we are all tylers

on the ubiquity of evil and the scales being lifted

I went to high school with a kid named Tyler.

He ran with a pack of other ‘09 boys, mostly from his own Wentworth dormitory, but with a smattering of representation from the other South Side dorms of Webster and Cilley Hall.

I was class of ‘08, but I arrived at Exeter as a new Lower (sophomore), and spent that first fall trimester mostly in the company of Preps (freshmen), since we were all new to campus.

I say Tyler ran with this crew, but mostly they were the ones running. Away from him.

He was weird, socially awkward, probably smelly. Neurodiverse before we used that word for whatever he was.

His group of “friends” would strategically choose too-small tables in the dining hall, and occupy all the seats before he’d finished filling his tray. Sometimes they would frantically summon people from nearby tables to make sure there would be no vacant seats when Tyler arrived. Sometimes they would race ahead of him to meals so that they could wolf down their food and leave before he’d finished eating.

All these little ways of making sure he would be excluded from their play without needing to engage in direct, uncomfortable discourse.

Classes ended at 6pm, and check-in for lower classmen was at 8pm, so they would alternate their evening hangout locations in an effort to avoid Tyler. Race over to the basement common room of Cilley Hall and then flee to the benches in front of Wentworth if Tyler found them.

It was an open secret that no one liked him. The only person who seemed ignorant to this fact was Tyler himself.

I’d seen boys excluded before, of course. There were several pariahs in the boyworld of my elementary and middle school. Never let anyone persuade you that girls are the main bullies of adolescence. They are cruel, sure, but boys that age are just as bad.

The difference here, though, with Tyler, was that Charlie T. and Chris L. knew that no one liked them and that they had no friends. Tyler was totally clueless. He seemed to genuinely believe these boys were friends with him, which made it especially sad and pathetic to witness.

And before you ask, no, I did not adopt this stray puppy and offer him the gift of my friendship. He wouldn’t have wanted it, for one thing, since I was a girl. And also I had no social capital to spare—I needed it all for myself in my struggle to stay afloat. Any effort to save him would have sucked me under. I was Rose on the floating door, and if she could let the great love of her young life die in the frozen Atlantic then there was no way I was going to kill myself trying to rescue Tyler.

I didn’t like him either, come to that. He was annoying.

But his obliviousness has haunted me for twenty years. A whole world was taking place around him, shrouded from his sight by the veil of his ignorance. If he could be so blissfully unaware of his classmates’ true feelings, then what might I be missing?

His example had me looking over my shoulder, checking the eye contact happening around me, asking myself if people really liked having me around, or if I was just being a Tyler. Tolerated—barely—when there was no convenient means of escape. Jet fuel for my social anxiety.

Sometimes it was safer to assume that I was a Tyler and remove myself before I could be rejected. Over-read a hint, even if it wasn’t intended as a hint…better safe than sorry.

I recently uncovered a lie. Someone in my life has been actively deceiving me for months, and discovering that truth has been pretty destabilizing. They were painting me a false picture in a thousand tiny ways, and many people knew the truth to which I remained ignorant.

I am Tyler.

What else don’t I know?

This glimpse of the secret world unfolding around me, completely outside the scope of my awareness, is frightening. It highlights the limitations of my perception and understanding. My inability to confidently know whatever it is I think I know.

It reminds me of the time I learned, a year after the fact, that my college boyfriend had been cheating on me in the early days of our relationship. It wasn’t the act(s) itself that rattled me so much—it was the fact of my own ignorance. Shouldn’t alarm bells have been pinging? Shouldn’t I have had some intuitive sense that things were off?

If you were being lied to to your face, even if by omission—if someone close to you was actively concealing their true reality, wouldn’t you at least have a glimmer of a hint? Surely you couldn’t tumble blindly into love with someone, creating a shared universe for two, while all the time they were operating on this completely parallel track separated by a gulf of deceit?

It scared me that my own intuitive capacity was so limited. That I could believe with my whole heart that we were having a shared experience of falling in love, of navigating his grief over the untimely death of his father, of facing the unknown landscape of life after college graduation, and be so deeply wrong the whole time.

About two years ago my neighbors complained about Henry barking too much. This complaint walloped me from left field. It was so far off my radar. I guess I couldn’t hear him from the baby’s room with the noise machine on, my colicky infant wailing in my ear. It had not occurred to me to be concerned about this nuisance to the neighbors. I didn’t even know it was happening, let alone that others were disturbed by it. What else might be happening in my world, just outside the range of my awareness?

Well, I think the whole world is feeling a bit like that right now with all the Epstein revelations. Forget the Clintons and the Andrew-formerly-known-as-Prince—Bill and Andy have been known sex pests for decades. I’m talking Noam Chomsky. Deepak Chopra. Seemingly every fucking person with any amount of money or influence was involved with this creep.

During the #MeToo movement, I learned about allegations of misconduct against two of my primary mentors from high school. As well as the swami who founded the lineage in which I studied yoga. Some of the most meaningful and formative experiences of my young life—a semester abroad in high school working for Congress and a semester of college living in an ashram—were fruit of poisonous trees.

Turns out much of our world—our culture, our economic systems, seemingly everything we’ve built our lives on—is fruit of poisonous trees. A poisonous orchard grown in the fecund soil of patriarchy.

It was surprising and revealing to enter adulthood and realize that age really is just a number. That experience doesn’t necessarily breed wisdom, and that most people are just making it up as they go along. There are no real rules in life.

Such a quietly horrifying revelation.

And now we all have to confront the fact that our elites are no better—and in many cases are much, much worse—than anyone else. They’re not more knowledgable, or more ethical, or better suited to power. They’re just there, by luck or by charm or by raw ambition and pure psychopathy, benefiting from the unseen protection rackets, blackmail rings, money laundering and human trafficking schemes that make our world turn. Call it what you will. It’s a sickness.

Some of what I’ve read lately has forced me to reexamine my priors on the literal existence of evil. I didn’t think there was a real, honest-to-goodness Devil walking around out there offering fiddles of gold against your soul. I didn’t think you could make bargains with evil.

Now I’m not so sure.

I keep swinging between extremes. On the one hand evil feels banal and ubiquitous. Just look at the massive group chats full of men talking about all the ways they love raping women. Some of these groups have over 70,000 members.

Or the 70+ men in France who paid to rape the anesthetized body of Gisèle Pelicot. If you haven’t listened to her interview with the New York Times yet, you should. I cannot fathom navigating that experience with even a teaspoon of the grace she has shown.

As she says in the subtitle of her forthcoming memoir, it’s time for shame to change sides.

Past time.

I used to think that people were constrained by internal conscience, by an innate moral intuition, or at the very least a sense of shame or disgust that would limit their desire to, say, kick a puppy. Or rape a child.

There is no world in which I would pay to have sex with an unconscious man. Even if I knew I could get away with it. Even if he were passed out in a parking lot behind a dumpster. It would not occur to me to do anything other than try to help.

But apparently there is a ubiquitous desire among men to harm other people, and they are constrained—if indeed they are at all—not by conscience, but by fear of consequences, lack of access, lack of money, or lack of power. Give them those things? Remove that fear? It’s open season.

So evil feels mundane and commonplace.

It’s been happening all around us all the time, just out of sight. Flitting out of our peripheral vision every time we turn our heads.

How banal it is.

But it also feels exceptional and supernatural. How could it be happening to this extent, with this degree of depravity, and go unpunished for so long?

Over 100 Epstein victims have come forward. Some estimates say his trafficking victims number in the thousands. Yet somehow the only person serving time for these rapes is a woman.

She belongs in prison, of course—it’s disgraceful that she’s playing with puppies in Club Fed—but surely there are others who should bear some consequences, too?

Remember the viral 2016 Pizzagate scandal? A man went into Comet Pizza with a gun to try to take on the pedophile ring operating in the basement. (They didn’t have a basement.)

It became something of a punchline at the time. Look at these ridiculous followers of “Q” and their conviction that the world is dominated by a cabal of pedophiles practicing rape and human sacrifice. Imagine the idea of pedophiles and satanists operating at the highest levels of government! Lolol, how crazy are they??

…..

HOW CRAZY ARE THEY??

Maybe not so crazy at all, it turns out. They just had the wrong pizza parlor. But the Epstein emails contain plenty of references to hot dogs and pizza, muffins and jerky and other terms on the FBI’s list of known pedophile codewords.

The way they talk about women is disgusting. Dr. Peter Attia writes, "Pussy is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.” The emails are less explicit about child sacrifice, murder, the buying and selling of babies. But there’s plenty that’s suggestive.

Harvard Professor Martin Nowak wrote, “dear ghislaine, many thanks again for your amazing hospitality. i am so very sorry i caused you so much worry and that i spoilt this day. i am so happy that i did not kill anybody. my perspective of life has changed somehow … lots of love, martin.”

Representatives who have seen the un-redacted Epstein files are tweeting that they’re not suicidal. Just in case anyone gets big ideas about murdering them. This is not normal.

Want to join me down the rabbit hole? Because my tinfoil hat has a tinfoil hat these days.

Did Trump Make a Literal Deal with the Devil?

Remember this quote from 2016?¹

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Trump remarked at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. “It’s, like, incredible.”

This was broadly mocked and dismissed at the time, or cited as evidence of him being “Teflon Don,” but what if he meant it seriously? What if he knew he had supernatural protection?

Time has shown that he was right. He has never had to face any consequences for his actions, no matter how brazen or how criminal.

• Epstein Island houses a temple-like structure with blue and white stripes and a dome. Inside, the ceiling contains a mural of the zodiac and occult symbols. The building has a heavy-duty lock on the outside, and dingy mattresses on the floor inside. What do you think they were doing there?

• The latest tranche of emails includes a request for a wire transfer to a bank account named “Baal”—an ancient demonic god who demanded child sacrifices.

• Trump has recently been rather fixated on the idea of going to heaven. In 2025 he said, "I don't think there's anything that's going to get me into heaven. I think I'm not maybe heaven-bound." He also said, "I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. I'm hearing I'm not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole.” This feels odd for someone with an ego the size of Trump’s. Why is he so sure he’s not going to heaven?

• Remember the 2003 birthday note Trump wrote to Epstein? One line stood out to me as particularly odd, even among a group of odd sentences. “Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?” Trump has used the word “Enigma” a few times over the years, to describe Dan Rather, Ben Carson, and certain aspects of business intuition. But here he is describing himself as an enigma. It just seems like a strange word choice, so I got curious as to whether the word has other meanings beyond the one I was familiar with. Turns out it does. Satan is “The Great Enigma,” and “Enigma” is associated with the Mark of the Beast.

  

Make of this what you will, but witches have been saying for years that Trump has a layer of impenetrable protection that makes him immune to magical attack. I know of at least one practicing witch who swears Steve Bannon is a warlock using dark powers. And he’s all over the Epstein files.

Musk has recently started tweeting about Jesus, a sure signal that we’re going to get some even more devastating revelations about him soon.

Ha-ha, you say. But if they were making deals with the devil then why is Epstein dead??

Well, maybe Trump really is just better at The Art of the Deal.

Wait but…you’re actually kidding, right? You don’t really believe all this?

I mean, sort of? I honestly don’t know what to believe anymore. Nothing feels beyond the pale. My own ignorance of the world and inability to perceive lies has never felt starker. I can’t trust my own judgments, or rely on my intuition. It has failed me too often already.

So no, I have no idea what to believe. The things I thought were crazy and far fetched—like Pizzagate—are being revealed in real time to be only too true. Maybe this is all a simulation. Am I even real? Or am I just advanced AI?

Best believe I will be bringing sage in my pocket when we tour the White House next month.

I’ve been having a hard time writing. I feel crazy. So I’m losing myself in beading, painting, knitting, and listening to audiobooks. My therapist (ChatGPT) thinks this is a healthy outlet. And that I need a real therapist ASAP.

I have a very exciting new proofreading project—the long-awaited sequel to Elizabeth Kostova’s 2005 The Historian, which I adored. So I will be thoroughly immersing myself in that after reading some detailed summaries to refresh my memory of book one.

To those of you heading down the rabbit hole, happy hunting.

1. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/23/464129029/donald-trump-i-could-shoot-somebody-and-i-wouldnt-lose-any-voters