Chapter 2: Get It Together: Troubling Tales from the Liberal Fringe

The BM Supporter

Emily is getting divorced. She’s also being sued by everyone in her entire family . . . except her brother.

“Do your lawyers know you’re doing this interview?” I ask her.

“No,” she says. “They don’t need to know everything.”

Her lawyers would beg to differ. Because once Emily starts talking, she doesn’t stop. And she doesn’t give a BLANK. A volcano of attitude, her personality erupts all over you. She’ll spill her guts. I’m shocked she hasn’t been cast somewhere on reality TV yet. “My energy is nervous energy,” she says. “Really, it is.”

Pretty, white, in her thirties, she’s been “a beauty and fashion publicist for, I don’t know, twelve, thirteen years.” Her main client is “Crackhead Barney.” I wasn’t familiar with her work, but Barney’s a black woman who dresses up and harasses conservatives. Here’s an example of her “work.” She films herself lying down in front of a group of pro-gun demonstrators, decked out in green face paint and a purple wig, moaning, “Hnnggghhh . . . shoot me with your load, baby.” “Despite the name, she’s not a crackhead,” Emily assures me. “She’s a performance artist. She’s wild. And she intimidates the right wing all day.”

Emily, who bills herself as an antiracist activist, doesn’t see the ridiculousness of a white woman promoting a black woman playing a crackhead. Emily is literally making money off fake black crackheads. “As a white privileged woman—I will say as well, very privileged, I grew up privileged . . . I never asked to be born, but I was born into a family, a conservative family, very, very conservative. This goes against anything that they would ever stand for.” There’s more than a little pride in her voice. “So we don’t talk anymore.”

On paper, Emily makes sense. “I married a finance guy. I did the whole white girl thing—the whole track that my dad had for me.” After that, she “did the whole stay-at-home mom thing for a few years” too. These “whole [X] things”—you know, the lifestyles lived by millions of Americans—are usually described alongside dismissive gestures and a knowing smirk, as if to say, I was young and naïve back then. Now I know better.

Emily’s sister is an influencer, she tells me. “So a huge part of that also contributes to why I’m doing what I’m doing. Because she gained all this notoriety in New York City for doing drugs. And she’s pretty, and she’s white, and she comes from a good family. She gets all this press. You would never see that with a black person, for instance. It’s pretty privilege. It’s white privilege.” I’m starting to get the sense that Emily’s antiracism has a lot more to do with hating her family than hating white supremacy. “The two of us started to beef online over Covid,” Emily says. “And again, she’s in the papers and in the New York Post, of course, all the time, who I protest actively. We go to Rupert Murdoch’s house, we’ve protested all over them, which is kind of fun.”

Emily and her sister were raised “in this stone, cold mansion—Tim Burton–style, with these stone walls and doors, and everything had these sharp corners,” she says. “It was really creepy. It was a Frank Lloyd Wright house. It was kind of like living in a prison, and if you spoke up about anything, [my dad] just would totally retaliate on you. So, he just never wanted us to have friends. We had these ridiculous curfews, couldn’t be on the phone, and it was just these rigid rules for no reason. But we knew our friends didn’t have those rules.”

You can start to see where the hatred for authority is coming from.

Emily’s parents were a trip too. Her dad was a psychiatrist; her mom was a psychotherapist. “Talk about privilege, we used to go on these five-star vacations to the Dominican Republic or wherever the hell . . . sponsored by Pfizer . . . and meanwhile, my dad’s just like . . . He’s a drug dealer. What’s the difference? He just has a degree from Duke.” She had sleeping problems when she was six, so her “dad sends me to a therapist, and they’re crushing up my pills in applesauce . . . as early as I can remember,” she says. “My dad wrote prescriptions for my sister for Adderall, and she became an Adderall head.” Emily was raised in a pharmacy. “We had drugs, the Prozac, the Viagra all over our house. Dad gave it to friends, family. At one point, he was Washington, DC’s top psychiatrist because he prescribed so many drugs.” Call it what you want, “the system,” “the man,” Emily felt oppressed. Her father “wasn’t big into females using their voice. So over the last two years, I’ve learned how to use my voice in different ways.”

Emily’s left-wing activism began as a revolt against her parents’ authority: “Growing up, my dad always told me how to not drive in black neighborhoods. He always wanted me to be two cars behind the car in front of me, so I had to have an exit strategy, if somebody came to rob me or beat me up. Did I really need to be afraid?” Later in life, she’d “bug out” when she drove through black neighborhoods.

When both of your parents are shrinks, everything looks like a disorder. “You couldn’t eat a waffle without them thinking that, ‘Oh, comfort food, you’re depressed, aren’t you?’ Or I would want to sleep in when I was a teenager, and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, you must be so depressed.’ No, I just want to sleep in. It was unbelievable. And they’re both narcissists to the full degree, so it was always about them. So, just pills, pills, pills and just diagnosing us with ‘this is what you have, this is what you have.’

“He did all kinds of crazy stuff,” Emily says of her dad. “Just anything to shut us up.” He “was also incredibly abusive, physically. Only with me. And I think a lot of that was because I had this voice. I had this lip. I mean, I couldn’t help myself. When something didn’t feel right, or he was doing something wrong, I had to call it out. . . . So I had two siblings, and I was always the one that got my ass kicked, always.” He “would beat the crap out of me. And a lot of it had to do with the anger he had towards my mom. But he would take it out on me because I was this very loud-mouth kid.”

One night almost turned deadly. “I picked up a knife, and I said, ‘If you come closer to me, I’m going to do something with this knife.’”

After the knife incident, Emily’s dad made a move. “I was kidnapped in the middle of the night and sent to this therapeutic boarding school in Utah called Cross Creek Manor, and it’s run by Mormons. They’re a for-profit institution, so your parents pay for you to go to these things. They pay people to kidnap you.” Apparently, “Paris Hilton did a documentary about this last year. It’s called This Is Paris, because Paris was also sent to one of these things. It’s to shut you up. It’s literally to shut you up.”

At the time Emily was sent away, she was fourteen. “I was a virgin, and I’d smoked pot a few times,” she says, and wasn’t suited for the “boarding-school-slash-jail run by Republicans.” You “literally don’t wear shoes. You don’t eat with silverware. You can’t watch TV. You don’t go outside. It’s a cult. They brainwash you. You’re completely, totally brainwashed. You have no contact with the outside world. They read your mail before it goes out. You have to do seminars and programs to get out. And the things they make you do—they make you beat towels to get anger out and scream. You would have to strip naked to prove your worth and your self-esteem. . . . You get thrown in isolation rooms. You’re strip-searched. It’s like jail, and I was only fourteen. I was pretty freaking innocent.” Emily says she felt abandoned and suffered from PTSD.

“I got pregnant when I was fifteen. First guy that I was with, boom. Got pregnant.” When Emily returned from Utah after a year, “my dad allowed me to hang out with one boy from my past—one,” Emily says. “And that’s the guy that I lost my virginity to and got pregnant with a few weeks later. Can’t make this shit up. He chose this person. In a way, it’s funny. Maybe my whole life has been like, how can I piss off my dad? Maybe that’s just kind of connected with me subconsciously because I didn’t really like this guy. He was just the only option.” Immediately, she was shipped off to another “lockup school” out of state, in Pennsylvania, all girls.

But not before she had an abortion. “My dad’s whole thing was trying to create these perfect little Republican conservative daughters,” she says. “But he was a hypocrite about it. My dad is the most pro-lifer you’ve ever met. But when it comes to his kids, no, he’s not. Oh, you’re going to get that abortion, you get that abortion, honey, and you’re going to keep quiet, right?”

Her mom—“a shopaholic,” Emily says—took her to get the abortion. On the way back from the abortion, her mom went shopping. “I remember going to Planned Parenthood, and when we were done, we walked out, and she saw a brand-new Nordstrom Rack that had just opened. And she couldn’t help herself, and had to take me shopping at Nordstrom Rack while I literally had a diaper on, I swear to God, because of the abortion. That’s just how her mind works. My mom just really always thought about herself.” Emily’s mom also “has diabetes and an eating disorder on top of it, so she would never eat. She would pass out in the middle of Nordstrom, just on a Tuesday, and you have to run to Starbucks and get her a sugar packet, rip it open, and down it. So, that happened after the abortion too, in Nordstrom Rack.”

It’s at this point that I ask Emily if I can option the rights to her life story. She laughs. But I’m serious. Pill-popping shopaholic mom passes out at Nordstrom Rack on the way back from taking her daughter to Planned Parenthood. Hollywood would gobble this up. Shame on me for thinking how profitable a dark comedy like this would be. Shame on me for casting Kristen Stewart as Emily. Shame on me for imagining a bidding war between directors Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers. Shame.

Emily went to the University of Maryland. “My dad was so disappointed. So disappointed. The goal was to get one of his kids at Duke. He’s a Blue Devil.” Emily, her sister, and her brother never made it to Duke. “Not even close. He also wanted us to be doctors. I could never amount to what he wanted me to be. It was impossible. So I majored in sociology and family studies, again, to my dad’s dismay.”

Where does Emily’s brother appear? “He’s out of all of this; he’s just kind of the third kid, and he just disappears.” Her brother is a teacher. Never amounted to what her father wanted. “My dad used to say, ‘Oh. If you had been a doctor like me, you could have gotten any woman you wanted.’ He would say stuff like that to my brother.” Reminder: the brother is the only family member not suing Emily.

Emily eventually married a guy who was the son her dad always wanted, the son he never had. “My brother ultimately just started to disappear, so when [my dad] met my ex, who loves sports, who loves college sports, oh my God, who’s in finance, who makes money, golfs, they became best friends.” Emily is perceptive enough to realize the obvious. “I married my dad, ultimately. I swore that I wasn’t, but I did.”

Emily’s ex didn’t have a ring. “He proposed with a Ring Pop.” How sweet. “I got married at City Hall. I was seven months pregnant. My dad convinced me to get married. I didn’t want to get married, and my dad convinced me because that’s just what you do, so that’s what I did. Then he gave me two hundred thousand dollars for a house in exchange in lieu of a wedding, so he would always use his money as a way to get me to do things, and it worked.

“Then I had a huge, swanky baby shower.”

“How swanky?” I wonder.

“At Lafayette in SoHo.” Swanky. “It was open bar, and we had everybody there.” Everybody.

The marriage fell apart. “He worked 24/7. We started to disconnect. He started to cheat over time.”

Now Emily’s getting a divorce—“which is really fun,” she tells me. Her father was dead set against it. “A lot of my divorce also had to do with the fact that my dad was going to lose my ex, right? So it’s selfish. It’s like it has nothing to do with his daughter. It has everything to do with the fact that he’s going to lose a friendship, and he doesn’t have that many friends.” And now “I ruined my dad’s life again.” That last sentence is delivered with a not-so-subtle hint of satisfaction.

The split sounds nasty. Divorcing her husband is how Emily got into activism. It began “when I hit my ex with a hairbrush,” she says nonchalantly. “The police came and told me to leave the home. Once again, that was never something I should have done. Had I known my rights, I never would’ve left the home.” But “I got slapped with an abandonment charge” because “I did what the police told me to do. So a huge part of my work now, when I’m policing the police, is exactly because of things like that.” Emily was a stay-at-home mom for five years. Now her children have been taken away from her. It’s difficult to pay for divorce attorneys. She’s not good with money. Her dad is suing her. And she missed an important court date. Still, Emily doesn’t dwell much on not seeing her kids, five and seven, which strikes me as odd.

The divorce began right around the time that George Floyd was killed, “so all of that generational trauma” from her conservative upbringing “just hit me like a ton of bricks. All the stuff with Trump just brought it up to the surface.” From there “I started getting into protesting. . . . I just found protests. And then I started to unlearn all the bad stuff that I was taught and how it impacted my life.” Emily is dismantling her white privilege, one BLM protest at a time.

“When I got to New York, everything was closed, and the only thing that was going on were protests. So I would just be walking around with my headphones on, and I would see this massive protest, and I just jumped right in. That’s when I started to find my voice. Then I’d find another one the next day, and another one, and another one. I mean, it’s literally what kept me sane.”

I asked Emily if Black Lives Matter was like a family.

“It was.” Emily purged (or was purged from) her real family and found her voice and a new family on the streets of social justice.

“Dad cut me out two years ago as soon as I started in Black Lives Matter. He thought that everything that I was doing online was completely crazy, called me mental. They’ve been telling me that I need to go into a mental institution. Again, my whole life. I’ve been in mental institutions, many of them. My dad sent me there. My sister too. That’s what they did to us when we were around. He would just send us to institutions all the time. I mean, we were tested as children by robotic clowns in mirrored rooms. I mean, we were just always being tested and thrown into labs. We were just like little guinea pigs at their disposal. I think it makes him look like some kind of ideal parent, like he’s trying to help his kids.”

Emily reveals she’s been institutionalized and medicated against her will her whole life. “You don’t get shoes. You don’t get silverware. You’re just medicated against your will. I couldn’t even tell you the drugs that I was taking. I had to take what was given to me. I mean, it was just a line. You just pound the pills back. I was robotic probably for a year. Most of my life. I was probably robotic because I was on all these pills.”

Now Emily is free. Oh yeah, and Emily’s also dating a black guy and living in the projects in the Bronx. Talk about a change of pace. “I started dating a guy from Black Lives Matter, and he just happened to live in the projects,” she says casually. It was “when I was divorcing—I had all this time on my hands.” (Hence the activism.) “I’ve never dated a black guy. I’ve only dated white guys because I was only allowed to date white guys. So it was very exciting for me that a black guy would be interested in some white girl.” When she moved from a wealthy neighborhood to the Bronx, Emily felt like she had to impress her new boyfriend: “I didn’t want to look like some snobby white girl. So it was like, I just started, over time, dressing down, wearing more sweatpants, no makeup. I didn’t want to stick out like a sore thumb . . . I didn’t want people to think that I was just this privileged girl.”

I have to ask. “Are you going to get married to this guy and have a baby?”

“I mean, my God.” Emily giggles. “Can you imagine?”

“That would be the ultimate revenge on your father.”

“Oh my God. You want to document it? You want to come along with me? I’ll bring you in the hospital room.” Hard no. But that’s Emily. Blurting out reproduction racial revenge fantasy film offers. Bravo’s Andy Cohen would kill for this. Real ex-housewives of the Bronx.

“Do you feel kind of guilty that you’re white?” I ask. Yes, she does. “I don’t speak Spanish. Every time I go into a store, and I can’t speak Spanish with that person, I feel like, ‘Emily, you’re in their neighborhood. Don’t gentrify the place.’” Emily the reluctant gentrifier. “Sometimes I don’t like being white. It’s funny you brought that up, just because I see my privilege all the time. In my building, the way people treat my boyfriend, for instance, they don’t let him in the building.” I have a feeling that people in Emily’s Bronx building don’t buzz her boyfriend in not because he’s black, but because he’s a stranger who doesn’t live in the building. But I don’t push.

Emily feels perfectly safe in the Bronx because she has white privilege. She pities the people who live there who don’t look like her. “You see what children have, most of the kids don’t even leave the house, like literally ever, because the parents are too afraid of their children getting shot.”

“Do you bring your children to the Bronx?” I ask. “No,” admits Emily. “Not yet.”

“So you’re worried about exposing them to violence?”

“Well, that’s kind of my point. There is no violence. I don’t know what the media is showcasing.” The Bronx has the highest crime rate in New York City.

“Emily,” I say, bewildered, “you said a lot of the people in this neighborhood are afraid to let their kids outside because it’s so dangerous.”

“Well, I think in their minds, that’s the idea, but I don’t actually see things happening. But I just know the kind of oppression that’s happening in the Bronx. When you walk around, there are no kids outside. There’s barely any women outside.” Emily doesn’t see the violence, or fear the violence; she just “knows” the “oppression.”

“I guess I can’t really speak to exactly why that’s happening”—that’s true—“but when I have talked to people, a lot of times it is they don’t want something happening to their child. I don’t feel like that when I’m in the Bronx personally, but I can’t speak to that because I’m not a black woman with a child. Would I have my kids outside? Yes, I would, in the Bronx. I would take them out there in a second. I mean, really would. I feel like I know my surroundings very well.”

The food sucks in the Bronx too. “When you go into a bodega, they don’t have fruit there for the children to eat. You go into a Bronx bodega, and it’s like brands you’ve never even heard of before. Little Debbie doesn’t exist in the Bronx. If you can find Little Debbie in a bodega in the Bronx, you are killing it, like for real. These are things that I pay so much attention to.”

Little Debbie is a processed food pastry brand featuring “honey buns” and “oatmeal cream pies,” with a borderline illegal amount of sugar and preservatives. Little Debbie makes you Big Debbie. The Bronx bodegas are doing a service by not stocking them.

“Emily,” I probe, “they don’t have fruit and vegetables in the Bronx?”

“I mean, there’s fruit stands and stuff. I actually did a TikTok on this.” Of course you did. “The oppression in the Bronx that I see, I don’t know how anybody could move up in life.” Somehow, J Lo found a way.

Emily is rattling off the kind of college-campus-style BLM activist lingo—“privilege,” “institutionalized racism,” “dismantling systems,” and so on—but it’s a second language. She’s like an American foreign exchange student in another country who’s amazed and delighted at how exotic and marvelously different it all is. “If anything, I found [the projects] to be more welcoming and warm than that in Manhattan,” she tells me. “To be honest, the stores there are full of so much magic, and they have things that you would never see anywhere else in the world—the African markets. Again, so I just got into it. I got into all the art and the people and the community service mutual aids. We would do mutual aids once a week. But in terms of police—the policing too, the way just the dirty cops that are in the Bronx, the way that they treat people in the Bronx. Just everything just opened my eyes.”

Emily’s an open book; politically speaking, she’s a radical, but it’s tough to shake the feeling that her radicalism isn’t a kind of prolonged teenage rebellion. Recently “I got arrested in an abortion protest, but I felt really proud of that,” she boasts. “I feel like I’m the Jane Fonda of protestors.”

She admits that protesting “saved” her. “I’m part of all the networks, so if we hear of a drag queen story hour protest, I’m going to go to that. We look out for flyers, and I support every single one that I can get to.” Protesting saved her from her ex-husband and her parents, it seems. “My dad is Trump,” she explains. Yup. That explains a lot.

Emily’s politics are a rejection of the cartoonish nightmare funhouse-mirror version of America, conservatism, patriotism, masculinity, whiteness—you name it—that she attributes to her father. They’re a rejection, in a fundamental sense, of the world she felt she had been expected to join. George Washington “never impressed me much,” she says. “Never.” (But she does “like Abe Lincoln,” she says. “Thumbs up.”)

She sees white supremacy as a kind of dark magic, hidden in every ligament and organ of American society. So you can see the appeal of the kind of activism that compels followers to “tear down” a broken system; that sees the kind of bourgeois, white-picket-fence, Wonder Bread suburban lifestyle that Emily grew up in as an insidious cover for evil structures of oppression and power; and that resents authority—particularly the forms of authority that employ the use of force, like cops. Above all else, Emily and her new friends do not like cops. Not one bit.

Oh, and white people. They don’t like white people. Which is funny, given the fact that, you know, Emily is white. But it was entirely reasonable for the activists to be hostile toward her at first due to the color of her skin. She nods gravely. “I was white. I was hated. People did not like me because I was white. That’s just the truth.” In the BLM movement, “I was one of the very few white people, and I just don’t think that they felt that trust with me because we were fighting against white people.”

We were fighting against white people. Whiteness, for Emily, is all-encompassing and omnipotent; it’s both a superpower and a kind of kryptonite. On the one hand, it allows Emily to go places and do things that she says black people can’t do: “Let me tell you something about my white privilege,” she says. “What I do to police is very different than what most people are doing. I know that my privilege is very real: the way I can go up to cops, in their face, and they don’t do anything to me—but if you’re a black person, they’ll brutalize them and arrest them.” At the same time, that privilege functions as a kind of disability—a lower place in the activist hierarchy that Emily, for some reason, seems to embrace. “I did find that as a white person in a black movement—in a black-led movement—that was where the education had to come in,” she says. “I really did need to learn how to be put in my place.”

“Are you going to teach your children about their white privilege?” I ask.

“Yes. Oh, one hundred percent.” No hesitation. “It just has to be part of their daily life.”

“So, do you think the United States is a racist country?”

“Yes, I do. Very. I think that we don’t know how racist we actually are. I really think that. It’s just so deeply embedded in our culture, what we do in terms of the education system with children. Weren’t we going to get rid of Columbus Day on the calendar, and turn it into Indigenous Peoples’ Day?” We did, I tell her. More than one hundred cities—and a number of states—have done just that. Emily pauses: “Oh, did they?”

“Emily, as an Italian, are you proud of Columbus?”

“No, because I think that he was a bad man that took credit for something that he didn’t do. Black people are the founders of this country, if you ask me. They’re the ones that built the railroads. They built all of the structures. They did the work. All the creativity, all the things that America was built on, started with black people, and white people just came along, took it, and called it their own.” I think the English, Scottish, Irish, Germans, Spanish, Chinese, and others may have “done the work” too. (Although white people “get some” credit for fighting a bitter, bloody civil war to free the slaves, she admits.)

Emily is surprised when I point out that black people in America have higher standards of living than black people in just about any other country in the world. “I didn’t know that actually, to be honest with you,” she says. “Again, making mistakes is part of learning, right?”

Emily is a recent convert to the left-wing religion; she has all the theological zeal but stumbles at times in rehearsing the dogmas. But her lack of concrete knowledge is, in and of itself, a testament to the absurdity of the ideology. She is adamant that the New York City Police Department, for example, is not a majority-minority police force. (Fact check: it is.) “I just looked at the stats on this.” She nods knowingly. “They’re not. It’s white males still dominate the police force. I just did something on this.” My assistant pulls up the demographic statistics: 42 percent white, 31 percent Hispanic, 16 percent black, 10 percent Asian. Emily pauses. “Really? Forty-two percent is white?” Yep. “That’s interesting. I seem to see a lot of, I don’t know. I’ll look at that afterwards because, yeah.”

I ask about New York City’s black Democrat mayor. “Eric Adams, African American mayor. Is Eric Adams upholding white supremacy?”

“He’s an ex-cop, so yeah,” she responds. “Like, not all cops are bad, right? But they’re bad because they’re part of a racist system, right? That’s how I go about it, right?” Emily seems to be softening, almost feeling out whether it’s okay to not hate all cops. This is progress (kinda). “I think I’m just in a place in my life where I’m angry at the white man. But see, I still love. It’s not every white man. It’s not. It’s just if they fall in a certain category, and I’m working on that, really, I am. I think I do have too much hatred in my heart. And I’m not a hateful person. I’m really not. Just in the moment.”

We’ve had a breakthrough. Emily is realizing that her political ideology could be based on the emotional trauma she’s working through.

“Well, if I was growing up in the hood, I already know for a fact that I would’ve become a gang member. Why do I know this? Because all of these people who become gang members are the lost children. They’re all kids. All of these kids that are shooting people in the Bronx are exactly what I just told you. They’re kids. They have no parents. They find community within each other. They’re like the Lost Boys.”

Emily gets deep.

“I’ve always felt like kind of a lost child, which is why I connect, I think, with the LGBTQ community so much because I just was never really accepted for who I was. I always had to be somebody else in order to make my family happy. So I never really got that full authentic childhood experience that I think a lot of other kids did because I was living in survival mode and constantly trying to people-please and make my parents happy and fix things.”

“Do white people get any credit?” I ask.

“We do,” she says, sighing. “We get some. We do. I’m not, I don’t want to like, sort of what I talk about . . .” She gets quiet for the first time. “But I think you’re, yeah, you’re right. And I’m going to look into that too, and do more research. I think what I’m saying is a little bit broad.”

It’s hard not to sympathize with Emily. Her life is a mess. She’s lost her kids and her husband, and her father just served her papers. “They hired a private detective and found me. I don’t know, this shit is crazy, so it’s been very hard to just Zen out. But I go to meditation classes and sound baths and things like that. I’ve gonged. I’ve gonged energy out. I do it.”

I tell Emily what I do to relax (walking, stretching, reading). We bond.

“So why don’t you run for president?” she asks. “I would potentially be open to voting for you.”

“You’re going to vote for a white male?”

“Yeah. No, listen, that’s what I’m trying to put on the table. I don’t hate all white males. You’ve changed my perspective today. I was thinking maybe I was going to be grilled. I’ve watched your stuff. I don’t actively watch Fox News, but I’ve watched your segments before. I don’t know. You all can get hard over there.”

We can get real hard. She’s right. But I’m listening now, and it’s starting to make sense.