What starts out as mere dislike - maybe you find someone’s opinions grating, or you think they’re too good-looking, or too full of themselves, or as it often happens in neurotic literary circles, all of the above - becomes a Salem-like feeding frenzy.

As Kat put it, there was everything from accusations of sexual impropriety to pressure on people she worked with to quickly cut ties with her:

“The rumor continued to spread, now joined by more, even salacious allegations: that my latest novel had been rejected by my publisher because it was too unspeakably racist to print, that I had sent abusive and harassing messages to reviewers who hadn’t liked my books, that I was guilty of unspecified-but-implied-sexual behaviors toward teens that made me a danger to the community. Any outlets I freelanced for were tagged and pressured to cut ties with me, as was my editor, as was my agent.”

Not only does cancellation work on the target - Kat’s writing career suffered in a variety of ways before she found her footing again - it also works on bystanders.

The acquaintance in question went into PR full time and abandoned her interest in writing what she referred to as “quirky little YA novels.” Kat is a successful essayist and crime writer today.

A literary community guts itself when it performs stupid purity tests and witch hunts; it exiles talent, while other talent leaves quietly. Remember what happened to Isabel Fall? A lot of people have chosen to forget. (Archive link to the story is here)

I also think that some of those people likely regretted their behavior years later. In fact, I know they did.

When I interviewed Stephen Elliott about his own devastating encounter with online cancel culture, he had a simple message, “there are no good mobs.”

The mob impulse isn’t just collective in nature. When we attack people thoughtlessly, we strive to reveal another person’s “evil” nature because we seek to conceal something vulnerable and broken in ourselves.

I was once a person broken in multiple places, and a member of a similarly neurotic online community. I paid for my behavior when this community predictably turned against me. Then the situation got worse - and a tragedy occurred

Talking about this is hard, but the Glorious Normie Restoration demands that we admit our dumb mistakes and learn from them. Regret without analysis is useless. I’ll take one for the team.

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I must first point out that I have been canceled in other ways. One time, for example, I made fun of the Twitter left for their outrage against targeted strikes on Shia death squads.

The Twitter left loves Shia death squads. Not only did they hound me and send death threats, they also dug up my LinkedIn profile (which I had forgotten about) and began sending angry emails to my former bosses, not realizing that I’d already been forced out of their organization.

That was hilarious. The story I am about to tell you is far from funny - it haunts me to this day. Because it involves suicide, I am asking you to proceed with caution.

If you’re still with me - it begins, like the story of Dr. Frankenstein, with the creation of a monster:

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A hot man is an observant man. An observant man can make a woman stupid happy for a good portion of the day. If he keeps track of how her body and her soul react to him, he can transform her into a glowing but simple mechanism that produces only words like “more.” I don’t know much about love and sex per se (I am a hobbyist and not an expert), but I do know that men who are observant are not to be taken lightly.

None of this magic is possible without trust. I mean, why do you think that married women tend to report greater sexual satisfaction?

I’m not here telling you to rush to the altar. I’m not telling you that your life sucks because you’re not married (look, I’ve been divorced for years and I am not certain that I will ever get married again!). What I am telling you is that relationships are good for you, and the weird miasma surrounding heterosexual relationships online is usually projection.

Obviously, women, regardless of sexual orientation, should be careful with their hearts. For an extreme example of what happens when you are too trusting and do not know your self-worth, look no further than this deeply reported piece on the Tate Brothers’ rape and brainwashing empire (*Warning*: It’s a terrifying article, and prison is too good for the Tates - if you can’t afford a New Yorker subscription at this time, here’s an Archive copy).

Knowing your self-worth is not the same as being a paranoid mess 24/7. And every day, in hundreds of little ways, the internet is making us messier and more paranoid.

Among the extremely online, for example, a man who has you dickmatized is de facto a terrible person who will either make you into a whore or a dupe complicit in your destruction.

I’ve heard about “heterofatalism” and how “boyfriends are embarrassing”. A few years ago, the aforementioned Andrew Tate also helpfully reminded us that sex with a woman is “gay” (unless you’re trying to conceive) and honestly, heterofatalism now acts as a weird extension of his psychopathic mindset: Do not make yourself vulnerable. If you do, have the grace to be sufficiently embarrassed about it.

Though all social media platforms are swamped with this content, TikTok is especially bad. I browsed it for the first time in months just recently, and immediately had to tweak my algorithm to prevent my eye from twitching.

The promotion of loneliness, whether spiritual or physical or both, is not simply a byproduct of the gender wars. It’s the culture of abstention, evasion, avoidance - in other words, it’s hermit crab politics, powered by the all too helpful apps in your phone.

And yes, it’s loneliness promotion, because most women are heterosexual and no amount of articles on the fluidity of the sexual experience by people with magenta hair who call themselves Raven and Aurora are going to suddenly change this.

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Remember YOLO by The Lonely Island? The song is over a decade old, and it sometimes feels prophetic:

… And don’t travel by plane
And don’t travel at all
Build a bomb shelter basement
With titanium walls

And wear titanium suits
In case pianos fall on ya
And never go in saunas
‘Cause they’re crawlin’ with piranhas

And never take the stairs
‘Cause they’re often unsafe
You only live once
Don’t let it go to waste

The idea that you shouldn’t YOLO too close to the sun is especially targeted toward heterosexual women, because, well, women are physically smaller than men. All sorts of things can happen to us. We also enjoy greater freedom than we ever did - so of course it comes with a giant warning label.

Forget physical danger, as so many other pitfalls await the heterosexual woman when she dares to step out of her house. For example, you can become ugly-coded simply for wanting a man!

As Cartoons Hate Her wrote last year, rejecting men is “insecurity repackaged as cooties.” If you’re hot, you simply don’t seek a man out. You’re fighting them off with a stick and installing a machine gun nest on your roof instead.

As I am currently reading The Last Straight Woman by the fantastic Phoebe Maltz Bovy, I must point out that she’s right on the money when she talks about how this is simply not your average woman’s experience. Most of us live normal lives and get our hearts broken occasionally.

Of course, you can be hot-coded as hell by all conventional standards and still face humiliating rejection BY A MAN. Happens to female celebrities all of the time, to be litigated and re-litigated by their fans for eternity.

In fact, I took comfort in celebrity stories of rejection the one time I got very publicly dumped, again, BY A MAN. “You’re our Jennifer Aniston” one reader told me, and I had to thank him. It’s much being a poor man’s Jen than being angrily lectured on how I should have known better.

It all goes to my point that everyone gets hurt in life, it’s just that the instruments of pain are different.

Still, the funhouse mirror representation of female heterosexuality on social media is getting kind of old for me, and I’m not even heterosexual. I mean, what the hell is this:

Here at the Normie Restoration, we love heterosexual women, and we love our millennial feminists, and not just because they’re everywhere. It’s also because they are a piñata for people across the the political spectrum.

The problem with bisexuality, meanwhile, is that people keep trying to make it political, and being political in bed is like acting horny in a zoo. It’s indecent. It’s gratingly unsexy. I like it when boobs are in my face, OK? Why does this need to be complicated.

Non-heterosexual identity is declining among young people, and the steepest decline is among women who identify as bisexual. As others have (correctly) pointed out before, a lot of this has to do with recent trends and social contagion simply wearing off.

You can fool around with women, and decide that this doesn’t amount to an identity you need to build your life around. You may have been attracted to the idea of being an oppressed minority and then realized that this was silly. You may have rediscovered the dick. It’s fine!

But I ALSO think that the politicization of bisexuality just got incredibly annoying. The tent became full of strident people, instead of people you want to make out with in between crushing diet gin and tonics while St. Vincent blares in the background.

Some of these women may have discovered that (shocker) seducing men is so much easier by comparison. It’s less work. Men tend to be more conservative, which isn’t always a bad thing. Men have the brawn to protect you - as long as they also protect you from themselves.

And most men also won’t stay up all night bothering you with their theories on whether the Gaylors are right or if pansexuality is real. I know I sound flippant, but the thing is, if the queer spaces that are available to you are kind of annoying and/or intensive, you can decide to withdraw.

“Well, a bunch of fundamentalist rightoids are coming for our rights, so everything is annoying and intensive,” people reading this will say. In certain contexts - sure. When boobs are in my face, I’d rather just think about how lucky I am.

If you’re a bisexual Lockheed liberal like I am, your available dating pool of women also shrinks significantly. Bisexual people are expected to skew left, and many bi women either fully lean into it, or else wear leftiness as a public mask. This is perfectly fine! I’m not judging them. Yet I must point out that dating is a numbers game. Most people get tired of scanning the horizon for a unicorn.

I know fellow bisexual women who feel the exact same way, but don’t want to be known as “queer-baiters” or whatever the term is anymore. I just don’t care if someone calls me a queer-baiter. People have called me worse.

Bisexuality is not meant to “save” you from meeting a man, or wanting a man, meanwhile. Especially if you detest the concept of being “saved” to begin with. I had enough of that while being dragged to Sunday school.

I also know that I am not the only bisexual woman whose efforts to meet other women have been affected by having a son (or sons).

In fact, the last woman I chatted to seriously about going on a date all but shoved me back into the closet when she told me that she doesn’t “do boy moms” as boy moms are “batshit crazy” and “not allies.”

She pointed out examples of mom influencers acting crazy as proof, and said a lot of her queer friends have started avoiding boy moms based on what they’ve seen online. I am not a mom influencer, but I do know how algorithms skew our perceptions of each other

I decided to not push back on that one, though - who has the time?? - and politely agreed that we are most likely not a match. This, apparently was a huge mistake on my part!

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(If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, bear with me)

As a kid, “Humbug” also introduced me to the concept of the Fiji Mermaid (sometimes spelled Feejee Mermaid), a famous sideshow hoax from the 19th century.

Exploring sideshow culture, “Humbug” plays with the idea of humanity playing tricks on itself. Can something be real just because you want it to be?

We’re more than a quarter into the 21st century dreaded by the characters in “Humbug,” and the answer is yes. People construct entire new realities on the internet and live there happily. Some make great money off of it, just as P.T. Barnum did off of the Fiji Mermaid.

Conspiracy theories are the new 24/7 sideshow hoax. On the X-Files, the human longing for conspiracies was transformed into something elegant, a noble quest for the truth. Today it’s Candace Owens screeching about FBI cover-ups and Andrew Tate telling people they need to escape "the Matrix” when he’s not busy playing gay chicken with his hangers-on.

Both Candace Owens and Andrew Tate have now traveled to Russia, incidentally, where they’ve uncovered the latest “plot”: Russia is a great country and a true ally of civilization, and “they” are lying to us about Russia:

It’s pretty similar to when Tucker Carlson also traveled to Russia, and was amazed by the fact that they have bread and shopping carts.

All of this is happening while Russia is busy pulverizing civilians in democratic Ukraine and supplying Iran with intelligence on how to better kill American service members.

It should be upsetting, but if we want the Glorious Normie Restoration to succeed, we can’t waste too much emotion on grinning sociopaths.

Instead, let’s ask ourselves this: What happens when a hoaxer is out-hoaxed?

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Because while Russia welcomes our dumbest fellow Americans, it does exact a price.

So what are the consequences of reactionary grifters such as Candace and Tate forging connections in Russia?

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At the same time, I am a tired optimist. I believe the Russian Federation will cease to exist in its current state - and that, in fact, it will do so sooner rather than later. I think that in the long run, this will be a good thing, and not just for Ukrainians, although Ukrainians feature heavily in my calculus.

Democratic nations, after all, must be prioritized. Ukraine is the vanguard of democracy, paying it for it with blood. “Democratic values” is not a sexy phrase, but the bedrock of a stable existence is not meant to be sexy. Leave sexy to the Hasan Pikers of the world, or whatever.

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The people who call themselves “policy wonks” usually act aghast at my stance on the breakup of Russia (Michael Rubin, however, gets it) - “You want to genocide Russians!” “You want global and regional instability!” “You want nuclear catastrophe!” - and I would like to address their concerns/screechings in this essay.

The truth is, the breakup of Russia doesn’t have to be a disaster. To understand why it doesn’t have to be this way, we must confront what the Russian Federation is, how it functions, why it is an inherently suicidal project, and how its wars are a function of suicidality turned outward.

Understanding Russia as it is, so that we may see the best way to deal with it. In “dealing with it,” I also include those few, very courageous Russians who themselves are sick of Russia’s crap.

I will not be using the framework of postcolonialism in my argument, because I believe that postcolonialism is built on grievance. I am tired of grievance. I am interested in positive change.

Keeping all that in mind, when it comes to Russia: Size matters.

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• She is one of my favorite Substack authors. Lucid, precise, and emotionally honest in how she tackles our weird social dynamics - even on the rare occasion that I disagree with her, I can’t help but think, “Damn, that’s well-stated.”

• She’s strikingly hot. An American MILF on a long weekend in Paris kind of hot, with bonus disco queen vibes (she can get mad at me for saying this; I am an expert in beautiful women, and I speak the truth)

When a woman is both intelligent and beautiful and isn’t hidden away at home in a burlap sack, some people will get offended. The internet will go crazy.

When I’m not specializing in beautiful women, I specialize in internet craziness. So I can tell you that the craziness that beautiful women on the internet inspire is some of the most toxic, radioactive phenomena I have seen in my entire life, and I survived middle school as a gangly Ukrainian girl in the American South.

While this discourse is not new to me - it often feels like torturing a very old wad of gum - I did discover something interesting when I saw the freakout over this beautiful picture of CHH, in a jumpsuit that she made herself (!!).

CHH cultivates an audience of normal people. Normies like you and me. Most of the comments on the jumpsuit and the way she looks in it were very complimentary. The criminally insane can’t stand to see positivity online, however, which is why some commenters decided to get mad at CHH, as she is happily married, and a mother, and yet dared to post something so gorgeous.

All good writers are sensitive, and CHH responded by pointing out that her husband obviously enjoys the fact that other people know he bagged a complete smokeshow (even if she didn’t word it like that - we’re all adults here, we can admit the man bagged a smokeshow, aside from the haters, but they’re not going to set the bar).

This is where it got extra funny and rose to the level of discourse: Prominent podcaster Anna Khachiyan, noted internet sociopath, former dirtbag leftist, and current dissident right harpy, decided to get VERY mad:

To understand why this initially became interesting to me, consider that Khachiyan specifically cultivates a large and extremely toxic and resentful audience that skews male, outside of the “I’m not like all the other girls” girls. Naturally, the freaks loved this, and couldn’t pass up a chance to call CHH a whore.

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As the Bible tells us, “You shall know them by their fruit.” If you’re a smart and interesting woman, smart and interesting people tend to gravitate toward you. If you’re a seething goblin, your readers will be like this:

Yes, yes, I just invoked the Bible in an essay about an internet fight over a glimmering jumpsuit - but bear with me for a second!

Aside from showing us how women end up in a trap when they pander to bilious misogynists - deep in her heart, I don’t think Khachiyan is happy with male readers who degrade her even as they offer backhanded praise for her own internalized misogyny - this raises a very interesting subject:

How the internet perceives male confidence, what male confidence actually is, and how the dissident right is being taken over by Taliban lite style sexual resentment demonstrated by socially isolated men.

Yes, we’re going to make this about the men, and here’s why:

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Back then, I used to write on social media about the magic of Kyiv, the way it churns in my blood, the way that I am tied it to it no matter where on Earth I make my home. The metaphysical side of the city is one I know well, and it knows me. It’s the opposite of the abyss - staring into the starry skies above Kyiv, the starry skies also stare into you. Maria told me that she envied me.

Today, this woman is a hysterical Stalinist who posts about how much she loves it when Russians occupy Ukrainian cities and brainwash/threaten the children living there into being pro-Russian:

I’d reply with screenshots of how Maria used to fundraise for new tits, but that seems crass, and anyway, I’ve had her blocked for years now. Who cares, honestly. When all you have is a pair of fake tits you had to get random weirdos to pay for, you might as well support an attempted genocide.

“What is the Russian obsession with Kyiv?” People who pay attention to Russia’s war of aggression often ask me this question. I usually reply with references to the bloody history of the Russian Empire and the phrase, “Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities.”

Kyiv is, crucially, older and freer than Moscow. Twenty years ago, when the current war seemed unimaginable (unless you were paying very close attention, and I certainly was not, I was too busy living my life and wrestling with my delusions), you could simply feel the energy shift when you hopped off the Moscow - Kyiv express.

Moscow, richer, bigger, more organized, more repressive even in the brief break between successive authoritarian regimes, squashes you down like a hydraulic press.

Kyiv is shambolic and bohemian. A proud city of ghosts and jokers. You can destroy it - the city has seen plenty of destruction - but you can’t really capture it. You can’t force it to love you back. A Stalinist could never understand.

When I was reading Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, long ago, a description of extreme sadism stuck out to me - one where the sadist forces, under torture, another person to give up the secret of who they are.

Fromm mentions the writer Isaac Babel’s passages on the Russian civil war, in which a man who murdered his former lord talks about how you “can’t reach the soul” by simply shooting a person, instead you have to stomp on someone, “for an hour or over an hour” in order to “discover life, this life that is ours…” [translation here is mine]

This drive to torture and destroy is familiar. This week, Moscow cracked buildings open like eggs in Kyiv, tearing off roofs and walls, stamping children in their pajamas into bloody messes. Moscow is the extreme sadist - a desperate one, as all such sadists are.

You can’t help but focus on the children’s bodies when they are laid outside shattered Ukrainian buildings. The little feet. Most of the time, they’re not blue yet.

You are supposed to turn away, but years of gazing at war crime footage mean that a checklist is running through my head even as a deeper part of me is lit up by rage and pain. “This child was alive two hours ago.”

My beloved Albert Camus once said that “true artists scorn nothing.” Today I tell his portrait that this is the reason why it’s so hard to finish my new book. I am so full of scorn most days that it’s hard for me to breathe normally. You feel this breathlessness more keenly in Colorado’s high altitude. I suffocate over and over again.

One of my cousins checks up on my father’s home, the home I inherited, regularly. I can always tell when Kyiv is under attack again - she shows up as “online” in the chat when she should be asleep.

I used to help her breathe through the explosions. She is used to them now, as much as a human being can get used to a Russian-made hell. Most of the time, she grumbles about having to get up for work “no matter what kind of night” Kyiv is having.

The city continues to live. My father’s building continues to stand. I haunt it most often in the pre-dawn hours. If you look up at the tall windows, I am there, drawing hearts in the dust.

The Kyiv that I know no longer exists, I don’t need anyone to tell me that. It roils and glimmers in my head - footsteps on the tense spines of stairwells, loud political arguments at one table interrupted by singing at the next. I’m too old now to climb its roofs like I used to (maybe), and many of the boys who used to furiously kiss me behind the heavy curtains of its theaters are dead.

But the spirit of the city endures, and if anything, it has been sharpened. I don’t need anyone to tell me that either - even though friends often do, while holding up their cats in greeting during our video chats, cats are an international currency of love and goodwill - I feel it from a distance. Kyiv is a burning arrow, loosed into history.

In writing this, I want you to understand what it is that Moscow covets when it turns its rheumy eyes westward. It’s freedom - something that Moscow has never truly experienced. Something that must be stomped into the ground.

Yes, there was corruption and chaos in Ukraine. You won’t find a Ukrainian today who hasn’t complained about it. Stick two Ukrainians into a room, and they’ll form three political parties.

The chaos was in Moscow’s best interest. As Russian officials used to tell me - to my face, in honest conversation - the Kremlin and its dogs could never afford to have Ukrainians living well. This could make Russians begin to ask questions of their own feudal government.

Zelensky was not an experienced politician when he took office, in fact, he wasn’t a politician at all. It catches up to him from time to time, usually in the form of the unqualified people he had originally hired, such as Tucker Carlson’s new darling, Iiulia Mendel, an opportunistic cow.

What’s amazing to me is that people on the internet will take all this, and say, “Yeah, this is why children’s bodies deserve to lie on the sidewalks, turning blue under emergency blankets.”

“This is why a nation of millions must be stomped out of existence, brutalized in dirty torture basements, raped, enslaved, beheaded.” [Never watch the Russians’ beheading videos, I used to do it for work, there’s a reason I don’t do that kind of work anymore]

“This is why a democratic people deserve death.”

The truth is, sadists have many enablers and fellow travelers. At the core of their being is cowardice disguised as realism. They are afraid. Even Muscovites like the deranged Maria Baronova secretly cower in fear.

It’s OK to be afraid, of course. Fear and cowardice are not the same. Cowardice does not have to be a product of fear. When it does - it is a conscious choice.

“Easy for you to say from Colorado, Natalia!”

Sure. I can tell you it hasn’t been easy to count my dead. The financial impact of this war has always been devastating. It is what it is, and I’m not complaining. I am still a lucky one.

And I’ve been lucky to know the many secret lives of Kyiv. I’ve known criminals and prosecutors. Businesspeople and scientists. Artists and soldiers. Cult leaders and snappy lawyers. I have bitten through the bone, straight to the marrow of the place that I was born in. It has brought me suffering and love.

Artistic collectives such as DakhaBrakha, the Dakh Daughters, and Vogonovozhatye I count among my family and friends. My late aunt, who died after her cancer diagnosis was delayed by the full-scale invasion, was an opera singer, and I used to know the backstage of the Kyiv Opera House like the back of my hand. I knew the flea markets, I knew the police stations, the hospitals and the morgues, the experimental restaurants and the beat up food trucks.

It’s rare, I think, to get such a vivid cross-section of a city of millions. I don’t know what I did to deserve my intimacy with Kyiv, or with Ukraine in general. Everywhere I’ve gone, people have opened themselves up to me. I’ve done shots with terrifying mobsters. I’ve baked cookies alongside nuns.

I was in love with a Ukrainian boxer once (NOT one of the Klitschkos, don’t fret, but he was hot and blue-eyed). And a Ukrainian cop. And an actor for good measure. My loves have fallen through my soul like a warm rain of the sort that you get in the Kyiv summers sometimes- beating down the dust.

It’s hard to characterize the Ukrainian nation, because it’s a nation of many different people. A bunch of weird online leftists dismiss Ukrainian as “kulaks” and “privileged whites.” The weird online right thinks of us as “whores.” I don’t want to argue with any of these mutants, because it’s like arguing with a single-cell organism. I can tell you, though, that it’s freedom that unites the people I know. Freedom is responsibility. It can be terrifying. But it runs through the veins of Ukrainian society.

Freedom is not just doing what you want - it means risking something for what you love and believe in. Ukrainians took many such risks long before the full-scale invasion, you can see it in their political history and the history of Ukrainian protest.

Now they are in the kind of fight that will define them as a people for generations to come.

I recently wrote about Putin for my friends at The Bulwark. I don’t believe that he is going to stop. Any overtures toward peace at this time are meant to manipulate the Trump administration.

But Putin is not an immortal vampire, and the system he has built, resting on his shoulders alone, is a brittle one.

Ukrainians know this. They carry on.

I don’t know if my father’s home will survive this war. But even if it doesn’t, I will put the lights on there against the night indefinitely.

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I said that I feel shame all the time.

“You don’t feel it, you BORROW it!” He thundered back. “You’re afraid of your true nature. Suffering will cure you of your cowardice!”

Twenty years have gone by. This man I admired is dead. Everything he said to me was true.

I wish that suffering wasn’t a vehicle for self-knowledge, let alone self-acceptance. At the same time, I also wish that Albert Camus was in my bed right now. I wish for a lot of things.

I wish I hadn’t recently found myself apologizing to a man who expected me to fall in love with him. “Natalia, are you stupid,” you’re saying right now. “Men want sex, why apologize for anything.”

Yes, but men also get ideas about themselves - and then they suffer. They suffer so much that they invent an entire crazy manosphere.

The manosphere’s most towering intellectual, Myron Gaines - whose statements about the female body bely his latent homosexuality - sees sex as a battlefield, in which a man must “fuck these whores” so he can then be accomplished and confident enough to marry a good woman.

When it doesn’t work, and solid women pull away from these men while women with undiagnosed personality disorders draw near, the fault is not with the teaching, but with gynocracy or Bill Gates or SSRIs or birth control or OMG JEWS.

There is always an excuse for why fear and contempt are not rewarded with loyalty and love. The fact that one might be gay and afraid, or just afraid, doesn’t occur to Myron and his friends.

It’s humiliating to apologize for giving a man what he wanted. It’s cruel to say nothing when you realize he expected more. I’d rather be humiliated than be cruel.

And in humbling myself before someone else, I forgive myself too. Because I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to be the evil temptress. (I am sometimes the evil temptress)

The spiritual companion of the manosphere is the radfemsphere, and I can only imagine what they’d make of all this. Call me self-hating, maybe.

That’s because the radfemsphere is just as crazy. All it does is flip the manosphere’s contempt for women on its head. Men are savage animals, women are long-suffering saints. Oh, you’re a man and you disagree? Clearly that’s because you are a monster.

The other day, another man told me that he hopes he isn’t “scaring [me]” because he likes fishing and video games, and he saw some female influencer refer to these pastimes as “the signs of a psychopath.”

This is a grown man with war scars and a sensible job, seriously worrying about a mean girl influencer. The internet is real. It has rewired our brains, and opened them up to more suffering.

Can we take the suffering and transform it into self-knowledge?

Conventional wisdom says no. We weren’t built for the internet and its psychosis-inducing landscape. As the author of the Normie Restoration, it is my mission to disagree.

People tell me the mission is pointless. “Natalia, you’re like Sisyphus.”

As Albert Camus - hotter than Bogart, swathed in cigarette smoke, draped by mistresses - said to us, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Camus and his absurdism is one of the many reasons why I prefer the frank hedonist to the “ethical slut” model that well-meaning people have been trying to cram down my throat (hahaha) for decades. I prefer the term hedonism to ethical non-monogamy too.

I’m not into sleeping around without an emotional connection, the holy spark - I’m a romantic and a serial monogamist. When I am with someone, they contain the universe for me in that moment. I believe in love, but I also believe that love is angelic. It shows up precisely when it means to.

So the internet is always telling me, “well, why can’t you be an ethical slut” or “why can’t you accept ethical non-monogamy.”

Here’s why:

The “ethical” framework is meant to paper over pain, because everyone is honest and everyone consents. Like communism, it looks good on paper. It doesn’t actually work out for the majority of people.

At their best, ethical sluts and non-monogamists still create hierarchies and headaches, because hierarchies and headaches are part and parcel of relationships, especially multiple romantic relationships (just ask Camus about his women problems).

The happiest and most content non-monogamous people I know accept the messiness of love and sex and don’t try to pretend that they’ve created a bedroom utopia. They’re true hedonists. They just don’t want to be called that, because the tepid terminology of ethical non-monogamy is today more socially acceptable.

At its worst, ethical non-monogamy is soul-destroying.

“But I’m honest - and therefore good,” the ethical slut insists in her vanity. No, baby, sometimes you are far from good. Honesty still has the power to hurt. It’s OK. We all have to grow up and accept the absurdity of our existence eventually.

Hedonism at least accepts the fatal flaw of human attraction (as Camus did when his gorgeous wife Francine Faure rightfully had a breakdown over his affairs). It accepts that we are all doomed in one way or another, so what’s the point of being afraid. It allows for love, it just knows that love is neither tame nor rational.

In that sense, hedonism is merely one of the expressions of the absurdity of human existence.

As Camus puts it:

Does this repeat gift hurt Don Juan’s women? Of course it does. Camus knows that. He also knows that the same instrument that creates pain creates passion and love in the first place.

The pain belongs to the realm of nature. You can soak romantically in the rain or drown screaming in it. You’re happier once you understand the paradox that is rain, the paradox that is your life.

There is a false dichotomy that permeates online debates on love and sex: The idea that we are always choosing between perfection or evil (“Men are psychopaths!” “Fuck these whores!”).

It’s an illusion. It’s not real. What’s real is the tenderness we get to share with each other in a world scarred by hatred.

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Tenderness, of course, makes us vulnerable, and we get hurt, or we hurt others, or both, and that’s the way it always will be. The celibate get hurt. The hedonists get hurt. The monogamists like me get hurt. Everyone gets hurt.

A frictionless existence is not possible.

We retreat into online worlds only to be harmed with words instead.

But when we leave the online world for the world of love and sex, we can be comforted in our hurt by touch, the simple act of listening to another beating heart. The act of hearing it skip a beat.

I have no problem with people who choose long-term celibacy. I get tired of those who loudly insist they’re wrong to live their lives as they choose. Like I keep saying, all of us get hurt. We can sometimes choose the method for the delivery of pain, that’s about it.

However, for the majority, celibacy is a mean joke we play on ourselves. I do not recommend it, even as it continues to trend upward. It’s not just a personal preference; we have the data on this. Celibacy makes a majority of people unhappy.

Men and women can do better, by allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and accepting the absurdity that governs human relationships.

“It’s up to the women to fix things” and “it’s up to the men to fix things” camps are both delusional. This is the part where everyone traditionally starts screaming at me, but hear me out:

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In court filings, Chirayu Rana alleged that Lorna Hajdini did everything from making him her “sex slave” by drugging him with erectile dysfunction pills and threatening his bonus if he didn’t play ball, to making comments such as, and I quote, “‘Birthday BJ for the brown boy? My little brown boy.”

As well as, “‘I bet your little Asian, fish head, wife doesn’t have these cannons.”

If that reads like perverted fan fiction to you (a woman using the word “cannons”?) - that’s because it likely is.

While the internet ran with the story in the first 24 hours, a lot of sane and reasonable people immediately began to question the over-the-top narrative Sadly, sane and reasonable people are outnumbered by bots and weirdos. I don’t like bots and weirdos. It’s why I write the Normie Restoration. So let’s get some things straight:

Not only does the lawsuit in question appear baseless (JPMorgan conducted an internal investigation, and its employees cooperated with it - Rana did not), but the woman in question wasn’t even the guy’s boss.

She couldn’t make decisions about his bonus. And what the hell does “fish head” even mean? Maybe we’ll find out when she hopefully countersues.

We know that Rana initially demanded JPMorgan give him millions to keep his mouth shut about this alleged case.

JPMorgan can more than afford to do that, but they chose not to - a smart choice if you think a claim is baseless.

If you read the lawsuit, you’ll note that Rana alleged that Hajdini stalked him and essentially forced her way into his apartment to perform disgusting sex acts on him against his consent. A lot of people don’t realize this, but that alone is how many false claims can easily fall apart. Your phone is always tracking your location - I dealt with a case like this based in Virginia (Rana’s parents’ home state, which we will return to in a second).

Someone says, “Hey, I was at this location, at this time, and Jim Bob showed up in a clown suit and made me have clown sex with him.” Jim Bob, knowing he’s perfectly innocent, turns his phone over to the police, and they establish a timeline that exonerates Jim Bob.

There’s a reason why Hajdini’s lawyers have zeroed in on this claim - and stated that Hajdini was never at the location mentioned. I will bet a thousand dollars that her phone exonerates her completely.

Same goes for Rana’s claim that Hajdini gained unauthorized access to his bank account, thus allowing her to track his every move. THIS IS SOMETHING THAT EVERY BANK WILL LOG. When I was first reading the documents, and seeing people quoting the article as if they believed it, I had to do a double take.

No banking software in the United States will allow you to simply log in without a trace. The best Russian hackers in the world can’t do it. If Rana’s claims were remotely true, he would have submitted proof from his bank to JPMorgan, and JPMorgan would have paid him to go away. They didn’t because none of this happened.

What all of this looks like is brazen extortion. And Lorna Hajdini is collateral damage, tied publicly to a gross-sounding lawsuit.

I got curious about this guy, and decided to do a little digging. I mean, what would motivate someone to do something this catastrophically awful, if true? Sure, money is a motivator, but this is so out there that you have to wonder about his mental state.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

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You know what that means. Time for the Normie Restoration to explain things. Again. Because I’m the Sisyphus of the older women/younger men debate, apparently.

The main problem people seem to have with this headline this time around is that, “These hags are looking for commitment and the younger men just want an easy lay.”

It’s not just manosphere trolls saying this either. Some intelligent people I know are saying the same thing!

As president of Concerned MILFs for America, I must first tell you this:

Women like to get laid too. And we attach less significance to it in our later years.

But wait, there’s more:

One of the hottest men I know is over a decade younger than I am, and is a dad.

He worked his ass off since he was a teen and can afford more children. He told me bluntly that he was willing to support me through pregnancy and beyond. There were reasons why we avoided this course of action - but I respected his desire for another child and his commitment to making it be as easy for me as possible. He remains the kind of man whom I can call on if I need help. I would do the same for him.

He visited me frequently even after we had moved on, and we always turned heads - and also made some people angry. The angry people were mostly the older male regulars at my favorite DC-area pub. One of them had gotten my number, ghosted me, but became belligerent when he saw me with a younger man a few months later.

I moved away shortly thereafter, but I heard that I was referred to as “that bitch” in my pub for a while to come.

I was open to the idea of going out with this age-appropriate man. I thought he was funny and interesting. But all he wanted was for me to be on the hook, boosting his ego and helping him deal with whatever problems lurked beneath the surface.

The idea that a woman, sorry, “that bitch,” could have options, and that these options included a young Adonis with a vape pen who could singlehandedly revive the romcom genre if he cared to was rage-inducing.

Having said all that, when older women date younger men, we’re usually not looking to make babies or find commitment. We’re looking for fun. It’s not just sex - it’s nice to be around someone who matches your energy, will absolutely take you out if you would like, and acts polite.

I’m not saying that all 40+ men are rude and low energy, but consider the simple math: Most cool men at that age are taken, my sweet baby darlings. You’re much more likely to meet a younger, single guy who meets the criteria.

“You girlbossed too close to the sun, Natalia! You missed your chance when you were young!” Nah. I married and became a mom while fairly young for my upper middle class to upper class friend group. I really thought I was marrying the love of my life. I left when his violence and substance abuse reached the point of no return. He chose that fate for both of us; the best I could do was move on.

My story is more dramatic than most, but a lot of couples get divorced later in life and have to start over. Some older men date younger women at this time. Some older women date younger men. The fact that this is a big deal to people is what’s astonishing to me.

Dating in middle age and beyond is not just a numbers game. Your average, decent person is traumatized by divorce, to give an obvious example. Why expect them to jump into a dating pool of people who remind them of their ex-spouse?

Yes, I apply the same logic to hot, middle-aged zaddies who date sweet young things after getting divorced. These men aren’t monsters. I understand these men.

Sometimes, all you want in life is a break. It’s not your fault the internet hates to see you happy and content.

If you’re not a rage-slop farmer from India, you are probably curious about the data surrounding the age gap dating phenomenon. I was too. So I checked out the data on the aforementioned New York Times piece on older women and younger men:

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Fair point. I have not been taking my own advice as of late. I’ve been working too much. I’ve been sleeping too little. I’ve been worrying. I’ve been celibate, for God’s sake (what an nightmare, do everything in your power to avoid my horrible fate).

Whenever things go spectacularly sideways for me personally - especially when they do so due to my own workaholism and inability to ease off the gas - I retreat to the place where I can make order out of chaos and transcend the swirling abyss of hell: my comfy kitchen with the butcher’s block countertops and the enormous sink.

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I fully believe that cooking at home can be transformative - I was doing it even before I wound up with the kitchen of my dreams (even if the cabinets need work) - and this new recipe certainly has been for me.

It was inspired by my wonderful neighbors, whom I have converted to the cult of borscht, and who have been launching their own kitchen experiments with it. Truly borscht is a bridge over the troubled waters of our shared reality.

Anyway, for this recipe, you will need:

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I had no idea who he was, a fact he seemed displeased by during our brief interaction. I was pulled aside and told, “So that’s the former lieutenant governor, he’s a creep.”

Justin had dealt with a number of sexual assault allegations throughout his political career. No charges were brought, but Justin was caught saying “Fuck that bitch” about one of his accusers.

Last night, Justin shot and killed his wife Cerina at their family home in Annandale. He then shot and killed himself. Their teenage kids were home at the time. They were the ones to call 911.

My heart breaks for these children. I sincerely hope they get the care and support they need in the aftermath of an unthinkable event. My son’s father, my ex-husband, used to threaten to kill me, and even bragged about his plans to mutual friends, so this hits home in ways that are hard to describe.

The DC area functions like a big village, which is how I also knew of Justin’s wife. Cerina was a successful dentist. By odd coincidence, her dental practice was recommended to me when I was weighing options for a difficult procedure back in 2024, before I left Alexandria for Colorado. I can tell you that Cerina’s patients absolutely loved her - the Google reviews of her practice can testify to that.

Both Justin and Cerina were fellow Duke people. In fact, one of Justin’s accusers, Meredith Watson, was also a fellow Duke person. The alleged assault occurred a few years before I matriculated.

When I was an undergrad, it was common knowledge that sexual assaults were frequently swept under the rug. And if you were a Black woman assaulted by a Black man, you could come under a very specific kind of pressure to keep silent. People can litigate and re-litigate this, but I can only testify to the campus atmosphere, which was often vicious and unkind to women like Watson.

Justin and Cerina had been going through a divorce, and living in separate bedrooms. In 2026, Justin accused Cerina of assault. Surveillance footage proved this was a lie.

It’s very clear that Justin Fairfax wanted to control his wife. She was the one who had filed for divorce. He killed her when he saw that his control over her was not going to last. And then he killed himself, like the coward that he was. These men are always trembling cowards underneath their bravado.

It’s a horrific irony, but Justin was a major proponent of red flags laws and other forms of gun control.

I understand that people may be surprised by this fact of his biography in light of what this man just did, but to be honest, it’s not surprising at all.

Since news of Justin’s horrific crime broke, I reached out to the woman who warned me about him at that event years ago. She understandably wants to keep her name private as she processes what happened, but as she told me, “I wish I was shocked. I think [he] was a ticking time bomb.”

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I haven’t been back since, as the progression of my stupid autoimmune disease has meant that I would be a liability for relatives and friends in a war zone. My son has depended on me for stability, and I can’t crack that open and expose him to the cosmic winds.

I don’t know if and when I will sit by the tall windows of my father’s kitchen again and hear his ticking clock, as if he’s nailed his own heart to the wall for us.

I also don’t like talking about any of this. It’s a small drop in the roaring ocean of pain. The best I can do is to support the men and women who have been taking revenge, and will continue to take revenge.

Too many are dead, even the cat. He died during an air raid, in pain, unable to get the mercy of euthanasia for his tired little body on time, my cousins crying over this random cruelty.

This newsletter is called the Normie Restoration, and this is my reminder that normality is fragile.

It makes me sound like your grizzled grandpa when I say it, but far too many Americans are soft and have no concept of how ephemeral normal life can be.

My late father said it best whenever he was making a toast. “Thank you for a peaceful sky overhead.” He knew war - and thankfully didn’t live long enough to see the new one, full of whizzing machines blocking out the sky.

For most of my fellow Americans, the idea of toasting in gratitude for a peaceful sky is as ridiculous as toasting in gratitude for having a highway that connects you from point A to point B.

On both sides of the political spectrum, people are forgetting that preserving a the sky means preserving the bonds we have with each other. Including people we don’t particularly like. “Oh, we could never have a proper civil war again, Natalia!” Of course not.

But as drone and robotic warfare are evolving, we have to think about the potential of their uses in light of our deepened divisions. Ukraine has already shown us how far this technology has come. Our famous laziness makes us ideal candidates for fully technologically mediated violence in the future.

Softness is meanwhile turning us belligerent, and the internet is helping the process along. It is soft men who act hard online. I hear from them often, including fellow Americans who call me “Ukrainian whore” and screech “deport.” They are missing a piece of themselves, and they think if they wound someone, they can reach inside and grab it.

I am a sensitive person, but at the same time, I am hard to truly wound with words. I’ve experienced too much violence for it to be easy. It’s how I know that all people like this overreach eventually. They grope in the darkness and the monster that hides in it sinks its teeth into their outstretched hands. History has taught us this.

If that’s too much metaphor for you - what this means in practice is that we are setting up the ideal conditions for doing depersonalized violence to each other on a smaller but still deadly scale, while our adversaries, China and Russia among them, stand to reap the benefits.

A robust economy could help with this, but with inflation back, we’re bound to get angrier. Again, I don’t think we’re on the cusp of some kind of old-timey Civil War. But I sense instability in the future.

If you think I’m dooming, please understand that I’m a cheerful person in spite of the bullshit (or maybe because of it). I don’t think Americans need to hate each other, and I don’t even hate the dudes yelling in my Twitter mentions all day. I do think that we are in for some hard times, and our prospects for 2028 trouble me especially.

This is why I want to go over some of the lessons that we are being taught by Ukraine - a very different country, but a country that has given us many examples of how to achieve better cohesion, no matter what our current vice president likes to say about it - with you today.

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Since Artemis II had its triumphant launch toward lunar orbit, the normies are excited, and the crazies are very upset.

This screenshot probably sums up it up best:

The long-term goal of NASA’s Artemis mission is to establish America’s return to the moon, create a base there, and, eventually, to begin crewed missions to Mars. That’s because if humanity is going to be a multi-planetary species, the United States is going to do its damnedest to lead the way.

For normal people, this is good news. Who else do you want to lead the way? Russian psychopaths? Chinese communists? If you’re saying “the EU,” you might have to wait a thousand years.

No, it’s American brazenness and can-do spirit you can rely on for leadership here. Plus, Americans were on the moon first. Other countries can keep their colonial noses out of our indigenous affairs.

If you think I’m being facetious, you are right - but only up to a point.

The moon is for everyone to gaze at, but the idea that Americans should hang back and let the runners-up have a go at a lunar base first is preposterous. That’s right America, let’s snatch defeat from the jaws of victory! Let’s hand out participation trophies!

That’s not how human exploration works, and in fact, that’s held true for the entire time that human beings have been exploring our native Earth.

Of course, not everyone is happy about American ambition, and this includes both right wing and left wing Americans. For example, this could have been written by a person from either fringe of the political spectrum at this point:

OH NO NOT MY TAXES WORKING TO ADVANCE THE UNITED STATES AND, BY PROXY, THE REST OF HUMANITY. Though to be serious for a moment, this kind of argument brings me to my first point in defense of our future lunar base:

There is never a “perfect time” for space exploration. It’s like waiting for a “perfect time” to have kids.

The traditional argument goes: “We have a lot of problems here on Earth. Some people are starving. Maybe if we figure all of that out first, we can use our tax dollars for a base on the moon and on Mars.”

No.

Hanging back for this reason means hanging back forever. There are always going to be problems on Earth, because existence itself, as I keep pointing out, is fairly problematic.

There is always going to be a reason as to why we should timidly cling to our rock.

That’s besides the fact that the United States spends billions upon billions more on feeding the hungry than it does on NASA. Look up the SNAP budget. Now look up NASA’s budget.

Now shut up.

Equally flawed is the argument about a “colonial epistemology” that undercuts space exploration and thus makes it a bad thing:

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My dog’s admirers kept breaking my concentration, but I didn’t mind. Every time I heard a reedy child’s voice call out - “Mom, look at that DOG!” “Do you think I can pet that dog?” “He looks like a polar bear!” - it was a relief. Grand Canyon was my father’s dream, and he didn’t live long enough to achieve it.

Nearly five years on, I have mostly adjusted to living in a world without the person who loved me most. But the great and terrible beauty now laid out before me produced a stabbing sensation that went beyond flesh and bone, all the way to my shaking, exposed soul.

“Daddy, you have to try to get better, you’ll get strong again, so we can see the Grand Canyon together,” I had sobbed to him on the phone as he lay dying on a Covid ward in Kyiv. He was in the midst of selling off some property when he got sick, days after already getting the first dose of a vaccine that could have saved him.

“I’ll do my best, little cat,” he rasped. Less than 24 hours later, my phone started ringing at 2 a.m. and I saw that it was my cousin, and I knew. I knew.

People have told me that being on the edge of the Grand Canyon is like being on the edge of the world, but gazing out from the South Rim feels more like being on the edge of yourself.

Here is everything you know. Here is your tiny life. Here is your father’s dream, and you are in it. You turn into a floating speck of dust on the great, frowning face of the universe. You are nothing and therefore you are everything.

We didn’t leave until it started to get seriously dark. A wandering coyote aroused the dog’s interest, and a group of tourists cheered that he could take him (Legolas was bred to chase off large predators, even if he mostly serves as my body pillow when we’re not on a hike). “I don’t want to leave,” my son confessed, unusually earnest for a teenager, after he got back with his haul from the gift shop.

We remembered his grandpa, cracked some of his favorite old jokes, and hugged as the setting sun lit up Mather Point in an elven shade of pink. A kind, random stranger snapped a picture of us two. I look like hell in it, but that was to be expected.

We drove through the twilit forest, occasionally slowing down to gaze at the enormous elk. “ELK AT PLAY,” a sign put up by the National Park Service - may it live long and prosper - informed us to take it slow. The spaces between the trees filled up with the ink of night. The canyon lay behind us, but we felt it, like a magnet on our backs.

Later on in a restaurant in the desert, a local and I were talking about wildfire season and comparing notes about the very warm winter they’ve had in Arizona with the warm winter we’ve had in Colorado. “We’ll have to pray for each other, amigos,” the guy concluded. “These fire seasons will get worse and worse.”

My son grumbled that between the changing climate and AI taking everyone’s jobs, it feels like there may not be a future. “There is always a future,” I said, a bit defensively. “But it may not look like we expect.”

My son and his friends are always talking this way. AI will kill us all, after it takes our jobs. The planet will burn. Iran will destroy us. The point of our road trip was to get my child out of his head and off his devices, to make lasting memories, to see the dreamlands in our corner of the world - San Luis Valley, Antelope Canyon, Grand Canyon, Flagstaff, Kaibab National Forest, Santa Fe - and I think it worked for a bit, but I also know what I am up against.

The algorithm sells my son and his friends hopelessness every day. And now, assisted suicide for the young has entered the equation.

The latest assisted suicide scandal involves the death of 25-year-old Noelia Castillo in Spain. She told of a rough childhood in Spanish care homes, how her father’s drinking impacted her life, and how she was assaulted by an ex-boyfriend and, on a separate occasion, by a group of men.

She tried to take her own life in 2022, became a paraplegic as the result, and was allowed to “end her suffering,” as assisted suicide evangelists have publicly put it, just the other day.

There have been a number of unconfirmed theories about Noelia - including that she wanted to change her mind, but felt pressure as her organs were set to be harvested, and including that the men who assaulted her were migrants - and in the absence of details, the theories will likely multiply.

Noelia was under no obligation to continue living. What struck me was the intense focus on her choice, and the supposed “freedom” it offered her. Who’s truly “free” after they’ve been raped, jumped off a roof, and were confined to a wheelchair while experiencing debilitating pain?

Noelia’s assailants are the free ones. They did what they did - and as far as I know, no police report was ever filed (having dealt with the justice system, I am not surprised by this in the slightest).

No one among the people cheering Noelia’s decision has set out to find her rapists’ identities. Rapists tend to rape again, as studies show, but of course we don’t talk about euthanizing repeat offenders either, because that would be barbaric! Instead, society mercy kills the victim it has failed.

I don’t judge Noelia for her choice. I do judge the people who celebrate it. A lot of them defend this view by pointing out that “at least she was paraplegic,” as one Twitter troll put it to me angrily.

Well, in the Netherlands, it’s already perfectly OK to mercy kill teenagers strictly due to their mental suffering. Dr. Menno Oosterhoff is a huge proponent of the practice - he recently gave a chillingly self-congratulatory interview to The Atlantic.

As interviewer Charles Lane noted, and as I will again note, Oosterhoff has an evangelical zeal for putting down mentally ill young people. He says that some of his patients refer to him as a hero. He says while a lot of psychiatry is still unclear, psychiatrists should absolutely “forge ahead,” as Lane put it, and help their patients make life-and-death decisions, and that the practice of euthanasia for the mentally ill should have less guardrails, not more. He leaves it up to history to judge him.

In Canada, meanwhile, the scandals surrounding MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying) have been so constant that it gave rise to a popular internet retort: “Seek Canadian healthcare.”

Canada is set to implement MAID for people suffering only from mental illness as early as March 2027, and yes, people 18 and up will be eligible. Wheeeee!

The conservative media in Canada is making a ruckus about it - such as the National Post highlighting how veterans are offered assisted suicide when they ask for help - so liberals brush it away with, “Oh, it’s conservative media, I don’t trust it” when they’re not yelling about, “My body my choice.” People are very partisan, and partisanship leads to blind spots.

“But Natalia, there will be waiting periods!”

Sure. At least at first. But what the government is also set to do is create a funnel. By offering euthanasia as a perfectly normal, rational choice to a young person who is struggling - it will be offering a peaceful solution. People who are struggling want a solution. Once you have a goal in sight, you are likely to keep moving toward that goal. Why should you waste your time on trying to get better and possibly failing at it, when a needle offers guaranteed relief and the light at the end of the tunnel is a glorious, rumbling train?

The dirty little secret that shouldn’t be a secret at all is that euthanizing sick people saves government money. Again, as the National Post notes, Canadian patients have reported feeling “badgered” and “harassed” to consider dying. None of this is stopping the expansion of MAID.

Every time I post about it, leftist trolls scream at me about choice. It reminds me a bit of Quietus from Children of Men:

Quietus is a government-sanctioned program that, in the movie, offers encouragement to the elderly and infirm that they have a beautiful choice to end it all.

Children of Men the novel was published in 1992. The film was released in 2006. At the time, people were horrified by it. “Quietus” = “quiet us,” for we have lost all hope. Now that same lack of hope is being framed as a brave and noble choice by people who are so passionate about it that at times they appear to be in a cult.

Here’s the thing, though, Children of Men takes place in a dystopian hellscape where there are no more children. War and terror are ever-present. Today’s assisted suicide evangelists from Western countries are living relatively peaceful, even uneventful lives when compared to, say, my native country of Ukraine.

War tears at the fabric of Ukraine, and Ukrainians march on and fight for their right to live, to exist. Back home in North America, entire swathes of the population, comfortable and rich by comparison, are obsessed with their own version of “Quietus,” even for those who stand the chance of recovery. To be honest, it’s been pretty INSANE to watch. If I had a darker sense of humor, I’d probably laugh.

Here’s where this story gets very personal for me again. I’ve faced two devastating diagnoses in my life already, and the first one came when I was just eighteen.

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And that’s just the slum dwellers. Candance Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Andrew Tate turn a much, much bigger profit.

That people need serious intellectual antibodies to withstand hateful slop on social media is nothing new.

I am, however, fascinated with how it’s making us more sexless, especially when we combine algorithms that promote misery with apps that promote a frictionless existence.

Friction is essential to sex and, uh, not just because, well, you know… You do in fact have to interact with people, and put up with their quirks, in order to have a sex life.

Forget incels for a minute - voluntary celibacy is on the rise. According to the study linked here, most people aren’t too happy about being voluntarily celibate either. They can’t find a partner whom they genuinely want, and it sucks for them.

We can blame unrealistic expectations for the rise of grudgingly voluntary celibacy - and yeah, both porn and smutty romance can be pretty damn unrealistic - but there’s just also the fact that meeting people simply takes more effort than cuddling up to your vibrator and a 400,000-word Heated Rivalry fanfic (before you ask, I prefer fan fiction featuring Aragorn, son of Arathorn).

It doesn’t help that the internet constantly bombards us with how awful and scary people are.

Being horny is meanwhile frequently portrayed as pathetic and/or dangerous. It’s not just lasting damage from the #MeToo years, it’s the women constantly bemoaning their attraction to men in popular online magazines while telling other women that turning men on “isn’t a flex” (the trad Catholic crowd is freakier by comparison, which is nothing new for trad Catholics if we look to history).

Sure, reducing a guy to a drooling mess probably isn’t a flex. Though it is fun.

This is the part where I come to you with a shocking confession: I am extremely biased on this topic. You see, I am not good at being celibate 👀

And I suspect I’m not the only one 👀 👀

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When I see author Lindy West crashing out because the internet hasn’t taken too kindly to Adult Braces - a new memoir in which she essentially admits to being forced into a polyamorous relationship by her clearly manipulative husband - I completely understand.

It’s rough when someone you love treats you poorly. It’s rough when you want to see a silver lining - and someone comes along and punctures your delusion, as potential publishers did to me.

I had no idea that the publishers were doing me a kindness. At the time, I felt crushed like a bug. At least my drama was pretty private.

To have half the internet publicly pile on with their thoughts? Oof. I get it. I write about how the internet is driving us insane, and I’d be driven mega insane by all of this too.

However, having read the book - which is a piece of writing that is available to the public for anyone who shows up to yell at me that this is a private matter - I want to establish the facts of what’s going on here. Lindy West’s story has been laundered as positive by far too many media outlets, the New York Times included.

First of all, a good critique of the memoir, timeline included, has already been published by Meg Keene. I agree with what she is saying. The book lays out, in pretty stark and uncomfortable detail, how Ahamefule Oluo started bullying his third wife, Lindy West, into an open marriage while she was still grieving the death of her father.

He said he wouldn’t stay with her if she didn’t agree to this arrangement, and used white guilt into further manipulating her (as in, it’s all a matter of “ownership,” white people love ownership, blah blah).

At one point, he was seeing at least two different women behind her back. He eventually moved one of them onto West’s property. West frequently sleeps in the guest bedroom - in her own home.

West says that this is a happy ending as she has come to fully accept the beautiful freedom and liberation of being in a throuple - which includes a second woman who is more conventionally attractive than she is, a fact that gives her pause, but it’s ultimately fine. It’s all about acceptance and life is a journey.

I got curious, and decided to look into Olue more closely and found a history of financial troubles and substance issues via public records. He’s been open about his struggles before - in a show notably co-written by Lindy West - so none of this is shocking.

I assume the substance issues are related to the opiates he was prescribed to deal with a horrible autoimmune disease, and it’s not my space to judge - what I am pointing out is that West is obviously his source of stability.

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I will not be linking to anyone’s “work” on the issue. I don’t need to give it additional clicks and notoriety.

It’s bad enough when people post unverified information during times of violent upheaval.

It is simply exhausting when people on the ground are placed in greater danger by excitable nerds.

You guys remember when Kabul fell to the Taliban?

As I said at the time, it was important to redact any public information that could lead to the mass targeting of people on the ground by fighters. It’s basic common sense, but when everyone on social media is chasing clicks, people forget.

I like clicks as much as anyone. I’m a writer, and not a wealthy one. I don’t have a sugar daddy or some donation-bloated org paying me for what I write. I need people’s clicks as much as any regular person in my line of work does.

But for the love of God, we have to understand that the desire for clicks in the middle of conflict can get innocent people murdered.

“Well, Natalia, you post about Ukraine a lot!” Sure do. But with permission. While anonymizing certain details. For example, here’s a slightly anonymized compilation from a fundraiser that my friend Herring and I did when his team’s buggy got torched:

We wanted to get rid of a few key details in the background of the buggy + a few key details of what was on the windowsill behind my man and his tactical cat. I got the two photos approved before I posted them. They’re not terribly sensitive photos to begin with, but this is standard practice.

And that’s because I know for a fact that someone would sit there trying to determine these two particular locations. Maybe not even a Russian! Maybe it would be some bugman with a laptop from back home who just wants to impress his fellow idiots.

OSINT gets a bad rap precisely because of unprincipled bugmen. They want to be “first.” They want daddy Elon to notice them. They take the tools and practices that are meant for sensitive investigations and create a circus.

I had a marketing guru tell me last year that I need to fix my branding, because I have “OSINT in bio” and “OSINT in bio” invites associations with terrible people. As a middle-aged woman who loves Office Space, I can only reply with, “Why should I change? They’re the ones who suck.”

That woman had a point, though. On social media, the profession is completely degraded. The posts that get clicks are usually sensationalist and unethical in nature. You can do a lot of good work, and still get tarnished by association.

I can’t appeal to braindead losers. I can only appeal to my fellow normies. If you see a post that doxxes innocent people in the middle of a conflict, please go ahead and report it. If you’re on Twitter and have community notes access, go ahead and community note it - hopefully the ad revenue incentive can be removed from a post like that.

“Oh but Natalia, who knows who is innocent!” - people say that to me sometimes, but that’s just nihilistic Russia-coded bullshit. I’m not interested.

On a better note, I’ve been collaborating with my neighbors on some new borscht recipes, and I’m getting ready to publish one soon! My borscht with pork ribs, meanwhile, remains available as a recipe in the archives.

When confronted with the cruel stupidity of the world, I prefer to keep my balance by making delicious food. The Normie Restoration cannot proceed if we only focus on what we despise.

Thank you for being here <3

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If you’re reading this, you might be saying, “Not all Russians.” And you’re correct! There are sane Russians who walk this earth.

What I am talking about, however, is what passes for mainstream Russian culture - mostly stolen from other cultures and mixed heavily with homicidal depression - what their sports commentators think, what the tastemakers think, what the wealthy Russians with underage harems think, and so on.

If you spend time on social media, you might have noticed some epic Russian tantrums over American Alysa Liu nabbing figure skating gold at this year’s winter Olympics.

What stood out about Liu’s performance was the joy:

Liu is a free woman, you can see that in her movements, in her smile, in the genuine pleasure she takes in her work.

And while Russians were always going to have sour grapes about Liu’s highly deserved win, they have resorted to claiming that Liu is out of shape and graceless:

Elsewhere, Russians have taking up arms against critics of their own figure skating coach, Eteri Tutberidze. Tutberidze is known for abusing her athletes and then publicly dragging them when they break.

Even some Russians have begun to point out her abuse, hence the term “Tutberidze skeletons” (i.e. starved athletes), and Russian patriots can’t have that!

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The Russians (and their useful idiots) who may attempt to use this essay as a weapon against Bellingcat’s research can go stand near a window, if you know what I mean.

I met talented people I respect because of Bellingcat. These include Christo Grozev, Aric Toler, Nick Waters, Giancarlo Fiorella, Christiaan Triebert, and many others. Nothing I say here is a reflection on them.

Here’s another good thing I will say about Bellingcat - they never got me to sign an NDA.

The Year of our Lord 2020 was terrible for many reasons, and it’s time to set the record straight about my departure as Bellingcat’s editor at that time.

Editor was my official role, but my job consisted of more. It involved everything from running Bellingcat’s successful Patreon to doing research and publishing work of my own.

It also involved dealing with harassment and workplace retaliation.

My first year with Bellingcat was excellent and productive. I signed on in late 2018, the first person to be hired in a formal editorial role for the team, and while people sometimes chafed at my editing guidelines, it didn’t bother me. I believed wholeheartedly in the work we were doing, especially the part wherein we unmasked Russian assassins.

The trouble began in my second year, when Bellingcat, famous for its investigation into Russia’s downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 among other things, began transforming into a Dutch NGO (many, many people who perished on board of MH17 were Dutch).

Around the time this transformation began, I hosted an informal gathering of Bellingcat researchers at my old house in Washington D.C.

It was fun, except for the appearance of a wealthy Dutch donor who, my then-boyfriend felt at the time, was a little too interested in me. I shrugged it off.

Some time later, Bellingcat’s newly appointed financial director and current COO, Dessi Damianova, a friend of this donor, casually mentioned on the phone that the man in question had “reeeeeally liked [me].” I shrugged this off too.

A few months later, we held a work summit in the Netherlands. In the course of the summit, this same donor pulled me aside and confessed that I was “aggravating [his] midlife crisis.” I was uncomfortable, and made my discomfort fairly clear, but this man was bringing money into the organization I loved and worked for, and hey, maybe this was just the Dutch bluntness you hear so much about. I didn’t tell anyone else what happened, not for a while.

2020 began. The pandemic gathered momentum. I was beginning to feel more and more pressure from Dessi Damianova in the course of my daily work. I wondered if her donor friend’s “aggravated midlife crisis” had something to do with this.

I used Signal to message Aric Toler, who had essentially been second in command at Bellingcat after Eliot Higgins, about the situation. I didn’t ask him to do anything, but I let him know, because it was weighing on me.

In our formal workplace chats on Slack, Aric and I began referring to what I had told him as "the Signal thing.” (I was paranoid about someone hacking our channels, among other things).

The pandemic lockdowns began. Life took on a surreal, fractured quality. I posted some funny pictures on Twitter about how lockdowns and social distancing were driving me insane, including a pic of me in a short tunic with a colander on my head (lol).

I didn’t think much of it at the time - Bellingcat didn’t have a social media policy for its employees, and my own boss, Eliot Higgins, was famous for telling people to “suck [his] big Bellingcat balls” online.

Of course, the rules are different when you are a) female and b) have powerful weirdos gunning for your head. I was reprimanded. I apologized, and deleted my silly pictures from Twitter.

I thought that was the end of it, but Dessi Damianova began hounding me even more. I couldn’t sneeze without being harshly criticized.

I felt that I was being targeted specifically over “the Signal thing,” though Aric said he wasn’t sure. I don’t hold that against him.

I have two Instagram channels and if you follow my work, you know why: One is for family and friends, for pictures of my son, etc., the other one is for anything I’d like to make public.

Dessi Damianova attempted to access my private Instagram. Then, she deleted the request. Then, she created a fake account and tried to re-add me. I was thoroughly creeped out.

Aric looked into what happened - we weren’t in digital forensics for nothing - confirmed I was telling the truth, and confronted Dessi. She denied it, which is to say that she lied.

At this point, I felt like I was being treated in a manner that constituted workplace harassment.

When I tried to speak about it to Eliot, I got brushed off. This is a snippet from our Slack logs with Aric to indicate how I, a grown woman and a professional in my field, felt at the time (I began saving everything by then, and I am glad I did):

At the same time, Bellingcat was trying to hire a second editor. The process was slow. Bellingcat deals with sensitive investigations, and we had to be careful.

I chose the perfect applicant and initially, everyone agreed with my choice, Dessi Damianova included.

However, as Dessi’s harassment campaign against me picked up, the hire was suddenly in jeopardy.

Dessi accused me of trying to hire someone whose English was not good enough, simply because the applicant in question comes from a non-English speaking country (as do I originally, by the way).

Legally speaking, this is known as discrimination based on native origin. It is utterly illegal in the EU, where Bellingcat was and continues to be based.

Damianova had no problem spelling out her discriminatory practices in an email, and I have no problem sharing it, as I am under no obligation to protect someone else’s blatantly illegal conduct:

I have redacted identifying information and pronouns. I did let the applicant know exactly what happened to them, though it took time to tell the full truth. They were left heartbroken. This person’s English is of course native-level, as is mine, and their credentials are impeccable. To be treated in this manner by an organization that aims to “hold power to account” is obscene. (Yes, I consulted the person in question before publishing this essay)

I’m not going to bore you with the other details of what I had to put up with at the time, though there were plenty of “fun” episodes.

Suffice it to say, I was told my contract wouldn’t be renewed during a vitriolic phone call with Eliot Higgins and Dessi Damianova (Aric, notably, was not invited to participate, he did tell me later that he wanted me to stay, but it was two votes against one) in the summer of 2020.

I was yelled at by both Dessi and Eliot. I was humiliated. I was even told that the cat pictures I posted online were inappropriate (this is from an organization that calls itself Bellingcat; the name is based on Aesop’s fable about mice who must put a bell on a cat they fear).

I was told that my colleagues disliked me and that I failed at my profession. When I asked how specifically I had let my colleagues down, and what I did wrong in the course of my duties, there was silence. When I asked if this would still be happening to me if I wasn’t a woman, there was silence.

Eliot did admit something interesting when he wasn’t busy yelling about how he “doesn’t owe [me] a job.” He said that he would be out 300k euros from a donor if he kept me on at Bellingcat. This was all the confirmation I needed. Everything that happened to me was apparently the result of “the Signal thing,” as Aric and I privately called it.

These people can call me a liar and retreat into the aura of prestige they have curated. I don’t care. My chat logs with Aric don’t lie:

I eventually calmed down enough to try to sue. In September of 2020, my lawyer sent Bellingcat a demand letter referencing the workplace harassment at Bellingcat. They reacted stroppily, as I knew they would.

I was prepared to see the lawsuit through, but jurisdiction issues made it slow and difficult. Technically, I had to file in Washington D.C.

It was hard to get appropriate legal representation in this jurisdiction and the pandemic was raging, the courts were backed up. I was surviving on freelancing, and I was genuinely struggling.

In April of 2021, my father contracted Covid and passed away very quickly. Dessi Damianova had the gall to send a sympathy card signed by my former colleagues - the same colleagues she said despised me. If you know Dessi like I do, you know that this was not a move at peacemaking or genuine sympathy. It was a, “I’m watching what you post online,” kind of move.

A few weeks after I buried my father, I was sexually assaulted. I took the guy to court. I could only handle one legal drama at the time.

Over the years, I’ve heard from former and current Bellingcat employees about Dessi’s “hatred” and “obsession” toward me. The comments ranged from ominous to hilarious, such as “Dessi even said you’re ugly.” Damn, girl. I was never going to be Miss America, but come on.

The rumor mill was hard to handle. I was painted as a “disgruntled former employee” seeking to ruin the good work that Bellingcat was doing. Some people even publicly claimed that I was “fired” for “being a liability.”

It sucked at the time. I am lucky that I still wound up building exactly the kind of life I want to live since those days.

As for Eliot’s sexist insults on that phone call, I ran with them, introducing open source intelligence tools and practices to women who didn’t know how easily they could be geolocated from a single cute picture online.

If anyone’s midlife crises were “aggravated” as the result of my own pictures - oh well. Sucks to suck.

I didn’t say anything for years, because I believed that Bellingcat was doing important work. I didn’t want that work to be tarnished by what Dessi and Eliot had done.

I no longer feel like I have anything or anyone to protect. Most of my friends, Aric included, left a long time ago (the ones who stayed have my sympathies). The terrific Christo Grozev hasn’t been affiliated with Bellingcat for a while either, and good for him. Years ago, Bellingcat was constantly in the news, doing groundbreaking work. This isn’t the case anymore. The days have gone down in the West, behind the hills, into shadow, etc.

I am also sick of the rumors. They still reach me from time to time, and you know what? Enough is enough. This is the truth of what happened.

Here is the kicker: I became friends with the job applicant who was discriminated against by Dessi. Last summer, this person and I decided we want to do a Europe-to-America political podcast together, and applied for funding with a specific project in the EU.

We were excited until we found out that none other than the illustrious Dessi Damianova was chairing the selection jury for this project. We didn’t know if we should laugh or cry. We eventually approached the organizers with a request to shield our application from Damianova, explaining her past behavior. Our request was denied. We did not pass the selection process.

I can’t say for sure as to what happened with selection, but what I can confidently say is that I am sick of this woman haunting my life like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

I am not naming the “midlife crisis” donor in question, because it ultimately wasn’t his responsibility to treat me fairly as an employee. That responsibility fell to Eliot and his right hand woman, Dessi. The former acted like a coward (he knew this, hence all that yelling at the end), and the latter, well, I’m not sure what kind of woman treats fellow women this way, but I hope it echoes for her.

Neither am I certain that the donor in question ordered Eliot to get rid of me. Maybe his apparent crush was weaponized against me within the organization. I can only tell you the things I directly experienced, and those things were illegal and inappropriate.

So this is the story of my time with Bellingcat. It wasn’t all bad, no thanks to Eliot and Dessi, and it taught me a lot, though they weren’t all lessons I cared to learn at the time.

I don’t believe that publishing this will change much, and my only goal is to set the record straight once and for all.

I suspect some good people will be upset with this essay, and maybe some bad people will be delighted. I wish it had been a different story that I could tell you on this page, but it is this one.

And if you just sat here and read all this having never heard of Bellingcat, first of all, I commend you, and second of all, it goes to show.

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I was angry with him at the time. I was also angry at my agent. For the purposes of this story, I will call her Mandy (I have enough weird stalkers out there, though if anyone tracks her down and bothers her for any reason, they’ll likely take a shotgun blast to the face).

Mandy was a butch lesbian who could practically unhinge her jaw when eating a cheeseburger, drove stick, smelled like a motel room ashtray, and was strict with me. No going out in New York after dark. No trips to Milan unless I was properly chaperoned. Get away from that photographer, Nat, he has a reputation.

I had no idea that my father’s strictness and Mandy’s strictness came from a desire to protect. I was young, skinny, lonely, and desperate for approval and money of my own.

Reading the Epstein files many years later, I realize how lucky I was. Many misfortunes befell me in life, but there were many I was also spared. I was not equipped for the world I was trying to work in at all.

Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison for procuring victims for Epstein, and I hope she stays there forever. Yet there were others too, including those who may have started out as victims.

One of the big misconceptions about the Epstein files is that everyone mentioned is either a victim or a villain. Sometimes, people are both. Also, Epstein had a vast social network into which people wandered in by chance, unaware of the monster he was.

It is also important to note that many unproven accusations, as sent in by tipsters, are in the files. It doesn’t mean that they’re all wrong.

It means it helps to be prudent with the information we have.

Look at this redacted email:

It was likely written by a foreign woman, judging by the syntax. Is it redacted because the person in question was also a victim at one point? Is it redacted for more sinister reasons? Both? We don’t have a way of knowing at this time, but you can see how Epstein twisted other people, and made them mercenaries in the sick games he liked to play.

In the spirit of being prudent, let’s take a look at some emails that are not so heavily redacted. Let’s take a look at Irina:

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