(Un)Dead inside, Berserker on the outside

Happy pride month to all my rainbow friends (and rainbow-adjacent pals) 🤩🏳️‍🌈

On April 14, 2025, Dan Berulis, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), filed a Congressional whistleblower complaint with an extraordinary and urgent claim: The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had seemingly compromised the agency’s data and appeared to be exfiltrating it out of the NLRB entirely. Additionally, Berulis claimed that mere minutes after DOGE members had accessed the agency’s data, there appeared to be login attempts from an IP address in Russia. At the time, DOGE teams, orchestrated by billionaire Elon Musk, were sweeping across government, firing federal workers and accessing sensitive data and technical systems with no oversight and little transparency. The following day, Berulis went public in an NPR article with his name and claims. In it, he claimed that in the lead-up to his Congressional disclosure, a threatening note had been taped to his door, including photos of him walking his dog that appeared to have been taken by a drone. Berulis was already scared that speaking out had made him a target. In a new defamation lawsuit, filed by Berulis in a DC court on April 17 and made public this week, Berulis alleges that Musk himself made him a target of further violence by falsely stating that Berulis’ whistleblower claim against DOGE was fake. The complaint was initially filed under seal because Berulis maintains a security clearance that requires prepublication review of anything related to his work with the government. Five days after the NPR story went live, on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025, Berulis got in his car to drive to Maryland to make a last-minute visit to his uncle, opting to take local roads instead of the major highway nearby. Within about five minutes of leaving his house, Berulis realized something was wrong. As he approached a stop sign at an intersection, his car wouldn’t slow down. He ran off the road and into the sign. When he examined his car, he found something that terrified him: His brake lines had been cut. Unbeknownst to Berulis at the time, the night before, on April 19, at 8:06 pm, Musk had reshared an X post from right-wing influencer Mario Nawfal, claiming that DOGE had been “cleared” and that people were asking the Department of Justice to investigate Berulis. Musk shared Nawfal’s post, writing, “Filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime.” The story had originally been circulated by @amuse, an account that has regularly shared misleading claims and misinformation and is followed by influential people like Musk and Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The @amuse post included Berulis’ name and photograph.

I will not be accepting this logic from people at a time when quuer people are being forced back into the closet. The A has ALWAYS for the over 30 years I have been a part of the community, stood for MULTIPLE communities INCLUDING aromantic, asexual, agender, and allied folks. And in case you've forgotten why allowing the safety of ally to be included in community building and solidarity building, when I was a child and started the SGA club at my school, I spent TWO FUCKING YEARS testifying before judges and district admin and officials about the violence and institutionally supported terrorism that ANYONE who showed their face at our club was subjected to. I testified about the kids who got the shit kicked out of them for showing up ONCE BY MISTAKE, the ones who got jumped on the way home from school for trying to stop that beating, even tho they had nothing to do with the club, I testified about the teachers who refused to discipline students who targeted us with slurs and harassment.

None of those bullies and bigots gave a fuck which letter in the alphabet we were or what it stood for. They cared that we were trying to make space for ourselves to exist safely and they were willing to hurt anyone and do anything to keep us scared.

I don't give a fuck what discourse you think you're responding to. If you say things like this, I consider you my fucking enemy, and so does every older queer person who raised me to do what I did.

Yall have gotten fuckin comfortable since same sex marriage became legal if you think this bullshit makes any sense to say and is anything less than a betrayal of the blood, sweat, and tears that tjousands of millions have shed over generations under the heading that A.

"am i normal" is not as helpful question to ask as "are intrusive thoughts causing me frequent distress?" and "would my life be better if i could find a way to feel less distress/learn to tolerate the distress?"

4 year old me: why must we do this

Fantastic old woman in the leopard print coat: "Why yes, my tooth IS real silver! Nobody ever asks me that. Do you like cats?"

a lot of my ritual behaviors are "checking"

self-guided ocd exposure therapy can be as simple as resisting the urge to check if your door is locked more than once and sitting with the discomfort until it passes without engaging in any reassurance rituals.

it can look like sending an email and resisting the urge to re-read it over and over again obsessing over your wording, sitting with the discomfort until it passes without engaging in any reassurance rituals.

some of my rituals are also "avoidance"

in which case it can look like checking your email inbox you've been obsessively avoiding because you're anxious about receiving a specific email you don't want to see.

and YEP! ☝️

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

A baby is never doing something to upset you. They don't act up to piss you off. They act in the only way they know how, and yes, sometimes the behaviour they're drawn to isn't great! That's why you guide them and comfort.