McKenna West is a cardiac nurse, a single mother of two from Alaska, who became a surrogate because she was struggling financially. During the pregnancy, the fetus was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a serious and potentially fatal congenital heart defect.

According to West, the intended parents wanted her to terminate the pregnancy. She says that when she refused, they threatened her with a $250,000 breach provision in the surrogacy contract.

The intended parents, Omar Ahmed and Nasheen Gilkar, dispute that account. In court filings, they say they initially decided to terminate the pregnancy and that West initially agreed. They claim that once she changed her mind, they respected her decision and began preparing for the baby’s birth and medical treatment in California.

That disagreement matters.

But there is another part of this story that matters even more.

The anti-abortion movement has spent decades arguing that women should not have the legal authority to decide whether to continue a pregnancy.

Now it has found a woman whose reproductive autonomy it suddenly wants everyone to defend.

And that should make us pay attention.

Issue One: The Contract

Surrogacy raises some genuinely uncomfortable questions about bodily autonomy.

A gestational surrogacy agreement can contain provisions requiring a surrogate to agree in advance to terminate a pregnancy under certain circumstances. A contract may also contain financial consequences for breach.

California, where this agreement was executed, cannot physically force a surrogate to have an abortion. It also cannot force her to continue a pregnancy she wants to terminate. Bodily autonomy remains protected.

But the existence of these contractual provisions creates a strange legal arrangement.

A woman can sign a document saying that under specified circumstances she agrees to terminate a pregnancy, and the contract can attach financial consequences to her refusal.

That tells us something about the nature of commercial surrogacy.

The intended parents are purchasing a service. The pregnancy is part of that service. The surrogate’s body becomes part of the mechanism through which the agreement is performed.

In other words, her body’s function becomes a deliverable.

There is a legitimate feminist debate about whether surrogacy itself commodifies women. There are serious questions about economic exploitation, consent, class, reproductive labor and whether wealthy people should be able to purchase another person’s pregnancy.

Those questions deserve discussion.

They are also capable of distracting us from what the anti-abortion movement is doing with this particular case.

Issue Two: The Pivot

The anti-abortion movement has opposed the principle of reproductive autonomy for decades.

Women have been told that they cannot be trusted to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy. The language of “choice” has routinely been dismissed as a euphemism for killing a child.

Yet in McKenna West’s case, the same prolife movement is relying on the language of bodily autonomy.

Her body. Her choice.

Suddenly consent matters enormously.

The difference is obvious.

West chose to continue the pregnancy.

The movement is comfortable with a woman’s reproductive choice when the result is birth.

That is a very different principle from bodily autonomy. A genuine bodily-autonomy position recognizes a person’s authority over whether she continues a pregnancy or terminates one. The anti-abortion position recognizes one acceptable outcome.

Birth.

And that is why the rhetoric surrounding West should be examined carefully.

The movement has discovered the language of consent because, in this case, consent happens to produce the result it already wanted.

Issue Three: Follow the Organizations

West did not simply arrive in the middle of the national anti-abortion movement by accident.

According to reporting cited in the original story, a mutual friend connected her with Lila Rose, president of Live Action, one of the country’s best-known anti-abortion organizations.

Live Action helped fund West’s travel and expenses when she relocated to Texas.

That matters because West has described herself as a financially struggling single mother who became a surrogate partly to make ends meet. Moving from Alaska to Texas while involved in a complicated legal dispute requires money, lawyers and organizational infrastructure.

Anti-abortion organizations provided that.

West also began publicly referring to the baby as Gabriel.

The intended parents call their child Rumy.

That difference may seem trivial, but names are powerful framing devices.

“Baby Gabriel” turns a complicated dispute involving a surrogate, intended parents, contractual rights, medical decisions and competing factual allegations into a much simpler story:

A mother is fighting to save a baby.

That is the story the anti-abortion movement knows how to tell.

Issue Four: Texas Enters the Story

Then Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office became involved.

Yes.

Texas.

A woman went to Texas seeking protection for her reproductive decision.

The same Texas that has spent years restricting reproductive choice and imposing some of the country’s harshest abortion laws.

That tells us something important about the post-Roe legal landscape.

A pregnant person’s practical rights can change depending on where her body is physically located.

West’s reproductive decision receives protection in Texas because she wants to remain pregnant.

A woman seeking an abortion in that same state would face an entirely different legal system.

Texas also sought to ensure that the intended parents provided necessary medical care for the child. At the same time, West has reportedly been legally restricted from presenting herself as the child’s mother.

That creates a striking contradiction in the political rhetoric surrounding her.

She is described as “the mother” when her identity as a mother helps advance the anti-abortion narrative.

Legally, however, the intended parents remain the parents.

Everyone wants her body to produce the child.

That does not mean everyone recognizes her authority over what happens to her body or what happens after the child is born.

Issue Five: Look at the Lawyers

West is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom.

ADF is one of the most powerful conservative legal organizations in the United States and has played a significant role in abortion litigation.

West’s attorney, Eric Baptist, directs ADF’s Center for Life.

He is an anti-abortion lawyer.

That tells us something about how ADF itself understands this case.

Its public messaging has focused heavily on the fetus, referring to the child as “Baby Gabriel” and arguing that he deserved a chance at life. ADF has also used language emphasizing that no woman should be forced to terminate a pregnancy.

Again, pay attention to the word “forced.”

In this case, force is presented as an unacceptable violation of a woman’s autonomy because the alleged force would result in abortion.

In other abortion cases, ADF has supported laws requiring women to remain pregnant when they want to terminate.

The principle changes according to the desired outcome.

That is why I do not think the long-term importance of this case lies primarily in surrogacy.

It lies in fetal personhood.

The Fetal Personhood Endgame

Surrogacy creates an unusual legal testing ground because reproductive consent has been put into writing.

The surrogate signs a contract. The contract records what she agreed to do.

Then pregnancy creates another claimed interest: the fetus.

That gives anti-abortion lawyers an opportunity to argue about what happens when a woman’s prior consent conflicts with what they characterize as the rights of an unborn child.

If fetal interests can override a woman’s contractual consent after conception, the implications extend far beyond surrogacy.

The underlying principle would be that once a fetus exists, a woman’s consent becomes subordinate to fetal interests.

That is fetal personhood.

And fetal personhood has long been one of the major goals of the anti-abortion movement.

Under a fetal-personhood framework, an embryo or fetus receives legal rights capable of competing with, and potentially superseding, the rights of the pregnant person.

That principle could affect abortion, contraception, miscarriage investigations, fertility treatment and medical decisions during pregnancy.

Surrogacy provides an unusually sympathetic vehicle for advancing the argument because the woman at the center of the case wanted to continue her pregnancy.

That makes the case politically useful.

The Trojan Horse

And this is where the media-literacy part begins.

When I first discussed this case, many people immediately wanted to debate whether surrogacy should exist.

“People shouldn’t be able to rent women’s wombs.”

“Surrogacy is reproductive exploitation.”

I understand those arguments. There are serious feminist critiques of surrogacy. But notice what happens when the conversation stays there.

Everyone debates the ethics of commercial surrogacy.

Meanwhile, some of the most powerful anti-abortion organizations in the country are building a legal argument about fetal rights.

That is why this case works so well politically.

Anti-surrogacy language can appeal to people who would never identify with the anti-abortion movement.

Progressive women concerned about reproductive exploitation can find themselves using language that overlaps with organizations whose larger political goal is eliminating reproductive choice.

They do not have to agree about abortion.

They only have to spend their attention arguing about surrogacy while the fetal-personhood argument moves forward.

That is the Trojan horse.

The obvious controversy sits outside.

The larger legal project travels inside it.

Look at the Entire Machine

Once you zoom out, every participant describes McKenna West’s pregnancy differently.

The surrogacy contract treats her body’s reproductive function as something governed by an agreement.

The anti-abortion movement treats the pregnancy as proof that fetal life must be protected.

The state treats her reproductive rights differently depending on jurisdiction.

The lawyers see an opportunity to establish legal principles that may extend beyond this particular pregnancy.

Different institutions.

Different language.

The same woman’s body.

And every institution wants some authority over what that body means.

That is the part of the story worth watching.

Media literacy requires more than determining whether a viral claim is technically true.

You have to ask why a particular story is being amplified.

Who benefits from the framing?

Which organizations suddenly appeared?

What legal principle is being tested?

What issue are you being encouraged to debate?

And what are you failing to notice while you debate it?

The McKenna West case may eventually tell us something important about surrogacy.

I think it is already telling us something important about the anti-abortion movement.

It has temporarily embraced the language of bodily autonomy because this woman’s reproductive decision serves its larger political goal.

The danger is assuming that this newfound respect for consent will remain once the woman involved wants a different outcome.

It won’t.

The larger project is fetal personhood.

And if that project succeeds, its consequences will reach far beyond one surrogate, one contract and one pregnancy.

Take the quiz HERE.

We’ve all been witness to its slow-motion collapse over the last year.

As a communications and media studies major at Fordham University at Lincoln Center in the late 1990s, I had the privilege of learning from news veteran, Joseph Dembo. Professor Dembo was a quiet, unassuming man with a deep voice tailor-made for broadcasting and a great sense of humor. He also had great stories.

Everything I know about journalistic ethics, I learned from him. Now that I am a full-time social media content creator—a job that didn’t exist when I graduated from college—that knowledge is more important than ever.

Professor Dembo passed away in 2010 after spending 21 years in academia following an impressive career in radio and television.

If you’ve ever listened to an all-news radio station, you can thank Joseph Dembo.

He was one of the architects of the modern news format that millions of Americans now take for granted. In the 1967, while working at WCBS Radio in New York, he was hand-picked by CBS chairman William Paley to convert an also-ran flagship radio station to the fledgling all-news radio model. He developed the “Up-to-the-Minute” news concept, a revolutionary approach that delivered continuous news updates throughout the day.

His career began in the 1950s at NBC, where he worked as a producer and reporter for both the network and its New York television station, WNBC-TV. But it was at CBS where Dembo left his biggest mark.

Over a 28-year career with the network, he served in nearly every major role a journalist could hope to hold. He anchored national newscasts, ran one of the country’s most influential radio stations as vice president and general manager of WCBS Radio, and served as CBS News bureau chief in Rome and Athens during some of the most consequential years of the Cold War.

He later became executive producer of The CBS Morning News, helping shape the network’s television coverage during the 1970s.

By the time Dembo arrived at Fordham University in 1988, he had spent decades helping build CBS News into one of the most respected names in American journalism. For more than twenty years, he taught courses on journalistic ethics and the history of broadcast news, including a class devoted entirely to Edward R. Murrow and the generation of reporters who established the standards that news organizations still claim to follow today. I took one of his most popular courses, “Ethical Issues in the Media.” What I learned from him guides me every day in the work I do now.

We often make analogies to Germany’s Third Reich when discussing politics today. Professor Dembo was born on March 13, 1927, in Vienna, Austria—just a few months before the July Revolt of 1927, a major riot in Vienna that erupted after three members of a right-wing nationalist militia were acquitted after killing two members of the Republican Protection League, a workers’ defense organization aligned with Austria’s political left.

For many Austrians, the acquittal confirmed what they already suspected: the justice system had one set of rules for right-wing nationalists and another for everyone else. That certainly sounds familiar.

Thousands of angry protesters poured into the streets of Vienna. Demonstrators stormed and set fire to the Palace of Justice. The government’s response was swift and brutal. Police opened fire on the crowd, killing 89 protesters.

More than a riot, the July Revolt was a public demonstration of a society losing faith in its institutions. The courts, the police, and the government had all become objects of suspicion, and the political divisions exposed that day would continue to widen in the years leading up to the collapse of Austrian democracy and it’s takeover by the Third Reich in the Anschluss.

Dembo’s family emigrated to the United States when he was a child. Perhaps his parents saw what was coming and got out while they could.

I think it’s a lovely poetic coincidence that a man whose family left Austria in the 1930s spent most of his career at a news network known for its strong stance against right-wing extremism.

In many ways, Dembo’s career mirrored the rise of CBS News itself: a period when journalism was treated as a public trust, newsroom independence was considered a virtue rather than a liability, and news executives were expected to protect the institution rather than maximize its quarterly earnings.

For much of the twentieth century, CBS News represented the highest aspirations of American journalism. It was the home of giants like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, journalists whose names became synonymous with public trust. When Americans wanted to know what was happening in the world, they tuned in to CBS.

This was, after all, the network that challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare. The network that exposed corporate fraud, government misconduct, and political corruption. The network that built 60 Minutes into the most successful investigative news program in television history.

CBS News was not perfect. No institution is. But for generations of Americans, it embodied a simple idea: that journalism existed to hold power accountable, not to serve it.

Which is why what is happening to CBS News today saddens me, as I’m certain it would have saddened Professor Dembo.

When institutions die, they tend to die slowly.

First through financial pressure. Then through corporate consolidation. Then through subtle compromises. Then through decisions that seem isolated at the time but viewed together, tell a very different story.

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

To understand how CBS News got here, you first have to understand that CBS is no longer really CBS. It is a division of Paramount Global, a company that began life as a government-mandated CBS spinoff, bought a Hollywood studio, acquired its former parent company, split itself in two, reunited, and ultimately became an entertainment conglomerate whose most valuable assets are no longer news at all.

Our story begins in 1971, when federal regulators forced CBS to spin off its television syndication division. That new company became Viacom. Over the next three decades, Viacom grew into a media giant, acquiring Paramount Pictures in 1994 and then purchasing CBS itself in 1999. After a brief corporate divorce in 2005, the two companies reunited in 2019 as ViacomCBS before rebranding as Paramount Global in 2022.

The result is that one of the most respected news organizations in American history now exists as a relatively small division inside a sprawling entertainment company built around movies, streaming services, sports rights, and intellectual property.

When a company’s primary business is no longer journalism, its priorities inevitably change.

For decades, media companies like Paramount made enormous profits from cable bundles. Whether viewers watched MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, or CBS, cable providers paid carriage fees and advertisers paid premium rates for access to large audiences.

Then streaming came along and changed the game.

Millions of viewers left cable for streaming services. Paramount’s traditional revenue base began shrinking year after year. The company could see the iceberg coming but couldn’t stop the ship. Like every major media company, Paramount decided it needed its own streaming platform to compete with Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon.

The problem was that streaming is extraordinarily expensive.

Paramount+ required billions in investment for content, technology, marketing, and subscriber acquisition. The company was simultaneously losing money on its old business while spending heavily to build a new one.

By 2023, the powers that be realized that the math ain’t mathin’.

Paramount was carrying significant debt, its cable assets were losing value, and Wall Street was getting nervous. They were increasingly skeptical that the company could compete against larger rivals like Netflix, Disney, Amazon, and Warner Bros. Discovery.

This is when they began openly exploring merger and acquisition options.

Multiple potential buyers emerged because Paramount was viewed as a company with valuable assets but an increasingly uncertain future.

Once the Skydance negotiations became serious, the company’s priorities changed. The objective was no longer simply running Paramount Global. The objective became completing the deal.

In 2024, Paramount announced major layoffs, eventually eliminating about 15% of its U.S. workforce. It also took a nearly $6 billion write-down on its cable networks, effectively acknowledging that many of its television assets were worth far less than previously believed.

The $8 billion merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media officially closed on August 7, 2025, creating the newly formed corporate entity Paramount, a Skydance Corporation. David Ellison took over as Chairman and CEO.

But the trouble at CBS News had already started even before the merger was finalized.

Concerns begin growing over editorial independence. Journalists increasingly found themselves working inside an organization whose corporate future depends on regulators, investors, and political relationships. The old wall between the newsroom and corporate management starts looking less sturdy.

The first visible cracks appeared in the departures of some of CBS News’ most senior leaders. In April 2025, longtime 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens resigned amid reports of growing tensions over editorial independence. Soon afterward, CBS News president Wendy McMahon was also gone. Separately, each departure could be explained away. Together, they painted a troubling picture:

The people most responsible for protecting the culture and independence of CBS News were leaving.

At the same time, the network became embroiled in controversy over its handling of legal and political pressures involving President Trump. Critics argued that the network appeared increasingly concerned with corporate risk and regulatory consequences. Whether those concerns were justified or not, the perception alone raised uncomfortable questions about who was ultimately shaping editorial decisions.

On July 17, 2025, CBS announced that Stephen Colbert would no longer be hosting The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and that The Late Show franchise would be retired altogether in May 2026, after 33 years.

The show’s cancellation, stated to be due to high production costs and declining advertising revenue, had been subject to speculation that it was tied to a settlement agreement reached two weeks earlier between Donald Trump and network parent Paramount Global in the former’s lawsuit against CBS—filed in December 2024—alleging deceptive editing of a 60 Minutes broadcast featuring then-Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, which occurred as the company sought FCC approval for its merger with Skydance Media.

On July 14, 2025, Colbert discussed the Trump settlement saying:

“Now, I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles. It’s a big fat bribe. Because this all comes as Paramount’s owners are trying to get the Trump administration to approve the sale of our network to a new owner, Skydance.”

His show was cancelled 2 days later. The network claimed it was a purely financial decision, but The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was the #1 show in late night.

So, Colbert was effectively fired a couple of weeks after Paramount Global reached a $16M settlement with Trump over the 60 Minutes interview, removing a potential obstacle to the company’s $8B sale to Skydance Media, and two days after Colbert called the settlement what it was: A bribe.

Colbert may have inadvertently “meddled with the primal forces of nature” and was therefore, forced to “atone”.

Bari Weiss, who has no prior experience in broadcast journalism, was installed as Editor-in-Chief of CBS News—a non-existent title in TV news—in October 2025, when Paramount Skydance acquired her media company, The Free Press for $150 million.

She reports to David Ellison, the head of Paramount Skydance. Her hiring was praised by President Trump.

The appointment was shortly followed by layoffs; one former CBS producer alleged these primarily targeted racial minorities while white employees were merely reassigned. Total reported losses were around 100 employees, including eight on-air hosts, all of them women.

On December 10, 2025, Weiss appointed CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil as the CBS Evening News anchor, effective January 5, 2026. On the night of Dokoupil’s first broadcast, Weiss rewrote his script to cast Donald Trump’s Venezuela military operation in a more favorable light.

Later that month, Weiss scrapped a 60 Minutes segment titled “Inside CECOT”, an investigation by correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi into the Salvadoran Terrorism Confinement Center.

At a meeting the following day with 60 Minutes staff, Alfonsi said Weiss had not contacted her before killing the story, and correspondent Scott Pelley stated that Weiss had not attended any of five internal screenings of the segment during the final stages of editing.

The full episode was inadvertently published online in Canada on a streaming platform owned by Global TV, which held Canadian streaming rights to 60 Minutes, and spread widely online. It eventually aired largely unchanged, with minor additional context, on January 18, 2026.

In May 2026, Weiss replaced Tanya Simon, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, with Nick Bilton, a former New York Times technology columnist with no prior experience running a television program. Bilton told reporters he had met Weiss socially in Los Angeles and worked with her on two documentaries before being hired by CBS. Correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega were also fired.

For years, concerns about editorial independence and corporate influence had largely remained industry conversations. Colbert’s highly public dispute with CBS transformed them into a national story. Suddenly, people who had never followed network politics were asking what was happening inside one of America’s most respected news organizations.

The final and perhaps most poignant chapter of this story belongs to Scott Pelley, a veteran journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent. As one of the last remaining figures directly connected to the golden age of CBS News, Pelley found himself articulating concerns that many journalists had quietly expressed for years. In doing so, he became something more than a reporter covering a story. He became a witness to the decline of an institution he had spent his career serving.

On June 2, 2026, Weiss fired Pelley. He then gave a detailed interview to the New York Times:

Taken together, these events tell a story that is larger than any individual controversy. The death of CBS News did not happen all at once. It happened gradually, through financial pressures, corporate consolidation, leadership departures, editorial conflicts, and shifting priorities. The result is a network that increasingly resembles a division of an entertainment conglomerate (and the White House press shop) rather than the fiercely independent journalistic institution it once aspired to be.

Make no mistake CBS News was destroyed by ideology. But it was the economics that made the organization vulnerable to the ideology.

The collapse of the cable bundle created the crisis. The streaming wars deepened it. The Skydance merger transformed it from a financial problem into a governance problem.

Once the survival of the company depended on a merger, every controversial editorial decision and late-night joke became something management had to evaluate through the lens of regulatory approval, shareholder pressure, and corporate risk.

The cancellation of Stephen Colbert did not kill CBS News.

The hiring of Bari Weiss did not kill CBS News.

The Paramount-Skydance merger did not kill CBS News.

The firing of Scott Pelley, Wendy McMahon. Sharyn Alfonsi or Cecilia Vega did not kill CBS News.

But if you put those events in chronological order, a pattern emerges.

It was all these things together, one after another, that destroyed the “Tiffany Network”, the beacon of broadcast journalism.

Because when one of the last surviving guardians of the Fourth Estate starts publicly warning the audience about what’s happening inside the building, you are watching an obituary being written in real time.

The call is coming from inside the house.

This is the story of the death of CBS News.

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Sources:

CBS and Viacom agree to $30 billion media merger

Viacom Set to Acquire CBS in Biggest Media Merger Ever

Skydance Media and Paramount Global Complete Merger, Creating Next Generation Media Company

Cancelling Colbert, bribery, an $8bn deal: what’s going on at Paramount?

Tony Dokoupil Is the Face of the Bari Weiss Revolution at CBS News. Will He Survive It?

CBS News chief Bari Weiss pulls ‘60 Minutes’ story, sparking outcry

Inside the Bari Weiss decision that led to a ‘60 Minutes’ crisis

New ’60 Minutes’ head Nick Bilton says Paramount’s CBS News hired him to pivot the show before ratings decline

Back when it was supposed to democratize information. Flatten hierarchies. Give everyone a voice. Back when the worst thing adults could imagine was that teenagers might spend too much time in chatrooms.

What I remember instead is something else entirely.

I remember the first time I realized that being a woman online was different.

Not in some abstract, academic sense. Not in the language we have now. There was no “manosphere.” No discourse. No think pieces. Just a low, constant hum of hostility that you were expected to tolerate if you wanted to participate at all.

You learned quickly what not to say.

You learned how to shrink your opinions.

You learned that visibility came with a cost.

And most of all, you learned that men were watching.

This is the part that I think gets lost in a lot of current conversations about influencers like Andrew Tate or the resurgence of the manosphere. There is this quiet assumption that something has changed. That we are witnessing a new phenomenon. That the internet has somehow “become” more misogynistic.

It hasn’t.

What has changed is scale. And visibility. And the willingness of certain men to say the quiet part even louder.

If you were online during Gamergate, you already know this.

Gamergate was not an origin story. It was a reveal.

A stress test of the internet that showed, very clearly, what would happen when women tried to claim authority in a space that men believed belonged to them. The harassment was not random. It was coordinated, strategic, and deeply ideological. And it worked.

Women left. Women self-censored. Women learned, again, that participation came with conditions.

And if you zoom out, what you start to see is not a series of isolated incidents, but a pattern.

Early forums and message boards where women were treated as novelties at best and targets at worst.

Comment sections that turned hostile the moment a woman expressed an opinion.

Gaming spaces where your voice alone was enough to invite abuse.

The rise of “ironic” misogyny that was never really ironic at all.

By the time figures like Andrew Tate emerged, the groundwork had already been laid.

The audience was already there.

The language was already familiar.

The grievances had already been rehearsed for decades.

This is where that The Guardian piece gets something right. It draws a line between Gamergate and the modern manosphere. But even that timeline is incomplete.

Because if you were a girl online in the early 2000s, you don’t need a line drawn for you. You lived it.

You remember what it felt like to log off not because you were bored, but because you were tired.

Tired of being corrected.

Tired of being sexualized.

Tired of being reminded, over and over again, that your presence was conditional.

And what’s interesting to me now is not that misogyny exists online. That was never in question.

It’s how often people still treat it as a glitch in the system.

As if the internet occasionally produces misogyny, instead of functioning as a near-perfect delivery mechanism for it.

Because the internet did democratize something.

It democratized access to women.

Access to our thoughts.

Our images.

Our labor.

Our attention.

And in a world where misogyny already existed, that was always going to have consequences.

What we are seeing now is not a deviation. It is an acceleration.

The same dynamics, just faster.

Louder. More profitable.

Men building entire brands on the resentment that used to live quietly in forums. Platforms rewarding engagement regardless of what that engagement is rooted in. Audiences trained to treat cruelty as entertainment.

None of this is new.

It’s just finally undeniable.

And maybe that’s the part that feels different.

Not the misogyny itself, but the fact that it can no longer hide behind irony, anonymity, or plausible deniability.

It has a face now. A voice. A business model.

And for those of us who grew up online, there is something almost surreal about watching people react to it as if it just arrived.

Because we remember.

We remember what it felt like before there was language for it.

We remember what it cost to learn the rules.

And we remember that the internet didn’t create misogyny.

It just gave it a place to organize, evolve, and flourish.

A career is a long-term professional journey, ideally aligned with your skills, passions, and long-term goals. It provides a sense of purpose and fulfillment beyond financial gain. It’s about building a body of work that reflects your expertise and impact over time. A job, on the other hand, is more transactional, often focused on immediate financial needs without the broader sense of identity or purpose that a career provides.

However, even a long-term role that you thought was a career can feel like a job if it’s something you stumbled into rather than something you consciously chose. If your work lacks personal meaning or connection to your larger ambitions, it can become a drain on your energy and creativity. You find yourself masking—pretending to care about the company’s mission or values to get through the day, performing enthusiasm for the benefit of the organization, not for yourself. This is where the disconnect between what you do for a living and who you are as a person becomes most apparent.

The Startup Culture Delusion

This disconnect becomes particularly glaring in companies that cling to a startup mentality long after their startup days are over. Sometime in the 2010s, corporate culture started to mimic tent revivals—complete with charismatic speeches from leaders, high-energy presentations, and a near-religious fervor around the company’s “core values.” It’s the same psychological trick cults use: convince people that by sacrificing their time, energy, and sanity for the mission, they too can ascend to a higher plane of fulfillment (or at least a higher pay grade).

The problem is that these core values are often based on the vision and values of the person who founded the company. What these companies are demanding is for their employees to sacrifice years of their lives being hyperfocused on and obsessed with whatever the founder was obsessed with when they launched the company. This expectation requires a level of delusion that is unsustainable over the long term.

This is especially true for neurodivergent employees, who are often required to perform crippling emotional labor and engage in masking to fit into workplaces designed around the needs and expectations of neurotypical workers. When you’re expected to pretend you’re equally passionate about someone else’s billion-dollar idea, it’s not just draining—it’s dehumanizing.

You become a cog in a machine that demands your emotional and intellectual investment without offering the same in return.

The End of Masking

For menopausal women with ADHD, maintaining this kind of professional delusion is especially challenging. The hormonal shifts of menopause significantly impact dopamine function in the brain, which in turn affects motivation, focus, and emotional regulation. The brain fog, memory issues, and lack of emotional bandwidth make it almost impossible to continue the act.

Masking, or trying to suppress your natural responses to fit a neurotypical corporate mold, is exhausting. It’s a survival strategy that often results in burnout, especially when compounded by the challenges of menopause. The expectation to maintain a positive attitude, display emotional intelligence, and project unwavering team spirit becomes a cruel joke when your brain chemistry pushes you in the opposite direction.

This is exactly what I was experiencing in 2025.

Suffering from ADHD burnout and having exhausted my capacity to mask, I could no longer convincingly play the part of the high-energy team player, or feign interest in someone else’s billion-dollar passion project. When your neurological profile requires novelty, interest or passion in order for you to perform at the level that is expected, this is a huge problem. Add menopause to the mix and it’s a complete disaster.

The Cost of Masking

The truth is, when companies build their cultures around a single, obsessive vision, they demand a kind of emotional conformity that is deeply hostile to neurodivergent workers, and frankly, anyone who values their sanity. This corporate culture relies on “framing”—a concept I explore in Episode 2 of my Red Pill Series—which is a psychological tactic that reframes exploitation as leadership and submission as teamwork.

When your success is measured by how effectively you can perform this emotional labor, it’s not just a professional hazard—it’s a mental health risk.

Eventually, you become fatigued from trying to become the kind of employee that the decision-makers like.

Zero Fucks Given

You know that “zero fucks given” stage of life that everyone jokes about? I think I hit it when menopause started a knock-down, drag-out cage match with my ADHD. The ADHD/Menopause combo exhausted what few fucks I had left.

I lost the ability to mask, which is a real problem when your professional survival depends on it. Without the capacity to mask, I could no longer convincingly “live the brand,” play the part of the high-energy team player, or fake interest in the organization’s mission.

The Path Forward

So, what did this middle-aged, ADHD-riddled, menopausal woman do?

I quit my corporate job and started my own business.

Risky? Yes.

Terrifying? Absolutely.

Do I regret it? Nope.

It’s hard work, but I’m having a blast!

My YouTube channel has really grown, I make my own hours, and I only devote my labor to things that I care about.

And I am currently working on a new project that I am really excited about…so stay tuned!

In the meantime, if you haven’t already, check out my series, Witches, Whores & Rebels. Or gift the series to a friend!

Check out the merch at my store.

Or my reading list.

There’s a version of success that asks you to become smaller, quieter, and more agreeable. What they call a “career” is, more often than not, a job that requires you to disappear in order to keep it.

I decided I was no longer willing to disappear.

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“Gullible, Cynical America”
The trouble with believing anything and nothing at the same time
By Adam Serwer
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/202...

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Sources:

Nathan “Nearest” Green and the history of Jack Daniel’s whiskey

Nearest Green Distillery historical archive

National Archives overview of the Whiskey Rebellion

The Bitter Aftertaste of Prohibition in American History

NASCAR Hall of Fame: Wendell Scott biography

Southern Foodways Alliance research on Southern distilling traditions

George Washington’s Cherry Bounce

James Sexton built a reputation as the “reasonable” New York divorce lawyer: pragmatic, emotionally intelligent, and allegedly neutral about gender. But somewhere between bestselling books, podcast tours, and viral clips, that persona shifted — and his co…

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In this video, I trace how James Sexton’s public image moved from compassionate attorney to red pill content creator, and what that says about the current media ecosystem around relationships, divorce, and gender.

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SOURCES:

CDC FastStats Marriage and Divorce

CDC National Marriage and Divorce Rates 2000–2023 (PDF)

CDC National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) Report on First Marriage Dissolution (PDF)

U.S. Census Bureau Story on Marriage and Divorce Trends

U.S. Census Bureau Blog on First Marriages Share

Pew Research Center “8 Facts About Divorce in the United States”

NIH / PMC Review Referencing ~40% First-Marriage Divorce

Shaunti Feldhahn Critique of 60–70% Remarriage Statistic

Census Bureau remarriage poster (SIPP based, includes percent remarried within 5 years by gender and cohort)

CBS News write-up of Pew analysis (mentions men slightly more likely to remarry)

NCFMR (Bowling Green State) remarriage rate by gender, 2018 change and gender gap

NCFMR remarriage rate by gender, 2019 (men consistently higher)

NCFMR remarriage rate 2023 (trend context, gender rates)

Peer-reviewed study on post-gray-divorce repartnering (gender gap, cohabitation vs remarriage)

General Social Survey (GSS)

Institute for Family Studies summary of GSS infidelity data

Research on household labor division and sexual desire in heterosexual relationships

For Women, Breadwinning Can Be Dangerous: Gendered Resource Theory and Wife Abuse

That work matters. But it is not sufficient.

Fact-checking treats misinformation as a content problem. As if false ideas circulate simply because they have not yet been corrected. History shows this is rarely how belief systems work.

Narratives persist not because they are accurate, but because they are useful.

They explain the world in emotionally satisfying ways. They assign blame, offer identity, and stabilize uncertainty. Even when individual claims are disproven, the underlying story often remains intact.

This is why media literacy must be understood as power analysis.

Power determines which narratives circulate widely, which are marginalized, and which are dismissed before they are even heard. It shapes incentives, amplification, and legitimacy. It decides whose interpretations feel normal and whose feel dangerous.

Social media platforms intensify these dynamics. Algorithms do not evaluate truth. They evaluate engagement. Narratives that align with existing power structures, emotional patterns, or economic incentives are rewarded. Others struggle to survive.

Fact-checking intervenes at the level of accuracy. Power analysis intervenes at the level of structure.

It asks different questions. Who benefits if this story is believed? Who is positioned as credible? Who is framed as dangerous, irrational, or disposable? What emotions are being activated and to what end?

Without this lens, people can correctly identify false claims while still absorbing the worldview that produced them.

This is why correcting misinformation often fails to change minds. The facts may be rejected, but more often they are simply absorbed into an existing narrative framework. The story adapts. The power relations remain.

True media literacy requires understanding how narratives function as tools. How they move through institutions, platforms, and identities. How they protect certain interests while obscuring others.

For educators, organizations, and public-facing professionals, this distinction matters. Training people to spot errors without teaching them to analyze power leaves them vulnerable to more sophisticated forms of influence.

Much of my work centers on helping people build this deeper form of literacy. Not to replace fact-checking, but to situate it within a broader understanding of how belief, authority, and influence operate.

Because in a media environment shaped by power, accuracy alone is not enough.

Today, propaganda rarely sounds political at all.

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It sounds personal. It sounds intimate. It sounds like lifestyle advice, self-improvement, identity affirmation, and cultural commentary. It shows up in the form of influencers, podcasts, wellness content, productivity hacks, masculinity discourse, femininity discourse, and “relatable” storytelling.

This shift reflects a fundamental change in how power moves through information systems.

Modern propaganda does not need to persuade people about policy. It needs to shape how people see themselves. Once identity is stabilized, political conclusions follow with very little resistance.

Social media platforms are designed around personal expression. They reward authenticity, vulnerability, and narrative coherence. Content that feels intimate performs better than content that feels abstract. Stories outperform statistics. Personal testimony outperforms institutional analysis.

This creates an ideal environment for propaganda disguised as self-expression.

Influencers function as ideological couriers because they feel trustworthy. They speak in the first person. They share experiences. They build parasocial relationships. The audience does not experience the message as instruction. They experience it as identification.

Once that identification is established, beliefs slide in quietly. A worldview becomes embedded in aesthetics, routines, and values. Political positions are no longer debated. They are lived.

This is why contemporary propaganda travels through content that appears apolitical on its surface. Wellness narratives can encode moral hierarchies. Productivity culture can normalize exploitation. Masculinity and femininity discourse can naturalize domination and submission. Cultural grievance can be framed as personal injury.

None of this requires explicit ideological messaging. It only requires alignment with identity.

This also explains why people react defensively when these dynamics are named. Critiquing the narrative feels like critiquing the self. Disagreement feels personal because the messaging was never framed as political in the first place.

Traditional media literacy struggles here because it was built for a different era. It trains people to analyze sources, check claims, and spot bias in overt political communication. It is less equipped to address belief systems that arrive through lifestyle, culture, and emotion.

Today, this is where power operates.

Understanding modern propaganda requires learning to recognize narratives, not just arguments. To examine who benefits from a particular identity story. To notice which ways of being are celebrated, which are ridiculed, and which are rendered unthinkable.

For educators, creators, and organizations, this shift has real consequences. Personal narratives shape workplace culture, public trust, and civic behavior long before they show up as policy preferences.

You have to recognize how influence travels through intimacy rather than authority. Not to strip meaning from personal stories, but to understand how they are structured and mobilized.

Because influence is most effective when it no longer feels like influence and just feels like common sense.

Instead, it asks questions.

“I’m just asking questions.”
“I’m just curious.”
“Why aren’t we allowed to talk about this?”

On the surface, this posture appears reasonable, even virtuous. Curiosity is framed as courage. Skepticism is framed as independence. Doubt is framed as intellectual honesty.

But this move has very little to do with inquiry and a great deal to do with power.

Propaganda has always understood that asserting a false claim makes it vulnerable. Claims can be disproven. Questions, by contrast, are much harder to confront. They shift the burden of proof onto the listener. They create suspicion without responsibility. They destabilize shared reality while maintaining plausible deniability.

This is why “just asking questions” has become such a powerful rhetorical weapon in the social media era.

A question does not need to make sense to be effective. It only needs to suggest that something is being hidden, suppressed, or ignored. Once that suggestion takes hold, the damage is done. Even if the implied claim is later disproven, the doubt lingers. The audience is left with a feeling rather than a fact.

Historically, doubt has been one of the most reliable tools of persuasion. Tobacco companies did not initially try to prove cigarettes were safe. They worked to manufacture uncertainty about the science linking smoking to cancer. Authoritarian movements have long used ambiguity to erode trust in institutions, journalism, and expertise. When people no longer know what to believe, power flows toward whoever feels most confident.

Social media has supercharged this dynamic.

Platforms reward engagement, not clarity. Questions framed as transgressive or forbidden perform exceptionally well. They invite speculation, outrage, and participation. Comment sections fill with people “connecting dots,” offering theories, and reinforcing suspicion. The original speaker remains untouched. After all, they never made a claim.

This is narrative sabotage.

The goal is not to arrive at an answer. The goal is to weaken confidence in existing explanations while offering no accountable alternative. Over time, repeated exposure to this style of questioning trains audiences to distrust expertise while mistaking cynicism for critical thinking.

This is why attempts to respond with facts fail. You cannot fact-check a suggestion. You cannot disprove a vibe. You cannot correct an implication that was never explicitly stated.

Media literacy, therefore, requires learning to interrogate questions themselves. Not every question is asked in good faith. Some are designed to clarify. Others are designed to corrode.

A useful starting point is simple. What outcome would answering this question produce? Would it increase understanding? Or would it merely deepen suspicion? Would it illuminate reality? Or would it erode trust while leaving nothing stable in its place?

The normalization of bad-faith questioning quietly reshapes how people relate to knowledge, authority, and one another.

People need to recognize these rhetorical patterns before they take root. Not to shut down curiosity, but to protect it. Genuine inquiry depends on shared standards of evidence and accountability.

Without those, questions stop being tools for understanding and become instruments of control.

I used to believe that.

This framing is comforting because it removes human agency from the equation. It suggests that people are acted upon, rather than shaped through participation. But it is also misleading.

Algorithms do not radicalize people. They reward emotional consistency.

Social media platforms are not designed to promote truth, balance, or nuance. They are designed to maximize engagement. And engagement is not driven by careful reasoning. It is driven by emotion that is clear, repeatable, and legible to a machine.

Anger, grievance, fear, resentment, moral superiority, humiliation. These emotions perform well because they are easy to recognize, easy to trigger, and easy to sustain over time. Content that reliably produces the same emotional response is more predictable. Predictability is valuable. It keeps users scrolling.

What this means in practice is that platforms reward people who show up emotionally the same way over and over again.

If you consistently frame the world as hostile, the algorithm learns that hostility is your lane. If you consistently frame events as evidence of betrayal, decline, or threat, the system responds by showing you more content that fits that emotional pattern. Because that is what keeps you engaged.

Over time, beliefs harden not through persuasion, but through repetition. The topics change. The emotional framing stays the same. That feeling becomes familiar. Familiarity becomes comfort. Comfort becomes conviction.

This is why radicalization today rarely feels like a sharp turn. It feels like coherence. Like finally making sense of things. Like everything clicking into place.

The algorithm did not persuade you. It reflected you back to yourself.

This dynamic also explains why “both sides” debates and fact-based corrections so often fail. Facts that disrupt emotional consistency are experienced as attacks. They feel destabilizing, not enlightening. The nervous system resists them. The platform quietly deprioritizes them.

What survives instead are narratives that preserve emotional continuity. Narratives that allow the user to feel the same way about new information as they felt about the old information. Narratives that do not ask for emotional recalibration.

This is structural.

Social media trains users to perform their emotions in increasingly legible ways. The clearer and more consistent the emotional signal, the more visibility it receives. Over time, this narrows the range of acceptable feeling. Ambivalence disappears. Complexity underperforms. Rage and certainty thrive.

Propaganda does not need to convince. It only needs to align itself with an existing emotional pattern and then feed it relentlessly.

Understanding this shifts how we think about media literacy.

The problem is not that people are being dragged into extremism against their will. The problem is that they are being rewarded for emotional consistency until belief systems calcify around those emotional responses.

Real media literacy, therefore, cannot stop at identifying misinformation. It has to ask harder questions. What emotional response is being cultivated here? What feeling keeps getting reinforced? What version of the self is being rewarded?

For people who teach, lead, manage audiences, or shape public narratives, this matters. Emotional reinforcement loops affect decision-making, workplace culture, brand trust, and civic life long before they show up as ideology.

A significant part of my work focuses on helping people recognize these invisible feedback loops. Not to police emotion, but to understand how platforms quietly shape what feels normal, obvious, or inevitable.

Because the most powerful form of influence does not change what people think.

It changes what feels normal.

That belief is wrong. And worse, it is dangerous.

Historically, propaganda has never relied on ignorance alone. It has relied on identity, status, and moral certainty. In fact, the more intelligent someone believes themselves to be, the easier it may be to guide them without their noticing. Not because they lack intelligence, but because intelligence produces confidence. And confidence is the real entry point.

Propaganda presents itself as insight. It flatters the audience. It whispers: You see what others do not. You are not like the masses. You are rational, independent, awake.

That framing has been used repeatedly throughout history, especially when targeting elites, professionals, and decision-makers. Colonial administrators, industrial managers, educated clergy, and political leaders were not fed crude lies. They were given narratives that aligned with their self-image. They were told they were stewards of order, reason, progress, or stability. The story did not contradict their intelligence. It depended on it.

The same pattern plays out today, only faster and at scale.

Social media has created an environment where confidence is algorithmically rewarded. The platforms do not privilege truth. They privilege simplicity, consistency, and emotional resonance. The people who perform certainty well are amplified. The people who hedge, complicate, or pause are buried.

This creates a subtle but powerful distortion. Users begin to confuse repetition with consensus and confidence with accuracy. Over time, belief systems form not because they are proven, but because they feel coherent. Each new piece of information fits neatly into an existing narrative. Contradictions are not examined. They are dismissed as bias or bad faith.

This is where intelligence can become a liability.

Highly educated users are skilled at constructing arguments. They can rationalize. They can contextualize. They can explain away inconsistencies in ways that feel intellectually satisfying. They are also more likely to believe they are thinking independently, even when their information environment has been carefully shaped.

The phrase “do your own research” captures this perfectly. It sounds like autonomy. In practice, it often means navigating a pre-filtered landscape where certain conclusions are repeatedly reinforced and others never appear. The research feels self-directed, but the pathways are not neutral.

Propaganda thrives in this space because it no longer needs to convince. It only needs to align. Once a narrative matches someone’s identity, values, or sense of moral seriousness, it can persist even in the face of contradictory evidence. Facts are rejected. The story remains.

This is why fact-checking alone is insufficient. You cannot dismantle a belief system that was never built on evidence in the first place. You have to understand the emotional and identity-based scaffolding holding it up.

True media literacy begins here. Not with spotting fake headlines or debunking viral posts, but with examining how confidence is cultivated, rewarded, and weaponized. It requires asking harder questions about why certain narratives feel satisfying, who benefits from their circulation, and what emotional needs they serve.

The uncomfortable truth is that propaganda is most effective when it makes people feel smart, not controlled. When it frames belief as discernment and alignment as independence.

This is not a moral failure. It is a structural one. And it is why understanding modern propaganda requires more than skepticism. It requires power analysis.

For those of us who teach, lead, create, or shape public narratives, this matters deeply. The cost of misunderstanding how influence works is not just misinformation. It is misplaced confidence, brittle decision-making, and an inability to recognize when we are being guided rather than informed.

Much of my work lives in this space: helping people see the invisible incentives shaping belief and engagement online. Not to shame or correct, but to build systems of awareness that will holdup under pressure.

Because the goal of media literacy is not to feel smarter than everyone else. It is to remain accountable to reality even when the story is flattering.

This is the complete version of my YouTube video that I had to edit for content. It contains detailed information about sexual violence and abuse. Reader discretion is advised.

There is nothing remarkable about the Epstein files.

Not the behavior.

Not the cruelty.

Not even the scale.

What’s shocking is not what powerful men did.

What’s shocking is that we are still pretending this is new.

Every time a scandal like Epstein breaks, we are encouraged to treat it as an anomaly. To see him as a monster. A uniquely depraved man operating outside the norm.

That is so far from the truth. There is nothing unique about Jeffrey Epstein or the men who went to his parties, visited his island and engaged in abusive and violent behavior towards women and children.

History tells a much colder story.

When men gain wealth, status, and institutional protection, sexual abuse is not an accidental side effect. It’s the goal. Epstein did not corrupt the system. He exploited a system that has always existed. To understand this, we have to stop obsessing over every salacious detail and start looking at patterns. And there is a very obvious pattern with powerful men and once you see it, these men stop looking exceptional and start looking familiar.

The abuse of women and children by elite men is not a historical deviation. It is the most consistent feature of male power.

Men do not become powerful and then randomly abuse women and children. The men who are either born with, or relentlessly pursue this level of power, do so precisely because it allows them to dominate, exploit, and remain immune from consequence.

This is not about the pathology of any individual man. It is about the male power structure.

And history is full of men just like Epstein. So many in fact that in the interests of time and your attention span, I’ve had to narrow it down to the stories of five men to illustrate this point.

Gilles de Rais

Baron Gilles de Rais was a French nobleman, a military hero of the Hundred Years’ War who fought side by side with Joan of Arc. He was one of the wealthiest men of his era. He also tortured, raped, and murdered dozens if not hundreds of children.

Let me be very clear about what elite protection looks like. Baron de Rais was not operating in secrecy. He was operating in plain sight. As a Breton nobleman and Marshal of France, he had enormous wealth, private castles, armed retainers, and legal autonomy. He used that power to abduct children, primarily boys from poor families, servants, and peasants who had no social protection.

Children were lured with promises of work, money, or patronage. Others were just snatched from villages surrounding his estates. Many were brought into his castles under the authority of his household, meaning their disappearance was explained away as employment or service. Inside his residences, children were subjected to prolonged sexual violence, torture, and ritualized murder. Testimony described beatings, strangulation, dismemberment, and the keeping of body parts as trophies.

Some witnesses recounted that he derived pleasure not only from the things he did, but from the fear his victims experienced and the power that he had to determine whether they lived or died.

Think about the Sascha Riley interviews and the things that he described during his time being trafficked through Epstein’s network as a young man. It was worse than that.

It’s not just about what Baron de Rais did. It is about how long he was allowed to do it.

Parents complained. Villagers talked. Clergy knew. Local authorities were aware that children who entered his castles and estates were never seen again. Nothing happened. No action was taken. Why? Because Gilles de Rais was rich, noble, and politically connected. He was a war hero. He was untouchable…until he became inconvenient.

When he was finally arrested and tried, it was not because society suddenly decided that the safety and wellbeing of children mattered. It was because he was fighting with the Church and the Duke of Brittany over land and money. His crimes became actionable only once his power threatened other powerful men. Even then, the trial focused as much on heresy and disobedience as it did on the murders themselves.

Gilles de Rais was a textbook example of what happens when a man has wealth, authority, lots of private spaces, and a population that cannot refuse him. The violence was extreme, but the reaction was ordinary.

Children are the most vulnerable members of society. They have no power and are always treated as disposable. A powerful man’s reputation mattered more than the lives of those children. Accountability arrived only when elite interests shifted.

This is the pattern for every powerful abuser.

Aristocratic power does not restrain violence. It licenses it.

Emperor Tiberius

Now let us go back in time to imperial Rome. If absolute power reveals character, then Tiberius is one of history’s clearest case studies. Tiberius succeeded Emperor Augustus, ruling Rome from 14 to 37 AD, inheriting an empire already structured around slavery, patriarchy, and extreme hierarchy. For much of his reign he governed from a distance, but in its later years he withdrew almost entirely from Rome to the island of Capri.

His time on that island functioned as a sealed environment, controlled by the emperor, staffed by enslaved people, and insulated from public scrutiny. It is during this period that ancient historians record a pattern of sexual abuse so extreme that it stood out even in Roman elite culture.

Suetonius, writing in The Lives of the Caesars, describes Tiberius surrounding himself with enslaved children chosen for their youth. He records that the emperor orchestrated their abuse as a form of entertainment, and that he openly discussed the things he did to his victims.

Allegedly, he trained infants and very young children, whom he termed “little fish” or “tiddlers,” to swim between his thighs while he bathed and nibble on his genitalia. He was accused of taking unweaned infants from their mothers and holding them to his genitals. He marveled at their natural urge to “suckle”. Tiberius allegedly sodomized young boys during sacrificial ceremonies and had the legs of those who complained broken.

He was open about it. Just like Epstein and the gang (they put it in emails!).

Tiberius is described as speaking so casually about his actions, as though his authority placed him beyond moral or social constraint.

This detail is crucial.

Elite men in Roman society already had extraordinary sexual access. Enslaved people had no legal personhood. Children were under patriarchal control. Sexual violence by powerful men was usually ignored. And yet, Suetonius and others still felt compelled to record Tiberius’s behavior as excessive, grotesque, and worthy of condemnation.

I mean we’re talking about a culture who routinely crucified people. The behavior of Emperor Tiberius shocked the Romans. It was that bad.

But the fact that these acts were recorded did not mean they were punished. There was no investigation. No legal response. No removal from power. Of course, not—he was the emperor. The imperial system did not intervene, because it was not designed to. The people harmed had no standing. The emperor had no superior.

Later writers turned Tiberius into a symbol of decadence and moral rot, a cautionary tale about a bad ruler. But that framing again shifts attention away from structure and onto personality. Individual pathology.

Tiberius did not abuse children because Rome failed to restrain him. He abused them because Rome gave him absolute authority over bodies the law did not recognize as worth protecting.

This is the pattern that repeats. When a system allows one man or a small number of men total control, isolation from oversight, and access to vulnerable people, abuse is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome.

If you want to understand how sexual violence becomes routine under power, look no further than the colonial plantation.

Thomas Thistlewood was an 18th-century British plantation owner and overseer in Jamaica. Unlike many enslavers whose crimes are reconstructed indirectly via historical records, Thistlewood documented his own actions in meticulous daily journals for almost 40 years.

He named the women. He recorded dates. He logged pregnancies. He noted punishments. Sexual violence appears alongside weather reports, crop yields, and labor assignments. It is treated as an administrative detail.

Enslaved girls were assaulted as soon as they were considered old enough to be…useful. One of the most infamous entries describes a punishment in which an enslaved man was forced to consume human waste as discipline. Others document extreme physical violence inflicted on women who resisted sexual access or were deemed disobedient.

Thistlewood did not fear exposure. His journals were not confessions. They were records. He lived in a society where enslaved women were legally defined as property, where rape was not recognized as a crime if the victim was enslaved, and where white men’s sexual access was an assumed right of ownership. There was no mechanism for accountability because the entire plantation economy depended on this structure remaining intact.

Thistlewood was not punished. He was not ostracized. He was not exceptional. He was ordinary.

That is the most disturbing part.

His journals survive not because he was notorious, but because he was typical. Historians value them precisely because they reveal how normalized this violence was within racial capitalism.

Thistlewood did not need secrecy, networks, or cover-ups. The law itself protected him. The economy rewarded him. Society affirmed his authority.

Sexual violence was not a scandal. It was a feature of the system. If you understand this precedent, you will understand modern abuse networks. When bodies are commodified, sexual exploitation follows. When power is absolute, abuse becomes normalized. Business as usual.

That is not a moral failure of one man. It is the logical and predictable outcome of an economic and legal order built on domination.

Which brings us to America’s third president.

Thomas Jefferson built his public legacy on Enlightenment language about liberty, natural rights, and human equality while privately exercising total ownership over hundreds of enslaved people. Among them was Sally Hemings, an enslaved girl who was the half-sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife and who became pregnant by Jefferson while he served as U.S. minister to France.

Hemings was fourteen years old when Jefferson began sexually exploiting her. She was pregnant with the first child that he fathered when they returned from Paris.

She was 16.

Under Virginia law and under the institution of slavery itself, Hemings had no legal capacity to consent. Jefferson controlled every aspect of her life, including her labor, her movements, her family, and her body.

We know that Jefferson fathered at least six children with Hemings. Extensive documentary evidence shows that Jefferson was present at Monticello at the time each child was conceived, while other potential candidates were absent. Y chromosome DNA testing of Hemings descendants further confirms that the father was a male member of the Jefferson line, and no other Jefferson male fits the historical timeline.

What followed was not accountability, but erasure.

Jefferson remained the embodiment of Enlightenment ideals. Sally Hemings was reduced to a footnote, then a rumor, then a controversy.

For more than a century, historians dismissed Hemings’s own testimony and the testimony of her children, portraying the relationship as unproven, consensual, or even romantic. Pop culture did the same thing. This denial functioned to protect Jefferson’s legacy as a moral philosopher and founding father.

Hemings remained enslaved for most of her life. Jefferson did not free her during his lifetime. He did not free her in his will. She was listed among Jefferson’s property in an inventory of his estate and was assigned a value of $50. Her children were freed selectively and quietly, often only after reaching adulthood, in ways that minimized public scrutiny and preserved Jefferson’s image.

This is how elite sexual exploitation survives historical scrutiny.

Jefferson understood power not only as ownership in the present, but as narrative control in the future. He left no public acknowledgment, no written reckoning, and no disruption to the myth that surrounded him. The institutions that followed obliged him.

Liberal political ideals have long coexisted comfortably with the domination and sexual exploitation of women. The violence disappears from the record not because it was rare, but because it was inconvenient to America’s founding narrative.

Jefferson’s legacy shows how easily moral language can coexist with sexual exploitation when the system itself is designed to protect white male power. A man can write about freedom while denying it completely to the women he owns, and history will still call him great.

That is foundational in American history—particularly as it relates to the Founding Fathers.

Donatien Alphonse François, otherwise known as the Marquis de Sade, was a French writer, libertine, political activist, and nobleman best known for his libertine novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts.

He was also notorious for his imprisonment for sex crimes, blasphemy, and pornography. So much so that the word “sadism”, derived from his name, is the term we use to describe deriving pleasure from inflicting pain.

Throughout his adult life, de Sade was repeatedly accused of severe sexual violence against women and girls, including assault, coercion, and physical abuse. Multiple victims testified that they were confined, threatened, drugged, and subjected to violence under his control. This was official testimony which, amazingly, resulted in arrests, trials, and periods of imprisonment.

However, while he was repeatedly jailed for these crimes, he was also repeatedly released.

De Sade’s noble status, wealth, and family connections consistently shielded him from any lasting accountability. His wife’s family intervened. Royal letters of cachet—sealed administrative orders directly from the King of France that could not be appealed—were used both to imprison him quietly and to release him when politically convenient. His punishments were erratic and focused more on containing the scandal rather than addressing the harm.

Even when incarcerated, de Sade retained access to servants, writing materials, and social privilege unavailable to ordinary prisoners.

After his death, de Sade’s crimes were gradually reframed as philosophy. His writings, which fictionalized sexual violence as liberation, transgression, and truth telling, were absorbed into literary and academic canons. The suffering of real women was abstracted into metaphor.

Violence became literary discourse.

This is a crucial pivot.

De Sade’s elevation to misunderstood intellectual allowed elite culture to perform a familiar maneuver. To detach the abuse from the abuser. Ever heard people say that you have to “separate the art from the artist”? when people say that it is usually because the artist in question is an abuser.

The victims disappeared. What remained was the myth of the provocative genius pushing moral boundaries. But de Sade was not theorizing violence. He was justifying it and defending it while actively harming women.

His work did not challenge hierarchy. It depended on it.

The Marquis de Sade demonstrates how misogyny survives not only through denial, but through aestheticization. When powerful men harm women, their cruelty can be repackaged as art, rebellion, or insight. The language changes. The power does not.

And that is why de Sade belongs squarely in this lineage of abusers. He reveals how elite sexual violence can persist even after exposure, by being elevated into culture instead of condemned by it.

Across centuries and cultures, the pattern is unmistakable: Wealth or inherited status. Access to unprotected bodies. Institutional silence. Cultural narratives that minimize harm. Punishment only when convenient for the power structure.

Sexual violence is not a glitch in male power. It is a feature.

Jeffrey Epstein did not invent elite sexual exploitation. He just modernized it. He scaled it.

Private jets instead of plantations, NDAs replaced feudal silence, business titles replaced noble ones, financial secrecy and blackmail replaced aristocratic immunity.

And the only reason we know as much as we do is because he happened to be friends with the most corrupt president this country has ever had who himself has been accused by multiple women and girls of numerous instances of sexual assault and found liable for one. If he had never been elected president, we wouldn’t even be talking about this.

The power network behaved exactly as history predicts.

Another important part of this discussion is that most sexual abuse does not happen on private islands. It happens in homes. By fathers. Uncles. Stepfathers. Grandfathers. Older cousins. Family friends. And what do we do when it happens?

We close ranks.

We minimize.

We protect the abuser.

We tell the child not to ruin the family.

We tell the mother to keep the peace.

Abuse of women and children is replicated, not just through elite networks, but through ordinary ones.

If we want fewer predators, we have to stop making excuses for them. We have to stop shielding them simply because we are related to them. Family court systems routinely prioritize fathers’ rights over children’s safety. Mothers who raise concerns are labeled alienating, hysterical, or vindictive. Child protective services are underfunded, overburdened, and structurally biased toward family preservation over child protection.

We say we care about children, but we build systems that force them to remain in close proximity to their abusers. You cannot dismantle sexual violence in elite circles while maintaining a culture that excuses it at home.

We also need to talk about tech billionaires and finance culture.

The modern billionaire class operates inside systems that reward dominance, secrecy, and risk externalization. They celebrate rule-breaking as innovation. These industries attract men who believe the rules do not apply to them. Then they surround those men with lawyers, publicists, and private systems designed to make that belief a reality.

The warning signs appear early: Private islands, exclusive retreats, non-disclosure agreements as standard practice, workplaces that are extremely hostile to women who speak up, and cultures that punish whistleblowers more than they punish abusers.

Because wealth is not tethered to accountability, there will always be abuse. Not always visibly. Not always immediately. But reliably.

The Epstein files do not shock me because I know my history. And so far, nothing that these men did was worse than anything that has already been done to a black woman in this country.

Consider the lynching of Mary Turner.

Mrs. Turner was a black woman who was eight months pregnant when she was lynched on May 19, 1918 at Folsom’s Bridge 16 miles north of Valdosta, Georgia. She was targeted in retaliation for speaking out publicly against the lynching of her husband, Hayes Turner, the day before. She had promised to take legal action.

A white mob bound her feet, hanged her from a tree with her head facing down, threw gasoline on her, and burned the clothes off her body. Mrs. Turner was still alive when the mob took a large butcher’s knife to her abdomen, cutting the unborn baby from her body. When the baby fell to the ground, a member of the mob crushed the crying baby’s head with his foot. The mob then riddled Mrs. Turner’s body with hundreds of bullets, killing her.

Why This Conversation Is Resisted

The reason people want to believe that Epstein is exceptional is because the alternative is terrifying. If we accept that he is a pattern and not a monster, then the problem is not individual morality. It is power itself. And that means solutions cannot be cosmetic. They cannot be scandal driven. They require structural limits on wealth, secrecy, and the dismantling of the system of male dominance.

That is a conversation that patriarchal capitalism wants to avoid at all costs.

So, the Epstein files do not tell us anything new about men. They confirm something old: When male power goes unchecked, sexual exploitation is inevitable.

The only thing left to decide is whether we are going to keep pretending that each revelation is unprecedented, or if we are finally going to admit that the sexual exploitation of women and children is part of the system’s design.

SOURCES:

“The Trial of Gilles De Rais” https://amzn.to/3O1KFkg

Sasha Riley Audios

outlaws of chivalry

"Don't worry. Boys are hard to find." Part 1 o2

Luke 12:2–3: “However, nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the housetops…

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9 months ago · 18369 likes · 3541 comments · Lisa Noelle Voldeng

Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) https://amzn.to/3MrC89P

Thomas Thistlewood Papers https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/resources/1050

Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Monticello https://www.monticello.org/sallyhemings/

Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Pulitzer Prize winning historian who reshaped scholarly consensus. https://amzn.to/4qkTF1r

Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello. Definitive work situating the relationship within slavery’s legal and social structure. https://amzn.to/3LYzLLD

Michel Delon, “Sade” in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Authoritative scholarly overview of de Sade’s life, crimes, imprisonments, and legacy. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marquis-de-Sade

Neil Schaeffer, The Marquis de Sade: A Life. Definitive biography documenting accusations, trials, imprisonments, and social protection. https://amzn.to/3Oca6j2

John Phillips, The Marquis de Sade: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press overview situating de Sade within aristocratic power and repression. https://academic.oup.com/book/9281

That definition is not wrong. It is simply incomplete.

In a media environment shaped by algorithms, incentives, and power, the most influential narratives are rarely the ones that are outright lies. They are the ones that feel reasonable. Familiar. Emotionally coherent. They circulate not because they withstand scrutiny, but because they fit neatly into how people already understand themselves and the world.

Media literacy, as I use the term here, is not about becoming a better debunker. It is about learning how influence actually works.

It asks different questions.
Not “Is this true?” but “Why does this feel persuasive?”
Not “Who said this?” but “Who benefits if this story is believed?”
Not “Is this biased?” but “What emotions are being trained, rewarded, and normalized?”

Historically, propaganda was loud. It announced itself. Today, it is quiet. It moves through culture, identity, lifestyle, and intimacy. It shows up in wellness advice, productivity content, gender discourse, and personal storytelling. It rarely looks political, even when it has profound political consequences.

This is why traditional approaches to media literacy often fall short. Fact-checking addresses accuracy, but influence does not operate at the level of accuracy alone. It operates at the level of narrative, repetition, and emotional reinforcement.

Belief systems persist not because they are proven, but because they are useful.

To be media literate in this environment is to understand how platforms reward certain ways of feeling and thinking. How algorithms privilege consistency over complexity. How questions can destabilize trust without making claims. How identity can carry ideology without ever naming it.

The essays in this section are not designed to tell you what to believe. They are designed to make the structure of belief visible.

They examine how narratives move, how power hides inside “common sense,” and how influence becomes most effective when it no longer feels like influence at all.

Because media literacy is not about winning arguments online. It is about remaining accountable to reality in a system designed to make that increasingly difficult.

And that is no longer an abstract skill. It is a civic, cultural, and professional one.

I finally did the thing everyone tells writers to do and opened a shop.

But before you imagine a pivot into Hustle Culture or me trying to sell you a 47-step mindset course, relax. This is not that.

The shop is just T-shirts and mugs.

That’s it. No manifesting. No grind. No “this quote changed my life” energy.

The idea was simple: sometimes you want something fun that reflects the way you think. Something you can wear, or drink coffee out of, that quietly signals, oh, she has opinions.

Everything in the shop is designed with the same sensibility as this Substack: sharp, a little irreverent, historically aware, and allergic to nonsense. It’s fun merch for fun people.

Independent writing is labor. Research is labor. Speaking on a public platform is labor. This store helps fund the work you already read here. Also, let’s be honest: if I’m going to spend my time writing essays about power, patriarchy, capitalism, and cultural myths, I might as well put some of that energy into a mug.

If you want to check it out, it’s here:

https://shop.thereselee.com/

No pressure.

And as always, thank you for being here.

The modern American debate over guns is often framed as timeless, instinctual, even inevitable—an extension of frontier ruggedness or constitutional destiny. But the Second Amendment was not born out of abstraction or philosophy alone. It emerged from fear, defeat, racial control, and rebellion against centralized authority, and its meaning has shifted repeatedly depending on who held power and who was being policed.

The recent killing of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, and the backlash it provoked from gun rights organizations, is not an anomaly. It is the latest chapter in a long and uncomfortable story about who the state believes has the right to bear arms—and what happens when that belief is tested.

On January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti, a Minnesota ICU nurse and lawful gun owner, was shot and killed by federal agents during an ICE operation. Early government statements implied that Pretti’s possession of a firearm justified the use of lethal force, despite later reporting and video evidence calling those claims into question. What made this case politically volatile was not just the killing itself, but the implication embedded in the official narrative: that merely carrying a gun, even legally, could render someone a lawful target of state violence. Organizations like the National Rifle Association responded with outrage, warning that such reasoning hollowed out the very meaning of the Second Amendment. Their reaction, while self-interested, exposed a deeper contradiction at the heart of American gun culture—one that has existed since the country’s founding.

To understand why this logic feels so dangerous to gun rights advocates—and why it should—it is necessary to revisit what the Second Amendment was actually designed to prevent. Not in modern mythology, but in its legislative history. The amendment was not born out of concerns about crime or personal self-defense. It was a concession extracted from a deeply divided Congress, shaped by fear of federal power, standing armies, and the possibility that the new government could disarm the people by law.

The Second Amendment arose out of a specific late-eighteenth-century crisis. After the Constitution was drafted in 1787, it faced fierce resistance from Anti-Federalists who believed it dangerously centralized authority. One of their core objections was Congress’s power to organize, arm, and discipline the militia. They feared the federal government could neutralize state militias through neglect or manipulation, replacing them with a standing army loyal only to the central state. In Federal Farmer No. 18, Richard Henry Lee warned that if Congress refused to arm the militia, it would become useless. The concern was not hunting or interpersonal violence; it was who controlled force.

James Madison shared this anxiety, though from the Federalist side. In Federalist No. 46, he argued that the existence of armed state militias would deter federal tyranny, framing “being armed” as collective political power rather than individual autonomy divorced from civic obligation.

When the First Congress convened in 1789, Madison introduced a slate of amendments meant to placate Anti-Federalists and legitimize ratification. His original draft of what became the Second Amendment was longer and explicitly tied gun ownership to militia service, even including a conscientious-objector clause. That clause makes little sense if the amendment were intended as an unrestricted personal entitlement.

Debates in the House of Representatives centered on fear of federal disarmament, not crime. Elbridge Gerry warned that unless power was carefully guarded, “the people may be disarmed.” During Senate debates, held largely behind closed doors, the language was shortened, the conscientious-objector clause removed, and the prefatory militia clause retained. These edits clarified political purpose rather than expanded individual use cases.

Statements made outside Congress further underscore this point. George Mason warned during the Virginia Ratifying Convention that disarmament was historically the most effective method of enslavement. Patrick Henry insisted that citizens must remain armed so the federal government could not dominate the states, not because every individual weapon was sacred in perpetuity. Even Alexander Hamilton, skeptical of militias and more supportive of centralized military power, acknowledged that forcing the entire citizenry into constant arms-bearing would be a grievance rather than a freedom.

There was no unified Founders’ vision of gun rights.

The Second Amendment was a compromise text, born of mistrust, designed to calm fears—not to settle philosophical questions for all time.

The legislative history makes one thing unmistakably clear: the Second Amendment was about who controlled violence in a fragile republic. It was about federalism, militias, and resistance to centralized military power. The idea that it was primarily about individual self-defense against criminals is a much later interpretation—one that would have been foreign to the men who wrote it.

The amendment was also not written in a vacuum. Colonial Americans inherited their understanding of arms-bearing from English law, particularly the 1689 English Bill of Rights, which allowed Protestants to bear arms in defense of themselves and the state. This was never a universal right; it was conditional, tied to loyalty, religion, and class. In the American colonies, guns were tools of survival but also instruments of power. Militias were not simply citizen armies prepared to resist tyranny. They were mechanisms for enforcing colonial order, suppressing rebellions, and policing enslaved and Indigenous populations.

From the beginning, the right to bear arms was inseparable from the right to rule.

When the Second Amendment was ratified, its language reflected elite anxieties about centralized power rather than a democratic commitment to universal self-defense. A “well-regulated militia” was understood as a counterweight to federal overreach, not as a safeguard for marginalized people.

Early American gun laws routinely disarmed those deemed dangerous to the social order, including enslaved Black people, free Black communities, and Native Americans. The right to bear arms was never race-neutral, even when its language pretended to be.

Nowhere is the cultural memory of disarmament more politically charged than in the American South. Many settlers in the southern backcountry, particularly in places like North Carolina, were of Scottish descent. They came from a society shaped by the failed Jacobite rebellions, after which the British state imposed sweeping disarmament laws on the Scottish Highlands. Weapons were confiscated, tartans banned, and entire regions brought under military occupation. That inherited understanding—that guns can mark a household for punishment rather than protect it—survives in cultural memory.

A vivid illustration of this appears in the TV series, Outlander, Season 3, Episode 2. While Jenny Fraser is in labor, children attempt to shoot a crow they believe is a bad omen. The act is rooted in superstition, but the danger is political. The gunshot risks drawing British soldiers to the house, nearly exposing Jamie, a defeated Jacobite outlaw hiding under constant threat of arrest or execution. In this moment, the gun is not a symbol of freedom. It is a liability. Possession invites scrutiny; noise invites the state.

This logic did not remain in the Highlands. It traveled with Scotch-Irish settlers to the American backcountry, shaping a culture where guns became both sacred and dangerous, symbols of autonomy haunted by the memory of punishment.

Yet even as white Americans cultivated a mythology of armed liberty, the law continued to treat gun ownership as conditional. After the Civil War, Southern states passed Black Codes restricting firearm access for newly freed Black citizens. In cases like United States v. Cruikshank, the Supreme Court allowed states to disarm Black communities while white militias terrorized them with impunity.

Guns remained a right for some and a threat when held by others.

This double standard became impossible to ignore in the 1960s, when the Black Panther Party began openly carrying firearms to monitor police activity in California. Their actions forced the country to confront a truth it preferred to ignore: gun rights had always been selectively enforced. The response was swift. California passed the Mulford Act, banning the public carrying of loaded firearms. Ronald Reagan supported it. So did the NRA.

Modern gun control gained real momentum only when Black Americans exercised the same rights white Americans had long claimed.

Over time, gun rights organizations successfully reframed the Second Amendment as an individual right untethered from militia service. Supreme Court decisions like District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago constitutionalized this interpretation. But the contradiction remained. The right to bear arms exists on paper, while the state retains overwhelming discretion to decide when armed citizens become legitimate targets.

This is why the killing of Alex Pretti matters beyond its immediate tragedy. His legal gun ownership was treated not as a safeguard against state power, but as justification for lethal force. Video evidence shows Pretti was unarmed in the moments before he was pepper-sprayed, restrained, and shot, contradicting official claims that he posed a threat. His death exposes the fragility of Second Amendment protections when confronted with law enforcement authority.

A right that evaporates the moment it is exercised is not a right at all.

The selective application of this logic becomes unmistakable when placed beside the case of Kyle Rittenhouse. When Rittenhouse crossed state lines with an AR-15 and killed two people during a protest, the law bent itself into a defense of his fear, his judgment, and his right to be armed. His weapon was framed as restraint, his violence as self-defense, his presence as understandable. When Alex Pretti legally carried a firearm in his own city, that same fact was used to rationalize his death. The difference was never the gun. It was whether the state saw the armed individual as a citizen exercising a right or as a problem to be neutralized.

Together, these cases expose the fiction at the heart of America’s gun debate: that the law is about weapons rather than about power. Until the country reckons with the history it refuses to name, every new shooting—whether by civilians or by the state—will be explained away as a tragedy, even as it unfolds exactly as the system intended.

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Sources:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/minute-minute-timeline-fatal-shooting-alex-pretti-federal/story?id=129547199&utm

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnvg812n01no

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt2-2/ALDE_00013262/?utm

https://time.com/4507852/second-amendment-all-citizens-history/?utm

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presser_v._Illinois?utm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunn_v._Georgia?utm

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https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt2-2/ALDE_00013262/?utm

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https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-12-02-0126

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https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt2-2/ALDE_00013262/?utm

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American traditional masculinity is not timeless. It is a political and cultural construction designed to protect power structures.

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