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Can we talk about Rebekah Jones? Should we? I'm honestly incredibly conflicted about these questions. One of the rules of the Motte is that we shouldn't weakman:
Discussing Jones feels like walking a tightrope (called "meaningful cultural and political issues") that has been strung over an open toxic waste pit (called "are my political opponents just mentally ill?"). Out of sheer both-sides-ism I want to say "there are surely equally bizarre figures in right wing politics" but I can't actually find any. The best I can do is to say, suppose you combined Marjorie Taylor Greene's extremism with George Santos' fabulism, then made the resulting chimera guilty of the things Matt Gaetz was only ever rumored to have been guilty of doing--that would get you pretty close to Jones, I think. Except that MTG and Santos and Gaetz aren't darlings of reddit and don't command fawning loyalty from major media outlets, which Jones also does.
As a refresher, I first learned of Jones back in the old subreddit, when someone posted about her COVID activism. I don't remember when I learned of her criminal activities, but to simply quote the Wikipedia:
Jones went on to say she was going to run for office in Maryland (IIRC), but when that didn't pan out for unclear reasons, she returned to Florida. I don't know how much she has received in crowdfunding from the anti-DeSantis crowd at this point, but two early efforts pulled over half a million dollars. Jones has continued to hold herself out as a "whistleblower," specifically against the DeSantis administration in Florida, even though these claims appear pretty thoroughly debunked.
"Aha!" You might say. "PolitiFact leans left, and debunks Jones, so even the Left is willing to disavow this nut!"
Sure, maybe, to some extent. She went on to win the 2022 Democrat primary to challenge Matt Gaetz for his seat in the House of Representatives, so at least 16,000 Democrats still preferred Jones to someone with an actual legal education and genuinely relevant experience. And yes--by this logic, some 50,000 Republicans preferred the candidate who was under investigation for sex trafficking minors! It's baffling, I agree. But this is one of those "meaningful cultural and political issues" I mentioned--the only way I can make sense of any of this is to take a deep breath and remind myself that most people lack anything approaching coherent principles, they don't care about these details--they only care to win.
Anyway, that's all just the background!
This morning I woke up with this in my feeds.
If you don't want to read "WhitePeopleTwitter" (and I wouldn't blame you), it is a tweet from Rebekah Jones, followed by others, which I have partly reproduced here:
Naturally, Jones also provides links to her crowdfunding platforms of choice. The reddit "discussion" is... predictable? Outrage, occasional people (mostly, but not always, downvoted) asking whether this is legit, very few people posting actual information. Well, proles gonna prole I guess. But the headline in the Miami Herald?
So, that sounds bad! But is it really why he was arrested? In fact it is not. He was arrested for posting stuff like this:
As this information was coming out, Jones added to her tweetstorm:
It's not clear when these events are supposed to have occurred; Max Nordau shared video of Jones delivering her son to the police station. Rather, as this tweet suggests, it appears that "Rebekah Jones tried to blame DeSantis and RAISE MONEY off law enforcement stopping a possible school shooting."
I don't know what Jones' problem ultimately is. Narcissism? Paranoia? DeSantis Derangement Syndrome? That she is a habitual fabulist is well-established. That she has profited substantially from vocal opposition to all things DeSantis is a matter of public record. She is a sufficiently shady known quantity that most really big national news outlets seem reluctant to continue signal-boosting her, but the Miami Herald (by circulation, reportedly Florida's seventh-largest paper) still seems happy to run false headlines at her mere behest.
This seems discussion-worthy, and yet part of me wants to just not even post about it because it seems wrong, somehow, to even discuss Rebekah Jones. Giving her any attention at all feels a bit like encouraging a delusional person to persist in their delusions; she clearly wants notoriety, she doesn't seem capable of handling notoriety in a healthy way, surely it would be best to just stop paying attention to her?
But also, this is a kid talking about doing violence at school, with guns or knives. Is narcissism hereditary? Did his home environment contribute to this? [CONTINUED BELOW]
When The Motte was on Reddit, there was a post about women possibly having a... personalised... take on what they experience relative to reality. Was the post-author... you? A childhood magazine was involved, I believe, and AOC was invoked (not in the magazine, but the comment/post, or maybe in the replies).
In combination between that post, my experiences, one of the last comments from Namrok on women being possibly p-zombies, @WhiningCoil 's recent comment on 'white-knuckling' it, and other sources such as a comment here about wishful female thinking, there is maybe something to this as to a wider unified hypothesis.
Agree that Men are no less likely to rewrite their own perspective on their own memories. I think a lot of this is linked to the need for internal self-consistency. If someone express traditionally conservative morals, yet acted in a very not conservative way earlier in life, it makes sense they would write it off as a "wild time" in their life, with a likely follow on of "but I grew up / got more mature etc." What's more, I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with this. Learning from experience and changing your views based on that experience is sort of how humans work. I'd rather someone used to be kind of an asshole and then got over it versus continuing to be an asshole but somehow "consistent" in their values?
The sex difference I see (incoming: anecdata) is that female self-revision seems to frequently remove any personal agency let alone fault. It's not that Alice chose a bunch of Bad Boy Bobs in her 20s because she wanted fun and thrills and, hey, turns out Bad Boy Bob was in fact a Bad Guy. Instead it's (ancedatally) more often "Bob turned out to be such an asshole who could've known that a guy with prison time, no job, and a stolen motorcycle wasn't a sweetheart!"
Whereas, with my male friends, I hear a lot of "Yeah, she did sleep with three other dudes but .... she was a stripper and I knew that so .... what're you going to do."
All this being said, I don't chalk it up to innate brain differences between men and women. Ideas and culture matter. Contemporary feminism is rooted in hyper-liberation theory and maximal individual freedom of expression without any consideration of personal responsibility, let alone behaviors that strengthen societal bonds. Women are told that sexual libertinism earlier in life is a profound way of expressing themselves. How can there be any self-critical examination of mate selection criteria and interpersonal trust if the whole point is to just do it!
"Well, aren't young men fed the idea that they can have fun in their 20s going out to bars and bedding dozens of women as well?" Sure, but, as has been pointed out many, many other times on The Motte, it's fundamentally harder for all but the top .1% of men to get sex on demand. Secondly, and more broadly applicable, how many Bro-movies have some variation of "don't stick your dick in crazy?" Is "fuck boi" not a term in common usage in a derogatory manner? As underdeveloped as these ideas may be, at least there is some concept of future repercussions of reckless personal decision making (bonus: hasn't "Man up" been used by both TradCon folks as well as all but the most insane gender-dismantling leftists?)
Young people in society will always have higher degress of openness and risk taking. We need this for society to continue to function. The balance that tradition and positive elder role models play is to create the acceptable outer bounds of those behaviors to create a hard check on catastrophic (both personal and societal) consequences of those decisions. I think current feminism has done a lot to blow up even the outermost of those boundaries. The current result, and future prospects, were excellently summed up in @FiveHourMarathon's quality post from this March
That does often happen with men, sure. However what also happens very often is "man gets with new girl, man's friends see that she is crazy, man doesn't see it because he's too into her to care, months later man realizes that she is crazy". Which is the same thing as your Bob example from above.
Anyway, if you ask enough guys for their opinions you will probably eventually find criticisms of women for doing pretty much anything whatsoever. If the woman goes with Bob, someone will say that she is being irrational even though she finds Bob to be hot and it's pretty rational to want to fuck people you find hot. If she follows her more logical side and goes with Tim the nice nurturing guy, someone will say "see, women are not as big risk-takers as men are" or "she actually wants Bob, she is just using Tim as a beta provider". If she decides to not sleep with anyone, someone will say that she is a prude. If she sleeps with both Bob and Tim, someone will say that she is too promiscuous.
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