Many Such Takes: "As A Black Woman," Night Nurses, Hard Boiled Eggs, Ballerina Farm

The most unhinged discourse of the week, always free

Welcome to Many Such Takes! I stay up to date with the latest and most chaotic Twitter discourse so you don’t have to. If you see yourself featured here and you don’t like it, simply send me a Substack message and I will happily remove, no matter who you are or what you said. Right now I generally abide by censoring usernames if the person’s ideology is something I consider dangerous, or if the person is a small or small-ish account who said something controversial and who has the potential to be overrun with too many negative comments if not kept anonymous. Generally, I do not censor large accounts or accounts who said things that I don’t think will open them up to undue criticism. This week…

“As A Black Woman…”

Conservative commentator Joey Mannarino learned the hard way that one should always be sure you’re logged into your Black woman sockpuppet account before tweeting in character:

The woman he was pretending to be was Lavern Spicer, who appears to be a real person, Congressional candidate and “friends” with him. His defense was that he had forgotten to log out of his account when he once used her device:

Joey, expert on Black women, posts through it:

The bizarre thing about this scandal is that because Lavern is, in fact, a real person, and because Joey does, in fact, know her, we have to assume that the origin of the tweet isn’t that Joey catfished everyone as a fictional stereotype. Obviously, the slip-up is funny regardless, but I’ve boiled down the possibilities to:

1. Joey actually did use Lavern’s device at one point and forgot to log out (unlikely)

2. Lavern has asked Joey to ghost-tweet for her, and on this occasion he logged into the wrong account to do it.

We have to assume it’s #2, but that begs the question: why? And I think that can be answered by learning more about Byl Holte, Patti Labelle’s anti-woke Republican nephew. Stay with me:

You’ll see where I’m going with this in a second. Four years ago, Twitter was graced with this scandal, in which the whitest-looking guy ever tweeted that he was a gay black man:

Rebecca Jennings covered the details on Vox, and it’s unclear exactly what happened, but it sounds like Dean Browning had a burner account which he regularly used to pretend to be a Black Republican named “Dan Purdy.” On that particular day had forgotten to log out. Bafflingly, an actual Black gay man took ownership for the tweet, but many believed that he was merely a fall guy for Dean’s mistake. Anyway, that guy was Byl Hotle.

In Joey’s case, there doesn’t appear to be a completely fabricated sockpuppet (Dean’s sockpuppet account Dan Purdy was not associated with any real person’s photo or name.) So we can only assume that Lavern asked Joey to tweet “as her,” somehow believing that Joey Mannarino would be convincing as a Black woman. Damin Toell, a liberal Twitter user, postulated that Byl and Joey were somehow in cahoots:

I actually don’t think Byl is involved in this, but I do think this situation was Byl-adjacent. Except the Byl was Lavern, and Lavern is actually giving Joey carte blanche to run her account instead of merely covering for his trolling. Twitter user Jules Suzdaltsev discovered an old alternate account of Joey’s who admitted to running several Twitter accounts, including Lavern’s. Some folks accused him of also running the Byl Hotle account, but I didn’t see any compelling evidence of that.

Hard Boiled Eggs

It’s been a long time since we had food/ableism discourse (remember “Doordash is ableist” followed by “Disabled people can’t eat frozen food?” I do!) Well, luckily we got a sequel:

This isn’t the first time this basic conversation has come up—someone thinks that pre-prepared foods in the grocery store are for lazy oafs, someone else insists they’re for disabled people…rinse and repeat. It’s almost boring at this point, but I feel compelled to include it.

Anyway, a lot of the commenters weren’t buying that disabled people were the target demographic for pre-peeled hard boiled eggs:

Whoever is buying these, I don’t really care. Even if it’s just lazy people. It’s OK to be lazy! Also, this person isn’t exactly wrong…

Chappell Roan and Garlic Bread

A Twitter user posted a sign in Portland advertising a “Chappell Roan and Garlic Bread” event which unsurprisingly does not actually feature the real Chappell Roan, but more maddeningly, requires people to bring their own garlic bread. In addition, masks are required, which beg the question: how will the garlic bread be eaten?

The poster kicked off a bunch of tweets about how quintessentially Portland such an event is, and the unsettling combination of masking and eating garlic bread.

Night Nurses on Right-Wing Twitter

I love this discourse because it finally answered one of my age-old questions: is it really “trad” to have an isolated new mother do 24/7 baby care? For a long time, I’ve been irked by right-wing, so-called “RETVRN” accounts insisting that women should have ten children, and in the same vein put on their sensitive Portland leftist hat and claim that any child who isn’t catered to immediately, by his or her mother, will develop lifelong trauma.

Well, Veronica, aka celestialbe1ng, who I’ve previously featured for her take about scented body spray causing infertility. She’s best known for her content about nutrition, most of which is a bit questionable for the “follow the science” crowd and hinges on some of the classic right-wing superfoods, like meat, raw milk, and anything endorsed by Ray Peat.

To her credit, she isn’t afraid to admit when her health isn’t perfect, as she did the other day when she mentioned how hard it is to run on four hours of sleep:

Right-wing Twitter doesn’t like weakness, even something as typical as not being able to run on four hours of sleep. She got lightly bullied for not being able to man up and power through (I thought you guys wanted women to be feminine! What’s more feminine than wilting delicately?!)

As part of a conversation that her initial sleep deprivation thread started, she waded into slightly different waters and shocked her audience by declaring she would only have children if she had the resources to hire a night nurse, due to the effects that sleep deprivation has on her:

She picked the wrong audience for that, as most people who follow her are right-wing and specifically the type who believe the main purpose of motherhood is constant sacrifice and martyrship, the same folks who believe that it’s abuse to put your baby in a bassinet instead of your own bed.

Veronica clarified a few things: she still intended to breastfeed, but she intended to use pumped milk for the night nurse’s duties. She also did not intend to employ a wet nurse, even though she brought them up in her original post. Some commenters pointed out that even if you are exclusively breastfeeding, and not pumping, a night nurse can be very helpful if their main job is to get the baby from the bassinet, change their diaper, and give the baby to mom so that mom can stay in bed and focus solely on the actual feeding.

Personally, I didn’t have a night nurse, but if I had the resources for one I might have been open to it that type of scenario. I did cherish the late nights with my babies, but there were a few nights where I really could have used a break, and I don’t think anything would be worse off now if I had more help back then.

Because this post was so big, it eventually broke containment and began reaching moms who are not frequent visitors to Right Wing Crunchy Twitter. This mom bumped her old post from earlier this year about the main flaw with modern attachment parenting narratives, which I think is spot on:

Ballerina Farm

This discourse took up so much space that it warranted its own Many Such Takes: Special Edition which you can find below:

JD Vance’s Couch Sex/Dolphin Porn

Best Tweets of the Week

• This Kamala Harris Law and Order spoof

• This information that I really did not need, but simultaneously need to show everyone: Elon Musk having a secret Twitter account where he pretends to be a toddler, and apparently being rebuffed by the “San Francisco furry community” in 2009?

• Some general funny tweets: