The new Daily Show is pretty bad.

Jon Stewart recently rejoined the conversation on his own non-network show, a little grayer but with his signature energy intact. He’s back to his consciousness-raising schtick, covering topics like gun violence and economic inequality with the deft balance we came to expect during his 16-year tenure in the Daily Show anchor chair.

Your Replacement Is Here

“Of course people are gonna challenge these ideas. There’s nothing really holding these ideas together, is there?”

King Critical argues in a recent video that straying from Liberal orthodoxy does not a Conservative make. He describes the arbitrary groupings with panache, walking us through how going to the source material first started him asking bigger questions.

“So, I looked into Islam and I came to an uncomfortable conclusion – I literally could not believe Islam is true. Because if I did, I would have to believe lots of horrible, horrible, evil things.” 

There are, of course, those who do not want us to speak. Why? Because, while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. 

My DVD copy of V For Vendetta froze about halfway through, not so much as a smudge on it. Not currently available on any streaming service, the eloquence of the fictional freedom fighter was out of my reach.

Strangely fitting for this Guy Fawkes Day, when even words have fallen under suspicion. Transwomen are women, and women are birthing people. 

“We define our sexual orientation as one thing and you’re changing it to another, and that’s the issue.” Self-described “old-school lesbian YouTuber” Arielle Scarcella sits stubbornly at the center of our cultural confusion.

“Now we have people telling us things like we have ‘complicated relationships’ with genitals? I don’t think me being a lesbian is a complicated issue. I think it’s just me being attracted to females,

However you feel about Dave Chappelle, he’s too big for the mainstream to ignore. His special The Closer has broken the cultural dam, unleashing the torrents of questions TRAs have worked so hard to keep us from asking.

The Flow Of Information

The staff walkout at Netflix made the news. NBC probably spun it the hardest, summarizing the day of protests as, “The media giant [was] forced to listen to its workers.” Because a longtime pillar of the establishment, now owned by Comcast, is just happy to see workers getting their own back, right? 

This week, Senator Joe Manchin insisted any extension of the Child Tax Credit payments should include a work requirement.

"Before you start saying, ‘is it going to be permanent?’,  let's see how we're doing this. Let's make sure that we're getting it to the right people.“

And who would that be, Joe?

"There's no work requirements whatsoever. There's no education requirements whatsoever for better skill sets – Don't you think if we want to help the children, the people should make some effort?" 

“Magic is a female fantasy and a male nightmare.”

The Witch has endured for millennia as a symbolic challenge to male supremacy. She represents our innate understanding of the power structure we live in, her different forms expressing our shifting feelings about Woman regaining her place on even footing with Man.

Magic was traditionally Woman’s purview – Our friends the Ancient Greeks, founders of Western civilization, worshipped a Goddess of Magic called Hecate. Hecate’s three faces are reminiscent of the traditional phases of a woman’s life – Maiden, Mother and Crone.

We are taught that Ancient Greece is the foundation of modern civilization.

Politics, Philosophy, Law – even Democracy itself was supposedly invented there, and we are still living in the paradigm created by the likes of Aristotle. We still discuss the Great Thinkers, offering reverential deference to the first glimmer of our present culture.

Enter: The Veil

Thing is, this seminal societal flowering was misogynist as all hell! These precious pillars developed during the first methodical clamping-down on the agency of women.

Last time our Readings took us to some pretty deep places in the Freudian unconscious. This time we’re looking at behavior that is in front of our faces every day.

I’m not the first to write an article inspired by Dr. Martha Stout’s superb book The Sociopath Next Door. It is riveting and filled with educational details. Dr. Stout employs narrative to draw characters who illustrate points from the easily digestible lists the book is populated with.

We have to stop holding back before it’s too late.

Dr. Amanda Foreman should be a household name. In her excellent four-part BBC series ‘The Ascent of Woman,‘ she explains why our past has never been a straight line: “The status of women is a barometer of a society’s tolerance, fairness and openness.”

Dr. Foreman asks the big questions – Why did history become dominated by men? Why has nearly every society placed harsh limits on us? And why are we so vulnerable to the changing winds of politics, economics and religion?