I used to stare at her picture on the cover of my mother’s copy of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, a beatific presence, glasses-smart and radiating joy. My mother, a feminist vanguard who was in the first class of women admitted to Brown in the 1970s and was one of the first female doctors to graduate her residency program at Columbia Medical School, brought her up often.

In my earliest understanding of the cultural icon who died yesterday at 92 years old, a woman named Gloria Steinem was why my mom could see her patients during the day and be home at night to cook us dinner and tuck us into bed. A woman named Gloria Steinem was why, in second grade, it was important I tell Noah Blumberg (allllmost his real name) that I could absolutely join the chess club after school. A woman named Gloria Steinem was why I should be allowed to wear pants to Yom Kippur services if my tights were too damned itchy.

I remember, in seventh or eighth grade, flipping to the “Feminist Revolution” chapter in my New-York-State-approved history textbook, and seeing the black and white picture of an adult woman dressed as a rabbit. It took me a moment to reconcile the 1980s Cool Aunt Gloria from my mother’s books with the model in the leotard and bunny ears.

“Oh,” I realized. “You can be smart and brave and also very hot.”

I clung to this notion when, my freshman year of college, I purchased a neon American Apparel body suit for a party called “Tight and Bright.”

“Just like Gloria,” I told myself as I shook my fluorescent green ass to Flo Rida in a sweaty off-campus house, “I am a feminist icon.” (It bears saying: It was only when I actually took a series of Women’s Studies courses that I realized I had missed the entire point. Perhaps if I had been writing an anthropological takedown of campus misogyny instead of trying to hook up with a guy named Trey (real name), the leotard would have better honored her legacy.)

Nevertheless, like many women raised by women who were radicalized by Gloria Steinem’s radical acts of the 1960s and 70s and beyond, I thought of her as a God who was part of my family. She was why my mother was able to be the way she was. She was an understanding between women who wouldn’t be intimidated or infantilized by men. To me, and to the millions of people who mourn her today, she was the coolest woman who ever lived and any time I did anything that felt cool it was because it reminded me of her.

This April, two decades and many of my own personal and professional feminist reckonings after the leotard party, I found myself invited to Gloria Steinem’s house for a talking circle about book bans. I read the email from Gayle Forman, a founding member on the board of an organization I love called Authors Against Book Bans, several times to make sure I hadn’t misconstrued it. When it was clear that I was, in reality, being summoned to the private home of Gloria Steinem I started to cry and called my mom.

“Of course you are,” she said, barely believing it herself, “It’s only right.”

On the day of the event, I texted my sister and best friends and one professional fashion editor several different outfit choices, got on the train, and headed uptown to Gloria’s.

Her townhouse, a century-old brownstone on a leafy block, was a feminist Shangri-La — a grand, bohemian haven teeming with all the artifacts of a triumphant activist life. The walls were covered in bookshelves and framed mementoes and photographs and protest posters and art. On the parlor floor, a cavernous study gave way to a sun-dappled living room meant for gathering — a large coffee table stacked with books and objects collected from decades of globetrotting, surrounded by a green velvet sofa and upholstered chairs and overstuffed ottomans. The kitchen was a tiny afterthought off a pass-through corridor, the countertop stocked with wine and Pellegrino.

Milling around the living room before the event, among the collegial and merry chatter of almost entirely women, my brain began to RETAIN as much as it could. This is the coaster on Gloria Steinem’s end table. This is Gloria Steinem’s throw blanket. This is the vase where Gloria Steinem puts her flowers. I saw her from behind, seated in a red overstuffed chair I recognized from pictures on the internet. The celestial center of everyone’s orbit, a queen in her throne.

Gayle Forman found me and took me by the arm and brought me up to Gloria Steinem. She was wearing a bright red sweater and her hair was in a neat bob. She was radiant.

I disassociated and Gloria smiled graciously as Gayle talked about my congressional testimony about book bans, and a few of my professional credentials. I had brought a signed copy of my book to give to Gloria, which immediately felt asinine, but before I could discretely drop it between my leg and the chair, Gloria took it from my hand. She flipped to the author bio. Her eyebrow arched. Gayle kept on with the generous introduction, and I blurted out as normal a “Thank you for everything, it means everything to all of us,” as I could muster.

Gloria stopped me politely — a skill probably shared with the Dalai Llama and Beyoncé. She pulled me to her side. I perched on the arm of her chair. Her hand, strong like my grandmother’s because of her age and what it had held, gripped mine.

We began to have as close to a conversation as I could reasonably have with Gloria Steinem.

“I had a stint as a comedy writer, too.” She said, smirking, pointing to the part of my author bio that mentions it. My hand was in her hand. She told me about writing for the satirical news show That Was the Week That Was in 1965. She talked about the writer’s room, and how much of a ride it was to digest the news through comedy, and about the sign on her office door. I told her how different it was by the time I worked in late night, how my bosses were all women — the show has a female head writer and was run by an all-woman team of producers. She told me about an American Indian word for laughter, and how it was similar to possession — that a true laugh is the only involuntary sound a human makes.

She was sharp and funny and generous and she blew my mind. She asked me about my book, and my experience being banned from an event in Montana, and I told her the truth I’m not really supposed to tell and have talked around on press tours: Buffalo Fluffalo is a book about toxic masculinity. She tucked it under her arm and smiled at me. She talked about observing young children play, and I nodded my head in a way that felt almost normal except for the fact that my teeth clanked together. I thanked her repeatedly. Gayle took a picture of us. I went downstairs to her bathroom and called my mother. “Gloria Steinem talked to me,” I told her, breathless. She laughed. “Good. Listen.”

The talking circle she hosted was a ceremony. Women gathered together to share experiences with book bans, led by the magnificent author and activist and friend Maggie Tokuda-Hall. The conversation was galvanizing, and the cause felt urgent but attackable. Granular plans were made — here are the contentious school board elections, here are the city councils in the balance, here are the libraries, here are the librarians on our side. All the while, Gloria listened, engaged, seemingly pleased by this group and these stories of fights to be fought.

It was the end of her life, and she was listening to what would happen next. Her interest, as it has always been, was the progress to be made. She was bringing us together to say out loud and to promise to her that we would carry on. After the discussion, Gloria addressed the group. She spoke about the current administration and her experience with government censorship. She didn’t preach, and she could have preached — she is a central authority on fighting a culture that silences voices. She expressed her gratitude, and spoke about the battles ahead. She wasn’t giving us her blessing so much as she was giving us marching orders.

I left that night and walked down her block and into Central Park. It was an absurdly gorgeous New York City spring evening, the pink confetti from cherry blossoms swirling everywhere and sticking to the footpaths. I sat down on a wood bench to jot down everything I remembered — the mug on her counter, her loud laugh, the way her hand felt, smooth and strong in mine. I closed my notebook and I knew two things to be true: I would almost certainly never be in Gloria Steinem’s house again, and I would never leave.

The Grudge Report has exclusively found seven letters President Trump wrote back to Natalie Harp, pending verification, we are posting them here:

Followed by:

Also:

And then:

More troublingly:

And finally:

The Grudge Report will continue to monitor this story as it develops.

Until now, I lived in a perfect house that was fully staffed, I had five children, I posted highly edited pictures of myself to social media constantly, I believed women should have Christian fundamentalist gender roles, and I did not believe in vaccines. I was a Trad President.

But this cold, dark place is entirely unfamiliar.

Panic seizes me. I lurch for the Diet Coke button on my bedside table. My hands slap air instead of smooth, red plastic.

I call out, weakly, for Margo, whose job is to print articles for me that say exactly what I want them to say.

Margo?

No answer. Surely she is nearby, ready to tell me that everyone loves the ballroom. But there is only silence. And cold. So much cold.

I’ve been abducted.

Kidnapped.

Someone must be here with me. Antifa?

Someone is going to kill me. Ghislaine? The Clinton Crime Family? Melania? The Iranians? The Ukrainians? The Chinese? The Saudis? The Russians? Eric?

I’m too young to die.

Too beautiful to die.

It’s always the young, beautiful ones who die.

My eyes adjust in the dark and I see it: Along every wall of my unfamiliar surroundings, from floor to ceiling, is cart after cart of microwavable hamburgers. Exactly the ones I eat aboard my plane. Exactly what I’ve always wanted. What I’ve always desired most. And now I am trapped in them.

I am living in my greatest fantasy, so why does it feel like a nightmare?

I feel my face. It feels older than I remember. I feel my ear. Completely healed. Then comes the stench. I won’t describe it.

I tell myself: Things feel different because it’s dark and you’re afraid, and everything feels different in the dark when you’re afraid.

I try to escape, but my hands scrape against a door locked shut.

I scream. Get up, Donald, keep moving. But my legs won’t move.

Then I see the inscription along the door: “TURKISH DO&CO CATERING.”

No. No no no no no no—

My body is so flooded with cortisol, I feel paralyzed.

Oh, God. Help me.

It hits me. In my new refrigerated life amongst the airplane hamburgers, I am a hamburger.

Who am I if not a microwaved lump of overcooked meat covered in slime surrounded by a doughy exterior?

This is my life now, as it has always been my life.

The whole world turns black.

Then the door opens. But…the twist?

It turns out…I was not a hamburger.

It is merely six minutes in the future.

The end.

For the 13-year-old girl who starved and weighed herself obsessively until she looked up and was 33, here is the only way I know how to shriek out for how intolerable this is. In an era where social media has become a pro-ana megaphone and the comments section under this skeletal woman’s pictures are a chorus of enabling and fawning her bone-protrusions, here is a helpful list for her inner circle. Forgive my satire. It is, as usual, the only way I can process this rage.

• I love you. You should seek medical attention in one month when your current dance obligations are over.

• You are my world. You should do nonstop dancing and international travel for another month, then seek medical treatment.

• Seeing you this ill hurts me. I hope there is a doctor who can urgently see you in one month, when your dance contract is fulfilled.

• Right now is the time to dance for a month straight on two continents.

• Nothing in the world is more important than your health a month from now.

• Because I am horrifically frightened for you, you should dance onstage every night for one more month.

• It’s time for you to get help. In a month.

• Enough is enough. Time to get off the stage and start healing on September 1st.

• What you need to focus on right now is continuing to do what you are doing.

• I’ll be rooting for you at the appropriate time given your current dance obligations.

And here is the completely deranged, morally ambiguous exchange that happened the following morning. At a certain point, the scammer got scared and tried to get out of the entanglement, but I think we ended in a good place:

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To torment one scammer right back, I decided to go completely insane. Here is the record of that saga, for your amusement and mine.

Subscribe for Part 2.

I grew up half a block from the attacks, on 84th Street and Central Park West. There is a synagogue on that block, where I went to nursery school. It’s unsettling to read that Raul Morales shouted “Allahu akbar” before stabbing an Asian man and then a kippah-wearing Jewish man yesterday. Any Jew reading this news — and certainly this Jew — felt a familiar rush of white hot fear in our bodies.

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Hate to say “I told you so,” but I wanted to make sure you’re aware the press is now saying Vegetables are super toxic, and it’s looking like they’re straight up canceled.

As an ally, I obviously do not feel good about working with them, and just want to put that in writing.

Feels like we should definitely pass on them going forward on involving any of them in Dinner-related projects, as I have continuously said. Possible to get an all-hands meeting together with the rest of the team to go over some other points of contention that have come up recently?

Starting to wonder if “Bedtime” might also be avoided.

Let me know when is a good time to connect.

Best,

Goof

Hi, Goof!

Thank you so much for passing it along and your keen instincts as usual! We have all been shaken by the bombshell report over here, and immediately thought of you!

Fortunately, the whole team is aware of the details behind the crisis, and we are staying flexible as we monitor next steps.

The good news is, according to what we’re hearing, the players involved weren’t really on our radar for Dinner anyway. Not to bore you with the terms but it looks like Raspberries, Blackberries, Cilantro (polarizing anyway), Bagged Lettuce, and Snap Peas are the most implicated.

But this shouldn’t affect our current lineup: Cooked Baby Carrots, Peeled Cucumber, and Flavor Broccoli the Way Aunt Zoe Makes It! So excited to get you all together in a room so soon!

Cheers!

Mommy

Hey.

I feel like I’m not being heard…

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• A picture of him holding today’s newspaper while riding on a horse.

• A picture of him holding today’s newspaper while wrestling a cheetah.

• A picture of him holding today’s newspaper while having tea with the Queen.

• A picture of him holding today’s newspaper while at the newspaper factory watching the all newspapers get printed on the press.

• A note on personalized stationery that says: “I am not currently dead.”

• A grainy video of him begging for his life (holding today’s newspaper).

• A single toe, sent by mail, to a news station.

• A simple FaceTime.

• A picture in front of a mirror where it CLEARLY shows he DOES have a reflection.

• A picture of an EMPTY morgue cabinet labeled “Mitch McConnell.”

• A doctor’s note.

• A drop-in at the Comedy Cellar.

• A July (!!!) Instagram dump.

• Walk outside.

  I gave this one out for free but the rest of the month will be for paid subscribers only so I can keep this going! THANK YOU XO!

• Silent meditation retreat upstate with friends from college.

• Getting really into “Real Housewives of Rhode Island,” arguably the crown jewel of the franchise.

• Lost his phone Memorial Day weekend at Surf Lodge! Get “Find My,” Mitch! This keeps happening!!

• Accepted to writer’s residency at Yaddo and is working on an autofiction novel about a junior Senator a…

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• Trans girls actually survive by drinking pool water (it makes them trans) so if we let them swim around in pools pretty soon there will be no pools.

• Trans girls cheat at badminton. They keep a secret extra birdie in their tote bags from independent bookstores.

• Trans girls often use mineral sunscreen which, though reef safe, leaves a white cast on the skin which can be really reflective and distracting for other kids just trying to have fun and play field hockey without going blind.

• Trans girls in sports might suggest a vegan pizza place for after the big game. One that uses cashew cheese.

• Trans girls sometimes have extra ear piercings which can maim or even kill a teammate in a post-game hug.

• Trans girls might encourage teammates to listen to the new Charli XCX track which can delay practice for two minutes one second.

• In 1996, a trans girl in sports demolished my entire city like Godzilla. She stomped on the buildings and ate all the people.

• Also a trans girl with a cute wrist tattoo of a butterfly started the war with Iran. She jogged (!!!!!????!!!) into the situation room and picked up the red phone and started the war. If she never was allowed to practice on her high school track there would be no war.

• Though there are FEWER THAN TEN (10) trans girls actually playing sports out of 510,000 female student athletes as of 2026, Chief Justice John Roberts needs to think about them every day or he will die. Like a shark but for nonstop thinking about ten (10) trans girls.

• Lot of crop tops.

Please consider donating to The Trevor Project 💞

Friends!

Our amazing, gorgeous, brilliant rockstar America is turning the big 2-5-0 this July (though she looks as smokin to me as the day we met!) and those of you who know her know it’s been a suuuuuper tough year for ‘Mer. One thing she loves more than ANYTHING is her birthday (haha fireworks anyone?), and this year I thought we would go ALL OUT and throw a rager called the GREAT AMERICAN STATE FAIR! Gonna spring for everything she loves — flags, ribbon dancers, hot dogs, a special musical guest, and of course: Educational dioramas about individual states. We have to cap it to 40,000 friends so RSVP by May 1 and we will make sure we have enough grill fixins for everyone! For EXTRA credit, record a video or write a note about how much you LOVE America and we’ll read them to her on the day! See you guys there!!

Much love,

Dan

Hi, Team Meri’s Birthday!

Thank you SO much to those of you who have RSVP’d :) Love you guys. Just wanted to add that we just got confirmation there will be SWAG BAGS for everyone who attends and…make sure you’re sitting down…Snow Cones! Also, since we’re going to have a professional photographer there (time for a new insta profile photo??) make sure you look FRESH AS HELL! Also, plus ones are totally welcome and feel free to share with anyone I might have forgotten! Again, there’s still time to RSVP, so smash that “YES!” button and see you there! Can’t wait to see the look on ALL your faces when the surprise musical guest takes the stage! Wooohooo!

Big hugs,

Dan

Guys.

To those of you who haven’t RSVP’d yet…

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• ANTISEMITIC!

Criticizing AIPAC.

• NOT ANTISEMITIC!

AIPAC’s Evangelical Christian backers advocating for Jews to return to Israel so the Rapture can happen per the Book of Revelation.

• ANTISEMITIC!

Refusing AIPAC funding and talking about it.

• I KNOW THIS IS GOING TO MAKE PEOPLE UPSET BUT:

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We can’t believe the school year is coming to an end! Just wanted to send a few quick reminders about important end-of-year events to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

• June 8th 5pm: Picnic!

  • To cover the cost of pizza, please Venmo $3 per person in your household to anyone in your contacts named “Emily.”

  • If your child’s last name begins with A-E, they are responsible for bringing PLATES. Last names F-L please bring NAPKINS. Last names M-R you are in charge of CUPS! Last names S-Z please bring SPOON. If your child’s last name is HYPHENATED, please bring SELTZER.

• June 9th: Pajama Day!

  • If your child is in the BLUE room the pajama theme is “Space!”

  • RED room the theme is “Barnyard Fun!”

  • GREEN room: “Under the Sea!”

  • YELLOW room: “Superheroes and Princesses!”

  • PURPLE room: “Tasteful Gingham!”

• June 10th: Moving On Ceremony (2s half day, 3s full day, 4s half day)

  • Dropoff is at 8:45. Ceremony will be in the gym at 9:30 and conclude at 10. Refreshments will be served in each classroom at 9:45 somehow. Pickup is at 11:30. You thought you were going to work? Hahaaaa!!!!!

• June 10th: End-of-Year Concerts! (2s full day, 3s half day, 4s half day)

  • Dropoff is at 8:30. Please be BACK in your child’s classroom at 9:10. The concert will end at 11:30. Pickup is at noon. If you are not there the entire time your child will remember this forever and grow up to do a one-man show called “Mother’s Choice” that is poorly-received at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

• June 11th: Crazy Hair Day!

• June 12th: Crazy Mom Day!

• June 16th: Dance Performance!

  • Please dress your child in the color OPPOSITE your classroom’s color on the color wheel. (GREEN room wears RED, etc.)

• Uh oh….June 16th AGAIN: Groundhog’s Day Type Situation Where You Re-Live June 16th One More Time to Get it Right.

• June 17th: Grandparents’ Day!

• June 18th: Deceased Grandparents’ Remembrance Day!

• June 19th: Xanax Refill Day!

• June 20th: Meteor, hopefully!

• June 21st: Beach Day!

  • The bus for the beach will leave from The Port Authority at 7am. Pickup is directly from the beach at 11am.

• June 22nd: Graduation Parade!

  • Please dress your child in HISTORIC GARB FROM HIS OR HER MATERNAL GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMOTHER’S COUNTRY OF ORIGIN.

• June 23rd - September 9th: Several different camps patched together in a frantic pastiche of childcare, a chaotic trip to the grandparents where everyone barfs at least once, one trip to the ER for what turns out to be poison oak, and the oldest one forgets how to read.

Please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions!

We did not send this to any dads,

Ladybug Montessori

I’m going to present the whole thing and before you judge me too harshly, know that this is who I have always been, and despite years of therapy it is who I am now, and I will never change.

Please enjoy the very first installment of “The Grudge Report, 1994.”

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• YES: “Yes!”

• NO: “This is not good timing for me.”

  ---

• YES: “Son, I would not miss it for the world.”

• NO: “I have a thing called Iran and other things.”

  ---

• YES: “Since your mother is no longer with us, of course I will be there.”

• NO: “If I do attend, I get killed. If I don’t attend, I get killed by the fake news.”

• YES: “What an honor. Would you like me to officiate?”

• NO: “Hopefully they’re going to have a great marriage.”

• YES: “As your only living parent, nothing could stop me. I’ll be there straightening your tie and wishing you well.”

• NO: “While I very much wanted to be with my son…circumstances pertaining to Government, and my love for the United States of America, do not allow me to do so.”

• YES: “Your wedding? Of course I’ll be there. And I’m sorry for allegedly slapping you in the face and knocking you to the ground in front of multiple eye witnesses in your dorm room at Penn all those years ago. My loathing for you is inherited. My father’s alcoholic rage is the defining trauma of my life, and my inability to meet his standards or please him created a pathological complex around amassing power. I’ve built myself monuments and surrounded myself only with people who abet my conquests or serve as trophies, and in stamping you with my name, you serve as a living reminder of my obsolescence. I am incapable of feeling affection toward you because your existence is a threat. I hated my father and I hate you as he hated me. This is not a family, this is a nuclear pain generator whose blast radius is the free world. So, no. I can’t attend your wedding because seeing you with your young, beautiful new wife is a painful reminder of my own loveless marriage, in which I, a decrepit old man vainly clawing to the appearance of virility, am so loathed by his own wife that she lives in another state. I can’t attend your wedding because I cannot bear witness to my own inferiority, a bystander to the triumph of the enemy I created. There is nothing I would rather do than anything else. Forgive me. May you one day, when you are on your third or fourth marriage and surrounded by sons who look at you with the same contempt, forgive me.”

• “I’ll try.”

I owe her an apology for what I wrote on Instagram last night. I’m going to reprint it all here, and include a dozen more things nobody should ever say about this stylish and cool person.

And I’m not just saying this because I am a working television writer who is actively pitching projects to streaming platforms including Amazon, I’m saying this because the woman is a timeless, regal human-looking person who seems like she’d be very kind to a spa attendant who accidentally dropped something while she was TRYING to relax.

So here goes. Lauren Sanchez Bezos, who legally has to share a bed with a man who looks like a cartoon turtle without its shell, wore this to the most important night in fashion:

I saw this look, styled by Law Roach in exchange for his voice which she wears in an amulet around her neck, and my initial reactions were — I freely admit — unfair. In case there are Amazon execs reading this, here are some observations I wrote that I disavow:

• This is the most “Mother of the Groom” I’ve ever seen a woman look not at her son’s Long Island country club wedding. This is the face she makes after ending her toast with, “And remember, he loved ME first, Sarah!”

• Her tailor is part of the resistance.

• It’s giving “The most requested Badgley Mischka mid-range gown on Rent the Runway” with dangly earrings from the case at the hair salon.

• It’s giving Oscars seat filler.

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I had met him for the first time years ago at comedian friend’s house in LA, where he was fundraising for his Congressional campaign and ingratiating himself into an alt-comedy circle, which seemed to be a focus of his ascent in politics. He’s one of the few members of Congress who has appeared on Kimmel, Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Chelsea Handler’s shows, and this month he had a cameo on this season’s “Jury Duty: Company Retreat.”

That day in a backyard in Silverlake, he exchanged cell phone information with a few of us, including my friend, a beautiful genius who would eventually use that contact information to text him “Resign” last week.

I thought nothing of it. He was friendly. All politicians network to survive. They all have a forced charm that hopefully translates to pushing a policy agenda through an unwilling legislative process.

Months later, I got an email from Swalwell’s friend:

I remember feeling a bit odd about the invitation, and for reasons that remain mysterious to me, I never replied.

In Manhattan last month, I entered the apartment while he was holding court in front of a half dozen people seated on two couches, hanging on his every word.

He stood when I entered, immediately familiar, and I reached out for a handshake. “Cmon, Bess,” he guffawed, pulling me in, “We can hug.”

I was charmed. It seemed to be folksy gesture of camaraderie, if a bit forced. After all, I hadn’t seen him in seven years.

Over the course of the ninety or so minutes he spent with us, I saw a very different man than I had met in LA so early in his political career. Back in Silverlake, he was a corn-fed slightly dorky character from The Music Man, eager to please and ebullient. But here he was, the frontrunner for the California governorship, with a clichéd mid-40s “glow up” beard, commanding the attention of some of the most judgmental bastards in New York City (myself included). I gave him a joke to use at Trump, and after the event, one of the two — and this has stuck out in my memory of the evening — extremely attractive young women working for him took my cell phone number for the Congressman. Again.

I texted a smart friend after:

“What’s your read on Eric Swalwell?”

“Not impressed,” was the response, then went straight to voice notes.

I agreed, and neither of us could really articulate why.

Another writer friend, who was invited to the apartment hangout but didn’t come, said she didn’t come because she had a similar gut feeling.

Thanks to the heroism of women who came forward about Swalwell’s multiple sexual assaults, we now know how horrifically that gut check bore out to be.

I’m not writing this because I think Eric Swalwell was in any way hitting on me. I don’t think he had any intentions with me beyond getting some free jokes and connections with famous friends and maybe a selfie on Instagram (which, again, for reasons I cannot account for, I did not post). I think he is the type of man who only interacts with anyone remotely female-shaped by flirting with them. This was a man who operated in a system that rewarded flirtation as a modus operandi.

All politicians rely on a degree of charm and charisma to separate donors from their money, and to convince voters that they’re worthy of their trust. But there’s a difference between politicians who use charm to push a political agenda and the ones who use it to assault their own staffers. The charisma divide between the Swalwells in office versus politicians like Mamdani and Obama and AOC, is that the latter group had magnetic personalities that owned a room since the time they learned to talk.

Swalwell, as my unimpressed friend texted after I met him, just never had it. Even with the forced charisma, there was something dead-eyed and rote about him. Despite the media exposure and anointments by all the right mega-donors and PACs, he had the vaguely pathetic rizz of a looksmaxxer, not a Kennedy. Eric Swalwell is a monster, and he is also the consummate pathetic loser. And according to multiple accounts, the way he could truly have his command of women was to drug their drinks.

Eric Swalwell is the latest flare up of an insidious American problem with sex abuse. This is a country founded by men who fucked around with impunity and were put on money and carved into stone.

The Declaration of Independence was drafted by a ginger violinist who was impregnating a woman he owned. The sitting president, of course, bragged about his habit of grabbing women’s genitals before he was elected the first time, then was convicted of sexual assault before he was elected for a second time. When reports came out about Trump’s close ties and “wonderful secrets” with known child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, his approval rating initially slumped, and as of this writing, remains between 81 and 88% among all Republicans. As of March, among Republicans who identify as “MAGA,” Trump’s approval rating is even higher. If there’s any partisan lesson to be gleaned from Swalwell’s resignation, it’s that Democrats won’t blink twice before annihilating one of their own when he’s accused of rape, while MAGA proudly wears the rapist’s hat.

But rape remains a nonpartisan offense. This stomach-churning list of American politicians in federal office across the political spectrum who faced sexual misconduct, harassment and assault accusations is longer than the list of poet laureates.

So what we are reckoning with is clear: This is a country with a rape problem, CNN recently reported on an online “Rape Academy” that had 62 million visitors in February alone, most of them by American users.

62 million visits. Mostly Americans. All looking for ways to drug and rape women.

I do not think 62 million men are preparing to actually commit rape in some kind of Purge-like marauding spree, but I do think all 62 million were entertaining a fantasy of dehumanizing and violating women.

The only hope I have in any of this are the women who are fighting back. The accusors are incredibly brave, and so are the women like Arielle Fodor and Cheyenne Hunt who initially fielded the women’s multiple reports and took them seriously.

So long as women continue to hold bad men accountable for their crimes against us, there’s justice. Our voices have legitimate political power when the whisper network turns into a collective scream.

As Eric Swalwell, in hopefully the last throes of narcissism, posts direct-to-camera denials of the charges that eventually came out on video, I look into his eyes that never twinkled like Obama’s, and his muppet features that never coalesced like Kennedy’s, and his forced innocence that doesn’t ring as true as Talarico’s, and I pity him. Here he is, asking for a hug, and getting told by every woman alive to go fuck himself.

That’s right: From here on out, the dress is off and so are the gloves, because it’s Pope Leo, Bounty Hunter.

So what’s the plan now that I’ve taken Donald Trump’s critique to heart and am solely dedicated to fighting crime and cheering war? First order of business is all the cardinals will be trained in mixed martial arts and pumped full of so much of RFK’s creatine/peptide injections you can see their neck veins from space.

Also all the communion wafers are Big Macs now.

You might have some questions as this could strike you as antithetical to Christian doctrine and my own past statements including last week’s Easter address in which I advocated for global leaders to choose peace.

First of all: Shut up. And second of all: The Bible was written by pussies (Hail Mary x 3).

From here on out, my time in Papal office will be spent doing awesome stuff, like shooting a gun out of the Vatican turret at anyone who seems like an immigrant. Also I think there should be more gold on the walls of my chambers. Also instead of zucchetto all the lesser cardinals have to wear MAGA hats.

Also I’m getting a Slovenian wife. Of Czech. Whoever can get her papers in order fastest.

But let’s not get sidetracked by all the awesome shit (Hail Mary x 5) I’m going to do. The most important thing is that I am tough on crime. Not crimes like sexual assault in the state of New York or mounting an insurrection or election interference, but crimes like being the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because it was Jesus who said: “Come [at] me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you [a concussion].”

I want to end by thanking Donald Trump directly for inspiring me with your sound critique. And, sir, I’d like to let you know that I have spoken with the Lord, and he thinks the AI image you posted of yourself as Jesus was “awesome.” And, Mr. President, though God is sad He will never meet you, He asks that you give His regards to Satan when you meet him in two years, one month, and six days.

Peace War be with you,

Pope Leo the Redpilled

But I married a practical person, and so I recently suppressed everything about myself and met with a lawyer and did what responsible people do.

The following list is from the notes from the meeting during which I, a comedy writer born to deflect, was faced with a series of tragic hypotheticals:

• Never pull the plug. Keep me hooked up to machines like a Saudi prince. They’ll find a cure.

• Ok. If I die first and he remarries someone the trustee deems skinnier than me, he gets nothing.

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