The Worst People in the World, Part One: Rachel Haywire, the Cultural Futurist

This impresari-ish stole 30 years of my work, and artists live in a Hell made by (redacted) like her. I gave her a second chance, though. Here's how that's been going.

Going home can be depressing. Especially if you’ve suffered a lot. But feel free to keep on suffering: The end of your attention span for it might be around the next corner.

Not to make life sound like a giant casino or anything.

So I just completed an arduous journey—from Europe to Central Wisconsin, which is not serviced by any public transit whatsoever. Physically, I was kind of ashamed by how hard and dirty it/I was. I had no idea I grew up quite so far from civilization; I was used to freezing and being buried. But the emotional journey was what really hit my G-spot.

I hate cars, although I love my brother-in-law who led the five-hour drive from the major airport in Chicago to the American Outback, almost as much as I love my sister who made him do it.

I cried about seven gallons. And I’m glad.

I’ve whined a lot about my backwoods background, and how bewildering it is to fight your way up when you don’t even know how low down you are. But sometimes, the harder it is to go home, and the more perspective you have on where you came from, the more likely you are to experience a… quantum leap in groundedness, I guess?

I hadn’t seen most of my family since I had to fly from Los Angeles to Chicago to give evidence in my rape case (I was not the perpetrator). That was more than half a decade ago, now. My adventures preceding and following that trip were hallucinatory. It ain’t really slowed down as much as I hoped it eventually would. And after this latest journey, I feel like fucking Odysseus.

It feels great. But it’s telling me to get the rotten people out of my life. Forever. With as much verbal violence as it takes. So, buckle in!

Here’s one of the things I have learned on my strange voyages:

“Writers” suck. And people don’t change. It doesn’t matter how many chances you give them.

I mean, I’m trying to change, but then again I enjoy an unusual degree of neuroplasticity—unlike a lot of the boring, greedy cretins here in wannabe-writerland, who would probably use the term “degree of crazy” instead, because cretins do as cretins will.

How greedy? Oh, “steal your whole life’s work” greedy. And “then come back to see if there’s anything left to steal” greedy.

Oh yeah, HERE’S a real-life, gritty story for ya. I mean it when I said it: BUCKLE IN! This is gonna be almost a fraction as wild as it was to live through.

So maybe I’m socially stupid. Yes, I should have never dealt with this person once. Much less twice. I realize my life is beginning to resemble some kind of retarded mini heat-death-ofd-the-universe cycle, expanding and contracting to suck in and expel this bitch, like I am a brainless oyster and she is the sand I keep getting up my snootch.

But I did teach myself to read at 18 months, couldn’t stop, and when I figured out shortly thereafter that human beings are the things that write storybooks, that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.

That’s a real vocation, folks.

A writing vocation looks like:

“I kept writing after work while I was stuck washing dishes because I didn’t know how to ask for a better job for seven years.”

Behold, exhibit A. Now, exhibit B.: No vocation outside of hipster shit looks like:

“I wanna get laid above my league while eating everything I want,” or “I have power fantasies,” or “That looks cool,” or “I wanna feel important” (feeling needed is a legit human need—but wanting to increase your importance is a necessary but not even close to sufficient condition for a vocation).

A writing vocation is certainly not “I want easy money”—money is only easy for shit writers, and is that how you want to spend your one and only life?, or … whatever motivates all the mutually backslapping, boring human cholesterol on here.

But I’ve gotten mixed up with assholes of all the above stripes. Most of all, Rachel Haywire of the Cultural Futurist.

You may know Rachel now as a cringeposter, rambling about stolen ideas she only half-understands. She has also been my coworker on the webzine Trigger Warning, which she used to crystallize the 30 years of intangible capital I had been building as a writer, cash it in, and then steal the cash for herself.

Because I am a dumbass, we recently worked together as well as on the podcast Meltdown Hour, which was her way of “re-befriending” me in the hopes of getting me to be silent about the past.

Now, she has been a pretty spectacular specimen of the genre, but I run into less creative, persistent, and energetic versions of her on a near-daily basis in the sludge of what’s become a writing game.

Alas, it’s probably because those spurious “vocations” involving an overwhelming greed for prestige and money are way, way, way, way waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more common than having any pressing need to really say any particular thing, much less to “master storytelling” (a phrase which has been used in all the sleaziest possible ways, but mastery should still be a goal, eh?).

So there are a lot more of them than there are of us. And they’re as competent socially as they are incompetent at writing dialogue.

(Taking a moment to drink in how strange that is.)

Which would be fine by me; I’m not mad about incompetent competition. Or at least I wasn’t, till everything became about clicks and the lowest common denominator.

If you’re not stupid, I need not struggle to explain to you that the Internet runs on the lowest common denominator, or LCD. An IQ of 100 isn’t that high, and to paraphrase Carlin, half of them are even dumber than that.

So 3/4 of the population is ineligible to even CONSIDER “liking” any statement on the Internet whose comprehension requires anything approaching near-full understanding of…. anything.

So a lot of people seem to believe that, to succeed in writing, or what ought to be a smart-person vocation—I mean, we do want to reach for the stars and not the gutter, right?—you need to either be stupid and dishonest, or you need to clump together with cronies. As long as some used car saleswoman at the NYT or whatever shit-sheet is hip in your social milieu can be cajoled into calling your book good, no matter how bad it is, the clones will mouth it and convince themselves it’s good, because they’re afraid to look stupid.

Guess they better hope I don’t see ‘em.

Thanks to my Aspergers, which went undiagnosed till the third or fourth time I was raped, thanks everyone, my experience in clumping together with cronies has been a fucking nightmare. Most recently a “friend” stole a character from one of my books that was based on my dead best friend. Kinda the lowest of the low, but he feels victimized because it made me angry.

Also victimized because I’m still angry is Rachel Haywire, who stole 20 grand in money Peter Thiel and my friends had given to our mutual website project on the strength of my work.

Rachel still justifies walking out with all the project money based on the fact that she started the site, and her amazing fund-raising social skills (although she also claims she has undiagnosed autism, like everyone lately who wants to get away with some shit; everything seems to be overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed, and I think most of the slack is NPD)—never mind that her site went nowhere till I came on board.

See, you probably haven’t heard of me now, largely because of what she did to me.

Although admittedly I became silent for a few years after my most spectacular sexual assault rendered me a homeless drifter, catching typhus in a shithole in California, because the City of Chicago cares more about criminals than victims. Another wild story.

But I was a pretty big deal back then. You’ve heard of all the new lit on the right that’s been coming out since Trump got reelected? Well, I’m politically homeless, so they have piggishly shoved me aside from that feeding frenzy, but I made it possible:

When I met Rachel Haywire I had just spent a year writing a literary column for the then-leading alt-whatever publication Taki’s Magazine, where I was also editor. Before that, when Gen X was still allowed in the mainstream media, I worked for the Chicago Reader for five years, as a writer and editor, and a freelancer for a few more years after that; you can find me all over their archives.

But the real space I opened up for free, non-leftist speech was in literature.

I had a few years back published NVSQVAM, the first men’s rights novel (most reviewers thought I was a man using a pen name). The best friend I had just mentioned had just died, however, and my undiagnosery and grief landed me in a mental institution, where Rachel found her new victim.

She found me in my worst distress, as these people do; she messaged me and told me I should help her with her website, and we would make money! Split it fifty-fifty! Girls together! Yeah! Fifty-fifty! Oh boy! I should have known it was a bad sign that she immediately started talking about money!

I no longer have access to the stats, but the site’s views went up by multiple thousand-percents when I began work. I want to say nine thousand? It was ridiculous. Her site went from a fart to a tornado under my care.

Yet somehow Rachel credited all the increase to herself, as a justification for stealing the donations to the site. She ran off with everything, although she now claims she gave most of it to a web designer—I am not sure. I don’t really care what she did with the money after she stole it. She hoarded and controlled every last cent of all my crystallized intangible capital.

Well, outside the pittance she finally paid me to split with my writers, so I would be the bad guy if they got less than we had agreed, so I had to starve—and after six months of asking her, she finally gave me a receipt (below) for the supposed web designer, which looks fake. I don’t know what she REALLY did with the money, not to mention the five grand that is still unaccounted for, although I have my rather sournois guesses. But apparently she spent all the money for web design on a site whose writers she had all chased away so she could have exclusive rights to said pot of money. (Don’t ask me; I have asked her to explain this a thousand times, and she blames a “financial advisor.”)

In finally sending me the receipts, she giggles now, and says to me, gee, we made some really bad decisions back then, tee hee!

I told her: YOU made those dumb decisions, you disgusting pig. You blocked me out from making any decisions.

THE DOCUMENT FROM HELL. This is the invoice she finally dug up, after six months of asking, to prove that she overpaid a web developer with the money she stole from me. Not sure if it’s real, but it sure does make me fucking angry. Look what this guy got: My life’s work in 130 hours! I’m going to vomit.

She created an LLC behind my back, then starved me out—working me sunup to sundown, leaving me without enough “free” time to do work that would actually pay my rent, so that she could take “mental health time” and still have plenty of time for leisure left over, as well as her own hypnotherapy (uh huh) practice. I think all she did for that site was scream at me and collmect the money, although she martyred herself over every email she was forced to exhaustingly type.

I still have the emails, if you want receipts; these days she complains that when we try to negotiate our “relationship” (as she hasn’t changed, it’s still a narcissist-sucker relationship, which is why I gotta go), I am mean to her about the way that she robbed me of my very life. She won’t give me a decent explanation for why, much less recompense.

But she has no room to complain, even about my reactions to her theft, without hypocrisy:

When when we were supposedly working together in the first bloom of friendship, she yelled and snarled at me constantly, as a means of control; I should have never let her know I was screamed at every day as a child. She was very good, I confess, at grinding me down with her constant ADHD decision changes (I DO believe her claim she has THAT), as well as deliberate manipulations to keep me busy. Deciding we should do a fiction issue, making me do it, then changing her mind. Making me edit her friends’ terrible writing because she wanted to trade publication next to my name for something she wanted from another crony.

She does have talent.

She’ll say I left voluntarily. After she took control of the finances, starved me, made me have sex with a guy to pay for stuff she wanted, created the LLC behind my back, hid the donor list, and caused me to fall behind on my rent because she wouldn’t cough up any of the intangible capital she had torn from me, crystallized, and monetized.

I lost a lifetime’s worth of slowly, painstakingly collected fans because she took their small donations and filched those too, leaving everyone with nothing.

Well, except her web developer, to whom she paid about 400 dollars an hour. I am going to be sick.

She doled out 1300 to me for my six months of work. I had to split that with my writers.

Making me choose between paying my writers and paying myself—that was, I hate to use this cornball word, but it’s the only one that fits: Demonic. (Although not as demonic as the time she pimped me on a road trip, after driving blasted on Xanax without offering me any.)

But generally her techniques of theft involved tyranically starving me out so she could get every cent. I told her recently, in a last-ditch effort to get her to understand the scale of what she did to my poor little life: “I recall, I had to leave because you A. Stole the money and created an LLC, B. Stole the money and refused to even let me know Peter Thiel was the donor, or let me even have any contact with the money you took for my work, and B. Caused me to almost lose my apartment because your greedy ass refused to pay me for my work and refused to allow me to have any time to do work for money for myself.”

Yes, Peter Thiel was interested in my work—that’s how big of a deal I was before this normie bitch in Hot Topic exploited me.

When I joined, he threw in some Thiel-bucks based on the strength of my work and reputation; Rachel did not tell me this at the time; she kept the name of the donor secret from me and claimed it was her personal friend, so all that money should be under her control.

She also ran off with many small donations from my fans and friends, who naturally turned on me and abandoned me when she stole from them.

There are more harrowing particulars, and I will cough some up if you are interested, but that’s the digest on the new info I’ve gotten recently from her old crimes. I had already written the first men’s rights novel, and the second; however, when Rachel ran away with the entire kitty, my entire lifelong labor was crushed under the weight of her greedy, manipulative deception.

WHY DID I GIVE HER A SECOND CHANCE THIS YEAR?

Well, it’s the mandatory cronyism. I have only just recovered from what she did, as well as the string of sexual assaults and homelessness that followed.

I have a lot of work to get out there. I have grandiose fictional ideas. But I was friendless, after she ripped off all my friends. This is one of the reasons I need to forcefully eject people like Rachel from my life again: This anger is distracting me from my work, and her further manipulations and disappointments continue to re-traumatize me, especially since she insists on wanting to talk things out like girlfriends.

DO YOUR GIRLFRIENDS NORMALLY CRYSTALLIZE ALL OF YOUR INTANGIBLE CAPITAL AND THEN STEAL THAT AND STEAL FROM YOUR FRIENDS AS WELL?

God damn, I am way too angry.

I have no outlet and few decent allies, except the aforementioned and a few new ones—almost all of them with Aspergers, because I am exhausted by everyone’s compulsive lies. I am not one of your social pigs.

So, when Rachel approached me for another mutual project this summer, a podcast, I thought, sure. People can change. Sure. She seems sincere. Duuuuuuuuuuuuuh. Also, I want to keep speaking English so I don’t sound too pretentious and put-on when I start stumbling over words in my native langauge. Also, I really like doing podcasts, but they’re so far out of fashion nobody wants to do them… And we did have fun conversations; this could be fun!

Of course, HER motives were slowly revealed to be: 1. Get another pot of money out of me, and 2. Manage my righteous anger so she can build a new World of Scams on Substack. She had left me to rot in the obscurity she created for years, but when I started building myself up again here, she noticed, and decided the best way to keep me silent would be to keep me close…

GOD this is tiresome to talk about. See, I just want to be writing fiction. But there’s no point if you aren’t heard. And there’s no being heard if I don’t deal with the worst pigs on the planet. And there’s also no point to life if you have to deal with the worst pigs on the planet.

Don’t fucking tell me what a great time this is to be alive.

Well, the talking dogs really are an honor, but that’s a whole different rabbit hole.

So anyway, fast-forward to exactly what you would expect, in our glorious reunion: Drama drama drama. We recorded only four podcast episodes, because when it turned out this project wasn’t instantly gonna cough up money again, Rachel had to take a long mental-health break between each one, instead of doing the long, hard, slow work that I did for the first forty years of my life to build up what she stole and frittered away.

I think she thought I was a renewably magical sprite who could instantly create her a bag of money every time she showed up to steal it. She was visibly disappointed when the mere announcement of our first episode didn’t result in my receiving more and more bags of money for her to steal. She even came close to admitting it at one point, when she said: “I may have slightly miscalculated.”

THAT FIRST BAG OF MONEY YOU STOLE WAS BOUGHT WITH WORK, SKILL, PATIENCE, AND SEVERAL DECADES OF MY LIFE, BITCH.

I COULD ONLY DO THAT TRICK ONCE. YOU TOOK THE GOLDEN GOOSE AND SLIT ITS GODDAMN THROAT.

We lamely recorded another couple of episodes, but they’re always held up by her vain panics over whether her voice sounds good. (She thinks the reason people don’t like her is her vocal fry.)

She clearly has not got the work ethic to help me replace what she destroyed. Although she is completely capable of making money for herself with the same swinish manipulation she’s used on me. Despite her continual whining about how she is “living in squalor,” she is making a pretty penny off ya kind folks here on Substack, doing absolutely nothing but “salon” and collect other people’s ideas.

If you give her money, I guarantee she is laughing at you behind your back, the way she laughed at me for giving her my talent and my time—she has plenty of deluded patrons for some reason, because she’s slick. So before you laugh at me, look at her subscribers list.

But, I mean, stupidly, for a little while, I was excited again. We were going to do it together, yay! She was going to help me rebuild my career she destroyed, yay!

This, she thought she could accomplish by having me read at a salon of hers for free. No, seriously, she paid me back for 30 years of work by having me read at a salon of hers for free. (SHE got paid, people never change.)

But, much worse for my “comeback” than simply asking me to read for free while she got paid, she insulted me deliberately by listing me below herself, and below several people who haven’t even produced a book of fiction (although they may have won a small attention lottery, which is why Rachel is trying to curry favor).

Now, this tactic is designed to make me look dumb if I complain about it. The order of readers on a flyer normally wouldn’t bother me. But she is so concerned with status, that nope.

I have Aspergers, not retardation, Rachel. Or obvious NPD like you.

This old, 40-year-old woman is STILL acting like a cross between an Onlyfans model and power hungry high school Plastic or Heather: jockeying, cooing, bitching, manipulating, and wringing the most possible benefit for herself out of everyone else while convincing herself that she is a good person. There is no chance this was not meant to get herself points, and points with the others, at my expense.

“Making it up to me” by pushing me down for her benefit. And then patting herself on the back for “not being mean to me” when I ask her, hey, thief, what are you gonna do about what you stole? Here’s the last message I got from her; I was very frustrated with her, as usual, so she decided to hide offline some more after dropping some platitudes:

Well, she also, I have to admit, listened to a terrible song I recorded and told me I have a wonderful voice, which I do not. I am not deaf. I can hear that I cannot sing. And yet she tried to convince me I could replace the career that I painstakingly built by hard work over decades with a fake singing resume she wrote for me.

No; seriously. She wrote a whole resume claiming I had done singing gigs all over the back forty, and was hurt when I didn’t like it. I do music for fun. I can’t fucking sing.

In an email titled “Hope this helps.”I guess this is how this kind of ho gets jobs, but I can’t keep a straight face while lying this egregiously. Or stripping. I have no idea if the two are related.

But that doesn’t matter to this kind of “artist,” whether you have earned something or not, whether you have a talent, whether you have cultivated it…. No; she thought she could replace the work I had done from the age of eight to the age of forty with hype, lies, and scammery. And she was HURT when I pointed out how crazy this is.

No wonder she took all my work, shoved me out of the company, and stole all the profits: She thinks lies are more valuable than hard work.

And perhaps, in your diseased world, she is correct, in a way.

Like most people who suffer from NPD and claim they suffer from ASD—I tried so hard to get her to listen to Sam Vaknin, but vampires can’t see in a mirror—this thief has never had an original idea or created anything of interest in her entire life.

And yet, she has twenty times the subs on here that I do.

That almost physically hurts me to admit, because people have put so much of their respect for others in the judgment of the lowest common denominator.

Think about what is wrong here.

She’s a thief and has managed me with condescending platitudes for the past few months, congratulating herself for not being mean to me when I ask her what she plans to do to fix what she broke. Yes, I use a lot of swear words at her; she’ll try to scandalize that, while playing up the “elderly friend” she’s supposedly helping right now because she’s such a great person—god help that poor old man she’s “helping,” although I cannot help but wonder why she’s spending all this time trying to fix someone else’s life when it’s mine she ruined. But swear words are what real people say when you ignore what we tried to say nicely.

I have made an honest effort for months and months. Trying to get through to her. She refuses to understand what she’s done. I even tried “Fucking fix this” a couple of times, because why not? She wouldn’t if she could, but you never get what you don’t ask for.

She should have never come out of the woodwork again and bothered me. Treated me like my kindness was foolishness again; wasted my percious time. I had almost forgotten why I wound up down here. But the minute she saw me getting some traction on Substack, she had to try to manage me, just in case I came back enough to harm her. I don’t normally have the emotional endurance to revive a grudge this old, no matter how horrific the harm done to me. I wouldn’t have even looked her up.

But she just had to fucking come back and kick the bear.

Nobody ever changes.

Her idea of “helping me make a comeback” was to put me in a private, online, paywalled Substack fiction salon, as an unpaid reader—a salon RACHEL GOT PAID FOR, and in which—I can’t make this up—SHE LISTED HERSELF ABOVE ME.

She’s never written any fiction in her life. Well, except for everything she types. OK…nothing she has presented as fiction.

To clarify, I don’t resent the other writers, especially since she’s probably grooming them to exploit them, and usually I would never resent a thing like this, the order on a fucking flyer—but I know exactly how status-conscious Rachel is, and I know exactly what she was thinking with each of these choices.

She was also thinking it would seem too ridiculous for me to complain about. Too small. And yet she has done these small things thousands of times in our new “partnership.” Not once was she thinking “help Ann recoup the decades I stole from her,” I can tell you that. When she made that flyer, we had just had a seemingly productive discussion over Skype, unrecorded of course—that’s how scammers work; don’t ever talk to someone who insists on unrecorded vocal communication rather than text—during which she thought she had placated me. So she could move on to trying to squeeze whatever she could out of the next person.

And yet she still has more followers here than I do.

“And yet,” Ann? Could you quit being naive?

We’re all shitting into a broken toilet, and nobody wants to plunge it.

She has also engaged in a constant stream of what I call “funnel plagiarism,” of which you have almost certainly been a victim, Substack hopeful.

Funnel plagiarism, which is incidentally what all of my better-platformed “friends” have done to me since Rachel’s theft ruined my momentum and good name, is the lifeblood of social media. It consists of larger accounts swiping from smaller accounts without attribution. It can be a friendly crime or a stranger crime. And everyone commits it in small ways unintentionally from time to time; you can’t help but be influenced by what you read and hear.

That’s a great excuse to use it as a shortcut to stay above people who have more and better original ideas than you do. In fact, it has become a way for people who are not creative thinkers in the slightest to pose as and overtake us fools who spend our time actually creating rather than strategizing to be a pointless chunk of human cholesterol.

Either way, funnel plagiarism is how large accounts keep small accounts small: By stopping them from getting reach by taking their best ideas without retweeting them, turning them into what looks like an original post, and then reaping the benefits for themselves. They “funnel” everyone else’s ideas into their own obese hoard of influence.

If I had kept the influence I had before, which Rachel stole, I might have been able to avoid this sucking vortex of no momentum. But she doesn’t understand what she’s done.

As a skillful attention whore, Rachel has no such problem: she plays plagiarism funnel to her talented writer friends all day every day. She’s been sucking down my political ideas and repackaging them as her own, then trying to have “girl talks” so she can actually publish my ideas in some demented, fragmented form before I do.

This is just the “friends” version: They converse with you, you think they’re interested in your ideas, they might even ask you to pitch to their publication—and then they rephrase your idea, because that’s apparently all it takes to avoid plagiarism now—and to your horror, you find your great new idea on their website, or your character in their book.

Then there’s the stranger, social-media version, wherein a professional atttention whore quietly, impersonally steals your ideas from your feed, without a like or a retweet. I’m pretty sure you have all been the victim of this, whether you know it or not. They don’t tend to pluck gems from the same person all the time; arrr matey, there’s a whole sea of foolish thinkers, just pumping our ideas into the atmosphere, hoping some of the credit will accrue to us rather than to the funnel rats and tunnel spiders.

You think that’s not OK? Then imagine someone stealing DECADES of your life this way. Then offering to help. Causing you more harm. Because all they wanted was more money, and to manage you into silence despite their crimes. And giving you platitudes before brushing off your concerns.

I’ve been the victim of so much funnel plagiarism that in order to reduce these distractions, I am moving towards using a pen name for much of my fiction in the future.

It will have to be a male pen name, because of my typical subject matter; sure, femoids have an advantage in normal publishing, but not those of us who tried to help men escape the worst excesses of feminism only to get raped by two different flavors of pig.

Allegedly. It’s a long story.

Not to mention the fact that the men’s rights and free speech literary spaces I created have been closed off to femoids, particularly those of us who aren’t explicitly and standardly vanilla right-wing, an irony which is not lost on me; I have mommy issues and complain about the still-grotesque excesses of feminism, but let’s not forget men are basically the same monster. Men and women are biologically different, but they are all aggressive, opportunistic, repulsive apes; and passive aggression is the worst kind.

But mostly, my interactions with Rachel and my interactions with the literary sphere I created have both taught me the same lesson: That no good deed goes unpunished.

Which, I suppose, also applies to the deed of having a brilliant thought.

Guess I sha’n’t be good anymore. Not in my own guise. I sha’n’t be female, anyway, because if the universe has a plan for me, it seems to be in an experiment to find out just how much irony poisoning is fatal.

Bye, Rachel. I gave you every fucking chance in the world. But you’re a spoiled brat, and you seem to be incurable.

Just like the Internet.

Yes; I realize my life is beginning to resemble an ouroboros of getting rid of this bitch with a denouncement, only to take her back again like my cheating wife.

Well, honey, this time your thieving cheating ass needs to go for good.

She tells me she’s poor and sick now. I don’t know whether to believe her. But hey, I’ve survived being poor and sick, and being kicked in the ribs by this pig to boot.

Get a job.

Wash a dish.

Start where I began, you mindless upper-middle-class bitch, and THEN tell me you don’t understand what you destroyed.