Bret Ellis manqué Russell Smith’s tenth and final book, Self Care (Biblioasis, 2025), treats an amour fou between a feminist and an incel. One of those categories is an animating force of the state. The other is purely notional, its ostensible members pursued with the full force of the state and its cutouts.
Russell, having been divorce-raped by his ex-wife (who now has custody of his son, whom she could transgend), cannot surmount his need for titillation in order to somehow address the present day honestly. His coterie of left-wing editors, and a publisher dependent on régime largesse, make matters worse.
Reportage by the corporate press provides prestige cover for the régime’s project of incarcerating (preferably extirpating) its domestic enemies.
Court rulings enact that project through binding precedent.
Self Care confers small-batch-artisanal literary cover on this selfsame project, giving it currency in the soi-disant cultural elite.
The warning signs were right there in Black and White (in a poor choice of typeface, as we shall see): Black is capitalized, but white and god are not.
You don’t need to know anything else or look further in any respect. What I’m doing here is well more than is necessary to understand the structural dishonesty in Self Care. Russell’s editors, like leftists everywhere, quite enjoy racial suprematism. It’s just their flavour of same. It’s never OK to be White, for example, least of all with majuscule, but Blacks are sacred. That’s why they get reverential capitalization.
The same ladies with bullshit jobs in the publishing industry who think Black-girl magic is real think God isn’t. Are they ever in for a surprise. Still, that’s why they lowercase (v.t.) His name. They do that even though single-word lowercased bowdlerizations have been available for nearly a century: omigod (OED 1961–) · ohmigod (1927–) · omigawd (1969–).
The same demographic that capitalizes black but renders God in lower case also believes that Catholics spent decades covertly bulldozing hundreds of Indian children into the aforementioned mass graves. Such capitalization choices are irrefutable signals.
The fundamental problem, as I explained elsewhere, is that Kids Today have simply not read huge masses of well-edited copy. Everyone from the previous century was steeped in well-edited copy. In that era, one had to know shit, which facility came about through voracious reading, germinating wide general knowledge.
Hence anyone under the age of 50, save for the preternaturally gifted, all of whom long ago got the hell out of Dodge, is incapable of copy-editing.
What are the editor credits?
Edited by Daniel Wells
Copyedited by Martin Ainsley
Typeset by Vanessa Stauffer
Ainsley lives in Fredericton (I’m from Moncton); works for small presses; misrenders the name of his own job (it isn’t a single word); and has the expected physiognomy.
I had had a whole jeremiad loaded in the chamber to lambaste lady copy-editrixen for having imposed their failed ideology on a male writer. Just as right-wing assholes decry spiritual faggotry, here I want Ainsley to quit editing like a girl.
I maintain the lexicon of right-wing-asshole coinages. While avoiding shitpost like the plague, Russell deploys a few:
pronoun people (not really)
trad wife (it isn’t two words)
alpha-male · sigma-male
cuck(boy)
black pill (twice, and in these usages it isn’t two words)
Staceys (and) Chads
soyboy (I’m amazed that one made it to final copy)
simp
Females operate by unspoken consensus. Some sorority girl or other in New York publishing decided a decade or so ago that the struggling book industry had to really, finally differentiate itself from those ghastly blogs (short for “Web logs,” a kind of online journal or diary). Print has to feel like it’s better than HTML – even when it isn’t, and even if electronic books in the ePub format are HTML.
In the hindbrains of the publishing cartel, book typography has, at root, two differentiators from beastly blogs: Em dashes and rendering basically every number as a word.
Nospace-emdash-nospace does not work in continuous composition, not least in justified text (try that on a Kindle) and worst of all when adjacent to quotation marks or any word containing a hyphen or en dash. Space-endash-space solves every problem.
Integers one through ten are rendered as words most of the time, as are some larger integers, especially when used figuratively (“I told you that a hundred times already”). Dollar values in particular are not meant to be rendered as though a pajeet at a call centre were banging them out (“forty-three thousand dollars” – what do you do if there are cents attached?).
Of course numbers can, and, in many contexts, must be rendered as numerals. Of course a numeral can start a sentence. Of course Self Care borks this completely.
Bembo is the wrong typeface for this means of reproduction. It’s the wrong font for anything other than letterpress printing using hot-metal type. A girl from the 21st century isn’t going to know that, nor is a 40-year-old man writing a how-to guide on a blog somewhere. Neither of them will have actually grown up reading hot-metal Bembo. Guess who did.
Italic works particularly poorly in this resolution and on this paper stock. I am not entirely sure I am looking at offset printing.
Another strike against Bembo (actually just the book designer) is its long-tailed R. Of course you can use the short-tailed version, but you’d have to know about that in the first place, and at that point why not use a face that is more suited to the reproduction environment?
But that would require expertise. The last thing this country wants. It would also require exposing girls in the workforce to the other word they successfully banished – no.
On the plus side, at least Self Care is using an OpenType Bembo. In the ordinary course of events, your Word for Windows file is flowed into an existing InDesign for Windows template using the publisher’s decades-old Type 1 fonts, for which they spent nothing (they were freebies with Adobe applications). Hence you’d never see ff · ffi · ffl ligatures, but the publisher, whose parent conglomerate is worth billions, wouldn’t have to spend a few hundred bucks on an improved font format that could be used ad infinitum. Russell’s book dodged that bullet while still picking up shrapnel.
Just as the copy-editrix[or] gets 60% (not “sixty per cent”) of the rules right, here the designeuse gets about 75% right. Of course one multiplies those together, and the result is a complete lack of surprise to see acronyms typeset a single point smaller. (Could be worse. Could be fake-ass small caps.)
Attempting to reproduce the text of instant messaging just does not work, not least because the listed mistypings would have been autocorrected or spotted before sending. Nobody has gotten this right.
Simulating blog copy is best done by actually creating such a blog, actually populating it with HTML and CSS, and running a screenshot thereof. Worked great in Camille Paglia’s retrospective.
The first page of a book is not enumerated. “7” is not the first page of any book, let alone this one.
Of course we aren’t presented with thin spaces between nested quotes. These gals have never heard of that.
Display type is so ill-chosen and ‑handled it isn’t worth talking about, though I do ask a question about boldfacing exactly five words at a time in the list below.
First of all, like a jeet they misrender Canadian English. I literally wrote the book on that topic and there is no excuse. Mr. and Dr. are rendered with word-final periods.
In this list, which I am not going to copy-edit further, see top/bottom/mid of cited page numbers.
289b blatantly missing end quote
9 errant comma after woman
15 djs; cf. 17m DJing
14–15 too much space between open quote and italic caps
140b that isn’t going to be the name of the “site”
Literally on p24 misses the chance to say “May 2‑4 long weekend”
40b comma mandatory but missing
41 forty • 47m • 50–51 • 78m dozen fifteen · 129b you have got to be fucking kidding me
44 Black • 26 white cis • 46m
46 PhD but cf. TA-ship in How Insensitive (yes, I specifically remember that, and it was typeset wrong)
49 Mr • Dr elsewhere • 224t
Why boldface only the first five words? 66 THE • 170b
65, 68 hours/times
97 actual Nazis (one of several references)
102m those should be slashes
106–7 spaceband too wide • Dr • Two of them end in periods
We have variously stalky and stalkery
182 not enough resolution for a page of Bembo Italic
185t it’s Dungeons & Dragons
189 $75
206 gagnant not ital (was twice before). And comma or slash?
208 nobody actually utters “YA novel”
229 and others: one does not dial one’s best friend (on what? a Contempra phone?)
240p4 make up your minds about numbers
236/273 in no respect is this how things work
Endpaper misrenders title
And for reference, the book’s title is a reduction of Gloria’s column title, “Daily Self Care,” which indeed must be rendered in quotes. Self-care in its usual senses is correctly hyphenated otherwise.
Self Care is highly sympathetic to Gloria and her autist paramour Daryn. Russell understands that Gloria “had a feminist education,” but also believes there really are men who hate women.
I suppose so.
But Self Care manages to meld wish fulfillment with predictive programming in that Gloria fantasizes about harming Daryn on page 34 and finally finishes him off by kicking him down a flight of stairs 253 pages later. (Except page numbers are off by six.)
Russell includes enough right-wing neologisms to give the impression he has read what these disaffected young men write. Like Gloria, he makes the mistake of believing them, or taking them literally. But Russell never goes so far as to accurately describe them and their lives using their own coinages. Meanwhile, he complains that the English language has a paucity of terminology for organs of reproduction and what one might do with those. As such I suspect Russell knows what he’s doing.
Ethnic cleansing lite is the precise outcome desired by feminists and the régime for any man who dares dissent. But while they’re waiting for small-scale genocide to finish up, they’ll settle for defaming; surveilling; doxxing, hounding, and firing; debanking; and finally arresting and imprisoning such dissidents. (Even the few females.)
Russell is minutely honest about his hapless twentysomething characters. Of course Gloria has a shitty job churning out Web content as piecework. But so did everybody at Gawker nearly two decades ago, so I see Gloria has learned nothing. (She works not a shit job but a bullshit job.)
Russell puts into words how one feels fatter and fatter the longer one sits at the computard.
(I do like the fact that Self Care manifestly is not a novel where E‑mail does not exist. Podcasts do, too [one mention, an allusion to Red Scare].)
She’s got a BPD-ho roommate whom she avoids. All her friends are BPD hos. How many of them also end up dead (by their own hands)?
What seems to be Self Care’s B‑story – suicide among arts workers – is a canard. Heathers handled suicide better. (“I love my dead gay incel.”)
As one would expect, Daryn (“Darill”) lives with his mom somewhere in the suburbs. When not working his own flavour of shit job, he shitposts online.
Russell has Daryn explain that his shitposting isn’t meant sincerely – though if Russell could somehow have managed to render the word shitpost, and gotten it past the longhouse, maybe he wouldn’t have needed line after line of dialogue. The underlying idea would have explained itself.
We’re presented with all sorts of true-to-life details, in other words. But the whole setup is colossally fake, and Russell knows it.
There’s no such thing as an incel in the received sense. There are surely (young) men who would like to have girlfriends but cannot manage that for one reason or another, but the conceptual category Incel is as real as anything that any other leftist neologism purports to name (gender identity, deadnaming, misgendering, trans kids · climate change · systemic racism · white privilege [case sic] · reconciliation · mass graves · diversity, equity, inclusion · hate · democracy).
The entire apparatus of the régime (and – again – its cutouts) has put immense effort, and a small fortune in public funds, into conjuring incels as a menace on the par with, say, machete-wielding Mohammedans. (They’ll tell you the latter aren’t real.)
It is pointless to list the entrenched government and private-sector programs buttressing feminism, because anyone who supports those programs will either deny they exist, deny they have any effect, or view them as putting into effect some form of neutrality or objective reality. Those same people (they’re feminists), when presented with the vast panoply of panopticon-like surveillance activities directed at so-called incels, will nod approvingly, tell you we’re not doing enough, and ask if they’re hiring.
The régime is getting everything it wants. Feminists are inseparable from the régime, and they wonder what the holdup is in putting incels in prison for misgendering a tranny.
Russell is belittled as a “former contributor” at the Globe and Mail, which, like all media outlets that aren’t Blacklock’s, CanadaLand, Rebel News, or a couple of others, survives on government grants. I downloaded, printed out, and read every article in the Globe that used “incel” in its headline (text archive), which I guarantee is more than anyone at Biblioasis bothered to do.
Apart from covering a few court cases, which served the régime well by allowing pure-laine or vizmin judges to blame “incel ideology” for actual murder, the articles quoted or were authored by females who literally say it’s about time incels were added to what amount to terrorist watchlists.
(To his credit, that subcontinental extremism expert, who, like a stopped clock, is right twice a day, identifies actual shitposting: “[T]hese forums are generally just social groups where disgruntled men can get together and talk smack.”)
If one puts all these observations together, were Daryn real, Russell’s former organ would seek to get him shipped off to Gitmo.
There can be no such thing as an “anti-immigrant protest” in Canada. (Russell must be thinking of the Khalsa Day Parade.) As Thomas 777 has pointed out, since the Nuremburg Trials it has been illegal to be actually right-wing in any Western reich. Here we’ll seize your bank accounts, arrest you, and imprison you for years if you dare defy the régime. If and when you’re acquitted, we’ll appeal the acquittal.
The state will literally charge you criminally, over and over again, for having made up, from whole cloth, an obviously satirical resistance group. (For having shitposted, in other words.) Yet a blatant form of containment is permitted in present day – the painfully astroturfed Elbows Up demonstrations.
No liberal anywhere even knows that most of the foregoing happened. The régime’s official media will not merely lie about the facts but simply refuse to even quote defence attorneys. Leftists do not know and will not believe what the state has actually done in recent years to anyone who dares defy it.
At the same time, they claim incels are a menace because the régime media told them that, which they vaguely remember without quite being able to attribute a source.
I would note that, while highly disaffected, right-wing boys are the only ones with a sense of joy or fun in their lives. At root that’s because they’ll laugh at anything short of God. (“Even the Holocaust?” ”Starting with the Holocaust. Also, which one?”)
Russell creditably avoids the commonplace that leftist girls (tautological) like right-wing boys because they’re basically hotter. Not quite: The only hot young men are non‑ or anti-progressive. (The swole left is as real as the trans child. Working out makes you right-wing.)
There are tiny gatherings at the horse statue in Queen’s Park (not what it’s called), which Russell vaguely name-drops in an unrelated context. (He likely had no exposure to the former near-weekly contretemps at Nathan Philips Square between antifa and “the far right.” Again, only one of those categories is real, and they’re the ones who started all the fights, as I directly observed and he didn’t.)
(Also unbeknownst to Russell, one of those gatherings is an annual men’s rosary crusade. He’s invited for next year.)
You don’t need to be Mike Benz to understand that dissident clubs in Canada (are they “far-right”?) are absolutely impermissible, banned, unlawful. The best these spergs can manage are podcasts, Twitter, and Substacks, one of which progressives no longer read and another they’ve never heard of.
The fact that Second Sons Canada is allowed to exist, and have a YouTube channel, is evidence it’s a glow-op.
Every phacephag in this video is the glowiest glownigger that ever glowed. Agents to a man.
There aren’t enough young fellas opposed to the régime in the entire country to fill up a subway platform. I suppose I should qualify that and say men opposed to the régime who are willing to do something, anything, about it.
These men are literally unplatformed.
At any rate, that platform, at Queen’s Park station, has been under construction for years and would not have held even the Second Sons’ handlers without somebody’s getting bumped onto the subway tracks.
Let alone consensual reality. Russell Smith vaguely is, but he could not get his book published if he were honest. How banal to “remind” me of the denotative senses of “novel” or “fiction.” I’m the one who constantly advocates printing the legend, for heaven’s sake.
Feminists, and progressives generally, and girls generally, all truly believe there are masses of incels out there and that they’re a problem, and find it credible that such masses might arrive en masse at a subway station. Russell is doing fan service for the readership he hopes he has – gals who have never quite twigged to the fact that The Handmaid’s Tale was not, at root, a cautionary tale of how fascistic Republicans are, but straight-up erotica.
When not talking about English usage or men’s fashion, Russell’s entire œuvre amounts to titillation. (I did what I could to skip pages and pages of shall we say physical intimacy in Self Care. I pay good money to keep female sexuality out of my life. But there seemed to be quite an interest in the phallus.)
Spy used to incessantly refer to “bosomy dirty-book writer Shirley Lord.” Cross your fingers, but maybe Russell Smith has taken up that mantle.
I jest, but Russell’s dishonesty cannot get a pass.
If Russell had managed to use more than a smattering of true-life right-wing vocabulary, he wouldn’t have ended up with a fundamentally untruthful novel. But Biblioasis, captured by the régime at remarkably low cost, cannot risk that kind of honesty.
It goes without saying that no character in a volume published by Biblioasis could ever call another character a nigger. That’s literally illegal, and would jeopardize arts-council funding – e.g., $95,000 from Ontario Creates in 2022, which requires diversity and inclusion (PDF) from grant recipients. In their actual workplaces, no less. And you have to prove you consulted gay race communists before you even apply.
(James Baldwin gets an N‑word pass even in death and even in French. Biblioasis’ Baldwin, Styron, and Me, from an authoress whose name is a couple of handfuls of random Scrabble tiles, quotes Baldwin using that word – in translation, no less. Not the phenomenon in question.)
Nor could a nonfiction title by Biblioasis (certainly not On Book Banning [also missing a hyphen]) treat the history of Quebec separatism, for example, which would entail mentioning Nègres blancs d’Amérique (White Niggers of America). The usage/citation or use/cite distinction simply does not hold when deploying a lexeme White liberal girls decided to ban. Certain words are literally unthinkable to them; draw your own literary allusions.
In Self Care, something else Daryn does not do is call his coworkers pajeets. (Gloria is not about to call her work supervisor a jeet.)
That’s because, while right-wing guys are fully Žižek-compliant in their embrace of casual racism as a bonding and defusing mechanism, and call each other faggot and retard all day, they would never behave with interpersonal rudeness to civilians they happen to know or meet. Daryn is, in early days, meticulously polite to Gloria, who later murders him.
You can be “anti-immigrant” without calling your Uber Eats driver a pajeet, even if that’s what he is, and even if Daryn fails to be an athleisure-class girlboss, hence never summons a wallah carrying Uber Eats to his mother’s high-rise in the first place.
If Russell had simply let Daryn call what he does shitposting, then maybe Gloria would achieve self-realization, comprehending for the first time that her real goal in life is to own the chuds. Like everything else she thinks she believes, that precept was simply assigned to her.
Gloria might blanch at the idea of becoming a tradwife, which lexeme was misrendered as two words. (How ’bout *trad cath? Is that about oldschool catheters?)
Or, for that matter, a Nazi. (Gloria also believes there are such things as Nazis here in Toronto.) Libelling young men in this way facilitates their persecution by the régime. Self Care is the champagne-socialist West Queen West flavour of such targetting of enemies. All the sad young literary girls have the licence they didn’t know they needed.
Russell Smith grew up in the previous century and began hamster-wheeling in the publishing milieu of that century. He has consistently chosen to keep working within the system even after said system fucked him over time and time again.
Self Care cannot stop talking about has-beens and grants that were refused. Neither can the book’s endpapers. (Lady grant referees were never going to fund a book about incels. He should have leaned into Gloria’s ethnic cleansing.)
Gloria has enough sense not to self-shitcan from her bullshit job. Perhaps this is Russell’s mea culpa from having quit the Globe over the fact he hadn’t gotten a raise in however many years. Quitting reduced that income stream to nil. Gloria is not the only one who has failed to learn from history.
Creative writing cannot be taught, and “teaching creative writing” is a make-work project for has-beens.
In present day Russell greenlights sexy-vampiress novels by and for ladies of a certain age for a rival small press, Dundurn.
These facts are downstream from the divorce-rape that separated him from his son and stuck him in “a rental apartment in Parkdale.”
Whoops. That’s not the actual quote (sic throughout):
I have great difficulty earning a living; a live in a rented apartment in Parkdale, I’m always worried about money and my quasi-fame such as it was has vanished entirely.
Yeah, well, I’m a bigger has-been than Russell is, but at least I know how he could solve the problem.
Having missed the book launch, last week (2025.10.20) I was one of six punters at a talk at a bookstore ostensibly starring Russell. He was there with his sexy-vampiress authoress and another novelist, whom I rather liked. I was the best-dressed man in attendance and Russell very much was not the second‑.
Again staying on-brand, Russell managed to utter the words “orgasm” and “ejaculate” (v.). (Michael Cunningham: “I can’t help noticing that as soon as I write a novel without a blowjob, they give me the Pulitzer Prize.”)
He’s well(‑)preserved for his age (≈62), and obviously works out to some extent, but sarcopenia is eating away at him. I was not aware that both hands were affected by syndactyly. Really, though, Russell’s sad-sack demeanour about book publishing was well treated in Super Sad True Love Story, though I doubt Smith would trade his hexed fingers for Shteyngart’s crumpled wang.
I heard a lot of back-and-forth about naming actual streets and subway stations, and whether or not some imagined reader in Winnipeg would recognize such names. (Queen’s Park wasn’t named; Self Care can’t make up its mind even on that degree of honesty.)
Well, they are. Gangly Hebraic shitlib David Shields reprogrammed my mind in one fell swoop with Reality Hunger, which permanently discredits the novel as a Victorian form that has not evolved even if it’s talking about interstellar travel or a final solution to the incel problem.
I cannot remember the last novel I read before Self Care.
This too is another manifestation of Russell’s suicidal need to work within the system. Even if one accepts the novel as (a) form, all the excitement is coming from based and redpilled authors like Delicious Tacos and Dan Baltic (and Mike Ma and Sam Finlay and so many others). Despite working with a small press in a failed state, Russell could still, right now, position Self Care within that milieu.
You can teach an old dog with a Wintel shitbox new tricks.
Russell’s aperçu about the fatness of sitting at the computard would have worked much better as the nucleus of a tweetstorm. One can publish onliné and in print simultaneously, after all.
Russell could ask for the rights to his entire back catalogue (he could “get his rights back”), paying for them if need be, and simply reissue everything and keep the money. Of course Amazon KDP is the obvious choice, but type and copy become even more pressing issues there. (BookBaby is marginally better in some respects.)
Few know of, and fewer have read, Blindsided. I do and have. One should not half-ass E‑book publishing.
The obvious way to present himself on video is to read his own works. This could become spectacularly popular in a matter of months. But he would need to quit looking like shit.
There remains his style-maven persona. Every recent photo shows him in rumpled shirting – sometimes in short pantalons. His book on men’s style was sorely weak on illustrations, not least of the various jacket types with callouts differentiating one from another. But style advice is one thing the right-wing assholes simply adore. I have literally had to talk one of them down from the ledge of becoming a full-(f)ledged wristwatch autist.
Style for Spergs is an obvious brand he could use.
Appearing on Red Scare (q.v.) is an absolute must. Biblioasis’ lady publicists (they’re hiring an “assistant”) would never in a million years allow Russell to appear on right-wing podcasts. Yet this is the latent market, well above and beyond the baseline of plump unmarried chicks.
Hence for the love of Pete get this book into the hands of the Red Scare gals, and ideally guest-star on an episode thereof. (Here Russell really could go full Houellebecq, who has already appeared on that show. [After he got kidnapped.])
Incredibly, in the time in which I’ve been working on this article, Russell’s official site has gone from being broken due to a missing security certificate, to having been domain-hijacked, to now producing a 404 error.
Start a Patreon right away and a Substack shortly thereafter.
One absolutely has to be on Twitter, and one has to pay for it. @Syndactyly and @StyleforSpergs are available usernames. It seems that CrossYourFingers.com has been domain-squatted, but it could be registered anyway. Or something along those lines (FingersCrossed).
Podcasts? Too many of them, and the Pareto distribution is no more blatant than in that demimonde. So do something different: Run a weekly podcast that’s never more than five minutes long.
What’s he going to talk about in these new ventures? Two things – literature, from his vantage point as a male novelist who isn’t David Shields or some kind of homo, and men’s style (ditto).
At no time would Russell self-shitcan from his pity-fuck job at Dundurn. If they or a bunch of girls in masks try to cancel him, well, cancelling is over. Every right-wing asshole who gets doxxed and/or cancelled ends up more famous and richer.
Let’s set a goal of earning Russell an extra $10K (not “ten K” and also not “ten thousand dollars”) within the first twelve months.
Last but not least, why can’t Russell start his own publishing house? All the joyous young literary spergs are doing that. And it’s working out great for them. One of these guys commissioned a new translation of and reissued The Camp of the Saints.
I’m not in a position to help Russell out, not least because one should never meet one’s fans – let alone, as he surely has done, bone them.
Nobody has put this much effort into studying Russell or his work. What you’re reading here is about $10K(’s) worth of editorial consulting. (Still not ten K.) Legend-printing doesn’t come cheap.
For a man who wrote about mourning coats and presented a radio show on “language” (archives) alongside a lesbo cohostess, surely only this degree of detail is warranted. He’ll always have one fan.
The young gals he’s sympathetic toward, and rather fancies, will send him to the gulag first.
You were here: Right-wing assholes in Canada → Russell Smith
Posted: 2025.10.27