Thread by @heterodoxan

As long as I’ve been involved in radical/gender critical feminism, I’ve seen people get passes on all kinds of bullying and unethical behavior, but get utterly dragged for having slightly different opinions or the ‘wrong’ associations. Still today.

Want to be brave …?

I don’t know how many women ended up seeing the video of the finance accountability meeting for Women Picket DC that I was sent a link to. To this day, as far as I know, no one has been willing to ask *all* the organizers where the money they raised went and who got payouts.

There are women in GC circles dragging parent activists for quoting the same sexologists that everyone else has been quoting for years.

It’s a selective, context-free trashing of people making use of the only research source on AGP.

Meanwhile, everyone on that WPDC call was mad as hornets asking where the money went, and two of the organizers bailed and put all the blame on the third. Like they had nothing to do with it.

I was told by 2 different lawyers that there were potentially serious ethics concerns.

Oh, are there, I asked? Should anyone do anything about that?

This question was unwelcome.

In about 6 months I raised, in cash on hand and pledged future donations, over $1.5 million for WoLF.

I was pushed out not long after asking questions about Women Picket DC.

And it took me a really long time to see it, but I think that within that social ecosystem, although I never believed the criticisms before, that it was a pattern of people involved with Deep Green Resistance getting passes no matter what they did, no matter what they said.

Everyone involved in pointing out the ethical problems to me, and sending me the link with a ‘look how awful this was, you were so right to stay away,’ helped push me out and immediately started cozying up to a person they knew was involved in Women Picket DC.

I was criticized as having badly run an organization I raised more money for than anyone, as far as I know, has ever raised for any one radical feminist effort. That really shook me, and it hurt.

And I also think it was a piece of utterly nonsense misdirection.

Where did this $30,000+ go? Who was responsible for it?

I was insulted, yelled at, misrepresented, and kept in the dark for over a week as my board colleagues repeatedly broke WoLF’s corporate bylaws *according to the warning of our contract general counsel,* while sitting with signing authority and whole access to over $500,000.

And I was terrified to leave the entire time, I was so afraid I would be sued if I left them without access to that money, because I had been the only person willing to take responsibility for it. No one else on the board even had debit card access at the start of that hell week.

I asked everyone on the board to help manage that money. I made sure everyone had an opportunity to sign on. Nope.

I was yelled at before that last board meeting, & during it, for not spending enough time handling low priority admin tasks I had no help with, on top of being ED.

The consequence applied to that staffer for having yelled at me, and for having made spurious accusations that were presented as if I was being accused of some kind of crime, was the offer of a ~$20,000 yearly raise, as a side note on a thread discussing when to fire me.

When that week started, I’d been making about $40k, and that staffer about $70k. I took a low salary as a donation to the cause.

They offered me a demotion, and a $17k salary, with “no authority,” and offered this staffer who yelled at me a raise to what I recall was about $92k.

I was even told staff complained I was “not warm,” and didn’t spend enough time talking to and mentoring them while doing my job.

Four years of excellent executive leadership, and the autistic woman has to go because someone who’s been there a few months said I was “not warm”?

Maybe it was as simple as … don’t ask questions about what people involved in Deep Green Resistance are up to?

Wouldn’t have been the first time someone got a pass like that, but it never involved so much money before, as far as I ever heard about.

Oh, almost forgot. The Thursday after I left, someone at WoLF’s bank called me in a panic. Did I know anything about a wire transfer? Did I know how to get in touch with Lierre Keith?

I said I didn't know anything about a wire transfer, which I didn't. I gave them Lierre’s #.

Lierre was, as far as I knew, the only person at that time with access to that account.

The next day, payroll didn't go through. It was delayed a whole day. Never had happened before.

You can't accidentally make a wire transfer. You have to enter a lot of numbers precisely.

The staffer who'd been yelling at me and accusing me of incompetence, accusing me of making the organization look bad, (unlike the woman involved with WPDC, I guess,) wrote me a very polite and apologetic email that Friday about why my last paycheck was delayed.

Maybe some WoLF donors should ask about that attempted wire transfer.

And it’s funny, because when Lierre passed me the link and the passcode to the accountability meeting, she also said, “Kara clearly had nothing to do with the fundraising and the money.” I don’t know why she said that, but it was in contradiction to the public record.

It wouldn’t have been the first time that someone who told me they were a Deep Green Resistance member got a pass from Lierre for really suspect behavior.

In 2017, a woman who introduced the rest of us to a lot of conservatives threatened to deregister WoLF’s incorporation.

This was because, having been introduced to this woman’s conservative friends, we considered working with a conservative fundraiser. She flipped over that (why??), & caused … a lot of work, say … to have to be done late on a Friday when she knew I was traveling for a funeral.

Lierre never held that against her, this woman who introduced herself to me as a DGR member when I first met her at WoLF’s camp at Michfest, and continued inviting her to events, including to speak.

I let it go because I don’t tell people who they can be friends with.

But I should have seen it as a warning that WoLF wasn’t first for Lierre, and she didn’t care how people treated me, or anyone else at WoLF, if they supported her environmental doomsday cult.

In 2020, after Kara resigned, Lierre told me that she showed up to a gathering at Lierre’s house in California with a WoLF contractor, and supported this contractor in trying to convince everyone that the then-current board, should be locked out of our online systems & databases.

That seems to me to be pretty unethical, but Lierre never held it against Kara, and joined some brand new WoLF staff in asking me to work with Kara. This included asking me to support Women Picket DC. I told them it felt like harassment, and asked them to stop.

Did I forget to mention that Kara Dansky told me years ago that she’d joined Deep Green Resistance, and was pressed to keep up with their monthly assignments? Well, I’m mentioning it now.

When Women Picket DC fell apart in recriminations, and I started asking questions, Lierre got snippy with me about it.

Within a day of firing me, WoLF was sharing Kara’s tweets & posts again. Lierre & Kara hardly seem to miss an opportunity to issue a press release together now.

And here they are, happily tag-teaming to trash the reputation of another feminist who tried to get a protest sign back from a TRA who stole it from her group.

Lierre told me that a WPDC attendee punched a male heckler in the face, but no such alarm was raised. Why not?

There was another incident that Lierre told us about from years ago, before WoLF was incorporated. She told us, and other women who’d been around then talked about it like it was common knowledge, about a woman who’d stolen about $10,000 from her, but she never reported it.

I asked why she didn’t report it, & never really got an answer. I assumed it had to do with what seemed at times like a near inability to tolerate confrontation.

Over the years, Lierre would seethe in private about people, thank me for engaging them, but say nothing publicly.

What if that woman actually knew enough about Deep Green Resistance that Lierre thought it was worth it to lose about ten grand in order to keep it from coming out?

I speculate, because that fits with the other facts a lot better.

Because if that’s the answer, then it’s almost not even weird that Lierre didn’t mind that Kara, according to Lierre and presuming that she was telling the truth, seemed to have been encouraging a WoLF contractor to commit a hacking offense that could have landed her in jail.

In that case, it’s almost not even weird that Lierre never seemed bothered that the other woman tried to blackmail us all, suggesting at one point that she’d just take all the money raised for WoLF—a registered charity at that point—and write it off on her own taxes.

Why doesn’t board member Kacie Mills mind what Kara got up to? DGR, also?

Alternatively, Kacie has a distinct style of mobile-optimized web design. Low text, simple layouts with big pictures, & elements that fade in as you scroll down the page. Kacie doesn’t work for free much.

During the board meeting last April—funny thing, nonprofit board meetings are technically not private meetings—Kacie followed Lauren Adams haranguing me for not going to the bank often enough, and tweeting too much, by saying to me, “95% of what you do is great, but that 5%…”

… literally, there was a dramatic pause, “it’s 5 percent too many.”

So I hope everyone there at WoLF now is 100% on-game, because Kacie Mills, who repeatedly just refused to do things I asked her to do, and was so uncommunicative I was worried she wanted to quit, will check.

The day Lierre announced that her “friend” Natasha Chart was no longer with WoLF, they had a new header graphic for the website, the social media feeds, and embedded in the email templates.

It was very nice, to be sure. I’d never seen it, or heard anyone talk about a redesign.

There was no one at WoLF besides Kacie who does graphic design.

And you do have to admit, that is a very nice design.

If it had been suggested to me, which it was not, I certainly would have approved it. I mean, scroll up and look at it. That is top shelf.

Back up a minute though, before the 95% comment, Lauren is ranting frantically about how I didn’t handle admin tasks fast enough, shouting at one point that, when these things weren’t done, “you don’t have any other work!”

Then she started in on the tweets.

I started to answer her about that, & Kacie solemnly intones, like she was announcing a funeral, “But Natasha, you violated the policy.”

Then Lierre spoke up. “We’ve all seen the tweets.” What tweets, I asked? Oh, Lauren sent them around yesterday, she said you knew. I did not.

Can I see them, I asked? No, we can’t do that.

Before then, I was astonished at Lauren’s behavior, but not concerned about any larger implications of her willingness to act out like that.

But the other board members were talking like I’d been accused of serious misconduct.

That was a Thursday. It took until Saturday for them to have Lauren send me what Lauren sent them. Her message included an improvement plan for me, and, in a Google Doc that she has since deleted according to the app, the report of offending tweets.

I talked with three other board members by phone about the tweets, and they directly told me that they had no problem with them, and didn’t think that they violated our social media policy.

Some of them were critical of BLM, which Lauren didn’t like having in public.

But before Lauren came to WoLF, Lierre had spent much of the year telling me how her new favorite pastime was watching the videos posted on Kiwifarms of Antifa and BLM rioters behaving badly. All of us had criticized the way BLM leaders embraced and deified woman abusing men.

The very idea that Lierre had ever thought those tweets were a serious matter is laughable, unless she’s so easily panicked that she didn’t realize her own opinion was being packaged and sold back to her as a serious offense against the authority of the board.

Lierre and I talked over those few days, on the phone and in DM, and before Sunday, she kept suggesting things could be worked out.

What she didn’t tell me was that on Friday, Kacie Mills had forwarded the rest of the board a motion to fire me.

Kacie’s motion included a job description, for less than half pay, and part-time, written by Lauren.

Lauren, who had been pestering me for months to work with Kara Dansky again.

After firing me as ED…
“We suggest she shifts to a new role as Political Advisor — still paid but carrying no authority, where she does all of the things she likes and excels at (and no finances or directing). Or an unpaid role where she can write and network at her leisure.”

Never mind that I raised them all that money, or did all those other things that raised the organization’s profile.

I could engage in those very activities that had brought them real money and influence, as “leisure” activities, with “no authority,” if I wanted.

While it is true that I did those things for many years without pay, I would on no account do them for people whom I knew to be so pitilessly unappreciative.

Again, unless they’ve been wildly irresponsible, my “leisure” is still responsible for the bulk of their funding.

I didn’t just raise WoLF that money, either. I set up every enterprise fundraising system, CRM database, and merchant processing account that we used.

They had a free MailChimp account when I got there, and their only way to take online donations was to start a GoFundMe.

This constructive dismissal, as I’ve been told the term is called, was described later, to third parties, by report, as an offer of a “lateral transfer.” I believe that someone else was told I had needed a rest.

Lies.

Since, third parties have told me that between Kara Dansky and people at WoLF, I’ve been described as not fit for leadership, toxic, not who I seem to be, and also that I didn’t know how to do fundraisers properly.

I sound like a real peach, according to some.

But I was just fine at all of those things when leading WoLF was a volunteer role, with nothing for pay but an ocean of sorrow, lots of enemies, and utterly ceaseless work.

I didn’t take a full day off between when Kara quit the board in 2017 and when the board quit me in 2021.

Secure a solid $500,000 in the bank, with promises of more to come though, and who volunteered to charitably step in and take my place for a proposed salary of over $70k, but Jennifer Chavez, who’d left the previous year because she said she was tired of it.

Ultimately, she declined to take it. But getting back to the timeline, I was told about this on a Sunday, when the proposal had been made on a Friday.

Even when a board member is ineligible to vote on a motion, I should have been notified of the motion at once, as board chair.

When our contract general counsel advised that this had been an error, and against the board bylaws, Lauren and Kacie were excused as having misunderstood this.

Mind you, their claimed grounds for treating me this way was a claim that I’d violated a policy.

But when I was sent the proposal to fire me and give me an insulting sinecure, Lierre told me the allegedly real reason, “Half the staff want to quit. That’s why the board’s decided to step in.”

Which is when it was clear that they’d already decided.

Lierre told me a lot of confusing twaddle, like that staff thought I hated them, and thought I was “not warm,” but yet that they all spoke of me “with real affection,” admired me, and “no one wants you to go.”

As I told her, this is not how you treat people you admire.

Sunday was April 18th. On Monday the 19th, Lierre sent me a DM of cute baby ducks, so I’d feel better, I guess. On the 20th, she DM’d me, “I am worried about you. I know this has been a load of awfulness.”

… as if she was writing me about something she had nothing to do with.

Later, in the discussion about when to hold the board meeting to fire me, I wrote my perspective of events. Lauren said she wouldn’t have time to read it for days. Kacie moved forward the meeting plans for that Friday.

Lierre wrote, “I'm sorry, I have a live event before thousands of people in a few hours. I will do my best to check in on this situation as I can but I am not terribly available today.”

So, I was clearly a very important friend about whom she was worried.

That’s the standard of leadership at WoLF now.

They broke the board rules at least two more times that week, too.

I don’t think the board cared about anything that they told me they had a problem with, none of it withstands scrutiny.

And “half the staff” was … who? Lauren, who told me just before the board meeting that she was worried I was going to fire her in favor of the contract general counsel, whom the board had told me I couldn’t hire?

Kacie technically was staff, though a contractor. Lierre said they complained to Hannah Sullivan, the development staffer, and Hannah told her. Hannah had known Lierre longer than I had, and she didn’t tell me there were any problems, she told Lierre.

What else is interesting there is that Hannah’s salary package included a bonus for what she brought in. As long as I was there being ‘bad at fundraising,’ she wouldn’t get the incentive for what I’d negotiated, like a $100,000 donation made not long before the board meeting.

Anyway, Lauren Adams told me that Women Picket DC was potentially big trouble for Kara.

WoLF is fine with that though, it seems.

How about @DeclarationOn? How do they plan to conduct their business? As a signer, I’d like to know.

I’ve been asked why talk about this now. There are lots of answers to that, because I’ve had a long time to think about it, & I’ve had nearly every opinion in the meantime about whether I ought to.

But one reason is because it cost me $95,000 to have retained the right to do so.

If you’ve been following along, it may occur to you, as it occurred to me, that my colleagues at WoLF were willing to pay me a lot more to leave than to stay. It speaks volumes about the honesty of their previous claims that they really, really, truly, wanted me to stay.

We’ll get back to that. Another reason is because I heard last month, ‘round the way, that Mahri Irvine has blamed ‘previous leadership,’ (and there’s no one but me who fits the bill,) for not knowing how to fundraise, as a reason for current problems.

Mahri doesn’t know me.

Another reason is that I heard last month that Kara Dansky is still going around telling people I’m “toxic,” and they should not be seen with me.

Really? After all this time?

It’s so much more interesting to wonder why that is rather than to be annoyed by it.

When the other board members were setting the meeting date to vote to fire me, after the warning of contract general counsel that they needed to abide by the bylaws, there was that side discussion Kacie brought up about giving Lauren Adams a raise for her service.

It was clearly calculated, in terms of timing & venue, to taunt & mock me. To make clear to me that they were so united against me, they could blatantly screw around. I thought, if it’s the part of the proceedings where people are asking for cash, time for a serious question…

As Robert Heinlein once wrote, “Money is truthful. If a man speaks of honor, make him pay cash.”

I first read that when I was a teenager, and I’ve always found it to be a reliable compass of intent.

Though her 1st round of accusations didn’t pan out, & the 2nd was weak, the board was still privileging Lauren’s communications as if she was a whistleblower.

I didn’t think I was going to get an honest answer about that.

So I asked them for a $95,000 severance payment.

When there’s that much money on the line, it would be the most natural thing in the world to come up with any plausible reason not to hand it over, would it not?

I posted that request to an email thread with 2 lawyers on it, & I felt it was the most effective possible way to get their honest, gut response, as to whether they thought they had a case against me on the merits that could withstand public scrutiny.

Like a poll question.

I expected a no.

Or haggling.

Or someone telling me that someone who had done whatever other thing they could think to throw at me certainly didn’t deserve that kind of sendoff. Instead …

Lauren wrote, “In light of Natasha's proposal - which we think is going to work out - I suggest that one of the directors call for postponement of the meeting to a later time so we can work out the payment schedule and terms of resignation …”

As soon as I stopped resisting the idea of leaving, it was all sunshine and roses. No more accusations.

But Kacie didn’t call for a postponement of the meeting, she called to have the meeting a couple hours earlier, then opened a Zoom for it and let the rest of us know.

And Charlotte, who’d been having a personal crisis that week, regarding which I remain sympathetic, wrote to say that she couldn’t make this new, earlier time.

I posted to the thread the portion of WoLF’s bylaws that required two days notice for a meeting.

There was nothing further on that thread. Lauren wrote me, just after 5pm ET, Friday, “In acknowledgement of your significant contributions and dedication to women and girls …,” and offering a payment plan, “… so that WoLF can continue this important work you have started.”

There were a lot of things about this situation that didn’t make sense if any of the reasons they’d brought up over the previous week were sincere or legitimate.

At the time, hurt and angry, it seemed like a bizarre personal conflict with a junior staffer that spun out.

I was not in a good place after that week. And though I hadn’t had a genuine expectation of being offered that money, it being on the table, I was tempted.

It would have solved so many problems.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

I hadn’t had another real job since 2015. And I remembered it earlier as two years, but it took closer to 3 years to get the story out about what happened there.

My professional networks had been destroyed though, and now it was happening again.

christianpost.com/news/is-there-…

Though that story only got out because I rejected the severance package and NDA offered by RH Reality Check, now Rewire. It had been very hard, but even remembering that, I also remembered the sick feeling I had when thinking about taking it.n

I had that sick feeling again.

The subconscious mind processes information much faster than the conscious mind, but tends to communicate in the language of feelings.

So it’s important to really figure out why a strong feeling comes up, because the slow, conscious mind probably missed something.

I’ve argued with a lot of people in my time, and had any number of failings out over political opinions. It’s unpleasant, but it’s in the main morally neutral. People can disagree, people can decide who they like, and they can change their minds.

This last year, I did a lot of personal work on gratitude and forgiveness. I’ve had mixed success, it’s in progress.

But it was important to work through that teaching; that anger, resentment, and the idea that something shouldn’t have happened mainly creates problems for me.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean something was right to have happened, or that accountability should be thrown out the window. It means there are emotions that, when we think from them, they distort our thoughts and make it impossible to enjoy the present or have hope for the future.

Though I had worked myself around to entertaining the idea, as of last month, of just trying to put the whole thing behind me and forgetting about it.

Until I learned that the whole thing, as it were, was still invested in destroying my professional reputation.

Why?

Why was a woman who has never exchanged a word with me firmly convinced of the idea that I had been bad at my job, and that she could freely assert this to third parties with the expectation of a complete lack of consequence?

Who convinced her to think like that?

Why is a woman who hasn’t been at WoLF since 2020 still going around insulting me, by reports, behind my back?

What threat could I pose?

I must actually, it seems to stand to reason, know something that’s really damaging that I’d failed to see through my anger & self-pity.

It also stands to reason, if Kara is still that upset, it probably had to do with her.

So I thought again about everything to do with Kara after she left. I thought about all the other women with whom I’d not discussed her leaving, who wrote me personally to resign from WoLF.

I thought about all the times Lierre kept bringing her up sympathetically, in spite of the fact that it was Lierre who told me that Kara had shown up to her house in apparent encouragement of a WoLF contractor making a proposal that could have landed the young woman in jail.

I thought about how odd it was that Lierre told me, of WPDC, that Kara obviously had nothing to do with the fundraising. Why would she say that?

Especially because Lauren Adams then spontaneously told me that any financial involvement could cost someone a law license.

I remembered Lierre being the first person to tell me, though this may not have been firsthand, that someone who’d taken possession of the Women Picket DC funds was on public assistance.

Who told her that? Who else knew?

And then I remembered how much trouble a friend had gotten in years ago for being on public assistance and having extra money that she shouldn’t have had.

She ended up in so much trouble, for so long, that she died of an asthma attack because she was afraid of an ambulance bill.

And that, within the space of a year, looks to me like a couple of influential movement leaders who showed themselves on three occasions as happy to stand back and have unwise younger women advance their aims in ways that might cause them no end of trouble.

I believe that’s what I’d missed as being the major thread, when I was full of blaming myself and feeling like I’d failed our supporters, and wondering what was wrong with me that these things kept happening.

But what usually happens to people who won’t keep the Omertà?

When I first thought about taking that $95,000, my reaction was that it felt like accepting something that ‘fell off the back of a truck.’

It felt like I would be signing myself up to be complicit through silence in something I didn’t have the clarity to understand at the time.

So I wrote a reply full of bravado in response, and then I deleted it.

I thought many things, back and forth, but I didn’t answer the email all weekend. They sent me two requests for a reply by Sunday afternoon, which I also didn’t answer.

Mind, I was still a member of the board. I should have been notified of motions for a vote. I should have been notified of meetings with two days notice.

Sunday, I was told they’d voted unanimously to terminate me and remove me from the board.

Lauren’s first accusations came back, that I’d mismanaged WoLF’s business affairs, and violated the social media policy.

All of these claims, in direct conversation with me, Lierre, Charlotte, and April Halley before she resigned over this, told me directly they didn’t support.

And the questions about this that I think are important beyond whether or not my former colleagues were kind to me, or liked me, are whether this is an appropriate way to handle employment at a feminist charity and whether people who act this way are good movement stewards.

A lot of women show up to feminism precisely because they’ve faced intimidation, improper coercion, or abuse. Many of them show up full of anger, feeling ostracized, and longing for community.

What welcome will they find in the radical feminist movement, or at WoLF?

I wouldn’t tell my worst enemy to subject themselves to most of what passes for radical feminist Facebook. I’d feel sorry for someone I despised if they were treated as I was treated at WoLF.

Isn’t it how things always get bad that the ‘little’ problems get overlooked too long?

How many more inexperienced or troubled women are going to have to show up to this dysfunctional mess and be encouraged in behavior that could destroy their careers, land them in crushing debt, or risk criminal charges, before it's a real problem that's big enough to care about?

I have no power over anyone, except to ask them to listen to their conscience, and consider if what they're doing is right.

I have no influence anymore, except to warn people of what I know, and ask them to take responsibility for seeing that the future isn't a Mobius strip.

Though I have been working on gratitude, as well, and that was hard at first, too.

But I'm grateful to know that I never had friends there.

Someone told me that, like in a breakup, what you really miss is your delusion about the relationship.

Better to face the truth.

Here’s a section, in case anyone’s curious, from my copy of Lauren Adams’s ‘my boss won’t immediately do what I and the communications fellow tell her to’ memo.

I didn’t want to waste anyone else’s time with it.

Here was Lierre’s response, after talking with me, and reading the 9-page letter that I took the time to write Lauren, explaining my position on the use of Twitter, which I have a ridiculous amount of experience in and which Lauren complained about having to pay attention to.

I had also explained to Lierre by that time, that the ‘anonymous’ complaints Jennifer Chavez contributed to Lauren’s memo, and personally called board members the day before the meeting to gripe about, amounted mainly to arguments caused by statements on genocide denial.

That is, there had been a lot of alarm about fascist accounts trying to weasel their way into GC circles, and I made a statement on our social media accounts how we didn’t want anything to do with genocide denialists, whether the Holocaust, the Holodomor, or the Great Famine.

Wouldn’t you know it, people showed up to defend Mao and Stalin. People who were popular in gender critical social media circles.

Conversations with Lierre about this were consistent with what you’d expect from someone who’s publicly talked about communists killing her family.

So that context was conveniently, and entirely omitted, from what Lauren and Jennifer put together in their scary hit piece memo, that used a lot of alarming words about liability, and failed to produce any evidence that I’d been willfully reckless.

Do I need to roll out the screenshot where Lauren asked me, the week of the board meeting, if I wanted to snark on Twitter about the lawsuit we’d just filed?

I did not, & said so.

I wouldn’t have in any case, but it should have made me more wary than it did that she said it.

Let me pause here in my narrative to say this: f*** communism.

One might even have been tempted to think, from the uptight, prissy air in which that memo was written, that it came from people who don’t know what Twitter is used for, & from a very stuffy legacy organization.

We were radical feminists who’d sued the Obama administration.

Our political opponents used Twitter to threaten lawsuits, demonize individuals, and childishly taunt people. That’s just the organizations and key staff at the ACLU.

More broadly, did they know how government & elected official accounts use Twitter? milkkarten.substack.com/p/yes-governme…

Could go down in the weeds on that a lot more, but let’s just look at some of the low volume, tedious, predictable tweeting that followed my ouster. Let’s start with directly accusing another organization of lying & go from there …

Is calling someone else “mindless” an insult or a provocation? Asking for a friend.

“ZERO self awareness,” they have “sold out.”

Gosh, this is some respectful and persuasive dialogue here, that has been QT’d straight into someone else’s timeline, in a way that can be described in social media terms as a lot more aggressive than the screenshots I tended to use.

I was told that part of the problem was I’d tweeted directly at an individual, in their timeline. I was told this was a Serious Violation of the social media policy, which had to be followed, as Lauren yelled at me on the phone the week before the meeting, “to the letter.”

How about “cowardly”? Is that an insult? Is that a Serious Violation of the oh-so-proper social media stance that ought to be taken by an organization that literally owns Gender Identity Watch now?

Or, show me the part of this tweet, calling another organization “ridiculous,” followed by three clown emojis, that is, “respectful, polite and patient.”

And again, not with a screenshot, but with a more provocative direct quote tweet.

Was there a board meeting about this?

I mean, I hope for the sake of not wasting everyone’s time for absolutely no reason, that it was not.

But Lauren started demanding to run my decisions by the board again every couple weeks or so, it seemed, starting the week that Jennifer Chavez left. It was exhausting.

We’d have discussions with conservatives, whose names & organizations she barely knew at first, and they would say things she disagreed with. Then she would tell me that we had to run it by the board, to which I’d respond that we hadn’t agreed to anything, we were just talking.

It was like she was astounded to discover that I had conversations with people who disagreed with us, and that I would listen to what they had to say without jumping in to argue every time I heard something that was different than my own opinion. I felt like I’d gotten a minder.

More, a minder who, most of the time, treated me like a dotty aunt with dementia. I would tell Lauren that the board had already discussed something, and she’d act like the reasonable assumption was that I didn’t know what I was talking about.

I’d say something in a Zoom meeting about our political situation, and Lauren and MK would lock & roll their eyes at each other. Together, though they privately claimed agreement with the criticism above, they seemed to have come to the conclusion that BLM shouldn’t be mentioned.

Not even though we were all horrified that they promoted prostitution, had a pimp representing at least one chapter, and did regularly canonize men who’d been violently abusive to black women.

But Lauren and MK seemed to have decided together to want to look better to the woke.

I just kept thinking …do you know where you work?

Then there was the week where, in a couple days of each other, Lauren & MK each started separate conversations trying to talk me out of support for bans on child sterilization.

“Have we really thought about this?” Lauren asked.

I had really thought about it. There was a several page white paper on the website about it that I’d written. I’d testified before a state legislature about it. All of this had been widely approved before Lauren and MK got there and tried to relitigate it internally.

Lauren and MK Fain would interrupt me constantly in meetings. Though they interrupted everyone, and I didn’t want to clamp down on what seemed most of the time to be an excess of enthusiasm.

At least they were doing other useful things. I didn’t want to make a big deal of it.

Lauren kept hassling me about social media though, in terms very different from what she presented in the memo she sent the board. She told me she had to spend too much time looking at it. She told me she didn’t like it. MK’s posts were rarely above perfunctory, often misspelled.

Why couldn’t I just spend my days teaching someone else how to … replicate coming across as engaged, informative, witty, and approachable on a medium she had distaste for and treated like a complete waste of time? Yeah, real head scratcher.

Lauren had tried many ways to make me simply comply with her aesthetic preferences, including telling me on the phone one day that I shouldn’t spend time on social media, saying, “But you’re our leader!”

She said it in a saccharine, ingratiating tone, that was out of character.

No one else talked to me like that, and I didn’t want it. She didn’t talk to me, or anyone else like that, the rest of the time.

It was repulsive.

Maybe that’s one of the times she meant, when she implied she’d been “warning” me to comply with her interpretation of policy?

And again, the story about the tweets being a huge problem didn’t hold together for even a full 24 hours, unless Lierre was lying to me.

I mean, it’s possible that she was just lying to me. But if so, why, and to hide what?

That memo did its work though, in creating a sense of panic that something very serious was going on, and that something had to be done. The subsequent claims that I had to be fired for not spending enough time talking to my staff were also treated like whistleblower claims.

That is, they were treated like privileged communications to the rest of the board about serious wrongdoing, summed up in Lierre’s own words to me as that I was, “not warm.”

Not. Warm.

Well, obviously, any female leader who is not warm should be fired at once!

& all those months, Lauren & MK kept asking me to work with Kara, whom they were obviously in touch with.

It did feel like they were routinely harassing me, and, in spite of how much it upset me to leave like that, I didn't fully appreciate how bad it was until it stopped.

The Friday before the board meeting, in a meeting with a contractor, I had to try three times to ask a question because Lauren kept talking over me and wouldn’t let me finish my sentence.

Should that have been a firing offense? Was that warm?

You know, since it came up.

I wasn’t talking to them enough, according to some, but there were an awful lot of times when it was hard to get a word in edgewise.

So it kind of seemed like, by mentoring, what they actually wanted was for me to sit listen to them like a houseplant and then do what they said.

Which of these statements was honest?

I was too divisive, but it was cool to give an interview to Dana Loesch, the former National Rifle Association spokeswoman?

If someone has a big enough media profile, it’s all good.

Unless none of them know who Loesch is, which is within the realm of possibility.

Before the events of that week though, I didn’t think anything had happened that anyone needed to leave over. I thought, foolishly, that all these issues could be resolved over time.

I, too, was once a very ignorant, overeager political amateur, who was convinced I knew it all.

Not that I know it all now. Obviously.

Which I note because I think the most pernicious political belief is that there does exist a class of people who do know it all, and who do know how everything they do is going to turn out. No such people exist.

The problem is, when people have a skill set that’s poorly understood by others, because it’s not understood as a skill, it can be mystifying to onlookers as to how they made things happen. It can appear like a sort of magic.

It’s all just ordinary people with unusual skills.

Just like, for instance, any one person with a standard political digital campaign skill set, a reasonable knowledge of political corporate law, a little legal support, and even fairly minimal help from others, can indeed effectively run an all-virtual political organization.

They’re force-multiplier skills, that can, as my favorite Star Wars heroine, Jyn Erso says in Rogue One, “make ten men feel like a hundred.”

For years, I was WoLF’s sole full-time support, amplifying and leveraging the much-appreciated work of part-time volunteers & contractors.

Rogue One is my favorite Star Wars, for much the same reason I’ve always loved Godfather III.

Ironically, because I think any properly observant participant (even peripheral) of organizational politics has to appreciate the fidelity of the portrayals of the perils of infighting.

These perils are the same if you’re in the mob, or in church, or in politics, and if there were any galactic empires they would be the same, because all of these institutions are full of people and we are all like each other, in aggregate.

But enough of that. Was it a correct understanding of my job that my main responsibility should have been administrative chores, morning to night, or was all of that “BS” that kept me from “more properly focus[ing] on policy and advocacy”? Which was it, Lauren?

In fact, I’d offered in the summer of 2020, and brought it up again in March of 2021, that I’d be willing to fly to DC to directly resolve the banking issues. On both occasions, I was told that this would have been excessive, and there was no rush.

But a few days before the board meeting, MK made a suggestion to me, something like, ‘Wouldn’t you like to just write more, Natasha? Maybe you could write something about the ACLU?’

We chatted about it, and moved on.

Sometime around a week or two before the board meeting, Lauren said we needed to hire contract general counsel, and she suggested a woman she knew I had a good relationship with, but whom the board had forbidden me to hire directly as staff.

The Friday before the board meeting last April, Lauren told me it was ‘inappropriate’ to have used the WoLF Twitter account to defend Graham Linehan’s reputation in a thread with a podcaster who supported child sterilization, but had favorably covered MK Fain’s projects.

The letter I sent Lauren about my rationale for how I ran social media was the one that Lierre had praised so effusively when she later read it, whether that was sincere or not.

That Monday, Lauren & I had our usual one-on-one Zoom. And she started it by looking at me sideways, oddly, expressing surprise that I’d showed up for it, and saying, “No, you’re not avoidant like that.” She said she thought I’d have been getting ready to fire her.

I said it hadn’t crossed my mind, which was true. Why bring it up? We discussed the proposed policy changes we were going to be recommending to the board, which I was supposed to review and edit or approve. She said it was her job to help me make policies I’d be happy with.

I know that Lauren showed that document to Jennifer Chavez. Did Jennifer ‘read the tea leaves’ and panic Lauren into thinking that she was definitely about to be fired because I had … taken the time to write her a ~9-page explanation of my social media strategy on a weekend?

So I adjusted some things about our policies, which I was told that I, and only I, needed to approve before they were recommended to the board.

Lauren suggested at the board meeting that this had been dodgy on my part, and in a later letter to the board, a conflict of interest.

So it was her job to help me change the policies, and mine to approve them, on Monday.

At the board meeting, Lauren was yelling about one of my changes, “I needed that [word] for my legal language!”

By Friday, it was a ‘conflict of interest’ for me to have suggested changes.

Who’s supposed to propose and approve policies if not the ED? Did we need to hire outside counsel for that, too? Should we have asked random passers by?

I wonder how many different stories Lauren has told about how this all went down over the last week.

If Lauren had had a real problem with what I’d proposed, and knew that there was any serious issue, she had about two days to have reviewed them before the meeting and said something appropriate to the gravity of the situation.

Instead, the day before the board meeting, Lauren circulated the document she and Jennifer put together, & Jennifer called all the other board members to complain about my tweets.

I didn’t hear about the document until the meeting, or about Jennifer’s calls until the next week.

The day of the board meeting, close to 5pm ET, Lauren asked me for a Zoom call to review our presentations.

It went as I’d have expected for a few minutes, but she brought up again that she was worried I’d been getting ready to fire her & hire the contract general counsel.

Then Lauren’s demeanor, which had been civil, changed like someone had flipped a switch, and she started yelling at me about the bank, how I spent too much time on social media and didn’t have the right because it wasn’t my job description, & I was failing in my duties.

She went on at great length about my job description, which I had mainly written, and which included the authority to delegate any number of tasks.

I was fairly shocked. I told her that I didn’t appreciate her trying to rewrite my job, and we would talk about all of this later.

She continued, but then she flipped again, and her tone softened, and she said something like, ‘Wouldn’t you rather just write more, and not have to worry about all of the rest of this?’

It sounded very much like what MK had said to me, and I was really tired of the tag-teaming.

A reader who wasn’t present to these events might understand why, at that point, what I thought was going on was that two of my new staff who had a history of trying to alternately flatter and wheedle their way into constantly second-guessing my decisions, were doing it again.

And I forgot for days about what Lierre had said to me that morning, where, seeming completely out of the blue to me, she had effectively offered to resign.

“I won’t make a fuss—it’s too exhausting, I promise.”

In the call on Sunday, when Lierre finally told me that they’d been talking about firing me since Friday, She said I should just step aside, as she had before. “Some people just don’t have the touch. … I wouldn’t, I was never very good at that,” she said, according to my notes.

“It’s what I would do,” Lierre said a couple times, trying to talk me into meekly accepting being fired for no obvious reason from the first job I’d had since 2015, and agreeing to be managed in my communications by two junior employees whose behavior & ideas she agreed were bad.

I was so gullible, Lierre. I still thought Lauren was pulling something & was worried about you.

I didn’t see you standing right there in front of me, able to have stopped the whole thing at any time, because Kacie and Charlotte were going to do whatever you said.

All the heart-reacting my every comment, no matter how mundane, for months … which was new & weird. All the over-the-top praise even as you dumped a “load of awfulness” on me.

It must have been quite a job of work faking that relationship. Hats off, really. You put in the time.

But here’s the thing, as I’ve said since I first recommended incorporating WoLF, back when everyone was talking about how to raise money for the first lawsuit in 2016: everything changes when money is involved.

This kind of high-school tomfoolery is one thing in a Facebook group.

It’s another thing when you’re a trustee of an organization with $536,037.87 in the bank, another $100,000 on the way, and employees who depend on responsible managers for their livelihoods.

Let’s just take one, single aspect of the situation, which is that no one else in the organization had taken any responsibility for managing our money, including Lierre, who was the official Treasurer, but hadn’t even ordered a debit card at the time of the board meeting.

It’s almost always upsetting for someone to get fired, and responsible managers take steps to make sure to minimize opportunities for people to act out in a fit of pique, out of respect for everyone’s best interests and just basic common sense.

Removing the ability of an employee being fired to access company money or premises protects the company, it protects other employees, and it even protects the person being fired from impulsively doing something that they might have cause to regret.

But no one could take such steps in this case. I suspect that no one even thought to.

So, congratulations, none of you is fit to be an assistant manager at a fast food restaurant.

At the time that Kacie & Lauren coordinated with each other to send this childish, spiteful, premeditated taunt to the thread where you were all planning the meeting about firing me, I’d put up with a week of slander and gaslighting. I still had responsibility for all the money.

Someone with less self control could have reacted to that by pulling a Mark Sanford, and all of you would have been responsible for it, too, because you took not one sensible safeguarding precaution besides relying on my ethics during one of the worst weeks of my life.

And indeed, later that day, obliquely, an offer to me of $95,000 in severance indicated that at least some of you knew how badly you had handled things, and how much liability your own actions had created for WoLF.

This was a failure in your duty of care to the reputation of the organization, by all of you, on multiple counts.

It was a failure of your duty to other staff, to protect their livelihoods.

It was a failure of your duty to me, not to engage in prolonged emotional cruelty.

Subjectively, the experience of being treated that way was shocking, frightening, and confusing. It was deeply traumatic.

None of you should be in authority near the kinds of damaged and abused women who show up to the “front lines of feminism.”

You are downright scary.

I thought many times, during that whipsawing of love bombing and humiliation, of when I was in that abusive marriage, or being beaten by my parents.

‘I love and admire you more than anyone ever will, [whack,] you’re so wonderful, [whack,] I just adore you, [whack!]’

Sure, people think I’m abrasive at times, and I am.

Partly, it is because I have never wanted to be the kind of evil manipulator who professes affection one minute and is ‘helping’ you cover up the marks the next minute.

If I have a problem with someone requiring action, I will address it. If I’m really angry with someone, I don’t pretend to be their friend.

It’s a question of emotional honesty.

I understand women can get that punished out of them. It’s not an excuse for bad behavior.

Every one of you responsible for these shameful events should resign immediately.

You know what you did.

You aren’t fit for trusteeship over a public charity, the trust of vulnerable women, or care for enough donor money to maybe get yourselves in real trouble with.

On Lierre’s part, it was yet another grievous failure to look after the ethical development of women who look to her for guidance.

And yes, Lierre, to take another crack at that question, I think you should resign, on the grounds of utterly lacking a moral compass.

I’m tired of carrying your misdeeds. I’m tired of the cloud that your bad behavior and slander of me to excuse what you did has cast over my life and work.

I’m tired of carrying the shame of knowing how awful you all were, and not having warned anyone.

You carry it now.

And if this statement you all added to the website after I left is anything but another taunt, all of you will have left WoLF by Monday.

"...these individuals operate in a position of trust and accountability to the public..."

Except that trust and accountability is not really your bag, is it?

Instead, you're going to front that you were all very worried about appearances on social media, but only some of it, occasionally, when it became convenient for reasons of making excuses.

Is that the authority I was supposed to have been disrespecting when I tweaked the nose of someone with a big social following?

Here's why I started worrying about WPDC: Because my colleagues at WoLF told me very decidedly that it seemed shady. I had been content to ignore it and try to stay away, but no.

I was told, by the current board chair of the Women’s Liberation Front, that there had been potential theft and assault related to Women Picket DC. According to her, she was talking to a lot of people about it.

But as soon as I asked if maybe someone ought to look into things...

Well, we can't have someone actually take potential criminal activity seriously if it may have occurred right in front of Lierre’s lawyer friend from Deep Green Resistance, Kara Dansky, who obviously had "nothing to do" with... the even she helped organize and raise money for.

*event

Does it seem like a bad idea to anyone else in the women’s movement to have such feckless, irresponsible people in charge of consequential organizing & finance decisions, when they know how many of the women who show up have desperate past or present circumstances? Just me?

Then Lauren Adams told me that Kara might have jeopardised her law license by being involved with WPDC, as it went down. Jennifer Chavez concurred.

So, I asked, should anyone do anything about this, if it's such a big deal? Oh, no.

Less than a month later, I was out.

Theoretically, it was about managing the banking, when we had never missed a bill. I'm gone a week, payroll bounces.

8 months later, I'm copied on an email from a granting organization asking why an electronic payment bounced. My name was still listed as a contact with them.

I specifically told them that last week, that account was the most important external account to update.

What happened, Lauren? Get too busy in meetings or with projects to remember to have an open-ended, tedious call with a financial institution? I can relate. But 8 months?

I'm still not sure what all happened, but I do know that nothing I was told made sense, because of context that's more than a soundbite to get across.

Here's the only thing that does make sense: people can get in a lot of trouble over shady fundraising. oregonlive.com/crime/2020/03/…

That is why I told everyone at WoLF that they needed to be incorporated and have an organizational bank account in 2016.

Then I made that happen, before I was even on the board and in spite of the fact that I’m not a lawyer, so that none of my friends would get in trouble.

Maybe they wanted me gone for some other reason? I know there are women who seem convinced I’m anti-abortion, which is weird, because I had an ectopic pregnancy in 2015, and I haven’t changed my opinions much since last I personally needed one. rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2015/0…

But it’s kind of odd, don’t you think, that Kara later made a point to use my refusal to get WoLF involved in an event she was organizing in order to distance herself, and others, from Women Picket DC?

If it was no big deal, hey, why all the public drama?

Someone might think, well, an awful lot of women were involved in Women Picket DC, so if something bad happened, wouldn’t someone have reported it by now? It would be a logical guess, but no. According to another organizer, it’s a sickening, demoralizing distraction to report.

I did not actually know it was possible to see asking about potentially criminal behavior as being itself a suspicious activity.

‘Hey, did someone at that event commit a crime?’

‘What’s your motive for asking? *I* only seek the well being of all women and girls.’

You know what really demoralizes movement supporters?

Seeing bullies, cowards, and shady liars fail upwards and be protected until they run everything, and you can’t turn around without having their names shoved in your face.

That’s utter crap for morale, every time.

I can only guess, for instance, at how many women were intrigued by, and then faded away from radical feminism because of how many of those Facebook groups are run by bullies and extremists who think nothing of ganging up on someone to destroy them over a minor disagreement.

We were supposed to be trying to do something different at WoLF.

One can guess that likely how all the big, institutional MeToo and other scandals happened was that they started with overlooking a couple ‘mistakes,’ then making a habit of that well past a pattern developing.

And we’d all discussed many times how much seriously bad behavior was present in radical feminist spaces, partly because of the nature of being a politically marginal movement with a culture of secrecy fostered by external bullying. There’s no normal feedback or counterweight.

Readers, consider these statements side by side, and tell me how long a movement with self-appointed leaders and gatekeepers like this has before someone actually ends up in jail for being stupid around money.

You’re not popular, like BLM.

Your ethics are your only safety net.

Think how demoralizing it would be to have the most famous thing about your movement being a financial scandal.

Some of you have been hiding in secret Facebook groups and being afraid of TRAs too long to remember the ordinary standards of society, and you need an intervention.

'She's a kind woman who's suffered, so I'm going to look away as she's supported in continuing to take leadership responsibilities she doesn't seem capable of understanding, and where someone could get in real trouble.'

How is this the moral calculus of a middle-aged feminist?

How is that the moral calculus of someone who thinks she has important public work to do, and from which potentially reporting a crime would be a distraction?

This is the mindset that combines with power to equal corruption.

There is a reason why the villain of Breaking Bad isn’t an addict who puked herself to death, but the stone cold sober onlooker who saw it happen, knew how bad it could be, and didn’t try to help.

If *I* heard that she had a half gallon of liquor at that event, by herself, and went back for more, then some of you heard it too.

If anything happens to her, as close as some of you are, knowing these other lapses too, some of you will never sleep another peaceful night.

You know it’s bad. Does she have to end up in an ER before one of her ‘friends’ does the right thing?

When are you going to wake up to the fact that it wasn’t a good idea to enable her demonization of the boring, straight-edge colleague scolding about the dangers of addiction?

When you demand to be allowed to take responsibility, you need to be responsible. Even if you haven’t been before.

People count on you. Not to be ‘nice’ to them. Not to validate their every opinion. To uphold standards that keep everyone out of trouble. You set the tone.

Waiting with bated breath for me to say something that will let you shut me up?

Your lack of care for the lives and reputations you hold in your hands condemns you.

Your own past words and actions condemn you.

Your inaction condemns you.

You’re unfit.

You know who I mean.

The rest of you who weren’t involved, how many stories have you heard about what happened by now?

How many lies do you think you’ve been told, and why do you think you were told them? How many times have you been fed gibberish that didn’t make sense?

When otherwise smart people tell you things that don’t make sense, in my experience, they’re usually hiding things or outright lying. Why?

Think how much trouble people who act like greedy, dishonest, or vindictive children when they’re around money and addicts, can get their associates in.

If you feel outnumbered by people like that, & they won’t leave, you should.

I was trying to remember something and went looking through my emails, and I’d forgotten that it’s apparently over 2 years now since being told that Kara Dansky decided to start complaining about me behind my back, without being willing to tell me what her problem was.

I’ll get back to the context of that string of messages, but the most specific reason Kara would give for demanding out of the blue that the WoLF board spend then-scarce resources on an actual mediator was to discuss “how the board communicates amongst ourselves.”

Meanwhile, less than a year later, she was apparently very offended that a fellow organizer of Women Picket DC was, “essentially asking women to show up at a meeting that you called, without providing us with any concrete information about what it is that we will be discussing.”

It’s almost as if she was talking about someone else’s event, rather than one that she was key to organizing and promoting from the beginning.

But back to another point, smart people who are being ridiculously vague know what they’re doing. They know what that looks like.

If someone’s being vague, they’re either trying to avoid saying something or making a power play.

For at least a couple weeks before Kara sent the board that email, Kara and Marian had been a solid wall of “no,” without a semblance of reasonable discussion.

They seem to have bonded over a general sense of huffiness that I was more polite to conservatives we worked with than they liked. As I told Kara, it was at least partly a counterweight to how rude she often was.

It wasn’t just about her though.

These people used to be my coworkers, for crying out loud. The radical feminist and gender critical Facebook groups aren’t much better, either.

And when we started working with conservatives, who were so routinely civil to us in spite of many disagreements, I remembered what it was like having coworkers who were normal people instead of far left activists.

It was routinely embarrassing how some of the feminists acted.

Then there was the fact that when one was civil to the conservatives we worked with, they’d reciprocate. Maybe you could even become friends.

The radical feminists we worked with tended to dole out civility based on agreement, and if you didn’t agree, you were just enemies.

So it seemed with Kara, who’d be in discussions with state lawmakers and organization heads, and be the sole person in the group who’d have a prima donna fit about getting copied on a stray reply-all.

But no lefty feminist could insult us badly enough that Kara wouldn’t eventually try to kiss up to them again.

The February incident that Jennifer wrote about was because Kara was going to the UK, and wanted to reach out to WPUK, who’d recently compared us to fascists.

Though they’d made our lives miserable on social media, it wasn’t like the women affiliated with WPUK cared about us, or any of the large majority of US women who weren’t acceptably far left. They were just putting on a show for other British leftists.

Kara and I disagreed that she should do that, something she’d sprung on us as if it were decided already, right before she planned to go. I was tired of her running off and doing whatever she wanted without talking about it, then making the rest of us deal with the consequences.

Then there was the eruption of ‘how dare you act like your title means anything.’

Jennifer smoothed that all over, she always did put in long hours making sure the extra things got handled, until a day when Kara DM’d me to say that Marian was calling her after an argument.

That was to be the last easy conversation I ever had with Kara, with whom I had spoken almost every day for some years by then, in good times and bad.

Then there was a blog post on the Bostock decision, which I wrote to respond to persistent confusion I saw on social media.

WPUK platformed Elizabeth Hungerford’s eccentric theories about the Bostock decision, which disagreed with the professional analysis left & right, the law journals, & eventually the court decisions that referred to it.

She disagreed with us though, so they ran with it.

This meant that a lot of GC women on were insisting that the decision had preserved sex-based rights, & I thought it was important to highlight the portions of the decision that contradicted this. I asked Kara to take a look at what I wrote, and she just took a hatchet to it.

What I wrote was ‘too long.’ Well, maybe, but it was a lot shorter than the decision itself, which almost no one seemed to have read.

Kara removed every quote that proved my points, chopped paragraphs out arbitrarily so that what was left didn’t flow, and just left a mess.

Having edited each other’s writing for years, this was a completely new tone. It felt spiteful, and mean, with the resulting essay an obvious embarrassment that made a lot of claims without proof.

I undid her changes and worked with Jennifer and Lierre on it.

Then Jennifer wrote something about an HHS decision, IIRC, where a rule was being changed that impacted abortion, among other issues, and Jennifer said that doctors obviously shouldn’t be forced to perform abortions against their conscience.

Kara and Marian flipped out.

They said it was vague. They said the piece overall was too long, too confusing. They accused Jennifer of having been sloganeering, and then they demanded that not only should the offending sentence be removed, but “abortion on demand without apology” be added to the start.

We had a phone call about it, & I asked them what that slogan meant to them, to include in a document like this. Should a woman be able to get an “abortion on demand” at the corner store? Did they know most OB/GYN programs don’t even teach how to perform an abortion?

But ultimately, this was the big question: Did they think the government should be able to force a doctor to perform abortions?

Even Lierre didn’t agree with that, when asked later.

Kara & Marian wouldn’t answer. They went back to hemming & hawing, saying the piece was vague.

It wasn’t too vague for them to get really offended by though.

But we took that sentence out. When I said after it was published that I hadn’t liked leaving it out, Kara seemed to take offense.

Then there was the demand for mediation. Over a couple of blog posts.

Remembering it, and everything that resulted, you’d think it would have been some kind of truly epic shakedown.

Nah.

It was a couple of stupid arguments over blog posts, where the people who had the worst arguments got the most angry, even when they got their way.

Then Kara and Marian demanded mediation, without being willing to specify a topic or make an attempt to discuss what was bothering them. They insisted. I told Kara I was tired of putting up with this sort of behavior yet again, and I defined “again,” because there had been a lot.

Kara got really offended by the fact that I had sent a 23 paragraph email demonstrating an understanding of how to outline a specific disagreement with someone so that you can all understand what it is that you are talking about.

I’d had Jennifer check my recollections though.

I didn’t count the paragraphs, you understand, Kara did. That was cited as a reason why she wouldn’t respond to them.

Marian cited a specific error of fact I’d made, demonstrating that she did indeed understand how to refute a particular claim if the facts merited it.

Kacie and Charlotte hadn’t been involved in almost anything we were discussing, because they barely participated beyond the monthly board meetings, and were generally slow to respond to email.

They each conditionally agreed to consider mediation.

Kara and Marian each wrote in response to a different one of Kacie’s and then Charlotte’s emails, in quick succession, misquoting their messages that were *right there in the thread* as being endorsements of their own position that we needed to pay to hire a mediator at once.

I pointed this dishonesty out. I asked them to come up with a reason or stop wasting our time, more or less.

Kara resigned, saying I’d been derelict in my duties. Which ones?

Marian resigned, saying that in all her professional experience, I was uniquely “malignant.” Because…?

Then according to Lierre, Kara showed up at a gathering at her house with a WoLF contractor, supporting and encouraging the other woman for hours as the contractor argued to those in attendance (many in WoLF) that the remaining board needed to be locked out of our websites.

As far as I know, no one else on the board had told this contractor one thing about why Kara was gone, except that she was no longer with us.

Lierre, and another volunteer who was there, called me on the phone right away when everyone left to tell me what happened.

I suspect if that other volunteer hadn’t been there, I’d never have known.

But that contractor, I keep going back to this gobsmacking point, could have faced serious consequences had she been successful.

Why was I the person in the scenario who worried most about that?

Around that time, something like a half dozen women I knew who were mutual friends with Kara resigned from WoLF by writing me, or about me. Including one I’d thought was actually a friend, & whom I’d visited with in person.

Another woman with whom I’d been friendly with or years, and who was working closely with Kara on a state campaign, ended up yelling at me on the phone for something like three hours on different occasions, convinced I was insulting her, & that Kara leaving had to do with her.

When we removed Kara from WoLF membership after all this, she showed up to a conference call we were both on, moping, with a wounded tone, introducing herself to people who already knew her and apropos of nothing, by saying that she wasn’t there representing anyone anymore.

Then when I had employees, of course she talked to them, and was continually asking to work with us again. Getting Lierre to ask.

Other people tell me now and again about nasty things Kara still says about me.

Did Kara’s apparently persistent, obsessive interest in demonizing me with third parties have nothing to do with anything else that happened last year?

Seems unlikely. Especially because they were posting in praise of her within a day of getting rid of me.

In September, WoLF joined in supporting the WHPA along with Kara’s group, which adds gender identity to federal law.

Now there’s not even one feminist group that will hold the line on gender identity in all cases, but they’ll *complain* about it after.

womensdeclarationusa.com/h-r-3755-women…

Lierre knew that all of this had happened, and clearly made her choice who to back.

So if you come to the radical feminist/GC movement because you are worried about being harassed by gender activists, that’s how the leaders of the largest factions of the US & UK movements think it’s cool to treat people … harassment, lying, smear campaigns, sustained bullying.

Kara’s a diversity trainer though, and WPUK are led by union organizers, so if they’re involved in making sure that minor political disagreements turn into years worth of sustained, vindictive retaliation, they’ll plan campaigns against you that are inclusive and well-organized.

Solidarity, baby.

‘We wanted to professionalize things, set a different tone.’

'You didn't even like taking care of the finances.'

‘You were a liability.’

‘You mismanaged WoLF’s business affairs.’

‘Former leadership wasn’t good at fundraising.’

“Geology is the study of pressure and time.” - Shawshank Redemption

I wonder how many times Lierre has said “gray rock!” by now.

I bet at least one of you never wants to hear that phrase again so long as you live.

When people are making an unjustified power grab out of spite, jealousy, greed, or sometimes just the satisfaction of causing distress, the insults always get more extreme even as the justification for them is ever more tenuous.

The hope is that the target will instinctively internalize the insults, and their shame will prevent them telling anyone what happened because critical thought gets short-circuited by the fear of disapproval.

The only possible shield is the question: “Is that true?”

It’s worth noting, it’s always a good idea to consider if a criticism might be true.

In the Jordan Peterson talks I listened to last summer in order to distract myself from my own thoughts, he reinforces that idea with the point that human sanity depends on social feedback.

Or if it seems like someone might be operating from a misinterpretation, or a strong emotional conviction, might as well try to really talk about it.

Like that volunteer who was yelling at me after working with Kara, she seemed convinced I meant to insult her because I suggested that a statement she wrote should be run through a grade-level analysis, and adjusted towards an elementary school level Fleisch-Kincaid score.

I’d had years worth of pleasant, jovial banter with her on social media. I looked at a college-level statement, & made a recommendation that’s one of the commonest pieces of marketing writing advice out there: adjust the grade level way down so casual readers get the point fast.

So, it was weird to get yelled at for hours over that, by someone with whom I’d not previously exchanged a cross word.

Almost like there was an unspoken motivator of her conviction that I now wished her ill because … I was trying to help her get something published in a paper?

Nonsensical interactions like this degrade the capacity of a social network to generate useful output, or remain tolerable to people who don’t enjoy that sort of chaos.

This is why left-aligned institutions are in a process of being hollowed out by SJWs, aka, the woke.

No social network that allows unreasonable people to seize ever more power, with ever less rational justification, is going to be able to consistently retain and promote people who care getting their jobs right and so will weigh every question on the test, “Is it true?”

Even the best-intentioned person is of course going to get the answer wrong sometimes. That’s not optional.

But continuing to come back to that question, “Is it true,” is the necessary foundation of developing competence and adaptability to changing circumstances.

Testing ideas for truth over time is the necessary foundation of having difficult conversations that eventually can inspire a solution based in trust and mutual understanding.

Dishonesty is, to the contrary, corrosive of positive intents and outcomes. We all err & discover this.

Some of us got a very alarming window on this sort of emotional dishonesty and insult as a power play during the summer of 2019, at WoLF Fest, or what Lierre referred to as, “Torture Fest.”

Reading back down to get here, I noticed a couple of spelling errors and omissions of my own along the way, and it probably serves me right. But you’re getting what you paid for so …

Anyhow, no, I don’t really want to write about TortureFest, aka WoLF Fest 2019.

WoLF Fest was Lierre’s event, which she managed through a small nonprofit of her own, paid for, and ran, without any direct support from WoLF following incorporation. Those of us who could afford to travel there would go, but it wasn’t ever a WoLF event.

It had usually been a fun event for the company & talks, though there would be minor problems like there always are when people get together. In 2019, events at Fest gave me reason to begin to seriously worry about Kara’s judgement, though as ever, I sidelined that for the cause.

WoLF Fest was supposed to have a track of programming for women of color, & in 2018, Lierre had gotten complaints from the attendees about how it had been run, so she got someone new. Someone showed up who was unhappy about not being asked to help again in 2019.

Things were mostly fine to start, then in the middle of a workshop I was attending, there was some screaming and uproar down by the riverbank.

There was a small river nearby, & we were in a very remote part of Northern California, hours of driving away from the nearest airport.

There was also a road bridge a ways downstream, and a few of the women who’d been attending the WoC track of programming had been sunbathing by the banks in a state of undress.

The camp had been pitched as a place so remote that people could sunbathe undressed by the stream.

I don’t really understand the appeal of walking around topless in front of strangers, even if they are all women, but it seemed a perennial feature of such events going back to MichFest, and there seemed no point arguing about it.

But it turned out we weren’t remote enough that there was no possibility of being spotted, even though the sides of the stream were wooded on both sides and the nearest homes were quite far from sighting distance.

So the women on the bank said they’d heard a vehicle stop.

Then a bit later, they heard a rustling in the bushes from the other side of the bank, and said they saw someone pointing their phone at them. They yelled at them, the person or persons fled, and they came up the little hill by the side of the stream justifiably angry.

We were in an area where no one had cell service, so we had to get in touch with the camp manager to make calls, if needed. The women who’d been peeped indicated they were going to be off to do that, which seemed reasonable.

I didn’t know any of them well, if at all, so I didn’t say much besides to express my agreement that this was an awful circumstance, and let them go their way back towards the main building.

Out of my view, things started getting ridiculous.

As far as I knew, the incident was being reported. A little later, I went to give my keynote talk in the main room. We kept hearing loud talking from outside, and Lierre called out a few times for the people on the porch to be quiet so everyone could hear.

There was no sound system, and not much insulation, so people kept having to be asked not to talk on the porch during a talk in the building.

But the women who’d been peeped were out there talking with the woman who was upset because of not getting to help again from 2018.

This request for quiet, made without seeing who was being asked or being able to clearly hear what was said, was about to be added to a list of grievances.

Lierre was called out, & soon came back in to stop the talk. I was supposed to talk for an hour & was at first relieved.

But we were being told we had to make everyone in camp come to the big room of the main building right away, so we could talk about what happened at the stream.

It turned out, police were not going to drive out from two towns away to take an incident report.

Police said that probably it was just out-of-town campers, like us, and they were probably very far away by then and would be impossible to track down without a vehicle description or any surveillance footage, which of course no one had.

The ensuing meeting, led by the woman from 2018, who hadn’t been at the stream when it happened, either, was a parade of alarming speculation about whether or not the camp was going to be besieged, and why it was that the victims of the incident were allegedly being ignored.

I was confused, like I think most of us were. It had been or was being reported, very few of us there knew each other personally, and the women coming up from the stream bank had not seemed like they wanted strangers to fawn over them. They were angry, and walking fast.

It also seemed like whatever had happened was over.

But the meeting escalated into the implication that the organizers, and all the white attendees, were racist, because, it seemed, we hadn’t all rushed these women to comfort them.

I don’t know about everyone, but in my experience, people who’ve just had something upsetting like that happen don’t tend to want to be stared at and peppered with questions by people they don’t know at all.

Anyway, another meeting was planned about it for later. For reasons.

The women involved in the incident started all walking together around camp, led by the woman from 2018, who, again, had not been at the stream. They had closed door meetings that they walked into, stone-faced, with Kara and a couple other women who joined what was now a group.

Just writing about this, I’m remembering the last Netroots Nation I attended, where attendees staged a disruptive protest about police violence in the middle of a keynote speech by a congressional leader on immigration issues.

They could have just had their own thing, too.

I’m not sure I could actually be paid enough to attend another conference of any description where I knew that most of the attendees were going to be political progressives or other far leftists.

I am utterly tired of dealing with DEFCON 1 escalations over minor disagreements.

So the group, which wasn’t all the women of color at the event, and wasn’t all women of color, demanded that they get the evening firepit that had been set aside as a sober gathering space. They also started harassing the woman who was maintaining the other fire area.

This meant women walking off with her things and being confrontationally slow about giving them back, and culminated with a white woman from their group stealing some of the drinks the other woman had brought, and bringing them back to the other firepit.

There was a third meeting called, where it was insisted that the organizers account for themselves to the entire camp. I went to stand up there with them, along with Jennifer Chavez and Kara Dansky, so they didn’t have to stand alone to take what we all knew would be yelling.

So we were standing all together to one side, everyone around the tables but chairs turned to face us, and the women from the group ran the meeting by yelling at us that we were racist, and giving CRT 101 lectures, which wasn’t really new news to anyone there.

Jennifer tried to talk to them, and then at some point she just went and sat down. She later told me that Kara had whispered to her, I didn’t hear this, “What are you doing?”

She took this as criticism of putting up any resistance, so just gave up. Both of them were behind me.

In fact, as the yelling had really gotten going, everyone else sort of melted back into the wall so that I was standing there in front, and became the natural focus of these tirades.

So, it was a lot like 90% of Facebook arguments about WoLF, for years, but live.

When everyone seemed to have said enough that they felt heard, and a particularly ringing denunciation about the evils of racial injustice had been delivered at me, I think I said something like, ‘Okay,’ and then if I recall correctly we all just filed out of the room.

Then some of us ended up crammed into the barely-a-closet that Lierre was sharing with another volunteer, Kara having deigned to join us again, and seeming to have finally at last realized that there was something wrong.

Kara was sitting in the only chair, and at some point started rocking back and forth, hands on her head, saying, “I think I can help because [the woman from 2018] thinks I’m a virtuous white woman … What if she thinks I’m a virtuous white woman?”

What does that even mean? I still don’t know. We were all pretty wrung out and no one had another big discussion in us.

But earlier, evidently in pursuit of this virtuous status, I was told that Kara had snapped at a friend & organizer with an accusation that she must be racist.

Because as soon as the accusation of bigotry had been made, no real analysis or discussion could take place. It was the role of some of us to be yelled at patiently, and woe to us if we didn’t play the part well. The friend Kara snapped at was in the to-be-yelled at category.

But people were Very Angry, so something serious must be going on, right? Serious wrongdoing? Big problems?

As ever, no.

And as on several other occasions, Kara was captured by the big feelings and was absolutely no help, if not actively unhelpful, when things got tense.

There was a second diversity trainer attending, also white, because of course there was. And it had been the sense of the group the day before that she had to take over the big meeting room the next morning for a white anti-racism meeting.

When I came in, the presenter was trying to explain to a woman of color up in front that it was supposed to be only for white people.

Like, they were trying to have a whites-only meeting.

If that woman of color hadn’t said everything that needed to be said, I’d have ended it.

For that, they’d displaced Jennifer Chavez’s talk on political organizing, just canceled it.

To try and have what the ‘anti-racist’ group at the event meant to be an actual, in real life, whites-only meeting.

Kara’s new best buddies.

Lierre was there for all of it, and that’s what she thinks makes someone leadership material. That’s who she’s helped push to the head of the line at the US Women’s Declaration International chapter.

The “virtuous white woman.”

I remember early on in working with Kara, I asked her once over email if maybe some of the wording on her diversity training website might annoy social justice warriors online.

She didn’t write back. She called me a couple days later, saying it had taken that long to calm down.

Because how very dare I question how Kara Dansky had worded her website? Who did I think I was?

I just read a lot about this stuff, I said. Probably thousands of hours by then.

But I apologized, because didn’t we need her help? We did though.

Maybe I know something about how things sound though. Even if I didn’t go to law school or work as a diversity trainer at the ACLU.

That was before Kara temporarily quit the board over all the criticism she got over her first Tucker Carlson appearance, and left me to defend it. Which I did, because it was a decision we all made together.

Now she uses her contacts with “Tucker’s people” to dole out favors.

In 2020, Kara resigned from her job at the DC Sentencing Commission, about which she had complained nonstop to me since first she started it.

Sometime around then, according to Jennifer Chavez, she’d started complaining about me, instead.

Then there was the argument Kara & Marian started about whether WoLF could say we didn’t think the government could require doctors to perform abortions.

I am curious to know if @DeclarationOn or @WDI_USA hold that doctors should be required by the state to perform abortions.

Sounds like some dystopian, Chinese Communist Party-style authoritarianism, right there.

If I had to guess, there hasn’t been a canvassing of the @WDI_USA membership on government-mandated abortions.

Maybe they don’t believe in that, who knows?

It’s not like they were being forthright about their motives and opinions at the time, so maybe it was just the nearest straw to grab at so that Kara could demand to run everything.

During the course of that argument, and in its immediate aftermath, Jennifer, who lived near Kara and saw her a lot more often than I did, started telling me all the things she’d not wanted to bother me with before.

For instance, Jennifer told me that although Kara had done more paid legal work for us than anyone else, she turned in briefs riddled with errors, cut-and-paste from other briefs, on one occasion a citation to an overturned case, and would refuse to make corrections.

So in order for us to have respectable filings, Jennifer would have to edit and make corrections, for which she was generally not paid. She was good at it though, so everything always looked great when submitted.

Jennifer also told me that she’d gotten inquiries after Kara’s well-being following her behavior after and around 2020 events in Seattle and the UK.

Then, as mentioned, Kara was reported to have encouraged a contractor with WoLF to hack our systems.

Hacking is an offense people can go to jail for, so it’s a good thing for that contractor’s sake that we were told.

Women Picket DC was in early 2021. Two different attendees told me that Kara said at the event she was wearing white that day so that if they were attacked, the blood would show.

Afterwards, Kara claimed to have nixed the idea of security because it didn’t seem necessary.

From three different sources, I was told that a man on a bicycle heckled WPDC, and Kara and some of the other women ran over towards him, surrounded him, and started shouting at him. I was told that one of the women hit him in the face. It seemed police didn’t see it. Did Kara?

Then there was the money raised for WPDC, which Kara posted on social media and appeared in video interviews to promote.

It reportedly went into the personal bank account of a woman on public assistance, who then passed some remainder on to a charity no one had heard of.

Did Kara pay for the house? Was it reimbursed?

Was all of this properly reported to the IRS, or was the whole mess just left in the lap of a woman who by all accounts was not well situated to understand the potential consequences of what was going on.

This entire chain of questionable behavior, which either Lierre Keith or Lauren Adams had been either present for or alerted me to, was apparently just an occasion for gossip to them.

WoLF is now run by women who saw all of this and endorsed it after the fact.

It has serious consequences for the well-being of a movement, and the participants in it, if authority figures encourage bullying and misbehavior, and if donors then reward this.

The new executive director also doesn’t appear to be on the board, but she’s supposed to manage two employees who were apparently rewarded with raises for starting a dishonest panic and getting their previous director fired. How’s she going to control costs?

From what I’ve seen, over the last year WoLF has had three other, more experienced lawyers write legal filings that Lauren has signed off on. Does that rubber-stamping need to be a full-time staff position?

Does an organization that small need a full-time web designer?

I bet if anyone thinks it’s excessive, they’re afraid to say so.

How many women heard that Kara had a screaming meltdown at an organizer of Sovereign Women last summer, because Kara was unhappy with how she'd been introduced before a talk? How many of those women will argue with Kara or her friends about how WDI USA or WoLF are run?

FCOL. Literally the line that Jennifer wrote & that Kara Dansky and Marian Rutigliano threw a fit about, demanding that we remove it, was saying that of course, the government shouldn’t require any doctor to perform an abortion against their conscience.

If that was a dishonest sideshow, and I wouldn’t put it past them, well that would be an interesting alternative explanation. But when we asked them if there were any circumstance where the government ought to mandate an abortion, they got vague & wouldn’t answer.

And no, I’ve never worked for ADF. That’s a straight up lie.

But I’d rather share an office with any person at ADF I have ever talked to than with 90% of the big names in radical feminism, because they can be civil across disagreement.

Though if anyone’s under the illusion that WDI USA is an organization that’s going to ask serious questions of the glorious and amazing queen that runs things, I don’t know what to tell you.

Political conservatives I’ve disagreed with: Can we talk about that, or agree not to? Should we exchange books?

Radical feminists I’ve disagreed with: You sleep with the Devil, right? You’re so evil. I’m going to round up a group to try & destroy you.

Hilariously ironic.

The left is becoming all it’s long accused conservatives of being. As standards of civility or liberal democracy are abandoned for slavish devotion to ideology, objectively bad behavior is going to be increasingly overlooked, with worsening consequences. thepostmillennial.com/boston-blm-lea…