Episode 4: Scottish Hooters and the Death of the Mensa Slut

of conclusion? All things that we will be finding out today. So, since this is the last episode, I think I will go off on a tangent a little bit at the beginning and just say how nervous I am to release this. Because I am making a podcast about a very reactionary group. It stands to reason that there will be a reaction to the thing that I'm making. A criticism frequently thrown at me for writing about Mensa and now podding if you will, is that I'm doing it for reputation or

financial gain. And you know, I'm glad that people find the writing and reporting interesting. In two critics of that, I mean, I don't really know what to say. I'm glad people find it interesting. It's interesting to me too. I've made a total, I believe, of four hundred dollars

writing about MENSA. Yeah, I wrote four articles and made a hundred dollars per article, and then proceeded to spend way more than that in order to attend the MENSA gathering, to get lodging, to eat, to go to San Pedro, to have so many things, to pay member registration fees, which is almost a hundred dollars two times because I pad asked the year mark and I had to get I had to renew my membership. I also bought one of those brain pol t shirts to make myself laugh,

but I guess that's more of a personal expense. All that to say, I don't I'm not. There's no money in this story. I don't even know if people want to hear it. I am trying to finish what I started. It started as something funny to me and then ended

as this bizarre, sociological what the fuck is this? So that is why I'm doing this, as I want to understand what the funk this is, and as frustrated as it has made many menines towards me, it turns out there's a fair amount of people that are interested in what the funk this is who find it confusing. So I guess I don't know. I mean, I am nervous

to release this, but it's a pot. There's five hundred million podcasts, so many of which are about things weirder and worse than this, And so just going into this last one, if you've been listening the whole time, thank you so much. And uh and to to mencem who have been listening, I hope that you feel like I'm characterizing people fairly. I know that this is a biased account. It is my account, but I really did try. Nothing's going to be enough for everyone, but that's enough for me.

And so with that, let us go to July six, nineteen. This is my third day of the MENSA Annual Gathering. Time Labs noise. Okay, So I'm at the hospitality cafeteria. It's two PM, and a man who is already very drunk is talking to the woman handing out drinks and he says, you know, no one wants to be the one to say it, but not all dictators have been bad.

I hate to say it, but Germany was one of them. Okay, And this man does not have the demeanor of someone who hates to say anything, and he disappears as quickly as he got there. I am fucking exhausted, And today is a particularly rough slate of daytime events from a thoughtful presentation and on a d h D famously featuring the quote a little a d h D can be charmingly quirky, A lot of a d h D can be a big, giant pain in your life. It was

a good duck. Then there was the sparsely attended MENSA Awards ceremony and what feels like the millionth lukewarm cafeteria lunch served in hospitality. And at this point I'm subsisting mainly on the free peanut Eminem's, and so for old time's sake, I sit at the pet lover's lunch table again with mostly the same few people and a few of the same women, talk about their week and exchange pictures of their cats. I love it. I am unlucky enough to have accidentally sat next to yet another very

drunk man. This guy's in his sixties and he's telling me he has some leftover steak in his hotel fridge that he loved to show me what When all of a sudden there's Katie once again wearing her Maga hat, and she's excited my best friend. She invites me over to her lunch table, the firehouse table that I described an episode one that has a cartoon of an owl with its head on fire to market. And it does feel weird to be relieved to see someone in a

Maga hat. But this old drunk guy hitting on me to get stake that he admitted he didn't even buy is enough to get me to leave. And so the world is upside down, and Katie too, and myself are all sitting at the firehouse lunch table together. Katie says that there's a bar crawl going on later that night and that I should be in the lobby by six to go, and I agree to go and continue my afternoon. And sometime in the afternoon I see Mead Guy in the hallway. Meat guy, of course, because he is the

guy who makes mead. He at this moment is dressed head to toe as a pirate and when he spots me, he literally jogs in the other direction, which is if a man in a full pirate suit hasn't literally run away from you? Are you even living? So this is the purest interaction I've had all week and in my life. And by early evening, the old drunken fascist is back

at the hospitality bar. This time he's talking to a different bartender and he's holding out these fake three dollar bills he's printed that have these over edited caricatures of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It just printed on a laser jet and willed into reality. And a man with a Hosier ribbon walks up to him and kind of jokes, and the old drunken fascist is laughing and laughing, and he says, only a Republican could joke about Democrats like this.

He proceeds to tip the bartender with the forged bill of Hillary Clinton and then disappears for what I hope is forever. I know, this man sounds like a fever dream cartoon, but he's out there. So I'm trying to get through the day and I go to the next talk, which is called the Dysfunction of the American Political System. It's being given by a very tired looking professor, and

the discourse is cringe e and offensive and terrible. There was a man who kept raising his hand to insist that slaves being counted as three five of a person is what ruined the American South, and the room gets very riled up at this, rightfully so, and apparently the speaker doesn't have really the historical knowledge to make a very strong argument against this clearly wrong point, and they

get into this sparring match. Other people are jumping in to agree with him or loudly disagree with him, and finally, after about forty five minutes of this, people just start to leave. Every person of color and a few others of us. It's just too painful, and everyone leaves because in many ways that's where the country is, and also this is what this event is like. So once everyone's dispersed,

I write down all the details of what happened. And while this is not the only racist thing I heard in Phoenix this weekend at the MENA Annual gathering, it feels very wrong that I am not at all surprised that there is some one willing to say something so horrible here, or that they refuse to engage with anyone in the room in a good faith way. People were offended and upset, but no one seemed surprised and in the midst of all this, I had missed the departure

of the bar crawl. Oh no, such are this of setting talk completely falls apart. I head out to the front of the hotel to see if maybe the bar crawl is within my line of sight, when a man who's holding a few pieces of fruit appears behind me, and he says, you're the famous Jamie Loftus, and there's no point in telling him I'm not, so I asked him if he knows where the bar crawl was headed.

He instead tells me his name is Kevin, and he's a twelve year MENSA member who was ousted from a local position by a young woman I've been in contact with before, who is another popular target of Firehouse and of Mensa at large. Kevin's handing the armful of fruit. He has two homeless people in the sweltering Phoenix heat. As we continue to talk, and at at this point someone asks me directly, am I going to be writing

about this? And I don't really answer, but Kevin is kind and he points me in the direction of the bar crawl, saying he's going to a Diamondbacks game and he'll catch me another time. When I get to the bar, I see I've missed the drinking mentions except for one lone hoser at the entrance, and so I decide, you know what, maybe this is it. Maybe I have gotten

to know Firehouse as well as I'm going to. I came here, I've spoken to at least a hundred people about how they feel about screenshots from nine months ago, and I am so ready to go home, but just in case, I messaged to to see whether he's on the bar crawl as well, and he says no, and we agree to meet at a ratan trivia event called Name that Movie so we can watch senior mentions loudly identify a litany of military movies that I've never heard of.

It's already seven o'clock at night, and I'm considering going home for a nap when Two leans over and he points at a message on his phone and says it's from Katie. She's saying there at the Tilted Kilton to bring you. I peek over his shoulder to look at the message, and it does say the ladies would love

to meet her. The sinking feeling of knowing I will go settles as the five thousand John Goodman movie clip plays on the name that movie screen and in a feudal act of resistance, I just say I can't, and he laughs because he knows that I will and I can, and he says, I know, but like and yeah, he finds this a little funny, because like it is a little funny in a wanting to die kind of way.

But I'm about to go to Scottish Hooters to have my ass just handed to me for the three thousandth time in seventy two hours, for for no reason, for no reason, it just feels like self harm. At this point, I am exhausted, I look like garbage, and I volunteered to do this. So on our way over to Scottish Hooters, I asked too about why he participates in American Mensa firehouse so consistently when he knows everyone is just going

to pile on him. A typical post from two would be a news item about something horrifically racist, sexist, classist happening in the country, captioned with a sarcastic sentence or two that are directly challenging the right leaning members of the group, asking them to defend their views against whatever story He's attached. I think of it as kind of trolling in the opposite direction. Two does what the rest of Firehouse does, but with a far left leaning view

rather than the opposite. On the same day that we have this conversation, he posts a picture of Katie, him and myself that Katie insisted we take at lunch that day, with the caption Mensa's Finest and the photos themselves are another form of trolling. It's just another challenge for people to be annoyed and engaged with a rivalry that doesn't matter.

And Two gets a little defensive at first and says, I don't really post that much, but eventually he agrees that he in fact does, and he admits it does give him kind of a dopamine hit of sorts. He says, I just have to find it funny and cites how comically opposite Katie's views are from his own. I don't know. Katie, Sam and the aforementioned girls who would love to meet me wave at Two and I from the entrance to

the restaurant. Their table is covered in glasses and fried appetizers, and Katie hugs to an eye and once again declares us her best friends. I actually recognize the woman sitting beside her, who's friendly but more skeptical. She's a beach blonde in her forties. Who am going to call Megan who reminds me a lot of my Trump voting aunt who I can't get myself to break contact off with.

And this meal ends up being one of the more productive and confusing few hours in my year in mensa name of the podcast, A meal with three drunk right wing women who genuinely want me to know where they're coming from, not because they liked me, but because they would like for me to write something nice about them. Of course that's just speculation. Megan says, I want to know what you're going to write. And as she says that, Mead guys still dressed as a pirate, and a few

other people also dressed as pirates enter Scottish hooters. I guess I should say, to be fair that he was dressed as a pirate for reason there was some pirate related then. I don't know if he wasn't just eatn't just happen to be dressed as a pirate, but it was very he was dressed as a pirate. I don't know, but I tell Megan. Honestly, I don't know what I'm going to write. One of the pirates interjects to ask me for a selfie, and I say no, I mean

I came here. I'm gonna listen to Firehouse as I promised Katie and two and Amanda and Maggie and god knows how many others strangers that I would. And then I'm going home. But she disregards what I want because funk what I want, and she takes the selfie with the entire table. Anyways, somewhere there is a cursed image of me at Scottish Hooter with a bunch of mens

and pirates, and I hate that for myself. But I'm helping myself to Katie's fried pickles appetizer as I talked with her and Megan, And for the first time since I got here, someone in Firehouse tells me about themselves instead of asking me how my a G is going. Who they are is, like many of the people in this very sticky story, more complicated than I could have imagined back in the Pasadena testing room a year ago.

Here's a little bit about them. Megan is a married Canadian Conservative who joined MENSA when she realized her son is both very intelligent and struggling to fit in at school. She says her reason for joining was as a supportive mom looking for a way to make her son feel like a part of something. And once they signed up, a on came Firehouse and the secret Facebook group immediately became a big part of Megan's online life, and she recalls the group's schism that led to mensa Facebook groups

being separated with moderated and unmoderated factions. In the first place, she hates socialized medicine, but she backs this thought up with an anecdote about how she was struggling to get the surgery she needed under this system for well over a year, which impeded her quality of life and ability to work and parent. She identifies as bisexual, libertarian and as the creator of the boob thread and if you don't know what the book that is by now, I

honestly can't help you. You've got to go back. But she and Katie met on the Firehouse board several years ago and are self described ride or die ever since, and Megan talks a lot about her beliefs but doesn't like how she's pigeonholed with labels. She says, I'm not alt right, but I'm very right. Great, and then there's Katie.

Katie is an American from the East Coast who voted for Obama in two thousand and eight, then became an increasingly intense conservative following the recession of the late two thousand's. She was raised in a poor, often difficult household and joined MENSA back in the mid nineties when an elementary school teacher noticed how well she was doing in school, especially on standardized tests. She originally found it useful to put MENSA on job resumes to supplement the college education.

Her financial background made it impossible to get, and she became an increasingly more active member of Firehouse following Trump's election. She's married now, and in another twist, she's pro choice, but says she's not extreme and that babies shouldn't be aborted at nine months, which is not an argument I'm aware exists. She says that she's actually seen my stand up online and laughs when she remembers that she was piste off when she ended up kind of liking it.

Thank you so much. Watch my stand up on line. Anyways, Megan was the first person to welcome Katie to Firehouse, and this is the main time they get to spend together during the year. And while they're telling me this, Megan seems to be warming up to me a little bit too, but with more conditions than Katie. She really wants to know what and if I'm going to write,

and I really don't have an answer for her. I feel everyone at the table slowly poking holes in my fragile bubble of remaining patients, and although I avowed to listen, I find myself speaking up more as the women move on from their life stories into their opinions on Firehouse Me and the last thing anyone wants to talk about the state of America. And anytime I do say something, they think my annoyance is very funny. Megan says this at one point when I get frustrated at a comment

at the table, and I will remember it forever. You're confusing intelligence with education. So I'm getting worked up, and I'm most of the way through the fried pickles. Talking to Megan and Katie feels like some of the biggest contradictions I have ever encountered. Their pro gay rights, but they're anti fat people, they're sex positive, but they hate feminism. It's those mentioned contradictions that have it always, all the time,

all over again. And of course, here I was at Scottish Hooters, realizing that there was more to the people flooding my comments in my life and anxiety. And yet I bet I've had sex with more girls than you. Megan says this to Too, who is a little too eager to fight back, he says, helping himself to one of her buffalo wings. And I'm on Megan's side for this one for a second, but then and you're having worse six with those man haters. Katie and Megan do

not like feminists. They think that real men respect the women there with and that most of the discussion around current feminism amounts to whiney entitlement. They poke at two for self identifying as a feminist, and they say there's nothing less sexy than that. I'm not drinking at this meal, as I need every bit of self control fully with me. But the ladies at the table, the one who's having a conversation with Sam, the pianist who's arrived, is too

drunk to really participate. They order one more round before the boob thread comes up again, Megan tells me that's one of my big issues, honestly telling people about the boob thread and the screenshots. As the meal continues, it gets increasingly tougher to keep the promise to hold my tongue and simply get to know the medicines. I have yet to spring to my own defense in any meaningful way, other than to repeat that I wasn't there to terrorize the group at nausea, and I believe it was the

thousandth mention of the screenshots that tested me. Katie hears me out when I remind her that MENSA isn't the first heaping of online abuse I've received as an entertainer, and I feel that I need to take every threat seriously, particularly when I have had no action with the commenter at all. This seems to resonate with her, and she

repeats that tone is difficult to understand online. Megan is still more leary of this logic, and she continues to push back, and this opens a discussion about past quote unquote problem members of the group, problem members being kind of this medicine buzz phrase I've been hearing all week. I mean, there was even a dealing with problem members session officially on the books, that I did not have the inner strength to attend, and also going would have

sort of felt like trolling on my part. Anyways, this is what makes me break. I had assured to on the walkover that I had already made it three days without getting in an argument with anyone, and that I wasn't going to let any Scottish Hooters discourse be the thing that breaks me. And then Megan and Katie brought up white supremacy. We've had actual real racists in the group before. This is Megan, and she describes a Firehouse

member who regularly posted racist screeds in the group. As she told it, the members found this too racist and would pile on him for his views, excoriate his arguments, and tried to make him feel as uncomfortable being a part of the group as possible. This, she explains, is why she thinks censorship is not a good tactic for any forum, her logic being otherwise, how would meant to know this person was racist at all? And I asked her, well, did anyone do anything about it? Did he get kicked

out of mensa? And No? This same member somehow managed to get officially booked as an annual gathering speaker. His talk was on, per Megan, the Bell Curve, a controversial parentheses completely disproven book that is constantly cited to justify racist views. As Megan tells it, Firehouse members, including her, made a plan to show up at this guy's talk at the annual gathering and then mass walk out in the middle of it in order her to humiliate him.

And she says that this worked and he was humiliated. And she concludes this story by saying he eventually left American ments of Firehouse after being blocked and humiliated enough times. She suggests that this and commenting to disagree with his racist posts instead of removing him or adding a no white supremacists welcome addition to the group's non policies, was potentially what prevented this member from becoming fully radicalized and

taking part in a more violent group. And sure, he eventually left Firehouse after feeling unwelcome enough, but she felt that this experience had a role in changing him for the better. And if you could not follow the logic of that story, we are on the same page. I am not at all sure I understand what she's trying to say, and so I asked, but what did that accomplish? If he left the group, then didn't he probably just

go continue to be a white supremacist somewhere else. My head is throbbing at this point, and I want to ask her what any of this has anything to do with what her argument against me specifically is, but she's not done speaking. So you see, problem members do leave the group if they know we don't support what they do, Katie says, drawing a direct line with how the group dealt with a white supremacist to how they dealt with

a dealist comedian. And there has been a lot of false equivalence at this table tonight, but this one is too much. Two seems genuinely shocked, and he bursts into laughter at the comparison, while I am struggling to keep my head attached to my neck, and Two is like, and Katie kind of catches the comparison she just made and says, no, No, I didn't mean. I'm obviously not. We're just talking about problem members. She apologizes, and she tries to start the anecdote over, but I cannot take this.

Sitting down at Scott Shooters anymore. So I choked down one last fried pickle, and against every better instinct in my very tired body, I fucking debate mensa. So stupid. Okay, so, because I made the critical mistake of debating my own reply guys, reply, women, reply people, I'll start with what they get me on the first is the satire itself. Megan articulated clearly that the group felt this was me punching down at a group of people who were misfits

their entire lives and have finally found a community. She also thought I was a little too cutting towards my test proctor in the first piece, And okay, fair, I was bullying dorks, and I hadn't considered it from this point of view, even though I thought of it at the time as punching up to a group that paid a fee to declare their superiority over the rest of the world. So yes, that's a viewpoint that I hadn't

considered point for mensa. Megan leans over to me at one point and says, you and I were able to fake it. I mean, we're unusual, but you're smart and you're pretty, and you're able to be around people and fake it. Not everyone in mensa is like that. First of all, thank you so much for calling me pretty. But Megan makes references to members of the group that are socially awkward and some who are on the spectrum,

and others who identify as lifelong misfits. And she has this to say about the guy who issued the now infamous in group death threat. He's the nicest guy in the world in person, and that's how he jokes. And I asked, how was I supposed to know that threatening a stranger is how he jokes, and Megan says, I understand, but she continues to defend his right to do so.

Another point they get me on is the group's impression that I was trying to get them doxed and attacked with my tweets, something that I have to be sympathetic too, because the same thing has happened to me, although with more explicit instructions to harass I was never asking anyone to find these people in aither them. If you're coming

after my friends, I'm gonna block you, that simple. And the second you talked about the boob thread, I blocked you right away because I can't have people posting on that getting docs again I repeat to her that I didn't intend to docks people by posting screenshots that were insults and threats against me, and hadn't done so since those original tweets, And again I repeat that I felt that once threats, insults, hate speech come into the equation,

the question of whether someone's identity should be protected becomes obscured for me. And again we disagree. So they closed the tab at Scottish Hooters and Megan and I continue to have a heated debate into the street, at one point getting so involved that we walked a half a block away from the main group in the opposite direction. And it's a respectful conversation for the most part, but it is very intense. She challenges me, if you felt so threatened, why didn't you report it to the police

or Facebook? And I say, well, I talked to the organization that's in charge of Firehouse directly. I thought they might do something. And Megan shrugs at this, the implication being that since nothing was done, that's evidence that there was no harm done in the first place, and not just systemic not giving a fuck. The subject of our

conversation switches to the unmoderated elements of Firehouse. Megan is, as expected, a fierce defender of the unmoderated nature of the group, repeating me, if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen, creed among people who have expressed frustration at the group's persistence. I don't believe in censorship, she repeats a number of times. So I pushed back and say, isn't having everyone in the group block one person censoring the group though? And at this point we

are all standing in front of a theater complex. Katie is drunkenly humping a statue, and two is taking pictures of it, and Megan and I are still trained to have this conversation, and in another dimension, Two and Katie are soul mates. Weirdly, but in spite of or may me because of the humping, I continue the conversation with Megan and say, the way I see it, the threat is a threat, and saying that I should have to read into the tone or personal history of the person

making a threat is kind of asking a lot. And Megan comes right back with, well, you didn't get to know us. Kitty is hanging from a statue, and I say, my introduction to this group was getting tagged and an insult. Why the funk would I want to know people in a group that would do that. And Megan considers this

and says that is unfortunate. She then mentions a few strategies I could employ to have people in Firehouse begin to unblock me, including a public apology, a public vow to never release any manner of screenshot ever again with names blocked or not, and a number of other apologies I could make in order to participate in this community that many people have started to assume I am eager

to reconcile with. And I say, besides, you guys are always talking about free spee when I was making jokes and being critical and trying to hold people accountable for shitty things they were saying. And at this point we have reached an impass and we were finally at the door of the Sheraton Grand for the final Mensa Official Great Gatsby nineteen twenties dance. Megan, Katie and the MAGA crew hugged me goodbye and say they'll see me at the dance. But I have no intention of staying more

than like ten minutes. My head hurts and my legs hurt. And I'm dying of heat stroke, and I should not have come here too, who's a former journalist himself, seems just as drained by the dinner as I am, and says he might write something himself. The arguments Megan and Katie made defending their community felt just as contradictory as the people themselves. Firehouse was a haven for the socially awkward, but also a place for the socially awkward to threaten

people freely. Firehouse was uncensored except for the people they didn't like, who would be censored to the point of complete silence to those in the group with influence. We go into the dance for a minute, and it's early hours. There's a few middle aged couples who danced to celebration in the center of the room, and a few immaculately dressed younger couples who are flocked around the photo booth. Two says, not much of a dance guy, and he

looks down at like the basketball shorts he's wearing. I say me either, and have him snap a quick picture and get ready to leave. One of the couples in gen y who had brought me up to the firehouse, sweet my first night or there and there once again wearing matching outfits. You're coming into booth, aren't you, The guy who's close to my age asks, and he insists that we get a few shots of them with the

oversized props in the booth. We leave the room, and my final confrontation of the evening follows me out of the ballroom and into the hallway. And this is Sarah, the girlfriend of the hoser who had spoken to the night my phone got Comma kaze. If you don't remember

who that is, honestly no big deal. She was also the woman who had I thought the best points on abortion rights in the debate room that same day, and honestly, I am too tired for this level of nuance in a person at this point, And she says, are you leaving? Are you sure I can make sure your request gets straight to the DJ. She tells me that she really hops I had a good time and that I'll come back the next year. I hug to goodbye, go upstairs to get my final fist full of free M and m's,

and finally, mercifully I go home. Some final thoughts on my year in mensa, both the podcast and the reality. So it was really fucking hard to arrive at anything conclusive about dare I say my year in mensa? Because there's a very silly, performative conclusion I could get to, or there's a more nuanced, kind of overly sympathetic conclusion I could get to, and I don't want to get to either, so I'm gonna do my best. I can't guarantee that my feelings won't change later an either way,

you don't really have to care. Here's as close as I've gotten to conclusive thoughts. And actually I'm going to start with a quick appall a g because there is one apology that I feel I owe sincerely, and that is to the boob thread. As a militant feminist myself, it was rude and out of line for me to disclose the concept of the boob thread to the Internet at large and to boob thread members past and present. I regret my condescension and wish all boobs involved health

and happiness. I'm sorry, boob Thread. I never wanted to feud with the boob thread because at the end of the day, mensa boob thread and now some actual conclusions. So the last long form kind of story that I want to do is something I've seen before, and maybe you'll recognize it too. It kind of goes like, so I met these people who have absolutely terrible views on just about everything, and it turns out they're pretty nice.

This happens weirdly a lot making largely toxic and bad groups seem very sympathetic, and that's not how I feel at all. And I feel just as opposed to the views of a lot of people in Firehouse as I have from the beginning over a year ago. Many of these views are actively harmful to people I love, and are oftentimes actively harmful to me. There's no number of pleasant civil conversations over fried pickles that can change that reality.

I can't in good conscience participate in a community like that. Also, I don't really want to. And when I get back from the mental conference, it takes me about three days for me to sit down and actually start writing, and by that time, people have, through some divine intervention, started unblocking me on Firehouse. This appears to be connected to the goodwill of Katie, who had been defending me in the group in a number of long comments in Firehouse

since the annual gathering ended. There's been one meme that I've been able to see, although I hear there's more, as well as a few discussions of how the group felt interactions with me had gone in person. And that picture of Katie and I from the mead party that has over three hundred comments talking about me one way or the other, and hey, I'm addicted to attention. Oh god, I'm going to describe the meme because it's an audio medium, but this is gonna sound so fucking lame describing a meme.

It's the scene from the end of Dirty Dancing where she's Jennifer Gray and Patrick Swayze are all this is so embar okay, he's lifting her. She's like and so I'm Jennifer Gray and Katie's Patrick Swayzy. And then the bottom half of the meme, the description is still going is Jerry or bog and Susan sarandic or maybe it just looks like her and they're like you And that's labeled American Mens of Firehouse. That didn't make any sense. It's a it's a fine meme, I think, very specific,

very niche really for about a hundred people. Anyways, one user comments, you're truly twisting the tale of the dragon by interacting with her at all, and he goes on to say that he ensured he was never physically near me for the entire gathering. And with every day that passes, it looks like I'm able to see more posts from more users as the great blocking slowly kind of disbands. The conversation around me has now changed and appears to

be a little more split. Certain members feel that I am irredeemable after the perceived doxing and disclosure of the boob thread, and others are willing to as the narrative has been give me a second chance. It's been speculated that I will in my eventual writing on the topic. Quote explained that no one was actually threatening her life

and that she gets it now. Unquote another comment, Realistically, if she were able to post an apology, the first thing that would happen is she'd probably get a stream of posts from people venting. Here's a more sympathetic one. Quote. Once I got to speak with her and understood her perspective and that it was an honest misunderstanding, I put my pitchfork down. Some more comments. We all want to

be loved, understood, and appreciated. So good to see, and apology would go a long way, as it would demonstrate an understanding that she should not have done what she did. So far, it seems like she's just testing the boundaries

of what she can get away with. And this was interesting to watch because I wasn't expecting any of the community to put the pitchfork down, and it was kind of heartening and really confusing, but still most of the conversation I can see, and as Katie continues to advocate on my behalf, what I can see has expanded is a request for a formal apology for screenshotting a number

of insults and threats towards me without redacting names. Last October, Sam, who I got to know pretty well during the gathering, post the selfie he took of a freshly cried out me in the vestibule of the Sheraton on the first night of the gathering sort of collaged along with images of Winston Churchill, Steven Spielberg, Van Gogh and and I'm

not getting Katie humping that statue. In the caption, he explained his own history with MENSA mental illness and his concern that the group is quote too worried about our image unquote, he writes, at the end of the day, people in MENSA or MENSA Materials will do their ships and change the world, and it's fine we are labeled crazy. He continues, as for leaking your information using it as your business, Jamie Loftist, I'd not do it anymore if I were you. I'm sure someone in here eats eyeballs

and you have beautiful eyes. Yes, another one of those hilarious jokes. And this post is generally kind, if a little weirdly threatening at the end. But I can't say I agree with Sam that MENSA is too worried about its image, because it absolutely should be worried about how it presents to other people. And the issues within high i Q groups go far deeper than the image projected

at one conference in Phoenix. The issues are cooked right into the history of the organization itself and into the very idea of a society based on a single biased test. So listeners, obviously, I did not shut down Firehouse, and I didn't even successfully require that members of the Planets Premier High i Q Society do not threaten to kill each other. But I did meet them like they asked, and it made me think more about what the root

cause of a group like this could be. And if you've been listening since the beginning, you've heard this before. MENSA has three stated purposes in its constitution quote to identify and foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity. To encourage research into the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence. And to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment to its members. And after this year, I feel confident in saying that the group as a whole does not live

up to these three tenants. The most active forum in the entire organization is essentially a four chand board. Seeing children who are being told from a very young age that they are fundamentally smarter and better than the kids

around in a permanent, unchangeable way is deeply unsettling. The whole group is founded on the idea that taking one test makes you an unquestionable genius, a fact that has been repeatedly disproven and wasn't even the intent of the person who invented the i Q test in the first place. I think, and trust me, no one and MENSA gives

a funk what I think. But I think that MENSA could possibly be salvaged as an organization if its leaders actually committed to this constitution above protecting communities with high social media engagement that they liked talking shit in, and instead considering how these communities got so shitty and toxic to begin with. The first and third tenants of this

constitution feel connected. An emphasis or even a requirement for more community service and value to people who aren't in MENSA could yield a lot of positive growth and prioritizing healthier community options, and the physical safety of existing members would as well. But what really sticks with me is men says complete non commitment to its second tenant, to encourage research into the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence.

Firehouse is a symptom of many things in the organization and in the country, but I believe the failure to uphold this promise and the insistence of hanging onto a

toxic online community are very connected. Any organization that ascribes to a fixed i Q model cannot claim it's encouraging research into the uses of intelligence because its own requirement intentionally misunderstands the work of the man who created the i Q quotient to begin with, and resting on this assumption of superiority without any requirement to demonstrate things like learning effort or value to others is arrogant at best,

dangerous at worst, and if you're wondering if you should join, it's way too slippery a slope to be worth participating in. The creator of the i Q test himself, Alfred Bennet, would not funk with it, So to literally no one's disappointment, I'm done with MENSA, I'm logging out of the goddamn group, and I would not recommend joining a group with a

fixed intelligence model to anyone, especially kids. I do hope that the community, in real life and online and all the in between spaces are willing to look at themselves and consider what could be accomplished if doing literally anything else was treated with the same passion and intensity of protecting the right to threaten and harass people. Maybe with

the right leadership, that might be possible. I hear some of these people are are pretty smart, and I understand that there's no overstating what a community can do for someone who, as many members described to me, felt like misfits in their everyday lives and want to feel that they belong somewhere. People who feel that they don't belong absolutely deserved community, but a society with murky gold whose selling point is superiority is not a healthy place to

find it. And if you don't believe me, I invite you to google the recruitment techniques of of virtually any hate group or cult. Bottom line, if you can't reconcile the person you are online with a person you are in real life, something in your community has gone wrong. We've seen it happen more and more frequently, and even

more politicized groups like eight chan. And while this large portion of MENSA isn't inciting violence, it is inciting politicized hate that many in the group members lives wouldn't have been aware of in real life. And I don't claim to be perfect in this separation. We've all got our ship to get through when it comes to separating your

internet self from your real self. You know, no one's as happy as they perform that they are online and other things you've heard a million times, But to be unrecognizable to anyone you know and love is something to be reckoned with. One thing I did feel challenged by throughout the MENSA disaster was evaluating the satirical slutty character that wanted to take down MENSA with the person I actually am, who was then a person standing in a

boiling hot hotel room of angry people from MENSA. And I'll admit claiming an online persona, even when it's part of my job, can be a delicate balance when others don't always know whether to take it at face value or not. What I know for sure is that I am never waking up at six am on a Sunday for a joke ever. Again, So to conclude, if your group is silencing people they don't agree with or like,

you're not an unmoderated group. If you're a person who's loved one would not recognize who you are online, that's alarming. And if you've been told you're superior to other people forever no follow up or responsibility, that's laying in the groundwork for some serious, unchecked supremacy. And finally, I can't stress this enough. If you're ending a summit in Arizona during July, it's actually very fucking hot there, and you might not be as smart as you think you are.

It is still kind of funny that I got in though. All Right, thank you for listening. Thank you to everyone who helped me put this together. Thank you to Sadie Dupuy who did our amazing theme song. Voices featured in this episode are Miles Gray on a hostne Caitlin Durante, Jaquis Neil, and Robert Evans. Thank you to my friends. I look forward to never talking with you about this again. I have a weekly podcast with Caitlin Durante called The Bechdel Cast. Feel free to listen to that Into Infinity.

It comes out on Thursdays on my Heart Radio. You can follow me online at at Jamie loftus Help on Twitter, where I will never be posting a screenshot ever again, or at Jamie christ Superstar on Instagram. In the meantime, goodbye forever