I’m trying to navigate my newfound celebrity. For whatever algorithmic reason, my Instagram account has exploded. At this writing I have over 62 thousand people following and over 3 million views in the last 30 days. That includes a certain star of Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club. I’ve gone viral! My 90-second takes on the state of political crisis are generating a vibrant dialogue from people around the world who are concerned about the fate of American democracy.
And it’s also brought out the trolls.
It’s shouldn’t be surprising that right-wing trolls target my masculinity. They call me “gay,” “beta,” and “cuck.” It’s the same language of the schoolyard bullies who called me “fag” and “pussy.” One troll said, “I bet he can’t even do 20 push ups.” (I immediately got on the floor to make sure that I could.) Somehow they associate caring about democracy with being feminine and they associate being feminine with being weak. These “alpha men” must not know any actual women. And their AI girlfriends don’t count.
I’ve written endless words in this blog about the ginned up “mansophere,” the booming world of performative masculinity that is there for boys and men who can’t navigate the social changes that include seeing girls and women as human beings. These are the fragile fellas that rally for Trump and rail against all things DEI, that think the man should be the king of his castle. They love MMA and rapists like Andrew Tate because they mourn the loss of the myth of unrestrained male id, to fight and fuck whoever they want. Trump allowed them to escape 4chan and take over Washington. Pete Hegseth is the Incel god.
The fragile troll boys aren’t much of an issue for me. I learned how to deal with them in high school. Redan High had a notorious bully named Ted who one day during lunch, unprompted, said, “Blazak, you’re a pussy.” I shot back, “Well, Ted, I guess you are what you eat, you dick.” I escaped while he tried to figure out what I had just said. These guys are never too smart. They can’t argue policy. They only have ad hominem attacks on how much you’re not like their avatar on Grand Theft Auto V.
Where the danger is in how these “alpha men” treat women and how they vote. The gender gap among the youth is widening. According to a recent NBC poll, only 24% of young women approve of Trump’s performance, but 45% of young men approve of Trump’s shit show. I see this in my college students. There are young men, including men of color, who see the MAGA movement as “preserving” a world where men had status over others. The idea of sharing power cripples them with fear. Trump, the sexual assaulter, with the porn star wife, is their redemption.
So they come after me as a “soy boy libtard.” It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Their hollow macho fantasies of fascism will ultimately bite them in the ass. This isn’t their imagined Roman Empire and it was never meant to be. But trying to beat them down only triggers their fight response. We need to learn how to talk to these boys and men to bring them into the family of man and woman. Alpha Men might just need a hug.
This national divide we’re in feels like a ramp up to civil war, brother vs. brother. But instead of the “We Want to Keep Slaves” Confederacy versus the “Let’s Just Brutalize Indians” Union, it’s MAGAts versus Libtards. Have we ever been so divided?
I’ve been writing about the Great Schism in this blog since 2015, when Donald Trump came down from Billionaire Heaven on his golden escalator to blather about Mexicans being “murderers and rapists.” But since my work on a federally funded de-escalation project, I’ve been pushing a controversial approach to the conflict, talk to the other side instead of yelling at them.
Trump and DOGE ended the funding for our 3-year project to reduce political violence, but I have a new audience; Instagram. For whatever reason, my Instagram account (@blazakr) has exploded, from 2000 followers last week to over 43,000 (including some favorite celebs). The algorithm gods have said, “You must take this message to the people.”
Here’s the simple truth. The 2024 election gave Trump the White House and both chambers of Congress. Trump and his MAGA acolytes believe America handed them a mandate, even though Trump got less than 50% of the votes. (77.3 million Americans voted for the Orange Don, but 108.5 registered voters didn’t even vote.) Since January 20th, Trump and his D.C. droogs have gone buck wild, shredding the very fabric of our democracy. DOGE has thrown over 65,000 Americans out work (and countless jobs that relied on federal funding, like mine). People have watched their 401Ks tank as Trump cosplays tough guy with tariffs. And between the ejection of due process protections and official buffoons chatting war plans on leaky apps, in 89 days the world has watched America collapse into a shithole nation.
Can America be saved?
Trump and his elite democracy death squads are hard at work dismantling the guardrails of our sacred system of checks and balances. His complete disregard with the Supreme Court’s unanimous order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador is just one example of the collapse of the rule of law. Tik tok time is running out for the USA.
But there are still options on the table. The millions of Americans taking to the streets is a central strategy. The 2020s could make the 1960s look like the 1950s in terms of protest actions. But I’d like to offer an additional strategy to rescue this 249 year old citizen ship.
Talk to Republicans.
We have to build a majority and there are some important populations to bring on board our pro-democracy movement. The first are Trump voters. That includes the thousands of Trump voters who voted for Biden in 2020. Many of these people are not happy with what Trump, and his boss, Elon Musk, have done to their country. They are farmers and (former) federal workers, parents of kids with disabilities, and old white people who were about to retire.
I tend to lump Trump voters into three categories. There are the MAGA cult members who think Trump is Jesus. They refuse to believe he has ever lied or committed a crime. The 2020 election was stolen because he told them it was. The only way to reach them is with a serious deprogramming regiment. Then there are the fascists. They loved the cruelty of Trump 1.0 and they want Trump 2.0 to bury our multicultural democracy once and for all. They are accelerationists who fuel the chaos and dream to create a white ethno-state from the ashes.
But the third group are perhaps the biggest. They are the casual Trump voters. They voted for Trump because he told them he would drop the price of groceries and adult diapers on Day 1. They thought a businessman would make a better president than a Democrat big government liberal. Many believed the complete crap that came out of Trump’s mouth about “illegal aliens” and “transgender athletes,” and the complete crap that came out of the right wing noise machine about Kamala Harris. Many supported Nikki Haley and held their noses to vote for Trump.
These people can be reached. Many of them are already protesting in front of Tesla dealerships and raising hell at Republican town halls. They are ripe for the picking. But they won’t be won over by being told how stupid they were for voting for Trump. They share many common values with us, including caring about our democracy and the future our children face. And many care about the immigrants in their churches and communities. This is the time to unclench the fist and open the hand.
This same appeal to decency and democracy instead of cruelty and barbarity can be made to the millions of Americans who didn’t vote. We need them, too. The very existence of this nation is on the line. We might not all be perfectly in sync on Gaza or GMOs (but at least we are on the same page about Greenland), and that’s OK. We need to drop the dogma and show up for the promise of America.
The other population to reach out to are elected Republicans. Many have sold their souls to Trump and live in fear of his wrath if they waver in their loyalty. They kiss his ass profusely out of terror of being accused of a thoughtcrime, being a RINO. But there are others who see the cracks in MAGA and are facing re-election in 2026. They know Trump’s War on Woke won’t win over the electorate when eggs are $16 a dozen and retirement accounts have been zeroed out. They include the Reagan Republicans who can still hear the ghosts of John McCain and Mitt Romney. (I know Mitt is still alive, but you know what I mean.) The constituents of these R’s should flood their offices and town halls with demands that they stand up to the Trump-Musk assault on America.
I can’t believe that I’m going to say this, but we need Republicans right now. Yeah, I’m pissed that that Kamala Harris is MIA in this fight, but you know who could really taken Donald down a few pegs? George W. Bush. Yeah, I know, war criminal. But good God, if anybody could peel away some good ol’ boys from the Trump train, it’s W. and his folksy charm. There are Republicans who know that Putin is the bad guy and that undocumented immigrants deserve kindness not cruelty. They need a permission structure to abandon MAGA.
Look, I’m as radical as the next sociology professor. I think capitalism is a death trap for the masses. But I’m willing to put my righteousness to the side while we save this democratic experiment that is America. That’s why I’m urging every liberal, progressive, radical, libertarian, and vegan pagan priestess to adopt a Republican. Reach out to one Trumpie, whether it’s a co-worker, family member or U.S. Senator. Make them your pet project.
Instead of screaming at them (the temptation is real), ask them how they’re doing. Be curious about their lives and then steer the conversation to our common values and how we’re not red and blue Americans, but just Americans. Stay calm and kind. Discuss the harm done to people you know. Don’t get distracted by silly tirades about “men in girls’ sports.” Stay focused on preserving the fabric of America’s Constitutional democracy. Fighting on social media is fun but where has that gotten us? Let’s try something different. It’s just us. No them. And many of these attempts will be complete failures, but some folks will flip and that might just enough to save us. Kill MAGA with kindness. They won’t know what hit them.
Do you ever think the the world would be a better place if a whole category of people would just die? No, I’m not talking about Trump supporters. They can be helped. I think I’m pretty good at understanding why people do the horrible things they do. Many people view school shooters, serial killers, Nazis and the Koch Brothers as just plain “evil,” but I look for the complex series of sociological, psychological, and biological variables to understand how they got to the point to make those choices.
Andrea was bopping around Instagram the other night. I was telling her about some crazy Japanese anime I’ve been writing about in my new book. Suddenly, she threw her phone down on the bed and clutched her chest. I figured she saw some bizarre Japanese drawings, maybe of women and eels. Nope. It was child porn. Real child porn.
Her eyes filled with tears and she handed me the phone. It was a profile called Cumfun and the first picture was a blindfolded girl, about 8 or 9, being forced to perform oral sex on an adult male. I didn’t look at any of the rest of it, but out of the corner of my wincing eye I could see that all the pictures were of children in sexual situations. He claimed to have a Snapchat account as well, which probably means he was the one doing the abusing.
I wanted to puke for so many reasons. As a parent of a girl, this is not just an abstract social problem. But also that this vileness could exist on America’s favorite photo sharing site. This is the site that banned #Goddess and pictures of women breastfeeding. Of course, plenty of porn slips on to Instagram. I discovered this last summer when I hash-tagged a picture from #Cancun. I don’t know what hashtags Cumfun used and I don’t want to know.
We were in a state of shock after seeing what could never be unseen. As soon as we got our bearings, I immediately called the 24-hour hotline for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (1-800-THE-LOST/1-800-843-5678) and reported the site. I had to thank them for the important work they do which suddenly had become very real. By the next morning Cumfun’s profile was gone. I was ready to call a friend at the FBI if it wasn’t.
So there are two issues here I am confronting.
The first is the lack of oversight on an app that I love and spend way too much time on (@blazakr). Cumfun had a lot of photos posted so I have to imagine that he (maybe she) had been on Instagram for at least a few weeks. How could this happen? Instagram clamps down on breastfeeding pictures but it’s oblivious to videos and pictures children being raped on its platform? And we just stumbled onto one. How many more profiles like this are on Instagram?
The second issue is the sickening reminder that child pornography is even more of a pervasive problem now thanks to electronic media. These are somebody’s children. Children who will grow up with all the psychic scars connected to child sexual abuse. I can suggest some important research on serial killers and show you that it often turns out very badly. Typically those children grow up to perpetuate their victimization on their own children. So, yeah, sometimes I hate the world.
On one hand, the social scientist in me wants to understand the causes of pedophilia. There is some pretty fascinating research that has found, among other things, that MRI scans of pedophile brains reveal less white matter than normal brains. White matter helps to pass nerve messages through the brain. Interesting, right? Yeah, no.
The other (more emotional) hand says who cares about white matter. I have a child that some monster may want to molest at some point. Just cut his head off now, white matter and all. I have plenty to worry about as a parent; Cozy getting splinters or becoming overly dependent on Elmo for her emotional needs. I don’t want to have to think about some dude with a “psychiatric disorder” kidnapping my daughter, filming her rape and sharing those images with other “sick” people. Good lord. Seriously?
But the reality is we have to prepare her for this darkness in the world. We have to let her know that there are people that will hurt her very badly just because they can. They might be strangers or they might be someone she already knows (which is actually more likely). We have to teach her to trust her gut and protect her body. We have to teach her to scream and fight and go for the eyes. And we can’t wait until she’s headed off to college. More like kindergarden. It is soul crushing to even think about.
I want Cozy to know the world is a beautiful place, filled with joy and excitement. I want her to take risks, reaping the rewards of a chance taken and learning from her failures. But she needs to know there is a dark force out there that will crush her for sport. There may be a scientific explanation for what they do (and therefore a real cure), but for the moment, I would be happy if they just died. I’m a compassionate person, but I also hope that “Cumfun” is headed to prison where he will be low pedo on the inmate totem pole. I don’t really care about what is wrong with his brain. I care about those kids in his Instagram profile.
What I can do right now is to encourage everyone who reads this to pressure Instagram into being more vigilant about allowing people to use Instagram for their exploitation of our children. And for Goddess sake, if you see something, please report it right away.
Watching the Wheels 