One of the topics I’ve written about the least this year is one that I wrote about the most last year:
My marriage in July 2025 to my wife, Sally Shideler Swindle, and our seventh miscarriage – her ninth – which happened on Thanksgiving of last year and now has inspired us to stop trying to have children and raise a family.
The reason for this is because last year Sally chose to take a “vacation” for a few months to visit family in Indiana while recovering from the trauma of this especially painful miscarriage, which soon became clearly not just a visit for a few months, but an intent to move back to live with her mother and step-father (who died on April 8, 2026) before divorcing me. A part of me knew when she left that I might never see her again.
However, it’s now the end of October, and Sally still has yet to file for divorce. She has regularly invited me to go ahead and file instead, but I haven’t wanted to because I still love Sally and I know how normal it is for marriages to die after miscarriages. I didn’t want ours to be one of them.
And further, the reasons that have driven Sally’s push to now divorce me simply have not been rational.
What are they about?
What are the “irreconcilable differences” now which she has chosen to end our marriage over and which I have simply now accepted?
And why do I now see them as hilarious, rather than tragic and depressing as I had previously for most of this year?
There are two reasons.
First, I accepted back on December 7, 2025 that my marriage might end.
The reason is because that was the day I read a key book for me cover-to-cover, in-one-sitting: The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life by Dr. Robin Stern.
Of the many messages the book offers: you have to be willing to leave your gaslighter.
And so I was.
I just didn’t want to until that was the only option remaining. A spouse should not give up a marriage until all reasonable options to save it have been exhausted. I’ve known this whole year that the marriage could end and then I could simply go and find another woman to try and have children with and raise in a loving family. It was now clearly confirmed that Sally’s childhood car accident injury was not going to allow her to carry a child. But it was likewise confirmed now for me that fathering a child was an option. The dream of raising a family with Sally might be over now, but the dream of raising a family with someone else still lived.
Over the course of a few hours, I left highlights, check marks and stars all over the book, recognizing not just my wife, but the third wheel in our relationship and marriage from the beginning, her mother, Barbara Swander Miller.
This marriage was murdered by my mother-in-law.
I say that with complete confidence and will write the full story eventually as well as a whole lot more about this bizarre Addams family I stumbled into joining. I’m not complaining or refusing to take responsibility. It’s just the fact. I knew what I was getting myself into when we got married. I knew this could happen. I knew the danger of marrying Wednesday Addams.
If Barb had wanted her daughter to stay married to me, then Sally would be with me right now in California, sitting a dozen feet away on our couch, snuggling with Jasmine.
But she doesn’t. And the reasons for that are very simple to summarize: apart from the reality that she’s not not getting any biological grandchildren out of this marriage now, my mother-in-law and I have wildly incompatible political ideologies and religious traditions. I work hard to try and determine reality professionally. She lives in a delusional fantasy world.
As I’ve laid out in depth for years: I am a center-right Reaganite conservative in ideology and a Judeo-Christian mystic in religion who made his childhood Bible the logo of his publishing company.
What is my mother-in-law?
Barb is a far-right Trumpist conspiracy theorist in ideology and a New Age adherent in religion who takes seriously stuff like crystals, Reiki healing, animals-to-human telepathy, and Spiritualist seances where people channel dead relatives. She became so taken with one conspiracy theory book she actually mailed it to me, the only time she ever mailed me a book apart from sending a $15 paperback trashing California as my Christmas present one year (the same year I gave her a $75 annnual Daily Wire subscription as a gift):
Sally’s told me all about totally bizarre things which her mother has said to her for years, apparently dredged up from Q-Anon-style online discourse. I’ll never forget her arguing with Barb for hours over the “illegal immigrants are eating dogs in Ohio” smear during the election in 2024.
When I married into this family and Sally taught me all about her family’s Quaker history and religious beliefs, she explained her and her mother as “Quaker spiritualists.” I soon learned, though, that for Barb and Sally, when it came to their religious practices and day-to-day beliefs, 1920s-style spiritualism was what predominated. Quakerism is more their family history than their sincere religious beliefs today.
In becoming engaged to Sally, I learned to live a life few men do: married to a witch whose mother has raised her to believe that she possesses a whole host of supernatural and psychic powers.
I married a woman who identifies and understands herself as a “medium” – her term of choice.
(And I’m not exposing some secret here. She’s written about it before and discussed it on podcasts. And she’s even given me explicit permission to write about our marriage and its ending now. She’s deleted her Substack and isn’t interested in advocating for her and her mother’s side of this story. She’s not interested in being a writer anymore now that she’s no longer trying to build a book publishing company with me to someday provide for a family.)
So this identity meant Sally would regularly speak with “ghosts” seemingly at random, including regularly her dead family members and ancestors. As we drove across the country from Indiana to California, we’d often stop at cemeteries so she could speak with the ghosts lingering there and help them “cross-over” to heaven. I soon learned this was very much a part of Sally’s life and worldview. We would regularly encounter the spirits of the dead, and she would have to talk with them, often inform them they were dead, and then tell them how to move on to heaven.
Her father Daniel Shideler regularly showed up to tell Sally how much he approved of me.
I was open-minded about this for years. I never truly “believed” because of my Robert Anton Wilson-style mystical-agnosticism. I’ve learned from 23 years of experimenting with occultism and mysticism, that a key part is always maintaining a sense of skepticism. That’s what the Sword means in Aleister Crowley’s version of the Tarot deck – rational, scientific skepticism. We don’t really know what it is when we’re having a “spiritual experience” with some sort of “entity.” We don’t really know if it’s some force “out there” or if it’s purely a phenomenon “in there” inside our heads. If a “ghost” appears, we don’t really know if it’s actually what it says it is or if it’s some “trickster spirit” showing up as something else to try and deceive us.
Or if it’s just our imagination.
And a lot of those ghostly and supernatural experiences that I had with Sally, do still seem genuine in many ways. It wasn’t just her talking, I was feeling and sensing things too. And that’s still my reality today with Sally gone. I do still regularly have feelings and experiences which I can’t explain and that are traditionally spooky, but which my therapist and psychiatrist have assured me are not signs of schizophrenia. Way more people hear and experience mysterious voices than people realize. Studies have shown that it’s more than 10%. Just because someone senses some sort of ghostly presence, it does not mean they are crazy. This is actually way more normal than most people realize.
For some of us, every day is Halloween.
So I trusted Sally when she was telling me what she experienced and what she and her mother believed.
Because that was the especially weird piece of this. Many men can probably understand being in a relationship with a woman with quirky New Age beliefs that can even seem silly. It’s something else when her mother has been affirming it in her since childhood and still does.
But what happened this year when Sally went a bit too far in her supernatural beliefs and proclamations?
I had tolerated far too much for years, but this Spring she started saying things which totally crossed the line from plausible spiritual experience to clearly a delusional mental health problem with no basis in reality and which could in no way be true.
If a spirit tells someone they are a wandering ghost of someone who died, then that’s plausible. There are thousands of years of myth, mystery, and folklore on those themes.
If someone says they are invoking angels or having a vision of Jesus or transcendent experiences with Hindu deities — those sorts of experiences are plausible and commonly understood religious practices.
But too often this year, Sally’s supernatural beliefs and claims just went too far — to such a degree now that the things she was saying and now the reasons why she’s insisting on divorce are hilarious.
I did not want my marriage to end over “irreconcilable differences” this absurd. I didn’t want this to actually be the story of why our marriage ended. It’s just too weird. I worried about embarrassing her by having to explain this.
But Sally has now affirmed that she doesn’t want to argue about this anymore and she’s not concerned about me writing about it. I get to own the public narrative of our marriage according to her. If she’s not interested in arguing with me about this in private, then she sure as hell isn’t going to want to in public.
I finally gave up last week with trying to persuade Sally to give couples counseling a try again or to see any sort of reason.
She sent me an email again gaslighting me about things we both knew to be true, and so I simply accepted it then. I told her I’d go ahead and file for divorce.
I cannot reason with someone who is committed to being dishonest with me and who sincerely believes that her dead step-father had magic healing Reiki hands, the ghosts of her dead relatives regularly talk with her, and that dogs in the neighborhood have the same arguments about Donald Trump’s immigration policy that she does with her mother.
Yes, my marriage is ending over talking dogs.
My wife would rather divorce than talk with our therapist about my worries about her belief that Jasmine and the black dog across the street bark at each other about ICE.
Now I could dwell on the tragic reasons why my wife has developed such delusional beliefs, and at some point I’ll certainly write about how I figured out what really has caused her beliefs in her supernatural powers.
But instead, for now I’ve decided to see my life not as a tragedy, but as a comedy.
A divorce over talking dogs? Hilarious!
The concluding third of this announcement today is not just about the end of my marriage, but about the beginning of my next career. The shock of this divorce under these bizarre circumstances is the catalyst, but I’ve been moving in this direction for years now:
I am done being an investigative journalist.
I am done trying to focus on raising awareness about antisemitism, ideological extremism, authoritarian regimes, and terrorism.
I am done with trying to get anyone to take me seriously.
I am done trying to persuade anyone of anything.
I am done trying to uncover some amazing new facts which will supposedly get people to “wake up” and engage with the world differently.
I am done trying to “save the world.”
As should be abundantly clear from the ridiculous narrative of my divorce: human beings are just too deeply irrational. Even people who are brilliant like Sally and Barb can still embrace totally ridiculous delusions like the idea that Sally is able to channel the ghost of their family’s dead relative Mary Jane Edwards so that her mother can then rewrite the dumb novel of her life more accurately. (I witnessed them doing this for hours. Barb even flew across the country so Sally could do some channeling for her as they rewrote the book for the umpteenth time.)
I can’t even get my own family to deal with the truth. My relationship with Barb finally ended when she got angry at me over the goddamn Dinesh D’Souza “2,000 Mules” documentary getting withdrawn and decided to block me. When it came time last year for her to come to our wedding, she set down one rule: no discussion of politics.
What sort of mother is going to do that? Make a demand that she will only attend her daughter’s wedding if the groom keeps his mouth shut about what he does for a living. I almost wanted to say she wasn’t welcome to come at all. Maybe at this point I should have.
But if I had then I wouldn’t now have a hilarious story to tell you and everyone!
Ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the Bible.
And to everything there is a season.
My season of trying to raise the alarm about the dangers and threats around the world is over. I can’t even get family members to listen or care.
I failed.
And so my season of just trying to make people laugh is now beginning. It will start with more satirical writing, humorous gonzo journalism, funny ebooks, and livestreaming comedy shows.
But eventually, as I can get this anxiety and hyperarousal under control and build up the material, the destination for me is now clear:
I’m going to get on stage and become a stand-up comedian.
The tradition of prophetic, psychedelic, truth-telling comedy pioneered by George Carlin, expanded by Bill Hicks, and now continued by Matt Ruby seems to be the only way to tell people the truth today. And it needs to be continued and passed on to the next generations of comedians, like my friend Cody Taymore who has also realized recently the importance of shifting toward comedy and inspired me in this decision too. It’s the right move for him, it’s the right move for me, and chances are it’s likely the right move for you too, person reading this essay.
The greatest of comedy filmmakers, Billy Wilder, once said “If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.” He directed the greatest film about American media ever made, Ace in the Hole, about a journalist so desperate for money and fame that he schemes to keep a man trapped in a cave-in for days on end just to milk the story.
Here is the complete film right here on YouTube, but you really should just pick up the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray as I have since this is one revisit every few years:
The story is a great tragedy with a black-as-midnight ending. But it’s also one of the funniest comedies you will ever see, its critique of America and our media more relevant than ever.
And so that’s the way I’m now going to move forward talking about both the conclusion of my absurd supernatural romance and this dark, collapsing civilization where it’s come time to simply embrace the Apocalypse, as Douglas Rushkoff has now begun advocating and started developing for his next book:
Instead of trying to save this anti-civilization, we can serve as its death doulas, making its collapse as gentle as possible on the living systems it has been exploiting all this time.
We can also serve as birth doulas for the emergence of a more horizontal civilization of mutuality to take its place. This requires discipline, maturity, and—yes—spiritual development.
Our lives are a joke, so it’s time to laugh as our world ends.
You’ll feel better.
After seven miscarriages and a marriage murdered by my mother-in-law, I certainly do.
“I can still hear you saying! (Still hear you saying!)
You would never break the chain! (Never break the chain!)
Chain keep us together! (Running in the shadow!)”
I am simultaneously sorry for the dissolution of your marriage, but incredibly grateful for this piece: I sent it over to a friend who is going through a divorce, so has been laughing at my “fortune cookie, Socrates schtick” for months now, as I try to get him to see the absurdity in his wife’s delusions. (Note: he has blame in the relationship, but at least his are rooted in reality and not the clouds)
For me, the gas lighter was my mother with my father as the enabler (ah, the psychological damage your parents can do), so I understand how hard it can be to unplug from the matrix - once you do, you fare far better when you learn to laugh instead of cry 😉