I’m leaving the magazine up because I think we have some good stuff here for any future curious people to find. But I am moving on. I’m going full local for politics and shifting to a project I’ve had on the back burner for too long: modern life administration. As in, I’m going to teach young people how to do it, merging the old ways with the new. It’s still keeping with the same goal I had in my writing, bridging gaps, but using community instead of being another of thousands of freelance pundits trying to persuade. Plus, I’ve complained enough about pundits endlessly chatting about problems that I’m convicted by the irony. It’s time to get to work.

I have few regrets about attempting this project to present conservative women’s perspective to the con-curious. I am disappointed it did not turn out as I thought, or hoped. But I learned. A lot.

Best,

Leslie

UPDATE 2020: I restarted the Iron Ladies Collection newsletter in the winter of 2020. It is now monthly and you can sign up here.

An Update About Iron Ladies was originally published in Iron Ladies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Just like in 2016 — something that should sound ominous to the independents and Blues — some large swath of the population perceives that they are being ignored. Also like 2016, this perception motivates voters. The Blues, and to a lesser extent the independents, do not see this motivation because they are busy dismissing the concerns of that swath of the public. This is, of course, why that large swath feels ignored. And the world turns.

Imagine a conversation, any conversation from one on ones to public square discussions, that goes something like this:

First person: “Listen to me. You should [vote for, believe, support] X because of reasons A, B, and C.”

Second person: “Well, I do not [believe, support] X because — “

First person: “How can you possibly not?! It’s obvious! Do you not hear A, B, and C? Obviously you aren’t listening. You must be a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.”

Who is actually not listening in that conversation?

The practical takeaway from this imagining: the 2018 mid-term was the Democrats election to lose, and they seem poised to lose it. Oh, I exaggerate a bit. “Lose” is relative here. They expect a Blue Wave like a tsunami but may only get one of those gentle rollers that breaks with the thinest line of foam, the kind that toddlers jump over on a sunny day at the beach. But they could also get something they aren’t expecting at all — because they aren’t listening.

Six weeks ago I would not have bet against a Blue Wave. In fact, I said as much. But things have changed. The Kavanaugh hearing started it. Before that show, Democratic ranks filled with the kind of voters who would walk over broken glass to get to the polls. (…) Meanwhile, the right relied on resigned voters. These voters would go to the polls, civic duty and all that, but many weren’t excited about voting. We had a wide enthusiasm gap when even a narrow gap can effect results, especially in state and local races — to which we still aren’t paying sufficient attention, by the way.

The Kavanaugh hearing closed that enthusiasm gap. Blues couldn’t get functionally madder. They were already going to crawl over broken glass to vote. But Reds became broken glass voters. Thus, with everyone’s voters eager to vote, something that early voter numbers have since confirmed, a Blue Wave became less likely.

But the late hit on Kavanaugh infuriating the right is not the only thing that may have changed the mid-term dynamic. How many middle-minded men saw themselves in Kavanaugh? And for readers’ whose first thought sounded like: “Excellent! It’s about time they saw themselves as the past, potential, or even accidental predatory males they are!” — that’s basically my point. The conventional wisdom has not seemed to notice the possibly that men may have seen themselves as potentially falsely accused.

The left’s typical assumptions about men knock a logical possibility off of their radar. Note, that the truth about Kavanaugh is irrelevant for this analysis. Perception is what matters here. Could the Democrats’ handling of the Kavanaugh confirmation have lost them votes? Did they even ask themselves that question? How many men planning to be part of the Blue Wave had second thoughts?

Then, what about women? How many mothers of sons changed their minds? For example, a friend recently became a mother of four with the birth of her first son. I’ve discussed politics with her for years. She has always understood arguments about misandry, but she also told me it all felt more personal, urgent, once she was expecting a son. How many middle-ish women with sons felt a transformation like that? I’ve seen realizations about misandry coming sooner to mothers of sons, and I wonder if the treatment of Kavanaugh was particularly jarring.

But the Kavanaugh hearing only started the change.

The news of the caravan tells a similar story to those willing to listen. Left and center pundits have been dismissing the caravan as no big deal and scoffing at anyone worried about it. That scoffing irks even conservatives who support more open immigration. We (I count myself in this wider immigration cohort) know that immigration has many practical considerations. Take only education for an example. Houston, which takes in many of the country’s immigrants, legal and otherwise, is full of elementary, middle, and high school campuses with temporary buildings. School district building projects cannot keep up with incoming students. One might argue that this is because of Texas school financing mess. It is a mess, no doubt about that, but one of the main factors stressing school funds and prompting crappy budget workarounds is immigration. Before schools even get to building new classrooms, they have to implement English as a Second Language programs. They must address cultural practices, transportation, nutrition — the list is long and complicated. And it ain’t cheap.

So even if I or someone like me thinks we can and should absorb more immigrants, I am not so foolish as to blow it off as no big deal. Furthermore, I know that it is not an illogical position — much less an evil one — to want to take care of current citizens before adding the financial and personnel burdens of caring for new arrivals. So all of the pooh-poohing of the caravan sounds like lectures from a bunch of tone deaf Tonies who will expect other people to actually deal with immigrants or implement the programs to support them. I’ve only seen one lefty writer even see this perspective so far, but I’ve heard Hispanics talk about the caravan — and not in the way the conventional wisdom expects.

All the while the Blues are debating whether they can really say there is a Blue Wave coming. They worry that their confidence would suppress their voter turnout. One, with the turnout numbers from early voting, the idea that this election will turn on voters who stayed home is nonsense. Two, they should worry about plain over confidence. There is a far from zero chance that the increased turnout numbers don’t signal a Blue Wave, but a Red one. Best I can tell, few have even considered the possiblity.

In Texas early voting numbers, around 20% of the voters do not have a voting history to plug into pollesters’ predictive algorithms. Some are young, first time voters, which usually bodes Blue, but then the iGen is more conservative than Millennials. How much more conservative? We don’t know. They just started voting in 2016. Other voters are just new. Pollsters do not know enough about any of these voters to attempt a prediction, and that’s if the old assumptions hold, which is not exactly a safe bet these days.

I do not claim to know what will happen tomorrow. With these numbers, anything goes. What I do claim: the right, in general, is more aware of and prepared for the full range of possibilities, while the left, in general, is hoping for a big wave, braced for a small wave, and will be shocked to their cores by anything else. Kinda like in 2016.

About the Sunday email and Iron Ladies

Sometime after the election, certainly after the hot takes, I will do a final round up of conservative women’s perspectives. I’ll include some recommended reads and women to follow in the future. After that, I am moving on. I’m going full local for politics and shifting to a project I’ve had on the back burner for too long: modern life administration. As in, I’m going to teach young people how to do it, merging the old ways with the new. It’s still keeping with the same goal I had in my writing, bridging gaps, but using community instead of being another of thousands of freelance pundits trying to persuade. I wasn’t just brainstorming here:

To Rebuild a Village

I have no regrets about attempting this project to present conservative women’s perspective to the con-curious. I am disappointed it did not turn out as I thought, or hoped. But I learned. A lot.

Last Thoughts Before Tuesday was originally published in Iron Ladies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From this Sunday’s Collection, my last for a while.

My heart is heavy. I’ve been watching the Kavanaugh debacle unfold, as stunned at the early dismissal of allegations before any investigation as at some watchers’ inability to understand why Kavanaugh might have been so angry. I don’t know, maybe you’d be upset about being accused of leading a gang rape you didn’t commit. A correspondent of mine, one of many who asks to remain anon because she has a family that she wishes to protect from the public expression of her opinion, stated it well right before the hearing:

The intersectional, anti “breeder”, groupthink promulgating, men-hating, motherhood abjuring, frenzied factions leave me with a deep revulsion: no room for grace, for humanity, for dignity, for presumption of innocence (and I do not have any a priori beliefs about the original Kavanaugh claims), for general decency, of anything resembling finer human feelings — but also for those who refused to treat the initial accusations against Kavanaugh with any semblance of probity, the women-hating, misogyny-spewing man-boys — I want to get off this merry-go-round. … I kept away from the hearings and Twitter until tonight. I should have stuck with medieval manuscripts and puppy photos.

I too tried to keep away from the social media inferno. Among other things, I picked up my young teenage son from school. He was agitated. Some girl, whom he does not know and does not go to school with, sent him a random message to stay away from some other girl, who he also does not know. He had no idea what prompted the message. I freaked out a bit, pushing him to find some nugget of something that could have prompted her message. All we sorted was two mutual friends, both on the other side of town. He just blocked the account and went on his way, which is standard operating procedure among teens these days. He was more freaked out by the fact that I was freaked out, pushing him to find out exactly how his name came up.

Moms of sons can tell you, this sort of thing happens all the time. Not just to boys mind. My daughter went through a round of teenager-text “she 1 said, she 2 said” last week. But even while that concerned a weightier topic, I don’t see Kavanaugh style public tribunals 30 years in the girls’ future. The boys, however, they will have to prove alibis for events they can’t even pinpoint now. For all I know there is some long group chat of girls being saved today that describes something damming about my son to be used as evidence decades from now. Any mistaken identity or mere rumor mongering among teens will be impossible to rebut then. Such is my present fear.

Still, when the first allegations against Kavanaugh surfaced, I was not prepared to immediately dismiss them. The sort of thing Prof. Ford describes happens, and certainly happened back in the 80’s. These were serious allegations and they deserved a hearing. And so, we had a hearing.

From that hearing, we learned that her story changed. Debra Saunders has a summary, including the fact nugget that her named witnesses don’t even recall the party happening, which sounds an awful lot like the Rolling Stone story. I did too much research on that mess to not have it color my perspective now. That was one of the laments when the Rolling Stone story fell apart, actually. It would hurt the credibility of future assault stories. So it has.

We also learned that the hearing was delayed to maximize political damage and to stall a Supreme Court appointment until after the midterms. Heck, the leak of the allegations were timed to do that. These are not the kind of facts that boost credibility, but then this hearing wasn’t about truth, it was about political strategy.

Abagail Shrier saw it coming before the hearing. Kay Hymowitz observed that neither poignant angst nor righteous rage provide evidence of truth. For the TL;DR* summary of her observation, Liz Wheeler tweeted something that fits. (*Too long; didn’t read.)

Best case scenario: Democrats used a wounded woman for political ends. They needed an explosive charge, late enough in the game so Republicans wouldn’t have time to vet another nominee before the midterms. How they got it didn’t matter.

Again, I have too much experience watching the left do anything if they think the Roe v. Wade scheme is threatened to dismiss this scenario. Alexandra DeSanctis cataloged their vows from earlier in the summer. They were never going to vet Kavanaugh. They were gunning for him from the start. Events after the hearing confirmed such motives. Someone used US House servers to publish the private addresses and phone numbers of the Senate Judiciary Republicans on their Wikipedia pages. [Update: Maxine Waters is frantically denying that it was anyone on her staff. The source IP address suggests otherwise.] Doxing, the public sharing of private information, is low even by internet troll standards, and this was the one year anniversary of Rep.Steve Scalise’s return after being shot at a Republican baseball game when government types are — or should be — more aware of the dangers of public service. But Roe is at stake so the ends justify the means. Always.

In short, I was inclined to believe the allegations before the hearing, but not after. The most authentic things were Dr. Ford’s and Judge Kavanaugh’s emotions, but feelings aren’t facts.

The damage done to the nominee and the process was significant, just not enough to get Kavanaugh to withdraw. In fact — irony alert — it became imperative for him to remain, otherwise every Supreme Court nominee in the future will be defeated with late allegations. Lawyers get the power of precedent and this one could not stand.

So we have a terrible, un-winnable outcome: a damaged Justice and the final stake in the heart of trust, or anything like it, amongst political opponents. The FBI investigation is designed to help what Megan McArdle noted on Twitter, “I think the left half of the political spectrum really doesn’t understand the unquenchable rage on the right at having this sprung on them at the last minute. I’m not sure the right understands the unquenchable rage that would result on the left from confirming Kavanaugh.” Maybe it will help, but I have many, many doubts.

It’s all unquenchable rage. There is no end in sight.

Thursday night my husband posited that this is going to be one of those events in public life that inflects. I don’t think he’s out on a limb. I’m feeling it. I’m reevaluating. I started a publication like Iron Ladies because broader perspective can prevent the rage in the first place. I could make hard to find perspectives easier to find for those who were curious. That was my theory. Only I can’t find the curious. Oh, I have found a few, but they don’t want to publicly admit their curiosity. It’s too fraught with social peril.

Social media is a bust. I can hardly buy advertising on Facebook — literally. One of my writers wrote about art censorship. Her post used a detail of a classic painting. Facebook allows use of classic art even if it has nudity (this one had water nymphs) and other publications had used the same picture. But we couldn’t. “Ad not approved.”

I’ve been on Medium for a couple of years. I can get top writer designation for any tag I write more than a few pieces on in a month; something about their algorithm likes my stuff. Only that does not translate to increased reads anymore — and that was before they brought in big publishers who are smothering the independent writers. My old blog got more engagement on a slow day than Medium now gets for the indy writers. The slowdown pattern holds for the magazine’s writers, too.

All of this makes it hard for me to find the curious. I spend hours reading and summarizing every week, basically helping a couple of conservatives find articles they might not otherwise find. That’s fine, but I can talk to those folks. The curious are…where?

About four years ago a friend called concerned about my weight and health. I needed to “stop writing those little blog posts” and exercise every day. At the time I was insulted because I was a Senior Contributor at The Federalist (this was before it went crazy, when it was aiming to be an Atlantic for the right) and those “little posts” were researched freelance articles which got thousands of hits and lots of follow up interest. But now? I am spending a whole lot of time writing, editing, and collecting for an audience I know is there but cannot find. And now I’ve admitted I did not unquestionably believe a woman’s public accusations. Again, I’ve too much experience with taking such inconceivable stances to hope I could gain readers outside the right now. I’m not usually a cynic, but that was before the Kavanaugh hearing.

All I see in political discourse is unquenchable rage.

While it rages on, I have a family that needs my attention and a city and a church in need of restoration. (We aren’t Catholic so I’m not talking about that, or anything approaching that magnitude. Still, the laity must rise to this challenge, which requires time and toil.) I’m sitting here at my computer. Finalizing The Collection for Sunday is on the schedule, but I’m wondering, why? Is this really my best use of time, burning hours to no effect when little local things I squeeze in have so much potential? No. It isn’t.

I’m bummed because I love this format. Tricia, my graphics gal, keeps improving it for me. But it’s not the best use of my time — at least not weekly.

Everyone who needs to find me knows how. I’m going to go figure out what I can actually accomplish. All I know is it is neither virtual nor national. I’m getting off that merry go round.

Photo by Eepeng Cheong on Unsplash

Unquenchable Rage was originally published in Iron Ladies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Most right-leaning commentary on urban government is insipid. Conservatives largely ignore urban, local issues and focus on DC — well most Americans do that, but it is particularly odd that conservatives do it. Even benign neglect of local issues is inconsistent with classic liberal ideals that are usually part of conservative thought. To completely ignore city governance is at least hypocritical.

On the odd occasions when conservative thinkers do offer policy solutions, they opt for grand urban planning ideas that will either get co-opted by local government cronyism or never pass until we win some urban elections. Nary a thought is given to how the right might win those local urban elections. Compounding the problem, if we won a local election, conservative thought leaders offer little to nothing on how to proceed after decades of urban fiscal mismanagement have left cities with few funds to act on the grand urban planning. Finally, aligning the base’s focus with action — hypocrisy here would actually be welcome — the Republican party powers-that-be provide little to no effective local campaign support.

I’ve seen all of this play out for decades in Houston, but the problem is nationwide. Conservatives are left with a chicken and egg question: Do we lose urban areas because we lack good and workable ideas or do we lack ideas because we’ve written off urban areas since we rarely win them?

At Arc Digital, Avi Woolf has started a series of articles arguing the latter. The right basically concedes blue government for the major US cities, even advocating for admitting defeat and retreating. (Not an exaggeration. Rod Dreher wrote the book sounding a retreat last summer. I don’t recommend it. It is written from a Christian perspective because he is primarily a social conservative (…), but I missed the part in the Sermon on the Mount about conceding defeat in the name of the Lord.) But I digress.

I will eagerly read Avi’s articles, and my hunch says I will agree with much of what he will say. But, as a local campaign veteran involved in two Houston mayoral elections when the city almost went red (Orlando Sanchez’s runoff with Mayor Lee P. Brown in 2001 and Bill King’s runoff with Sylvester Turner in 2015), I have observed a problem of under-appreciated consequence that is not part of the chicken and egg discussion — and one that might have gone away last month.

Cities are more conservative than they appear.

The right, especially the libertarian leaning right, can get ideas to resonate at the local level. We have to make workarounds for lack of favorable, or sometimes any, media coverage. Our candidates have to do more face to face events. We need better social media and web efforts. But we can manage all of this. I’ve seen it happen many times in Texas politics, notably Ted Cruz, who was almost unknown 18 months before his win, and the two mentioned Houston mayoral races, Sanchez and King. Twelve, nine, even six months before their election days, these guys were written off as future also-rans. Each of them campaigned on ideas and either won or came razor close. Ballotpedia has King losing the 2015 runoff by less than 700 votes. (Hence, my general agreement with this voting take but only for national elections. At the local level, votes matter more.)

Effective GOTV could make the difference. For that, however, the right needs better voter data. The GOP really, really stinks at this even at the national level. Remember the Romney voting day collapse compared to team Obama’s innovations using social media data mining? It was a new and promising thing, as Patrick Ruffini explains. This is why Ted Cruz was seeking Cambridge Analytica data, and it is how the outfit ended up with the Trump campaign. The Mercers (the money for the project) switched to Trump.

The scandal aside, national campaigns with the money find it difficult to get good data, which makes sharing it with the local campaigns problematic. This is not such a problem in small towns or in rural areas where the candidates know the voters. It is a problem in the cities.

But the main impediment to the right’s local campaign success is not within our control. It is a systemic advantage the Democrats have had for decades. And it is the practical fact that might have just changed.

Follow the money

In my Houston primer, I discussed public pensions. When private companies moved to 401k’s, that is, defined contribution pensions, urban (and state) governments stayed with defined benefit plans. Why? Because defined benefit plans allowed the hopeful politicians to offer hefty benefit packages to public employees in the here and now. The bills for those benefit packages would not come due until later, likely when someone else was in office. Besides, it was the 90’s, that holiday from history underwritten by a soaring stock market. The public pension funds would be fine because they would always and forever have double digit rates of return. Alas, pride does cometh before a fall.

The fall was the dot-com bust of the turn of the millennium and later the financial crisis. These days realistic, responsible municipal governments have reduced their pension funds’ rate of return assumptions to the more realistic 6–8% range. But more realistic doesn’t mean realistic. In real life, the public funds, the good ones at that, have been managing rates of return in the 3–4% range. It’s caused this whole crisis in public finance, “Where are the screaming actuaries yelling ‘fire’ in these burning theaters?” But again, I digress.

The public employees getting the big retirement plans were in public unions. Those unions brokered the retirement deals through collective bargining power — a simple thing when membership is mandatory. Those mandatory memberships came with mandatory dues or fees. That is, the unions had lots of money. The hopeful politician would promise the union members bountiful benefits, without actually paying those benefits, a neat accounting trick using those unrealistic rate of returns mentioned above.

Back in the ’90s, stock market gains helped fuel pension investment growth so much that by 2001, the average pension was fully funded. That meant the money it had in assets would grow through investment returns to eventually cover the pensions promised to current workers and retirees. That’s when many governments got too comfortable and made two fatal mistakes: They stopped regularly paying their annual pension bill, and they boosted retirement benefits for workers.

Find your local municipal debt graph to see it. Houston’s graph is in the Houston primer I linked to earlier. City debts rise sharply in the early aughts. Almost every urban government was doing it.

Here’s the important bit, though: not only would the unions make generous donations to the hopeful politician, but also they would rally their members to participate in the campaign. Members attended events, knocked on doors, put out yard signs, and worked GOTV when the voting started.

Thus, on election days, Team Red with a rag-tag band of volunteers hardly knows which houses to call or which doors to knock, and they likely spent the last of their funds on media buys. Team blue, on the other hand, is flush with money, organized volunteers, and data — the latter of which was bought with earlier money. Furthermore, demographically, Team Blue’s reliable voters are easier to gather. A blue volunteer can reach 25 doors at a single apartment complex in about the same time it takes a red volunteer to reach maybe 10 doors in a suburb.

At the local level, turnout matters.

I’ve seen two elections in Houston come down to small votes in the late hours. In the recent Bill King race, 10% more turnout in a couple of red precincts would have done it.

If the conventional wisdom about urban voters being lost to right ideas were true, then King — a rich, white-haired white guy up against a carasmatic black state representative in Houston, a city in which most of the concentrated red areas are incorporated into interior cities that cannot vote in City of Houston elections — could never have come close to winning. In fact, through most of the summer, the King campaign was pooh-poohed for that reason.

Fast forward to today. Voting day dynamics have changed in the past few weeks. The United States Supreme Court case handed down at the end of this past term, Janus, held that the mandatory union dues were infringement on free speech. Mandatory unions can no longer compel their members to pay dues, which means they aren’t going to have as much money to dole out to hopeful politicians. Politicians will then lose the moral hazard problem of promising big future benefits for big present donations — or lately, of refusing anything more than band-aid solutions for arterial budget bleeds. (They will find another moral hazard problem, I am confident.) Without the promise of big benefits, then public union workers may be less motivated to hit the pavement for a politician.

Or shorter, Democrats have been using union money to run vote and talent farms in city campaigns, and some of that money is now going away. No one knows how much the decision will affect dues collection for unions, so the overall effect is still spectualtion. But it will have effects — and by this November. Yes, unions have already collected dues for the year so they have more money than they will likely have in the future, but they can’t spend it on political speech. The rule changes start now.

Conservative write-off of urban governance has always been unwise and unjustified. Now, it would be ignorance and folly.

Time to Get Serious About Urban Governance was originally published in Houston & Texas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Shared in honor of a post from Lydia Sohn, “I’m Normal, I Swear.”

A letter from November, 2011

Comrade C and his family came to London. As my usual habit for friends visiting, I took them to tea at my favorite location: the hotel with the nude shabby chic mosaic. That’s a distinguishing feature of the hotel, not my favorite feature — although it is certainly memorable. (…)

Anyway, the girls are in high school. They are Christian and conservative and sadly accustomed to the “but you seem so smart/normal/nice/well informed” remarks that seem to come with any reply that our cross is real or any admission that we didn’t vote for Obama.

Incredulous comments that we seem so normal are common conversation topics when conservatives get together. It happens all the time. Sometimes they even write it up.

At this conversation over tea, I told the girls about the recent, “I can’t believe my best friend is a Republican” article in Salon. Read the whole thing, but this bit caught my attention:

When I moved to Los Angeles, the 2004 election had just finished ravaging the neighborhood. Friendships had ended over differences of opinions, a few marriages had learned what they were made of when one couldn’t abide what hadn’t been that big of a deal before 9/11. And so when I met Janet, she was on the defensive. That first dinner at her house, someone brought up her Republicanism. I looked down into my soup, sure this was something we shouldn’t talk about. I don’t remember the comment, or Janet’s reply, but I remember my husband asking why she’d be friends with all these liberals — and yes, it was only liberals at the table — if she felt so strongly. Throwing her hands up, she said, “I guess I lack the courage of my convictions.”

But it’s not that. I don’t speak for Janet, but I think there’s something deeper at play. Janet’s willingness to associate with so many liberal friends — though I know she seeks refuge in chat rooms and magazines that share her beliefs — makes her a better and more interesting person. She has her beliefs challenged constantly. She is more well-read and educated in her politics than most of the liberals I know. Too many liberals I know are lazy, they have a belief system that consists of making fun of Glenn Beck and watching “The Daily Show.” Shouldn’t their beliefs be challenged, too?

I won’t quibble with Taffy’s conclusion about liberals needing to be challenged, but she is wrong about the reason for her friend’s comment. She missed, or avoided, that her friend’s comment about courage of her convictions was ironic. Her friend doesn’t lack the courage of her convictions. In a moment of frustration, she was accusing liberals of lacking the courage of theirs.*

Liberals tell us that they are the most open and tolerant, yet it is the liberal who can’t look her friend in the eye and missed the subtle jibe that refusing to socialize with the Other is hardly courageous. It is Janet who is willing to sit amongst the Other, willing to have her beliefs challenged, willing to calmly explain and defend her beliefs to someone who sometimes won’t even look her in the face. It is Janet who will have to endure the common smear that conservatives are so intolerant that we must find it difficult to associate with people with whom we disagree — while we sit amongst those with whom we disagree.

We conservatives know of liberal contempt. Liberals should not imagine that they hide it well. When Janet seeks refuge in chat rooms, and magazines, and like minded friends, I assure you that the topic of the left’s impressive irony-resistance capabilities comes up from time to time. They are tolerant of everything they agree with.

Sometimes we get weary. But we pick up and carry on. After all, we aren’t going to win any hearts or minds by crying on a pillow or preaching to the choir.

In related links, Another heartless conservative (last item)
If you want intolerance, move to California. (h/t Instapundit)

• Note, we conservatives do respect the courage that people like Taffy, the leftist author of the Salon piece, have. We know how our liberal friends have to defend themselves and, perhaps, to keep us separate from their other friends. Some are braver than others, of course, but we know they come under fire for associating with us. The effort does not go unnoticed.

Interesting, but now, in 2018, what stands out to me about the article is how polarized things were back then. Conservatives are so used to being other-ed, that sometimes I forget it is only an increased intensity that grew out of social media and — more significantly — out of the fact that we now do it to each other. Those online retreats we used to go to, to restore our strength, our center, and even our sense of worthiness from the constant disdain, they are gone now. “But you seem so normal…” It’s a lot harder now than it used to be.

Conservatives: “Monsters” From the Outside, “Traitors” From the Inside

“But you seem so normal.” was originally published in Tales from An American Housewife on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A few times a year, I revisit some collection commentary, and Facebook has been a topic of discussion a few times in the past months. In honor of the company’s recent news, I re-present a few pieces of Facebook commentary. If you would like the full comments, the archive is here.

From March 11, 2018, “Conservative and Feminist?”

(This was 6 days before the data scandal broke.)

Analysts have been declaring Facebook dead for a few years. Facebook has been laughing at them. Until now. For the first time since opening to the public, Facebook shed active users, and time on platform is dropping. The easy answer is the algorithm changes [the company just rolled out], but that isn’t quite right. It is not just that Facebook changed how our posts go out, it is what the change shows that they think of their customers.

Facebook has been running a new payola scam. Pay-to-play. Unlike the vintage radio scandal, however, Facebook steered businesses into positions where only their pay-to-play would work. For a few years Facebook hooked entrepreneurs, writers, and artists with easy publicity. These professional pages gained followers. But when Facebook wanted to make money off advertising, they did not offer these pages benefit of their algorithm to grow their audience. I would have paid for that. Instead, they ransomed the page’s followers. “You have 1000 followers, but if you want to still reach more than half of them, you’ll have to pay up.” Payola.

Payola is hard to regulate, which usually doesn’t matter because the public hates the game, so players keep it small and quiet. But FB got cocky. People had been frustrated with the need to “boost” to reach existing followers already. The recent algorithm change was a drastic cut with little warning. It put companies out of business.

Zuckerberg can take all the listening tours he wants. Sandberg can give women in the workplace speeches until all professional parking lots have maternity spots. (That was one of her big moments in Lean In, closer parking for pregnant women.) Company actions show contempt for customers. FB was planning on business page owners simply reverting to their personal profile when the algorithm changed. Somehow they did not connect the dots between upsetting business owners with upset regular users. The only thing missing now is the upstart platform that everyone can escape to.

From April 8 2018, “What’s Wrong With Conservatives?”

Grow Up

Peggy Noonan: “We’ve always had a thing for youth, but this respect for immaturity is new.” It’s an excellent read, but I take issue with a point at the end. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the immature, is going to Congress to talk about regulating social media. Noonan says, “Mr. Zuckerberg invited Congress to regulate him. Wondering why, it has occurred to me it’s because he knows Congress is too stupid to do it effectively.” I disagree. This is Facebook’s “drawbridge up” moment. They’ve hit their growth ceiling and gotten into trouble. They want regulation to slow potential competition down. Dragging a new platform’s growth is their best protection against failure at this precarious moment. If people had another Facebook like option, they’d already be gone. And Zuckerberg isn’t worried about Congress’s stupidity. He’s counting on it. He’s probably got a team ready to offer up for a regulatory board, and each one of them has a secret stock deal that vests upon their retirement from the regulatory authority. They keep FB safe, they get a nice payoff. It’s the regulatory capture game, only like everything internet, it will play out 10x speed.

From April 29, 2018, “The End of Free Internet”

Not much has changed here, except it turns out that, yes, Facebook’s first quarter numbers were not-quite-right. They were hiding a decline, specifically a decline in active hours on the site, which just happens to be the thing the company has monetized, as Lou Kerner pointed out in January, again in April, and then yesterday. Incidentally, in addition to the decline in hours on site, the Facebook quarterly conference call also spooked investors by providing new data. In his introduction, Mark Zuckerberg told the audience that the company included users of all of their other platforms, such as Whatsapp and Instagram, for the first time. He said they did it because it better reflects the number of people using their products. That could be true. But introducing new data is a bluffer’s tell. Savvy analysts ask, “Why are you giving me this info now?” and with Zuckerberg’s low credibility after months of dodging scandals, the savvy analyst is probably looking for what he might hide with those numbers rather than what the numbers might show. That is how the quarterly conference call started. The rest of the call failed to assure people that Facebook wasn’t hiding bear-ish numbers and so the stock started diving during the call, and by the turn of 24 hours, Facebook had posted the largest single day market loss in history. Just a historical reminder, the next two on that list were Intel and Microsoft during the dot-com bust of 2000.

The End of Free Internet

Megan McArdle has been great on journalism lately. This week she explains why we, the public, will think that journalism has gotten expensive soon. We never paid its real cost:

For more than a century, magazines and newspapers were what’s known as a “two-sided market”: We sold subscriptions to you, our readers, and once you’d subscribed, we sold your eyeballs to our advertisers. That was necessary because, unbeknownst to you, your subscription dollars often didn’t even cover the cost of printing and delivering the physical pieces of paper. They rarely covered much, if any, of the cost of actually reporting and writing the stories printed on those pages. And you’d probably be astonished at how expensive it is to report a single, relatively simple story.

But that was okay, because we controlled a valuable pipeline to reader eyeballs — a pipeline advertisers wanted to fill with information about their products. You guys got your journalism on the cheap, and advertisers got the opportunity to tell you about the fantastic incentive package available to qualified buyers on the brand-new 1985 Chevy Impala.

When Facebook soaked up all the advertisers (and FYI, I don’t think those first quarter numbers announced this week are as glowing as the reviews suggest), that advertising subsidy, if you will, disappeared. So writers either do this philanthropically (hi!), find a benefactor or lots of them (see everyone on Patreon), or start charging the audience the real cost of the service. It’s the end of the free internet — at least if you want the good stuff.

To sign up for the Sunday Collection, go here.

A Collection Recap: The Facebook Files was originally published in Iron Ladies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I originally wrote this for The Collection in February (2018), when the where-are-they-now? style story ran in the Washington Post. It was a follow up to the rah-rah egg freezing articles from a few years ago, but unlike the earlier articles, it received relatively little fanfare. At the time, I didn’t see many commentary reactions either, but WaPo and/or the author allowed the piece to be edited and reposted by the National Post in Canada. That article popped up in my social feeds this week, so I am rerunning my comment.

A few years ago egg freezing became women’s insurance policy. Remember? There was a book, a blog, a whole bunch of cheerleading articles, and progressive companies putting egg freezing in their insurance benefits packages. I remember thinking that maybe these women would want to write the books and articles after their babies were born, not when they first put their eggs on ice.

Aged forty myself at the time, I had a lot of friends going though IVF. The success rate was not good. Plus, another book The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock had just been published the year before by an Ivy League woman who had learned the hard way. (She was very clear that she was highly educated and still did not know the fertility basics, ergo, it must have been information withheld.) But in 2014, egg freezing was the new baby insurance. It would be a few years before some of these women started trying to use their frozen eggs.

That few years is now. The Washington Post has the story from the woman who ran the Eggsurance blog. “Things didn’t work out as she imagined,” the tagline tells us. The article covers four stories of egg freezing, two successes and two not, a ratio which contradicts the stats and which, to their credit, WaPo does publish.

But the old pattern repeats. The happy promises are shouted. The sad results slip away quietly. Although I was hopeful for the truth this time. Given the fanfare when the egg freezing craze happened, one would anticipate that the disappointing results for these women who put their name on the idea of egg freezing as insurance would get loads of traction. But no.

I’ve been reading pop feminist commentary since the mid ‘90s and I’ve seen this phenomenon more than a few times now. In ‘14, there were egg freezing parties. While The Big Lie collected dust on the bookshelves, women filled swanky venues to sip cocktails, nibble canapés, and listen to consultants explain how the freezing worked. It was the professional woman version of a Tupperware party.

Yet when the results come in, when we learn — again — that women’s fertility has a short and set window: crickets.

Maybe the article is going around on dark social (emails and text). But the rest is near-silence. Even right media, who was all over the problems of egg freezing back in ’14 and who usually sees some pundit take a mocking “I told you so!” swipe, is quiet. I do not mention that because mockery is called for, it isn’t, but to point out how quiet the reaction is. I’ve not seen any comment on this story yet.

Women in professional circles just don’t want to hear news like this. And this is not new.

A Long Look Back: “The Talk of the Book World That Still Can’t Sell” — New York Times, 2002

In its two months on the market, Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book ‘’Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children’’ has generated the kind of publicity authors and publishers usually only dream of.

The book was featured on “60 Minutes’’ and the cover of Time and New York magazines. It was promoted on “Oprah,’’ “Today,’’ “Good Morning America’’ and the “NBC Nightly News.’’ It was debated on the editorial and op-ed pages of The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times.

But there’s one place you will not find a mention of Ms. Hewlett’s book: the best-seller lists. The most talked-about book in America, which raises the specter that women who sacrifice families for careers might wake up childless at 45, is hardly selling at all.

Originally published February 4, 2018 in The Collection, “Rest for the Wicked, Rebuke for the Faithful: How Rachel Denhollander Lost Her Church.”

The Lie of Eggsurance was originally published in Iron Ladies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Karol Markowicz made a case for assimilation in response to an op-ed in the Washington Post that called for an end to birthright citizenship. And she’s correct, birthright citizenship and our ability to assimilate newcomers has been one of the primary sources of America’s success. And this has never come home more starkly to me than it did in the spring of 2011, when I took the Life in the UK test to become a permanent resident of the United Kingdom.

London, May 2011

Thursday, I took the Life in the UK test. The LUK test (my acronym not theirs) is their naturalization test. For anyone planning on taking the test, I will discuss the process — the unnecessarily drawn out process — at the end of this post. First, however, a bit about the test itself, because it explains much about the UK’s problems assimilating immigrants.

Remember JFK’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”? Hold onto that for a moment.

The LUK test study guide reads like a help manual for new immigrants to the UK. ‘Here is what life in the UK can do for you.’ There is some civics, but the topic is very basic and watered down — where does the Prime Minister live? — and surprisingly, to an American at least, covers the established church in England and Scotland as much as Parliament. The bulk of the test, however, covers PC topics like minority populations and women’s suffrage and social welfare topics like how to use the NHS and how to find a job.

Granted, some of these are important things to know. Disseminating such information is necessary. But this test is the first step for conferring the privilege of citizenship. Shouldn’t the LUK test cover the candidate’s knowledge of British culture, of what it means to be British?

Contrast the US test. The US naturalization test is a civics exam. There are 100 questions. The immigration officer asks the candidate 10 of those — no multiple choice. Here are the current questions. Note that none of the questions discuss the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986, which makes it illegal to turn laboring women and others in need of urgent care away from medical care. None of the questions ask under what circumstances a landlord can modify rent or someone can employ children, both of which appeared on my 25 question LUK test. We have limitations on each of those, of course, but those are details, not threshold knowledge for new citizens. Also, on my LUK test — I am not making this up — how to get tickets to watch Parliament, a tourist question.

In short, and back to Kennedy, the US test covers the basic knowledge an immigrant needs to do things for their new country. How to join and serve. The UK test covers what British citizenship can do for the immigrant. How to arrive and be served.

With this test, that Brits commonly see and resent immigrants coming in and taking advantage of the social welfare state is frankly to be expected.

Regardless of the merits of the test, however, I had to take it. Yasha has a five year work visa, which expires in a few weeks. Extensions are not an option. At the end of your visa period, you either go home or get started on the Path to Citizenship. The LUK is the first step.

Taking the LUK test

First you call to make the appointment. On the appointed day, you take yourself, your passport, £50, and something to read to the test center. When you arrive, you sign in. The sign in sheet won’t be easy to find and the other test takers are not always helpful in pointing the sheet out. (Might have been my group, but they watched me flounder in two endless lines at the library desk and silently went into the test center at which point I saw one of the people had been sitting on the sign-in sheet.) Once in the center, somebody gives an overview of the test, tells you to get your ID and money out (cash or card) and come up to the desk when called.

At this point, things get weird. The clerk calls each person individually to present ID, get checked off the appointment list, pay, and receive a computer number. Once everyone is at their computer, about 25–30 people, another clerk calls you to another computer, takes your passport and enters your name, date of birth, and passport number into the computer and asks why, specifically, you seek UK citizenship. He enters that and sends you back to your computer. Once he enters everyone’s information, then he explains the test again. At this point a login screen is on your computer, but you don’t login yourself. The guy goes around to each computer and logs in everyone. Then you can start the practice test…which you have to take twice. It is only 4 questions each time, but still the computer won’t let you proceed until you practice. (The UK doesn’t have a rep as a nanny state for nothing.)

The test itself is 25 multiple choice questions. You have 45 minutes to take the test. As you might guess, it does not take everyone 45 minutes to take the test. If English is not your first language, you might need the time, but otherwise the test is not particularly difficult. Yet, you cannot finish the test, get your results, and go. Even though the test is computerized and the computer knows your results as soon as you confirm you are finished, the test monitors will not give out the results until everyone is finished. You go to the waiting area and read for a half hour plus, until they call you individually to receive your results.

Perhaps there is a good reason for this procedure. I simply don’t know. My best guess is the British habit of habit. Brits do lots of things because that is the way they have always done them. I suspect this time intensive procedure is a vestige from when the test was administered on paper and hand scored.

One last detail about taking the LUK test: the test centers aren’t in the nicest parts of town. Mine was in Brixton and I foolishly expected to get back by taxi. On the test day I did not have my Oyster card, and I was short on time anyway. I took a taxi. There are two types of places that don’t lend themselves to taxis: remote or low traffic areas and lower income areas. Brixton is the latter, and at my specific location it was of the rough variety. When we finished, I was waiting at the library doors with 10 other people who hoped to get taxis. I was already later than I expected and poor Silvie was home with 6 children. (I had forgotten I was taking the test until Tuesday. I’d taken two other kids for the afternoon. All in all, not my best planned week.)

I could have taken the Tube by cash but thought a single, not from around here gal, confined in the Tube station was more of a mark than walking down a very busy street in broad daylight. So I did the London thing and simply started walking where I needed to go, knowing I’d eventually find a cab. I wouldn’t have minded so much if it wasn’t the day London got two months of rain in a day. When the inevitable cab showed up about half an hour later, the cabbie laughed at me when I gave him my address. “What were you doing here?” he asked. My advice, arrange for transport ahead of time.

When I told her that I passed, Pip Owens asked me if I felt “frightfully British.” Right now, I do but that is because I am composing this post in a grey skyed Hampshire with a cup of tea at my side. The test itself made me feel more American, which I doubt is the intent of British immigration officials.

Banner image of JFK’s Inaugural Address via nydailynews.com

Assimilation is not a dirty word was originally published in Tales from An American Housewife on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.