One pleasant bit of non-news is that CPAC is dying. For a couple of decades now, the Conservative Political Action Conference has been a yearly spectacle of far right conservative speechifying, when the radical Republicans could let their hair down and let their freak flag fly, and the media would dutifully report on their gibbering mania, and we’d point and laugh, and then some of the kooks would get elected to high office. Remember when David Silverman tried to get American Atheists represented at CPAC? That was an omen.
This year, I hadn’t even realized it was going on until several days into the conference, it was that much of a yawner. Attendance is way down, and the ratfuckers are giving speeches to nearly empty seats. Prospective presidential candidates are skipping the whole show. It’s a “who cares?” event now.
However, as it’s relevance declines, the participants are reaching for the big bottle of crazy evil to spark excitement, and as we all know, the Republican party has become unhealthily obsessed with what’s in other people’s pants. They’re trying to pass laws to restrict people’s civil rights, they’ve developed a weird hatred of Mrs Doubtfire, they want to burn books that even mention the existence of non-traditional non-heterosexuals. What’s next? How can they top the insanity they’re perpetrating right now?
The Right’s war on queer and trans people took center stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference as Daily Wire host Michael Knowles openly called for the public eradication of transgender individuals. During his speech on Saturday, Knowles told the crowd,
For the good of society… transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.
…
In his speech, Knowles used a convoluted line of thinking and false logic while trying to prove his horrifying point that trans people should not exist.There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It can be all or nothing,he said.If transgenderism is true, if men really can become women, then it’s true for everybody of all ages. If transgenderism is false — as it is — if men really can’t become women — as they cannot — then it’s false for everybody too. And if it’s false, then we should not indulge it, especially when that indulgence requires taking away the rights and customs of many people. It if is false, then for the good of society — and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion — then transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.
We’ve seen where this line of thinking goes, we don’t need a roadmap to recall our history. First we have to silence the Badthought with bookburnings and firelit marches and shrieking news articles. Then we pass laws criminalizing drag shows (Tennessee just made appearing in drag a felony with a 6 year prison sentence). Next we have to isolate the bad people in concentration camps, and then we have to move on to a Final Solution.
You would think that Ben Shapiro, Knowles’ big boss at the Daily Wire, would be aware of the comparison. Knowles himself is being made aware that he said the evil parts out loud, and is lashing out at the media that is reporting on his words and demanding retractions.
You said it, big boy. Be thankful that the only pain you might suffer is a little public humiliation, rather than a prison sentence or a beating or a gas chamber, like your victims have to deal with all the time.
Big IF – & wrong IF. It’s not false. Its true.
Trans people are people.
Memo to Repugs – they are also people who vote.
As do their families and friends and supporters.
Let’s hope those votes do make a difference. Also .. Expletrives, just expletives
These Fucking People!
PS. Also NO “indulging” i.e. respecting the Humanity and wishes of Trans people does NOT “take away the rights or customs of many people..” As pretty clear from lack of actual examples and specifics there. Just like equal marriage did NOt invalidate any straight mrriages obvs even for the Repugliklans.
So.. yeah. FFS.
The speakers would sound a bit more impressive if they used German, as the banality of their words would be hidden in a language few understand.
But I doubt they could master the grammar.
Here go again. Not for the first time.
“… transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology. . .”
Transgenderism is NOT an ideology. There are no beliefs or principles or doctrines that you have to subscribe to. Even a little kid can be transgender.
“If transgenderism is true, if men really can become women . . . ”
I wouldn’t say transgenderism is true. I’d say it’s real. But no, sorry, men cannot become women. Can’t happen, Bud.
“If transgenderism is false — as it is — if men really can’t become women — as they cannot . . . ”
There you go. You just said so yourself: men really can’t become women. But that doesn’t make transgenderism false. It just means that you haven’t got the first idea what transgenderism is.
I really wish that if people want to talk about transgenderism, especially if they want to condemn it, they’d start by learning what it is. And some idiot Repub wants to eradicate us.
John Brunner said, I forget which novel, that “Extremism is the death-rattle of any movement.” If anti-trans are talking genocide, instead of bathrooms, it means they are doomed. (I hope.)
Every time I see more rhetoric like this start up it makes me wonder if I ought to just move to New Zealand.
“If religion is true, if men really can become religious, then it’s true for everybody of all ages. If religion is false — as it is — if men really can’t become godly — as they cannot — then it’s false for everybody too. And if it’s false, then we should not indulge it, especially when that indulgence requires taking away the rights and customs of many people. It if is false, then for the good of society — and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion — then religion must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”
This does not surprise me. It was inevitable. And unless it is somehow stopped, it will eventually become mainstream Republican Party policy.
As Siobhan over at “against the grain” points out in her article “Misgendering is violence”, there’s a logical progression. Othering and invalidating a group of people is the first step on the road to genocide, and once you get a movement going in that direction, it gains momentum. Once people discover they can get influence and attention by advocating and implementing step A and that stuff becomes normalized, then it’s easier for some demagogue to get even more influence by advocating step B. And (as we math nerds would say), the remaining steps are by induction.
Wow, at least that poor Cocaine Bear had an excuse…
I thank God ( literally I’m a Christian) I’m not one of these a-holes. It was a near thing as both USA southerners and West Indians tend be conservative to the point of some being religious reactionaries. Being science literate tends to make you think, which I’m quite sure fundies don’t. De Satan is pandering in Florida. I always thought he was a smarter version of Dolt45 (which is hella scary )
DeSatan has the charisma of a tree stump. Even Agent Orange45 has more, and he will probably crush him in the primaries.
This will set a candidate that is only popular among the MAGA core against whoever runs for the Democrats.
…and as DeSantis will no longer be governor after 2026 he will probably be forgotten by 2028. Two years is an eternity in politics.
If you want to look inside the mind of a conservative leader, it is good to have uncensored access to phone messages from government ministers.
Good lord what an asshole that ruled over the covid response.
https://youtu.be/3TjRRgVCDD4
And here we come to the core of transgenderism. A fear of men not fulfilling traditional gender roles, and somehow that makes them less of a man.
I’ve often wondered, where will these people stop? The answer is of course, “Nowhere.” Bad people don’t stop. Ever. They just keep going–unless maybe somebody else can stop them.
HERESY! How dare they contradict St.Reagan and St.Tatcher !
Collective forms of governance, infrastructural investments, collaboration all help societies last longer, study finds
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-infrastructural-investments-collaboration-societies-longer.html
“If left-handedness is true, if the dominant hand can really on the left, then it’s true for everybody of all ages” (-:
Not to be the word police, but “transgenderism” – although it is used in the medical literature – is a pathologizing term. Less stigmatizing terms are ‘gender incongruence’, or better yet, ‘gender variance’.
He honestly believes there’s a distinction between wiping out “transgenderism” and wiping out “the transgender community”, because he thinks gender variance is an ideology like Christianity or socialism. We could easily say that we’d be happy to see Christianity eradicated from the planet, but we certainly don’t want to wipe out all Christians (despite what they may claim about us),
I doubt we’ll ever convince him that he’s not owed a retraction, or that gender variance is not a choice.
@11 & 12 birgerjohansson : Yes. Hopefully but mostly agree there fromwhat i’ve heard. Stephen Colbert has this good segment on that here – 7 mins, 57 secs mark or so
@ Silentbob #18
“Not to be the word police, but “transgenderism” – although it is used in the medical literature – is a pathologizing term.”
Hi, Bob! Now this is where I’ve fallen afoul of a number of other transgender people, all this worry about words. E.g., a while back nobody (that I knew) had any problem with the term “T-girl”. It was just a short, friendly way of saying “transgender woman”. Then it appears that our enemies took hold of the term and made a slur of it–the result being that I once had some snippy little transgender kid scolding me for continuing to use the term myself.
This is what has been done with the word “transgenderism” itself. For me it’s just “the state of being transgender”, i.e., it’s just what I am. But then our enemies changed its meaning to (more or less) “the transgender agenda”, i.e., all the nefarious things we transgender people wanted to do to the rest of the world. So now they’ve taken another word from us. We can’t use it any more, and we have to come up with things like (as you say) “gender incongruence” or “gender variance”–or one now in use “transness”, and I’m going, “Jesus Christ! Could we possibly come up with a worse term?”
These terms “gender incongruence/variance”, where I myself might use “gender non-conformity”, can also be misleading because there are many different types of gender non-conformity besides my own. I’m the standard sort of binary transgender person, and this term “transgender” might eventually fall to us alone by default because nobody else seems to want it. Long ago I saw indications of cross-dressers and non-binary people rejecting it because for them it suggested “transsexual”, a term that we ourselves have now rejected.
I once saw a note describing how right-wingers deliberately do this sort of thing: they attack our words, thereby stigmatizing us and making it difficult for us to talk about ourselves. They’ve got us constantly chasing our tails, constantly looking to invent new terms, and I just throw up my hands in despair. Why do we have to let those obnoxious brats determine how we talk about ourselves, especially given that not a one of them actually understands what transgenderism (however you want to term it) is?
Recently I saw a black woman sneering at the term “people of color”: “I’m not a person of color. I’m black!” I can understand that (I think): a softening of the term “black” stigmatizes the term “black”, thereby stigmatizing the person. That’s the way I feel about it. I’m transgender, and whatever somebody else wants to do with the word, that’s not my fault. It is what I am, and I have nothing to apologize or blush for.
But you’ll have a lot of transgender people on your side.
Ah here we go again, the party of “freedom” and “don’t tread on me” spends all their time focused on telling other people how to live, act, and feel. And distorting how people chose to live their lives differently from them as some sort of offense, rather than the much more obvious conclusion that they are just choosing to be themselves and not some pre-determined state that no one fits in to.
“then it’s true for everybody of all ages” so? he thinks that is an argument? Of course a trans adult used to be a trans child.
It sounds like a variation of blood libel. “they’re coming for your children” and we all know that NEVER resulted in “pogroms” or “genocide” or “lynching”.
Ted Lawry@5:
While I’m not certain, that sounds like The Sheep Look Up, with the eco-terrorist ‘Trainite’ faction. Though my favourite quote from that book is from Train himself when he comes out of hiding, saying “I am no more responsible for the actions of my followers than Jesus Christ is responsible for those upon whom Paul of Tarsos projected his own personal neuroses.”
Also, sadly, being doomed doesn’t mean they won’t do a whole lot of damage in the process and attempt to take everybody else down with them, which they are certainly trying to do.
Just seen Stephen Colbert’s classic take on this years CPAC here which summed things up pretty well and showed a lot of empty chairs.
@jenorafeuer :
Source : https://www.azquotes.com/author/18257-John_Brunner
Italics original.
Quite a few other good Brunner quotes there. The Sheep Look Up is one helluva read. Way ahead of its time – or hare we just ended up far behind where we should be?
I’m honestly kinda pissed at this blog’s soft-gloves response to fascism and calls to genocide of people like me and my family. You all know the only way historically people committing these atrocities have been stopped and yet refuse to acknowledge the necessity of direct action against them and the systems that allow them power. Whatever. Hope all you cis people have fun living in your shitty patriarchal white supremacist theocratic dystopia after they kill all of us, then another marginalized group, and another, each time liberals considering them “acceptable losses to avoid a war” and refusing to stand up and actually fight. You all need to grow out of your pacifism fucking yesterday and face the reality that being an “ally” doesn’t mean just sitting on your ass and voting every couple of years in an increasingly-corrupt country with archaic electoral and representative systems. Trans people are going to be fighting this shit for our lives and cis people need to start joining and supporting those who do. Sooner or later a trans person is going act in self defense and you need to create an atmosphere where the general populace actually understands why and supports them rather than moans about “violence” and “incivility”. You need to get people to ask themselves why they are unmoved by laws passed by a relative handful of people that are designed to cause us mass suffering and death but clutch their pearls at the idea of a brick thrown through a powerful politician’s window. Blog posts like these that state shit like “be thankful that the only pain you might suffer is a little public humiliation” towards a man with a huge platform who is literally advocating for our genocide don’t fucking help anyone. It’s just misery porn and a signal that you aren’t actually going to step up, that you don’t actually consider the situation dire for us, that you would rather sacrifice us than disrupt the lives of “normal” people (aka white cis het men). After all, the bodily autonomy of millions of people in this country was tossed away by a panel of nine last year without so much as a squeak: just stop pretending otherwise and admit that you’re actually fine with violence, but only when it’s enforced through law or capitalism and targets marginalized people based out of ignorance and bigotry.