SHOWTIME: 9:15 pm US Eastern, July 19, 2026

SHOW IS AT 9:15 TONIGHT!

Tonight we’re going to look a single topic: the black American reaction to the Karmelo Anthony murder conviction. Spoiler: the majority are happy Karmelo killed Austin Metcalf.

That is, when they’re not spinning wild conspiracies that Karmelo dint do nuffin, that Austin’s brother was the murderer, or that Austin’s father was. Yes, really. You’ll see and hear it all tonight.

America is having a crisis called “black culture.” Not just a few black people, not a loud minority. Black culture itself is in sanity free-fall. It’s so severe that prominent black commentators are calling the murderer the victim, while they call the dead white victim a psychopathic scumbag.

Put on your mask and take a deep dive with us tonight on Disaffected as we plumb the depths of the Karmelo conspiracy.

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If we were in person, not behind a screen, I would work to avoid telling you. I’d lie. I’d find a plausible excuse for avoiding something so that you wouldn’t know about my fear because it’s humiliating to me when people see it in person. (One or two people have seen it and know about it in person, and that’s OK because they’re my real friends. One of those friends was with me for this story I’m about to tell).

I have a desperate, extreme fear of heights. It’s worse than most people think of when they think of people who are afraid of heights. Sometimes I can’t bring myself to walk up one single flight of stairs to the second floor of a building.

Yesterday I made some progress against it. I suggest recognizing and consolidating small victories you achieve over fears, phobias, or bad habits. Really notice them, and coach yourself to see them as cumulative progress.

My fear of heights is dire. It’s not just nervousness, but extreme neurotic panic. It’s gotten much worse over the past 20 years. Open stairs with no walls, suspended escalators, atrium balconies, suspended automotive bridges.

Even roads on the side of gentle mountains terrify me if I can see down into the valley at the side of the road.

It’s quite bad. I’ve missed appointments, even flights, because of my inability to make myself climb a staircase or walk across an elevated walkway.

The Staircase in My Mind

There’s a fictional staircase that haunts me. It’s connected in some way to my fear of heights. I do not know how it’s connected or why. It’s not clear if my first encounter with this staircase in childhood caused my fear, or if these stairs became attached to it, or if they symbolize it, or just what.

There’s no apparent reason this staircase should have scared me in the first place.

It’s this one. You can see the opening to it in the lower left of the frame.

Here’s another view.

It’s the staircase in the house lived in by Carrie White and her mother, Margaret, in the 1976 movie Carrie.

Knowing as you do that my mother was very like the personality deranged Margaret White, and knowing as you do that Carrie has been a psychological landmark in my mind for me because of that, it might seem obvious why I’ve fixated on this staircase.

But it’s not obvious to me. Yes, the scene shows Margaret stabbing her daughter and sending her down the staircase to her presumable death. So far, so obvious. And maybe it’s that, the evil domestic psychology of that, that scarred my mind.

But the thing that scares me about that staircase is that there’s no handrail. The stairs just “float” between two walls. From the first time I saw this scene as a child, that scared me. A lot. Much more than makes sense. Right now as I think about it and type this I feel vertigo in my stomach and an urge to throw up. Because there’s no handrail. There’s nothing to grab onto. You get one chance to do it right. If you slip and fall, it’s over.

This staircase has worried my mind for 45 years and I see it in my mind’s eye when I’m looking at tall, suspended staircases or escalators in the real world.

One of life’s perversities is that my first house, the first one I bought as an adult, had just this staircase in it. It was a late 1800s Cape Cod with two small upstairs bedrooms. The kind of house they call a “one-and-a-half story”. The stairs were exactly like these, floating inside the walls with no handrail. Somehow I was able to get over my fear of them quickly, but I always held onto the ceiling/floor that jutted out over the opening in the wall.

I can’t figure it out. The characters of Carrie and Margaret will always haunt me; there’s something so similar, so much like “home” in that relationship—I’ll never shake it. My mother was so like Margaret White, including the crazed affect and “devotion” to her cause, even though my mother was at war with God and Christianity, not an overzealous fanatic believer like Margaret was.

Decades later, I now know that Carrie colonized my mind so thoroughly because my subconscious knew that my mother was absolutely capable of coming down the stairs with a knife in her hand while she smiled. As child in fear-fascination watching this movie, I did not know that consciously. But I did know it.

Yesterday I crossed a bridge

Yesterday I had to cross an elevated pedestrian bridge over a highway to get to a destination. There was no choice, no alternate route. There was no possibility of refusing to cross because such a refusal would have had bad consequences for my friend.

When I crossed in the morning to enter the place, I jogged across it speaking to myself in song inside my head to distract myself. It worked well enough, and by the time I got to the other side I thought, “This isn’t really so bad.”

When I had to leave at the end of the day I decided to make myself walk, not run. I started out by keeping my eyes pointed down so I couldn’t see the drop-off on either side.

It was OK. I was tempted to run, but I didn’t let myself. Then I looked up just a little and told myself “You can do this. Panicking is a choice, and you don’t have to choose it.”

Kept walking, sedately even. By the time I got to the other side, I had almost no fear.

I can’t tell you how to do it, but I can say that if you can lecture yourself directly in words-”I can choose not to panic, and I’m making that choice right now”-sometimes you can snap yourself right out of the panic. By will alone.

It worked, and I’m pleased.

Good luck to you on your own version of this.

When: Wednesday, July 15, 2026, 3 pm US Eastern time

Where:

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Join us for a livestream conversation between Josh and Disaffected viewer Sherry. We’ll discuss “going no-contact” with an abusive parent. When is it justified? When is it necessary? Are you doing wrong or failing to honor your father and mother if you end a relationship with an abusive parent?

Sherry was born to a psychopathic single mother in the early 1970s. She grew up neglected and abused by a mother who cared more about scoring drugs and dates than she did about her daughter. After multiple attempts to “mend fences,” Sherry ended contact with her mother.

Bring your comments and questions to the live chat.

This is the extended conversation we started on last Sunday’s episode of Disaffected.

I should not feel compelled to put such a disclaimer at the top. That I do feel compelled is evidence of the problems I discuss in this piece. What I’m doing here in this introduction is soothing the feelings of adults in a way no writer would have had to do 40 years ago.

Apologies, but that’s where we are in 2026.

—Josh

Do you want a return to normal? Then you have to accept that the only way we get to return to normal is to say things that you’ve been trained to flinch at.

Things that are Not Nice.

On Disaffected this past Sunday, I talked about how saying normal things has become “misogynist/right-wing coded”. I have a reputation for saying “extreme” things. Trouble is, those things are not “extreme.” They’re only 2020s Extreme (TM).

While I’m more disagreeable than average, I’m not “extreme” by any standard reasonable people would have recognized a few decades ago. Part of why men like me are called “extreme” is because having normative male attitudes—reality is real, plain speech is best, you are responsible for yourself, whining should be mocked—has been socially pathologized. Having boundaries is called “being abusive.” Failing to accept lies, misdirection, and emotional manipulation is called “not being a team player.”

Another way to put this is that the cultural father has been demoted and replaced by the cultural (devouring) mother. We’re out of balance. Here’s the part a lot of well-meaning people don’t want to accept: getting back to balance is going to require privileging a male, fatherly response much, much harder than seems “comfortable.” For a time, we’re going to have to remove our thumb from the distaff side of the scale and push down hard on the other side.

Like this.

If you don’t recognize the picture, you’re not as fully triggered as I’d like you to be. It’s a still from the wildly popular 50s sitcom Father Knows Best.

Millions of people are dissatisfied with our culture. They mourn the loss of manners, etiquette, rearing children to be responsible. They’re tired of failing public education that cannot instill 6th-grade reading and math skills by graduation. They’re extremely sick of being told that heterosexuality, having a family, and being white, are acts of colonization and abuse against poor widdle victims.

Are you one of those millions tired of this? I am too. There is a solution, or at least the start of a solution.

But you’re going to have to accept that you may not Super-Like (TM) that solution. Getting back to reality requires recognizing and speaking reality, and those are the things you’ve been persuaded to reject, to flinch at. Learn to stop flinching at things that wouldn’t startle you silly if you’d heard them 30 years ago.

That solution starts with Saying Not-Nice Things.

Here are some Not Nice things that have to be stated in public, without apology, repeatedly, until the tantrums stop:

—Black culture is corrupted and black people behave horribly. They must be corrected. That correction is going to have to come from white people, because we coddled and created this monster black culture. They’re not going to stop themselves.

—There are far too many women in politics and positions of power. It has ruined trust and institutional credibility.

. . .read on with a paid subscription

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-Should you go “no-contact” with your abusive family members? Since anti-conservative woke people have been cutting off their parents simply because the parents are conservative, “going no-contact” has come under criticism. But when you’re dealing with an abuser, it could save your health and life.

-Friend of the show Sherry joins us to talk about being raised by a psychopathic mother amid poverty and drugs. Find out why she went no-contact, and why it’s OK for Christians to sever ties with abusive parents.

-Madonna looks like a cast extra from the Walking Dead. Why are we still making narcissistic, plastic celebrities filthy rich? A reflection on why damaged people fall in love with damaged stars.

Did you like the show?

Throw us some cash support!

-Disaffected is sponsored by purveyors of the finest cured meats. Visit biltongusa.com and use promo code JOSH to get 10 percent off your order.

-Slocum Consulting: You can book an hour with Josh on video to talk about troubled relationships, political clashes at work, and more. If you’re looking for someone who won’t call your concerns “crazy,” Josh is the guy you want. Book at

https://www.joshuaslocum.net

I was moving a lamp and a clothes-drying rack when I noticed some jive-ass bullshit flopping about in the corner near my feet. I didn’t even jump, because I’m acclimated to living in the country now, and that means you will have mice.

You know that, right? If you live in the country, you simply will have mice. It doesn’t matter if you keep your house clean; it’s nothing to do with that. It’s to do with the fact that you live in the country, mice live in the country, and like you, they appreciate having a home.

My family lives in the upstairs flat in my house; I live in the downstairs. They’re trapping mice with snap traps, while I have kitty Mina to do it for me.

So I figured it was another mouse and I was about to scold Mina for slacking off when I noticed it doing un-mouse-like things. Hopping half a foot. Hopping at the wall like it was gonna scale it.

“Mice don’t usually do that,” I says to myself.

Well it was no mouse.

Yeah. A big old freakin’ toad. How did that toad get in my house? I don’t know, but he did.

Or she. My sister told me the other day that the lady toads are bigger than the boy toads, and it turns out she was right. All this time I’ve been watching the toads that live in my sunken window well on the mossy rocks, calling the largest one Big Daddy. But it’s really Big Mama.

When I look at the little guys and this one big girl sitting on a rock I think to myself, “How is he gonna do his business on these heifers?” Somehow they do, I guess.

Anyway I had to chase the toad and catch it to bring it outside, which it did not understand as it squirmed and fussed around with its little amphibi-paws on my fingers. Here’s an illustration based on a toad encounter from two weeks ago.

I told Fred the woodchuck (his family lives on the river bank in my back yard) about it and he was like “Ooooo gurrrrrrrl.”

Anyway, it’s like this around here.

Help yourself to the coffee but mind the rat poison cuz it looks just like Skinny and Sweet.

A few things are true at the same time:

-Social media (really, text-only communication at base, but elaborated by the structures of social media) strips communication of tone, intent, body language, and most other indicators that show good-faith or bad-faith. Yet it is not impossible to make good guesses about whether someone is in good faith or bad faith from text alone. No system is perfect.

-I appear to many people to be excessively reactive and harsh. To some degree, I am. I have personality flaws.

-At the same time, it is not always the case that “Josh is excessively [read: without reason, and just because he’s cussed by nature] harsh.” It is often that I won’t tolerate what is most likely to be a bullshit conversation move. Examples include: plausible deniability; deliberate ambiguity so as to be able to “win” no matter which way it goes; personalizing about an article or comment; and inappropriate demands to stop generalizing because a reader has hurty feelings.

Most people buckle under to covert-aggressive (you know it as “passive aggressive”) social manipulation. They have internalized the narcissistic dictum that the villain is the one who demands clarity and good faith (or who speaks directly or swears or gives back as good as he gets), and the innocent is the one who cries most piteously about being held accountable.

We are in a feminized culture, and feminine narcissistic aggression is everywhere online. It’s cloaked. It pretends to “be concerned.” Most people fall for it. My masculine rejection of that reads exaggeratedly to modern people as “really aggressive” or “abusive.” This is not usually the case.

There are conversational dealbreakers for me. When these occur, I will either reject them harshly and specifically, I will walk away and refuse to continue the conversation, or I will mute or block the person who communicates this way as a habit:

1. Dishonesty—Lying is unacceptable. Lying takes many forms. Scads of people are habitual liars in our era, but we don’t recognize them as liars because they don’t just clumsily state a flat untruth. They take a slightly more sophisticated approach.

   
   Instead, they lie by pretending they don’t understand what someone else is saying. This is the most common form of online lying in the 2020s. It’s captured well by :
   

   

   
   It’s not just leftism. “Conservatives” do this too. Our very culture itself is modeled on dishonest narcissistic maneuvers in our era, and these respect no party lines.
   
   My belief is that most people who the average reader takes as “stupid” or “not bright” or “who misunderstands” are not actually stupid, are often at least of average intelligence, and they understand the issue perfectly well.
   
   They’re not stupid, they’re lying.

   
   I’m not talking about abstruse philosophical or mathematical concepts. I’m talking about things like assuming that blacks or sensitive women or emotional gays are “unable to understand averages or per capita.” No. A minority truly are slow enough that they don’t understand these things.

   
   Only a minority. Most people do understand these things. They are pretending not to understand them. That pretending is called “lying.” It displays narcissistic character traits.

   
   I will not tolerate that, and I will not “be nice” and pretend that they misunderstand. The majority of people want to pretend (and they want other people to pretend along with them) because it makes their tummy feel bad to have to confront the reality that people are constantly lying when they use words that “sound nice.”
   
   Well, they are constantly lying to get one over on others. Narcissism and lying are socially and monetarily rewarded in our era.

   
   My objection to this behavior is not evidence that I’m mean, or overly aggressive. It was an entirely normal disposition for an adult man to have before about 50 years ago. A lot more women in those days had this disposition, too.
   

2. Moral equivocation and “equalizing”— What is it? Here are some examples:
   
   -Observing a dispute in any context and declaring that “well, they’re both fighting/saying-naughty-words so they’re both just as bad.”
   
   This is an infantile, pre-adult “moral framework.” To believe this, a person must admit that he or she does not recognize any moral distinction between a deliberate aggressive provocation, and the defensive response to that provocation. To believe this requires a person to “not believe in” self-defense. It requires a person to believe that it’s “just as bad” that I hit my mother in the face at 13 years old in self defense as it was for her to beat me and stalk me around the house screaming in my face for years. It requires a person to believe that a man who cold-cocks an aggressive driver in the parking lot who laid hands on the man’s wife is “just as bad” for hitting the aggressor back to protect his wife.
   
   Thing is, almost no one believes this nonsense. When they equivocate this way, they are (once again) lying. They know the difference full well. It’s that they don’t emotionally like the reality because they want their own personal ox gored, and they’re willing to pretend they don’t understand basic morality in order to accomplish that.

   
   Another way of describing this is what I call Kindergarten Teacher Morality. I observed it as a schoolboy who was often targeted for physical bullying and fights because I was a sissy. Boys would torment me, hit me, and when I finally blew my stack and went berserker the teacher would make both of us give up our lunch recess because “I don’t care who started it—you’re both equally bad for fighting.”

   
   Kindergarten Teacher Morality is, by definition, immoral. If KTM ruled in American court rooms, every person who used a gun to eliminate a robber or rapist, every person who slugged another guy on the street to stop that guy from hitting his wife or children, would be given a maximum prison sentence. You will notice that this is exactly what the narcissistic left tried to do to subway hero Daniel Penny.
   
   The very notion strikes you as absurd because it is absurd. And it is immoral.

If you see me reacting in a way that strikes you (on the surface, without knowing any history or context) as excessively harsh, it is usually for the reasons I list above. There is usually a history or context. I have usually made an odds calculation in my head about how likely it is that someone is, consciously or unconsciously, using these manipulative strategies.

You may have a different set point than I do for suspecting this. I’d bet most of you have a different set point; that seems to be the case generally. I’m the odd man out on this one. Most reading this probably believe I’m “too harsh” and “too uncharitable.”

I just as strongly believe that most people are way too lenient, way too cooperative with obvious narcissistic manipulation, and too timid for their own good or the good of people around them.

Yes, there is an error rate in my method. I do sometimes jump too quickly, and see bad faith where there is none. But my hit rate is much more accurate than a coin flip. Most of the time, not always, but most of the time, I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing. When I don’t, and when I stick my foot in my mouth, I will admit it and I will apologize as publicly as I made my mistake.

I can imagine that this piece itself will strike some readers as “super aggressive,” but I can’t help that. I hope it’s at least clarifying on some level, and thank you for reading it.

• Telling millions of people how their autism makes them have a hard time communicating with others but in the most interesting way

• Telling millions of people about how put upon they are in a world of “neurotypicals”

• Posting pictures of them doing doing Quirky Activities Like Being A Girl Who Skateboards and how their autism makes them Super Good At It

• Telling millions of people the intimate details of arguments with friends, family, and girlfriends and how it’s all because the neurotypicals don’t have theory of mind for spergs

• Rewriting their entire biographical history in light of their newly discovered autism diagnosis so that everything they ever did was the most autistic thing ever

• Recasting every area of interest-storm chasing, steam trains, ocean liners, whatever, as “autistic” and insisting that every other person who likes that subject area is Also Autistic Just Like Me

If you can, stop and clear the palette of your mind. Try to see this fresh, not primed by what you’ve been told is the right way to see “autism” for these past 10 years.

Ask yourself this question:

-Do these behaviors truly seem “autistic” to you? Do they sound like the behaviors that would be done by a person with a profound neurological impairment that makes socializing difficult?

-Or, do they sound like narcissistic behaviors to you?

Join me and guest Aimee Terese for a conversation about the narcissistic, Cluster B takeover of our society. Aimee sees the same narcissistic, manipulative behavior in society that she experienced as a child in the home; the thesis of Disaffected. She also sees the way women and feminized men camouflage their abusive manipulations behind feminine tactics like plausible deniability and tears.

Join us in the live chat! You may also ask Aimee about her sassy Rhoda-style headwrap.

What: Disaffected Livestream with live chat and guest Aimee Terese

When: Wednesday, July 8, 3 pm US Eastern

Where: Any of these platforms

Youtube

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Twitter/X

Let me start out by telling the silent majority to fuck right off.

We only hear from you when you’re “feeling uncomfortable” that the rest of us are noticing the problem and talking about it. You’re not so silent then. You’ve got lots of words and tears and demands for “I’m not like that” and “all my friends aren’t like that.”

For a silent majority, you never shut up when more engaged and responsible people do the work you refuse to do by pointing directly to a problem and saying “enough of that.” You come out of the woodwork to bellyache. You cry about how mean men like me “act like we’re all perverts/misandrists/psychopaths.”

There you are, digitally wringing your hands about how MEAN and STEREOTYPING other people are when they notice that your demographic has been taken over by narcissists and performative emotional toddlers.

You can apply this to any group of people claiming to be a “silent majority”:

• Non-feminist women

• Non-ghetto black people

• Gay people who don’t walk around in chaps showing their wang to children in parades

• Legal immigrants who came to the US the right way

Any group of people whose social reputation is getting dinged by the illegal, rude, or obscene behavior of their most prominent members does this obnoxious pleading. “Most of us are normal, you just don’t hear from us!”

Then why am I hearing from you right now? You obviously have a voice. We see that you are able to bestir yourself to comment on a social issue.

So why do we only hear from you when you don’t like reality, and you don’t like us noticing? Where are your words when the destructive members of your cohort do damage to society and to your cohort’s reputation?

You don’t say shit.

Because you’re freeloaders. You take, but you don’t give. You want your reputation coddled, but you refuse to take any control over your reputation. You won’t police your outliers. You won’t even admit that they’re not a tiny minority.

You don’t even respect those of us who are doing your job for you. That’s right. People like me are doing your job for you. We’re trying to socially punish bad behavior so that all of us can enjoy a better society, and we’re taking on the load you leave at the side of the road because you’re lazy and cowardly.

Here’s an example. UK political commentator Nick Buckley posted about the sorry state of “LGBTQ+”

Right as rain comes the “won’t someone think of the silent majority?:

Shut the everloving fuck up. If you’re going to be in the silent majority, then for Christ’s sake be silent.

Your social credit card limit has been reached. You’ve made no payments on your debt (that’s what your silence is, a lack of payment toward your social debt), so you have no credit to spend asking people not to say hurty things about your tribe.

You’re flat-busted broke, and beggars can’t be whiners.

You want to join this conversation? I’d honestly love to have you. But you don’t get to plead on behalf of the silent majority. You either stop being silent and do your part, or you shut up and get verbally knocked around like I’m doing right now.

Speak up or fuck off.

Sally Struthers-style appeal:

“Do you want to hear more bitchy tirades directed at gormless assholes? Sure, we all do! Starting at just $5, you can buy Josh and Kevin a “Ko-Fi” to support this bitterness.

Just click on my picture, below, to buy the boys a Ko-Fi at Ko-Fi.com/disaffected!”

Taylorleigh
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Boys:

Groyperson
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Maxlooks

My new Gen Z name:

Clavuncular

Sunday, July 5, 2026, 9 pm US Eastern

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-America’s 250th birthday passed with a whimper compared to the 1976 bicentennial celebration. Woke isn’t dead. Can we keep this republic?

-The feminization of the West now has us watching British lady cops run to arrest a white boy after *he* was assaulted while the black assaulters walk away. Are we ready to tell women “no” yet?

-A farewell to the once-beautiful city of Ithaca, New York, now a graveyard of reanimated meth zombies and gangbangers. Watch carefully, because this is coming to your “safe red city” too unless YOU stop it.

Did you like the show? Throw us some cash support!

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https://www.joshuaslocum.net

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When I see these people, as I so often do living in the blue/progressive/Cluster B Northeast, my usual reaction is disgust, and often irritation or anger. I’m in Ithaca right now helping my family move to my house in Vermont. It’s not a moment too soon; it’s years overdue.

It is like this. Ithaca is Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights in motion. Beings, para-humans, move about the city. The young and smug are aggressive. With their bound breasts and testosterone beards, young women who call themselves men strut down the street with their septum-pierced noses pointed skyward. Two of them, nasty, aggressive-faced dykes, tried to cause me to hit them in my car, as is frequent in towns like this.

You don’t believe me, some of you. But I tell the truth. In cities like Ithaca, and Burlington, Vermont (I presume it is the same in Portland, Seattle, etc.), young women (yes, it’s usually women) frequently speed up as pedestrians to put themselves in front of your car as a challenge. I crept so slowly, carefully, into the intersection, knowing that college kids today refuse to look in either direction when they cross.

I waited until it was clear. I checked that the light was in my favor. I glanced at the WALK sign and confirmed it had a red STOP hand symbol. I started my turn. The two “trans” bulldykes immediately strolled quickly into the intersection so I had to slam on my brakes.

“They did that on purpose, you know,” said my brother in law, who works downtown and sees this every day. “They want you to know it, too.”

I know. I see the sociopathic smirks on their faces. I know they see two middle-aged white guys in a clean late model car and they hate us. They are absolutely willing to risk their own bodily integrity, and their lives, for the chance to be “oppressed” by my inability to suspend the laws of physics while they break pedestrian traffic laws. Why wouldn’t they? They’re already killing themselves with testosterone and restricting their rib cages with breast binders (only necessary until they do the ultimate act of “cutting” self-harm, mastectomy).

I’ve been dealing with aggressive pedestrians like this for years in Vermont.

Turn the corner past the Methodist church, one of the few gothic churches in stone that remains a church (nominally, falsely), not a vape shop, “community activist space,” or a night club. See the stained glass windows obscured by the LGBTQ+ flag, the Black Lives Matter signs.

Turn down State Street and look at windows in the diner, the bicycle repair shop, the veterinary clinic. All of them believe “no human is illegal,” all believe “women’s rights are human rights,” all believe that “love is love.” Walk through the enormous, fantastically decadent and sprawling luxury grocery called Wegmans, and pass under 20-foot banners hanging from the ceiling exhorting you to enjoy “pride, together!” this June.

If you notice the para-humans while you drive, you’ll see that they’re in a somnambulist state. Dead eyed. Grotesquely fat, or methamphetamine thin. There’s the addict on the corner with his “Hungry HUMAN” cardboard sign. There’s the whore waiting for a car to pull over, or is she? In 2026 you’ll never know since her attire is indistinguishable from what rich Cornell girls pay hundreds of dollars for. As Dolly Parton noted, it takes a lot of money to look that cheap.

Young black men saunter down the streets with foot-high afro-dreads, “wife beaters,” and their asses sticking out over the pants with waistbands around the back of their knees. They’re not “black people,” they’re niggers. And they want you to know that they’re niggers, but so help you God, don’t you dare say so. If you want to live.

As is the case in all Northeastern cities, the roads are in. . . no, “disrepair” is not strong enough. The potholes and frost heaves are so deep, and have been left for so many years, that your car is genuinely at risk of breaking an axle if you do not thread oh so very carefully through at 20 miles per hour.

The city is dying, and everyone pretends it isn’t.

You know from my past writing that Vermont, too, is in a bad way. But places like Ithaca are in a circle closer to the center of Hades.

Thank God my family is leaving with me in a few days. We’re not going to paradise, but we are going to a house on a dirt road in the country with quiet, with robins, with deer, with frogs, and with trees that provide a background whisper instead of the electro-despair hum of urban decay.

It was the man at Taco Bell who broke me.

He was a grotesquerie. One of the worst I’ve ever seen. If you had seen him, you would have felt as you did the first time you saw the antagonist in the movie Hellraiser.

He was about 30. From the backs of his fingernails to his jawline he was covered in tattoos that did not bear close examination. I gasped when I saw his wrist. He had used a cigarette, or a heated metal punch, to burn a series of half-inch-deep holes around his wrist to give the impression that he was wearing a bracelet made of his own mortified flesh. The red inflammation is just now fading as the deep scar tissue takes prominence. He will never be able to take this manacle off.

Then he turned his lizard eyes to me. No, I am not being poetic, I am describing him literally and accurately. His eyes had a vertical slit for a pupil. The kind with that sickly neon-yellow-bile tint seen in reptiles. He was wearing contact lenses to give himself the appearance of a pit viper.

As I write this to you, a part of my brain is asking “Is this real? Can this be real? Are you just having a nightmare?”

It is real. But how can it be real? How have we created actual hell on earth? How does anyone survive this?

Unlike almost every other encounter I’ve had with the human demons, this time I wasn’t angry and disgusted. I was in despair for him. I wanted to cry out to God to give this man some hope because sure as shit no one on this earthly plane has.

Of course I know that I’m looking at Borderline Personality Disorder. I understand where it comes from, because I escaped my own hell in childhood where a depraved borderline wearing a maternal mask ruled over her children in a welfare-funded outpost of hell. I know the kinds of things this man has seen.

He broke me because he was nice to me, and for a moment I saw the human man behind the demon face. He smiled, just a little. A smile, not a smirk. He asked me politely if I’d like a paper receipt. When he wished us a good afternoon, it sounded like he meant it.

That’s not usual. Most people this far gone can’t break through the rotting corpse shell they’ve crawled inside. He’s still there, for now, but not for long. We have built a world that not only fails to put up guard rails that disincentivize such self-degradation, we have built a world that encourages it, claps for it, and cries tears of demoniac joy to witness such brave self-actualization.

I hear the character of Father Merrin in The Exorcist.

“I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us.”

I don’t know if there is a God, let alone one who loves us. But I think this man needs an exorcism. Conflicted as my stance is, that is what I believe. I think our nation needs an exorcism.

I wish I had the faith that many have. But even if I’m not sure myself, I wish I could convince this man that there is a God, that he loves him, or at least that love and good are possible.

I will pray for him tonight, and for us. May God deliver us, because I do not want to live in the Garden of Earthly Despair for another moment.

This here? “Miss Rachel?” This is not normal. It was never normal until recent decades. Miss Rachel may be an extreme example, but we have all heard a version of this overly melodic, cutesy-pronunciation, scrunch-faced glurge. Teachers now do it constantly. Women in HR are barely better when they speak to adults.

Not normal, and actively unhelpful.

Children are not stupid. Unless they’re actually mentally disabled, they’re not retarded. Wait—even genuinely mentally retarded children do not need teacher-melody-speak.

It’s not just that it’s not necessary, it’s actively insulting, and it encourages infantile behavior in children we claim to be trying to raise (into grownups).

• Speak to children in the same tone of voice you would use when having a civilized conversation with an adult.

• Speak to them clearly, and don’t dumb everything down for them.

• Make them work just a little bit past where they are.

• Speak as if you expect that they understand what you’re saying. When they don’t, you can explain in simpler words. But there is no need for “that voice” when you do it.

• Use misunderstandings to give the child a new vocabulary word. If you have to reformulate your statement with simpler words, stop and connect the simple word to the more complicated one right then and there.

• Children naturally want to grow up and they want to impress us with what big boys and girls they are. We must encourage this, instead of encouraging the opposite.

I remember being a child. Around the age of eight I noticed that some teachers were talking to me like I had brain damage. I told my mother it offended me, because it seemed like they thought I was too dumb to speak like a person. She agreed that it was insulting.

This was something my mother (abusive though she was) got really right. She never spoke down to us as children. She spoke in a way that assumed we were smart enough to understand, and that tacitly encouraged us to stretch and grow. No, she didn’t talk to us as if were were college grads leaving us confused. But she did not dumb down her vocabulary; she expected us to grow ours. This is what a parent is supposed to do.

Where does this urge come from? It’s not about the children. It’s about the women themselves. These chronologically adult women are actually emotional children. We have infantilized women generally, women have infantilized themselves, and they then infantilize the rest of us. Turn on any “serious” news broadcast where a Western female politician is talking to other adults, and you’ve got a good chance of hearing that repellent sick-sweet tone. You hear it in hospitals and doctor’s offices when some 30-year-old charge nurse asks “Are we taking our medicine today?”

I think this is projection of adult women’s infantile self-state onto others. It’s an unconconscious bit of costume play.

Whatever it is, it’s intolerable. Say no to it. Correct teachers who speak to your children this way. Do not tolerate being spoken to this way as an adult.

Resistance to the notion of bringing back real punishment in the West comes from an unspoken moral norm that we have silently absorbed for years. It’s never articulated out loud.

That norm is this:

“There is nothing a person can do, there is no crime so heinous, that he loses the legitimate claim to the caring and concern that we accord to normal, non-abusive people.”

Put another way, it means that even if he rapes a woman and kills her, he is still automatically entitled to the same degree of care, concern, and humanitarian treatment.

This moral norm is morally corrupt. It is the antithesis of justice. It is a socialist idea that redistributes emotional care and concern “equally” just as socialism does with capital.

It can also be described as a mother’s response. It is a grave mistake to apply motherly concern to non-motherly domains. The mother naturally feels love for her child almost no matter what. Even if he is convicted of a great crime, she will still love him. This is natural and understandable, and a necessary, unavoidable part of having something we call “mothers.” This psychology evolves to protect offspring.

But it has been off the motherhood reservation for years. There is a reason we don’t let a mother’s weeping sway the court when it imposes sentence on her murderer son. Yet, that is exactly what we do at societal scale. We let “a mother’s tears” control our response to psychopaths, criminals, and human scum. We have put ourselves in this bondage because we refuse to tell the feminine NO.

Bad people who commit outrageous crimes against others and society can, in fact, forfeit their claim to the moral concern we extend toward the good and the non-criminal.

In its most extreme expression, it means that a man can forfeit his right to live by committing crimes so extreme that he is executed.

Ultra-modern 20th and 21st century, first world, soft and gentle “morals” are not, actually moral.

No. Being soft and gentle this way is not “rising above.” It is not “taking the high road.”

It is an act of contempt and aggression toward stable society and citizens of good behavior and good will. It is lowering ourselves—and forcibly lowering others—into a gutter of violence, fraud, and intimidation.

Bring back flogging. Painful, humiliating, public flogging.

Use it to replace a great number of the prison sentences. Most of them don’t get served at full time anyway. It costs you and me a mint to pay for prison and to feed criminals.

It doesn’t seem to deter people, either, in part because it’s so easy to get off or out early.

Flogging solves so many problems:

1. It would correct behavior immediately. He’s not going to be a recidivist.

2. It’s humiliating and extraordinarily painful, and must be done in public. Televised. This will throw fear into even psychopathic criminals.

3. It costs next to nothing. Stop paying for years of prison and just mete the punishment out right there in real world. Quickly and briefly.

That guy who just defaced and damaged the DC reflecting pool because that’s what we do now when we hate Trump and normal nice things—he could get up to 10 years prison.

But he won’t.

And even if he does, that’s not going to deter this behavior. We’re way too far gone.

Tie him down and whip his bare back in public. He’ll never do shit like that again, and neither will a whole bunch of scumbags who are ready to do the same and worse.

This isn’t difficult to figure out. If it makes your tummy feel bad, I do understand, as it’s only been recently that I’ve been able to stomach it, because we have been mollycoddled and conditioned over decades to be masochistic dishrags. We’ll take any abuse no matter what, but we’ll wring our hands over whether we’re being “humane” to human pieces of shit.

But the fact that your tummy feels bad and you’re feeling the need to signal to others how your tummy feels bad (point at me and call me the Bad Man) doesn’t take this necessary conversation off the table.

Our weakness before violent, murderous scum, and before people who tear down our civil structure, is not normal and has little historical precedent. We are not more enlightened than people who came before us. We’re much stupider. We’re much more naive. We are 100 percent out of touch with universal reality and human nature since the dawn of time.

We’re weak. We may be fatally weak, too. This may, indeed, take down the West within our lifetimes.

You can squirm and fuss and accuse me of being all kinds of evil and it won’t change a thing. You can call me brutal, or a psychopath, or evil, and it won’t change a thing. I don’t care about criminals anymore, and I don’t care what other people think about my opinion, either. A lifetime of watching the abusive ratchet click shut has worn all the “caring” out of me. I don’t care if it’s not “humane.” It’s not supposed to be.

If you are not willing to harness the necessity of violence and channel it through proper, just moral order, you’re going to get violence anyway. Except instead of it happening to criminals, your daughter will be raped and your son will be killed.

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I’ve had enough.

Like many people, I am tired of being treated like dirt by rude, indifferent staff at businesses that I’m voluntarily supporting with my money. My patronage is part of what makes these businesses viable. I don’t have to spend my money there. No customer does.

I nearly wrote this anonymously, because I know from experience that reasonable customer complaints now are more likely to result in the staff or owners treating me, the customer, like an unreasonable enemy. Everything that used to be normal is inverted today.

But on the off chance that you, the owners of Positive Pie, do still care about how your business is run, I’m writing this here under my own name to put my money where my mouth is. I won’t be patronizing you again, so I’ll avoid any revenge your staff might be contemplating while preparing my order. There won’t be any more orders.

Where I’m Coming From

I’m a 51-year-old guy who lives outside Montpelier. I’m a writer and talk show host.

In my teens and twenties, I put in about a dozen years in food service. Mostly front of the house, with some kitchen experience.

The kinds of restaurants I’ve worked in include:

• Greasy spoon diners

• Corporate chain family restaurants such as Pizzeria Uno

• Privately owned casual dining joints

• Privately owned fine dining restaurants on the outskirts of New York City, the kinds of places celebrities dine at when attending their kids’ college graduations

The jobs I’ve held include:

• Waiter

• Busboy

• Bar back

• Prep cook

• Catering waiter for weddings and bar mitzvahs

Most of my experience is front of the house, waiting tables. That’s where the money is if you have good organization and a customer service personality. I have those things, and I made great money.

My experience taught me what a restaurant needs to be successful—enjoyed by customers, but also enjoyed by the staff. I’ve worked at badly run joints where the work is slipshod and the staff were ill-treated by owners. I’ve also worked at restaurants where the ownership puts their whole heart into the business and treats its staff like hard-working family.

The difference is usually obvious to the customer. You can tell when people enjoy working at a place where they are valued, and where standards are upheld.

I can’t know what it’s like to work at Positive Pie, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s unpleasant. Why? Because your waitstaff have consistently treated me like an annoyance.

I’ve been a carry-out customer of yours for a couple of years; your calzone is great and so is your pizza. The counter staff service is uneven—some of your people are pleasant to interact with, others are obviously stoned out their gourd and barely able to notice that they’re on the clock.

That’s OK (not great, not great at all) if all I’m doing is picking up a box and making my way home.

It is not OK when I come into your dining room and spend $70 on lunch.

Twice in the past few months I’ve had a meal at your place. Both times I had the same waiter. Both experiences were nearly the same.

Most recently:

• Your waiter, a tall bearded guy who appeared to be about 29 years old, refuses to communicate with the spoken word.

• He will not make eye contact

• He comes up to the table and says merely “S’up?”

• You are lucky if you’re able to catch his eye for anything you need, because he disappears for 10 minutes at a time (if you have short staffing problems, that is not my fault, and I’m not interested in pushback about how I should “understand” that. It does not excuse at least a minimal acknowledgment like: “Hey folks, I’m sorry. I’m the only one on the floor today and I know you’ve been waiting.” If he’d only said something like that, I wouldn’t complain, because I understand, having done his job).

• Like almost every restaurant these days, you have “forgotten” to put basic items on tables, like salt and pepper. Is this a “little” thing? Yeah. When it happens once. But like most other restaurants, it’s all the time. Customers have to ask for basic things (like cutlery these days) that should have been provided.

• This is the exact phrase I used, because I speak politely to service staff: “May I please have some salt and pepper?” The response I got was no eye contact. Your waiter just turned his back on me, grabbed them from another table, set them down heavily, and walked away.

• What would you think as a patron if you experienced that? That’s the kind of response that would normally indicate that the waiter meant to communicate annoyance or contempt. No, no—it does not matter if you’re “sure he didn’t mean that.” That is not polite, reasonable behavior, and I’m not insane or persnickety to think to myself, “What the hell did I do to offend him?” His behavior is unacceptable whether he “means it” or not.

• When I was finally able to get his attention for the check, he set it down hard too, again silently, and with no eye contact.

That’s enough. It may seem little to you, but it’s not. The experience of being a customer at most retail businesses these days is death by 1,000 paper cuts. The rude young man staffing your dining room today was just the last straw.

You are unlikely to find a more polite patron than me. I avoid sending back a steak that wasn’t cooked to my order. I don’t make a fuss when a dish is not well prepared; I take it in stride because I don’t like being perceived as a complainer. I remember what it was like as a waiter to have an unsatisfiable customer who embarrassed the rest of the party and made the waiter’s afternoon miserable.

I never “give orders” to waitstaff or treat them as if they were servants. I always say, “When you get a moment, may I please have a refill?” I can’t be any more polite or easy to serve. There’s nothing else I can do to signal that I’m friendly and won’t cause a problem.

Here’s the part where I get really candid because I have nothing left to lose: How dare your staff treat me like I’m some piece of shit interrupting their day? What’s wrong with your management, your business vision, and your standards?

I realize you’ve probably never had a letter like this. You’re likely to see this letter as coming from an asshole customer, because that’s the standard response in business today even when customers are reasonable.

But I’m not alone. Most people won’t tell you candidly what your service is like because they don’t want to cause a fuss. But I’m one of millions of Americans who are fed up with this shitty, rude service that’s taken over our culture in the past six years.

Recommendations

On the chance that you will take this seriously and realize my complaint is reasonable, I offer these. They’re basic, and they used to be second-nature. No one had to make a list out of them because businesses did them automatically:

• Staff should make eye contact with all customers, and greet them with a smile. Nothing over the top. Nothing slavish. Just ordinary politeness.

• Staff should be reminded to verbally respond to customers when the customers speak to them.

• Staff should be reminded not to slam items down on the table as if they mean to communicate irritation that the customer asked for an item.

• Staff should remember to put themselves in the customer's place. They should ask themselves, “If I were the one sitting at the table, what would I appreciate hearing if the food was taking a long time, or the service was slow because of understaffing?” It’s so easy and minimal. A quick, cheerful, “I’m sorry you’ve been waiting so long, and thank you for your patience,” would solve most problems and lead to a happy, rather than a disgruntled, customer.

• Staff should be reminded to speak ordinary business English. A grunted “S’up” is not acceptable. I’m not your frat bro.

• Basic items like salt and pepper need to go back on the table. Get out of your “Covid” mental groove, take a look at your operations, and bring back basic common sense in table service.

If you are willing to hear this as reasonable constructive criticism, you could begin to go back to good service and I promise you that patrons would notice. Word of mouth matters.

If your restaurant had operated along these ordinary, reasonable standards, I wouldn’t be publicly calling your service and reputation into question in front of the world.

Good luck.

Watch on Rumble

Watch on Youtube

-A recent report claiming 250,000 white British girls have been raped and trafficked by Muslims for decades brought the cold sadism found on the female left into plain sight. We’ll scrutinize it.

-Major League Baseball is punishing players who don’t meekly wear pro-LGBTQ+ messages on their uniforms. Sen. Josh Hawley is looking to punish MLB. Woke is NOT dead. Not by a long shot.

-Potpourri du Moquerie, featuring Michae–Michelle Obama’s galaxy-scale narcissism and more!

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