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

Trevor Noah has always seemed more scripted to me. His tone changes pretty drastically when he’s off-script, his natural rhythm peeking out to reveal a softer, even pensive style. Ironically, these are the moments he looks most natural as Stewart’s successor – Trevor is also kind, but firm. Jovial, but principled.

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? 

Something wicked is brewing in conservative America.

The same culture wars that birthed incels have impacted the girls who won’t date them just as much.

Our refusal to draw mothering into the fold leaves a lot of girls feeling conflicted. Feminism fails them as long as it ignores the more nuanced questions of many women’s lives. 

Jen at Fundie Fridays knows a lot about it, “The misogyny on Caitlin’s channel is rampant and direct. She often uses the same talking points as incels when expressing her worldview.”

Bill Maher makes a great Boomer spokesman.

Sitting halfway between Bill and the Young People I think he’s yelling at this week, I remember his firebrand image from 25 years ago.

He’s always spoken for that segment of liberals who fancy themselves independent thinkers. They made a big splash as the new kids in town, when I was a kid. But the turmoil of the past quarter-century hasn’t triggered any growth as they became the dominant force in American liberal politics.

Think of them as liberal Libertarians – People who are Democrats because they want to avoid the Right’s racism and sexism, even if they’re not really interested in social programs. Identity politics is the perfect strawman they can slay over and over to avoid doing any collectivism. And it has many forms besides Wokism.

I knew something was up when I woke up to 19 notifications.

They had me right – A smallish account with only so much energy to defend myself. But they just really hated my Cyberpunk article!

After the original poster proclaimed it was “NOT ok to insult anyone because of their opinion,” a group of them wasted no time dogpiling me to tell me why my opinion meant I needed to die.

Hardly bothering with ‘transphobe,’ they labeled me ‘vile,’ ‘disgusting,’ toxic,’ (of course!) and even abusive. My writing was referred to as “a pile of dog shit.” I was told to take ‘feminist’ out of my bio. And called a bigot and a fascist, for good measure.

Watching Reddit go down in flames this week was way too satisfying.

Supposedly, they got to know ‘Aimee’ through a volunteer relationship. But no one ever bothered to Google the name!

Many people, myself included, had at least a passing familiarity with the Challenor crew before these latest events. David the Elder had gotten himself expelled from two political parties in the UK for generally being a nasty, pedophilic fuck, but especially for doing it in public a little too often.

‘Aimee’ the younger is a well-known validation junkie. So it was no surprise that, upon being given full Moderator powers, this person set about hacking away at anything that hindered this quest.

When your identity is built on a lie, reinforcing it is a constant preoccupation. This obsession bleeds into everything you do.

One Stunning&Brave soul calling himself Bella Blondeau shares his view through a trans lens darkly. The game Cyberpunk 2077 strikes him as pretty transphobic, and he would know!

But while trying to illustrate transphobia in gaming, Bella actually demonstrates his lack of understanding of gender theory or the real world he’s so desperate to avoid. He complains that the game is an “insidious attack on trans personhood” because characters are chosen based on the player’s voice.

“America’s sense of what it is to be intellectual, moral, or artistic; what it is to educate a child; what it is to foster justice; what it is to express oneself properly; what it is to be a nation – all is being refounded upon a religion.“

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? But Professor John McWhorter was writing this week about race theory in America, not gender.

He is talking about the same thing we are, without knowing it.

Last week, I pointed out that Kyle Kulinski over at Secular Talk had stumbled upon the same issue we in the feminist community have been wrestling with for years – That lots of so-called Liberals really aren’t very. 

The world has gone crazy, but I push myself to not let anything completely slide. The blog is especially vulnerable, it would be easy to get caught up in the daily scramble and lose touch with my webspace.

My developer Jay is a few years older than me, our kids go to school together. A peach of a man, he comes from a military family and at politics from the Other Side. We laugh about that quite a bit. We met a few years ago when my older son joined Scouts, the one year Jay was Scout Leader.

We live in the same subdivision, his son works at the grocery store up the street. I see him and his family around plenty, even for a small town. But we only got together professionally this past Winter. It was actually Hubs who put it together in conversation that Jay was moving into managing blogs, and I definitely have one.

Hey, all! Your faithful Brazen here, still around but busy with so many things. Lots in the works in this weirdest of years.

But yesterday, a morsel slipped across my plate too juicy not to bite.

The Black Lives Matter protests have given me a strange glimmer of hope. On the front lines of Feminism, JK Rowling published an eloquent essay last week quintupling down on her flagrant support of women’s rights. These two events have dragged me back to some familiar spaces, fresh air in my lungs and a bitchy twinkle in my eye.

Making a special effort to check in with the opposition, I stumbled upon a reference to a “trans” person from history, in the form of a portrait in the National Gallery in London.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal has done us the service this week of openly arguing that their bottom line is more important than our lives.

It’s behind a paywall, but Fox Business was kind enough to provide a free version for our perusal. The headline, ‘Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown‘ vaguely presages its thesis subheading: “No society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its economic health.“

Yes, yes they can. Many countries around the world are running a skeleton crew of essential services to stave off, ya know, a pandemic.

Ah, Female Dating Strategy! This section of Reddit is always good for a laugh and some insight into what makes a good partner. A fair amount of male-bashing does go on there, but nothing I would be surprised to hear when mature women gather.

Perhaps the most famous gathering of mature women in popular culture is the foursome from ‘Sex and the City.’ This show was once so ubiquitous, I had absorbed more of it than I realized.

Why do I suddenly care? Funny you should ask.

Woman as Cultural Icon

I was 15 in 1998. Women in my age group are known to say things like, “It changed my life!” I did not want my life changed by a grown woman in a tutu, so I stayed as far away as I could.