My Egyptian Grandmother

I have said it before. You don’t have to like me to hear what I’m saying. I’m receiving a lot of “why are you so mean?” complaints. I’m not mean. I’m factual. Maybe the problem is that liberals don’t like a woman straight-talking to them.

Today Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a week after Donald Trump won the election, decided to remove her pronouns from her Twitter bio. The pronouns have indeed come out of corporate emails (in my inbox at least) the second the election was called. What does this tell you about the integrity of people the last four years. (By the way, I have never put my pronouns in a bio or at the end of an email because I am a woman who is offended to my core any time I am asked the question of what my pronouns are. My pronouns are Absolutely/Not.)

Anygay, I wanted to talk about an interaction I had on Monday with my Egyptian grandmother. I no longer have living grandparents and have not since the age of nine, but I have an Egyptian grandmother. She works in the gas station round the corner from me, where I go often to buy gallon bottles of water, Trident gum and Listerine. On Monday, I went in after running my morning 10k, and she was serving a woman in front of me. A classic Silver Lake liberal, late forties, has that perpetual look of ennui and endless despair on her face like she doesn’t know how to be useful to society, except on Tuesdays when the recycling trucks take her trash. As she left, my Egyptian grandmother gave me her usual big smile: “My beauty! What can I do for you today?” And she shook her head. I said: “What’s wrong, Maibe?” She lowers her tone and her head as her big brown eyes peer above her spectacles. “The woman in front you says she is depressed because of Donald Trump…”

Cue Maibe and I sharing our common grievances for ten minutes. “We have been here at this spot for 48 years!” she said, of setting up a small gas station after fleeing to America. “These people don’t know what it is to be living under oppression or to be at war! Look at all the terrible things happening in our world! We need them to stop! Why every time I go to CVS is there nobody at the cashier to serve? It takes 20 minutes in the coffee shop to get a coffee! Why everything stopped working in this country? When I tell my granddaughter Donald Trump won, she went excited to school screaming ‘Donald Trump! Donald Trump!’ to all her teachers. She is six.”

My Egyptian grandmother is a good person. She always talks about the friend she takes care of at a nearby nursing home, and tells me to pray to God and my prayers will be answered. She is such a grandmother. Maibe wants me to find a nice husband. I tell her I have one in mind. I don’t want to break her heart and reveal that I want a wife. (Btw I feel much safer with old world homophobia over the nauseating new condescending homophobia that heterosexual “allies” deploy to tell LGBTQ+ people how they should feel and think about everything that happens in the world, see “Queers For Palestine”). Maybe one day I’ll come out to my Egyptian grandmother.

As I’ve said before. Every Uber driver. Every service industry worker. Every immigrant. Every person of color. Every single woman who has lived in the reality of the last year with their eyes fully open. Every one that I have interacted with for a year… All of them told me they were voting for Trump. And all of them did. None of them were hiding it. Some Jewish women voted for Harris, and have since expressed sheer relief to me in private that she didn’t win. So who is trying to make a supremacist American nation? Is it really Trump’s voters? Or is it the elite white men and women that insist they’re the voices to listen to on diversity, equity and inclusion? Your game is up.

I left things with the Egyptian grandmother thus. I said: I don’t care how you vote. I care how you live in your community and what you do for the people around you and how you behave towards your fellow human.

So rather than continuing to gate-keep minorities and speak for immigrants or those who you perceive to be "oppressed", maybe stop talking and start listening as to why they really don't agree with you or need you to save them/us?

World events cause a shift in view. That is healthy. When you have lived experience and your perspective expands and you learn new information the reasonable thing to do is to realign your viewpoints rather than martyring yourself for no longer relevant ideals. October 7 changed my life in every single way possible. How could I have the same perspective I did before? I don’t. I want better for us. And I certainly don’t trust the people that couldn’t bother to stand up for us amid this devastation. If anyone who is truly alert to October 7 and its aftermath still trusts mainstream media narratives on any issue, they are stupid. The independent media is the new order now. When mainstream media attacks (or promotes) someone’s character over and again (yes, even Trump), without truly critiquing their actions, it raises my heckles. Why? Because it happened to me. It happened to people I love. Total widespread mischaracterizations. For the mainstream media Trump has to be the villain. The same can be said for Bibi, which is why I always employ cautious skepticism surrounding his harshest (often never objective) critics. I worked in mainstream media for over ten years, and I can tell you that you’re tasked with creating a soap opera for the world stage. That’s what sells. Well, people need facts, not drama.

So while there is a lot of drama still surrounding women’s perceived loss of rights in the United States, I have asked specific devastated women - what rights are you losing? The election was not run on abortion. Each state has a right to govern itself and the constituents of each state (women included) can vote for legislators to dictate policy in that state. Yes, fourteen states have banned abortion, and others limited access by criminalizing abortion after the earliest weeks of pregnancy. And yet, even if Harris had become President, she would not have been able to affect those laws. As for the idea of a federal abortion ban, I addressed this in my last post: Trump has repeatedly said he would veto such a ban. So what rights are women going to lose now as a result of Trump’s election? Can we please have less talk and more action? Rather than putting on the performance of aggrieved loser, switch off from the media, and tune into what you can personally do to empower yourself and those around you. And above all else, please grow accustomed to dealing in truth, not fears.

As sex expert and Zionist activist Dr Logan Levkoff said about women in America adopting South Korea’s 4B movement (no marriage, no sex, no pregnancy, no dating until 2028):

“How feminist is it to deny yourself sexual pleasure and intimacy on your terms? How feminist is it to deny your body the opportunity to get pregnant over the next four years if you want to? People say reproductive rights are stake. You could be fighting for them instead of martyring yourself for the cause and jeopardising your potential fertility. It’s not feminist to deny yourself options.”

People are still displaying a catastrophic inability to see past their own weaponizing of women for their advantage. These agendas are nothing new. Do you think that the legal team behind E Jean Carroll cared about women’s rights? Or do you think they cared about political power and fat checks? Do you think Roberta Kaplan (lawyer in both that case and the Charlottesville case, and one of the leading original figures of the Times Up movement) has ever spoken out against antisemitism in any place other than Neo Nazi rallies? (I can answer that negatively). As I’ve stressed repeatedly ad nauseum for a year since October 7, these hifalutin lawyers are not to be trusted, and they’ve set an agenda that has only served them, not the people they purport to protect. It made them money. So let’s stop pretending that the “good” side were doing anything to secure civil liberties for the masses. Perhaps in a world that has proven itself to be upside down in so many respects for so long now, we should be cautiously hopeful that the “bad” side might undo some of the damage they’ve caused.

Another phenomenon over the course of the last week is the performative walkout of lefties from social media. It is unreal to me that people are talking about the potential manipulation of social media by its owners, and Russian interference etc now. Now? Where have you been? People who have said nothing once nor questioned their place here while terrorist proxies such as Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran itself have abused social media for more than a year to spread filmed massacres and pogroms and make Islamist propaganda widespread. You’ve said nothing. You didn’t consider leaving. But now you’re fear-mongering about unsubstantiated limitations on free speech? Phenomenal.

There is nothing noble or righteous about calling for the unity of the marginalized, or walking out of Twitter, or suddenly caring about women's rights after spending four-plus years policing the marginalized if they didn't meet your standards, remaining on social media despite rampant disinformation and foreign influence, and ignoring the active plight of women both in this country and all over the world. It's not noble or righteous. It's narcissistic and immature, and the result of losing without grace.

Even The Guardian itself has said it will no longer tweet on X. (*Suddenly antisemitism on Twitter is reduced by 342%*).

Here’s Joe Rogan on this issue. I can’t say I disagree with one word.

Do you really think Joe Biden was sincere in his efforts during the war in Gaza? A man who with his other hand helped fund the Iranians by sending them $6billion shortly before the violence broke out on October 7. President Biden was asked this week if he thinks that he can get a hostage deal done by the end of his term. He answered, commenting on the number of cameramen in the room: “Do you think that you can get hit in the head by the camera behind you?”

Come again? How are the hostage families supposed to feel as the butt of a joke after their loved ones have been in captivity for more than 400 days? These are no more the good guys than the guys who are about to take power.

Speaking of, Trump has picked Marco Rubio for Secretary of State. Here’s Marco Rubio destroying the antisemitic Code Pink activists in DC earlier this year:

There’s good news to focus on this week. Obviously some of Trump’s picks, including Matt Gaetz, who has made antisemitic remarks in the past, raise eyebrows too. I’m choosing to focus on the elements that will move the needle positively, such as Trump’s planned treatment of the UN and specifically UNRWA.

I especially choose to focus on this as antisemitism in Europe continues to spread like wildfire, without coming up for air. The terrible acts of violence by Islamist fanatics continued in Amsterdam this week. The attackers screamed “Cancer Jews!” (how original!) while setting fire to the city on Monday night.

When they tell us to go back to where they think we came from where exactly do they mean, huh? The writer and public intellectual Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been speaking out about her experience this week, living in the Netherlands, and witnessing how Muslim Brotherhood integrated into the state apparatus, taking advantage of lower vetting standards in the police to become a substantial percentage of local authorities.

“I know Amsterdam well. For many years I lived in the Netherlands, including The Hague, which is only 36 miles away. What happened last night is not surprising to me. I have spent more than 20 years warning Europeans and Americans of the likely consequences of large-scale migration from Muslim-majority countries, especially when combined with naive politics of multiculturalism, rather than integration and assimilation.

Yesterday night’s pogrom was thus the opposite of a black swan. Such an event was foreseeable long ago. Twenty years ago, I watched as the Dutch authorities caved in to almost every Islamist demand. Muslim students disrupted or walked out of classes on the history of the Holocaust, so the classes were eliminated from their curriculum. Jews and gays were attacked and beaten in the streets of Amsterdam, so—after a series of platitudes about “unacceptable behavior”—the victims were told not to appear so gay or Jewish in future.”

According to Ali, the movement to globalize the intifada is not approaching. It has arrived in Europe, and it is not going anywhere.

America cannot become Europe. It has been in danger of it. In many respects it still is in danger of it. I can vouch for this with my own life. I abandoned Europe for America due to the very problem that started to spread its cancerous poison over this country during the last four years as a result of an administration that could not hold its center. If you are abundantly convinced that Trump is going to be terrible for democracy, for human rights, and specifically for Jews and Israel and that he will go against everything he’s said, then it’s compulsory you watch this address he made this week before you continue your arguments.

Why don’t you think of it this way? Right now, you have a guy coming into power with centrist policies who wants to help us. Maybe it would be more fruitful to start embracing it. Trump’s address was one that Biden never had the gumption or balls to make during the biggest antisemitism crisis in American history. Not a single word of what Trump says here is wrong. It is accurate. He understands the issue in its entirety and plans to stop it. “The American taxpayer will not subsidize the creation of terrorist sympathizers on American soil”. Donald J Trump. Thank you.

Does this look like an administration handing over to what they deem to be a fascist dictator who will ruin American democracy?

What a bunch of lies.

It’s a beautiful week, y’all. Keep spreading the truth and the light. I think big things are coming. Big great things.