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We’ve all heard the tales of marital woe caused by a “third wheel.” An old flame. A nosy in-law. A so-called “work spouse.” God forbid, an affair with another person.
One anonymous writer for an Australian feminist outlet has declared that an unusual “third wheel” has entered her nuptials, however. He’s bald, entertaining, half a world away and beloved by millions. Yet, he’s “ruining my marriage,” the anonymous author said.
She speaks, of course, about Joe Rogan.
In a month that produced plenty of evidence that those on the left refuse to even tolerate those not on the same page as them, much less take their arguments seriously — a theme that was played out violently on campuses across America over the war in Israel, especially at Columbia University — one of the wackier manifestations of this phenomenon came from Down Under.
On April 8, an anonymous writer published a screed on MamaMia, an online feminist outlet that describes itself as a center of “independent women’s journalism.”
This includes hard-hitting articles like “Influencers are bringing back ‘Day on a Plate.’ And it’s more toxic than ever,” in which YouTubers and TikTokkers are slammed for sharing their healthy meal plans, with the author arguing they come in under the recommended calorie intake for a day.
Also, “Calling someone your ‘girlfriend’ is officially cancelled.” It’s a thinkpiece about how Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, among other celebrities, refer to each other if they’re dating but not married. Spoiler alert: It’s “juvenile” to use those words, and “the structure of our relationships has changed significantly over time, but our vocabulary hasn’t sufficiently extended to be inclusive of these new unions.”
This is funny enough in its own peculiarly sad way, but the cake-taker is the anonymous spouse who declared, last month, “Joe Rogan is ruining my marriage.”
The scribe began with Princess Diana of Wales’ quote, during an interview, that, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” She was referring, of course, to the then-title-free Camilla Parker-Bowles — now Queen Camilla — who then-Prince Charles was having an affair with.
Our anonymous agonized spouse said she identifies with Princess Diana, “though the ‘third’ in my marriage is an annoying male American voice who has somehow managed to insert himself into my relationship.
“Joe Rogan, often touted as the world’s most popular podcast host, can be heard in our kitchen, bathroom, or backyard on loud speaker morning, noon and night,” she wrote. “And like the uninvited guest he is (by me anyway) he’s causing tension in my home.”
Yes, reality is now officially making satire obsolete. The Babylon Bee has nothing on this.
Now, the author admitted that both her husband and her differ politically, but had “settled into a companionable acceptance” of these differences.
“Very loosely I am more liberal and he is more conservative. There were arguments (usually around national elections) but it didn’t really interfere with our relationship,” she said.
“But since Rogan has appeared on the scene I feel like my husband’s taken a trip to right-wing-crazy-town. He’s developed a deep distrust of science and government. He stopped taking the COVID boosters early on and is skeptical about vaccinations generally. He once tried to explain to me why aliens probably built the pyramids,” she claimed in the article.
“And while I do believe in taking a critical approach to life, relentless conspiracy theories are exhausting and can leave you feeling like you’ve landed in la la land.”
The woman then brought up things she said Rogan has posited that are false, including furries demanding kitty litter in school bathrooms. However, how she would know this is beyond me, because this is what she admits in the very next paragraph:
“My husband will argue that I can’t criticize Rogan because I don’t listen to him, which is true. But what I can do is observe his influence on my husband, and this is what I see.” [Emphasis ours.]
Oh! Rogan is apparently on in her house day and night, so much so that his voice is inescapable … but she hasn’t listened to him? She just knows because now her husband is talking about things like wokeness gone amok, and we can’t have that.
According to her, the husband has gotten some wacky ideas via the “third wheel,” noting, “It appears that for Rogan and those who follow him, the political is personal. My husband will often get angry about what he calls ‘woke’ activists and how ‘they’ are going too far. When he says the word ‘feminist’ he reduces it to a dirty word.” [Emphasis again ours.]
In this paragraph, we can see exactly why Rogan irritates so many on the left, and it’s not because he gives marching orders to brainless, spineless men whose political views would otherwise be moldable by — thank ye heavens! — sensible women like our author, but who are now being warped by some podcaster.
Note the bolded phrase: “The personal is political.” It has a history, so much so that the Encyclopedia Britannica — among many other sources — has an entry on it. Spoiler alert: It didn’t originate with the right, but with radical feminists instead.
“The personal is political, political slogan expressing a common belief among feminists that the personal experiences of women are rooted in their political situation and gender inequality,” the Encyclopedia Britannica noted.
“Although the origin of the phrase ‘the personal is political’ is uncertain, it became popular following the publication in 1970 of an essay of the same name by American feminist Carol Hanisch, who argued that many personal experiences (particularly those of women) can be traced to one’s location within a system of power relationships.”
There’s no particular need for feminists to spout this phrase anymore, at least for themselves. In this arena of the culture war, they have assumed they’ve attained victory. “Toxic masculinity” and “gender roles” are phrases tossed around by liberals with the same contempt that this woman’s husband allegedly uses when he talks about “wokeness” and “feminism.” “Believe all women” isn’t just a phrase that sprouted from the #MeToo movement, it’s now become an inviolable cultural maxim in the West and similar cultures.
When men wake up and realize this is all rubbish forced upon them by a leftist monoculture, it’s blamed on that goshdarned “toxic masculinity” — in this case, embodied in the personage of Joe Rogan, a podcaster who is apparently ruining marriages.
“I know my husband is not a bigot. If a child asked him to use a certain pronoun, he absolutely would without a fuss. He has empathy. What has this harlot Rogan done to my kind, loving husband?” the writer asked.
It’s truly amazing that this woman — apparently more than willing to vocalize her opinions to her husband — is suddenly repulsed when he gets some of his own. But he couldn’t have come up with this himself, right? Blame the dude with the show on Spotify … which, admittedly, she’s never really listened to.
Before the author hit send on this, she surely must have read it again to see if she had cogently expressed her arguments. So lacking in self-awareness is this woman, apparently, that, at no point during this rereading, did it occur to her that she was telling one side of a problematic relationship, and a telling one at that.
To this writer’s husband, I imagine there’s a “third wheel,” too: the cudgel of political correctness she wields whenever he criticizes “wokeness.” Heaven forfend he ever doesn’t use the pronoun the hypothetical child asked him to, or then he’d really get a whack with it — probably in divorce court, from the sound of things.
Joe Rogan is not the one who made the political personal in this dysfunctional relationship. Instead, it’s the fact that this woman has apparently blindly swallowed whatever pap that was fed to her by progressive feminists who have succeeded in making their personal grievances political and react with unmerciful venom whenever their status quo is challenged.
This would all be quite silly — if there weren’t enough people who probably nodded along with this witless, self-deluded woman, and not given her condemnation of the “third wheel” in her marriage the mockery it so clearly deserved.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
The post Writer on Feminist Website Says Her Marriage Is Being ‘Ruined’ by ‘Third Wheel’: Joe Rogan appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The price tag of President Joe Biden’s student loan amnesty just keeps growing — and it’s not the neediest who are getting the money, either.
According to the New York Post, a new study by the University of Pennsylvania estimates that a new round of student loan cancellation programs raises the amount that taxpayers are stuck holding to $559 billion total, including $84 billion under new provisions announced last week.
The kicker? The newest provisions under the Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, plan will benefit those in higher tax brackets the most.
The income-driven plan was introduced last summer, but new loan cancellations for 277,000 borrowers were announced last week.
“Today’s announcement shows — once again — that the Biden-Harris Administration is not letting up its efforts to give hardworking Americans some breathing room,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement, the Post reported.
“As long as there are people with overwhelming student loan debt competing with basic needs such as food and healthcare, we will remain relentless in our pursuit to bring relief to millions across the country.”
Cardona was doing the usual media rounds promoting how the plan was going to help the most vulnerable student loan recipients:
.@SecCardona breaks down who qualifies for President Biden’s new student debt relief plan.#GMA3 pic.twitter.com/BB3PVT76K4
— GMA3: What You Need To Know (@ABCGMA3) April 9, 2024
However, the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model found that the new round of cancellations wasn’t exactly going to help those who were struggling to put food on the table — unless their diet consisted of three square meals of foie gras and Wagyu steak.
“President Biden recently announced five main provisions to provide student loan debt relief. Some of provisions are already mostly covered by President Biden’s SAVE plan introduced in 2023. Some provisions, however, are more incremental to the SAVE plan, including one provision — the forgiveness of longer-term debt — that expands eligibility to higher-income households,” read a Thursday media release of the study’s key takeaways.
“We estimate that the New Plans will cost $84 billion in addition to the $475 billion that we estimated for President Biden’s SAVE plan, for a total cost of about $559 billion across both plans.
“While the New Plans, like the SAVE plan, contain provisions to relieve debt based on individual or household income, the New Plans will also relieve some longer-term student debt for about 750,000 households making over $312,000 in average household income,” it continued.
“The main reason for this high average household income is that the SAVE plan already provides long-term debt relief to households with lower incomes.”
Of the five major components of the new plans announced on April 8, two in particular stick out as driving the relief up the income ladder.
First is the threshold for waiving accrued and capitalized interest on the loans: “Up to $20,000 in accrued and capitalized interest will be waived for borrowers with current balances above the initial balance upon entering repayment, regardless of borrower’s income,” the Wharton media release read.
“Single borrowers making less than $120,000 or couples making less than $240,000 a year will qualify for a total waiver of all current balances above the initial balance if they are enrolled in any IDR plan. Automatic relief will be applied, and so no application is needed.”
Second is the elimination of undergraduate student debt for those who have been paying it for over 20 years or gradate debt for 25 years.
“If student loan repayments started on or before July 1, 2005, all debt will be eliminated for borrowers with undergraduate loans only. (For borrowers with any graduate debt, this date is pushed back to July 1, 2000). No enrollment in IDR plans will be needed to receive the relief, but currently it’s unclear if any other application will be required from the borrowers,” the news release said.
The total cost of all the five measures is a touch over $84 billion, added to the estimated $475 billion Biden’s unilateral student loan relief has already put taxpayers on the hook for.
However, in this case, Biden is providing relief to households who are less than $100,000 away from that magical $400,000 number that he says makes you one of the wealthy that he plans to tax to pay for his spending sprees — you know, those who need to start paying their “fair share.”
To say this is ridiculous is an understatement — until, of course, you realize that 2024 is an election year and Biden’s poll numbers haven’t looked hot since the beginning of the race, despite the fact that Democrat DAs and the Department of Justice have been on a quest to tie up the presumptive Republican nominee in court until November.
As House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Jodey Arrington, a Texas Republican, noted, this wasn’t just unconstitutional, it was a “quest to buy votes.”
“In reality, his plan will shift the responsibility of paying for loans owed by high-income earners who freely incurred them onto the backs of all taxpayers, many of whom do not even have a college degree,” Arrington said via a statement.
“[Biden’s] administration is dead set on circumventing the Supreme Court, defying Congress, and saddling our country with more debt.”
And unlike he says, it’s not taking from the rich to give to the poor. It’s taking from those who didn’t take college loans or paid them off and giving relief to wealthy people who did and haven’t.
Is this what student debt relief should look like? It is when one is down badly in the polls and is grasping at straws to get suburban voters in swing states. That’s hardly good policy — but as cynical strategizing, it’s not half bad.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
The post Biden’s Student Debt Cancellation Has Taxpayers Paying Over $550 Billion, Benefits Wealthier Families appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
You would think that, given the cost of living and the exodus already underway from the Golden State, nobody would be trying to make California more expensive than it already is.
But this is California, a state where Jerry “Governor Moonbeam” Brown can be considered a relative political moderate in the whole scheme of things because he occasionally kept an eye on the state budget.
So of course somebody’s trying to make it more expensive — and not only that, that somebody is a group of environmentalists looking to shut down nearly 10 percent of the state’s energy production. And not only that, that energy comes from one of the cleanest, most reliable sources of energy we have.
Welcome to California, as they say.
According to a Wednesday report from The Associated Press, an environmentalist group called Friends of the Earth is suing the U.S. Department of Energy over its decision to award funds to keep California’s last remaining nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon, open.
The DOE awarded $1 billion to keep the plant open past its planned 2025 closure date after Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said shuttering Diablo Canyon, which provides 9 percent of the state’s power, would leave California vulnerable to blackouts, according to regional conservative outlet The Center Square.
“As we experienced during the record heat wave last September, climate change-driven extreme events are causing unprecedented stress on our power grid — the Diablo Canyon Power Plant is important to support energy reliability as we accelerate progress towards achieving our clean energy and climate goals,” Newsom said in a 2023 statement.
In 2022, Newsom signed a bill to allocate $1.4 billion in loans to keep Diablo Canyon, located in San Luis Obispo, to extend its service life to 2030.
“Climate change is causing unprecedented stress on California’s energy system and I appreciate the Legislature’s action to maintain energy reliability as the state accelerates the transition to clean energy,” Newsom said at the time.
The move came after the state announced earlier in the year that it would ban sales of gas-powered cars by 2035; just days afterwards the California Independent System Operator, the non-profit organization which manages most of California’s energy grid, put the Golden State on notice that the stress charging electric vehicles would put on the grid would simply be too much to close a source of reliable, carbon-free energy generation.
CISO pleaded with EV owners to not charge their cars during “flex alerts” because it was “likely to strain the grid with increased energy demands, especially over the [Labor Day] holiday weekend.”
In January, the Biden administration chipped in $1.1 billion to extend the plant’s service life. So, naturally, the environmentalists sued, because reality doesn’t have to matter when you’re a privileged ideologue.
“The environmental impacts from extending the lifespan of this aging power plant at this point in time have not been adequately addressed or disclosed to the public,” the group’s lawsuit said.
While a safety assessment concluded there weren’t risks to keeping the nearly 40-year-old plant alive, Friends of the Earth called that “grossly deficient.”
“[Pacific Gas & Electric] has long said the twin-domed plant is safe, an assessment endorsed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” the AP noted.
So, just to get this straight: A non-carbon-based source of energy generation that provides roughly a tenth of a state’s electricity is going to stay open thanks to government spending. This is in a state where, according to EnergySage, residents already pay an average of $3,060 a year on their electricity bill — 34 percent higher than the national average.
The state is hemorrhaging residents and revenue thanks, in part, to the cost of living — making that 2035 EV mandate more unlikely than ever, especially if there are rolling blackouts due to lack of electricity.
Friends of the Earth should be doing a coordinated group dance at Burning Man to celebrate this development. Instead, they’re suing. Why? Because nuclear is super-duper evil — even if it’s safe and clean.
Enviros may invoke the specter of Chernobyl or Three-Mile Island, but outliers like that have been sorted. The real issue is that they want scarcity. They desperately want us all to do without. That’s why wind, solar and other renewables — despite the fact that they can’t reasonably provide for our energy needs — are the only types of electricity generation these types of radicals will accept. If we could do away with the grid, period, that would be even better!
Americans shouldn’t have to listen to the piffle. Neither should the courts — and one hopes this suit is tossed as soon as feasible.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
The post Environmentalists Suing to Shut Down Power Plant Providing 9% of State’s Power appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
It sounds like the setup to a joke: a class to teach residents of the Bay Area how to leave California. All you need is an unwashed hippie, a rabbi and a talking Republican duck.
But, no: According to The San Francisco Standard, it’s instead one of the few good-news entrepreneurial stories out of the Golden State these days.
The class is the brainchild of Punam Navalgund of Intero Real Estate Services, who hosts it over Zoom (of course).
“Taught through the Campbell Union High School District’s adult education program, the class also helps people connect with trusted lawyers, real estate agents, accountants and even counselors in their chosen destination,” the Standard reported on March 15.
While some of her pupils are looking to decamp to less-expensive areas of California — Fresno and Temecula, in particular, were mentioned as destinations — Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Nevada and Texas were the most popular landing spots for Navalgund’s students.
“I’m a problem-solver. I hear what struggles people are having and try to figure out a solution,” she told the Standard.
“Many homesellers really feel stuck in their homes.”
Well, yes, that is a problem: Census data released last month showed that only two counties in the Bay Area experienced population growth between July 2022 and July 2023; every other county in the sprawling Northern California region lost residents.
Between July 2021 and July 2022, a Stanford study found, the state lost a net 407,000 residents to other states. Furthermore, the number of people who left the state jumped during the pandemic, according to The Mercury News in San Jose, with more than 800,000 leaving in both 2021 and 2022.
Overall, the Public Policy Institute of California estimated that between 2010 and 2022, 8.5 million people moved out of the state against only 6.3 million people moving in.
This is what happens when you have to deal with high costs of living, rampant crime, quality of life issues and being around other Californians, one supposes: The desperation to escape sinks in.
So, yes — I suppose this is a booming business in an area where retail chains are fleeing and once-iconic malls are shuttering.
However, it is the most California thing imaginable to have a Zoom class teaching Californians how to jump off their own sinking ship.
Roughly 50 people were enrolled in the class at the time of the article — a lower number from when it started, but not due to a flagging number of people who need to figure out how to find their way out of Cali.
“Class enrollment has dipped from an early 2023 attendance peak, partly due to her taking some time away from work, and not a dip in demand,” the Standard reported.
One attendee, Ukranian-born engineer Ilana Shternshain, said she wanted a change of pace after working in Silicon Valley; she said those who “don’t want to work all their life” in the grueling world of Big Tech should consider it.
The class, Shternshain said, taught her about “nailing down where you would want to move to, what kinds of ideas to entertain in your head, what’s important to you, what kind of lifestyle you want to manage or have when you move there.”
That destination was eventually the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson, Nevada. Shternshain quit working full-time and focused on an investment firm she founded.
“The only downside is the distance from our friends,” she said. “That’s something that anybody can anticipate if they make a move.”
Christine Howes, a pediatric nurse who is a Bay Area native — along with her husband — said she took the class because both were tired of the Bay Area grind. When her sister found out about the class and asked to join along with her, she accepted.
“I had already done like a ton of research over the years, working up toward this. Even then, she brought new information that I wasn’t aware of,” Howes said of Navalgund. “I found it very helpful, and so did my sister-in-law.”
“It’s never easy selling your home and buying a home, and she just made it a more pleasurable experience,” she added. (Howes was one of the “graduates” who remained in-state, settling in Clovis, California, in Fresno County.)
“It’s very much a small town feel, but it has a lot of the bigger town amenities,” Howes said. “It’s more of a laid-back lifestyle. We have views of the Sierras all around us during the winter, and it’s gorgeous. Summers are hot and miserable, but that’s what air-conditioning and the pool are for, so we’re happy.”
Leaving the Bay Area for greener pastures? A class by Punam Navalgund has helped nearly 50 adults find new homes elsewhere, offering guidance on finances, legalities, and more. Here’s where they’re heading and why: https://t.co/jYMJzvEOiB
— The San Francisco Standard (@sfstandard) April 4, 2024
Which is all quite wonderful, in both cases — but they need someone to tell them this?
Since the first colonists began arriving in what would eventually become the United States back in the 17th century, we were able to readily find out for ourselves how to move to greener pastures if it was advantageous to us.
It was never particularly difficult — so much so, in fact, that we quickly found our way to California and made it a state in 1850. This was before the Transcontinental Railroad, air conditioning or the fair-trade half-caff oat milk latte, either, so it’s not like the Golden State was as attractive to the laptop warrior class as it is these days, either.
Now, in 2024, we have U-Haul and Zillow and a great big wide web of information that allows us to pick up a handheld screen constantly connected to said web through magic wireless technology and research virtually anything about anywhere we want to move within the United States — or outside of it, for that matter.
If you are currently living somewhere, it has never been easier to work out the logistics of moving somewhere else, especially in California. How dense do you need to be to have someone teach you something generations of Americans have figured out without even having a car, much less a Tesla?
Yet, Punam Navalgund is making good coin, one assumes, on video classes designed to teach people how to get out of a state that can’t seem to keep people in it.
And you wonder why the Bay Area is one of the most reliably liberal places in America, year after year? Good grief.
I’d still say it’s all a huge joke — but the hippie, the rabbi and the talking Republican duck all declined to renew their leases and moved to Texas. There goes that.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
The post Dense and Desperate Californians Need Class to Learn How to Leave the State appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Vaunce News 