The Order Of The Aggrieved And Unlaid

These Losers Are the LAST people who get to tell ANYONE what masculinity looks like.

Who the fuck are THESE losers to decide what a man is?

No, seriously.

Has the universe truly gazed upon Ted Cruz, Ken Pedo-Protector Paxton, Stephen Ugly Fuck Miller, Elon Musk, JD Vance, Donald Trump and this twitchy congregation of pork-flavored peacocks, foam-stabilized man-children and swagger-sloshed zealot-chihuahuas and thought: “Yes. These oddly overconfident disasters. These half-fermented men. These off-brand action figures melting on the dashboard of a rental Kia. THESE shall be America’s Supreme Court of Manhood”?

Like God got bored, reached into a grab bag of bonerless reprobates and said, “Fuck it, close enough.”

Ted Cruz, marinating inside mom jeans apparently inherited from a disappointed aunt, jowls trembling like uncooked flan beneath a face that reads less “human” and more “divine dare.” A man who looks like he Googles “how to stand” every morning and still gets it wrong.

Stephen Miller, aka: “the ugly fuck”, the haunted bureaucratic homunculus forged from a hairless mole rat, a paperwork error and the aesthetic profile of a mildly haunted testicle, gliding through hallways like a Victorian child ghost who died of spite. A man who looks personally offended by sunlight, carbohydrates, hugs and the existence of joy.

Elon Musk, somehow transmuting infinite wealth into the psychic residue of a sophomore Reddit mod rage-posting through humiliation. A billionaire whose emotional maturity stalled somewhere around middle-school group chat collapse.

JD Vance, a man who has changed his name four goddamn times and still somehow landed on “smoky-eyed grievance goblin.” Walking around with the doughy face of a Cabbage Patch Kid left out too long, eyeliner smudged like a middle-school breakup, carrying himself with the wounded self-importance of somebody who got rejected by a sectional and never emotionally recovered.

Donald Trump, spackled in makeup thick enough to survive a Category 5, looking less like masculine vitality and more like a sentient tub of grocery-store frosting going through a bitter divorce. Rage, bronzer and processed lunch meats waging an endless turf war beneath a suit tailored by somebody who clearly resents him. A serial adulterer. A convicted felon. Found liable for sexual abuse. Somehow sold to the gullible as the pinnacle of masculine strength, like if a collapsing ham hired a publicist.

And Ken Pedo-Protector Paxton, smug, stank-breathed, droopy-eyed philanderer carrying himself like somebody who wandered into moral authority through clerical error and simply decided confidence could be purchased wholesale.

THESE are the arbiters of manhood?

The ones inventing emergencies about veganism and pronouns because masculinity is supposedly so fragile it cannot survive a man ordering the Caesar fucking salad?

And now, somehow, these same people are sneering at another straight white Texas guy.

A teacher.

A pastor.

A football-loving, conventionally masculine, church-going married dude.

The exact species of man they spend half their waking lives insisting America has tragically lost.

And yet: unacceptable.

A guy whose greatest offense seems to be not behaving like insecurity wearing wraparound Oakleys indoors.

Welcome to the Tyranny of the Unfuckable™.

The Age of the Limp and Fuckless.

The Order of the Aggrieved and Unlaid.

The Incel Illuminati.

A clammy coalition of overfunded disappointments with private jets, bad hair, ketamine addictions and nine million opportunities to simply go to therapy who somehow decided the gnawing emptiness inside must obviously be everybody else’s fault.

THEY bark orders about softness.

THEY sneer at compassion.

THEY scream about “low T” while converting emotional fragility into public policy.

And I cannot get past the staggering audacity.

These are the guys who look at you like they genuinely cannot decide whether they want to write vows for you or wear you as a skin suit.

The ones whose stare feels like they are mentally monogramming your skin.

They have that deranged, hyper-focused interest that lands somewhere between “I practiced this introduction for forty minutes” and “I already picked our anniversary.”

The type where your whole body goes: absolutely not.

They hover near your drink like it has ritual significance.

They smile like they Googled “how to be human” on the walk over.

And they radiate that unmistakable energy:

“I’m not dangerous, I’m just… intense.”

Which is exactly what someone dangerous would say.

These are the guys you warn your friends about in all caps.

The ones who make you clutch your drink like a crucifix because you can feel he has chosen you as his next obsession and you did not even make eye contact.

These bargain-bin Casanovas of chronic disappointment, these over-lubricated prophets of dissatisfaction, these charisma-deficient, confidence-cosplaying dweebleclowns with opinions on women’s leggings are where the orgasm goes to die.

In a ditch.

Behind a Target.

And THESE are the self-appointed sheriffs of swagger?

The theologians of virility?

The mall cops of masculine legitimacy?

Absolutely the fuck not.

Because that is the real offense here.

The offense is that somebody walked into the room looking an awful lot like the kind of man they keep pretending to worship and turned out to be thoughtful, steady, decent and secure enough in himself not to need the performance.

A man who does not need domination, humiliation or manufactured panic to feel powerful.

And the second a person like that shows up, the whole performance starts looking rented.

James Talarico.

Texas Democrat. Pastor. Teacher.

A guy who looks considerably less “shirtless atop a mountain narrating a protein powder commercial” and considerably more “calmly explained insurance paperwork to somebody’s overwhelmed aunt without making her cry in a CVS parking lot.”

A man who does not look like he would roofie your Midori Sour.

A man talking about public schools instead of outrage bait, healthcare instead of humiliation, responsibility instead of chest-thumping, dignity instead of endless moral static.

Nobody is asking this man to deadlift a Jeep.

He is not stomping around in tactical upholstery fueled by conspiracy runoff and seventeen tubs of powder named after apex predators that would maul him before he finished grunting.

He is not posting gym selfies captioned Be the wolf despite possessing the spiritual presence of forgotten bread.

And that is exactly why they are terrified of him.

Not because he said something scandalous.

Because he can beat them.

Because he is everything they have spent years pretending to be and does not need the costume.

A person people trust. Listen to.

So they manufacture the outrage.

They invent the scandal.

They scream about pronouns and apocalypse because if they can make him radioactive enough, maybe nobody notices he makes the whole act look flimsy.

James Talarico says “God is non-binary” and suddenly the entire culture-war grievance machine starts acting like civilization collapsed in the food court.

“My Christian ears.”

THAT is the apocalypse.

The hustle becomes impossible to miss.

The LGBTQ hysteria.

The trans hysteria.

The endless emergency siren over pronouns, bathrooms, drag queens, masculinity, femininity, whatever fresh scarecrow they stitched together in fear at two in the morning.

None of it is conviction.

It is camouflage.

Dress cruelty in scripture, point it toward whoever already arrived carrying the most risk and suddenly a bully gets mistaken for society’s last line of defense.

They are not protecting families.

They are using people already catching enough hell as target practice so nobody notices what they actually are.

But Trump?

Perfectly acceptable.

None of this is a red line.

Not the adultery.

Not the convicted felon part.

Not being found liable for sexual abuse.

Not the business fraud.

Not bragging about grabbing women without consent.

Not humiliation masquerading as leadership.

Paxton?

Apparently untouchable.

The same Ken goddamn Paxton whose office negotiated a plea arrangement that allowed a former attorney who admitted to sexually abusing a child to spend sixty days in jail before walking back into the world while the victim’s family condemned the outcome as betrayal.

Sixty.

Fucking.

Days.

And THIS smug, stank-breathed deputy of borrowed bravado wants to lecture everybody else about what manhood even is?

Brother, if you are demanding the Ten Commandments in classrooms while sounding like somebody who broke half of them before breakfast and rationalized the rest by lunch, maybe sit this one out.

Because so much of this feels like revenge fan fiction written by men who never recovered from the wounds of youth.

A lifetime of rejection, awkwardness, insecurity and feeling painfully small calcified into grievance and the desperate need to punish the world for having once witnessed them lose.

Not confidence.

Not strength.

Retribution.

“I’ll show them” dressed up as moral authority.

Look, I was not exactly popular with boys growing up.

I was so infamously unattractive during those years boys practically used me as a safe word.

Some troll recently posted yearbook photos of me like they uncovered classified documents.

Please.

I knew.

I looked like the oldest Golden Girl lost a fistfight with adolescence.

And yet somehow rejection, embarrassment and not inspiring a single goddamn boner while my boobs were still in their awkward prequel phase did not turn me into a revenge machine hellbent on punishing humanity.

Instead, I watched Rangers games, read weird shit, learned to laugh at myself and developed enough perspective to understand that insecurity is something to metabolize, not weaponize.

Sometimes struggle sands people into something kinder.

Funnier.

More compassionate.

Or, if you are a resentment vessel with money, repression and unresolved wounds stacked to the rafters, you spend adulthood trying to revenge adolescence on everybody else.

And as the mother of an almost seventeen-year-old son, I keep coming back to this: if he grows into anything, I hope it looks a hell of a lot more like James Talarico than this twitchy fraternity of overcompensating little strongmen cosplaying certainty.

Because masculinity, at least the version I want my son to understand, is not domination, cruelty wrapped in counterfeit confidence, or mistaking intimidation for integrity. It is treating people with dignity. It is decency when nobody is clapping. It is respecting women enough to understand their bodies belong to them and that freedom means autonomy, not permission granted by frightened little men in expensive loafers.

It is being secure enough in yourself that somebody else’s identity, somebody else’s joy, somebody else’s existence does not register as a personal attack. It is standing beside people catching hell instead of joining the mob because cruelty feels safer than character and cowardice easier than courage.

That is why somebody like James Talarico rattles them so badly. He models the thing they keep pretending to be.

These people might be having a moment. The money. The power. The microphones. The little grievance empires. Fine. Moments end. And here is the thing about these petulant little princes of perpetual rejection: eventually they start trying to force what never arrived on its own, mistaking fear for respect, obedience for affection, exhaustion for admiration. This whole act feels like the inevitable ending to an origin story that began with somebody nobody rooted for deciding one day the world would pay for that.

Because you can rig a room, buy applause, scare people into silence and confuse intimidation with influence, but you cannot force warmth. You cannot force trust. And you sure as hell cannot force people to want more of you.

These people do not get to define manhood.

They do not get to police it, quantify it or gatekeep it.

They would not recognize actual character if it walked up, handed them a business card, a warm meal and said, “Hi. I’m everything you’ve been pretending to be.”

These flaccid fascist fucks are every bully who mistook cruelty for power, every coward who dressed domination up as principle.

They are not the standard for what it means to be a man.

Not even fucking close.

And with that, today’s song:

I love you guys!!

Stay safe, stay strong, and stay as adjacent to sanity as you possibly fucking can.

A genuine thank you to everyone who reads, shares, comments on, and supports my work here. This incredible community has helped me provide for my kids, and I do not take that for a second lightly. My work will always remain free, but if you subscribe and have been thinking about upgrading to paid, it truly helps keep this going and allows me to keep writing, researching, yelling into the void, and showing up every day.

💙 Jo