Facts and Logic

Mike Daly was storming out on his first day of classes. He had known that he'd have to deal with bullshit like this, but he didn't realize how bad it would be. He thought he would've been able to keep his mouth shut and power through it, but that hadn't proven to be the case. How could leftists be so hypocritical? They complain about suppression of free speech when the President makes fun of some dumb reporters, but in our supposed bastions of learning and free thought you can't have a reasoned argument based on facts and logic when your professor declares an obvious falsehood as indisputable truth? God, it was such bullshit.

There was really no point. He should just drop out, try to build up connections with some of the people he had intellectual discussions with on Reddit. Clearly the internet was the future. The old institutions had to fall. Leftist propaganda had become so rampant within them that they were beyond the possibility of rescue. Although Mike didn't agree with the president on everything—for instance he didn't believe in God and he had to admit the liberals had a point about the importance of global warming, even if their ideas for combatting it were asinine. The only realistic possibility for the survival of the male race was a market-based one—he had had some hope that the cheeto-in-chief might send everything toppling down. Perhaps he still would. Mike held out hope.

Maybe in the rubble of the old world he would have a chance to show his real worth. He wouldn't have to deal with dumb women professors who were only hired to meet some government-mandated quota. He probably knew more about sociology than this bitch did.

Maybe he would go to his next class. It was a physics class with a male professor. Dr. Robert Watkins was his name. Hopefully he would be more open to reasoned debate. Mike wasn't too optimistic about that, though. This shit was probably boiler-plate. It had been decreed from on high. There would be no "discrimination" in the classroom. Even if Dr. Watkins was a reasonable man and realized that this was unscientific leftist propaganda, he probably wouldn't be able to step up and say something or else he'd lose his comfy job. In only a split-second, Mike went from sympathizing with the difficult situation of the "conservative" academic in today's world to despising Dr. Watkins for his hypothetical cowardice. Jordan Peterson still had his academic job, after all. At least last time Mike had checked he did.

It had been a simple enough question. "What if it's scientifically-backed discrimination?" She had been standing on her podium, declaring from on high that there would be no "discrimination" in her classroom. Guh. He had almost vomited in his mouth right then and there. These dumb leftists just repeated buzzwords without thinking about what they meant. Discrimination just means distinguishing one thing from another. Not discriminating means the same thing as treating everyone the same! He'd be bored out of his skull if they treated him the same way as the rest of the dullards in his class. He had even seen a man in a skirt. Poor brainwashed bastard. He wished that there was a hell for the piece of shit to burn in. Score one for the Christians, he supposed.

The professor had been stunned silent, like she didn't even know how to respond. Then she just glared at him. "We're trying to work to have an open and honest classroom environment. If we start out assuming that some members of our class are worth more or less than others, we cannot have a genuine dialogue." More leftist buzzwords. He wanted to vomit in his mouth. "But if the data shows that some groups of people are, on average, more intelligent than others, surely I should treat them accordingly?" Next to her stammering, you'd have thought he was the professor and she was just a student. "We can have a conversation after class," she told him, probably thinking it'd been a snappy response. But he could see the fear behind her eyes. She didn't want to be humiliated in front of the rest of the students. It was obvious to anyone who was looking. He wasn't going to play her power games. He tried to sit there for a little while longer, but the fire kept building in his chest. "Open and honest?" How did restricting his free speech make the classroom more "open and honest?" It was 1984 stuff. Freedom is slavery and all that. He assumed that was a line from it. He'd never actually read it. He liked the film with John Hurt, though.

Eventually he just walked out of the lecture hall. All of the other students' eyes followed him. They paid no attention to the professor. Even she was probably looking at him. He hadn't looked to see. He didn't care. Caring is weakness.

He stood out in the hallway, thinking about what to do next. He listened to Rage against the Machine on his iPhone. They get it, he thought. Tear it all down. The system is corrupt. The machine keeps hard-working creative people like him down. It was a miracle people like Tom Morello and Ayn Rand were able to get through the slog of shit every once and awhile, to get people to wake up. He smiled and polished his glasses. Even if his parents weren't going to be happy with it, this was the decision he had to make. He had to go it alone. Let them explain it to Tom and Betty next door. Sure, it wasn't the "respectable" thing to do, but the rational thing is not always respectable.

Suddenly, the door to the lecture hall swung open. Mike half expected it to be the professor, trying to get him to come back to class. Fat chance, he thought. Fat bitch.

But it wasn't her. It was a younger woman, another student. He had noticed her in the crowd. She hadn't seemed to pay much attention when he left. He immediately pegged her as a feminist. She was wearing a white tank-top and black leggings with an acid-washed jean jacket. No obnoxious pins in there, except for a single plain white pin with the female symbol in pink. He rolled his eyes. Her hair was cut short and dyed bleach blonde. How ironic that these leftists went on and on about "body positivity," conveniently ignoring the fact that it was your dumb choice to eat all those cheeseburgers, but they changed their own bodies in all kinds of unnecessary ways. He was sure that she'd be beautiful, if she'd just let her natural dark hair grow out. Instead, she made herself into a parody of femininity. It made him want to vomit in his mouth.

He was sure the dumb bitch was about to lecture at him. He'd have her in tears pretty soon. Bitches like these usually were so brainwashed you couldn't reason with them. He'd have to force her into submission.

She seemed pretty calm, though, for someone who clearly had to be fuming on the inside. She was stronger than most of her lot, that was for sure.

She leaned against the wall outside the lecture hall and turned towards him, head cocked. "Hey," she said.

"Hey," he muttered, trying to ignore her.

"I like what you said back there." She smiled casually.

Thinking this was a trap, he pulled out his earphones reluctantly. "Oh, really? You agree that we shouldn't treat everyone the same? That it's okay, maybe even morally required, to discriminate against people based on scientific evidence?"

"Of course. It's just dumb, to ignore the facts staring you right in the face. You wouldn't treat a 14 year old the same way you treat a 20 year old, because 14 year olds are fucking idiots, whereas 20 year olds are just kinda dumb, y'know?"

What she was saying made sense, but she spoke English on a very low level and clearly had never read the great works of Western civilization. Still, he was happy to have someone to talk to whose mind hadn't been totally shut off by leftist brainwashing. "I totally agree. It just shows how far the level of discourse has fallen in this country that they think you're a racist just because you take into account the fact that black people statistically have a lower IQ than white people!"

"Totally. It's egalitarianism gone wild. I mean, it sounds like a good idea in theory, but look where it's gotten us, y'know? If we just let the people who actually knew what they were doing in charge of everything, think about where we'd be? That's the problem with both the major parties. The Democrats think every race and gender have the same rights to education, the Republicans think a country pastor has the same right to talk about science as a theoretical physicist."

"Right." He was becoming suspicious of her. There were intelligent women, of course. Statistical anomalies exist. But they didn't look like this. They wore dresses and had long hair. They knew their place. They didn't dye their hair and wear jean jackets. "So, you really agree that the less intelligent gender shouldn't have the same access to education?"

"Ideally, yeah." She stared up in thought. "I mean, in practice it's probably not going to happen anytime soon. But, really, it's a silly idea. Equality in education, I mean. We'd all be better off without it."

"Oh, okay." He stuck his hands down in his pockets, satisfied. "So, you understand under an ideal system that you wouldn't get to go to school, but as long as this is the system we have, you may as well take advantage of it?"

A sly grin came to her face that he couldn't quite make sense of. "Something like that," she muttered. He didn't know why, but he started to feel a warmth in his pants.

Suddenly, the doors to the lecture hall slammed open and other students started rushing out. They didn't seem to pay the two outsiders any mind, but Mike knew it must be taking them all their effort not to look, not to see what these two titans were doing while they were wasting their lives listening to some brainwashed bimbo parroting slogans.

"Listen," the girl shouted over the din, "I've got another class to go to, but I liked chatting with you. You seem to have some pretty clever ideas."

"Yeah," he grinned.

"I live in an apartment. Off campus. Wanna hangout tonight? I don't have any homework to do tonight. This place's a total shitshow."

"Sure!" he said, inching closer to her. "You didn't even tell me your name!"

"Erika," she said calmly. "I live in apartment B12, 246 N. High Street. We'll talk more tonight."

"Cool. See you around six o'clock?"

"Why not?"

Mike was genuinely excited about meeting with Erika again tonight. Sure, she wasn't a traditional woman. But her mind was genuinely open. He was sure that, with time, he could convince her to stop cutting her hair, start shaving her armpits, maybe even start dressing in skirts and things. The whole idea made him want to explode in his pants in a way that he wasn't fully willing to acknowledge yet. If she would just return to her natural state of femininity, he thought, she would be the ideal woman. Smart enough to have a real conversation with, but not so smart as to have a chance of beating him in an argument. He smiled.

This was going to be a good night. He might even stay on campus, if that meant being close to Erika. She might even let him stay at her apartment, depending on how many roommates she had. It might be better than being at a dorm with Brayden. What kind of a name was "Brayden," anyway? He was sure the guy was gay. Had to be, with a name like that and shorts like those.

It wouldn't be right, though, he thought, to be relying on his girlfriend for his place of residence. That certainly wouldn't be right. If she had any sense, she wouldn't agree to it either, would see how emasculating it would be for him.

No, no matter how much he hated Brayden, he couldn't move in with her until he could afford to be the one paying the rent. A young man living on his parents' dime was just a natural stage of growing up. He'd move beyond it soon. A young man living on his girlfriend's dime was sick and unnatural. He was sure of that.

At some point between heading back to his dorm to jack off and browse Reddit and leaving for Erika's place, Mike had apparently decided that this "hangout" was really a date. Accordingly, he had switched out his wrinkled Fallout t-shirt and cargo shorts for a blue button-up and jeans, still with the same grey hoodie. Though it was still technically summer, Mike was a southern man and it may as well have been fall already in Massachusetts as far as he was concerned.

Looking down at what he'd scribbled down on his arm, Mike clicked the button for B12. "Hey, Erika," he shouted into the shitty little speaker box, "It's me, Mike! Y'know, from this morning." Christ, he thought. I'm beginning to imitate her vocal mannerisms. I must steel myself against her feminine charms. I'm supposed to be making her more civilized, not allowing her to drag me down into her relative barbarism.

With a beep, the front door to the apartment building swung open. Taking a deep breath, Mike climbed up the stairs to the second floor, which for some asinine reason was called floor "B."

The door to apartment B12 was already cracked. He slowly unzipped his hoodie and knocked once. The door swung open. Erika was standing in the middle of the room by a circular glass table. "Hey, Mike!" She smiled at him. She was wearing the same clothes from that morning but apparently she had been working out. She was glistening with sweat.

"I hope you didn't have a hard time finding your way down here," she said. Mike imagined that she had put a peculiar emphasis on "hard," but he was probably just horny.

"No, no. I just used Google Maps."

"Cool, cool," she muttered. "Want a beer?"

"Sure," he said nervously. He had only gotten drunk once before and he hadn't really enjoyed it, but he didn't want to admit that to her. He realized suddenly he had no idea how old this woman was. She obviously wasn't a freshman like him if she lived off-campus. Hell, he didn't know anything about her.

While he was deep in thought, she had set two glasses of beer down on the table. "Sit," she said, offering a chair. "Let's just chill, talk the talk. I want to hear more about your theories on society, Mike." She was either genuinely interested or a good liar.

"Yeah, of course." He pushed the door shut behind him and sat down. He took a quick drink, just to make sure she knew he wasn't a pussy. It tasted good. It wasn't how he remembered beer tasting, but again he'd only had it the once. He couldn't afford to look like he didn't know how beer tasted in front of her. It might give her the wrong idea. "Ultimately," he said, "You have to go back to Nietzsche. I mean, you look at the statistics and you see how men are stronger, harder-working, more intelligent and you realize that they must've had a decisive advantage over women in the state of nature. But then you have this priestly caste that arises and they create this idea of guilt and suddenly you have the naturally more powerful, the stronger sex, feeling bad about being so strong and so they let them into universities and suddenly they—not you, I mean, but women in general—get so upset about the historical superiority of men over women—which is just facts, I mean—that they force men using guilt to give up more and more power and you see how we end up in the place we're in."

"Right." Erika nodded. She sat back in deep thought. "But, how did the priestly caste instill this sense of guilt in men?"

"What do you mean?"

"I'm sorry." She looked amused. "I'm just trying to understand what's going on. I mean, I like to think I'm pretty smart, but I'm still a woman, right?"

"Right," he said, taking another drink. "Well, naturally it only makes sense to evolve some limited sense of communal feeling. The priests preyed on this, worked to expand it beyond the level needed for survival, and used it to manipulate the strong into putting them in charge. As soon as this happens, well, it's a natural progression to modern leftist egalitarianism."

"Cool." She leaned back again. "I'm just wondering. If, y'know, this sense of communal feeling only evolves to the extent that's needed for survival, how do the priests expand this sense of communal feeling? Because they didn't have any power until it had been expanded to the point it gave rise to a sense of guilt they could manipulate, but for it to expand they would have to already have a degree of power to be able to manipulate the strong men. The strong men would already have to recognize them as people who are worthy of respect for them to be able to work towards developing this sense of guilt in the strong men."

"Are you trying to challenge my account? I thought we were just having an open discussion here between friends."

"No, no." She smiled coyly. "I'm just trying to understand how we got into the leftist egalitarian nightmare situation we're living in now."

"Okay." Something seemed to be off about all this, but she was very pretty and this beer was very tasty. Mike took another drink. It left foam around his lips. He burped.

"So, help me to understand."

"Understand what?"

"Understand how your account of the formation of the leftist egalitarian nightmare doesn't involve circularity. Or am I just too dumb to understand it, being a woman?"

He thought about it for a moment. "That. You just can't understand it, because you're a woman." He realized that sounded mean. "I mean, you're a smart woman, but you're still a woman."

"Really?"

He nodded.

"What if I told you I had a different account of how the leftist egalitarian nightmare was formed, one that isn't just a rehashing of Nietzsche?"

"Oh, yeah?" He was intrigued.

She leaned forward, staring down at him with her shimmering, emerald green eyes. "Those statistics you have, that say women are intellectually inferior to men, at least on average, those are based on IQ, right? IQ tests?"

"Yeah, of course. How else are you going to test for intelligence?"

"College admissions, for one thing. Other practical tests. IQ tests show, at most, theoretical intelligence. And they're made up by men anyway. To get a real sense of intelligence, you need to look at practical measures."

"I guess that makes sense. We should look at the facts, not what the government tells us to think."

She smiled at him. It made him feel good. "Yeah, that's right. But we have to take certain things into account when we look at the facts. Things like the historical oppression of women. Things like their intellectual achievements being undervalued. Things like the demands on them to always be pretty, always be beautiful, which men don't have to deal with. Things like the struggles of sexual assault and harrassment, which disproportionately affect women and keep them away from positions of power. All these things need to be corrected for when concerning the data on women's intelligence."

Mike began blinking rapidly. He had a strange sort of a headache. "You're- you're- I thought you were different, dammit!" He rose shakily to his feet. "You're just another feminazi bitch, brainwashed by the machine! Another egalitarian social justice warrior complaining about fake 'inequality.' Goddamn! It's a shame, how often you can judge a book by its cover. No real woman has short dyed blonde hair and wears a jean jacket."

She leaned back in her chair, disappointed. "Oh, Mike, you've got it all wrong! I don't believe in anything like that. I'm a Social Darwinist, y'know? The strong should rule over the weak. It's just the course of nature. We have no business interfering in it."

"Oh, yeah? Maybe you're a Socialist Darwinist. Look, facts are facts. If you don't see it that way, you can't say you believe in science when the mean Republicans tear down corrupt EPA regulations. All these fake narratives of 'inequality' don't remove the cold hard facts that women statistically score worse on IQ tests than men. And it's only because college administrators have to conform to leftist quotas that women outnumber men at universities."