​But Harris objectively did generate enthusiasm. Her campaign announcement was followed by record-breaking donations and a massive spike in voter registration. It makes no sense that she got fewer votes than Biden. I also thought, like many, that women would flood the polls in droves to elect her because they're so pissed about losing Roe v. Wade. That didn't happen. In the states where abortion rights measures were on the ballot, they got significantly more votes than Harris herself did. That makes no goddamn sense at all. Voting for abortion rights and the guy who took them away in the first place is like... well, I won't even bother coming up with a comparison because it's self-explanatory. Anyway, I didn't see the same enthusiasm for Trump. Voters rejected him and his ilk in 2018, 2020, and 2022. The midterm "red wave" we were supposed to get didn't happen. Why would I have expected it to happen now? Despite the persistence of hopeless MAGA cultists who would suck Trump's dick if he dismembered their children in front of them, I hardly imagined he could be as popular now as when he lost four years ago. Within that time, he led an insurrection to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, he was found legally liable for rape, he was convicted of 34 felonies, his brain turned into cottage cheese, and several former members of his administration begged us not to vote for him. Attendance at his rallies dwindled, and hundreds of people left early while he rambled about Hannibal Lecter, sharks, and windmills. But now he wins the popular vote for the first time? What the fuck?

I certainly hope the possibility of fraud is being investigated. I said possibility. I'm not asserting that there was fraud just because I hate the outcome, and if no evidence of fraud turns up, I don't advocate for liberals to storm the Capitol and file scores of baseless lawsuits. But the results are sketchy and should be investigated. Republicans constantly accuse Democrats of the things they do themselves, and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if this were another such instance, especially since they have a 900-page blueprint for creating a dictatorship now that they control all three branches of government. It's not hyperbole, it's not a conspiracy theory, it's right there in their own words that have been available to the public for a long time. If we don't have a Christofascist theocracy within the next four years, it sure as hell won't be because Republicans didn't try. It will be because Americans stopped them.

Getting high the night before the eleaction to calm my nerves was a mistake. I should have gotten high the night of the election. I thought I'd want to be sober while I watched the results, and then Harris would win and my stress would dissipate. Instead, as I feared, I became suicidal for two days. When I was high, as I often do when I'm high, I grappled with my mortality. The high is more intense every time, and this time, I thought my heart might stop at any moment, and I felt so out of my body that I felt like if I relaxed completely, I would drift away from it and possibly never return. I had a one-sided argument that I couldn't die yet because reasons. I told this unseen and possibly imaginary something that if I could die temporarily and have a near-death experience right now, that would be great, but I didn't trust it to bring me back. And there was a whole other thing where I wondererd if the water heater on the other side of my bedroom wall would explode and kill or horribly disfigure me, but I decided that I trusted the homeowner to keep it well-maintained, so that was fine. I also heard a helicopter that sounded close enough to crash into the house. Anyway, the high was pure bliss, and if that's what actual death feels like, sign me up.

But instead I was in this reality where the worst person in the world just became my president again, this time with virtually no guardrails. I had to talk to a suicide hotline and several friends to upgrade to feeling nothing. (I also mentioned it to the aforementioned family member, who responded, "You could move to Costa Rica.") Of course my friends wanted me to stay alive so they wouldn't be sad, but they were miserable too, and none of them could promise me that the rest of my life won't suck. I do believe my life will get much worse next year when Trump raises the price of everything with his dumbass tariffs and puts an anti-vaxxer with a brain worm in charge of healthcare and food. My life will continue to get worse in the long term as Republicans gleefully shit all over the environment. Depending on how bad things get, Trump may run out of Democrats, journalists, and late show hosts to persecute and send the military after me for criticizing him since 2015. But I'm not just worried for myself, because unlike my conservative family members (yes, if you're reading this, I'm calling you out again. Bite me), I'm capable of empathy for people who are different from me. I feel deeply for everyone who's explicitly targeted by the GOP's Christofascist agenda and has more reason to be afraid than I do. Empathy is excruciating. I can understand why my family members and everyone else who voted against their fellow humans' lives prefer not to be burdened by it.

But of course, Trump voters have metaphorically stabbed themselves too. They lost big on Tuesday. They just don't know it yet. They're about to learn the hard way just how few shits their orange savior gives about them, and when they do, I hope I'm not too mature to rub it in their faces. At this point they have no excuse for not knowing better.

Beyond the specifics, though, what really crushed my soul and sapped my will to live was the realization of just how fundamentally vile this country is. It could have shown girls that they can do anything, but instead it showed boys that they can lie, cheat, and rape to their hearts' content and become the most powerful person in the world with no qualifications. I thought fascism would be defeated with a few elections and a lot of funerals. Now I see that it's deeply woven into the fabric of American society. I had heard that Gen Z boys were more racist and sexist than previous generations because of influencers like Andrew Taint and Nick Fuentes who for some reason haven't been shot yet, but I had no idea how bad it was. I suppose I should have guessed. A few months ago I documented my own experience with speaking out against sexist comments on social media and immediately being targeted by scores of men who accused me of trying to get laid because that's the only motivation they could imagine for treating women like people, but I thought they were a really loud and annoying minority. The phrase "Your body, my choice" went viral after the election. I recommend that all women carry firearms. Women aren't the source of this country's gun violence problem, so I have few concerns about them abusing said firearms. Also, doxxing white supremacists is not wrong. I don't 'understand why that's even a debate.

Speaking of cesspools, I just joined the mass migration from Twitter (where I've been suspended since June for refusing to delete my response to a racist who said that Juneteenth isn't a real holiday) to Bluesky, which is like Twitter except it isn't crawling with Nazis and isn't owned by a douchebag billionaire (yet). Actually, the CEO, Jay Graber, is a woman of color. Again, as I said last week, that in itself wouldn't be a sufficient reason to use the site, but it is a nice bonus that I get to support diversity in the software industry at the same time that I'm not supporting Elon Musk. I've already reunited with some of my ex-Mormon and progressive Mormon friends from Twitter, but the conservative Mormons who base their entire personalities on hating gay people and apostates are conspicuously absent. The downside is that I don't know who I'm supposed to argue with now. My feed is full of anti-Trump sentiments, inspirational quotes, Nancy comics, Homestar Runner screenshots, pictures of astronomy, and pictures of people's pets. How am I supposed to work up any righteous indignation over that?

I never got around to mentioning this, but my Twitter account has been suspended for over two months, and I've chosen to leave it that way. This was my third strike. First, I got in trouble for saying I can't wait until Putin hides in a bunker and kills himself. Twitter, being a haven for Russian bots, took that very personally. Then I got in trouble for saying that the only platform Nazis should get is one that comes with a rope and a long drop. Twitter, being a Nazi platform, took that very personally. Then this last time, I got in trouble for saying "Die mad about it" to a moron who said that Juneteenth isn't a real holiday. Since Elon Musk fired all the smart people, Twitter interpreted that common figure of speech as a threat of violence. I appealed the decision and suggested that they penalize the moron for being racist instead. Twitter upheld the decision and didn't penalize her. I appealed it again. It's been stuck on appeal for over two months. They clearly have no intention of touching it, and the only way I can regain access to my account is by canceling the appeal, deleting the post, and acknowledging that it was wrong. Screw that.

It's really for the best. Twitter brought out the worst in me. Of course, in my case, the worst means insulting and swearing at terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people who deserve all of it and so much more. I'm not even a little bit sorry for being mean to bigots who make the world a worse place with every breath they take. But I'm sure it wasn't good for my spirituality or my blood pressure. Also, Elon Musk is a colossal piece of shit, and I don't want to make any money for him, especially now that he's using it to get Trump re-elected. Elon Musk is a case study of how capitalists support fascists for personal gain. Also, if he weren't rich, he would already be in serious legal trouble for his fake voter registration website. Billionaires should not be allowed to influence our elections. Billionaires, frankly, should not be allowed to exist. No, I'm not advocating the French solution, as much as I admire and fantasize about it. Making them pay their share of taxes would also work. Anyway, here's a funny video from my favorite comedian about how stupid Elon Musk and his fanboys are.

First, indulge me while I pat myself on the back.

This new record has been set in large part thanks to my page about Ezra Taft Benson's 1987 talk "To the Mothers in Zion," which a lot of people looked up to verify that the LDS Church's general Relief Society president, Camille Johnson, disregarded the prophet's counsel in the 1980s and is now being celebrated by the church for it. The gaslighting is rather tedious. I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post.

Twitter is now completely X, which is a really cool name if you're in middle school. I'll probably just keep calling it Twitter to show my contempt for its owner. It's a dumpster fire of bullying and hate speech, and it deserves to lose all its advertising sponsors, but I keep using it because I have the unfortunate moral failing of really enjoying heated arguments with bad people. I've had a few more civil debates with okay people, but they didn't give me the same thrill. I was going to share several of the stupid LDS-adjacent Tweets that I saw this week, but as this topic probably interests no one as much as me, it isn't worth the effort. I'll just share one. I was one of the first people who saw it, and I couldn't believe my eyes. I gladly helped make it go viral-ish.

It's public knowledge that this man has a traumatic brain injury, and it's very obvious from his posts that he's delusional. I've tried to tell him that a few times. I know there's not a nice way to tell someone that they're delusional, but I tried not to be a jerk about it, and I hoped he could make the connection since he's aware that he has a traumatic brain injury. But no. Given the circumstances, I don't think he's guilty of the same intentional evil as most of his right-wing Mormon buddies, and I want to be sympathetic to him, but he's such an insufferable ass that it's impossible.

Most Mormons are, of course, as shocked and horrified by this man's belief as I was. Even on Twitter, many decent Mormons told him he was wrong. (The horrible ones were strangely quiet.) He claimed that only apostates and "progmos" were telling him he was wrong, and he doubled down.

So this is the nonsense of a mentally ill man who does not accurately represent what most Mormons believe. Nonetheless, I have no hesitation in using it to humiliate the LDS Church, because it is what the Book of Mormon teaches. It's what I was taught as a kid. It wasn't made into a big deal, and I didn't give it much thought, and I didn't realize how horrifically racist it is until I was in college - and then only because I stumbled, quite by accident, upon an article by Mormon apologists arguing that the skin color in the Book of Mormon is metaphorical. They presented a surprisingly sophisticated argument, and it persuaded me for several years. But it makes no sense in the obvious nineteenth-century cultural context of the book's origin, it isn't what Mormon leaders taught for most of their history, it isn't what was depicted in decades of visual media based on the Book of Mormon, and I'm pretty sure that even today it isn't a mainstream Mormon belief. I suspect that most Mormons, like me, honestly just don't think about this part of the book very much. I bet a substantial number of them don't even know about it because they've never read the whole book. One apologist got raked over the coals recently for suggesting that the skins in the book were the animal skins that people wore, and that's what Mr. Plumb is mocking in his Tweet. Ironically, he's correct about it being ridiculous.

Here's Spencer W. Kimball, a Mormon prophet, seer, and revelator, teaching the same thing in General Conference that this delusional man believes, because it's what the Book of Mormon says:

This was in 1960. Notwithstanding the widespread virulent racism that existed in 1960, normal people had at least figured out by then that skin color was not caused by curses from God. But Kimball also taught that masturbation led to homosexuality and women having equal rights led to divorce, so I'm not positive that he wasn't delusional too.

Kimball does deserve some credit for lifting the LDS Church's racist ban against full participation by members of African descent. Here's prophet, seer and revelator LeGrand Richards in an interview with Reverend Wesley Walters a couple of months later. Walters asked him if Mormons still believed that Black people were less valiant in the previous life. Richards said,

That was in 1978, in case anyone forgot. Mormon leaders don't say that stuff anymore, but I have yet to hear any of them endorse the "it's metaphorical" hypothesis.

The obvious nineteenth-century cultural context of the Book of Mormon's teachings about skin color is the racist Mound Builder myth. Many European settlers believed that the Native Americans were too primitive to have built the mounds and earthworks that dotted North America, so they speculated that those things had been built by an earlier race of light-skinned people before the darker-skinned people wiped them out. Many European settlers, without the benefit of modern anthropology or DNA science, also believed that the Native Americans were descended from Israelites. Lo and behold, both of those ideas became essential to the narrative of the Book of Mormon, and since neither of those ideas has the benefit of being true, it strains credulity to regard that as a coincidence. The argument that the skin color is metaphorical relies on the book coming out of an ancient Hebrew context without the modern concept of race, but it didn't. It so obviously didn't.

But that's not the worst part of the Book of Mormon's racism. The worst part of the Book of Mormon's racism is its assertion that the Native Americans deserved to be displaced and decimated by the Europeans because their ancestors abandoned God. And this is an absolutely core part of the narrative that can't be downplayed as "metaphorical." Over 20 times the book paraphrases the teaching, "Inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land; but inasmuch as ye will not keep my commandments ye shall be cut off from my presence." Even the chorus of the children's song "Book of Mormon Stories" (which has its own racism problem) repeats "Given this land, if they lived, rye-chus-lee." (emphasis in original) Few things could make it more obvious that the book was written by a man of European descent putting God's stamp of approval on his ethnocentric worldview. But this is an abhorrent thing to teach anyone, especially the descendants of the people who were displaced and decimated.

So again, I have no moral qualms about using Mr. Plumb's deranged Tweet to humiliate the LDS Church, because he's a more solid believer in its foundational text than its own current leaders are. I don't doubt that he causes more problems for them by saying the quiet parts out loud than I do by criticizing them on my blog. But if you're struggling with how to continue believing in the Book of Mormon as a divinely inspired ancient text despite its blatant nineteenth-century racism, don't worry, he has a solution for that too.

Twitter's pathetic lack of moderation has empowered conservative Mormons to fully out themselves as terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people. Of course, they don't have a monopoly on being terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people, but it's the hypocrisy and the delusion that really drive me up the wall. These terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people apparently believe in all sincerity that they're doing what Jesus wants, when in reality, he would smack the shit out of them if he were here. These terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people are representing the LDS Church to the world, and as long as it refuses to do anything about their behavior because it doesn't want to alienate its Republican base, it deserves to be represented by them.

I like liberal Mormons, though - you know, the ones who don't base their entire identity on bullying others. I don't think their beliefs make a lot of sense - they basically create their own religion that isn't the one being taught by the church they belong to - but I think they're great people, and I respect their right to believe whatever they want. Jim Bennett is a really exceptionally great, open-minded, loving man, which has made him a high-profile target for harassment by the scum of the Earth.

As soon as he posted this, a conservative Mormon with the self-awareness of a sea sponge tried to set a world record for proving him right.

I know Jim Bennett would never tell anyone to fuck off, becuase he's better than that. But I'll always be willing to step up and tell someone to fuck off on his behalf. And on behalf of others.

I was going to stop there to let my words carry their maximum impact, but I couldn't resist adding that the only platform we should be giving Nazis is one that comes with a rope and a long drop.

ADDENDUM: I'd like to thank this exceptional waste of oxygen, and whichever of her cult of stalkers is assigned to me, for the sudden spike in traffic to my obscure little website.

And I'm not even shocked anymore that conservative Mormons think this is okay:

Well, "The land of delusion" is pretty accurate.

Sometimes people on Twitter tell me to get therapy. Not because they actually care about me or mental illness, of course, or because they agree with the best practices of the mental health profession. But I did just go to therapy for a few months. I got it from an unlicensed USU student at a huge discount because I live in poverty. Like everyone else in that building, she was irreligious and politically progressive, the opposite of these Twitter people - not that she pushed any of that on me, but I made the assumption and she confirmed it. I mentioned on my blog when I started therapy, and then I thought I'd have a lot to say about it, but I didn't. Now I'm done for the time being because we ran out of things to talk about and also because I live in poverty.

At the beginning, I was just so excited to have a captive audience that I wanted to talk to her about all the deep intellectual things that I'm starving to talk about. I'd half-seriously considered hiring a prostitute to pretend to be interested in the things that interest me, and I assume this was cheaper. But she wanted to have actual therapy goals and stuff. She had the idea to read and discuss a chapter of The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through the Unique Perspective of Autism by Dr. Temple Grandin and Sean Barron each week, and since it's available to borrow for free on archive.org, I agreed. I went through a suicidal patch last summer when I realized that the loneliness I've experienced for my entire adult life is never going to go away. Now it's daunting to even think about trying to have real relationships. I'm still not sure if I will.

I've been a fan of Temple Grandin for a while. I'd never heard of Sean Barron. They bring very different perspectives to the book. It seems that Sean wants relationships for their own sake, while Temple just sees them as a thing she has to do to advance her career. Sean sees autism as a disease and thinks he's been cured of it by learning to think differently, while Temple just sees it as the way she is. I have some mixed feelings about their approach to teaching social skills in the book. I agree that people on the autism spectrum need to understand how to be polite and hygienic. I think I've already benefitted from some of the principles they explained, like showing interest in people and  knowing when it's okay to break the rules or lie. At the same time, though, neurotypical people should learn not to be ignorant assholes about things that don't matter. Sean tells the story of how he started to make friends with a boy in his class, but then he blew it, and the boy started bullying him like everyone else. The entire focus is on his lack of social skills, and at no point does he acknowledge that the boy was wrong to bully him. Temple mentions that she got a new boss who wanted to fire her for being weird, but she changed his mind by showing him how much she'd contributed to the company. She doesn't seem to recognize that her boss was in the wrong legally and ethically. She says she learned not to do certain mannerisms in public. She shouldn't have had to.

The other day, an anonymous Twitter account told people that I was always weird, even in the Mormon singles' ward. I asked him what I did that was so weird. He said, "Dude you wandered around shoeless muttering to yourself." He seems to have remembered wrong or conflated me with someone else, because I've never been in the habit of muttering to myself in public, but the first part is accurate, although he could have just as easily said "walked" instead of "wandered," but that wouldn't have sounded derisive enough. Walking around for exercise is entirely normal behavior. Doing so without shoes isn't, but so farking what? I didn't harm him. I didn't harm anyone. He just thought I was harming myself and needed therapy because it was different and therefore made him uncomfortable. Not that he ever expressed that to me in person, of course, though he claims that he knew me pretty well. (He's not the first anonymous Twitter account to make that claim. It's actually pretty creepy.) I wonder how many other Mormons just pretended to be my friends while having no qualms about telling people behind my back that I'm weird. It's funny how they think drinking coffee is a sin but being two-faced isn't. So that was kind of depressing, but I'm used to people unfriending or unfollowing me all the time, so it wasn't very surprising. And I read enough of his Tweets to confirm that he's an asshole and I don't want him as a friend.

The last chapter had a section on anger management which, unlike all the other chapters, included several comments from other adults on the spectrum. It was the first time I ever heard of a correlation between autism and anger. I've wondered sometimes if I'm just an exceptionally angry person. But Jerry Newport validated me by saying, "ASD folks are no strangers to anger. They have lots of reasons to grow up into angry teens and angrier young adults. Put yourself in their place. Imagine yourself being teased, constantly misunderstood, abused in the name of therapy and often genuinely confused and overwhelmed by it all - not just a few times, but hundreds, if not thousands of times. It is no wonder that I know many adults with ASD who are literally paralyzed by their anger." Then, I might add, people just blame you for being angry and tell you it's entirely your responsibility to make something edible out of the shit sandwich that they gave you.

I, for one, get angry about injustice whether it's against me or anyone else, and this world has no shortage of injustice. That's basically its defining trait. I'm angry about how I was raised and about how my entire generation has been royally screwed over by the preceding ones so that I'll never be able to own a house or retire, but I'm also angry about people murdering children in Ukraine and Palestine, people oppressing women in Iran and Afghanistan, people fighting against LGBTQ rights in my own country and too many others to count, etc. I think average Americans ought to be a lot angrier than they are about all this bullshit. It's called empathy. Some members of my family still believe that anger comes from Satan, and I think that's a really immature an unhealthy view. But since I'm also powerless to do anything about anything, my anger goes nowhere, and the only way to deal with it is to stop caring and escape through entertainment. I prefer music and movies. I hope to try mushrooms soon. I take some comfort in knowing that someday we'll all be dead.

Between Temple and Sean, I think I have more in common with the latter. Temple thinks in pictures. I think in words. My mind is constantly running an inner monologue, and the pictures I get in my head while reading are vague and unfocused. I just came to realize this about myself when I needed to put more description into my novel. Sean struggled more as a kid and had more anger. Before, I assumed that Temple had twice as many obstacles to overcome from being autistic and female, but from her description, it seems like those things canceled each other out to an extent, and she was treated better and learned more easily than a boy might have. (She has high praise for the structured, polite society of the fifties and sixties that she grew up in, so that's some white privilege too.) Sean mentions that he struggled with humor, that he tried to be funny by repeating funny lines from TV out of context until everyone was sick of him. This is where I differ from him. Somehow I've gleaned underlying principles of humor without even trying. I often forget to put them in my blog posts, but my novel is very funny. Please read it. Amazon Associates link: