Many Such Takes: Spiking Cortisol, Anti-Italian Trans Cabal, No More Dates

The most unhinged discourse of the week, always free

Welcome to Many Such Takes! For those unfamiliar, this is a free weekly segment (I also do lots of other stuff!) For Many Such Takes, I stay up to date with the latest and most chaotic Twitter (and now BlueSky) 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.

For previous issues of Many Such Takes, see this tab on my main page.

For those of you who missed it, I released all my open surveys yesterday!

Spiking Cortisol

Earlier this week, I wrote about how many of today’s right-wing influencers just don’t have the juice. This is a separate observation from all the inherent political or moral disagreements I may have with such people. From a purely talent-oriented perspective, most of today’s right-wing influencers are forced to circle the drain, eventually bottoming out at “I love Hitler” to try to get attention. But there are a few—not many—who are able to produce content that is, if nothing else, unique to them. Anyway, one RW personality who actually does have the juice is Veronica. In this Many Such Takes extra special and extra long segment, you’re going to learn the backstory of this now-infamous tweet:

I may disagree with Veronica on 99% of things, but I do have to give her credit on carving out a niche for herself in the very crowded space of RW Twitter. Her main thing is wellness and nutrition—but before you roll your eyes about yet another based raw milk tradwife, that’s not her at all. In fact, she regularly talks about being over thirty and not having children yet, and argues with trads who insist women should only have kids in their early twenties. In Veronica’s world, nourishing your body and taking care of yourself is the #1 priority before you bring kids into the world, and she got into it with the trads a while ago (which I featured on Many Such Takes) because she said she would hire a night nurse if she had a baby, because sleep is paramount to her wellness regimen. This is an oversimplification, but Veronica likes things that make you feel good—eating yummy food, sunlight, and sleep. She hates caloric restriction, cold plunges, or anything else that feels vaguely monastic and punitive. She previously sparred with eating disorder Twitter over this, which I also featured in my 2024 roundup.

Another thing that’s important to her? The Ray Peat diet, which I’ll write about later in more detail, but one of the things that separates this loosely right-wing-coded diet from other stuff, like all the raw meat platters that look like they’re a pitbull’s last meal before euthanasisa, is the fact that sugar (yes, including regular white sugar) is treated as a superfood of sorts. Other OG superfoods for Veronica include freshly squeezed orange juice and gelatinous bone broth. *Joker voice* you wouldn’t get it.

Anyway, Veronica came under fire this week when she extolled the virtues of her diet and lifestyle and credited them for her exceptional beauty. Someone found before and after photos of her getting lip fillers on a plastic surgeon’s Instagram, and accused her of running a grift wherein the Peat diet is unfairly credited for the work of surgeons. Veronica admitted to having had lip fillers once in 2019, but insisted that she hasn’t had anything else done since then and that her beauty is all-natural. People weren’t buying it! (And by “people” I mean “people who bathe in beef tallow” because this content wasn’t reaching the feeds of normal people.)

Veronica fought back with an epic lore drop, in addition to the now-iconic accusation that her haters were “trying to spike her cortisol and make her less beautiful.” Side note, but I do love that RW Twitter is in a place where heroin, birth control, cocaine and SSRIs are all roughly equal in their toxicity.

Plenty of folks defended Veronica, while others said they had no problem with the lip fillers but thought it was odd that she was quicker to fess up to using heroin:

Veronica sums up the wackiness in a way that’s giving “He wanted us all to switch from Catholic to Jehovah.”

Clearly riding the wave of discourse, Veronica posted a video of herself eating ridiculously gelatinous broth, which she called “Botox and lip filler in a pot.”

I spent so long on this segment because we now have a new meme, courtesy of the whole drama:

Anti-Italian Trans Cabal

I have to admit, I’m not at all familiar with Christopher Rufo, so when I initially saw this tweet on my feed I assumed it was another very unhinged rant from some 45-follower crazy person and didn’t think much of it, until a friend sent it to me later and told me I needed to feature it in Many Such Takes.

While I’m probably butchering some of this because I found it very confusing, some of what Rufo unearthed includes a wacky private chat between two employees talking about hypothetically raising an intersex child with they/them pronouns, and an accusation from an NSA whistleblower that the NSA stopped reading our texts and started attending a nonstop parade of DEI trainings. They were doing full time DEI.

Sure, the Italianphobic trans cabal isn’t real, but it really says something about society that I thought it was:

Richard Hanania had a truly unique take: trans people are simply higher IQ than everyone else, and that’s why they might be overrepresented in this “NSA cabal.” So, *Chad voice* good.

No More Dates

I’ve been aware of the MGTOW (or “men going their own way”) people for a while—these are men who are so fed up with women’s bitchiness, demands and nonsense that they swear off women forever (women wanting nothing to do with them is, of course, not the reason.)

Well, this week we found out a new way that men are (kind of?) swearing off women—by swearing off dates, and limiting their encounters with women only to the ones who will agree to show up at their house to fuck them like some kind of Coochie Instacart. It all started with this great tweet. (Sorry it’s so long, it’s worth it.)

Basically, this guy doesn’t want relationships and he only wants sex, which he believes he should acquire immediately upon contacting someone. A woman realized he was probably just after sex, and didn’t have sex with him because she presumably didn’t want a casual hookup. His conclusion was that women are nefarious food-leeches and he should filter his love life to women willing to have sex with him immediately, without having hung out in person first. I mean, okay I guess? A lot of guys can’t even get dates, so this feels like A.) a made up story or B.) a “solution” that would only work for ultra-attractive men who don’t have to worry about this stuff anyway.

Obviously I’m biased because I don’t think society would be better off if every man’s sexual strategy was to have a body count in the hundreds (and at least as far as my surveys go, most men are looking for relationships anyway.) But I feel like this is only a “hack” if you’re the type of guy who a woman would want to do this for, and obviously that’s very few men. Of course, all of this commentary hinges on this story being true, so whatever.

What if we kissed…in Jay’s racially categorized fuck diary? ;)

Most of the comments focused on the faux pas of trying to sit next to a girl instead of opposite her.

Of course, we wind up at this argument, which I won’t get into because my latest survey is covering this…

To sum it up:

Funny Tweets/Other Happenings

• Obviously the impetus for this tweet isn’t funny, because it’s incredibly tragic that Michelle Trachtenberg died this week. However, I do have to include this tweet of a guy accusing spinach and cheese pasta of taking her out:

• Elon Musk going full divorced/deadbeat dad:

• Funny QT:

• Without context, gonna start using this one as an evergreen reply:

• Mario and Luigi:

In case you missed it…