Red Pills and Pink Diapers

In the ancient world, an extreme form of revenge is to kill your enemy’s children. It’s worse than killing your enemy, since your enemy remains alive to suffer at the loss. The story most people would be familiar with is the drama Medea, in which a foreign wife spurned kills her own children in order to strike a blow against her Greek husband, before then also killing his new bride. A more extreme version of this kind of revenge is mentioned in Herodotus and also in the Bible, where an enemy’s children (in Herodotus it’s Harpagus, a Mede) are killed, cooked, and then served up at dinner to the enemy without his or her foreknowledge.

I recently experienced my own, less Sweeney Todd, version of this type of revenge.

I’ve been a realtor in Washington, D.C. (and its suburbs) since the mid-90s. From the late 90s up until the mortgage crash of 2008, I was overworked, but made a huge amount of money, some years over $200,000 (at least gross if not net), as DC properties appreciated 25% annually (from their depressed prices under the crime ridden days of Mayor Marion Barry), as the Clinton regime inflated the currency and created one asset bubble after another. In years where I actually bought an undervalued property, held it, renovated it, and finally flipped it, I would make even more from selling the property, not from brokering. (I should have done much more flipping and less brokering.)

DC is by registration over 70% Democrat, and only 7% Republican (just under 20% of voters register “No Party,” and about 1% are registered as either Libertarians or Greens). So virtually all of my customers were Democrats. Since I tended to troll for new customers at things like gay film festivals or fundraisers and happy hours for the Human Rights Campaign, the Lesbian Power Breakfast, and the Mautner Project for Lesbians with Breast Cancer, many of my customers were liberal or left-wing gays and lesbians, and even my straight customers tended to be lawyers and economists or urban planners at the World Bank or the EPA or the Department of Justice, or lawyers, lobbyists and PR people at the Sierra Club or the National Women’s Law Center. I had many a lesbian client, often new couples selling their condos and then buying a house together in preparation for adopting a baby from abroad (sometimes I had single straight women doing this as well).

These people all assumed their politics were mine. After all I was gay. I had slightly long wavy hair. I wore Armani Exchange high end causal wear. (Imagine Ellen DeGeneres if she were Scotch-Irish, chestnut haired, hazel eyed, and better looking. And a real guy.) Everyone assumed I was a liberal. Once I was at a CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) annual meeting typing on my IPad in the back of a workshop on new media, and conservative radio talk show host Larry O’Connor (now a friend, then an editor at Breitbart) asked “Do we have a liberal spy here?” and it took me awhile to realize who Larry was talking about. Everyone thought I was a man of the left, which I had not been since giving up socialism in the 9th grade when my best friend, Emily Wilhoite, made me promise to read Ayn Rand over the summer so she would have someone with whom to discuss Atlas Shrugged.

But then the mortgage crisis happened. I had a slow year and some free time. I took up blogging. Tea Party - One Lump, or Two? was my blog on Blogger, which Google has since cancelled (if you search hard you can find it archived on WordPress). No one noticed or cared for months.

Then Glenn Beck decided to hold an anti-Obama rally on the National Mall. And I wrote the LEAST ideological entry I had ever written for my blog - a guide to where the cheap motels, coffee shops with good wifi, and safer neighborhoods were in Washington, D.C., for tea party tourists not from here.

I had taken a little part time job a block from my home (I lived in a downtown co-op). When I came home in the early afternoon I saw I had messages from journalist David Weigel, a friend/acquaintance I knew from his days as a reporter at the libertarian magazine, reason. Wiegel wanted my comment on the controversy. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

A friend in Maine had asked if a tea party publication there could repost my guide and of course I said yes. While I had been at my side gig, a variety of leftist websites had been denouncing me as (what else) a racist, because I told tourists not to randomly get off the DC metro and wander around without someone like me in the neighborhoods now heavy on stabbings, shootings, and carjackings. Because most of those neighborhoods are majority African American (as are the victims of crime in those neighborhoods, something the liberals always overlook). (Reading the leftist press that day I had a premonition that I would be denounced that night on Rachel Maddow’s show, and sure enough I was, as well as on Chris Matthews’ MSNBC show.)

My cancellation was swift. I think I only have two politically involved and aware leftist or liberal customers - a World Bank economist whose wedding I had attended and to whom I had sold three houses, through singlehood to marriage to childbirth to divorce, and a State Department analyst to whom I sold a house and then listed it when she married - who continued to use me. The rest - a local ACLU attorney, feminist non-profit law center employees, a Facebook privacy lawyer, Sierra Club lobbyists, GLAAD activists, DNC committee people, Hillary and Obama appointees, Clinton White House staffers, etc. etc. - all dropped me.

One lesbian customer, to whom I had sold three houses and helped her sell two, once told her friends (in front of me) that I “was the source of all her wealth,” which was true in the sense that I advised her on buying houses on blocks that were about to rapidly appreciate and helped her snowball that money into better and better investments. House #1 she was buying with her partner of the time to have a baby. We talked about many things (I was having a baby with someone else at exactly the same time). I thought we were friends. By House #2 she no longer had the partner but she did have the baby, a little boy. By the time she was buying House #3 and selling House #2 the boy was a pre-teen whom she dressed in girl’s or gender-fluid clothing. (I worried about him.)

I have followed her career and her subsequent real estate transactions. Like all of my former left-wing customers I send her Christmas or New Year’s cards, as I do to ALL my former customers. From the left-wing customers (save the one or two) I never hear a peep back.

Flash forward to this month. I go to a book talk by Ashley Hayek, a tradmom of five who ran Women for Trump, at the local Log Cabin (i.e. gay) Republican meeting on Capitol Hill. I’m older. I barely have hormones. I almost have to lift weights and eat a steak to have the metabolic substrate to notice that a guy is interesting. Among the people I had not met was a skinny kid with almost emaciated features, a kind of Timothee-Chalamet-nextdoor. He was animated, almost hyper, and at some point a bunch of us were in the kitchen of the house the Log Cabin organization shares with some other conservative group, and he said something interesting. We started talking about crime in DC, and he mentioned that he grew up in DC and he meant really in DC, not in the suburbs (something almost never true of white people in DC who say they grew up in DC). Then he started talking about a specific neighborhood, Columbia Heights. Then he mentioned the names of streets he had lived on.

I asked him if his mother was a lesbian.

He said yes.

I asked him if his mother was “XXXXX XXXXX.”

He looked perplexed and said yes.

I told him I was his mother’s realtor on her first three houses and that I had actually known him back when he was 9 years old. [Said young man wants everyone to know he refused the gender-fluid clothing at age 6, and even before then dressed as a cowboy and played with toy guns and GI Joes when he was at his dad’s on the weekends.]

He excitedly told me how his mother was beside herself back then in 2010, calling her friends and complaining that “My realtor is a Republican!” (At the time it would have been much more accurate to say I was a Libertarian.)

But here he was at a Log Cabin event. He said he had been driven from the left by its “pathologizing being white” and by his experience working for a Democrat campaign consulting group that had him surveying Hispanic voters in Maryland and then ignored the findings (Hispanic voters want more police!). We discussed all the many lesbians we both knew who were in his mother’s circle, from a Scripps Howard heiress to a poet/carpenter. Before we both left the event he asked me for my phone number and texted me. So I texted him back the Daily Beast article on my teaparty tempest in a teapot.

My fairweather friend’s pink diaper baby has been red pilled.

A shorter version of this ran earlier this week at SpliceToday.