If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them -Sojourner Truth, “Aint I a Woman”

With the spirit of Ms. Sojourner Truth in mind here’s how you can start building unity again- Leave me alone.

Knock it off with the mass reporting. I am so sick of endless pages of these kinds of messages in my inbox.

Wanna win me over? You can start by doing something very simple-Stop trying to get me banned literally everywhere I go. This did not happen before Tara Reade. I’m not breaking any rules. I’m not saying anything illegal. I am not committing treason and last time I checked we supposedly lived in a free goddamn country. I’m not even upvoting content anymore but I’m still allowed to have an opinion and speak my mind, I literally bother no one I stay in my own goddamn spaces and very much in my lane. Y’all are acting like you will bring me over to your side kicking and screaming and you seem to have forgotten a very fundamental thing

I know this because I have been on YOUR side every single election cycle. I have been in the position of being the “winner” of the grand prize of needing to try to piece together the coalition and drag Sanders supporters along kicking and screaming, and yes, it sucks doesn’t it? I remember. This has been MY role for years and I’m simply now at the logical end point of what i said back in 2012 when I fought for the unity of the Obama coalition- I am NOT doing this shit.

You are using quite the bold paintbrush here right now calling some of us Bernie bros and Russian agents. You’re going to find out very soon just how long that’s going to continue to be tolerated. I’ll give you a hint- Not for one second longer. I mean for a second. I mean it when I say it, time is fucking up.

Just to drive this point and demonstrate how fast things are moving I’ll start with an excerpt from a post I was working on last week before the situation ended up with gasoline poured on top of the crowd to get them to evacuated inside the structure in this allegorical scenario. Because I think we need to take a moment to understand one very fundamental thing here just to make sure we are on the same page:

There is a strange, deafening silence around Tara Reade, the former senate aid who is accusing Joe Biden of rape 26 years ago. Or to make things even weirder in an already terminally weird period of history, there is silence in one ear, and a cacaphonia of rape apologia and sexist bullshit in the other, from people who really ought to know better. If the online left was represented by a cocktail party, I envision a ballroom where there is an invisible dividing line and two different parties going on under the same roof. On the one side the party is a racuos weinie roast with tech bros and broettes letting their hair down, exotic dancers of a questionable age, where everyone is one upping each other on who can make the more offensive rape joke. On the other side of the room is a more subdued crowd staring into their glasses uncomfortably and murmuring about how terrible those turds at the other cocktail party were, reminiscing about that time they marched on the capital wearing pink hats and pondering what could have happened to that beautiful female solidarity. Some of this crowd is eying the other side of the ballroom or muttering about this terrible behavior, but they don’t want to interrupt the festivities or make a scene by calling it out. On the outside of the ballroom is a gathering crowd of people who have either been kicked out of the party who were never invited in the first place correctly identifying that this is a fucked up scene, and this whole thing feels weird and manufactured in some difficult to articulate way that requires our immediate attention.

Do you get it now? I don’t want inside your party! I WAS in there, just got out of that joint, and now I’m out indefinately because I think it’s lame and I think it’s creepy and I damn sure feels like a fire hazard. In fact actually to be very specific here, it’s reminding me of Penn State riot, and you know the one thing after the coronation of Joe Paterno was threatened. And I am very very good on that one, my dears, I am firmly on the side of the vigil holders not the kids sitting cars on fire over Paterno. So I’m gonna invoke the spirit of my ancestor uncle Sam and go run into the woods, and it’s now up to you to find me

And that’s why I want to start this off by assuring you that I am not in any way sad or bitter or resentful today, I am in fact delighted. I would like to start this off by saying thank you to Bernie Sanders who has given me the best Passover gift ever and I am so incredibly grateful for this moment, because the unthinkable has now happened!

Do you know what this means?!

For my entire adult life I have crawled through glass for the Democratic Party and have not one thing to show for it other than the constant reminder that I am NOBODY to them. I am NOTHING to them

Oh, I mean unless it’s time for a donation drive and then I’m good enough to get my name spelled wrong on a pandering form email trying to manipulate me into donating whatever pennies I have left from my drained savings account, going into their coffers. Or when they need to use my work as propaganda. But other than that I am nobody! I am told this time and time again by you people.

But today a miracle happened. I just became a somebody! I’m a fucking American undecided voter today! And that means…. people are gonna now have to start to pay attention to me and cater to my demands! What?!? That’s incredible. Shit I might get cocky and ask for something crazy like free childcare and welfare indefinitely during COVID for parents of school age children and funding DCFS so we can stop seeing cases like Gabe Hernandez, I mean big child welfare could get GREEDY right now or something in these conditions!

So here’s here’s where I think that will begin. I’ll start negotiations with a party who has the absolute best shot of bringing me over to the other side, the Democratic Party. Here’s where I stand at this current moment, Democrats.

Right now, I am not voting for Joe Biden because of the following:

I believe he raped Tara Reade in his senate office in 1993, and

There is some kind of organized cover up

It’s really just that simple. I think we potentially have a John Edwards situation at hand here and are about to destroy any chances we have of winning in November and I want to find out if that’s the case before we have a convention, let alone a coronation!

And more importantly,

I am not voting for Joe Biden, because I believe that the cultural silencing around this issue is going to have a devastating impact on the #MeToo movement, which I fear it will never recover from.

That’s my starting point. That’s where YOU need to meet ME if you want any chance to change my mind. And I’m not gonna lie, you do have a very tough road to hoe ahead of you and I wish you the best of luck, sincerely. Solidarity forever.

Now I’m going to be fairly militant here in my stance that part of the compromise electoralism represents means that I don’t have to convince you of jack fucking shit, and you are indeed at the “and find out” part of the bet you made when you decided to fuck around. But I’m a unity kind of person who wants to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. So I’m going to entertain you for a moment

I realized that for a lot of you the case has not been proven to your satisfaction. You’re suspicious. You think Tara Reade might be a Russian agent or some kind or working for Bernie Sanders or just a liar. In any case, do you think that there’s just really no way to prove this one way or another, and we should just focus on Trump right now.

I understand completely where you are coming from

I respectfully disagree.

I believe there is a very strong almost unimpeachable case that Tara Reid is being truthful, that her motives are pure, and that she’s not working for anybody. And that case gets stronger the more I look into it. I’ve been scrambling quite frankly to pull this case together myself before Biden really did become inevitable. I actually began before I heard the Tara Reade allegations in the first place. I started ringing the alarm about this back in February, when I was still an Elizabeth Warren supporter, in a way I’ll put together over the next few months because it will require a lot of background and context.

But I’m not going to sugarcoat quote this.

It’s bad folks.

It’s probably worse than you think.

It involves more people than you realize and there appears to be a cover up involving party leadership, and there’s probably no way to reveal the truth without slaughtering a few sacred cows

I take no pleasure in saying that. I take no pleasure in being the one to do it, especially when one of those likely sacred cows has now been transformed into a near deity by making him the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Because you see, this is what a Biden nomination now means for someone like me, a person dedicated to covering the case of Jeff Epstein and Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein and how they all intersect into a global network of sex trafficking among the power elite, while also serving the rights and interests of victims of sexual abuse and rape and domestic violence, is I am now left with these kinds of choices:

Lest we forget

Do I continue writing this story the way I began in 2016, by following a single line of inquiry that leads directly to Trump while ignoring the overlaps that begin with Bill Clinton and Bill Richardson, and where those roads may lead out of concern to Democratic Party legacy? Something I don’t seem to recall ever making a loyalty pledge to in the first place? And do I also have to avoid discussing how horrifically my near lethal domestic violence was handled, and what system reforms are needed to prevent this from happening in the future? Because that would show just how badly VAWA is failing victims and I would then just have to hope that Biden runs on a platform of reform, even though that will inevitably lead back to his own hypocrisy so he probably never will? Do I wait until after the election to work on this or produce any content whatsoever? Do I just sit in the corner and shut up until November, I guess, then hold my nose and vote for Biden? Or do I still have to crawl through glass to vote for Biden? Am I still expected to go out and help get out the vote in November or I’m bad Democrat? Like, what exactly do you expect out of me at this point? Because let me tell you, I’m tired!

Here’s the bottom line, I am now your undecided voter because these options are all sounding unthinkable, if not laughable. And I’m just too exhausted to even entertain them at this point. Frankly, I’m insulted by them. I’m angry that you would even think this is something I would be okay with, and I’m most certainly no longer willing to be part of any coalition or movement that forces me into positions of moral compromise like this again and again. Especially one that seems to keep expecting so goddamn much from me and yet gives me so little to show for my efforts. So I’m going on strike. And as I’ll demonstrate I’m really a canary in the coal mine for you because I’m a very dedicated democratic foot soldier and pragmatic progressive coalition builder with a lifetime of service to the party. So if you are losing me, in the middle of a pandemic no less and may I remind you I’m a nurse, you really need to stop and pay attention here. Voters like me represent the biggest challenge ahead of you in the months ahead, and much more than this.

I am here to sound the alarm on something I am observing and find very concerning that I consider a situation of national urgency. The women’s movement appears to have been badly undermined, if now destroyed from within, in ways that lead many of us to wonder if it’s all by design. A candidate who has what to many of us sound like at least one credible rape allegation and 8 sexual misconduct allegations, and an entire reel of footage of him behaving inappropriately with CHILDREN, has a campaign that is being spearheaded by a woman who not only worked for Harvey Weinstein but worked for him PRO BONO and employed some of the most vicious silencing tactics imaginable. We have a right to be highly skeptical about what is going on here. We seem to have a party with a bit of rape problem.

Now, the Republicans also have their fair share of rapists. In fact one of the biggest and most dangerous rapists of all, a full blown child sex trafficker at that-is their standard bearer Donald Trump. This is not news to any of us, and certainly not news to me- far from it. I think I speak for many women undecided because Tara’s allegations when I say Donald Trump is what radicalized me on this issue in the first place. His history of misconduct was so astonishingly flagrant so widely known and so obvious-The man was caught on hot mic saying he grabbed women by the pussy for fuck sake! That we all came together and marched in the streets over it!

I REMEMBER!

I remember when #MeToo was a movement that meant something. Those of us passionate about social justice for women and by extension children came to this issue very organically and need no convincing about how horrible and dangerous Donald Trump is Thank you very much. I WROTE WE ALL KNEW ABOUT THE TRAFFICKING AND THE TRAFFICKING IS WORSE THAN YOU REALIZE

But with that being said, there’s going to be some who may flirt with the idea of joining the MAGA coalition, and a few who may go over to that side because of this. I myself briefly toyed with the idea after the 2016 debacle. I was niavely asssuming that they genuinely cared about the issue of child sex trafficking with pizza gate and QANON on and I just assumed incorrectly that they were led astray by disinformation campaign, and that I could get them to see the light on their own hero eventually. As I quickly discovered, this was a pointless exercise. Trump’s QANON crowd for the most part were only concerned about the issue so long as it was an Alex Jones style conspiracy that confirmed their worldview and made them feel like they were doing something important. The image of that loser LARPing with his shield at some protest- and sorry but I literally can’t even be even be bothered to look his name up at this point but he was on the banner page of The Donald on Reddit before they scampered off-represents the shallowness of their community commitment to being true white knights for children, and the few who were open to the idea that they were being misled weren’t worth the toxic cesspool of appalling and open racism I had to wade through in order to find them. While I’m resigned to the fact that my brief foray into the MAGA crowd and red pill feminism will be trotted out to discredit me despite years of being a movement builder- although I must tell you I’m increasingly having to search through the couch cushions to find a fuck to give about my “credibility” these days- I do hope it serves as a cautionary tale about how poor a strategy and recipe for disappointment it is to join any movement led by an unapologetic rapist. One who uses the very same victim blaming techniques that are inherent to rape culture is a non starter, it will never work, because the only way to truly transform the lives of women and children and to liberate them from patriarchy is to push for the kind of dialogue around rape culture that will inevitably lead to their own hero’s downfall.

This is a true risk of a Biden candidacy for me and why this was an outcome I so desperately wanted to avoid. You have now forced me into a coalition led by someone who essentially represents the same challenge that Trump does. The response to the Tara Reade allegations has been chilling and it feels very palpable. The response is to completely ignore her. This is called shunning and it’s a form of cultural silencing.

The dialogue around #metoo was the movement and the entire point -a frank and open dialogue around this toxic culture of sexual harassment and how silencing women’s voices was leading to inconscionable amounts of hidden suffering

We are now in conditions of forced isolation where we are haunted by the silence we feel all around us. We are haunted by what we know is going inside so many of these houses now that they have been transformed into literal prisons for women who used the workforce as their way to escape domestic violence. We are haunted by how that will clash with the shutdown of abortion clinics. We are tired of feeling all alone in the world right now as if we are slowly beginning to disappear and no one’s doing anything about it. People are going to end up defecting to the MAGA side for no other reason and they feel like they have nowhere else to go.

And I refuse to accept that.

That is why I’m saying times up.

It’s really very simple.

You will not win us over by silencing anymore. You will not Gaslight us into gaslighting other survivors.

Â It will not happen the way that you seem to think it well. Again:

The onus is now on the Biden camp to convince us that he will be a champion for women and allow our voices to be heard. The first step in that is allowing a dialogue around the Tara Reade allegations that does not involve attacking rape survivors like me for speaking out on her behalf. Whether or not these allegations are true, many of us believe her. If it turns out we are wrong so be it. But so far, your evidence has not been convincing. And the collective chill we feel in seeing the same silencing tactics we rose up against when they were used in the Kavanaugh hearings- and ushered in a blue wave for the Democratic Party in the process, if I might remind you-now being weaponized against us. And it is far too high a cost to pay. It is abusive conduct, it has correctly been identified as such, and as a victim advocate is my job to put my foot down and say, time’s up when it comes to abusive conduct period.

I will not be moved.

I will not be silenced.

I will not be Gaslit and I will for damn sure not be bullied out of trusting my own intuition, believing my own research and what my own eyes and ears are seeing and hearing.

It is your job Democratic Party to now make your case for Biden, I am no longer your loyal foot soldier. I am on the side of #MeToo and pro victims rights Forever and always. I am also VERY much against movement interference and astroturfing and I call it like I see it. I am your new undecided voter. Convince me.

The Democratic Party is funded by powerful interest groups filled with powerful men who have a very strong investment in damage control operations because of their long and astonishing careers records of sexual misconduct. Me too represented the beginning of that cascade of dominoes crashing down but something happened now didn’t it?

Where did it go?

The leader of an international child sex trafficking ring that seemed poised to topple the power elite last summer committed suicide, or so we’ll are told, under circumstances that can only be described as highly suspicious. And the whole thing just went out with a whimper and no one even seems to be talking about it anymore except for QANON and TRUEANON. Now his accomplice who is a tragic faildaughter offshoot of the monarchy and a product of generational incest named Ghislaine Maxwell is hiding out in Israel. Meanwhile Megan Markel and Prince Harry are trying to defect to the United States and Trump- who seems very pro monarchy for a country formed in opposition of one when you think about it- is taunting them instead of giving them asylum and maybe seeing what the fuck is going on?

Especially now that it is almost indisputable that the entire matter was some kind of CIA funded blackmail operation? And it involves raping children in at least one royal, and they just had a baby and the monarchy has a tradition of incest as much as it does racism and that’s why there are so many unrepentant eugenicists like say one Jeffrey Epstein and one Donald Trump? And G-d knows what’s happening now with the Prince Andrew lawsuit since all of the Epstein victims are apparently being represented by Lisa Bloom, yes the same woman who I believe was involved in a catch and kill of the story I wrote about Trump models and child sex trafficking in 2016, who we now know was working undercover all along for Harvey Weinstein? You know, Harvey Weinstein, who was also given pro bono representation by Anita Dunn of Times Up? The woman who employed such vicious tactics against Rose McGowan and Ronan Farrow for trying to sound the alarm about who we all know now was not only a serial rapist but an unrepentant rapist and it was just an open secret in Hollywood for years, that they were both almost destroyed in the process. This is just a fraction of the kind of shit that’s starting to come out of the woodwork at the exact same time we have a movement that is starting to turn on itself.

And now all just in time for the #MeToo backlash, with carefully placed stories and astroturfing campaigns designed to manufacture consent and cover up the truth. This is a known and studied phenomenon with a long history. It can be traced, it can be studied and understood and it is something many of us see happening right now in front of us.

Look, bottom line here is all we are asking for really is a TIME OUT. But if this campaign of authoritarian silencing continues, it will be time’s up and it will be the absolute end of the Democratic Party, and any chances we have of beating Trump in November, and I will break my stance about not shaming and say, shame on all of you if you allow that to happen because you can’t bear to look in the fucking mirror. Reality is fucking reality. We want to know the truth because the truth matters even when it’s inconvenient. It’s not changing no matter how many times you hit us over the head with #bluenomatterwhorapedyou and at a certain point, we need to find shelter from that type of abusive conduct so don’t blame us when you need to ask for OUR permission to be let inside OUR movement instead of vice versa.

Roman Polanski just got a STANDING OVATION at a French film Film Festival. For a movie about false accusations. Only a couple of French actresses walked out in protest. Whoopie Goldberg, who supports Roman Polanski, defends Joe Biden by trashing Tara Reade.

Alyssa Milano has somehow become a high profile Democratic Party surrogate after planting herself in the audience for the Kavanaugh hearings and basically appointing herself the movement leader after that blatant publicity stunt, and dressing up in outfits and has #MeToo branding all over her Twitter profile. And she is amplifying herself as some kind of moral vanguard, allowing attacks on Tara Reade and basically making us a laughingstock in the process. Make no mistake, this is all being screenshotted and stored away to be weaponized against us as we speak ladies, and we damn sure deserve it. We look like a bunch of hypocritical morons, so thanks Alyssa. But I sure don’t remember appointing Alyssa fuckin Milano the standard bearer of anything. Far from it. We know Alyssa is married to someone high up and CAA, which is basically acted as an escort ring for Harvey Weinstein. No, let’s be explicit here, CAA is a bunch of pimps, Rose McGowan fucking called it just like she did with Alyssa Milano-she’s fake, we don’t like her, she doesn’t go here. Just like she spoke out about Harvey Weinstein back when no one else listened and no one was and in fact there’s a word for what they did when she kept sounding the alarm anyways, they SHUNNED her. Rose McGowan is starting to sound like our new Nostra fuckin damus over here. And if you think about it, a cult survivor may have a thing or two to tell you about what is really going on, and how you can be deprogrammed.

I mean I’m just saying is it possible our party made an unholy alliance when it allowed Hollywood to play such an outsized role and its continued existence? Maybe one that started as an outgrowth of what was at first, a very important alliance in response to the McCarthy hearings that lost its way at some point down the line? Maybe in some horrific ways that we are only beginning to unpack? Because I gotta tell you folks, with the Weinstein scandal and Epstien and Trump and the attempted resurrection of legacies like Joe Paterno and Roman Polanski, along with the increasingly misogynistic direction I’ve seen pop culture go in after a brief, brief glitch with the #MeToo movement, which now seems safely absorbed into corporate feminism.

Call me a purist, but I agree

This is something feminists have been ringing the alarm about for a very long time. Andrea Dworkin, another seeming Nostradamus of our era, was shunned for calling it back in the 1970s when the women’s movement which had begun as a seemingly unstoppable force for good began to fracture. And at the core of the divide was the fact that one side was putting themselves into an unholy alliance with the interest group that was at its core foundation, a group of child pornographers.

Yeah. It gets ugly.

Face it folks, we have a nasty system that grooms for this.

And silence will not keep us safe.

“Stop Writing Dirty Stories” Cultural Silencing in Action

None of these questions were on my mind in August 2019 when I was staying in a battered womens shelter in Springfield IL named after Sojourner Truth- Sojourn Center- I was simply trying to find the language to explain what was going on with me, and why everyone hated me. And then I started to notice something.

Everyone hated them too. We were the leper colony of Springfield. The cops hated us. Our families hated us. Half of the time our kids seemed to hate us and most of our significant others sure as fuck seemed to hate us- some of them were actively trying to kill us! But we were actually some of the most loveable people in the world, and we loved each other. And we loved on our babies and they in turn became bundles of love and light. And our love started to seem big enough to take over the world, or at the very least shelter the shelter itself from evil. All because we began to do something brilliant. We began to organize.

It happened very naturally. It began with the removal of the culture of silence. It was a phenomenon that happened organically. For me it started when I met one of my roommates. I had several so this is in no way identifying and although she gave me the go ahead to write about her, as did all the ladies I composite, but for the time being I’m changing her name and significant details to preserve her privacy- but I will link this post to the letter I wrote to dollar general corporate when they racially profiled her and her cousin so you can get a better idea of the kind of woman she was and is. Dollar General Corporate did not listen to my plea on behalf of this young woman or her cousin, so I hope the response from the public will be different. Let me introduce you to a composite character that represents a very real young woman I will call Aaliyah

She was a poised and stunningly beautiful young black woman. She had a cute style that made salvation army look like Prada and dripped elegance and grace. She exuded sweetness, and she seemed utterly exhausted. She also had a kind of blooming inner militancy- the birth of a tiny movement leader that could bloom under the right circumstances. She was brilliant. She spoke in poetry. I knew she was a writer before she even told me- but here is what I want you to know.

She was a writer who had stopped writing. She stopped writing when she was in grade school. She had started writing on her own from the time she was a shy tiny little girl, crafting together books out of notebooks, putting together plays with her siblings, rewriting fairy tales with black princesses and creating imaginary worlds where she felt protected or even important. Her teacher noticed a budding talent and urged her with the kind of praise that feels like water in the desert for a child who otherwise feels so invisible. For a child like Aaliyah who was being molested by a family member, a crime that was being allowed to continue by her own mother, who was in fact punishing her for even hinting at. He was beginning to groom her baby sister. She felt a sense of urgency- she needed to do something. And so she did something very brave- she had an assignment to write some kind of creative essay. She used it to instead write her testimony- to let her teacher know what was happening to her and her baby sister. She took her time and made sure she did as good a job as she could in explaining to her teacher what was happening, and that her mother was not safe and would beat her if she knew Aaliyah told.

And this teacher responded by calling Aaliyah to the front of the class and forcing her to read her testimony out loud to her gasping classmates, forcing her to choke back tears as her peers broke out into spontaneous bursts of nervous laughter. And then her teacher scolded her about writing dirty stories and making up false accusations, and she never was praised for her writing again.

And so she stopped writing altogether.

And eventually, she stopped talking.

And for years she was so culturally silenced, she literally went mute.

And just as she predicted her stepfather ended up raping her sister 2 and destroyed TWO childhoods in the process, and this man still walks free to this day.

It’s imposssible to not see the parallels to Anita Hill when I think about Aaliyah. Trusting a figure of authority only to end up with a ritual of public humiliation. Erotomania. Insinuations of attention seeking. Destroying dreams and taking away chances of your voice ever being heard again.

Silencing.



The silence is deafening.

The silence was broken when we talked to each other at Sojourn center. We were black, white, cis, trans, all different ages, some of us mothers, others had kids in the system, my best friend was taking care of my daughter because her first time at Sojourn had been such a bad experience so I relished the chance to “adopt” other babies and take them into my aching arms.These children broke my heart but gave me hope at the same time. They exuded sweetness. They represented so much promise. And they were being so utterly failed by the system and everyone seeemed to hate us for it, but we began to work together to build ourselves up and keep each other accountable- we had a sisterhood. We only had each other. We were allowed to hate men if we needed to. Deep down we knew also loved the fools too and just worried so much for our sons and felt so failed by our fathers and partners. We were allowed to demand our rights and have the police keep their distance. We were allowed to put a stop to hate crimes being plotted and women being targeted by pimps because of wasteful budgets and harmful policies.

The ones who silenced us repeatedly were the ones in charge. We kept our distance from them and came together. Conversation flows when sheltered from authoritiarianism. Communities flourish. Injustices are undone. We take care of each other. We take care of our babies. You know what else we do? We solve motherfucking crimes baby! That’s why they break us up! That’s why they were determined to break us up at Sojourn Center. We were piecing together a sex trafficking ring. It involved cops. It seemed to involve politicians. I began writing about it, and agitating about it because it was swallowing up girls like Aaliyah whole right in front of me. It was silencing a beautiful voice once again, robbing her of her potential.

And I wanted to hear her poetry. I wanted her to teach her baby boy how to write and help foster in him the courage to speak again. He was already completely mute from trauma and I was so tired of being haunted by his silence. I was already mourning for the parts of his childhood he had lost, which I saw in his haunting eyes every time they bore into me. I was already mourning for the books Aaliyah would never have a chance to write. I felt like we were all inside an hour glass being sucked in, like I was navigating quicksand. I was surrounded by reminder after reminder of somehow running out of time.

“Stop Acting Like This Is Sophie’s Choice”

I will avoid publicly shaming anyone who has behaved in such a deplorable manner, but I will paraphrase the one statement I found especially galling. On Twitter yesterday , in opposition for me daring to so much as suggest I needed to be convinced by a thorough vetting that Joe Biden did not rape Tara Reade, someone mocked me for acting like this was “Sophie’s Choice”

My grandfather was a survivor of the Shoa. He was one of the miniscule percentage of the Lithuanian Jewish population to survive and the near COMPLETE cultural genocide of the Lithuanian Jewish people. Today is a high holiday. The man who was almost the first Jewish major party nominee suspended his campaign, and there has been blatant anti-semitism employed against him in this campaign and it continues. His Jewishness has been erased. McCarthyism is being employed. That has a long and chilling history of being used against the Jewish community.

The lack of respect and dignity shown to this man and his supporters today is appalling. To have it employed against me, a descendent of the shoa who is currently separated from her child by conditions of poverty thanks to the failures of YOUR government policy, invoking SOPHIE’S CHOICE of all tropes, is a bridge too far for me. This IS a Sophie’s choice for me. I AM literally being asked to sacrifice my daughter! Sacrifice her to capitalism, and sacrifice her emotional well being by engaging in cultural silencing.

The language of shoa is SILENCING. Do you need me to quote the poem again?

FIRST THEY COME FOR THE COMMUNISTS.

BUT I DID NOT SPEAK OUT BECAUSE I WAS NOT A COMMUNIST.

I have a very central organizing principal- do you allow women to speak? Are you willing to speak out on our behalf when we are silenced? Do you listen to children? Does the same apply to them as well?

Do you truly believe us?

If your answers to these questions is conditional and if you in any way allow cultural silencing, than YOU don’t belong. That’s my third rail, democrats. I don’t allow abusive conduct to enter my bubble. I don’t negotiate with hostage takers because I no longer allow myself to be made into a hostage in the first place.

You are welcome to join me once you are ready to make your case respectfully and I will promise in the meantime to keep an open mind. But seek the truth no matter how inconvenient, no matter where it leads me.

To employ a lighter metaphor than Sophie’s Choice in closing, I see that “Get in losers” meme used a lot today, but as a guardian of mean girls meme’s and part of the Mean Girls generation, I would like to point out that you are using it correctly, just not in the way you seem to think.

You are in fact the “Get in losers” crew, and I don’t recall coming away from Mean Girls thinking I wanted to party with the plastics. I’m a certified queer kid who got called dyke all my whole life and written about in slam books who has really morbid interests- what crowd exactly do you think I represent here, and did you not watch the actual movie?

I’m good out here in the crowd of outcasts. I like theladies who shave their heads and rip up pictures of the pope on national television. You can have your lame weany roast plastics, I’ll be here when you’re ready to stop acting like an army of Regina George’s. I am no longer an enlisted soldier so as of today I am no longer a democrat. I am also very much not a republican, thank you, just a good old fashioned American undecided voter, and that means for the first time in my adult life, I’m actually someone important.

I am #RoseArmy #DivSubRosa

I am #MeToo

I #BelieveWomen

I #TrustVictims

I #TrustKids and they don’t want the age of consent lowered, they want to take down pedophiles and solve conspiracies; I also represent the Micheal Jackson coaliton who want to know what the FUCK was up with that “Saving Neverland” documentary

And on that note I am #FreeBritney

I am #TrueAnon

I am #Antifascism

I am #BlackLivesMatter and want to know #WhereIsDevonteHart

I AM #TheResistence and we #Occupy

I am the granddaughter of the survivor of the Shoa and the great neice of a Jewish attache who literally was a World War II hero after escaping a concentration camp so I damn sure #PunchNazis, and I also carry concealed so don’t even try me.

AND

I believe Professor Anita Hill

I believe Tara Reade

I believe Katie Johnson

I believe Juanita Broadderick

I believe Professor Christine Blasey Ford

I always believed them because I believe women unless they give me reason not to. That’s the bottom line.

That’s my coalition, and we are now having a rave in the woods. We won’t be hiding, the woods are all around you. This is our country just as much as it is yours. Ages 13 and up, no unrepentant liars, no racists and no pedophiles. Those are the only rules and there will never be a fee to get in. You’re welcome to join us whenever you’re ready to help us turn the world upside down, rid it of abusers, and then turn it right side up again. You represent the men now. And like Ms. Sojourner Truth said, the men had better let us.

And with that, ladies and gentleman, you may now return to your cocktail party. It appears my time is finally up.