Everyone Who Disagrees With Me Is An Extremist Threatening the Very Foundations of our Republic
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Everyone Who Disagrees With Me Is An Extremist Threatening the Very Foundations of our Republic
Reductio ad MAGAdom - 2 August 2022
THEY CHOSE THESE OPTICS: The staging was deliberate, the message was dour, and a deeply divided nation heard President Biden tell them to go ahead, choose sides. Everyone is already digging ideological trenches for a pending national security indictment against the former president. What could possibly go wrong?
Democrats think they can get a midterm bounce out of defending abortion access for, um, well, for people who identify as needing abortions. In fact, reproductive rights issues became an electoral wedge against the right during the last decade but Republicans failed to notice the trend.
As they delete abortion rhetoric and pro-Trump language from their websites now, however, Republicans might consider winning back some of this ground just by naming “women.” It might work a little.
More to the point, though, is the energy of this speech. I am old enough to remember Jimmy Carter’s “malaise,” as well as the landslide election of Ronald Reagan that followed it, and Biden strikes me as an angry Jimmy Carter. Your mileage may vary.
I am simply observing that if Republicans can get over Trump and put a nominee forward who comes across as the sane person in the room, they might just elect a president. Sarah Palin’s failed congressional bid this week is striking in this regard. Everyone seems to be tiring of candidates who are defined by drama, and in that sense Joe Biden is his own worst enemy.
Perhaps by 2024, Republicans will be ready to pick a more disciplined, traditional conservative as their standard-bearer. With all of that said, I will just note that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has attached himself to an emerging wedge issue that, by 2024, will have established itself on the American political stage, with Democrats on the wrong side of the reality-based community.
DETRANSITIONERS EXIST AND THEY ARE SPEAKING UP: Thousands of American children were harmed by this woke medical experiment on children. There will be hell to pay.
THIS WAS AN IDEOLOGY-DRIVEN EXPERIMENT ON CHILDREN: The idea of the “trans child” caught on with clinicians through no small amount of social justice lobbying within medical communities. A quack fad thus became the standard of care. As Dr. Malone writes in a letter to the British Medical Journal:
Globally, there are significant difficulties in discussing, let alone challenging, the practice of gender clinics, due to the belief systems of those who adhere to gender identity theory – a non-clinical ideological perspective for which there is little to no empirical support. This position requires clinicians to believe that everyone has an innate, subjective gender identity and that individuals whose bodies do not match this should be provided with ‘gender-affirming’ medical interventions regardless of the harms and lack of evidence of benefit.
PARENTS BECAME THE ENEMY: And so did evidence-based medicine. Emphasis mine:
Family therapy sessions centered around pushing Daria and her husband to facilitate their son’s social and medical transition. “It became a lot more trying to convince us that our kid was transgender rather than working with us on how to support him in eating,” she said. Counsellors helped him pick stereotypically feminine clothing and settle on a stereotypically feminine name, but the eating struggles remained.
Daria, a scientific researcher, asked for evidence that cross-sex hormones would alleviate anorexia, but was given none. She asked about side effects. A therapist told her: “You need to stop focusing on the evidence and start focusing on your daughter.”
VICTIMS WERE GAY AND LESBIAN: A new survey of the literature by US-based Lesbians United finds that almost 8,000 deaths have been attributed to puberty blocking drugs. Victims of “gender affirmation medicine” have higher risks of osteoporosis. An ideology that de-sexes and slowly kills lesbians is not “progressive.” Medicalized “gender nonconformity” is absolutely harmful to homosexuals.
ANY CHILD CAN BE ‘TRANS’ BECAUSE NO CHILD IS ‘TRANS’: As Colin Wright notes, “The definition of ‘transgender’ currently used and embraced by our largest and most prestigious scientific, medical, and human rights organizations is literally synonymous with common gender nonconformity.” After all, if you make the discursive category as broad as possible, you attract the most potential converts.
THE BODIES OF GIRLS WERE EXPLOITED: Raquel Rosario Sánchez, a Dominican feminist who became a victim of harassment and abuse at a British campus that enabled her inquisitors, writes for Newsweek that the surge in young women identifying as “trans” represents a “dystopian medical future” of internalized sexism.
At a time when unprecedented numbers of children and young people are presenting with gender dysphoria, what do we make of a federal ruling that considers this condition a form of disability? What the head of the National Center for Transgender Equality refers to as "gender-affirming care" are irreversible and life-altering procedures now covered thanks to a new legal loophole.
PEOPLE SPOKE ABSURDITIES: The first step in getting people to commit atrocities is altering their language. In this highly-ratio’d tweet, TIME has demonstrated that truth by pandering to the ridiculous demands of an author for a puff piece about their pornographic “children’s books.”
KINDNESS BECAME A TYRANNY: A Kansas school district will pay Pamela Ricard $95,000 in damages for her suspension over refusal to use “preferred pronouns.” Seems that her views on the topic were, you know, worthy of respect in a democratic society:
“We’re pleased to settle this case favorably on behalf of Pam, and we hope that it will encourage school districts across the country to support the constitutionally protected freedom of teachers to teach and communicate honestly with both children and parents,” said Tyson Langhofer, the director of the Alliance Defending Freedom Center for Academic Freedom.
CAMPUSES NURTURED CRUSADERS: When Donald Trump got elected, lots of people lost their minds. The case of Gibson’s, a bakery in Oberlin, Ohio, is a case in point. The night after Trump’s election, they became the object of a harassment and slander campaign by the Oberlin College after specious charges of racism were leveled by a shoplifter. Clearly in the wrong and ordered repeatedly to pay an extraordinary judgment, the college still refuses to concede anything to the affected family business.
Reading that harrowing story, I saw parallels with Julie Jaman, the 80 year-old woman who was mobbed in Port Townsend, Washington last month after city and YMCA officials smeared her in the media and whipped up an angry crowd. The mayor of Port Townsend is a graduate of Evergreen College, which is almost as famously woke as Oberlin. He is actually trained to do this sort of struggle session-as-governance.
THERE IS NO THIRD PARTY SOLUTION: As I have written before, “gender critical” was never going to produce a third party in American politics. Such projects are doomed to ultimate failuree. One of the two major parties will eventually swallow any new constituency and incorporate it. Worse, marginality invites ideology — that is, any third party will quikly fill up with kooks, and they will fight amongst themselves for power. In fact, the longest-running third party in America has recently been declared dead after an internal takeover by an extremist faction:
EVERYTHING BELOVED MUST BE DESTROYED: If the decade can be defined by one cultural trend, it is the atavistic urge of young “creatives” to deconstruct, gender-and-race-flip, and “queer” everything that anyone ever loved until it is unrecognizable, then tell the fan base that they are bad people for not getting THE MESSAGE. We get the message: you hate us, you’re monsters.