Be strong. I had this very thing happen to me the last couple of years. First, they tried to accuse me of false shit in 2019. Dug up mistakes in past from 18 years ago. And then, they convince one of my business partners on a side business to turn on me and lable me a racist, a transphobe, a misogynist. I was in a meeting for my day job and then the attacks dropped. Within 30 minutes, while in that meeting, I had 5 death threats, rape threats against my wife, and threats against my dogs. People I knew and loved dropped me. People I had known for years, people I ha helped, ghosted me. I disconnected and survived. Got out of the hustle (a RPG business) and concentrated on the day job. You can do this. I wish you well.
The past two years have strained friendships, work relationships and families. The sooner we return to the concept that we all have a right to speak, the better off we will all be. It’s hard to be creative when you have to constantly check to see which way the wind blows. I hope your new friends and co-workers are a great improvement over the old ones. Lovely article!
Unfortunately, this is an example of how power is wielded, and people submit to power.
Not Eve, as she is not submitting to anyone; she is persevering.
The woke people who are wielding their wokeness as weapons are abusers of power and people. They are empowered by fear from other woke people as enablers. Fear stems from those who submit to that power and quietly ostracize Eve. Do they agree with the woke view? Probably, because they typically learned the same intolerance as the other woke people. Sheep still believe the farmer is boss.
Woke people wield power over others because they are powerless and/or need to have power over someone else. If you do not believe in them and follow them, you will be ostracized and thrown away. Sometimes it is powerful people. As any dictator knows, that to stay in power you must keep instilling fear and get people to wear your badge. Wokeness is that badge of identity you must wear to be a part of their club, to be their flavor of cool. Or you get picked up by the black coats and driven to some undisclosed location.
They wield a lot of power as evident here. You lose your friends. You lose your job and future income.
It is not about changing someone's mind, so they become woke. The changer must show proper respect, and not just to the woke. They must show fealty to the trending people in the woke world. Offer proper penance and loyalty to those who originally demonstrated how properly woke.
Eve cannot simply turn around and say "oh, yeah, I'm wrong." She is now the tool by which people can wield power and instill fear in others.
So, you don't play the woke game? You will get ostracized and thrown out of their world.
It matters if you want to be in that world. It’s not as simple for Eve to say, "Oh, I'll just go over here and get my job."
Can you get allies among the woke colleagues? No. They will tell you in quiet whispers that they agree with you. "But... I have a family to feed, and without this job I will be on the street." In every autocratic society there are sympathizers, but they must survive in that world too.
However, they need to have power as well, and to demonstrate fealty, they cannot be passive. Once you become the 'enemy', they can wield their power over you.
Everyone must stone you. Like a bunch of jackals, they are looking for any weakness to get a new victim. Once the feeding frenzy starts, you don't want to slip and fall down.... you’ll get eaten too.
Eve's colleagues don't want to lose their jobs. And some of them are seeing this as a way of promoting themselves.
Friends? Nope, not really.
The interesting thing is that once you have been thrown out, they cannot throw you out any further.
In a strange way, you are free. Yes, you lost your income. You lost your friends. They were not friends.
But you are free now to find the people that you can work with and who appreciate what you can do.
Eve, keep up what you are doing. The fact that you are speaking out tells me a whole lot.
“The best relationships and the right opportunities handle the truth. The ones that can’t were never reciprocal. They were never real. They were never honest.”
This is perfectly stated and very good advice. Some relationships are simply transactional. We should never mistake the difference between these and true friends.
All pariahs must be brave. Now you know you can survive it and still retain the most essential thing - the right to be yourself. I wish you well finding your new path forward.
Thanks for this! The reality of suppressed speech just snuck up on me. And the instinct to self censor lets them win. So sad and exasperating. But as you say, we can survive the mob and we will find out who our true friends are. Hang in
Thank you. At least we can take some comfort in knowing the people who support antisemitism will ultimately meet their demise. It is an odd universe these woke people live in, where Jewish people are placed on the pinnacle of the privileged oppressor pyramid.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion should be about including and respecting everyone, especially those with whom you disagree. Let's stop calling it that because the purveyors of woke-ism are not interested interested in diversity, rather conformity. I prefer Fairness, Opportunity and Diversity of Opinion.
Gen Z here, but "baddie" is used as a positive term, like a hot chick. I thought she was going to write about how great everyone thought she was based on the article summary. Oops.
Wasn't familiar with this writer, but I will be from now on! I've been punished in my family lately for being honest; not brutally or with hostility, but for saying something that needed to be said. It feels cold and harsh and lonely right now. This essay has given me encouragement and faith to keep going and not be overwhelmed by despair. Thanks Eve.
My favorite line by the poet Charles Baudelaire states that "...the study of beauty is a duel in which the artist shrieks with terror before being overcome..."
No one escapes life and life is voracious. It eats ten Van Gogh's every morning before breakfast. Art is not entertainment. The narcissism of little pink angels playing air guitar in no way reflects the brutality experienced by those standing in the light of the the actual transcendent. The blessing is in the struggle to find the courage to face the wounding unreasonable nature of the experiential. Don't snivel.
If Elvis was a light offering escape from the profane, Col. Tom Parker was surely the embodiment of exploitation and industrial darkness. Embrace one and the other embraces you. Luck and talent are required but the overdose seems to be a written part of the contract. Like poor Parsifal we commit to the quest without fully understanding the danger. We discover that there is always a place for the rhinoceroses horn to enter and that like all good Knight's we chose to enter the dark forest alone.
We are finite creatures standing on the edge of eternity. We are struggling to regain the clarity we've lost to the manufactured schizophrenia of this age. It is easy to get lost. Our Mr. Young and Ms. Mitchell who once lamented the "...big birds..throwing shadows on our lives..." now wander the electronic ether scolding the emergent truth they once championed. We find home again, when we find ourselves. It's time to get clean.
My point: If one is cast out by poseurs and moral cowards embrace the new frontier. It's the natural environment of the American. It is the place where new worlds are born.
Seeing a ghost: that is how I feel these days when I look around this country that used to mean something, that used to stand for things that made sense, that used to be a country and not a Monty Python skit of one. As we all watch Ukrainians hopelessly defending their country against the invading Russian Army - an army that itself is a ghost of a force that some decades ago, made up of mostly teenagers marched from the ruble of Stalingrad all the way to Berlin, braking the back of the Third Reich through enormous sacrifice and courage - it's no surprise that we admire what Ukranians are doing as own country has been kowtowed and occupied by - fuckin' Twitter!
This woman was thrown out of the courtroom during the Heard vs Depp trial. Apparently she’s a big supporter of Heard and was being disruptive.
To hell with those people.
Be strong. I had this very thing happen to me the last couple of years. First, they tried to accuse me of false shit in 2019. Dug up mistakes in past from 18 years ago. And then, they convince one of my business partners on a side business to turn on me and lable me a racist, a transphobe, a misogynist. I was in a meeting for my day job and then the attacks dropped. Within 30 minutes, while in that meeting, I had 5 death threats, rape threats against my wife, and threats against my dogs. People I knew and loved dropped me. People I had known for years, people I ha helped, ghosted me. I disconnected and survived. Got out of the hustle (a RPG business) and concentrated on the day job. You can do this. I wish you well.
The past two years have strained friendships, work relationships and families. The sooner we return to the concept that we all have a right to speak, the better off we will all be. It’s hard to be creative when you have to constantly check to see which way the wind blows. I hope your new friends and co-workers are a great improvement over the old ones. Lovely article!
As I read this, an old saying popped in my head:
"When you sleep with dogs, you get fleas"
A letter to all the Eves,
Unfortunately, this is an example of how power is wielded, and people submit to power.
Not Eve, as she is not submitting to anyone; she is persevering.
The woke people who are wielding their wokeness as weapons are abusers of power and people. They are empowered by fear from other woke people as enablers. Fear stems from those who submit to that power and quietly ostracize Eve. Do they agree with the woke view? Probably, because they typically learned the same intolerance as the other woke people. Sheep still believe the farmer is boss.
Woke people wield power over others because they are powerless and/or need to have power over someone else. If you do not believe in them and follow them, you will be ostracized and thrown away. Sometimes it is powerful people. As any dictator knows, that to stay in power you must keep instilling fear and get people to wear your badge. Wokeness is that badge of identity you must wear to be a part of their club, to be their flavor of cool. Or you get picked up by the black coats and driven to some undisclosed location.
They wield a lot of power as evident here. You lose your friends. You lose your job and future income.
It is not about changing someone's mind, so they become woke. The changer must show proper respect, and not just to the woke. They must show fealty to the trending people in the woke world. Offer proper penance and loyalty to those who originally demonstrated how properly woke.
Eve cannot simply turn around and say "oh, yeah, I'm wrong." She is now the tool by which people can wield power and instill fear in others.
So, you don't play the woke game? You will get ostracized and thrown out of their world.
It matters if you want to be in that world. It’s not as simple for Eve to say, "Oh, I'll just go over here and get my job."
Can you get allies among the woke colleagues? No. They will tell you in quiet whispers that they agree with you. "But... I have a family to feed, and without this job I will be on the street." In every autocratic society there are sympathizers, but they must survive in that world too.
However, they need to have power as well, and to demonstrate fealty, they cannot be passive. Once you become the 'enemy', they can wield their power over you.
Everyone must stone you. Like a bunch of jackals, they are looking for any weakness to get a new victim. Once the feeding frenzy starts, you don't want to slip and fall down.... you’ll get eaten too.
Eve's colleagues don't want to lose their jobs. And some of them are seeing this as a way of promoting themselves.
Friends? Nope, not really.
The interesting thing is that once you have been thrown out, they cannot throw you out any further.
In a strange way, you are free. Yes, you lost your income. You lost your friends. They were not friends.
But you are free now to find the people that you can work with and who appreciate what you can do.
Eve, keep up what you are doing. The fact that you are speaking out tells me a whole lot.
You will find your way.
“The best relationships and the right opportunities handle the truth. The ones that can’t were never reciprocal. They were never real. They were never honest.”
This is perfectly stated and very good advice. Some relationships are simply transactional. We should never mistake the difference between these and true friends.
All pariahs must be brave. Now you know you can survive it and still retain the most essential thing - the right to be yourself. I wish you well finding your new path forward.
The frenzy of marginalizing those who voice opposing viewpoints expresses the heart of segregation.
Thanks for this! The reality of suppressed speech just snuck up on me. And the instinct to self censor lets them win. So sad and exasperating. But as you say, we can survive the mob and we will find out who our true friends are. Hang in
Thank you. At least we can take some comfort in knowing the people who support antisemitism will ultimately meet their demise. It is an odd universe these woke people live in, where Jewish people are placed on the pinnacle of the privileged oppressor pyramid.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion should be about including and respecting everyone, especially those with whom you disagree. Let's stop calling it that because the purveyors of woke-ism are not interested interested in diversity, rather conformity. I prefer Fairness, Opportunity and Diversity of Opinion.
Gen Z here, but "baddie" is used as a positive term, like a hot chick. I thought she was going to write about how great everyone thought she was based on the article summary. Oops.
Wasn't familiar with this writer, but I will be from now on! I've been punished in my family lately for being honest; not brutally or with hostility, but for saying something that needed to be said. It feels cold and harsh and lonely right now. This essay has given me encouragement and faith to keep going and not be overwhelmed by despair. Thanks Eve.
My favorite line by the poet Charles Baudelaire states that "...the study of beauty is a duel in which the artist shrieks with terror before being overcome..."
No one escapes life and life is voracious. It eats ten Van Gogh's every morning before breakfast. Art is not entertainment. The narcissism of little pink angels playing air guitar in no way reflects the brutality experienced by those standing in the light of the the actual transcendent. The blessing is in the struggle to find the courage to face the wounding unreasonable nature of the experiential. Don't snivel.
If Elvis was a light offering escape from the profane, Col. Tom Parker was surely the embodiment of exploitation and industrial darkness. Embrace one and the other embraces you. Luck and talent are required but the overdose seems to be a written part of the contract. Like poor Parsifal we commit to the quest without fully understanding the danger. We discover that there is always a place for the rhinoceroses horn to enter and that like all good Knight's we chose to enter the dark forest alone.
We are finite creatures standing on the edge of eternity. We are struggling to regain the clarity we've lost to the manufactured schizophrenia of this age. It is easy to get lost. Our Mr. Young and Ms. Mitchell who once lamented the "...big birds..throwing shadows on our lives..." now wander the electronic ether scolding the emergent truth they once championed. We find home again, when we find ourselves. It's time to get clean.
My point: If one is cast out by poseurs and moral cowards embrace the new frontier. It's the natural environment of the American. It is the place where new worlds are born.
Interesting. Oblique, challenging and difficult, but interesting. “Art is not entertainment.” That’s good. This forced me to think.
I used to tell people - “In America, you have the right to be wrong”
I no longer say that. I stand corrected.
Don't roll over. It's an airball.
Seeing a ghost: that is how I feel these days when I look around this country that used to mean something, that used to stand for things that made sense, that used to be a country and not a Monty Python skit of one. As we all watch Ukrainians hopelessly defending their country against the invading Russian Army - an army that itself is a ghost of a force that some decades ago, made up of mostly teenagers marched from the ruble of Stalingrad all the way to Berlin, braking the back of the Third Reich through enormous sacrifice and courage - it's no surprise that we admire what Ukranians are doing as own country has been kowtowed and occupied by - fuckin' Twitter!