"There was a cult of Fauci. People were getting Fauci tattoos and dancing with images of Fauci."

"He really was on the cover of every magazine, which, if you think about it, was weird! If millions of Americans suddenly made me their cult leader, and I had previously just been an unknown short man in the back of an HIV press conference, I would go insane with power too. So would you. And when you see lockdowns in the context of a power-drunk elf getting turned on by the idea of canceling Easter—he’s typing so fast he can barely keep up—you can understand better what we all lived through. For him, the pleasure was canceling things, especially things he felt gave power to the right (sports, family gatherings, religious events). We can never forget the freaks who gain power in a centrally controlled system...."

Writes Nellie Bowles in "I Am the Most Famous and Talked-About Person in the Country" (The Free Press).

So do "freaks... gain power in a centrally controlled system"? Or does the power that's there to be gained  in a centrally controlled system make freaks out of people? Bowles must mean the latter, because she'd saying she would "go insane" under the same circumstances and "So would you."

About that "dancing with images":

Flash back to the paid vaccine pushers!!! Never forget!!! pic.twitter.com/FxouJOmKNL

— Freedom Forever (@Freedom49503795) November 6, 2023

About what I boldfaced above: I'm up for taunting Fauci over the things Fauci deserves to be taunted for, but having repeated fun over his height seems... well, it seems like Obama's thing about balding:

"Bimbo feminism is the celebration of woman as a dumb, hot object. Woman as an absolute idiot."

"To hell with girlbosses and equality in the boardroom. New feminism—bimboism—is about celebrating the vacant, sexual woman, the dumb woman, the hole. Being smart is capitalism. 'No more Instagrams about rising and grinding,' an opinion writer at The New York Times told us one day in describing the trend. 'No more The Wing. No more straining to be smarter than the boys. Bimboism offers an opposing and, to some, refreshing premise: Value me, look at me, not because I’m smart and diligent but for the fact that I’m not. It’s anticapitalist, even antiwork.'...The first wave [of feminism] was the suffragettes from the late 1800s who fought for a woman’s right to be seen as an autonomous individual and to vote. By the 1960s and ’70s, the second wave was about equal rights for women at work and the little things, like being able to own credit cards and decide when you have your own children. The 1990s saw a third wave focused on sexual liberation and expanding the conversation beyond wealthy white women.... And now, in the 2020s, there’s the fourth wave. The fourth turning. The trans revolution and the bimbo feminist.""

Writes Nellie Bowles, in "Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History" (commission earned).

That opinion writer at The New York Times was Sophie Haigney. Here's her piece "Meet the Self-Described ‘Bimbos’ of TikTok." And here's where I blogged it back in 2022. When I ran across "bimbo feminism" listening to Bowles book this morning, I felt like that's something new, I ought to blog that. But now I see, not only did I blog the article Bowles was talking about, I had the same feeling I was seeing it for the first time:

"We’re not judging you for the soap that you use. But, collectively, that can add up as billions of people wash their hands or bathe..."

"... hundreds or thousands of times a year. If you’re so inclined, it makes sense to switch to a more eco-friendly product. Just understand that there may be a trade-off between sustainability and comfort. 'The consumer has to decide: Are they serious about where their soap comes from, whether it’s synthetic or natural?...'"

From "Bar soap or body wash: Which is best for your skin and the planet? Depending on its ingredients and packaging, your soap could cut as much as a third of the carbon emissions from your next shower" (WaPo).

So: Don't feel judged, but feel judged. "We’re not judging you"... but you — you conscientious people — need to step up and judge yourself.

That reminds me. I'm reading a book — "Morning After the Revolution" by Nellie Bowles (commission earned) — and here's how the chapter "The Most Important White Woman in the World" begins:

"She acknowledges being the beneficiary of a previous generation’s progressivism... It’s the crazy activism she’s against — you know, the 'fringe' stuff."

"By fringe, she means trans. She’s peeved that some trans women are trying to redefine feminism in ways that seem to her to be anti-woman, resents that lesbians risk being erased by trendy all-purpose queerness and fears that as a married lesbian mother she will have her own rights swept away by anti-trans backlash.... I was, of course, eager to read good gossip about The Times. The best nugget: After Bowles started dating... Bari Weiss... she says an editor [exclaimed]... 'She’s a Nazi.'... Her most serious charge is that the editor thought her story ideas weren’t as good after that. The obvious question is whether her heterodox turn has conferred much benefit when it comes to ideas. The ones on display here seem pretty shopworn. I recall admiring a sharp-elbowed profile of the psychologist and anti-identity politics commentator Jordan Peterson that Bowles wrote early in her Times tenure. Nothing in this book hits that level.... [T]he book’s central fallacy is that idiocy on the left requires moving to the right. It doesn’t...."

Writes Laura Kipnis, in The New York Times. She's reviewing the new book by Nellie Bowles, "Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History" (commission earned).

Should I read this book? It's 7 hours by audiobook. I'll try. Kipnis warns me that Bowles is trying to be the new Tom Wolfe, but she's not as good as Wolfe (and neither is Kipnis): "where Wolfe was a precision-guided stiletto, Bowles is more of a dull blade, ridiculing her former colleagues by saddling them with laughably vacuous thoughts and dreams — their 'beautiful vision of the role of journalism for such a beautiful time,' for instance."

What about in that "sharp-elbowed profile" of Peterson? Was she closer to Wolfe back then? I blogged it at the time — here, in 2018. Bowles wrote:

"U.S. officials are starting to grumble about Ukraine and possible corruption. After months of having Americans bake Ukraine flag cupcakes..."

"... and fly Ukraine’s colors outside our houses, there’s a bit of hedging going on now. The government seems to be soft-rolling it, like in this Thomas Friedman piece: 'Privately, U.S. officials are a lot more concerned about Ukraine’s leadership than they are letting on. There is deep mistrust between the White House and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine—considerably more than has been reported.' This is, after all, a former Soviet republic full of rent seekers and minigarchs, and you don’t become president without fraternizing with those people, and those people, well, they don’t just go away once you’re in power, and all the Vogue covers in the world can’t whitewash that."

Writes Nellie Bowles at Common Sense, reviewing the top stories in her column called "TGIF." She's also got this, about Afghanistan:

"Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy/He says there’s a crisis in masculinity. Why won’t women — all these wives and witches — just behave?"

Whoa! That's a pretty insulting title for a new NYT article about Jordan Peterson. The article is by Nellie Bowles who spent 2 days with him, with access to his home — check out the unflattering photograph of him in his home — and listening in to his phone calls and following him backstage at a lecture.

Wherever he goes, he speaks in sermons about the inevitability of who we must be. “You know you can say, ‘Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn’t be human anymore. They’d be something else. They’d be transhuman or something. We wouldn’t be able to talk to these new creatures.”...

Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end.