen every night. Welcome to holy world.