I had read a few negative reviews, no not of books, but of Goodreads and the ability to discern fake reviews, a problem on numerous sites that have ZERO filters or vetting to ensure that anyone posting anything is legit. It is why I quit reading them. The numerous issues regarding fake Amazon reviews, Facebook, Google and Yelp have been well documented and I will not go into that subject at this time, but I have yet to tackle Goodreads. Hmm interesting a site owned by Amazon.
I read this in the Guardian and will let you make your own conclusions regarding how valuable Goodreads is in reviewing books. It is in fact up there with Tik Tok but again we are at a place where little is done for Writers when it comes to promoting one’s work. It falls now to the Writer to generate publicity, provide the medium in which to promote and sell one’s work and have a ready audience with cash and interest in hand. And that falls to where? Social Media, the garbage pail in which to troll for something salvageable.
‘It’s totally unhinged’: is the book world turning against Goodreads?
The influential user review site has suffered a year of controversies, from cancelled book deals to review-bombing, and exposed a dark side to the industry
David Smith in Washington
The Guardian Mon 18 Dec 2023
For Bethany Baptiste, Molly X Chang, KM Enright, Thea Guanzon, Danielle L Jensen, Akure Phénix, RM Virtues and Frances White, it must have been brutal reading. All received scathing reviews on Goodreads, an online platform that reputedly has the power to make or break new authors.
But the verdicts were not delivered by an esteemed literary critic. They were the work of Cait Corrain, a debut author who used fake accounts to “review bomb” her perceived rivals. The literary scandal led to Corrain posting an apology, being dropped by her agent and having her book deal cancelled.
It also uncovered deeper questions about Goodreads, arguably the most popular site on which readers post book reviews, and its outsized impact on the publishing industry. Its members had produced 26m book reviews and 300m ratings over the past year, the site reported in October. But for some authors, it has become a toxic work environment that can sink a book before it is even published.
“It has a lot of influence because there are so many people now who are not in the New York ecosystem of publishing,” says Bethanne Patrick, a critic, author and podcaster. “Publishers and agents and authors and readers go to Goodreads to see what is everybody else looking at, what’s everyone else interested in? It has a tremendous amount of influence in the United States book world and reading world and probably more than some people wish it had.”
Goodreads allows users to review unpublished titles. Publishers frequently send advance copies to readers in exchange for online reviews that they hope will generate buzz. But in October, Goodreads acknowledged a need to protect the “authenticity” of ratings and reviews, encouraging users to report content or behaviour that breaches its guidelines.
Goodreads said: “Earlier this year, we launched the ability to temporarily limit submission of ratings and reviews on a book during times of unusual activity that violate our guidelines, including instances of ‘review bombing’. This kind of activity is not tolerated on Goodreads and it diminishes the community’s trust in people who participate.”
The platform has been involved in previous controversies over online comments. Last summer the author Elizabeth Gilbert postponed a historical novel set in Siberia after hundreds of users criticised the book, which had yet to be published, as insensitive amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The author Sarah Stusek appeared to take offence when a Goodreads user, Karleigh Kebartas, gave her debut novel Three Rivers four stars instead of five and commented that the “ending was kind of predictable, but other than that it was incredible”. Stusek berated Kebartas on TikTok, drawing widespread criticism and ultimately losing her publisher.
Corrain acknowledged using multiple pseudonyms to trash novels on Goodreads. She posted an apology on Instagram, attributing her actions in part to struggles with mental health and substance abuse.
Corrain’s own novel Crown of Starlight had been scheduled to come out next year through Del Rey, a science fiction and fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. Both Del Rey and Corrain’s agent, Becca Podos, announced last week that they would no longer work with Corrain, who had a two-book deal.
Speaking from McLean, Virginia, Patrick comments: “She was lying, she was being deliberately cruel. This is not just crossing ethical boundaries. This is crossing the boundaries of healthy behaviour.”
Publications such as the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post hold journalists and reviewers to professional standards, Patrick argues, whereas Goodreads lacks such oversight. “The interesting thing about this current problem – tied in to some of the ongoing long-running problems – is that it shows why Goodreads has a terrible reputation with critics and why people like me shy away from it.
“I don’t know anyone who spends a lot of time on Goodreads and I know that my other writer friends all actively try to stay away because no one wants to see some of the ugly stuff that people are putting up there. It seems very careless and mean spirited.There are also mean things on Amazon but there’s something about Goodreads over the past five to seven years that has burst out of its cage.”
When Patrick published a memoir, Life B: Overcoming Double Depression, earlier this year, she gave Goodreads a wide berth. She recalls:“My memoir is about mental illness and mental health and so I have done a lot of work and did a great job of keeping myself stable and healthy through my book launch. And part of keeping myself stable and healthy was staying away from Goodreads.
“But I know many people who do have six months of horrible anxiety or depression or spinning out of control, just trying to be frantic getting every single thing right. Everything’s a tool and Goodreads, the way it is built and used now, can allow someone to use it in a very unhealthy way. That’s why I think it would be a great idea for there to be more oversight of the platform.”
The founders of Goodreads did not come from a background of literary criticism. The site was launched in 2007 by Otis Chandler, a computer programmer, and Elizabeth Khuri, assistant style editor for the Los Angeles Times’s Sunday magazine (the couple married in 2008). Goodreads was bought by Amazon in 2013 and now claims to be the world’s biggest site for readers and book recommendations.
But as in many other corners of the web, the removal of gatekeepers is both liberating and frightening, promising the wisdom of crowds but delivering the wild west. Concerns about the manipulation of Goodreads, and its ability to end careers before they begin, have been growing.
Shelly Romero, a freelance editor and writer based in New York, points out that most of the debut authors whose books that Corrain disparaged on Goodreads were people of colour, who already have an uphill struggle to get their work published.
Romero, 29, says: “The lack of moderation opens up a door to the review bombing. Any review can go up, which in the grand scheme of things is great because you have all sorts of opinions, you see all these different viewpoints. But like with everything, the lack of this moderation allows it to be abused in a way that impacts Bipoc authors especially and also queer authors.”
She continues: “If it’s a queer author, they say this book is inappropriate because it talks about homosexuality and sex and it’s a middle grade book and so it’s not appropriate for a 12-year-old. Books by Black authors in particular seem to get targeted just for the sole fact that their authors are Black and their main characters are Black. They’re called political or woke or that they’re too grown up and it could very well just be like a normal fantasy story.
“These types of targeted campaigns on Goodreads do not give a majority of people within the industry a lot of causation to trust Goodreads or to even give a lot of weight to it. I’ve seen it called the necessary evil and I kind of agree, though we could probably steer away from it more.”
Goodreads denies that it is turning a blind eye to the challenges. It says in a statement: “Goodreads takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously. We have clear reviews and community guidelines, and we remove reviews and/or accounts that violate these guidelines.”
But the drumbeat of controversies and scandals could be taking a toll. Some in the publishing world detect that Goodreads’ influence is on the wane.
Courtney Maum, author of Before and After the Book Deal, says: “I’ve published five books traditionally and when I started there was, if not pressure, definitely a lot of energy from my publisher around getting solid reviews on Goodreads and making sure people were interacting on Goodreads giving away tons and tons of ARCs [advance review copies] and galleys on Goodreads.
“I thought, oh well, this is another sector of the publishing industry that I don’t understand. I joined it when my first book came out in 2013-14 and frankly didn’t find it a pleasant place to dwell. I also think aesthetically the platform is very unattractive and has kind of a Dell computer vibe when we’re living in an Apple universe.”
Speaking from Litchfield, Connecticut, Maum, 45, adds that she never read Goodreads reviews of her books. “It’s like an Armageddon energy there that is destructive and devoid of value. I can’t imagine that publishers going forward in 2024 are going to keep putting tons of stock into Goodreads because it’s got a lot of garbage in the room.
“In the last couple of years, because there’s been so many dumpster fires on Goodreads, it’s pretty evident now to publishers that this isn’t a platform that they can trust 100%. A lot of people that I know were suffering some serious abuse through Goodreads. Whether it was stalkers hellbent on ‘review bombing’ them at every turn or their nemeses – jilted ex-lovers, whatever – it was very easy for trolls to pan people on Goodreads.
“The agents and publishers up until maybe this year have put tremendous stock in it but authors for a very long time have been trying to get the word out that hey, this is not a safe place for us. We have no protection. It’s totally unhinged.”
The summer is a notorious time for Book Sellers and Publishers as it is the season for Summer reads. Well that was back in the day, but the New York Times had a recent article in their Book Review section on the subject of Reading the current crisis of it. I found this quite telling as we are in the middle of a massive cancel culture that has attacked Authors, dead or alive, editing or revision of books that were once considered classics, Book banning, and in turn massive canceling of Books and/or Authors as their subject matter is not considered appropriate due to their own origin story or for those related to the wider audience. To say this is right out of a book would be redundant.
The article currently cites the current testing scores of children and in turn how they are lower than have been in years, leading children in Tennessee to be held back a year under a new Statute. Then there are the issues surrounding the teaching of reading and the science behind it being challenged and now again revised in which to get more kids to read at appropriate grade level. Well if you continue to ban books that may be a problem right there, as if there is nothing to read then how can you? There was a time in this world that neither Women nor those in Bondage were allowed to read and with that we believed we are becoming a greater nation for enabling education to be public and free. So much for that working out as the foundations of Democracy are now being put to a whole new test which many will fail.
Writing has always been a challenging occupation but there were always gigs that enabled one to write and find some consistent income. But that has dramatically changed over the years with the rise of the gig worker now is coupled with the use of Freelance writers as well as CHAT AI that enables companies ways to circumvent the hiring and paying fair wages for both Writers and Editors. If you have ever dealt with FIVERR or Upwork you will find out how bad it really is when it comes to finding work.
Add to the current crisis in reading are the closing and discontinuation of publications both those who are largely online publications as well as those in print; consolidation of publishing houses; The National Geographic, a historical and well read if not collected Journal, has now laid off its entire staff and will become a Journal with no assigned nor permanent staff in which to manage its production. And with that how many of the few that are left will follow?
What was once the fear of the Amazon and the idea that few bookstores would remain has been a circle or cycle that did find many businesses close but with that many local stores and Barnes and Nobles still remain, a little more challenged and some have found a niche market in which to thrive so many writers can still find an audience and a place in which to read and sell their wares. But with Self Publishing and the views by many in the industry that it is a lesser product many Writers still go unread. I am sorry folks but many of your self imprints lack the touch of a professional and it doesn’t make the work bad it just doesn’t make it good either. So where does a Writer go?
Well clearly not to Goodreads, irony another Amazon brand with no oversight. So when I read this it shows that risk is all the Author(s) all the time. And there is no logic when it comes to books, reading them, banning them or canceling the Writer. Times they are a crazy and it is why I abandoned all writing other than submissions to requests via their own site and blogging here. We are fucked without dinner it seems.
How Review-Bombing Can Tank a Book Before It’s Published
The website Goodreads has become an essential avenue for building readership, but the same features that help generate excitement can also backfire.
By Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris | The New York Times | June 26, 2023
Cecilia Rabess figured her debut novel, “Everything’s Fine,” would spark criticism: The story centers on a young Black woman working at Goldman Sachs who falls in love with a conservative white co-worker with bigoted views.
But she didn’t expect a backlash to strike six months before the book was published.
In January, after a Goodreads user who had received an advanced copy posted a plot summary that went viral on Twitter, the review site was flooded with negative comments and one-star reviews, with many calling the book anti-Black and racist. Some of the comments were left by users who said they had never read the book, but objected to its premise.
“It may look like a bunch of one-star reviews on Goodreads, but these are broader campaigns of harassment,” Rabess said. “People were very keen not just to attack the work, but to attack me as well.”
In an era when reaching readers online has become a near-existential problem for publishers, Goodreads has become an essential avenue for building an audience. As a cross between a social media platform and a review site like Yelp, the site has been a boon for publishers hoping to generate excitement for books.
But the same features that get users talking about books and authors can also backfire. Reviews can be weaponized, in some cases derailing a book’s publication long before its release.
“It can be incredibly hurtful, and it’s frustrating that people are allowed to review books this way if they haven’t read them,” said Roxane Gay, an author and editor who also posts reviews on Goodreads. “Worse, they’re allowed to review books that haven’t even been written. I have books on there being reviewed that I’m not finished with yet.”
Rabess, who quit her job as a data scientist at Google to focus on writing after selling her novel to Simon & Schuster, worried that the online ambush might turn people against her book.
“I was concerned about the risk of contagion and that readers and reviewers would dismiss the work without ever really engaging with it,’ she said. “I felt particularly vulnerable as a debut author, but also as a Black woman author.”
Despite some accolades — her novel landed on some “most anticipated” books of the summer lists and was a Good Morning America “buzz pick” — it had a sluggish start. After its June 6 release, the book sold 1,000 hardcover copies in its first 10 days, according to Circana BookScan.
Established authors have also been subjected to review bombing campaigns. Earlier this month, Elizabeth Gilbert, the best-selling writer of “Eat, Pray, Love,” received hundreds of negative ratings on Goodreads for her forthcoming novel, “The Snow Forest,” which is set in Siberia in the mid-20th century. In her case, reviewers weren’t attacking the book itself, or even the premise — a Russian family seeking refuge from Soviet oppression in the wilderness. Critics objected to the fact that Gilbert had set the book in Russia while Russia is waging war on Ukraine, and lambasted Gilbert as insensitive to the plight of Ukrainians.
Gilbert’s response stunned the literary world: She swiftly responded to critics and announced that she was postponing her book, which was slated for publication in February from Riverhead. Riverhead hadn’t even printed advance review copies yet.
Gilbert wasn’t the first author to delay her novel when faced with a tsunami of criticism. The young adult authors Keira Drake and Amélie Wen Zhao postponed publication of their novels after facing criticism on Twitter and Goodreads that their depictions of fantasy worlds were racially insensitive. In 2019, the young adult novelist Kosoko Jackson canceled his debut novel, a love story between two teen boys set in the late 1990s during the Kosovo War, after drawing withering critiques on Goodreads.
In a statement, Goodreads said it “takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously,” and that it has made it easier for users to flag suspicious reviews.
Goodreads also said it has taken steps to improve its ability to detect and remove content that violates the site’s community guidelines, which forbid reviews that attack authors personally, reviews that attack other reviewers and multiple reviews by a single user that abuse the rating system.
On Amazon, book reviews indicate whether or not someone has purchased a title, and Amazon typically does not allow reviews to be posted for books that haven’t come out yet, with some exceptions. Rotten Tomatoes, a movie review site, says that users leaving verified reviews must prove they purchased a ticket. But Goodreads, which was bought by Amazon in 2013, lets any registered user review or rate a book.
Even books that are still gestating can be reviewed. George R.R. Martin’s long awaited “The Winds of Winter,” the next installment in his “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, doesn’t even have an official release date, but it has amassed more than 10,800 ratings and some 500 reviews on Goodreads.
It’s unclear how Amazon uses the data generated on Goodreads, which offers insights into readers’ preferences and consumer behavior. The company said that Goodreads reviews and ratings do not influence its decisions around which books and how many copies it buys from publishers.
Given its influence, some authors have come to think of Goodreads as a necessary evil, and a minefield.
Lincoln Michel, the author of the sci-fi novel “The Body Scout,” said he fears his books might get review bombed if he tangles with people online.
“As any author who is moderately in the public eye, you do always worry that if you get into a fight with someone on Twitter about politics or sports or even a Marvel movie, some angry fans might go leave one-star reviews in retaliation,” he said.
The occasional critical pile-on might not be a bad thing for Goodreads itself. As a social platform, part of what Goodreads is offering is conversation and user engagement, and controversies and debate can drive more comments and time spent on the platform.
The vitriol can also fly in the opposite direction. Recently, the author Sarah Stusek posted a video on TikTok criticizing a Goodreads reviewer for leaving a four-star review of her forthcoming novel, “Three Rivers.” In the video, which was later removed because it violated the platform’s community standards, Stusek berated the reviewer for ruining her five star average. After the Goodreads user amended her review to note that the author was attacking her, fellow Goodreads members rose to her defense and flooded “Three Rivers” with around 600 one-star reviews.
Stusek’s publisher, Sparkpress, announced on Twitter that it was parting ways with the author, and the novel, which was going to be published in September, disappeared from the publisher’s website. Stusek said in an email that her video was intended to be a joke, and that she is planning to self-publish the novel this fall.
More often, though, a negative spiral is set off by readers.
When Gretchen Felker-Martin sold her debut novel, “Manhunt,” about trans women trying to survive in a world where a virus is spreading among people with higher levels of testosterone, she knew some would find the horror story distasteful. But she was blindsided by what felt like an organized campaign of review bombing on Goodreads, she said.
People who objected to the novel’s premise “went ballistic, and bombarded the thing with hundreds and hundreds of negative reviews before anyone had read it,” she said. Felker-Martin, who is transgender, said she had asked Goodreads to remove some of the more personal attacks, and asked friends to report hateful comments, but never got a response, although a couple of reviews were taken down.
“I don’t think Goodreads has an economic incentive to be any better,” she said. “It would be just a gargantuan job to significantly monitor the kinds of abuse that’s being heaped onto people every single day, but there’s certainly some middle ground between breaking your back trying to deal with all of it, and dealing with none of it.”
I just finished an article in the New Yorker about Salman Rushdie. He was attacked last year on stage by a self identified and self radicalized Muslim. This is similar to the young man who did the same in Maine over the pandemic and traveled to New York City when on New Years Eve attacked three Police Officers in some attempt to either create Jihad or actually get killed aka commit suicide. These lone wolf freaks are everywhere
This is from CNBC:
The man, who made pro-jihadist statements from his hospital bed overnight, is believed to have traveled from Wells to lower Manhattan on Thursday mainly via Amtrak, those sources said.
Investigators were probing whether he stayed at a homeless shelter downtown, the four officials said.
A diary found by investigators may have indicated the suspect believed he was on a suicide mission: He left notes about who would inherit belongings and where he wanted to be buried, the sources said.
The suspect said in the diary he regrets disappointing his mother; he also wrote that he wanted his brothers to join him in his fight for Islam, they said.
He had expressed some desire to travel to Afghanistan in the past, the officials said. Terrorist-related propaganda and personal writings were found in his backpack, they said.
FBI agents with court authorization searched the man’s home in Maine on Sunday, an agency spokesperson said.
Neighbors told NBC affiliate WCSH of Portland, Maine, that the suspect is the child of divorced parents and has two siblings. He recently worked at an area country club as a groundskeeper, they said.
Bickford was a 2022 graduate of Wells High School, where he wrestled and played football, according to the station.
Multiple law enforcement officials said they were looking into whether the attacker traveled to New York specifically to target police on New Year’s Eve.
The New York Police Department has seen other lone wolf terrorist-type attacks on officers. In Jamaica Queens in 2014, a radicalized man named Zale Thompson attacked three officers without warning with a hatchet, nearly killing one of the officers. In June 2020 in Brooklyn, Dzenan Camovic stabbed an officer in the neck, stole his gun and used it to fire at responding officers in another jihadist-inspired lone wolf attack.
……………………………………………….
The pandemic has enabled a large swath of the public to enrage and enforce many a fucked up notion. See the freak who attacked Paul Pelosi in his home with a hammer. And with that we every day are seeing similar versions play out in the streets towards innocent regular citizens going to the store, to school, to Church, to work, going home or just well being themselves. Mental health is in dire straits right now and we have nothing in our arsenal in which to combat it. So we just arm Police and hope for the best? The worst?
With regards to Rushdie, the Fatwa was or had been assigned as a running joke as he often was on Bill Maher and with that even Curb Your Enthusiasm, and he continued to write, speak and live life. Then came a pandemic. With that came his assault by another lone wolf. As the article states about his attacker:
In 2018, Matar went to Lebanon to visit his father. At least initially, the journey was not a success. “The first hour he gets there he called me, he wanted to come back,” Fardos told a reporter for the Daily Mail. “He stayed for approximately twenty-eight days, but the trip did not go well with his father, he felt very alone.”
When he returned to New Jersey, Matar became a more devout Muslim. He was also withdrawn and distant; he took to criticizing his mother for failing to provide a proper religious upbringing. “I was expecting him to come back motivated, to complete school, to get his degree and a job,” Fardos said. Instead, she said, Matar stashed himself away in the basement, where he stayed up all night, reading and playing video games, and slept during the day. He held a job at a nearby Marshall’s, the discount department store, but quit after a couple of months. Many weeks would go by without his saying a word to his mother or his sisters.
Matar did occasionally venture out of the house. He joined the State of Fitness Boxing Club, a gym in North Bergen, a couple of miles away, and took evening classes: jump rope, speed bag, heavy bag, sparring. He impressed no one with his skills. The owner, a firefighter named Desmond Boyle, takes pride in drawing out the people who come to his gym. He had no luck with Matar. “The only way to describe him was that every time you saw him it seemed like the worst day of his life,” Boyle told me. “There was always this look on him that his dog had just died, a look of sadness and dread every day. After he was here for a while, I tried to reach out to him, and he barely whispered back.” He kept his distance from everyone else in the class. As Boyle put it, Matar was “the definition of a lone wolf.”
I urge all to read the article as it lends a larger discussion about Rushdie and the controversy around his writings which are about the subjects of which he is most familiar and have the most resonance in the creation of his works. When we speak of a “Writers Voice” that means the authenticity they lend to the subject and with that it can be through personal association, knowledge or experience or through the skill of writing and the gift of language and creativity. You don’t have to be a Doctor to write about one but it helps to learn about the field and in turn lend realism to the story you are trying to imagine and in turn create. And I have discussed that idea in another post so with that you do as an Author choose to write about a subject that may well be controversial or possibly inflammatory to a reader but the idea of any book is to either inform, entertain and sometimes just sometimes shock and enrage you. And that is okay but what is not is going beyond that emotion and acting upon it. Don’t like a book stop reading it, toss it, write a negative review but to do harm, and that includes creating false flags and dogpiles on Social Media is going to far. You are doing harm.
And when other Writers, Authors and Critics in the community participate or in fact start this bullshit I often wonder if it is not professional jealousy, with a touch of an “ism” of some sort. To read the critics of Rushdie who victim shamed him (hmm where do we hear that normally?) I laughed as one was Roald Dahl. I do think there is some Karma there, no pun intended. As the article states: ………..
….and yet some regarded the fatwa as a problem Rushdie had brought on himself. Prince Charles made his antipathy clear at a dinner party that Amis attended: What should you expect if you insult people’s deepest convictions? John le Carré instructed Rushdie to withdraw his book “until a calmer time has come.” Roald Dahl branded him a “dangerous opportunist” who “knew exactly what he was doing and cannot plead otherwise.” The singer-songwriter Cat Stevens, who had a hit with “Peace Train” and converted to Islam, said, “The Quran makes it clear—if someone defames the Prophet, then he must die.” Germaine Greer, George Steiner, and Auberon Waugh all expressed their disapproval. So did Jimmy Carter, the British Foreign Secretary, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
I will say that if I was to be branded negatively, other than Jimmy Carter whom I have deep respect for, the rest of those assholes it would be an honor. Come on really?
And with that I move onto J.K. Rowling. To be perfectly clear I have never read nor watched any Harry Potter at all. Never went to the Play on Broadway but I am aware of the books and their importance in Children’s Literature. I have made myself well acquainted with the subject matter and the characters as one does teaching English. I feel the same about many book, the Vampire Diaries etc. I don’t have to read them to evaluate others writings on the subject, but it does help when reading a criticism or evaluation. I have been thankfully spared that in my Teaching as many reports on these books are simply to say the least “basic.” And I use the source as the push and the paper is evaluated on how well they expressed their views and of content within the context of what defines an acceptable paper. Trust me you read enough of them it is akin to reading the book. But I have no opinion on Rowling as a Writer but I am aware that again like many Writers she like Rushdie turned to a pseudonym to write as a way of extending their voice, to tell their story that is new and not like previous works. At times it suits to do so and over history we have seen that many a name associated with writing a new work can be a distraction. And it too does not take long anymore to figure it out and Rowling I believe has abandoned said efforts. I also want to remind anyone currently trying to get published that she was like many, rejected numerous times and her feedback often negative and with that she continued to write undaunted by the criticism. It seems to have served her well now as she has been most verbal about her issues regarding Trans-Women. Irony as Germaine Greer who condemned Rushdie has faced similar wrath about her own views on the subject. Oh how the worm turns.
And this week the New York Times placed an editorial by Pamela Paul in defense of Rowling and wow what a row that has started. Again, we are entitled if not allowed to speak our minds over our beliefs as long as they are not intended to bring harm. And this brings me back to the criticism over American Dirt. I again think it was professional jealousy, some poor handling by the Publisher and in turn the rise of the dogpile on Social Media that was badly handled. Rowling has been facing this criticism the last few years and unlike Greer who immediately rescinded her statements, apologized and moved away from it (but I assume behind closed doors has not changed her view one iota), Rowling simply will not. I respect and admire that as she is again entitled to it. It is not like Chappelle who has literally used Trans people as punching bags. He has become boring on the subject but the attack on him last year at the Comedy Festival was not related to that but the issue of free speech and the canceling of those whom you disagree continues and it arms him to go on, and on and on. I said he has used this now to fuel it and make it even more boring and utterly unfunny. My God I blame Ron DeSantis at this point as he is really putting this one into overdrive with his hate speech bullshit. Now that is what it is, it is political theater and done so at the cost of many individuals time, their money and their professional lives. When does it stop? Well never apparently.
And that is what this is, a circle jerk in every sense and application. Stop.Just.Stop. Talking about Rowling over and over does nothing to change her views nor change those who do love her books and want to read them. So let them without a stain. I love Picasso and that is a man with a lot of history. Should I never look at his art? The same goes with many others. The debate over Michael Jackson or Elvis or anyone. They are dead all of them and with that the music lives on. Listen or don’t but do not denigrate or demean those who do not follow your beliefs and choices. They are theirs, yours are yours. Wow if I want to see myself I look in the mirror. Remember you have to live your life and walk your path, you can do it with others or you can do it alone and neither are easy. But as Dionne sang, you can walk on by and keep walking if there is something blocking your path.
In Defense of J.K. Rowling
Feb. 16, 2023 | The New York Times | Opinion | Pamela Paul
“Trans people need and deserve protection.”
“I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others but are vulnerable.”
“I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them.”
“I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.”
These statements werewritten by J.K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” series, a human-rights activist and — according to a noisy fringe of the internet and a number of powerful transgender rights activists and L.G.B.T.Q. lobbying groups — a transphobe.
Even many of Rowling’s devoted fans have made this accusation. In 2020, The Leaky Cauldron, one of the biggest “Harry Potter” fan sites, claimed that Rowling had endorsed “harmful and disproven beliefs about what it means to be a transgender person,” letting members know it would avoid featuring quotes from and photos of the author.
Other critics have advocated that bookstores pull her books from the shelves, and some bookstores have done so. She has also been subjected to verbal abuse, doxxing and threats of sexual and other physical violence, including death threats.
Now, in rare and wide-ranging interviews for the podcast series “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling,” which begins next week, Rowling is sharing her experiences. “I have had direct threats of violence, and I have had people coming to my house where my kids live, and I’ve had my address posted online,” she says in one of the interviews. “I’ve had what the police, anyway, would regard as credible threats.”
This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.
So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia? Surely, Rowling must have played some part, you might think.
The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people.
You might disagree — perhaps strongly — with Rowling’s views and actions here. You may believe that the prevalence of violence against transgender people means that airing any views contrary to those of vocal trans activists will aggravate animus toward a vulnerable population.
But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic. She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing. There is no evidence that she is putting trans people “in danger,” as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist.
Take it from one of her former critics. E.J. Rosetta, a journalist who once denounced Rowling for her supposed transphobia, was commissioned last year to write an article called “20 Transphobic J.K. Rowling Quotes We’re Done With.” After 12 weeks of reporting and reading, Rosetta wrote, “I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message.” On Twitter she declared, “You’re burning the wrong witch.”
For the record, I, too, read all of Rowling’s books, including the crime novels written under the pen name Robert Galbraith, and came up empty-handed. Those who have parsed her work for transgressions have objected to the fact that in one of her Galbraith novels, she included a transgender character and that in another of these novels, a killer occasionally disguises himself by dressing as a woman. Needless to say, it takes a certain kind of person to see this as evidence of bigotry.
This isn’t the first time Rowling and her work have been condemned by ideologues. For years, books in the “Harry Potter” series were among the most banned in America. Many Christians denounced the books’ positive depiction of witchcraft and magic; some called Rowling a heretic. Megan Phelps-Roper, a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church and the author of “Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving Extremism,” says that she appreciated the novels as a child but, raised in a family notorious for its extremism and bigotry, she was taught to believe Rowling was going to hell over her support for gay rights.
Phelps-Roper has taken the time to rethink her biases. She is now the host of “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.” The podcast, based on nine hours of her interviews with Rowling — the first time Rowling has spoken at length about her advocacy — explores why Rowling has been subjected to such wide-ranging vitriol despite a body of work that embraces the virtues of being an outsider, the power of empathy toward one’s enemies and the primacy of loyalty toward one’s friends.
The podcast, which also includes interviews with critics of Rowling, delves into why Rowling has used her platform to challenge certain claims of so-called gender ideology — such as the idea that transgender women should be treated as indistinguishable from biological women in virtually every legal and social context. Why, both her fans and her fiercest critics have asked, would she bother to take such a stand, knowing that attacks would ensue?
“The pushback is often, ‘You are wealthy. You can afford security. You haven’t been silenced.’ All true. But I think that misses the point. The attempt to intimidate and silence me is meant to serve as a warning to other women” with similar views who may also wish to speak out, Rowling says in the podcast.
“And I say that because I have seen it used that way,” Rowling continues. She says other women have told her they’ve been warned: “Look at what happened to J.K. Rowling. Watch yourself.”
Recently, for example, Joanna Cherry, a Scottish National Party lawmaker who is a lesbian and a feminist, publicly questioned Scotland’s passage of a “self-ID” law that would allow people to legally establish by mere declaration that they are women after living for only three months as a transgender woman — and without any need for a gender dysphoria diagnosis. She reported that she faced workplace bullying and death threats; she was also removed from her frontbench position in Parliament as spokeswoman for justice and home affairs. “I think some people are scared to speak out in this debate because when you do speak out, you’re often wrongly branded as a transphobe or a bigot,” she said.
Phelps-Roper told me that Rowling’s outspokenness is precisely in the service of this kind of cause. “A lot of people think that Rowling is using her privilege to attack a vulnerable group,” she said. “But she sees herself as standing up for the rights of a vulnerable group.”
Rowling, Phelps-Roper added, views speaking out as a responsibility and an obligation: “She’s looking around and realizing that other people are self-censoring because they cannot afford to speak up. But she felt she had to be honest and stand up against a movement that she saw as using authoritarian tactics.”
As Rowling herself notes on the podcast, she’s written books where “from the very first page, bullying and authoritarian behavior is held to be one of the worst of human ills.” Those who accuse Rowling of punching down against her critics ignore the fact that she is sticking up for those who have silenced themselves to avoid the job loss, public vilification and threats to physical safety that other critics of recent gender orthodoxies have suffered.
Social media is then leveraged to amplify those attacks. It’s a strategy Phelps-Roper recognizes from her days at Westboro. “We leaned into whatever would get us the most attention, and that was often the most outrageous and aggressive versions of what we believed,” she recalled.
It may be a sign of the tide turning that along with Phelps-Roper, several like-minded creative people — though generally those with the protection of wealth or strong backing from their employers — are finally braving the heat. In recent months and after silence or worse from some of the young actors whose careers Rowling’s work helped advance, several actors from the “Harry Potter” films, such as Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes, have publicly defended the author.
In the words of Fiennes: “J.K. Rowling has written these great books about empowerment, about young children finding themselves as human beings. It’s about how you become a better, stronger, more morally centered human being,” he said. “The verbal abuse directed at her is disgusting. It’s appalling.”
Despite media coverage that can be embarrassinglycredulous when it comes to the charges against Rowling, a small number of influential journalists have also begun speaking out in her defense. Here in America, Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic tweeted last year, “Eventually, she will be proven right, and the high cost she’s paid for sticking to her beliefs will be seen as the choice of a principled person.”
In Britain the liberal columnist Hadley Freeman left The Guardian after, she said, the publication refused to allow her to interview Rowling. She has since joined The Sunday Times, where her first column commended Rowling for her feminist positions. Another liberal columnist for The Guardian left for similar reasons; after decamping to The Telegraph, she defended Rowling, despite earlier threats of rape against her and her children for her work.
Millions of Rowling’s readers no doubt remain unaware of her demonization. But that doesn’t mean that — as with other outlandish claims, whether it’s the Big Lie or QAnon — the accusations aren’t insidious and tenacious. The seed has been planted in the culture that young people should feel that there’s something wrong with liking Rowling’s books, that her books are “problematic” and that appreciating her work is “complicated.” In recent weeks, an uproar ensued over a new “Harry Potter” video game. That is a terrible shame. Children would do well to read “Harry Potter” unreservedly and absorb its lessons.
Because what Rowling actually says matters. In 2016, when accepting the PEN/Allen Foundation award for literary service, Rowling referred to her support for feminism — and for the rights of transgender people. As she put it, “My critics are at liberty to claim that I’m trying to convert children to satanism, and I’m free to explain that I’m exploring human nature and morality or to say, ‘You’re an idiot,’ depending on which side of the bed I got out of that day.”
Rowling could have just stayed in bed. She could have taken refuge in her wealth and fandom. In her “Harry Potter” universe, heroes are marked by courage and compassion. Her best characters learn to stand up to bullies and expose false accusations. And that even when it seems the world is set against you, you have to stand firm in your core beliefs in what’s right.
Defending those who have been scorned isn’t easy, especially for young people. It’s scary to stand up to bullies, as any “Harry Potter” reader knows. Let the grown-ups in the room lead the way. If more people stood up for J.K. Rowling, they would not only be doing right by her; they’d also be standing up for human rights, specifically women’s rights, gay rights and, yes, transgender rights. They’d also be standing up for the truth.
In an effort to cancel culture as in Literature, History, Art, Music and any expression of diverse thought or ideas comes the concept of AI and ChatGPT, where you can create a world of your own making or that of the Computer. Kevin Roose in the New York Times tried Microsoft’s Open AI and to say the exchange is creepy is insufficient. But for likely man men she is a dream come true. And the Washington Post also tried the service and they felt it was much like many of those who post on the comment page – angry. I can see this working out well.
The issues about where I see writing going with the advances of this ChatGPT concerns me. It is still highly structured and with that a quality Reader/Editor/Publisher can see the technical aspects of it easily but with that most people are not that skilled and it will become the new method in which to construct newsletters and faux blogs that will be perceived as legitimate in both fact and source. Again we have a massive problem distinguishing fact from opinion and with that I have complained that most of the Washington Post is now in fact much like Fox, Opinion based new disguised as fact. The argument over the concept of journalism as objective has been raised of late and the idea of it being actually debated as something worth relinquishing concerns me as more and more Billionaires like Bezos who owns the Post turning it into his personal form of propaganda. The LA Times has had a struggle to survive with their changes but I am reading it without a past history so I find the paper very readable. Does it cover local news as well as it once did? Likely no as the Post has cut much of that staff as well. Eliminating the weekly magazine that included local art reviews and other more social news. We have of course Tik Tok, hot mess. Facebook equally so and Twitter certainly will or has due to Musk.
This week as the Tech layoffs continue what has been largely the Fact Checking sides of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have been decimated and with a skeleton crew of one to two left, what was largely already a mess of confusion is now largely non-existent. As we move into election season, the war in the Ukraine and of course more disasters such as Turkey and Syria, Afghanistan and the rest of the world and political upheavals this will not be handled well at all by those who rely on these sites as sources of both communication and information. And it is expected to get worse.
But what about actual books, magazines, online journals and those that still remain in print? Will they soon fall the way of the dust bin? I have no clue as more close and or are consolidated there is another one coming round the pike. Gawker’s reinvention found it closing down again by choice as it simply failed to have the heat as it once did. We are seeing changes in Vice and others as they move forward into a new landscape that seems to rely less on actual boots on the ground. So writing as a profession is deeply in trouble. And on that note let’s talk about dead Authors. Already living ones are finding books being removed off of reading lists and out of Libraries. And there are those of the past being pushed aside for the language and tone of the books by those who feel that the use of language and issues of Race are no longer relevant. And here comes Roald Dahl facing a new editor, social mores.
I wrote about Dahl and his relationship with his wife with regards to a book that is coming out, so I was not surprised that someone decided to re-examine his work on the revelation about his own Misogyny, etc. He is not the first nor the last. The concept of books being used as a political football is not new and the McCarthy Hearings targeted much of the same, ask Dalton Trumbo about that.
I cannot wait to read ChatAI’s biography!
Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive
Augustus Gloop now ‘enormous’ instead of ‘fat’, Mrs Twit no longer ‘ugly’ and Oompa Loompas are gender neutral
Hayden Vernon Sat 18 Feb 2023 The Guardian
Roald Dahl’s children’s books are being rewritten to remove language deemed offensive by the publisher Puffin.
Puffin has hired sensitivity readers to rewrite chunks of the author’s text to make sure the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, resulting in extensive changes across Dahl’s work.
Edits have been made to descriptions of characters’ physical appearances. The word “fat” has been cut from every new edition of relevant books, while the word “ugly” has also been culled, the Daily Telegraph reported.
Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now described as “enormous”. In The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”.
Hundreds of changes were made to the original text – and some passages not written by Dahl have been added. But the Roald Dahl Story Company said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.
In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
In previous editions of James and the Giant Peach, the Centipede sings: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that,” and, “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.”
Both verses have been removed, and in their place are the rhymes: “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute / And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,” and, “Aunt Spiker was much of the same / And deserves half of the blame.”
References to “female” characters have disappeared. Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “most formidable female”, is now a “most formidable woman”.
Gender-neutral terms have been added in places – where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas were “small men”, they are now “small people”. The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People.
Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company made the changes in conjunction with Inclusive Minds, which its spokesperson describes as “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature”.
Alexandra Strick, a co-founder of Inclusive Minds, said they “aim to ensure authentic representation, by working closely with the book world and with those who have lived experience of any facet of diversity”.
A notice from the publisher sits at the bottom of the copyright page of the latest editions of Dahl’s books: “The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters. This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”
A spokesperson for the Roald Dahl Story Company said: “When publishing new print runs of books written years ago, it’s not unusual to review the language used alongside updating other details including a book’s cover and page layout. Our guiding principle throughout has been to maintain the storylines, characters, and the irreverence and sharp-edged spirit of the original text. Any changes made have been small and carefully considered.”
Yesterday I came from a meeting of my new Accountant whom I hired to do my taxes. For years I had the same CPA, he got sick and with that dropped the ball. I then realized I needed to find one who was a woman and with that through another long line of Financial Service Advisors I hired her friend from another firm in Seattle. They dumped me in a very sad email that was both rude and frankly impersonal, so it left me in the lurch to find someone. Numerous emails to varying individuals locally finally led me to a place in Manhattan. They were only one of the two that called back so beggars cannot be choosers and yesterday I went with the Taxes of the past, my current records and what I thought would be a brief but productive meeting. Brief yes, productive I have no clue as I walked out of there feeling like “dirt” and with that came home to run for an hour to calm down. Again, as I have been writing of late, I am very hyper aware of how people speak to me and the manner in which they do so. I want as few as encounters like the one yesterday and with that even fewer in the future. But with that I realized that it is one I have had numerous times with Accountants, largely over my true love, writing and why I don’t make any money from it. They constantly level the same threat that the IRS looks as smalls businesses that don’t generate income as hobbies and will of course audit me. I have been audited, nothing came of it. I made no money had no excessive losses kept well detailed records so let’s talk about Trump and his. Oh wait the IRS admits they don’t have enough experienced on staff to conduct complex audits and in turn Attorney’s and Accountants run rings around them. So I will wait to see if this audit happens. As my response was “okay” which told him nothing affirmative or negative as then he answered all the questions he asked me regardless of what he asked me. It was an exercise in tolerating my own distress. He had received the same taxes I dragged with me not looking through them to prep for the meeting, then pulled out my copy and went through it asking the same version of the same questions, finding the answer in the taxes and then in my current folder, which he went through pulling our random documents and then asking me about if I had the info, while HOLDING THEM IN HIS HAND. I could not tell if he was eccentric, neurotic or stupid. The biggest question and the catch was his comment about me paying him more than the quote and then asking for a deposit. It was $200 bucks. I paid my last Accountant $3,300.
As I wrote in the last blog post, I should have known this was about him and not him doing my taxes but him not getting involved with a client who might have complex taxes, have more forms to do and in turn he make more, but about him just not doing the extra work. In fact I had a call a week prior by an Associate to ensure I understood that they billed hourly and did I get that rate, $175/hr and was I fine with it. Yes, I was. The call was about money, in fact he did not know that I had an appointment in a week, but then again few do. They have in their office literally a garbage can in which a sign says, leave tax info here into which to dump it. I knew then this was a factory. From the plastic hanging everywhere, to slots to slip your card through to the receptionist, to the mask signs everywhere, I knew this was a firm of archetypes and stereotypes that a few years ago would have amused me, today no so much. I have always prided myself on having detailed records, a spread sheet, all the receipts/documents you need and then some. With that I brought two years of taxes that little have changed except losses and gains, my businesses expenses associated with my work as a writer and occasionally Teaching. But as he rifled through the according folders, he again berated me as I said REPEATEDLY that any info about my investments were to go to my Financial Team whose info I had printed out clearly marked and labeled. And as we parted after insulting me again , “Well you have to give them permission or they won’t disclose.” Again I pointed out, “You go all my Tax Info from the Accountant and this should not be different, and again you will get that and as they are on the West Coast it will be by the end of day here and before theirs you will know that I took care of it.” Then he laughed as he said to his Receptionist once again as he had already asked me at his desk about about the firm that had “fired” me, he said he wished they could fire some of theirs. Again I said, “I don’t know. I sent you their email about why they were letting my account go, it was not anything about me that I am aware of, my Accountant had a new baby and the pandemic with hiring issues may have been a factor or that I live in another State which may also be a factor, but feel free to contact them as again they have the release and you can find out more.” Again is this man just a raging asshole, a fucking moron or simply not funny.
I HATED THIS MAN. It was a realization that for years I actually believed I had to like a person I do business with, and with that this may be the beginning that it is better that I don’t as I can expect less. But do I believe he will do my taxes? Yes. And they will be fine and I will still hate him but I believe that the dog you know and frankly going through this again is not on my to do list. I may change my mind but for now it is fine.
But it was during the meeting about the same argument that I have about writing is one that I simply cannot fathom why this one is so hard. There is no money in it. I used to freelance and make pocket change and now with Upwork and the push to use AI I see very little opportunity in pursuing that field any further. I decided to write a book or two and even possibly taking up podcasting which sounds more my speed, but I expect no money in either. Once I began to understand the cost risk benefit to self publishing I decided not just one blog but two may be best and I will be careful on how I outlay expenses and costs in which to do so. To self publish you must spend serious cash, true costs depending on type and word length can cost upwards of 10K and that means publishing it yourself, marketing it yourself and doing it all on your own. If you hire someone the costs rise accordingly and in turn to sell a book that has to be at a price point that is usually not enough to generate profits. That comes from selling THOUSANDS of books and few do.
Below is the story of how the cancel culture worked in not only destroying a Writers worth but the commotion behind it may have led to readers not being able to read the book as they were told something that may be a matter of opinion. It also had an affect on other writers and their own fears about their writing and associations with this “canceled” Author.
For writers this is the truth about the industry. They have a type or genre that they push, they care little about the voice of the writer but the ability to sell books that enable them to maybe have a book that isn’t of type but enables a new voice to be heard. That happens even less so now. It is why I struggle with the idolizing of former dead writer as voices of their time. Well their time is over, Joan Didion, Phillip Roth and others who seem to be the only source of work that matters. Really? Why? I am all for reading works of long dead and gone but the idolizing, the endless romanticizing of them bores the shit out of me. But this woman is alive and well and she wrote a good book, she deserves to write more. Will she too have to self publish and go the route of many whom write endlessly on Facebook or Instagram of their frustrations and desires to be read? I know an accountant who can help her with the financials of it. He is a piece of dirt.
The Long Shadow of ‘American Dirt’
Jan. 26, 2023
Credit…Carolina Moscoso
By Pamela Paul
Opinion Columnist The New York Times
Three years ago this month, the novel “American Dirt” by Jeanine Cummins landed in bookstores on a tsunami of enthusiasm. “Extraordinary,” Stephen King wrote in a prepublication blurb. “Riveting, timely, a dazzling accomplishment,” raved Julia Alvarez. “This book is not simply the great American novel; it’s the great novel of las Americas,” Sandra Cisneros proclaimed. “This is the international story of our times. Masterful.”
The book’s momentum was nonstop. Riding on starred prepublication reviews from the trades, the book, a fast-paced road novel about a Mexican bookseller and her son trying to cross the border to escape a murderous drug cartel, was named an Indie Next List Pick by independent bookstores. Then came the rapturous reviews. “A thrilling adrenaline rush — and insights into the Latin American migrant experience,” raved The Washington Post. Cummins “proves that fiction can be a vehicle for expanding our empathy,” said Time magazine. Finally, the golden ticket: Oprah selected “American Dirt” for her book club. “I was opened, I was shook up, it woke me up,” Winfrey said.
It all fell apart with stunning speed. Following a blistering online campaign against the author and others involved in the book over who gets to write what, and in response to threats of violence against both author and booksellers, Cummins’s publisher, Flatiron Books, canceled her book tour. Cummins’s motives and reputation were smeared; the novel, eviscerated. “We are saddened that a work of fiction that was well intentioned has led to such vitriolic rancor,” Flatiron’s president said in a statement.
Looking back now, it’s clear that the “American Dirt” debacle of January 2020 was a harbinger, the moment when the publishing world lost its confidence and ceded moral authority to the worst impulses of its detractors. In the years since, publishers have become wary of what is now thought of as Another American Dirt Situation, which is to say, a book that puts its author and publishing house in the line of fire. This fear now hangs over every step of a fraught process with questions over who can write what, who should blurb and who can edit permeating what feels like a minefield. Books that would once have been greenlit are now passed over; sensitivity readers are employed on a regular basis; self-censorship is rampant.
A creative industry that used to thrive on risk-taking now shies away from it. And it all stemmed from a single writer posting a discursive and furious takedown of “American Dirt” and its author on a minor blog. Whether out of conviction or cowardice, others quickly jumped on board and a social media rampage ensued, widening into the broader media. In the face of the outcry, the literary world largely folded.
“It was a witch hunt. Villagers lit their torches,” recalled the novelist and bookseller Ann Patchett, whose Nashville home Cummins stayed in after her publisher told her the tour was over. The two were up all night crying. “The fall that she took, in my kitchen, from being at the top of the world to just being smashed and in danger — it was heartbreaking.”
How did the literary world let it happen?
From the moment Cummins’s agent sent “American Dirt” out to potential publishers, it looked like a winner. The manuscript led to a bidding war among nine publishing imprints, resulting in a game-changing, seven-figure deal for its author. In the run-up to publication, as the editor of The New York Times Book Review, I asked attendees at Book Expo, then the most significant annual publishing conference, which upcoming book they were most excited about. The answer was as unanimous as I’ve ever heard: “American Dirt.” Publishers, editors, booksellers, librarians were all wildly enthusiastic: “American Dirt” wasn’t only a gripping novel — it brought attention to one of the most vexing and heartbreaking issues of our time, the border crisis. This, its champions believed, was one of those rare books that could both enthrall readers and change minds.
But in December 2019, a month before the novel’s release, Myriam Gurba, a Latina writer whose memoir, “Mean,” had been published a couple of years earlier by a small press, posted a piece that Ms. magazine had commissioned as a review of “American Dirt,” and then killed. In her blog post and accompanying review, Gurba characterized the novel as “fake-assed social justice literature,” “toxic heteroromanticism” and “sludge.” It wasn’t just that Gurba despised the book. She insisted that the author had no right to write it.
A central charge was that Cummins, who identifies as white and Latina but is not an immigrant or of Mexican heritage, wasn’t qualified to write an authentic novel about Latin American characters. Another writer soon asserted in an op-ed that the “clumsy, ill-conceived” rollout of Cummins’s novel was proof that American publishing was “broken.” The hype from the publisher, which marketed the book as “one of the most important books for our times,” was viewed as particularly damning. Echoing a number of writers and activists, the op-ed writer said it was incumbent upon Mexican Americans and their “collaborators” to resist the “ever-grinding wheels of the hit-making machine,” charging it was “unethical” to allow Oprah’s Book Club to wield such power. More than 100 writers put their names to a letter scolding Oprah for her choice.
Never mind that for years, Oprah had championed a diverse range of authors and been a huge booster of the book world. Or that a publisher will use whatever it can, whether wild hyperbole about a book’s merits or a marathon of reliable blurbers, to make a novel work given the unpredictable vicissitudes of public taste.
But an influential swath of the literary world clearly felt galvanized by the charges.
In one of those online firestorms the world has come to recognize and occasionally regret, activists, writers, self-appointed allies and Twitter gunslingers competed to show who was more affronted by the crime of the novel’s success. “American Dirt” was essentially held responsible for every instance in which another Latino writer’s book got passed over, poorly reviewed or remaindered.
As the story gained traction, the target kept moving. According to her critics, it was the author’s fault for not doing better research, for not writing a more literary novel, for writing a “white savior story,” for inaccurately reflecting aspects of Mexican culture, for resorting to negative stereotypes. It was the florist’s fault for repurposing the barbed wire motif on the book’s cover as part of the arrangements at a launch dinner. It was the publisher’s fault for mounting a “perfectly orchestrated mega-budget campaign” on behalf of a white, one-quarter Puerto Rican author rather than for other, more marginalized Latino voices. The blurbs for “American Dirt” were too laudatory. The advance was too big. There were accusations of cultural appropriation, a nebulous and expansive concept whose adherents will parse from homage, appreciation or cultural exchange according to rules known only to them.
What should have been done instead? Should the publisher have pushed back on the blurbers, asking them to tone down their praise? Should Cummins have balked at the advance, saying it was too much money, given some back? Would anyone have gotten this upset had Cummins received $50,000 and a few tepid notes of praise from writer friends?
Many of Cummins’s fans went silent, too scared to mount any kind of public defense. In conversations at the time, a number of novelists — from all backgrounds and ethnicities — told me privately they were afraid the rage would come for them, for earlier novels they’d written in which they’d imagined other people’s lives, other people’s voices. For future novels they wanted to write that dared traverse the newly reinforced DMZ lines of race, ethnicity, gender and genre. (Even now, three years later, many of Cummins’s early champions I contacted were wary of going on the record for fear of poking the bear; many people in the publishing world would speak to me only off the record. Macmillan, the imprint’s house, did not respond to a request for comment.)
And so, the accusations went largely uncontested. Macmillan submitted to a round of self-flagellating town halls with its staff. Cummins lay low, having become something of a pariah among her professional peers. Since publication, I have been told, not a single author in America has asked her to blurb a book.
Some calls for change that came out of the firestorm were well founded — in particular, the call to diversify a largely white and well-heeled industry. Publishing, an exciting but demanding and notoriously low-paying job, isn’t for everyone. But it should certainly be open to and populated by people of all backgrounds and tastes. Black editors interested in foreign policy and science fiction, Latino editors interested in emerging conservative voices or horror, graduates from small colleges in the South interested in Nordic literature in translation. People from all walks of life who are open to all kinds of stories from all kinds of authors can bring a breadth of ideas to a creative industry.
Yet in their assertion that the publisher somehow “made” this book succeed in ways they wouldn’t for another Latino author, the novel’s critics misunderstood several fundamentals about how publishing works. First, it is a business, and one in which most novels fail. If publishing were as monolithic and all-knowing as many critics seemed to presume, publishers would make every novel succeed. If all it took was throwing marketing muscle behind a novel and soliciting every over-the-top blurb possible, then publishing wouldn’t be such a low-margin business. When a book proposal comes along that generates huge excitement and the prospect of success, naturally publishers will jump on it, spend the money they need to win the contract and do everything they can to recoup their investment. For most authors, a six- or seven-figure advance is a shocking windfall; most books typically do not earn back the advance in sales. Publishing is full of authors and editors who believe in their books, only to be disappointed.
Many critics of “American Dirt” also made cynical assumptions about the author. In their view, Jeanine Cummins set out to profit off the tragedy of the border crisis. Tellingly, most didn’t consider that Cummins might have had any motivation beyond money.
Think about what could have been.
The response from other Latino writers and the larger literary world could have been yes to this book and to this author, who made an effort to explore lives other than her own, as well as, yes to a memoir by a Honduran migrant, for example, and yes to a reported border narrative by a Texan journalist and yes to a collection by a Mexican American poet. A single book, whether perfect or flawed — and negative reviews are entirely fair game — cannot be expected to represent an entire people, regardless of how it is written or marketed. Instead of shutting down this particular author in the name of a larger cause — its own form of injustice — the response from fellow Latino writers could have been more generous.
The outcry among its detractors was so thunderous, it was hard to see at the time that the response to “American Dirt” wasn’t entirely grim. There was no significant outcry outside the American literary world’s cloistered purview. And significantly, the novel was translated into 37 languages, selling well over three million copies worldwide.
The novelist, filmmaker and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (“Amores Perros,” “21 Grams”) says that in Mexico, the novel was read and appreciated. “As a Mexican born and raised, I didn’t feel the least uncomfortable with what Jeanine did,” Arriaga told me. “I think it’s completely valid to write whatever you want on whatever subject you want. Even if she exaggerated the narco aspect, that’s the privilege of an artist.” When Arriaga discusses the novel with book clubs in Mexico, he says, nobody raises the concept of cultural appropriation.
A few Latino writers stood up publicly in Cummins’s defense. “The author is getting a lot of crap for stuff she is not responsible for,” Sandra Cisneros said in a contentious public radio segment largely devoted to other people calling Cummins out. “If you don’t like the story, OK, that’s what she wrote and that’s her story,” Cisneros continued, urging people to “read this book with an open heart. If you don’t like it, put it down.”
Readers, the people for whom books are actually written, were otherwise largely ignored in the debate. But it turned out that many readers kept an open mind, with little patience for the mine-not-yours tussles that animated Twitter and its amplifiers. Here in America, the novel debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, where it stayed for 36 weeks. That’s the power of a book that resonates.
But if the proposal for “American Dirt” landed on desks today, it wouldn’t get published.
“In the past two or three years, there’s a lot of commentary about the publishing industry being increasingly eager to appease potential cancelers, to not get into trouble to begin with, to become fearful and conformist,” says Bernard Schweizer, a professor emeritus of English at Long Island University who is founding a small publishing company, Heresy Press, with his wife, Liang, to take on the kind of riskier work that now gets passed over. According to Schweizer, the publisher will look for work “that lies between the narrow ideological, nonaesthetic interests presently flourishing on both the left and the right” and “won’t blink at alleged acts of cultural appropriation.” As he told me: “The point is not to offend but to publish stories that are unfettered and freewheeling, maybe nonconformist in one way or another. Somebody may be offended or not, but that’s the kind of risk we want to take.”
For some aspiring writers, the mood remains pessimistic. “My take is the only take and the one everyone knows to be true but only admits in private: the literary world only accepts work that aligns with the progressive/woke point of view of rich coastal liberals,” the Latino writer Alex Perez said in an interview with Hobart magazine last fall. “This explains why everything reads and sounds the same, from major publishing houses to vanity zines with a readership of 15.” Shortly after publication of Perez’s interview, Hobart’s staff of editors quit and Perez was widely mocked on social media. Elizabeth Ellen, Hobart’s editor and the person who conducted the interview, posted a letter from the editor advocating for an atmosphere “in which fear is not the basis of creation, nor the undercurrent of discussion.”
History has shown that no matter how much critics, politicians and activists may try, you cannot prevent people from enjoying a novel. This is something the book world, faced with ongoing threats of book banning, should know better than anyone else.
“We can be appalled that people are saying, ‘You can’t teach those books. You can’t have Jacqueline Woodson in a school library.’ But you can’t stand up for Jeanine Cummins?” Ann Patchett said. “It just goes both ways. People who are not reading the book themselves are telling us what we can and cannot read? Maybe they’re not pulling a book from a classroom, but they’re still shaming people so heavily. The whole thing makes me angry, and it breaks my heart.”
Much remains broken in its wake. Jeanine Cummins may have made money, but at a great emotional, social and reputational cost. She wrote a book filled with empathy. The literary world showed her none.
Well it appears that some are regretting the great resignation and have started to return to their former employers and is now being called The Great Regret. How shocking! No, not really. The coddled class still want to work from home and may do so only now at less pay. Well you wanted to work in Oklahoma. No you didn’t you moved to the cool places and with that the housing market will be making a correction sooner versus later so that pad you overpaid for may be worth less so I would suggest you stay put.
And with that we all want it well all. In one of my many debate where I expressed my opinion on what it was like to be a Teacher and in turn the shortage issue that is crossing the country, I was informed I was wrong, not nuanced in my opinion and would not build alliances with that belief. HUH? Was I in the Big Brother house? I am not here to make friends or build alliances I am here expressing my opinion, like it, don’t but tell me I am wrong about the experiences I had working in public education is well misguided and utterly arrogant. Oh wait it was from a White Male and that explains that. So are most bosses and the few women I have worked for were not much better but then most of them were sleeping with their male bosses so go figure. Again this is my experiences and not yours, write your own blog if you have something to say about YOUR experiences.
A week ago I read this story about the infamous wage CEO of Gravity Payments who had taken a pay cut to raise his workers salary and with that became the darling of the Interwebs. That right there is the first warning. Dan Price reminds me of many of the white men I knew in Seattle, so condescending, so right and so very left in politics that it was as if you had the temerity or audacity to contradict, inquire or disagree with them you were immediately ostracized and labeled as well “negative” I think that was the same as being told I lacked nuance, sounded angry and would be alone without allies. Okay, what.ever. Was I on a Housewife show?
But that is Seattle, the cut dried epitome of a perfect Liberal. Of course they immediately contradict said words with deeds and Dan Price is no different. A rapist, a serial predator and abuser puts him in the Harvey Weinstein category I believe. The man waterboarded his ex wife. WATERBOARDED her. I am not sure what to make of that other than he needs his nuts cut off with rusty scissors. Shit there go the allies! This is also why I hate social media and have no allies there either. As Groucho Marx once said, “Any club that would have me as a member I don’t want to belong.” I am good on my own and anytime I have trusted anyone to get close it has been a walking disaster and I am lucky I am still alive to write this after what happened to me in 2016. Not a day goes by whenever I do feel alone that I remind myself of that and those who did me harm and go, nope I’m good!
With that story then we have the other Boss, the crying one. Okay really? If a woman boss cried I don’t see this going well and anyone having one good thing to say about it. Again the white boy sheds a tear and we all cry with him. Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone as my Mother used to say. Well she was wrong I guess! First time for everything.
And with that I think Roxanne Gay said it best to a worker who is complaining about her co-worker and wants her canceled. Well again this is not your world and we are welcomed in regardless even if it is.
Here is Ms. Gay’s response:
You are asking a lot of questions here for which there aren’t satisfying answers. You want a toxic person to see the error of her ways, but if she were capable of doing so, she wouldn’t be so toxic. You want your new employee as an ally, so you have at least one person on your side. You want your boss to hear your concerns and act accordingly. You are clearly feeling isolated, which is understandable.
But what you’re asking is, “How do I control people, so they behave the way I want?” I’m afraid that isn’t possible even in situations where all you want is to be seen, heard and treated with respect. It is challenging to join a company where the employees have a longstanding bond. It doesn’t seem as if this group is particularly interested in welcoming new employees, which inherently creates tension.
It also seems as if you came into this organization and immediately began critiquing their processes without understanding the culture. That doesn’t justify this woman’s behavior by any means, but you may want to think through more effective ways to integrate with this new company. The only actions you can control are your own, so boundaries are, indeed, going to be your best defense. Limit your interactions with her. If she speaks to you disrespectfully, call her out on it and document it.
Develop a collegial relationship with your new employee. You don’t need to get her to understand your co-worker’s toxicity. I am quite certain that is self-evident. Play chess, not checkers. Your co-worker is an obstacle you need to work around until you find a way to get past her. I hope you and your new colleagues can develop a more frictionless working relationship. Toxic workplace cultures are untenable. You deserve better.
What this means is OWN IT. You have to let people reveal themselves to you and with that take the bad and the good. Model the behavior you wish to receive and by demonstrating that you show respect and give it they should in turn do the same. Then if they don’t you have done all you can and in turn start the process to inquire on what to do, do the work around or leave. I usually chose the latter, again not good building alliances which is why I would be evicted day one on Big Brother. Again honesty apparently not the best policy. That is two for two with regards to my Mother.
I have never understood office politics and I am not good at it. I am good as a person and it got me harmed, taken advantage of and nearly killed. So with that I am done and my new No Compromises is enough for me to continue on in this third chapter of life doing what I do best.. have a life and have fun in it. And those in my orbit at the moment will benefit from it. It is like Covid only without the need to end up in the hospital or dead. Been there done that. You don’t know someone’s story until you hear it from them.
The weekend is nearing the starting gate and with that after a short “holiday” week it seems as if I am already over it all. I suspect this summer will be a fast ride and the weather seems intent on taking us for one across the country, so get ready for a bumpy one.
With that I am trying to make sense of how the week started on the Grand Ole Day of Independence or in my case the Day Democracy Died, which now upon reflection seems as if I called that one. It began with the new American tradition – a mass shooting by a 22 year old white male. The one thing I love about this new asshole is he is the III, sort of like Thurston Howell without the Lovey. He scaled a fire escape to a rooftop and armed with a high powered rife, purchased legally, some other weapons and a disguise (what playing Trans to infer another issue OMG say it ain’t so!) where he managed to kill 7, injure many more and then casually donned his lady gear and went to his car where he was sighted and in turn stoppedl where he surrendered without further shots fired. Interesting that in nearby Ohio a Black Man also stopped in a traffic stop, did what most Black men do, is run and with that shot 60 times. So what have we learned here? Well white boys with guns immediately following a shooting and still in possession of said guns, the getaway vehicle and on the run are usually taken in without a shot fired. This goes for the Buffalo shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse, the Waffle House shooter, the Parkland Shooter, the Detroit area school shooter and now the III. Meanwhile you can also shoot up a school and sit inside for over an hour and terrorize the kids, the Teachers who managed to survive and the Parents outside and the Cops will wait for: a) instructions; b) gear; c) assistance; d) fear of getting shot; e) a, b and c. Whatever.
Now the 3rd got his guns legally despite having had his varying knife collection removed due to threats and risk of self harm, which did not seem to prevent him from getting a gun thanks to dear old dad, the 2nd, who authorized the purchase. This is very similar to the Waffle House Shooter whose dad had the kids guns returned to his custody after a mental health hearing going he is not to have guns and the Dad said, fuck that, “Here son take these guns, please!” And with that the son relocated to Tennessee and killed some innocent folks inside a Waffle House the day AFTER stealing a BMW going on a low speed chase with the cops who bailed on the pursuit and retrieved the vehicle later from this idiots parking lot with no further interaction or arrests that well kinda sorta would have prevented that shooting from happening.
So what have we learned here? Well I know that the minute a Black person moves, moves slowly or quickly or just stands still when the Police encounter them they have a higher likely percentage of getting shot to death while white mass murderers, not so much. And with that the apologists and excuse makers will say, “Well the kid ran.” Well the kid has been indoctrinated to a world where encounters with the Police are deadly just this one even more so. I cannot explain the reason why one runs but I do get fight or flight, so I got nothing except when a Police person encounters you hit the ground spread-eagled. I did that in Nashville at a school when the Police stopped me as I was leaving an Uber, thought we were “suspicious” and I threw my purse away from me as I hit the ground. The Police Office were telling me that it was not necessary and that it is not like that. Really it isn’t? And I felt the same when Vanderbilt felt compelled to call the Police on me for a wellness check when I yelled at them voraciously that they thought I was a danger to myself. Hardly, but my rage at their incompetence did not change that I and did so repeatedly to the point they realized I hated their guts and they just needed to finish the work I PAID FOR. Explains the turnover in staff as well. They were a danger, me not so much. Yeah, call me Lovey.
I have nothing to say to the Police anymore except when I see one anywhere I know trouble is not far to follow and that trouble is likely due to them. The Fourth is no exception and the host of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me had just jogged down that same street in Highland Park prior to the parade and it was aligned with not flags, but Police heavily armed. He tweeted later after the shooting, “So much for Good Guys with Guns.” Yeah.
As the weeks unfold we will find more about the shooter and his intentions or not as so far we only know that the kid in Buffalo hated Black People and scoped out the area for weeks before, had issues and had a legal gun while living with his parents and was well aware of how he was enough to cover his tracks all while online chattering about killing. The same with the kid in Uvalde and he walked in with cash in hand and bought a gun. Hey the kid in Chicago, just the face tattoos were enough of a flag right there he has issues. As for his violent videos and attending a MAGA rally who the fuck knows if that was the trigger (pun intended) to set him on a course of planning not just the Highland Park shooting but to go to Wisconsin to do another. Was he planning to meet up with Kyle? Just asking.
And let us not forget his costume and disguise as a woman, or was it a TRANS woman to deflect and lay blame possibly on the Trans community. Again here we go folks lets gather the wagons and sit around the fire to debate the issues of import and of course become hysterical over trying to make sense of a senseless act. It is about guns you fucking morons and the ability to get them regardless of your history with police, your online fantasy life, your mental health and your musical choices. And if you are Black and have a gun the Supreme Court made it easier for you carry and that you won’t be prosecuted. Yes believe it or not that is the spin in New York over that decision that it is akin to the Drug Wars, falsely imprisoning Black men for their right to carry. Yeah okay and that is after three shootings just yesterday. Oh three you say, the third!!!
And the fight over women, famous women, trying to assert their Feminist credentials while asserting that the rights of the LGBQT are equally important but that Trans women are not women in the same way they are. I already wrote my thoughts on that but again the reality is that this is truly over a LETTER. You can call yourself and be yourself whoever that self is. I don’t think any Trans Woman is saying I am a Woman, they are pretty clear they are Trans and want to be known they are and be accepted as they are. They are not “passing” and again that was also my point about the skin tone and colors that I was aware of in the Black Community but had no idea how important that issue is and that even a white person can be hauled into that debate. No, no I don’t want to be as it is not a part of my belief system but again if you are a screaming Racist and you do use that as a factor then have at it.
So as we move into the weekend we have to remind ourselves that we are already at risk of losing something more important, our DEMOCRACY. And by that this time next year see us fighting for that and clean water. Oh you think the Supremes are done with just air, hell no, water is next on the docket. I reprint the editorial from the LA Times explaining the nature of the case regarding States control over elections and how that will have massive issues affecting the 2024 elections if they approve of the States argument. It is truly a problem and with our current Congress don’t expect any movement on that to happen now or well ever. Dysfunction Junction what’s your function?
And then as we move to midterms we are seeing elections for Governors in both Texas
and Florida, home to two of the most egregious elected Officials in the position of Governor since say, Schwartznegger. That was a steal as frankly that recall was a flaw to California’s own process to recall elected officials. Florida is moving to the Hungarian model with each sweeping decision, the largest being the move to take State Control over public Education with policies and curriculum that is limiting in scope and scale of topics to be taught. And again in some cases I do get it, the idea of sex education and the idea of teaching K-5 issues that are surrounding the new complexities of sexual identity, such as binary, non, cis and the rest is just really over the top. Start with Boy and Girl and then go on with no gender roles or ideas on who plays Soldier vs Baker.
Reminds me of the Musical I saw last night, Into the Woods, the Baker is Man and he was played by Brian D’arcy James who replaced the Encores version Baker, played by Neil Patrick Harris, who is great and all but I did not love him a role that requires a style of singing that defines Sondheim. And with the cast changes it was an inspired choice and the house was packed and the audiences were very different this time (composed of all kinds where Encores was largely Gay thanks to Harris) which surprised and delighted me. That is what Broadway is – diverse in every sense of the word. But that too has its own parameters of what that means and with this cast it became even more white and the audience still very white. I am sure that has to do with topic and costs and frankly I don’t see Sondheim as a draw for POC in general unless you love theater.
And that is why ham fisting and shoving it down throats fails as it puts resentment and anger in many, including allies. And this is another article on the blowback to Trans rights with regards to Macy Gray and another Broadway Icon, Bette Midler. You cannot win here people unless you literally recite the script and do not deviate in any way. I was shocked that for the first time the comments section did not descend into madness as is the norm of late in WaPo.
And lastly the use of words or letters in how we talk or describe ourselves and more importantly our history is also under attack but in a far more insidious way. Again thanks to the obsessive need by Liberals to have everything Egalitarian, including Math, has led to a blowback regarding text books, library/reading books, and the subject matters taught in K-12 outside of sex. History and Language Arts are taking the biggest hits from both sides and the absurd notion of the legal CRT being taught is the most insane as is the 1619 Project. They are both excellent ideas and concepts and could be used as a teaching tools, meaning part of an assortment of tools one needs to build a house and in turn find new methods to do so. I think of it as Green Building as it was once thought too complex, too expensive is now almost a standard in which to reduce costs and save overall environmental issues. Well maybe that will go away too soon as it is again a “regulation” and we all know about that. But this is another article in the LA Times about Texas and their version of revisionist history. That is truly an example of WHITEWASHING in every sense of the word.
So as we argue over the book To Kill a Mockingbird or Huckleberry Finn or how many letters can be include in LGBQTIA handbook, the right is busy, very busy moving to end Democracy as we know it. We sure have a lot of rights to protect. I am going with Civil Rights and Human Rights and we have them in an aged document that clearly no longer serves us. And with that we are afraid of it and afraid to make the necessary amendments that will show that the founders understood it would be and was intended to be a fluid document. What is more disturbing is that we are moving to take those ones away that were earned after a hard battle (14th and 19th anyone?). This along with our constant lack of engagement, our unwillingness to fight only with each other (I hate Hilary so I am voting for Jill Stein, yeah that worked out) has allowed this. We have given them the get out of jail free card and more is coming. Read this op ed below and be afraid, very afraid. It is irony or foreshadowing that the Court is surrounded by a fence with a Guard. Who or what is it protecting?
Op-Ed: The Supreme Court is poised to cut the heart out of majority rule
By Laurence H. Tribe and Dennis Aftergut The LA Times
July 5, 2022
The Supreme Court’s extremist justices are aiming their next dagger at the heart of the entire democratic enterprise: voters’ right to pick leaders of their choice.
On Thursday, the court announced that it will hear Moore vs. Harper, a North Carolina case involving gerrymandered congressional district maps drawn by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature. Those maps would probably give Republicans control of 11 of 14 congressional districts in the state.
North Carolina’s Supreme Court rejected the maps because they violated the state Constitution in illegally favoring Republicans. While the Moore case involves legislative districts, how we choose presidents is in the court’s sights. More on that in a moment.
In Moore, Republican state legislators petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, advancing a debunked right-wing doctrine innocuously labeled the “independent state legislature” theory. It maintains that state courts can play no role in overseeing their legislatures in federal election matters.
Hence, according to this baseless notion, state legislatures can do whatever they want in manipulating elections no matter how extreme the results — principles of voter equality and fairness be damned, along with the state’s constitution, its governor and its courts.
Four justices — Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh — had previously signaled support for this idea. One more justice would provide a majority to give state legislatures absolute control of electoral votes in presidential elections.
One of the two constitutional provisions the independent legislature theory purports to rely on is directly at issue in the Moore case.The Constitution’s elections clause provides: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”
Yet in North Carolina, the Legislature itself expressly specified that the “manner” of holding elections would include the state courts’ final authority to overturn improper districting decisions. The state’s General Assembly has even detailed the findings courts must make, how and where such challenges must proceed, and the courts’ authority to impose an alternative map. Using the independent legislature idea to throw aside North Carolina’s election law would, therefore, violate the elections clause itself.
And even in states whose legislatures haven’t specifically assigned their courts a role in elections, any ruling granting legislators alone unfettered election authority would contradict our whole constitutional scheme. It would rip all 50 state legislatures from their moorings in the state constitutions that create those legislatures and limit their authority within three branches of state government. Such a holding would commandeer states’ constitutions, the ultimate repository of the power the 10th Amendment “reserves to the States respectively, or to the people.”
No less fundamental, the U.S. Constitution’s Article IV guarantees each state “a republican form of government.” In a republic, the people elect their representatives to make the law. That fundamental principle would lose all meaning if the Supreme Court decided to shred state constitutional provisions governing state election laws.
Going into this November’s elections, 30 state legislatures are firmly in Republican hands, including in most of the battleground states that determine presidential election outcomes. Adopting the independent state legislature theory would amount to right-wing justices making up law to create an outcome of one-party rule.
Take Arizona. In 2015, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision upheld the state’s nonpartisan redistricting system, which voters adopted by initiative, empowering an independent body to draw electoral districts. Now, under the independent legislature theory, the court could strike down Arizona’s nonpartisan scheme because the state’s Constitution allowed voters to make election law.
Next look at Pennsylvania, a key battleground state. In March, the Supreme Court declined to block a Pennsylvania state court decision striking down Republican-drawn gerrymandered congressional maps. If the conservative justices adopt the independent legislature idea, such long-standing oversight would be stripped from the state’s courts.
Constitutional textualists such as former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, the preeminent conservative jurist, already see what lies ahead.
Luttig recently wrote that the pushers of this debunked theory would also seek to apply it to presidential elections to “‘steal’ from Democrats the presidential election in 2024.” Those pressing the idea claim that state legislators may ignore the people’s vote — not to mention the state judiciary and state election procedures that the legislators have themselves enacted into law — because the Constitution’s electors clause directs each state to “appoint” electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.”
Our freedom to govern ourselves is at stake if the conservative justices embrace this theory.
One possible defense is for Congress to enact the John L. Lewis Voting Rights Act, which could be invoked to defeat the way the independent legislature theory disenfranchises the state’s people. Arizonans and West Virginians must prevail on Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin to end their resistance to eliminating the filibuster on that bill. The Constitution gives Congress the power to set elections rules nationally for federal elections, no matter what any renegade state legislature might try to do.
Voters can also elect state legislators committed to respecting the will of their constituents, regardless of the gimmicks dangled in front of them by autocrats posing as lawyers.
Keeping our power as citizens to choose our leaders and keeping our republic are one and the same. We need to recognize the great peril we now face and speak out fiercely against what we can foresee unfolding in state legislatures and on the Supreme Court.
Laurence H. Tribe is the Carl M. Loeb University professor emeritus at Harvard Law School. Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, is currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
I reprint below a comment to a Washington Post article regarding how the now invigorated Right are ready to mobilize and restore legislation and laws that have been stricken from the books due to the Supremes ruling on Roe v Wade. Uncle Tom did not give them a dog whistle but a megaphone to re-examine all laws that once prevented conception, sodomy and marriage between same-sex couples; note to self, did not include the Loving Ruling that permitted inter-racial marriage. Hmm wonder why there Uncle Tom? Ginni might not wear the robes but she is the ruler in that house I am sure.
The term “the base” is an odd reference as when I think of a Base I think of a touchstone, a foundation, a cornerstone of a structure be that physical or literary.
So with that the implication is that is core belief of a political party that consists of millions of voters and in turn making them truly hateful human beings that are a part of a dangerous group of individuals willing to do harm to their country and fellow citizens.
And if that is the case it appears that there 36 Million registered GOP over what is 60 Million Democrats. And with that number in mind, accounting for Independents and a percentage of each that do not vote nor consistently vote for their party members, I find this interesting how they have managed to hold the country in thrall and in power for 40 years. This argument, this belief system has been in place since Voodoo Reagan and with that two Presidents who were Father and Son and with that placed between them placed Alito and Thomas on the Supreme over Bork and Harriet Miers, who now seem benign in comparison to the current composition. In fact the pro life movement loathed her. But again Bork was Alito that much is clear. So the work was in place for decades but may have been circumvented had Democrats then blocked them both as there was more than opportunity.
So as we see this 40 year war in the making by a party with fewer members how did we get here.. voting is one but the other appears by accountability and the failure to hold that to those whom we as Democrats have elected. The Republicans do not care and are willing as we can see to say and do whatever it takes to remain in power. That is our true enemy… the ability to put differences aside and fight in unison.
And with that I think of the word base when they speak of Mt Everest and how that is the starting point for the largest ascension of many climbers lives and with that this too is a reference not lost. As the climb to undo all the wrongs done by the Right will be akin to that task. It will not be easy and it will not be quick. They began their ascent in 1969 following the Civil Rights Act. You could say it began ever earlier with the creation of Social Security began under FDR. The Right has a real aversion to Government Money being “given” to people not white. They have no problem with taking Federal Money allocated to the States in which to administer as they see fit to the programs and policies they have enacted, such as Education. In only becomes a non starter when the hands that give have some set of expectations in which the receiver must allow. The most recent of that was the ACA and the federal dollars to expand Medicaid, the poor folks version of what we have long needed, public option. Anyway, that program serves the poor and the poor in America are largely faces of color and irony that is true in the most extreme of Red States; HOWEVER, and that is big however, they are smaller in percentage and number than poor whites. The biggest equalizer of all I have found in many of these States is poverty. There are larger exceptions and it shows in the deep south, but again as Atlanta has proven that the great migration in reverse changed much of that dynamic and has become a much stronger powerhouse of Black Intellectuals and Entreprenuers. That said, drive an hour or two out that is a completely different story. Georgia is an amazing State of natural beauty, Savannah has a large school of design and many artists and creatives flock there but its city has an immense amount of poverty that aligns the truth of the city. New Orleans is one of the other cities that seem best to describe this yin/yang of diversity and talent mixed with wealth and dire poverty all clustered under this rainbow umbrella. The South folks is COMPLICATED.
But let’s head up a bit to the Midwest or even over a little to Arkansas and Nebraska or to parts of Ohio and meet the majority of the poor, they are white. The same goes for Indiana and include Virginia and West Virginia, coal mining country. They are the areas most affected by Opioid addiction and they are white. States that have welcomed Immigrants have found a network of individuals who build communities that withstand their own economic stability, in multi family housing, in businesses that cater and employ those that share their culture and language and with that build a significant tax base. They are also usually quite conservative politically and religious. They are the true base of this group of voters that few actually acknowledge nor believe are in fact a member. So when you do look at the real numbers the reality is that in a country of over 300 million the majority may not be a Democratic as one thinks. And irony that many have come from countries that were not a Democracy in the least but they are also ones who fear easily. And they are not easily outreached without understanding their own history and culture, just assuming that coming to America was in search of a better life means affiliating oneself with the Democratic Party is an assumption that defines the broken meaning of the word: Ass/U/Me. And without their Churches and Organizations that include long standing ones that parallel the Pro Life Movement you are climbing Everest without a Sherpa. This is not a top down movement were we simply vote as for DECADES the Democratic Party did NOTHING but enable if not encourage this push to extremism. And those who hated Hilary and voted Independent have to look at the right and the Evangelicals who are willing to align themselves with anyone regardless of flaws to accomplish said goals. Integrity means you vote for the lesser of two evils and then you move to ensure that she is doing the job you voted for her to do. That accountability thing is called Activism, it doesn’t stop on election day.
The rise of Christian Nationalism in Churches that once would cast them out of their houses, instead embraced them. And you saw the symbolism and advocacy of Churches on January 6th, as they too marched towards the current state of affairs we are now facing. They do not care about Color/Gender/Sex when it matters about THEIR goals. You think a Cuban and Black man would normally be members of right wing militias? Well they were. And there were many Gay Republicans there as well. A Gay Porn Star was arrested for his role that day. And you think you are going to appeal to women over this reproductive issue? Who do you think were the chairs and foot soldiers of all of it? Women.
This will take at least half the time it took the Right to mobilize and energize. There are many at the end of their tethers, as Uncle Tom and Alito are in their mid 70s. This now becomes a death watch for many of the GOP leadership and with that the younger are not any better. Josh Hawley anyone? But among them are rational thinkers, Adam Kinzinger is one. Again strange bedfellows but this needs to be a bed that makes King size seem small. The scolding, the reprimanding and belittling of your fellow Liberals must also stop. We are not all going to agree on EVERYTHING. I truly find this hysteria over pronouns absurd. As one screaming liberal informed me online that I was denying one’s Civil Rights by not acknowledging that as an issue. Shut the fuck up, no really shut up you are not helping. Keep that in house. Gay writers Andrew Sullivan is bored with what he calls the Alphabet People (of which James Kirchick is another) and the Gay Journalist, Katie Herzog have been verbally attacked for their contrarian views regarding these issues. That said the Trans Panic has become an overwhelming source of hysteria from all sides of the aisle. Shut the fuck up. No really shut up and let people have that privacy thing that we are so close to losing in many ways if you don’t just shut up and do what you need to do but acceptance and understanding may be a big ladder that you will climb and we will do our best to hold it, but it is one at time friends, one at a time. In the current world the biggest threats to Democrats are Democrats.
We have to climb that ladder one rung at a time, one at a time and we will get there, it will just take time. But this is a generation of no. They do not understand delayed gratification or the idea that not everything is centered around them. With that we have a sense of entitlement and confusion that led to the crazy nonsense of “cancellation” and a type of new “outing” people that led to jobs being lost and harassment under the guise of doing the right thing as in the case of the Teen boy that was the profile of New York Magazine which was another battle between me and a woman who called it revenge porn and I was a supporter of child pornography. That the absurdity of that is one thing, the other citing Gawker an online mag with a history of problems is not my source of reference. And from the New Yorker we learn that the gang mob mentality targeted largely kids of color and were done by largely white girls. Wow the Karen meme takes on a new meaning when one selectively chooses their battles. Again the Liberals worst enemy, Liberals. Try making sure all the facts are known before throwing stones and with that bones will get broken. It is why I am certain that blood will be shed in the forthcoming year as we approach the midterm elections and the Presidential one. We are not good at not having our way. Funny that is a fast food slogan and that is how we want everything, now, now, now. Three year olds act that way, be an adult and act like one as we are going to need that kind of behavior and action as we move forward. The right wants us go to backward, just say NO. Take a page from their playbook and turn it, they did that to the Liberals. And look how it turned out.
There is a phenomena when a group gets together and becomes a mob. The concept of “groupthink” refers to a mode of thinking in which individual members of small cohesive groups tend to accept a viewpoint or conclusion that represents a perceived group consensus, whether or not the group members believe it to be valid, correct, or optimal.
The story below is one such story. And with it the idea of cancel culture to the point we are bombing, dog piling or ostracizing individuals with no point of return. I have seen this happen on social media and in varying comment pages that are not moderated well, such as the Washington Post; which under the new editor has been slowly switching its tone and with that recently a new social media bombing occurred in the newsroom leading one reporter to be terminated. I have canceled my subscription and put the money towards other sources of news and with that am making sure that during the interim I post incessantly about my reasoning for doing so. Clickbait are not stories, the comments are out of control and news should be both local and global, not all political. And almost all of the responses are always about Republicans and that they believe the paper is prepping for the new regime. Okay, that is insane, we are not veering to state owned press at this point so are you fucking kidding me? That is how bad it is. I peruse Twitter and it is the same people saying the same sound bites over and over again. When a man is talking about his anxiety and filming himself coming from one Doctor’s office to another and then posting glamour shots of himself nude with regards to gun control five minutes later, you need to put the phone down and get the fuck offline. How many talk about their addictions and yet this is another form of it.
The reality is that Americans are lot more lonely and bored than they admit and few have any other interests other than commiseration. That is not healthy and I found myself getting so tired of reading moronic post after post on Facebook from these idiots trying to self publish that I was being utterly nasty. Between the scams and the poor folks who do not speak English and want to be writers it was annoying and not helpful, supportive or interesting in the least. This is what many are discussing when examining the affects of social media on the psyche and for me it was not a good place in the least. So I have a site with no friends and all groups are simply not being “followed” leaving my feed mostly advertising and I am fine with that. Instagram is another that has interesting photos and blurbs and I am fine with that, but it also has a strange man who seems to be hitting on me and from the manner of his writing I am sure he is not an English speaker despite the photos and description. And with that I have no intention of being the next subject of a swindler/fake documentary on HULU or Netflix!
So when I read the below article yesterday about the High School kid who was an idiot and faced being canceled, I was shocked and not. I want to say that it takes two. Why was a young girl taking nude photos of herself and giving them to him? I know they had a relationship but this is not new nor something I would allow my Daughter to be involved with. That is something that is never brought up it the article, an interview with the parents of her and there role in this debacle. When are we going to admit that girls have equally screwed up values about sex and boundaries and that it is enabling many to exploit, traffic and use these images to sell and market. See the story about Porn Hub to understand how this works.
What happened here is a story similar to the one that happened at Garfield High School in Seattle a few years ago where the parents of a victimized teen had to file a Title IX complaint to get the school district to realize the seriousness of the assault.
It is not perfect yet the goal is there and we can see the results in both National and International sports. Since its origin in 1972 It has been been amended in its scope and scale and of late been used more regarding sexual assault/abuse/harassment in educational environments.
Some key issue areas in which recipients have Title IX obligations are: recruitment, admissions, and counseling; financial assistance; athletics; sex-based harassment, which encompasses sexual assault and other forms of sexual violence; treatment of pregnant and parenting students; treatment of LGBTQI+ students; discipline; single-sex education; and employment.
And it also may explain the rush by States to ban Trans Athletes which again as it is a Title IX violation and will likely play out in the courts. And given the Swimming Federation’s new statement on banning Trans Females from competition this is another federal statue I see heading to the Supremes real soon for an overhaul.
But this blog entry is about the story below; There are many many issues at large here and the reality is that lives could have been more seriously destroyed but not to the extent which one could imagine. If you wonder why there is a rise in Teen Suicides and Mass Shootings, this may explain that, but thankfully those involved lives were just badly badly damaged. And even that is debatable as how does one measure the fall out of what was so poorly handled and administered by the supposed Adults in the room. Again this falls to training, the failure of the district to quickly get a hold of this and have Attorney’s and Counselors on hand to handle the students directly as well as those affected by the allegations made. It was a cluster fuck, not the first nor the last in these trying times.
And this brings me to why Title IX was used, as we have a problem filing police and criminal report over what is assault/abuse/rape and have to rely upon a federal law ensuring sports equality seems odd. Criminal activity vs Civil rights, not quite the same but there are some overlap, but still then it would still fall into a federal criminal statute. But this is not in that purview. And that is where it becomes a challenge for the K-12 schools as while they are required to have a Title IX individual they are usually counselors or Admins wearing multiple hats. But when schools are investigating shit of this nature as the article discusses, they are not equipped nor trained to do so. Again what the fuck are we asking Administrators and Teachers to do here? I am so glad I am out of full time Teaching.
Teenage Justice
A list of boys “to look out for” appeared on a high-school bathroom wall last fall. The story of one of them.
Elizabeth Weil New York Magazine June 21, 2022
Twenty months after he developed a crush, 18 months after he’d fallen in love, Diego, who is enormously appealing but also very canceled, boarded the bus with Jenni and Dave. They were going to the beach, and it wasn’t a big deal — except for the fact that pretty much all of Diego’s friends had dropped him, so, yeah, it was. The three, all 17, sat in a row of orange seats that ran the length of the bus, Diego’s eyes dark, goofy, and sad; his body freshly stretched to almost six feet; his oversize Carhartts ripped on skateboard ramps. This could have been in any American city this past January, on any bus. (First names in this article are pseudonyms.) Jenni kept her face tilted down toward her lap, hidden by a scrim of shoulder-length hair.
Then, a stop away from school, another high-school student boarded the bus. Just one more kid with a backpack in a hoodie, and at first Diego waved and Jenni smiled. Diego because he wanted to show he wasn’t scared, as this kid had thrown accelerant on a stupid mistake Diego had made, thus blown up Diego’s life. Jenni because she’s pragmatic enough to play along with social rules, plus this kid sat right in front of her in AP Statistics. But instead of waving and smiling back, this boy just stared, his eyes flat and certain. Jenni began to hyperventilate.
When, the month prior, Jenni first befriended Diego, he tried to warn her: You really don’t want to be canceled. It sucks. No one looked at him during the day at school. His teachers marked him present, then sent him to study by himself in the library because kids changed seats if he sat next to them in class. Diego no longer wanted to get out of bed. But he had talked to Jenni at the climbing gym, where he’d started going after the skate parks filled up with “opps” — kids who hated him. She noticed that Diego was surprisingly sweet and funny given how much his life had turned to shit.
She also asked him what had happened, which almost nobody did. She decided hanging out with Diego was okay.
This okay did involve putting a jacket over her head when she rode in Diego’s car near school. But it was too late to hide now. After the kid got off at his stop, he took a picture of Jenni through the bus window. Jenni started crying.
Later that night, Jenni, whom Diego described as “a solid, solid woman,” tried to do some damage control because, as she explained, if you get an Instagram post about you, your life is over. “I know what this looks like …,” she texted the boy. For months now, he had played the role of self-appointed enforcer. In Statistics class, he’d announced, “There are not many people that I would bash in the head with a hammer. Diego is one of them.”
“I was on the way to the beach,” Jenni wrote. “And I saw Dave, who I know.”
Dave attended a different school, but he was such a good wingman — his earnestness was so disarming, his golden curls fell so adorably into his eyes — that everyone, boys and girls alike, was at least a little smitten with him. Dave was the one friend of Diego’s who had never disappeared. “It never even crossed my mind, like, Am I able to handle this?” Dave said. “Diego is like my brother.” Still, he kept their friendship quiet — which is to say he didn’t post pictures with Diego on Instagram. That seemed to appease his peers.
The boy from the bus left Jenni’s message on read overnight, meaning he’d seen it and not responded, a very bad sign. In the morning, he wrote back, “Yeah, I know Dave, too, but I don’t go sit with him and Diego.”
Jenni wrote again: “I’m friends with Dave and I can’t help it.” She wasn’t involved in the situation, she explained, and she didn’t plan to be. Still, the day after the bus ride, the enforcer turned around in Statistics and said as a threat, “Fuck Diego. I love cancel culture. If you were to cancel anyone, who would you cancel?”
This nightmare began sweetly. Diego — fan of Nivea deodorant, Air Jordans, and Taylor Swift; dragged on annual camping trips by his parents; his father white, his mother Filipina; 8.5-by-11-inch prints of every school photo of him and his sister hanging in his family’s upstairs hall — started high school and met a girl. They dated for a month. (According to Diego, this doesn’t really count.) They broke up. He spent a lot of the next year hanging out in skate parks, learning to do frontside 360s. Summer after their sophomore year, the two started going out again. Fiona was Diego’s first real girlfriend, and she was almost psychedelically beautiful: pale, celestial skin, a whole galaxy of freckles, a supernova of red hair. This made everything, even the pandemic, okay. Diego would do online school and skate and hang out with Fiona. Sometimes she broke plans with Diego to go on hikes with her parents, which Diego’s mother loved. He said, “I know, Mom!” when his mother, who taught college courses on parenting and child development, reminded him to ask for consent.
Then, in the middle of last summer, Diego went to a party. He got drunk and — Diego really fucked up here: Everybody, including Diego, agrees on that, so please consider setting aside judgment for a moment — showed a nude of his beautiful girlfriend to a few kids there.
Three weeks later, school started — senior year, finally back in person after 18 months at home, woo-hoo. Within days, teachers and administrators started noticing that the ninth- and tenth-graders were acting like middle schoolers — wrestling, invading one another’s personal space. “It was really clear a lot of them hadn’t been in school since seventh grade,” said the principal, who had held her job for only seven months before the pandemic closed in-person classrooms. Juniors and seniors, she noticed, also had “big gaps” in the skills they’d need “to navigate complexity” and “a very low tolerance for relational discomfort.”
Everyone seemed scared of each other’s bodies and breathing and out of touch with each other’s boundaries. Soon students started streaming into the glass-fronted administrative offices asking school staff to intervene in their relationships with one another, saying they felt unsafe. Students also wanted their administrators — the principal and the two vice-principals, all young women who led with a big-sister, let-me-make-you-a-cup-of-tea vibe — to investigate interpersonal incidents from years prior, stuff that no longer felt right after 18 months stuck at home.
Yaretzi, a young woman in Diego’s grade with walnut skin and a gentle voice that masked her intense focus, started attending school-board meetings on Zoom and speaking up during public comment about how disregarded students felt by the way the district handled sexual harassment and assault. “We were given the space and a lot of time,” she said, half-joking, “to reflect on why that kind of behavior was tolerated at school.” No way was she just slipping back.
This was a common pattern: the isolation of the pandemic producing both pain and insight, followed by a need to assert new power dynamics as people gathered up the shards of their social lives and tried to reassemble them. Diego’s school began working up a curriculum on harassment, a “tier-one intervention,” as one of the vice-principals called it, meaning the whole community needed help.
Two and a half weeks into the school year, a friend of Diego’s approached him between classes. He was like, “Yo, I heard this kid was walking around bragging that he was gonna tell your girlfriend that you showed some random dude her nude.”
Diego was like, “Broooo, what?”
Then the kid did.
Fiona dumped him, which, frankly, good for her. She felt humiliated, betrayed, and startled that someone she trusted so much respected her privacy so little. “I had put so much care into our relationship,” she told me. “Then I got screwed over.”
Diego offered Fiona a raft of apologies — “ ‘I’m so sorry, I’ll never do that again,’ that kind of thing,” Fiona said. He then holed up in his bedroom, ashamed, heartbroken, and furious with himself. He started writing songs with bald lyrics: “It’s all my fault / I hate me for that / And I’ll do anything to get you back … / You’re beautiful and perfect / I’m sorry.”
Over the course of the next three days, everyone in Diego’s old friend group stopped talking to him, which he didn’t really notice at first because he was too disgusted with himself to pay much attention. But by the following week, most of the other students in his grade had stopped talking to him as well. Diego’s parents reached out to the principal for the first time on October 4, 2021, to alert her that students were broadcasting their son’s “errors” and telling kids throughout the school that Diego was an abuser and if they remained friends with him, they’d be condoning rape culture. The principal, who was still planning the anti-harassment summit for November, did not respond.
A vice-principal walked Fiona through how to file a Title IX complaint. Title IX established a quasi-legal protocol meant to protect students’ right to access public education without discrimination or harassment. Every public school is required to have a Title IX coordinator. The principal and a vice-principal both held this job at Diego’s school. (“There was so much to share this year!” the vice-principal said.) In terms of securing equal access to school sports, Title IX works well. But with regard to preventing harassment in high schools? The regulation is a sieve, a piece of ed code, the vice-principal admitted, that is “not really written to protect students” but instead “revolves around protecting district and school from liability.” The result is a law that both does a poor job of stopping harassment and leaves students feeling ignored and enraged. “Students come in saying, ‘I feel harmed and uncomfortable and sometimes unsafe,’ ” the vice-principal told me. What Title IX mandates from there is that the students fill out a form. That form is sent to lawyers at the school district’s Office of Equity. A verdict comes back in legalese. The lack of shared vocabulary between students and the adults meant to protect them created an added layer of hurt. “Assault has a very specific meaning in the ed code,” the vice-principal said. “So sometimes difficult conversations arise when we say, ‘I acknowledge you feel uncomfortable and unsafe, and we should attend to that. This wasn’t assault.’ ”
Through the end of October, Diego remained heartbroken and depressed. While half his school canceling him seemed a bit much, he hated himself too. He spent a lot of time alone with his pet rat, Toe (named because he didn’t like the rat at first, but she grew on him), sitting under his lofted bunk bed, composing music on his mini Korg synth-vocoder, staring at the haute-adolescent mash-up on his walls: family water-park photos, concert-ticket stubs, Junior Ranger pins earned at national parks.
He also wrote Fiona a letter, but it was too much “pleading love letter” for her taste, too little “straightforward apology.” Besides, she thought, he’d brought this extended exile upon himself. He’d acted like a jerk that past summer, partying a lot, even breaking up with her for a bit. That had left Fiona feeling, she said, like “this person patiently waiting for him to come back, when he seemed he couldn’t care less about how I felt.”
Diego’s father, a high-school teacher in a different town, took the day off work on November 1 to try to dig his son out of his dark hole.
That same morning, posters with blood-red lettering that read GET ABUSERS OFF CAMPUS started appearing around school. “I just got really fed up,” Yaretzi, who made them, said. “My friend had called me to tell me about how her abuser wasn’t being held accountable after multiple reports were made about him.” She’d heard this from other friends too. “I printed like 60 posters in an hour and ran around the school and slapped them on the walls.” She herself had suffered through the fear and humiliation of sexual abuse, but her abuser did not go to the school — a “privilege,” she said, in that this made her worry less about retaliation. Yet she saw how girls on her campus felt more unsafe than ever. So she taped the posters up in the long, locker-lined hallways, in the bright stairwells, in the girls’ bathrooms, in front of the fishbowl of an office where the administrative staff worked.
That afternoon, around five, administrators learned students were planning a walkout the next day over the school’s handling of sexual misconduct. They also found a list on the girls’-bathroom wall labeled PEOPLE TO LOOK OUT FOR. Scrawled on the off-white tile in black Sharpie were seven names. DIEGO was one.
The list caught Yaretzi by surprise. “On my way home from school, I started getting calls,” she told me. “I’m like, ‘What the hell list are you talking about?’ ” Her intent was to lay blame at the feet of the school district, not specific young men.
Administrators phoned the parents of all the students named to tell them about the list and the walkout, which immediately got paired in everybody’s mind. School staff also locked the girls’ bathroom and repainted the wall, but it hardly mattered. Photos were already bouncing around social media, accompanied by tags like “stay safe please look out for these people” and “I wanna add [names] to this list.”
November 1 was also Diego’s mother’s birthday. When a vice-principal reached her, she was heading to meet her husband and Diego, along with a friend, for dinner. She pulled her husband aside to alert him, then they limped through the meal for the friend’s sake. Afterward, Diego’s parents sat him down.
“This is serious. I don’t want any surprises,” his father said. Diego laid out the facts: drunk at a party, showed the nude. His mother was relieved he hadn’t done something worse. His father was pissed.
“It was not good, actually really terrible,” he told me. “It’s embarrassing as a parent. You thought you raised your kid differently. You wish you had done things better.” Diego’s father was upset with himself, upset with Diego. He wanted his son held accountable, though he wasn’t sure what that looked like yet.
At 11:39 p.m., Diego’s mother wrote an email to the school:
Subject: My Son Is Not a Rapist.
This situation with my son has gotten out of control and needs to be stopped. I’ll be heading to campus tomorrow with my son to help him file a Title IX Violation for those “Spreading a series of sexual rumors about a peer.”
Early the next morning —the morning of the walkout — a classmate texted Diego and said, “Bro, you shouldn’t come to school today.”
On campus, from the moment students arrived, administrators tried to stay on top of the situation, but even the simple task of keeping the bathroom walls clean felt exhausting and futile. Lists went up; administrators scrubbed them down. Lists went up again, not always with the same names. Nearly 20 students (not even the principal knows the full count for sure) were named in all. “People would put names on the wall and then other people would cross off names. And then people would write on the wall, like, ‘How dare you take that name off’ and ‘You don’t know the story,’ ” the principal told me. Fiona herself did not write Diego’s name. The principal’s whole focus became “How do we stop the bleeding?” As she saw it, “students are acting as judge, jury, and executioner for other students.”
At 10:30 a.m., 500 kids walked out of class, many dressed in red, as the organizers, most of whom were girls and queer people of color, had urged. Some had red-inked NO ABUSERS ON CAMPUS signs taped to their bodies. Others had written in pen on their skin: MAKE SCHOOL SAFE on an arm, I AM A SURVIVOR along collarbones. In the quad, Yaretzi led the crowd in ten minutes of silence to honor survivors. Then everybody walked up to the parking lot for speeches. Students punctuated these by banging on drums and rattling keys. They chanted “No abusers on campus!” and “Fuck admin!”
“I have been here for four years,” one of the organizers told a local newspaper reporter. “I’ve walked people, hand in hand, up to the office to go report their assault, and a lot of times, they were turned away or they said, ‘Okay, here’s a piece of paper, fill out this report, and talk about what happened to you.’ ”
“There are known abusers in that crowd right now,” Yaretzi added in that same interview. “There’s so much protection for the abusers rather than the victims. We’re just sick and tired of it.”
“It was a wild day, a wild day,” the principal told me in her office, choking up, her back to the treadmill desk she had started using to ease her stress. “I’m having a hard time talking about it even now.” She had students screaming, the calls for systemic change wrapped up in very public accusations against specific young men, a disturbingly high percentage of whom were boys of color, almost none of whom she knew anything about. She had a whole student body aching, telling her to fuck off. Just two weeks before, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association had jointly declared a state of emergency in child and adolescent mental health.
In the popular imagination, the evolution of the crimes of the boys on the wall was rapid and steep. “You’re an abuser” quickly morphed into “You’re an assaulter,” which soon turned into “You’re a rapist.” The truth, according to Jenni, was most people didn’t actually care what they’d done. “Someone goes, ‘Oh my God, I heard he’s a bad person — don’t talk to him.’ And then people are scared to be on the wrong side. So they just do it. They don’t think about it. They’re just like, ‘Oh, I don’t know him, so I guess I won’t talk to him.’ ”
The unifying rally cry on campus was “We’re not safe here.” Even for students who’d never felt that way themselves, “suddenly there was a very compelling narrative to buy into,” the principal said. “There was a lot of social capital and relational capital to be found suddenly — I don’t wanna say it was a lie — in understanding your own experience within the context of this narrative.” That story line rested on the idea that the administration failed to do its most basic job. Parents started emailing the principal, asking if students were getting raped on campus.
his was not just Diego’s school. This was all over the country. A boy touched a girl’s waist without consent at a Spirit Week rally — shunned by his community and called a sexual abuser. A student accused a boy of touching her at a school dance — major investigation, lawyers on all sides. A student outed by the friend of a girl he tried to feel up after she reciprocated his affections while cuddling and holding hands — threats on social media, thoughts of taking his own life.
The case of Kathleen Kurtz and Robert Straub v. Lewisburg School District, in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, reads like a horror story in the form of a civil-action complaint. The plaintiffs were parents of a 14-year-old boy, Minor JX. In November 2020, classmates at school started calling JX a “rapist, pedophile, and child molester,” according to the complaint, and encouraged other students to do the same. Then, on March 19, 2021, a girl at his school made an anonymous report to ChildLine, the State of Pennsylvania’s child-abuse hotline, accusing JX of being a rapist. When a classmate was asked what JX had done, another girl said, “You know what you did, JX,” and refused to elaborate. JX started begging his parents to let him skip school. His parents sent a letter to the school principal:
JX is a sensitive soul and we fear this is damaging to his confidence at a very crucial time in his life where he is building his own Self-worth.
These horrific verbal attacks he is undergoing can make or break what kind of human he becomes.
The local police investigated the ChildLine call. As the complaint reads, “the allegations were entirely fabricated.” Still, the bullying continued. “JX’s Mother reported that, given the ongoing bullying and name-calling from November 2020 to the present, the School was no longer an emotionally safe place for JX to be educated,” the complaint reads. He told his parents “his life was so bad right now that he can’t see how it can get better anytime soon.” JX’s parents sued under Title IX. The judge tossed the case, explaining the facts failed to prove JX’s harassment was based on his sex.
At Oakland School for the Arts, vigilantism drew the attention of the NAACP. Before the pandemic, a group of students had been swapping nude images of female classmates. The administration disciplined the ringleader, but many felt his punishment was light. Then, while stuck at home for remote learning, some students formed a group chat to share experiences of sexual abuse and harassment and frustrations with reporting them to the school. They requested a Zoom meeting with the dean about how to make the campus feel safer. But the meeting was a disaster, two of the students told me. The dean wanted to talk about vaping, not sexual misconduct, and the students were incensed. “It’s hard to have somebody not necessarily believe you, but it’s even harder when it’s like somebody should be really concerned about you,” one of the students said. The group chat organized itself into the Student Safety Committee and in late September planned a walkout and rally in a park across the street from the school. The event devolved. While students, primarily women of color, shared their personal stories of sexual violence up front, students in the crowd screamed at specific boys, most of whom were Black: “Rapist!” “You need to go die in the ditch.”
The rally ended early, one of the organizers told me, after a school administrator approached her. “He was crying and was like, ‘You’ve got to shut this down,’ ” she said. “We don’t have the mental-health support for this.”
The organizers spent the next day in the school administrators’ office. “It was just, like, a horrible experience,” one said. “It was like talking in circles or like talking to a wall.” Parents of accused boys showed up as well.
“How are you going to put that genie back in the bottle?” a Black woman whose sons were called rapists asked the dean. She had no doubt that the girls who had singled out her sons had experienced real pain. “I’m not saying that they’re not harmed,” she said. “What I’m saying is that hurt people hurt.” No individual had accused either of her sons of any specific abuse or crime.
In the weeks and months that followed, parents and grandparents began showing up at Oakland School for the Arts board meetings, saying they were scared to send their children to school because of all the sexual violence. Families of the accused boys reached out to the local NAACP chapter to talk about consolidating a case. Parents told Black children about the Central Park Five. “This can ruin your life simply because she says so … The school empowered a group of teenage young ladies, little mini-Karens,” one of the mothers said. Another mother told me her son struggled with returning to a place where everyone thought he was a rapist. “To survive every day, going to school like that,” she said, “having to prove he’s worthy, a good person, when he feels like he’s going to a school of hundreds of kids who think otherwise?”
Oakland School for the Arts eventually sent a letter to the school community acknowledging that most of the “allegations of sexual assault against a number of predominantly African American boys” were “either not backed by evidence, unfounded, or in some instances a result of mistaken identity or assumed guilt by association” and that the community had real healing and soul-searching to do.
On November 4, Diego lost his job with a youth organization in town. “You suspended my son due to graffiti on the wall that you saw on Social Media?” Diego’s mother wrote to his bosses. “NOT ONE person has accused my son of sexual assault.”
One of the bosses wrote back that she was “not in a position to say that Diego has sexually harassed or assaulted anyone,” but the truth was not the issue. Other kids in the program, which was entirely online, now said they felt unsafe with Diego. The program had to distance itself from him “based on the fact that this has gone very public and has compromised the way participants feel and/or interact.”
The Title IX claim about Diego ended up with the incident being declared outside the school’s purview. The vice-principal told Fiona she could file a police report. She didn’t want to do that. In communication with her family, however, the school made a plan to help Diego and Fiona repair. Fiona’s family, the vice-principal wrote in an email to Diego’s, made two requests:
1. That all pictures are deleted from every possible device, cloud, storage/media platform, etc.
2. That it be made clear to Diego and his family that this was a serious violation that is having an impact on the student’s overall well-being.
Done and done. As individuals, at the beginning, the two had managed this incident okay. Fiona had no interest in getting back together. But a couple of weeks after their breakup, when Diego was still eating only a handful of peanut-butter pretzels a day, they’d met at the beach and talked. “I was like, ‘I don’t appreciate getting treated like an abuser,’ ” Diego said. “And she’s like, ‘I don’t think you’re an abuser at all. I know that.’ ” But this had grown way beyond them.
The public conversation recast Fiona’s view of Diego’s actions in a worse light. She was mortified knowing that every time people thought about Diego now, they thought about her nude photo. Still, she felt validated and supported by the list. After the clinical and pointless Title IX claim, “it was refreshing to know that, like, Wow, someone else is standing up for me,” she said. “Someone does care about my story.”
Everyone hoped that after Thanksgiving break Diego would feel comfortable returning to school. That didn’t happen. Other boys whose names had been on the list were doing horribly too. One had hitchhiked away from home earlier in the year after his ex-girlfriend called his mother one morning to tell her she was going to cancel her son that day. Then she did. He returned a day later at the ex-girlfriend’s urging. (“They couldn’t stay away from each other,” his mother said. “She didn’t want him to leave.”) But being in a town where everybody shunned him, except for the person primarily responsible for that shunning, was just too painful. His mother stayed up all night with him so that he didn’t slip into the bathtub with a kitchen knife. Then he ran away again.
Yaretzi tried to keep the focus on systemic change. One simple ask, which Fiona would have appreciated, too: more counseling support to complement the reporting process. Yaretzi spoke with the superintendent and the Office of Equity, pleading with them to, at a minimum, connect students with outside mental-health resources. “They’re like, ‘Well, what would you propose?’ ” she told me they said right after she made her pitch. “And then I just started laughing. I was like, ‘I just told you what I proposed!’ I mentioned the possibility of a Linktree. Have you ever seen a Linktree? It would take ten minutes and cost zero dollars.”
A scarcity mind-set — not just in terms of money but in terms of care, morality, and protection — set in. Students kept coming into the principal’s and vice-principals’ offices “upset over the fact that in the days after the protests, the school helped create safety-and-support plans for some of our male-identifying students who have been named,” the principal said. “And our female students saw that as ‘Who are you protecting? Whose narrative is more important to you? Who do you believe?’ ”
For instance, the school put Diego on independent study for the month of November. “The guy who caused a lot of pain to me now gets kind of like a GET OUT OF JAIL FREE card?” Fiona asked. Shouldn’t there be “something offered in the other direction?” (The school did offer her a safety-and-support plan, but she declined because she didn’t share any classes with Diego.) Meanwhile, some of the families of accused students had started deploying what has become the standard legal tactic in the Me Too backlash, displayed most publicly at the Depp-Heard trial: going on the offensive. The families demanded disciplinary action against the students shunning their sons. “But I can’t make your kids be friends,” the vice-principal told those parents. “I can’t stop kids whispering and laughing when your kid walks into the classroom.”
In the worldview that set in, being kind to a canceled kid is all downside. If you’re kind, you’re an apologist, then you too will be shunned. As another canceled kid told me, he’d really tried to press his ex-friends on why they ostracized him, but there was no point. “They were like, ‘You know why.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know why.’ And they’re like, ‘You know why.’ And then I just ended up leaving because how can you argue with that?”
The school’s official protocol on how to deal with ruptured relationships was to use restorative practices. This usually meant a facilitated conversation among the people directly involved, with the goal of creating empathy and coaxing kids out of angel/devil, black-and-white thinking. But Diego’s school had a countervailing policy: You couldn’t use restorative practices in cases of sexual misconduct. You also couldn’t make anyone participate in restorative practices. Given that the students existed in a universe where just talking with an alleged abuser made you an apologist — where you could lose all your social capital simply for suggesting that someone might deserve compassion — who would agree to restore?
It was an impossible situation, a whole world supersaturated with emotion, starved for common ground and facts. The school tried to get the stalled anti-harassment training back on course, but the advocacy group it had hired to run the workshop declined. “This is not the time for us to come,” its representatives said. “People need an open mind to learn.”
Diego barely ate for weeks. He slept 12 hours a night. He wrote bad poems. He stared at the pink Post-it note he had put in his phone case on November 1:
Reminders
— Compliment people always
— be kind and respectful to everyone regardless of previous encounters
— be generous
— Not wish for more or better
— Think before acting
— “He who is not satisfied with what he has will not be satisfied with what he would like to have”
— don’t talk shit ever
What else did he do? “Cry? I don’t know,” he said. Eventually, he agreed to go with Dave to Dave’s family’s cabin for the weekend. On the way there, they stopped at a taco truck. Diego said, “Bro, I’m not hungry.” But Dave made him order three tacos anyway and stood there while he ate.
Diego’s parents kept pressing the school to do something, to at least use restorative practices with Diego and the students threatening their peers with social ostracization if they talked to him. Yet on December 2, 2021, the vice-principal sent an email explaining to Diego’s parents that a restorative circle was not going to happen. Those students canceling him, she wrote, “have no personal ill-will toward Diego but that the social pressures on them are so great that to be associated with Diego would cause too much harm for them.” She also said she’d reached out to “their peer groups, teachers, or classes but they believe these interventions would cause more conflict (at least at this point).” So that was that.
The bullying and harassment complaint that Diego’s parents had filed in November was closed on December 17. The outcome letter acknowledged “that the situation” — which in this case referred to Diego’s cancellation — was indeed “both severe and pervasive” and, as such, violated the district’s bullying-and-harassment policy. To remediate this, the letter continued, school officials had counseled the offending “students to stop that behavior.” Yet in a tacit admission that this made no difference, Diego now would be excused to eat lunch early and leave campus early so he could avoid interacting with other students. His teachers would also excuse him from class because they couldn’t stop the bullying.
OverChristmas break, Diego’s sister, two years older, came home from college. The whole family got in the car, as they did every year, to chop down a Christmas tree.
Diego’s sister had made the best of shelter-in-place, which she’d spent in her apartment near school — she pulled through all her STEM courses. She even earned a commercial driver’s license and now worked as a public-bus driver. Diego’s friends used to tell him they were jealous of how close he was to her. Now her politics, according to Diego, involved spending a lot of time on Twitter and, according to her dad, thinking he was a privileged white guy with a beard. He’d taken to saying to her, “Key word: Nuance!”
Diego drove the family car to the Christmas-tree farm. On the way, his sister called him a bad driver. He told her to shut up. She then said, “Abusers deserve to be canceled.” Like virtually all young people in their town, she’d seen the image of her brother’s name on the school-bathroom wall, posted and reposted many times.
Diego:“Bruh, that was a little out of pocket. Get the fuck out.”
Sister: “Oh my God, I don’t want you in my life anymore.” Everyone started crying. Their parents kicked her out of the car and told her to find her way home.
New Year’s came. Then February. The experience kept rooting in the dark rut of its own logic. A kid spat on Diego in a stairwell. (It wasn’t clearly caught on security video, so no one took disciplinary action.) Diego’s mother started losing her own friends. (“There are levels of abuse, you know,” they’d tell her. “You don’t know what your son did.”) She started making Diego drive her to work to get him out the door to school. But he often drove to school and just sat in the car. His whole day was working by himself in the library anyway. Why enter the building at all? On occasion, he’d see other boys in the library whose names had been on the wall, and they’d sit together. But mostly he felt invisible.
Race remained a topic almost too toxic for the school to touch. “You are telling us that most of the boys that were accused were Black and brown students, and all of the kids who are canceled are brown or Black, and the white boys were able to walk back on the campus, no problem,” Diego’s mother said to the principal. “And yet you’re not telling these white kids this? That’s called white fragility and being afraid of these girls.”
A reprieve finally came in February, when Diego and Dave traveled to the South on a trip organized through Sojourn Project, a social-justice nonprofit that takes groups of students to places like Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham to learn about the modern civil-rights movement. It felt so good to be in a different place with different kids, tune in to the arc of history, focus on justice with a capital J. They talked a lot about how people use and respond to negative power. Diego described the trip as “one big therapy session.”
The universe snapped back into perspective for a moment. Diego had fucked up and hurt someone; people had ostracized him. That wasn’t the whole world. But the good feelings did not last long. Emboldened from their travels, Dave and Diego posted trip pictures together on Instagram: the two of them goofing off on buses; Dave, smiling, his body held up parallel to the ground by Diego and a pack of kids. This got Dave fully canceled. Within two weeks, he, too, was eating lunch out of his car, thinking about an MLK quote he had learned in the South and half-remembered now: “It was something like, ‘It’s not about what will happen to me if I help this someone,’ ” he said. “ ‘It’s about what happens if I don’t help them.’ ”
“When we’re home,” Dave said, “I feel like we’re in a bubble of hate.”
By this point, the guardians of the social order had changed. “Boys are worse, I’m not going to lie,” Diego said. “Guys just want to feel powerful, and they feel entitled to be mean to other people.” And they really didn’t want the girls to think they stood with abusers.
“My friend Ethan — I mean, my previous friend,” Dave said. “I have three classes with him. And he made it clear. Like, ‘I miss you. It’s just, like, this situation is so dumb, I just can’t hang out with you.’ ”
Dave tried to get his school to help. He approached “the counselor, dean person, I forget what she is, really,” he told me. “She said, ‘Canceling is very new to me, and it’s a very hard thing to deal with.’ ” He asked if she could set up a restorative conversation. “And she said, ‘Well, I can ask, but I can’t force them to do it.’ And so she asked and they said no.”
Reason and control felt like distant concepts. Diego and his sister pretended the fight had never happened the next time she came home, but Jenni was still putting a jacket over her head when she rode in Diego’s car. “I feel bad for putting my reputation before my friend,” she said. “But, ummm …” A boy threatened to beat up Diego while he was visiting Dave at school. Diego’s father thought about going over to this boy’s family’s house because the school district, obviously, was not going to intervene. Everybody was exhausted. Diego’s principal had decided to quit.
The absurdity of the situation caused something in Diego to crack, and that release allowed for new clarity: You’re only canceled if you’re trying to hang out with the people refusing to associate with you. The rest of the world doesn’t know — and probably doesn’t care. Diego and Dave started taking the bus to the beach on Friday nights and talking to anybody who looked their age. “Everyone I met, I was like, ‘By the way, this is what is happening at my school right now,’ ” Diego said. “ ‘It’s better to hear it from me than from some kid: ‘He’s a certified abuser. Oh my God.’ ” But almost no one met his disclosure with much besides sympathy. “They were all like, ‘Don’t worry, bro. You’ll get through it.’ ” Or: “ ‘Your school is wack as hell.’ ”
Let’s just come out and say it: It’s a horrifying time to be a young woman. The world is burning and bleeding out. Adults are not fixing it. Teenage girls are poised to have fewer rights over their own bodies than their mothers had. The sane response — the awake, healthy, non-nihilistic response — is to feel panicked, frantic, hung out to dry, devalued, and unsafe. Who are they supposed to believe is looking out for them: the schools? The courts? Elected officials? Will anything get done to make the world better if they don’t do it themselves? So we can ask, “How is this mob justice possible?,” and leave it there. Or we can ask, “What happened to this cohort to unleash what Northwestern legal scholar Deborah Tuerkheimer described as ‘a primal scream’?” — a scream that conveys in its raw, messy, full-of-collateral-damages way that “we don’t trust our institutions, we’ve been betrayed by our institutions, and so all that’s left for us is to do this.”
The principal at Diego’s school had not just quit her post; she was considering leaving education. “I have a lot of love and empathy for people who are trying to run schools and work in schools right now,” she said. How was anybody supposed to hold teenagers together through this? The mental-health crisis? The country’s convulsions around race and misogyny? The threats to democracy? The school shootings where adults in bulletproof vests stay in the hall while kids whose classmates are dying cower under desks and call 911?
Six weeks before the end of the year, students at Diego’s school taped up posters again: WALKOUT TO GET RAPE CULTURE OUT! THIS ISSUE IS STILL HERE — AND SO ARE WE! At 11:45 a.m. on April 15, 75 kids left their classrooms and gathered in the concrete quad. Diego stayed home from school that day. The principal was on vacation. The tribal, exorcistic energy of the fall walkout had burned off. The agenda included a teach-in on Title IX and how to work through school-district bureaucracy. How can students exercise their rights if they don’t even know what they are?
Yaretzi was clear-eyed about how the year had unfolded. She’d raised awareness and created social cohesion more than she’d fixed anything. “I’m gonna be so honest with you,” she said. “I’m so sick of the walkouts. They are calls to attention, but they aren’t effective when it comes to long-lasting change.” The list on the wall had derailed her efforts for real change too. Nobody wanted their name attached to this admission, because parents had threatened organizers with lawsuits, but students acknowledged that some on the list were falsely accused. The whole thing was a distraction, counterproductive, pulling focus away from the school district’s failings. This is not to say everyone was innocent — they weren’t. Students at Diego’s school were sexually harassed and harmed. Yet this is also true: “Rather than, like, the actual perpetrators, a lot of names put on that list were just random people,” a student told me. Classmates wrote them “out of anger and pure emotion.” This made the act reckless and destructive but not meaningless. “We need to look,” the student said, “at why those emotions are there.”
A few weeks later, Diego decided to attend his prom. He bought a black suit for $79 at H&M, pulled on fancy white sneakers, and took a girl with cupid’s-bow lips who lived in a town 45 minutes away. “It was like a Disney movie,” Diego said. So much buildup, “hella drama.” While there, a student pulled his date aside to tell her that Diego was an assaulter. “We had fun after we left,” he said.
The school hadn’t healed. The vice-principal announced she was quitting too. So was the principal at Dave’s school. Fiona rejected the narrative that Diego was canceled. That made it sound, she thought, like other people had done something to him. Time had caused her view of Diego’s actions to harden, not soften. She didn’t think he deserved to be friendless. “I guess it is harmful when people are jumping on the bandwagon,” she said. But his behavior had really hurt her. In hindsight, maybe he was emotionally abusive? Was it wrong to warn other students to stay away from him?
One morning in May, after sleeping late — because why hurry to get to a class you’re not going to attend? — Diego sat alone in the library in his ripped Carhartts listening to songs he’d written over the past nine months for his final capstone project: a presentation for his teacher “on the emotional roller coaster I went on this year.” He played all the instruments, wrote all the lyrics, sang all the vocal tracks, one song after another about love and regret: “I’ve never seen anyone as beautiful as you.” “I really shouldn’t have done that / It was asinine of me.” “It’s all my fault.” “My frail heart has crumbled — no one has seen it / Your incandescent glow could help me find all the pieces.”
A girl walked up and said hello. “She’s canceled too,” Diego said. That girl’s boyfriend’s name, he explained, had been on the bathroom wall, and she didn’t break up with him. It later came out that his name had been written entirely by mistake. His accuser meant a different kid with the same first name. But it didn’t matter. The photo spread. The story turned into he kidnapped someone and raped them at gunpoint.
Around lunchtime, another student, this one in braids, overalls, and a black beanie, sat down with Diego. “She’s canceled, too,” he said. At the start of the school year — her sophomore year — she had made a comment to a new Black friend about his “monkey ears.” The remark was dumb, full of implicit racial bias. She caught herself in the moment and apologized. The two discussed it. Then, on the second day of school, her second day in a building with students since the middle of eighth grade, he called her a racist in a crowded hallway. Now, despite all the public and private apologies she had made, all the months of therapy and reading, she was still “that racist kid” and probably would be until she graduated in two years.
“There’s no room for growth,” she said, eating the quesadilla she brought for lunch. “You do something wrong, therefore you’re a bad person.” There was no community that, as part of holding you accountable, made space for you to learn; no presumption that you could — and will — change. Who could survive adolescence like that? “My brain isn’t fully developed,” she said. “None of our brains are fully developed.”
She was stoned all the time now — her way to manage her anxiety and get through the day. “People are trying so hard to, like, be the good person in the situation. They always want to be the bigger person. They want to feel like they’re right.” Some girls recently tried to fight her in the bathroom. “I was just like, ‘You need to calm down, you’re acting like a child, please grow up.’ ” She waved to her ex–best friend in the hall.
All around us, kids were falling asleep on the library couches. Staring. Flirting. Scrolling through TikTok. Being teens. Sometimes, Diego wondered what his peers would think when they were older. “If they’ll look back with their kids and be like, Damn, I was so hateful in high school.”
Diego skipped his own graduation. He attended four proms, and after the last he found some drunk kids from his school waiting on his block, at 1 a.m., just to tell him to fuck off. Soon after, the school emptied for the summer, nothing fixed, the clock run out. In three months, Diego was leaving town to go to college hundreds of miles away. He didn’t know if he’d return.
We have an insatiable need to be right and therefore anyone who challenges us or makes us feel wrong we want to lash out and do damage to right the wrong we feel. I get the scorched earth policy as I frankly react that if you fuck my pussy or my money I will come after you, anything else is frankly not worth my time. It is just how I do so that makes it less a dish best served cold or one that is how I like my Latte’s – hot.
Of late I am trying to at least sort of mend a bridge that I may or may not cross again but like an escape option. The first was the asshole who exposed me to Covid, and did so knowingly without ever admitting that he did and apologizing. I had coffee with him the other day to see what he would finally admit after over 18 months of Covid denying, anti mask rhetoric and of course anti Vaccine messaging that I heard from him in March of this year, a year nearly to the day he exposed me and the Barista at the coffee shop that day he went for testing. I had followed up with him after that day asking about his test and got a jumbled answer and vague admission that his wife had tested positive, which I knew immediately he had as well given what I understood of transmission and the efficacy rates of the virus. I knew I was actually okay as I was outside when we spoke that day and he did sort of have a mask on and was well withing the six feet distancing that was being encouraged/promoted; However, I was not sure what transpired in the shop while waiting to and for his order. The shop had cross ventilation with two doors and I had been insistent that they open them all the time, day after day to prevent any gas accumulation that could have the virus. You know the droplet thing well liquid into gas and all and that I have known from early on this was an airborne virus like TB which they finally admitted is as well. Covid only took a year or so before that so that is progress.
So upon the exit of his beverages to go to the testing site, as who doesn’t stop for takeout enroute to a test that was at that point life threatening and highly contagious, I went inside and told Ben to get tested ASAP and I went to the walk in clinic near my home to make an appointment within the next 72 hours. Again, this is not a disease that takes 14 days from exposure to symptomatic. Most diseases are within a three day time frame and this number is random and of course given what anyone knew that seemed reasonable and hence lent to the confusion that the lockdowns would be that long. Whoops! I went in 48 hours after exposure and tested negative but I definitely tested positive when it came to anger. And when I saw him a year later I was still pissed and we had a polite exchange on the street but still no admission until now. And with that I elected to keep my anger in check and discuss the logic behind some of Covid that led to the confusion, largely how the virus came into existence and that we will never know but we will be doing this forever. His anti mask vaxx position I knew so I only spoke of myself and my feelings about protecting myself and with that protecting others so I will not be responsible for another getting ill, even inadvertently. I saw the seed being planted and I went on discussing the variations in vaccine types and how they are equally safe but fundamentally different when it comes to the MRna versus the J&J one and that there are no cures only treatments which are no less experimental and equal in percent when it comes to healing this very random disease that seems to affect every BODY in varying ways. And there was another click of the switch and I was done. I have no intention of spending anytime in his company in the future, but if I do run into him I can be polite and move on without maintaining the anger that dominated my feelings about this man over the last 18 months. He is not worth it and what is tragic is that he had Covid, his wife did, and in turn his Brother-in-law and his Father-in-Law contracted it, which could have had a much more tragic ending. Maybe he will get it but there is a Reddit forum on how so many did not and they are now being laughed and mocked at. Talk about a nice memorium. Sorry, but Colin Powell had serious health issues, took a risk was vaccinated and given his health it was not enough and it killed him. That he is also a Black man does make me wonder why the Brown/Black community is so devastated by Covid and is there more to this than pre-existing conditions. Is there a cellular issue the science community is missing. And with that when the Asshole told me of his great second Uncle once removed whom he never speaks do but did the same and died too, I just said, “Well Colin Powell did as well so there you go, nothing is 100% so I would still risk a preventative over a treatment that is about the same odds.” And with that I tried to end my persuasive talk about being pro mask/vaccine as duty to the larger good, to children and to family and that is not politics in the least, it is just good sense.
The same goes with that woman neighbor who was all against Dave Chappelle and the mountain made over a show she never watched but knew that her social media “friends” (as I am sure that is what defines her social circle) had told her about and were right. Yes said the angry Trans woman who had been bashing Asians until 2018 and said she was in a “bad place.” Really? So when you are in a good place you are not a screaming Racist? That is some kind of weird on and off switch. I don’t swill a glass of wine then suddenly go all Insurrectionist and demand that Trump be President. That is a bad place I will never go. But I reached out with my copy of the Hilton family that pretty much trashes Kathy Hilton and her family. Juicy and hilarious and worth the 45 bucks I paid for this. I could tell she was very nervous with my sudden appearance and I offered to loan it to her upon completion and that I had on backorder the other tome about the Housewives that allege more bizarre antics and behaviors by the Fraus. It was like talking to the Dental Hygienist about your dental care and you fake concern and nod with the intent of improving your flossing technique and immediately being relieved when that ends and going back to your regular routine once out of the office.
Again, I have no reason to be angry at her as I wasn’t the evening she walked out of the dinner, she paid the check and I finished my wine in quiet. I admittedly lost my patience with her and had residual anger over an issue I share below, and in turn had a discussion that I should never have bothered nor disclosed my personal history to someone not worthy of sharing it to. What is the truth was that actually going in the first place as I have really not loved her company, it was a distraction during this time where I had so little sane encounters even ones that resemble one I will take. This is of course violating my No Compromises mantra I have decided to follow but again I am trying to find ones that work in that confine and in turn do little damage to my own health and sanity. She did neither really and of the two the fucker with Covid (aka The Asshole) still sits number one on the list but if I was willing to bury the hatchet, not in his head at least, only symbolically, as he has never nor will apologize for what his actions could have caused and never will. And with our “friendship” ends on my terms, so no I did not compromise. I confirmed what I suspected, he is moron and yes an asshole. The end.
So as with regards to my neighbor, will I drop of the Hilton book as promised? Yes and that is because I do what I promise and I hold no anger to a woman whom I am simply not that vested in. I do not know her last name, her telephone number or anything of import and frankly I care even less about what I do know, she is not that interesting nor intelligent. A diversion does not merit that much emotion so you move on. But gestures are larger than words and I have none for her.
But the last exchange is one that I cannot and that is the Management or what acts as such, is that of my building owned by the Kushner Company. Given what has transpired over the last two years I am pretty sure that this company that is no longer run by Jared, still however, shows how badly managed and run this company is overall. The building is run by an utter Bitch, not one employee current or former, have anything good to say about her. Those that remain are enablers of said dysfunction and are equally co-dependent on this type of behavior or why are they still here? The new CEO may sweep clean but he has been President and acting in the role for the past few years while Jared was pretending to be the President’s right hand and it there we see that hand is to say the least crippled if not utterly useless. It explains a lot right there.
On October 11 ( a banking holiday no less) I received. threatening letter from the management. Of course it is not personal one iota as it was addressed to DEAR TENANT. But in the email and the attached letter it was passive aggressive and of course questionable as to the act they were planning for my missing rent check, as currently in New Jersey the eviction moratorium stands. Needless to say I was hysterical as I pulled up my bank statement and Bill Pay and saw the Check cut and disbursed on Sept 20th. Okay I contact the Assistant Manager to ask what this means as it appears my check is lost in the mail. And with current Postal Slow downs I thought I built in the lag time to get it there well beyond the cut off date, which is five days after the due date. But alas now, here it is 10 days later and this is alarming in the best of times and these are not good times. Oh wait can I do a racist rant here? As again all of these people are not white so maybe that is it? No. But in the course of two weeks this went on and on where the check was found, immediately after I had cancelled said check, then in turn they tried to cash said check which was rejected, so they in turn sent me another threatening letter with more fines and fees. So wait, you had the check, misplaced it was in fact delivered late as all mail is recorded with a stamp upon arrival, so you went ahead and tried to cash it even though you had already cashed the other check I submitted to replace said check? This went on in a circle fuck for two weeks.
Check cut, check mailed on 10/20, did not arrive or did arrive before 18 but lost, notified on 10/11 that check not there. On 10/12 cut new check but then new check was there and 10/13 tried to return new check as they had the original check but that was cancelled on 10/12 as per the instructions of the Assistant Manager. Who had the new check, never bothered to send/deliver it to Accounting. 10/15 reissued check cleared. 10/25 received note from accounting that check that should have been voided and cancelled was in fact attempted to be deposited and failed to do so, so now being charged NSF fee. Then it began a round of email that terminated on 10/27 with me threatening to call an Attorney to resolve this. As the emails from the Accountant and the now Apartment Manager, as the Assistant has excused himself from this, telling me for what amounts to the third time, my rent is due on the 1st, if not received by the 5th late fees are charged and that they excused it this time as a courtesy and that I needed to get my rent in no later than that regardless of their error or post office delays. The term courtesy is again debatable is that again doing one’s job is not a courtesy, nor is removing said fines as we can never really tell who or what was at fault here, so let’s file this under shit happens and move on. Taking checks, filing paperwork is not something they apparently do here so I see why they see it as a “courtesy.”
Well folks as this was all going on I had already submitted my Nov rent on the 20th of October via Bill Pay and sure enough on October 28th, the check cleared. Exactly what the bank had informed me that during the tracing efforts they could see that at most it was a seven day delivery schedule with a day for them to handle/process said check. So where was the October check cut on 9/20 and likely delivered no later than October 7th? Hell if know but that is where the cookie crumbles with regards to KRE. The management of the building does not communicate with the headquarters or the accounting department, they do not process or handle any paperwork or checks for tenants and do from what I can tell little to accommodate said tenants but deny responsibility and lay blame. And when they do their job they do it with a script in hand and offer it as a favor. In other words the doppelganger to the Trump Administration and you see why and how Jared and his lovely wife were often called the “Interns.”
** I also edit to add this info, during Covid’s early stages in 2020 there were at least two units infected, that I knew on the downlow from a staff member. There was another that infected a staff member knowingly and seemingly oblivious in denial the same way my Asshole was. That staff member was never tested as he did not fit the absurd lengthy specific criteria one needed to be tested at public sites. He went to his private Doctor who had no test but was sure he was sick. After 48 hours he was showing full signs and went into quarantine per the Doctor’s instructions. He never confirmed said diagnosis until after the 14 day period passed, he was feeling better and went to the city facility that confirmed he had antibodies and that they indicated a recent infection. The building management did not contact trace or track, never set out notices and information that staff and neighbors were positive and in turn failed to protect the tenants. There were other staff members who were also infected and thanks to the former staff who I also looked after were very vocal about the tenants and staff whom they knew were no goes on the list. This is a Kushner Building, does it explain much? It should****
I leave this building in April of next year and I look forward to moving out of Jersey City. This is a transient community of larger commuter who have no interest in the city other than flop housing in the numerous expensive transient housing being constructed throughout the city to appease the developers that the Mayor is beholden. That is the case of many cities that have been designated “it” prior to and during the pandemic. The shady shit that I saw in Nashville followed me like a hurricane here and I am moving to less popular areas that have no cool third rate bars or restaurants. And trust me folks the food and bar scene here lacks, no this is not the 5th Borough or whatever bullshit hype the City pimps. Manhattan has recovered with regards to housing and it will only follow with business sooner versus later, despite what one hears, it is still fucking Manhattan. And with that I know I am not wrong.
And as I end this rant, I watched another Netflix comedy special, Bo Burnham, Inside. It was far more entertaining, provocative and frankly more clever as he filmed himself during the lockdown as he delved into his version of documenting his sanity or at least maintenance of it. But one thing he said during his riffs, was that people cannot stop sharing their opinion and they do it regardless of sense or purpose. And with that is comment one thinks when I hear “cancel culture.” He has not been without his detractors and criticisms and in reality you like it or you don’t. What it doesn’t make you is a “ist” a person who suddenly caught white male privilege, homophobia or whatever screed their act is doing to enrage or amuse. I said this to the asshole (who will always be called that in private) who could have transmitted me Covid: “We are on a very different spectrum when it comes to Covid and the issues that surround this pandemic, but I can find a bridge, a rather long one to cross with many views and I can take them all in. And hence I welcome the chance to hear or see the view from your eyes. But ultimately none of them will likely affect my crossing and reaching my destination.”
And that is why we have to accept that on life’s crossing bridges there are delays, by intent, by accident or just because the journey is a long one and hearing a fellow traveler’s story does not change the journey or the end, just the middle, so take a break an LISTEN for awhile then move on.
Off the Rack Publishing 