In this 11th installment of the Diogenes Club — Nick Paro, Walter Rhein, and Evan Fields welcome special guest Frederic Poag — essayist and masculinity guru — with “The Ballad of Frederick Poag,” an epic poem Walter composed in Frederic’s honor. The ballad sets the episode’s emotional mood: this is a room of men who have chosen humor and solidarity as survival tools while the world outside burns. The poem is funny, yes — and it is also a form of life and love — the care of men for each other, for women as a whole, for the next generation — is ultimately what this episode is about.
From there the conversation moves fast and wide. Nick is re-listening to Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series, which he uses as a framework for what’s happening in front of us: a society that replaced explicit racism with explicit classism, where your worth is determined by color — not of skin but of caste. Golds exploit Reds not because of hate but because of structural necessity; the system is designed to reproduce itself. Nick draws the line to the present — to warehouses and non-competes and gutted labor boards — and makes the argument plainly: when you make it impossible for people to survive with dignity, you create the conditions for radicalization. The U.S. government is doing that right now. This is a warning that has already proven itself.
The labor rights thread anchors the middle section of the episode. Fred recounts the culture inside the aviation industry, where management treated above-and-beyond recognition cards as threats to authority rather than tools of human dignity. A worker earned nothing more than the absence of punishment. Nick’s counter-example — being told he should be grateful he has a job while selling his labor at rates he had to accept rather than rates anyone negotiated freely — is a description of the basic asymmetry of power in American employment. Walter connects this to Amazon: a warehouse worker died on the floor, colleagues with CPR training were told to step back and wait, and the terminal where the man collapsed would probably bear his name before his employer bore any liability. The unions, they note, are what separates “they offer CPR classes as part of the contract” from “they denied a dying man CPR to limit legal exposure.” The National Labor Relations Board has been effectively gutted. Weekends, eight-hour days, the right to organize — these were all fought for by people who died to establish them. We are watching them be dismantled in real time.
The episode then turns to religion as a parallel system of protected abuse. Nick reflects on his family’s departure from organized religious life after a synagogue — where soon after his grandfather’s death his family was contacted to ask for a donation, but never condolences, and they never returned. The lesson his mother taught was simple: when an institution reveals it cares more about your money than your grief, you walk. He holds that against the dominant experience of religious life in America, which for the majority of people who talk about it involves trauma, coercion, and brainwashing. Evan provides the military chaplaincy comparison — the existential bargain between cleaning the barracks and sitting in a pew — while Nick names the positive exception: Qasim Rashid, Esq., who practices personal faith without imposing it, as the model of what belief can look like without becoming a weapon. The critique is not of faith. It is of institutional religion as a structure that consistently covers for the men at its center.
This critique becomes explicit and devastating when the group addresses the week’s most disturbing news: the exposure of a coordinated network on motherless.com, in which thousands of men shared techniques — including pharmaceutical recipes — for drugging and raping their wives, then livestreamed the assaults for a paying audience. Sixty-nine million monthly visits. An “eye check” protocol. A man who charged $20 a viewer and performed on command. The women on Threads connecting this to the “choose the bear” conversation are not being hyperbolic. They are explaining why the default assumption of danger around men is not paranoia but evidence-based risk assessment. Evan says it directly: “You have to assume. We know other women are safe around us. But they don’t fucking know that.” The network exists. The men in it are somebody’s husband, colleague, neighbor. Nothing has happened to them yet.
The political analysis that follows is unsparing. There is a congressional slush fund — taxpayer money — specifically reserved to help members of Congress defend themselves against sexual assault allegations. Not the accusers. The accused. Nick names Eric Swalwell as an open secret the Democratic Party protected. Ruben Gallego as someone currently under investigation for misuse of campaign funds with Swalwell on a trip to Puerto Rico. The argument is not partisan point-scoring. The argument is: Democratic attorneys general have jurisdiction. They have the legal authority to act. Democratic members of Congress could go to the floor and put the names of every member who drew from the sexual assault defense fund into the congressional record. The fact that they haven’t done this is a choice. It is a choice that protects rapists in the name of party stability. Nick’s counter-proposal is the opposite of stability: out them all, replace them all, and build something that doesn’t require protecting abusers to stay functional.
The episode’s emotional peak comes from Walter’s story — which he tells, by his own admission, still getting hot. Several years ago his daughter came home having been spat on by a classmate in Spanish class. He called a lawyer (aggravated assault during a pandemic), then called the school resource officer. A meeting was arranged. The cop, buddy-tone and dismissive, tried to attribute words to Walter’s daughter that weren’t hers — and Walter, who knows precisely how his daughter speaks because she uses the long words you get from books, caught it. He cut the cop off before he could wind down and hang up. And then he made a speech. He told that cop that he had been on the search party that found the body of an eleven-year-old girl who had been raped and murdered in the woods. He told him that the reason little girls get raped and murdered is because some other little shithead in a classroom spits on a girl and not a goddamn thing happens. His daughter’s case was handled. The classroom kid was removed. The next time Walter saw this cop — who was also his daughter’s cross-country coach — the cop handed Walter the clipboard and would not make eye contact. He’d heard it. He would not forget it.
Walter is not an uncommonly large or intimidating man. That’s the point. The confrontation worked not because of physical dominance but because of moral clarity, specifically deployed, at the right moment. Evan makes the connection to the broader feminist argument: because of how patriarchy has structured masculine emotionality, men have a kind of social permission to get loud, get angry, say unambiguously that something is unacceptable — permission that women are systematically denied when they try to assert the same thing. This is not a power to hoard. It is a power to spend. Frederic Poag puts it simply: think about every woman who protected you as a boy — every teacher who made you feel safe, who was almost always a woman. Now imagine those women in government. “It’s not that fucking hard to envision. Just give up control. It’s not a big deal, dude.”
Evan closes with a reference to Chanel Miller — the woman formerly known as Emily Doe, survivor of Brock Turner’s assault behind a dumpster at Stanford — who is now a writer and Substack author. Fuck Brock Turner. Support Chanel Miller. This is how the episode ends: not with despair about how much is broken, but with a directive toward the specific woman who rebuilt herself after the system gave her attacker a gentle sentence because he was a promising swimmer. She’s still here. She’s writing. She’s on Substack. Go find her work.
The episode title is the thesis. Belief: false accusations run at approximately 2% or less, meaning that statistically, epistemically, morally, we should believe women 98% of the time. We are not doing that. We should start. Calling out the bullshit: every system discussed in this episode — religious, corporate, electoral, educational — is set up to make the hard thing go away. The resource officer trying to wind down the call. The manager who resents giving the above-and-beyond award. The Democratic caucus that protects its predators. The church that phones the widow for a donation. Every single one of these is a system choosing comfort over accountability. The Diogenes Club’s answer is the same one it’s been all season: name it. Don’t let it go. You condone what you don’t confront.
Sources & References
* Chanel Miller — Author and survivor, formerly known as Emily Doe; published Know My Name(2019); active on Substack
* Brock Turner case — Assault conviction, Stanford, 2015; sentenced to six months after assault behind a dumpster witnessed by two passersby
* Pierce Brown, Red Rising series — Science fiction saga examining authoritarianism, caste, and labor exploitation across a colonized solar system
* Qasim Rashid — Muslim-American activist and attorney; cited as a model of faith practiced without coercion
* Congressional Sexual Assault Slush Fund — Taxpayer-funded fund used to settle and defend sexual misconduct claims against members of Congress; opponents, accusers
* National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — Federal agency overseeing labor organizing rights; subject to budget and staffing cuts under the current administration
* Motherless.com — Adult website; subject of CNN investigative reporting in April 2026 exposing a coordinated user network sharing techniques for drugging and assaulting spouses
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Nick’s Notes
I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community!
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