The Bluestocking 419: White House cage fight

a pure vector for rage

Happy Friday!

Here’s what I read in May.

Helen

---

A couple of weeks ago, I included a New Yorker profile of Linda McMahon, Trump’s education secretary and wife of WWE’s big boss, Vince, in the newsletter.

Here’s a companion piece on Dana White, the impresario behind the upcoming cage fight on the White House South Lawn. “Trump and White have long had a mutually beneficial relationship,” writes TIME’s Ariel Fisher. “White moved to Las Vegas in 1995 because, in his telling, associates of notorious Boston mobster Whitey Bulger were attempting to extort him.”

Inevitably, there’s some macho posturing:

Cigars, guitars, sports memorabilia: they’re all there. “I am unapologetically masculine,” White says. Men, in White’s mind, never split the bill when out to dinner with a woman. Men don’t shirk family responsibilities. And they never, ever, vocalize their mental-health struggles. “Talking about it publicly, I just feel like it opens the door to make young men think that it’s OK to just f-cking go, ‘Oh, I’m having mental [health issues],’” White says in a mock whiny voice. “Handle it behind closed doors. Don’t show that weakness to anybody.”

And some wellness bollocks:

White turned his back on conventional medicine coming out of the COVID pandemic, and in 2022 he began working with Gary Brecka, a popular wellness influencer. Brecka, who is not a doctor, put White on a regimen of supplements, cold plunges, IV drips, and red-light therapy that has left him feeling leaner, more energized, and no longer suffering from sleep apnea. “This is what changed my life,” says White. “Go strap that CPAP machine on your fat face and good luck. I wish you all the best.”

One surprising detail, about how White has two pistols in his office:

One barrel is cloaked in a red bible cover, the other in a black one. “Those two books have killed more people than any handgun ever made,” says White. “I am very antireligion.”

---

Photo by Guillaume Jaillet on Unsplash

The Globe and Mail just ran an extraordinary editorial, admitting that the Canadian media “did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge” the assertion that the remains of 215 indigenous children were found at a residential school in Kamloops in 2021. (What had actually happened was that ground-penetrated radar had picked up “disturbances” in the earth there. Activists put this together with the well-documented removal of indigenous children from their parents and created an urban myth about “mass graves” of murdered kids.) In the five years since, no human remains have been found at Kamloops.

Why didn’t the media “scrutinise or challenge” those claims? Because to do so was framed as “residential school denialism,” which one Canadian MP even wanted to be criminalised. But, as this editorial notes, acknowledging that the residential schools were harsh and uncaring, with high death rates (and that removing kids from their families is wrong) doesn’t mean you have to accept every assertion about what happened at those schools.

I’ve been low-key obsessed with this story since reviewing Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, a book which chronicles Naomi Wolf’s descent into conspiracism. I found a lot to like in the book. But I wish I had been more openly sceptical about Klein’s chapter contrasting the trucker protests over residential schools with the trucker protests against vaccine mandates. The residential school protests were Good And Righteous, according to Klein: “the deaths of these children and the subsequent cover-ups were true conspiracies, and now they could no longer be denied.” The vaccine mandate protest, by contrast, were dismissed as ginned up idiocy, carried about by “aggrieved small-business owners” (boo) and supported by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Except. The first set of protests, we now know, were based on misinformation. And they were violent: “In the weeks after the announcement in Kamloops, 11 churches in western Canada were burned to the ground in cases determined to be arson by investigators,” reported CBC in 2024.

The reason I’m obsessed with this is that the allegedly Good Naomi was here showing the exact same problem she identified in the Bad Naomi. She accepted an overarching narrative (Canada treated its indigenous people terribly) and was therefore inattentive to the hard facts. As far as I know, Klein has never addressed this error: in 2023, she was still talking about how “unmarked mass graves were found at the sites of residential schools for First Nations people.” They weren’t.

This is particularly annoying since more cautious accounts were available at the time she was writing Doppelganger. Terry Glavin, in the National Post, was a prominent sceptic and got attacked as a “denialist” for it. (She, or her editor, must have seen some of this stuff, because the language about graves was toned down between the early proof I received and the final published text.) Here’s Glavin now:

Thousands of aboriginal people really did suffer unspeakable torment in residential schools, and they deserve something better than our complicity in situating their agonies in the same rabbit hole where you’ll find secret torture chambers beneath the Vatican, Jewish 9-11 plots and vivid accounts of Queen Elizabeth’s hushed-up abduction of ten Kamloops residential schoolchildren who were invited to a picnic with Her Majesty and Prince Philip during a royal visit to Kamloops in 1964, and were never seen again.

---

Quick Links

1. “Cat is a noun that is used to represent all sorts of different qualities. Writers use it to mean everything from graceful to weak.” Thanks to the Browser for this tipoff—an interactive guide to the most overused similes in English (Pudding.cool).

2. “Over time, I began to recognise the tone of Groff’s emails to Epstein. They reminded me of the kinds of messages I sent in my first jobs, at the lowest level of institutions where I still naively thought that good behaviour would be noticed and rewarded.” Sophie Elmhirst on Epstein’s executive assistant Lesley Groff, who claims to have known nothing about his illegal activities (The Guardian).

3. “When she came in, her baby was dead. The mother’s perineum and vaginal wall collapsed because she’d been left to labour for so long. She now has a stoma bag.” Horrific details from the upcoming Ockenden review into maternity services in Nottingham (BBC).

4. Morbidly fascinated by the pitch for MAMA magazine, which bills itself as a men’s magazine “for the sophisticated retard” who wants to “escape the longhouse”. I found MAMA via its occasionally eyebrow-raising profile of the supporters of LA mayoral hopeful (and reality TV star) Spencer Pratt. As a political counterpoint, here is Jacobin on Pratt, “a pure vector for rage.”

---

Parish Newsletter

The critic Benji Wilson has written a book on how star ratings took over the world.

See you next time!