An Open Letter to My New Socialist Best Friend, Heron Greenesmith, presenter from the Collective Power Conference.

The Socialists are mad at me!

On April 15, 2023, I spent the day at the Collective Power conference at Hampshire College in Western Massachusetts, with 200ish of my closest comrades. In this limited series, I will document the experience.

There’s a lot to talk about. If you appreciate my work, please consider funding it by subscribing for $5/month or $50/year.

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Meet Heron Greenesmith, pronouns they/them.

Heron was featured on the opening panel at this past weekend’s Collective Power conference and also led a breakout session I attended about opposition research (I wasn’t originally going to attend it, but Heron said so many insane things in the opening keynote that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity).

In the middle of the breakout session, utilizing my newly honed opposition research techniques, I discovered Heron had blocked me on Twitter…on both my personal account @DrKarlynB and my @ActivelyUnwoke account.

Of course, you can always get around a Twitter block, so I wasn’t really concerned about that.

As crazy as some of Heron’s ideas are (and we’ll get into those in a future article about the sessions they led), I actually think that Heron is a wonderful teacher and an extremely smart individual. They’re deranged when it comes to the political right and doesn’t understand the culture or the people as well as they think they do, but that doesn’t mean they’re not smart. It means they’re engaging in confirmation bias and only seeing what they want to see rather than as they are.

I was actually impressed that Heron told people clearly not to use the information they were learning to dox people. They emphasized using it ethically. That’s good, as it should be.

So, given that Heron emphasized ethical use of information, I was a bit surprised to discover that they posted a Twitter thread on me today with an abundance of inaccuracies. So I thought I’d write Heron an open letter (I can’t DM them on Twitter, after all) to clear a few things up.

Here’s the thread Heron wrote about me, and my open letter below.

Dear Heron,

Hi. I’m Karlyn. I was sitting directly in front of you for 90 minutes the other day, and we shared a few laughs, but we haven’t officially met.

I’m a pro-choice Libertarian who believes adults should be able to do whatever they want with their bodies (including trans people), that all drugs should be legalized, that doesn’t give a flip about drag queen story hour, and that (as a rape victim myself) I believe all women should have the right to choose.

I believe you should be able to exist and live your life however you want as long as you aren’t forcing me to do something I don’t want to. In return, I promise I won’t force you to do anything. Fair?

I even respect people’s pronouns, even though I make mistakes sometimes because you guys are screwing up grammar. But I do try my best. Everyone deserves the basic respect and courtesy of being referred to how they want to be.

I say this because your Twitter thread about me incorrectly assumed that I’m anti-abortion. It got some other stuff wrong too, but we’ll get to that in a second.

I’m not anti-abortion. I’m pro-choice. I just have this crazy idea that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare…I think I heard that somewhere once from some feminist. Do you remember who said that?

We probably disagree on this point because you guys seem to think that abortion should be freely available up to birth. You have a daughter - you told us so in your session. Does it seem inhumane to you to abort a baby in the third trimester if it’s not medically necessary to do so to preserve the life of the mother?

I got my first birth control pills from Planned Parenthood while I was a student at Boston University (where Heron currently teaches in the School of Law) back in the day. I was always grateful to have them as a resource. I had a metric ton of sex in college and then in my 20s…and if I had gotten pregnant, I absolutely would have availed myself of the option to end the pregnancy.

I’m not anti-abortion. I’m anti-insanity. And I think an abortion doula and a bastardized spiritual ceremony following a home bathroom abortion is insanity.

But truth be told, the abortion stuff wasn’t even the stuff that most interested me about your conference. It’s the entire ideology that interests me.

So, how did I end up at your specific conference, then?

Well, frankly, I’ve been studying you guys for six months and I wanted to see it up close and personal. I wanted to hear what you had to say in your natural habitat.

I was a Democrat back when I was at BU and never questioned it. I attended anti-war rallies in the Boston Common after George W Bush invaded Iraq (those stopped after he left office, even though we didn’t leave the region), proudly voted for Obama twice, and for Hillary in 2016. Growing up in Vermont, I also voted for Bernie Sanders in every election in my adult life, until I moved to New Hampshire for work.

But something happened to me a few years ago: I realized how much people like you had lied to me my whole life. I realized that most people on the political right are not racist or misogynist or any of that. Most of them are just normal people who want low taxes, hate being censored for their ideas, and want to be left alone.

It’s probably not your fault that you’ve lied to people about the right - you were probably lied to as well by the media, your teachers, etc…and you probably truly believe that you’re telling the truth.

But I do think it would be helpful if you could look at your political opponent from a more detached perspective.

I’m not suggesting the entire political right is perfect - I was telling the truth in your session when I told you that I couldn’t stand conservative Christianity and that Matt Walsh is my mortal enemy. He has done more to hurt the conservative right than almost anyone and the ones that worship him like a God are (frankly) stupid. We even both hate the TERFs! They’re insufferable. We have so much in common, Heron.

The alt-right is a real thing too, and they are bad news. After I was doxed and terrorized by them for weeks for saying that Critical Race Theory IS NOT anti-white in 2021, I spent a lot of time investigating them…probably more time than you have.

But the reality is that the alt-right has grown substantially in the last few years as a backlash to the absurdity of the progressive and socialist left. You guys made them stronger, you drove more people into it with your own actions, all because you wouldn’t listen to people who used to be much more moderate and treated them as though they were an invasive species to be stomped out.

These elements are real, and the conservative right would do well to clean up their side of the aisle. But the fact is that most of them are too lazy to do it.

This will surprise you: The conservative right are LAZY.

That’s why I don’t associate with conservatives: I find them to be lazy, entitled, and have a learned helplessness from convincing themselves that they are perpetual victims of the evil far left that is really quite offputting.

So I’m not a conservative. Sorry to disappoint. I’m not with the Family Research Council or the Heritage Foundation. I’m just a person who thinks that both sides are crazy for different reasons.

I wrote all this because, Heron, we’re going to be in each other’s lives for a few weeks….maybe even longer if you’re really lucky….and we really should get to know each other. The real stuff, not the made-up stuff.

Let’s correct a few more things you said.

I was in your session, very good! I actually thought it was great and I even learned a thing or two…but I really struggled not to correct some of the things you said about the political right because some of the things you said were SO WRONG.

My plan was to accurately quote you while saying you emphasized the ethical use of the tools and flat told your audience not to dox people. I didn’t even remember the thing about pooping on someone’s doorstep, but thanks for sharing that info.

I don’t know why you would assume I would do anything other than quote you accurately, almost like you made assumptions without researching that I always come with receipts.

Well, you said many more interesting things than that from the main stage, which I will be reporting on. But honestly, I was more interested in the former president of Hampshire College agreeing with you that conservatives are “fuckwads” in the same breath as she denounced capitalism.

Heron, this is where you really hurt my feelings.

First off, I have no interested in canceling you. That makes no sense. I left the left because I DO NOT support cancel culture.

But more importantly, I made a special effort to explicitly follow the conference's rules to not give you guys any reason to kick me out. I sat there, took notes, didn’t bother anyone, didn’t even try to record you guys without your permission.

The rules ask that you don’t take photos of people without permission. So, I didn’t.

You said in your session that you record everyone, regardless of if it’s a two-party consent state or not. Maybe you wouldn’t have followed the rules, but I did.

Ethics after all…am I right?

I would never dox students. I didn’t even speak to the students. Students are victims of this ideology. It’s not their fault, and my interest isn’t in them anyway.

It’s in people like you that I’m interested in, adults who are spreading lies about people you haven’t even bothered to understand.

So I’ll make you this offer, Heron:

Come on my channel and have a conversation with me. Do your homework. Try to understand someone with a different perspective. Maybe I can ask you some questions in return. We can be adults…crazy idea, right?

I was with you guys all day, and you never knew I disagreed with you because I’m capable of being around people I disagree with and not hating them. There’s no need to be rude.

Can you rise to the same challenge for a conversation?

Let me know. You can DM me on Twitter.

I still haven’t blocked you.

Sincerely,

Karlyn

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