I want to do a multi-part analysis on what exactly the “Anti-Bullying” campaign came to be. I now realize it is central to the greater story at play; the march through our institutions, the molding and perversion of our youth, and the capturing of our nation. I often say “turn over rocks”, and I believe these rocks are going to lead us to the answers we MUST find if we’re going to escape this quicksand we allowed ourselves to be marched into. I don’t enjoy writing long-form (yet). It constrains my free-flow of thought. I feel the need to make perfect and polish here. Every error gets underlined and stands out. So I’m going to write more in pieces, tackle a big topic as a series. To begin this one, I want to rewind back to when I was a kid…
It wasn’t that long ago. Man, it feels like a completely different planet. In some ways, it almost was. I was one of the now rare and valuable breed that transversed The Great Divide between the pre-internet world and the post. Not only did we not have internet, we didn’t have any form of communication outside of landlines (house phones, pay phones and quarters, eventually beepers). I lived fully inside those Beforetimes; yet, I’ve lived the majority of my formative years in the Aftertimes, our increasing Techtopia. Hell, I created a BBS when I was 10 or 11 that had thousands of accounts. We used 1200 baud modems and IBM 80386 computers to communicate before most adults could even understand what we were doing. So I am a man of this technology and interconnectivity. I even jive with the notion of role-playing and avatars, as I talked about recently. But I’ve seen the world without those layers. I understand the human crust that lies beneath all that plastic.
What brought me over to Substack tonight was this thread regarding a boy in a public-school that is being allowed to live as a girl within the school. And so all of the other children, all of the other families, they have their entire framework uprooted (dismantled) so this one kid can act out his fantasies at school and not just at home. This fact-pattern is repeating nationwide. It’s largely what has led to such a colossal level of anger from our populace. It’s largely why Trump carried every swing state and the popular vote. It’s important to not forget that Queer+ activism is just one tentacle of a much greater Equity beast. But I don’t want to get into that here. As will happen in most of these situations due to the portal they create, the behaviors in that school grew increasingly more perverted and dire. He now rubs his penis in the locker room and stares at the girls while they change, claiming he needs lotion for chafing. Can you imagine how uncomfortable that must make these girls? OMG! These are children. Schoolchildren! And they aren’t the state’s kids. These children belong to other parents; moms and dads who I am certain without having met them are not ok with perverted boys rubbing themselves in front of their naked daughter. Just typing those words makes me so mad I could fight someone. And that’s basically the tone that thread took on…
But I felt compelled to come over here and flesh it out a bit. I want to make sure everyone understands why I come with that bravado. Without fail, someone over on X will come back at me how I’m acting tough guy and fetishizing violence. No, I’m actually not. I’ve been around a decent amount of violence (IRL and not Call of Duty) and know how everyone involved in violence loses. Similarly, I’m not over there acting Billy Badass because I need people to think I’m tough. I’m not that tough. Most people who are wouldn’t say that and I do all the time. That’s because I’ve seen IRL tough, so I have a solid gauge. I’m 6’3” and 170pds soaking wet. My points in this vein have very little to do with IRL me. They’re about principle. I’m just sharing them through my eyes and understanding. I’ve walked some paths a lot of people haven’t, especially those trapped behind avatars.
I knew tough back when I was a teenager quite well. I ran with a tough pack of dudes. I grew up in a bizarre area where it should have been super nice and drama-free, but for some reason there were over 100 registered gangs in the county and shit was wild! We were doing things back then that truly seem surreal now, even with the decades of experiences I would later have in Miami and across Florida. It was a perfect storm of timing, money, suburbs, rap music, PUD zones, and access to the District. I saw a decent amount of gang activity. I saw a lot of criminal activity. I was involved in more than I’m proud to admit. Again, I wasn’t the “tough” in this scene. I was just around it.
I knew an all-state wrestler who just loved physicality. He played Mike linebacker for our school too. Of course he did. He wore black gloves and black face-paint and liked to hurt people out there. Speaking of not-tough again, my tiny ass played football as a freshman because all my boys were and I quit after three weeks. I got destroyed on those fields! By people with black face-paint. That kid was tough on the football field, tough on wrestling mats, tough when we were just hanging out and fucking around, just tough as nails. He was a lion. I saw him get in numerous fights. I never saw him lose one.
My best friend was one of the toughest kids I’ve ever crossed paths with. We called him “Ultimate Warrior”. For a lot of reasons, but he was a true warrior. Again, lion. These are our warrior breeds. He was tutored by this OG named “Nate”. Nate was a fighter, like an MMA guy back before MMA had really become a thing. He trained on this “sphere of contact” notion and my buddy was fascinated by it. These are the type of men who even as boys are constantly challenging themselves physically and, in doing so, forging themselves into greater humans and machines and weapons and men. I knew so many guys like that back then. I know a lot still today; meaning, across the later chapters and spheres of my life. The guy who took me under his wing as a kid surely had a wild streak, but he was always quite composed when he needed to be. He is both a lion and a leader. I was very fortunate to have him in my life. I’ve mentioned him before, but will share more one day as my anon walls come down. He is a very important figure to me. We had some other boys who were equally as physical but not as restrained. I use the term OGs because we literally had an Old Guard of dudes we all looked up to when we were like 13-18. I don’t really understand why they existed, come to think of it. Lol But they did. This will dox me if anyone from this era reads, but these were some crazy MFers who even had crazy names. Fat Tony, Johnny Yay-Yo, Steve Glass, Ryan King. Even the toughest dudes from our immediate ranks didn’t feel tough in the presence of those guys. They were true gangsters, man. And sadly, I mean that. Of those four names above, last I knew, one was dead and two were serving legit time. Running in this stuff is a big part of the reason I chose to leave the DC area and start my life over with a clean slate down south. I truly left one person behind and worked to become another.
I share this all because I want to apply it (the environment I came from) to this school today where the environment is apparently so FUBAR that dudes can stroke their jeunk with lotion in front of girls while changing. Importantly, not because they’ve done away with boy/girl spaces, but because FrankenFemme Equity zealots have seized control of admin and are forcing every family at that school to pretend this boy is actually a girl. It’s insane to say, even though we all have now said it so many times. What I wrote that started that thread was quite simple: “Back in my day, we would have beaten this kid up.”. And I mean that. See above. It is unquestionable that the guys I knew back when I was a teenager would have gone into that locker room and handled that situation physically. Not just my friends, but the jocks, the skaters, definitely the Latin Kings and DC banger-types, probably even most just run-of-the-mill dudes if they were told and asked. Maybe it would only take intimidation. That would be fine. But I suspect not. And if that tide had to be turned, it would have flooded out quick! The message would have been delivered swiftly and severely that this is not ok and will not be tolerated. “Not be tolerated” means you will have a wall of pissed off dudes up in your grill if you do that shit again. Is that clear?!? These messages don’t get delivered effectively on flyers or school emails. They come through real freakin clear when you’re inches away from the enraged face of my wrestler buddy who has his shirt off and his body looks like it wants to tear something apart. That sends messages that people don’t ever forget. And when it comes to some pervert taking his penis out in the sight of girls who are undressing, that is a message I want delivered quickly and clearly every single time. I commented in those posts that our fathers would not have been upset for defending that line. I believe that to be true. They too would have been willing to defend that line. Some of them had daughters.
So why did I dive into this all under the framing of “Anti-Bullying”? Because that’s how we got here. In that modern scenario, that weirdo would have the entire school system behind him. It’s a classic case of “Don’t hate the player, hate the game” now. This would have become civil war in my area growing up! Our parents would never have allowed it. We would have rained hell down upon that county until the problem was resolved. Not much different than the angry boys in the locker room, just older, more adult, and probably therefore protest and election and policy based (anyone remember “Don’t Say Gay”?). These were MY parents, not my great great grandpa. How the hell did we allow this to completely collapse in one child rearing? It’s unfathomable. And yet, it now surrounds us. We have our own government encouraging boys to cry, men to become women. Our Department of Education is all “Queered” out and our Health and Human Services is a dude in a dress named Richard we’re told to call Rachel who preaches FrankenFemme scripture about using drugs to ensure children don’t go through the “wrong puberty”. WTF! USA Today awarded that mental mess the title of “Woman Of The Year”. Gotta defend those “Women’s Rights”. You know what became of my old county? Some of the worst woke capture in the nation. Loudoun, Fairfax, Montgomery, etc. Absolute disgrace! That part of the nation became one of neutered lions. Dominant mothers; absent or spineless trampled-on fathers; too much wealth; spoiled children; slipped moorings. All the ingredients for this new FrankenFemme Equity revolution to thrive. These are the soccer moms with BLM stickers on their designer thermoses full of Pinot Grigio.
What is the behavior I mentioned at the start of this in the context of education, administration, this pursuit of “Progress”? It’s bullying. Undeniably. And heck, I don’t deny that much of what I referenced (these natural pressures) is a form of bullying. So what? I want a kid stroking his nob in the girl’s locker room to get bullied. Like I’ve made clear, I’m good with him getting his ass kicked. Let him receive a message he never forgets. Remind him another will await the following week if this sick shit continues. I don’t even understand what we’re talking about here. All of civil society, every family in that school, all of the mothers and fathers of the girls in that locker room, are just to turn away and be ok with this all because a bunch of weird chicks from Amherst who hate their own fathers screeched “Progress!” and “Queer!” over and over and were awarded Gender Studies degrees? Absolutely not. If we can’t defend a line this simple, we’ve lost the ability to act as a common people at all. And at that point, it’s every man for himself. Every family for itself. Every community making these decisions first. The capture and ideological coercion that has occurred via the federal apparatus is staggering, disgusting, and very dangerous.
And we can trace so much of this back to what was known, sold, pushed, coerced, smothered across everything as “The Anti-Bullying Campaign”. Bullying is wrong, right? Who would be against that? Much like racism, and ending hate. Aha! What do you know, that all ties directly together. I think this is probably a good stopping point for this Part I primer. In the next parts of this series, I’m going to dive into the origins of “Anti-Bullying”. How did it come to be? What entities drove it? Who was behind them? What shapes did it take? What is its nexus to Social Emotional Learning (SEL)? Then what is the link from there to complete academic capture down to K-12 and perversion of our boys and girls? FrankenFemme! I have a list of amazing people I want to sit down and talk about this all with too. Mostly my ladies list. You know them all (it’s a few of you reading this). These are moms. Been there, done that! I want to hear their voices on “Anti-Bullying” and this (Progress)ion surrounding it. Get inside their heads on what’s happening, especially to our boys. I’ve teased those talks for two years now, but it is time to make them happen.
These are the most important discussions of our time. It’s how we begin marching back out.
"Bully" (2011) was a Weinstein Company documentary that "raised awareness" of bullying on the school bus. Weinstein et al were on the left. James McGibney became the online hero of the anti-cyberbullying movement in 2010 only to have his Twitter account suspended a few years later because of his association with online bullies. McGibney has always been on the political right. So during the first Obama term, there was a consensus that bullying is bad. No one likes being bullied. There was too much of it, and we should do something about that.
Three notable events stand out. First, we put little worry machines ("smart phones") in our kids' hands. This is how we got brawls breaking out in school cafeterias to create viral videos while students race from their classes to get the most viral video of because they got a text about it from a student already struggling to capture the most viral video. Our faith in technology was misplaced. Kids were playing Tumblr games to learn their gender identities instead of learning math or science or any other subject. The impact on arts and humanities education is even worse.
Second, in 2011 the Obamas put a spotlight on the issue and created public-private partnerships to end bullying once and for all, changing human nature through administrative policy. The government was here to help with the bullying problem. During the second Obama term, this new crusade against bullying was enlarged and extended to anything deemed harmful, especially words. The main theater of this activity was the Department of Education. American educators were administratively disciplined to "respect gender identities" because to do otherwise in any form, especially words, was now "bullying." See how that works?
Third, covid happened. The bullies made us wear masks and get vaccines and socially distance and shut down everything because to do otherwise was literally murdering them. Now you see Taylor Lorenz etc all wearing their masks as political signifiers more than anything. A national emergency happened and the real bullies showed us who they were. They are still showing us. A new consensus has formed in America.
Alex Libby, the subject of "Bully," was embraced by his classmates after they watched the documentary. Turns out that kids need to work out their status in the world, struggle against the oppression of other kids, play together outside unsupervised, and stay away from screens to become normal, functioning adults. Turns out human nature is immutable and contra Barack Obama, bullying is both natural and inevitable, being part of human nature. Turns out that, especially for young men, a process of overcoming challenges and getting over ego when you tap out is absolutely vital to becoming a grown-up.
That’s exactly right. We need constructive feedback from our peers. In the Navy, I watched this campaign trickle its way in. An “ass chewing” is unpleasant, but only get one if you screw up. To avoid the discomfort of another one, you correct yourself. Slowly this dynamic began to shift, and before long, Sailors who were offended began filing grievances. Leadership was being reprimanded for their Sailors having their feelings hurt. But that’s the whole point! You are supposed to feel shame! It didn’t take long for the under-performers and slackers to feel empowered by this victim card, and now the benefits of constructive negative feedback has been thrown out with the bathwater almost entirely. We need a new regime to take the reins of our military and turn this around. The military is the worst place for this nonsense to permeate. Great piece my man! As usual. 😉