Spot on, well said! It’s got a lot worse with the advent of social media - now every nut job politician can perform to their fan base all the time. It tends to confirm my belief that politics is a personality disorder.
LA, virtue signalling, pfft. Those guys are amateurs. You want real virtue signalling head three hours north by plane where the big heads in Calgary decided that Canada Day our NATIONAL HOLIDAY similar to July 4th needs to be "DIE"ed. “For many Calgarians this is a day of mourning or reflection,” ...... , Calgary said it would “offer diverse, educational and inclusive programming for Calgarians to celebrate culture and community.” WTF, the day we celebrate our country, which by the way is generally a pretty damn good place to live, should instead be for "mourning and reflection"?
Follow on, the Calgary city council, to their credit, also said WTF and canceled the cancellation
Got to love our neighbors to the north lol. I used to spend a lot of time with Canadians because of a former job. One fall a Canadian friend spent some time trying to convince me American thanksgiving is clearly racist but Canadian thanksgiving is all good.
This was one of your best columns. I’m definitely right of center, but I’m with you on the Texas thing. Unless, of course, Chuck Heston as Moses is the one putting the 10 Commandments in the schools, which I’m totally behind. 😁
I’m convinced 90% of the anti LGBTQ legislation we’re seeing in the states is performative. Poll after poll says the public doesn’t want it, just a loud minority, but state senators and governors are so afraid of a challenge from the right that they’re performing solely for the nutbag portion.
Disagree vehemently. It is being driven by the Department of Education / DEI Industrial Complex's arrogant assumption that (a) ideological indoctrination is their job and (b) it is none of the parents' business. That "trust the experts" schtick coming from people in their 20s and 30s who have never even changed a diaper really, really grates.
And the framing of this as a free speech issue is bullshit. This is a governmental entity (state governments) versus a governmental entity (the Department of Education) pissing contest.
Anti-LGBQT legislation is FAR different from legislation mandating a sane and age/developmentally appropriate sex education curriculum. 9th graders should not be counseled about radical surgery and/or hormone therapy w/out informing their parents, 5th graders should not have access to what is essentially gay pornography in school libraries, and 2nd graders should not be taught that their Y chromosomes or lack thereof are not a defining biological and social feature.
Lookup Christopher Rufo. He's the new conservative golden boy strategist. He masterminded the backlash against "critical race theory" and after that he outright said he was tackling the gender movement/trans issue next. He is super cynical and absolutely knows what he's doing. If he's targeting that issue, he has some vision of it leading to political victories. My guess is it's not just about driving the base, but it's about pushing the left into defending the most extreme gender theory views. (There's no such thing as biology, transwomen in sports have no advantage, children should be able to transition without their parents consent, puberty blockers are perfectly safe, etc) If he succeeds in putting the Left on the defensive, it will be the critical race theory thing all over again. "But that's not reeeaal critical race theory!" was the only defense progressives had against it and it failed. There's also the issue that moderates/centrists are getting fed up with the gender wars. And if he can convince them NOT to vote, then that's a win for the Right.
I've read most of Chris Rufo's Substack. He's able to put "the Left"- i.e., the Democratic Party that won't say no to its lunatic fringe- on the defensive, because the trans movement has handed him a political wedge issue beyond anything that any provocateur could confabulate on their own.
Rufo's Substack posts are mostly about the militant pediatric trans movement,. And to the extent that they are, Rufo isn't getting anything twisted. He isn't distorting his reporting. He doesn't have to. He's having the issue delivered to him by the trans movement, gift-wrapped. He doesn't need to exaggerate. He just needs to recount the history. https://rufo.substack.com/p/the-real-story-behind-drag-queen-story-hour
Read that link. Rufo's a outlining a historical narrative that would be laughed off as preposterous conspiracism- if only he didn't have so much evidence to support his premises. He's describing an organized, intentional agenda with an internally coherent logic and purpose that's openly espoused by its theoreticians, leaders, and spokespeople.
To allude to another issue brought up by your comment: the single most inaccurate feature of Rufo's views is the reduction of American politics to a war between "the Right", represented by the Republicans; vs. "the Left", represented by the Democrats. But that situation isn't about Rufo's ideological twisting- it's the cold reality at the ballot box. He's just playing the hand that's been dealt to all of us. Spurious ideological identifications notwithstanding, those two opposing parties are all Americans are allowed as electoral choice.
This is the reason that I've been advocating ranked-choice voting in national elections for 25 years...you know who else has offered statements of support for it? Both Democrats and Republicans- including Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. Talk about performative rhetoric; neither party has done anything to put the issue before the American public.
I'll note here that between January 2009 and January 2011, the Democratic Party was in the strongest position at the national level of any single political party since 1978. The Dems had the Presidency, a supermajority in the House, and hovered between one and two votes short of a supermajority in the Senate. They used those one or two GOP votes as an excuse to be utterly ineffectual at doing anything other than passing a bill that handed a huge expansion of public health care coverage over to health insurance companies, HMOs, and the pharmaceutical industry, at public expense.
I realize that- for no good reason at all- each state gets to set up its own ballot process for national office, which means that any reform such as ranked-choice voting needs to be enacted at the state level. That is not an excuse for either national party to disappear the issue from the public conversation. But that's what they've both done.
The approval rating of both parties with American voters is below 25%, The "leadership" of both parties are obviously well aware that the game is rigged to ensure their existence, and they're terrified of the reform most likely to undermine the power of both of them, which operates for all practical purposes to their mutual benefit as a hegemony. Despite the fact that both Congress and the two separate party delegations have been below 50% voter approval since 2003. https://news.gallup.com/poll/163244/americans-rate-republicans-democrats-congress-poorly.aspx
I know almost nothing about Chris Rufo's political leanings other than the fact that he's taken the game as it stands, and he's thrown in his lot with the Republican Party.
The NY Times/orthoDem narrative is that the Republican Party leadership consists of spineless capitulators to Donald Trump.
Chris Rufo's narrative is that the leaders of the Democratic Party are spineless capitulators to an extremist movement bent on using the public education system to overthrow what they refer to as "heteronormativity"- i.e., the prevailing model of male-female sexual attraction and relationship that provides the basis for a family unit of a female mother and a male father raising their natural offspring. The traditional--and yes, "normative"--basis of human society for as long as we've been a species. It should be needless to say that "heteronormativity" and the "nuclear family unit" also comprise the basic biological template for most species of mammals and birds, but under the circumstances, I find it necessary to emphasize that factual reality.
The extremists leading the trans movement view heteronormativity as a tyranny to be overthrown. So do their "allies" in the LGBTQ &c. movement. (Read the Rufo Substack post that I linked above.) And, for that matter, the overthrow of heteronormativity is also implicitly endorsed by any self-identified heterosexual who endorses the trans activist political agenda (a separate issue from providing common courtesy and respect to individuals with a trans identity, fwiw. The principle that everything isn't politics should serve as a crucial distinction between sane people and the lunatic fringe.)
I think Chris Rufo has the better of the argument. At least there's some evidence of pluralism and open dissent against Trump in the GOP. Considerable evidence, in fact.
By contrast, there's no dissent at all by Democratic elected officials against the agenda of the social revolutionaries of the trans movement, who openly and explicitly despise "heteronormativity", and seek to overthrow it. The goal of the activists is not fair treatment of individuals regardless of their gender identity; trans adults have already achieved official civil rights protections. There's no "trans genocide"; the number of murders of trans people every year--for any reason--is less than 30. But the trans movement has the Democratic Party doing its laundry, all the way up to the President. And the agenda of the trans movement is indoctrination in the public school and the public square to Abolish Heteronormativity. The public policy goal they currently seek is a hard push for the "trans right" of onset-of-puberty medical intervention, for a population currently estimated by the American Association of Pediatricians at 150,000 children between age 12 and age 17. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/142/4/e20182162/37381/Ensuring-Comprehensive-Care-and-Support-for?autologincheck=redirected
It's probably superfluous to add that trans surgery is covered under public health care provisions.
It also has to be understood that Republican-leaning voters are captive to the two-party ballot system just like voters inclined to vote for the Democratic Party, which makes any sneering about "spinelessness" ring hollow when it's directed at the voters for either of the two parties. Every American voter is cornered by the system, to some extent. The voters who are actually enthusiastic about their candidates are handily outnumbered by those who are not, particularly in Presidential elections. It's been that way as long as I've been voting.
But if two choices is all the voters have, and the Democrats have handed Republican activists like Chris Rufo a partisan slam dunk the way they have, the Dems are liable to be left wondering for whom the bell tolls on Election Day. As clueless as ever.
I get that everybody remaining in the Democratic party is miffed at "Woke M&Ms" but as a resident of LA, I absorb enough wokester preaching; I don't need to be lectured by a candy wrapper. The fact that the wrapper already lists the calories makes me feel as shitty as I'm going to.
Also, as a survivor of Catholic school in the 70s and 80s I can tell you that there was no better way to teach kids to fear and hate organized religion than to subject them to the daily hypocrisy of abuse for one's own good by sadists masquerading as nuns. (Exemption for Sisters Constance and Richard, you guys were the best)
I think we're going to see the same thing with the woke mob taking over schools. The backlash is coming. Book it.
I read the part about the statue with a fetus inside the womb, smiled and expected my eyes to fall on the second half of the joke. When no such thing appeared, I Googled it, and oh my god it was real.
Try Academe the last 50 years. Every meeting was just virtue signalling. We'd pass the most absurd stuff, hire some incompetents to teach it, and insulate the productive departments. Tech and Science were left alone, the Liberal Arts were taken over by the loonies.
Well said - there's tons of politicians who would be way better served by being activists or community organizers, fields where the 'results' don't really matter. We need politicians to be effective at solving problems, not performing for social media clips.
The Faith Angle podcast recently featured Yuval Levin talking about "America's Crisis in Social Trust" and it was on these same lines. His observation was that too much of politics (and lots of other spheres) appears to have devolved into a performance because it's being recorded and can be played as a no-context clip later. The real work of politics gets done in places like the House & Senate Intelligence Committees, which aren't recorded and thus feature actual dialogue about real solutions. Members of Congress have consistently cited working on those committees as the most valuable/productive part of their time serving.
I think the problems with La Sombrita are worse than Virtue Signaling. Scott Lincicome tweeted a report by the CATO Institute showing how the entire project was essentially designed to fail. One of the most amazing things in the report was the revelation every City Councilor in LA had the right to veto new bus shelters in their districts.
It's kind of funny how we have our own moral enforcers on the Left now too. A friend of mine calls them the Rainbow-Haired Church Ladies. Instead of peeking into neighborhood windows looking to find gossip to punish people with, they go through your entire Internet history looking for dirt.
I can't believe that you made me watch that lady from Nebraska solve the world's problems.
Getting an incompetent project to pass is best accomplished by calling it a benefit for some traditionally marginalized group. If it was said that it was to protect white people from the sun while waiting for the bus, every politician in the county would have seen the waste and fraud right away. Somehow linking it to DEI initiatives meant that if you pointed out its flaws, you were just some sort of phobic person.
Another terrific post. That said, I truly believe you have, in fact, underestimated the stupidity of some Texas state Senators. (I know some NC legislators personally, and it's not exactly an IQ test to get the job--especially on the GOP side).
The M-1 "Sombrita" SALA (Shade And Lighting Awning) is planned in five variants, each requiring unique international subcontracting partnerships. (Only one will ever be produced in any quantity and the others abandoned, but this has still created jobs, Clean, green tech jobs! Whee!) Material inputs such as rare earth elements in lighting components rely on supply streams in substandard production conditions (read: a Congolese boy is digging them out of a muddy hole under the watchful eyes of a gunman right now). Progress isn't cheap. You can have it done right, done cheap, or done right away, but you only get to pick one and a half of them. See, this is why you must rule the galaxy as emperor first, is so that you can finance the programmatics of a death star with Wookie slave labor on Kessel. If we want to build an awning that is a death star, we have to spend a little.
Spot on, well said! It’s got a lot worse with the advent of social media - now every nut job politician can perform to their fan base all the time. It tends to confirm my belief that politics is a personality disorder.
LA, virtue signalling, pfft. Those guys are amateurs. You want real virtue signalling head three hours north by plane where the big heads in Calgary decided that Canada Day our NATIONAL HOLIDAY similar to July 4th needs to be "DIE"ed. “For many Calgarians this is a day of mourning or reflection,” ...... , Calgary said it would “offer diverse, educational and inclusive programming for Calgarians to celebrate culture and community.” WTF, the day we celebrate our country, which by the way is generally a pretty damn good place to live, should instead be for "mourning and reflection"?
Follow on, the Calgary city council, to their credit, also said WTF and canceled the cancellation
FFS. That’s, well, pretty fricking crazy but on par for Canada. 🤦♂️
Got to love our neighbors to the north lol. I used to spend a lot of time with Canadians because of a former job. One fall a Canadian friend spent some time trying to convince me American thanksgiving is clearly racist but Canadian thanksgiving is all good.
First Nations get fucked over in Canuckistan too……
This was one of your best columns. I’m definitely right of center, but I’m with you on the Texas thing. Unless, of course, Chuck Heston as Moses is the one putting the 10 Commandments in the schools, which I’m totally behind. 😁
I’m convinced 90% of the anti LGBTQ legislation we’re seeing in the states is performative. Poll after poll says the public doesn’t want it, just a loud minority, but state senators and governors are so afraid of a challenge from the right that they’re performing solely for the nutbag portion.
Or maybe they are against sterilizing children.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvBa3OxqNxE
Disagree vehemently. It is being driven by the Department of Education / DEI Industrial Complex's arrogant assumption that (a) ideological indoctrination is their job and (b) it is none of the parents' business. That "trust the experts" schtick coming from people in their 20s and 30s who have never even changed a diaper really, really grates.
And the framing of this as a free speech issue is bullshit. This is a governmental entity (state governments) versus a governmental entity (the Department of Education) pissing contest.
Anti-LGBQT legislation is FAR different from legislation mandating a sane and age/developmentally appropriate sex education curriculum. 9th graders should not be counseled about radical surgery and/or hormone therapy w/out informing their parents, 5th graders should not have access to what is essentially gay pornography in school libraries, and 2nd graders should not be taught that their Y chromosomes or lack thereof are not a defining biological and social feature.
Lookup Christopher Rufo. He's the new conservative golden boy strategist. He masterminded the backlash against "critical race theory" and after that he outright said he was tackling the gender movement/trans issue next. He is super cynical and absolutely knows what he's doing. If he's targeting that issue, he has some vision of it leading to political victories. My guess is it's not just about driving the base, but it's about pushing the left into defending the most extreme gender theory views. (There's no such thing as biology, transwomen in sports have no advantage, children should be able to transition without their parents consent, puberty blockers are perfectly safe, etc) If he succeeds in putting the Left on the defensive, it will be the critical race theory thing all over again. "But that's not reeeaal critical race theory!" was the only defense progressives had against it and it failed. There's also the issue that moderates/centrists are getting fed up with the gender wars. And if he can convince them NOT to vote, then that's a win for the Right.
I've read most of Chris Rufo's Substack. He's able to put "the Left"- i.e., the Democratic Party that won't say no to its lunatic fringe- on the defensive, because the trans movement has handed him a political wedge issue beyond anything that any provocateur could confabulate on their own.
Rufo's Substack posts are mostly about the militant pediatric trans movement,. And to the extent that they are, Rufo isn't getting anything twisted. He isn't distorting his reporting. He doesn't have to. He's having the issue delivered to him by the trans movement, gift-wrapped. He doesn't need to exaggerate. He just needs to recount the history. https://rufo.substack.com/p/the-real-story-behind-drag-queen-story-hour
Read that link. Rufo's a outlining a historical narrative that would be laughed off as preposterous conspiracism- if only he didn't have so much evidence to support his premises. He's describing an organized, intentional agenda with an internally coherent logic and purpose that's openly espoused by its theoreticians, leaders, and spokespeople.
To allude to another issue brought up by your comment: the single most inaccurate feature of Rufo's views is the reduction of American politics to a war between "the Right", represented by the Republicans; vs. "the Left", represented by the Democrats. But that situation isn't about Rufo's ideological twisting- it's the cold reality at the ballot box. He's just playing the hand that's been dealt to all of us. Spurious ideological identifications notwithstanding, those two opposing parties are all Americans are allowed as electoral choice.
This is the reason that I've been advocating ranked-choice voting in national elections for 25 years...you know who else has offered statements of support for it? Both Democrats and Republicans- including Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. Talk about performative rhetoric; neither party has done anything to put the issue before the American public.
I'll note here that between January 2009 and January 2011, the Democratic Party was in the strongest position at the national level of any single political party since 1978. The Dems had the Presidency, a supermajority in the House, and hovered between one and two votes short of a supermajority in the Senate. They used those one or two GOP votes as an excuse to be utterly ineffectual at doing anything other than passing a bill that handed a huge expansion of public health care coverage over to health insurance companies, HMOs, and the pharmaceutical industry, at public expense.
I realize that- for no good reason at all- each state gets to set up its own ballot process for national office, which means that any reform such as ranked-choice voting needs to be enacted at the state level. That is not an excuse for either national party to disappear the issue from the public conversation. But that's what they've both done.
The approval rating of both parties with American voters is below 25%, The "leadership" of both parties are obviously well aware that the game is rigged to ensure their existence, and they're terrified of the reform most likely to undermine the power of both of them, which operates for all practical purposes to their mutual benefit as a hegemony. Despite the fact that both Congress and the two separate party delegations have been below 50% voter approval since 2003. https://news.gallup.com/poll/163244/americans-rate-republicans-democrats-congress-poorly.aspx
https://news.gallup.com/poll/401864/recent-congressional-approval-trending-higher.aspx
I know almost nothing about Chris Rufo's political leanings other than the fact that he's taken the game as it stands, and he's thrown in his lot with the Republican Party.
The NY Times/orthoDem narrative is that the Republican Party leadership consists of spineless capitulators to Donald Trump.
Chris Rufo's narrative is that the leaders of the Democratic Party are spineless capitulators to an extremist movement bent on using the public education system to overthrow what they refer to as "heteronormativity"- i.e., the prevailing model of male-female sexual attraction and relationship that provides the basis for a family unit of a female mother and a male father raising their natural offspring. The traditional--and yes, "normative"--basis of human society for as long as we've been a species. It should be needless to say that "heteronormativity" and the "nuclear family unit" also comprise the basic biological template for most species of mammals and birds, but under the circumstances, I find it necessary to emphasize that factual reality.
The extremists leading the trans movement view heteronormativity as a tyranny to be overthrown. So do their "allies" in the LGBTQ &c. movement. (Read the Rufo Substack post that I linked above.) And, for that matter, the overthrow of heteronormativity is also implicitly endorsed by any self-identified heterosexual who endorses the trans activist political agenda (a separate issue from providing common courtesy and respect to individuals with a trans identity, fwiw. The principle that everything isn't politics should serve as a crucial distinction between sane people and the lunatic fringe.)
I think Chris Rufo has the better of the argument. At least there's some evidence of pluralism and open dissent against Trump in the GOP. Considerable evidence, in fact.
By contrast, there's no dissent at all by Democratic elected officials against the agenda of the social revolutionaries of the trans movement, who openly and explicitly despise "heteronormativity", and seek to overthrow it. The goal of the activists is not fair treatment of individuals regardless of their gender identity; trans adults have already achieved official civil rights protections. There's no "trans genocide"; the number of murders of trans people every year--for any reason--is less than 30. But the trans movement has the Democratic Party doing its laundry, all the way up to the President. And the agenda of the trans movement is indoctrination in the public school and the public square to Abolish Heteronormativity. The public policy goal they currently seek is a hard push for the "trans right" of onset-of-puberty medical intervention, for a population currently estimated by the American Association of Pediatricians at 150,000 children between age 12 and age 17. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/142/4/e20182162/37381/Ensuring-Comprehensive-Care-and-Support-for?autologincheck=redirected
It's probably superfluous to add that trans surgery is covered under public health care provisions.
It also has to be understood that Republican-leaning voters are captive to the two-party ballot system just like voters inclined to vote for the Democratic Party, which makes any sneering about "spinelessness" ring hollow when it's directed at the voters for either of the two parties. Every American voter is cornered by the system, to some extent. The voters who are actually enthusiastic about their candidates are handily outnumbered by those who are not, particularly in Presidential elections. It's been that way as long as I've been voting.
But if two choices is all the voters have, and the Democrats have handed Republican activists like Chris Rufo a partisan slam dunk the way they have, the Dems are liable to be left wondering for whom the bell tolls on Election Day. As clueless as ever.
I Superlike™️ this post, and wish I could Superlike™️ it a thousand more times.
I get that everybody remaining in the Democratic party is miffed at "Woke M&Ms" but as a resident of LA, I absorb enough wokester preaching; I don't need to be lectured by a candy wrapper. The fact that the wrapper already lists the calories makes me feel as shitty as I'm going to.
Also, as a survivor of Catholic school in the 70s and 80s I can tell you that there was no better way to teach kids to fear and hate organized religion than to subject them to the daily hypocrisy of abuse for one's own good by sadists masquerading as nuns. (Exemption for Sisters Constance and Richard, you guys were the best)
I think we're going to see the same thing with the woke mob taking over schools. The backlash is coming. Book it.
I read the part about the statue with a fetus inside the womb, smiled and expected my eyes to fall on the second half of the joke. When no such thing appeared, I Googled it, and oh my god it was real.
Try Academe the last 50 years. Every meeting was just virtue signalling. We'd pass the most absurd stuff, hire some incompetents to teach it, and insulate the productive departments. Tech and Science were left alone, the Liberal Arts were taken over by the loonies.
Well said - there's tons of politicians who would be way better served by being activists or community organizers, fields where the 'results' don't really matter. We need politicians to be effective at solving problems, not performing for social media clips.
The Faith Angle podcast recently featured Yuval Levin talking about "America's Crisis in Social Trust" and it was on these same lines. His observation was that too much of politics (and lots of other spheres) appears to have devolved into a performance because it's being recorded and can be played as a no-context clip later. The real work of politics gets done in places like the House & Senate Intelligence Committees, which aren't recorded and thus feature actual dialogue about real solutions. Members of Congress have consistently cited working on those committees as the most valuable/productive part of their time serving.
I think the problems with La Sombrita are worse than Virtue Signaling. Scott Lincicome tweeted a report by the CATO Institute showing how the entire project was essentially designed to fail. One of the most amazing things in the report was the revelation every City Councilor in LA had the right to veto new bus shelters in their districts.
https://www.cato.org/blog/la-sombrita-or-how-fail-infrastructure
I detect Emotivism in that posted video clip
It's kind of funny how we have our own moral enforcers on the Left now too. A friend of mine calls them the Rainbow-Haired Church Ladies. Instead of peeking into neighborhood windows looking to find gossip to punish people with, they go through your entire Internet history looking for dirt.
I can't believe that you made me watch that lady from Nebraska solve the world's problems.
Getting an incompetent project to pass is best accomplished by calling it a benefit for some traditionally marginalized group. If it was said that it was to protect white people from the sun while waiting for the bus, every politician in the county would have seen the waste and fraud right away. Somehow linking it to DEI initiatives meant that if you pointed out its flaws, you were just some sort of phobic person.
You are absolutely right. Nothing wrong in this one!
Another terrific post. That said, I truly believe you have, in fact, underestimated the stupidity of some Texas state Senators. (I know some NC legislators personally, and it's not exactly an IQ test to get the job--especially on the GOP side).
The M-1 "Sombrita" SALA (Shade And Lighting Awning) is planned in five variants, each requiring unique international subcontracting partnerships. (Only one will ever be produced in any quantity and the others abandoned, but this has still created jobs, Clean, green tech jobs! Whee!) Material inputs such as rare earth elements in lighting components rely on supply streams in substandard production conditions (read: a Congolese boy is digging them out of a muddy hole under the watchful eyes of a gunman right now). Progress isn't cheap. You can have it done right, done cheap, or done right away, but you only get to pick one and a half of them. See, this is why you must rule the galaxy as emperor first, is so that you can finance the programmatics of a death star with Wookie slave labor on Kessel. If we want to build an awning that is a death star, we have to spend a little.