You have science, truth & decency on your side, *they* have nothing but raw ideology. Pound science & truth. Don't be stupid and set up a fight between two ideologies. They falsely claim science & truth - meet them there and show why they are wrong with the language of science and truth. If your retorts are instead religious, onlookers will think that they are right and you're a nut.
Truth and decency (and even science) come from God. In rejecting God the left has rejected truth and decency. They consider truth and decency White-supremacist patriarchal homophobic social constructs. To fight them it is necessary to reject the whole relativist package.
The thing is, most Democratic voters don't get that yet. They still think there are rules - they think there must be rules. They think there must be some sense to it all, surely, and someone somewhere can explain how it all makes sense. They aren't ready to deal with the fact that so many of the people they trust are abjectly stupid or abjectly cowardly.
You have to take them by the hand and lead them in a long, long circle. You have to show them contradiction after contradiction after contradiction. You really have to rub their faces in it sometimes. They don't like it. They get mad. But it works!
Have you ever put in the time to prove to a trans-identifying person that the concept of trans is nonsense? Most of them will block you fast - but not all. Some of them really try to argue for it. It's sad to see - they really think they'll win. They've been told over and over and over again that they're right, right, right. And it shocks them when they find that they have no response to a simple question like "Define woman without reference to sex-based stereotypes." It shocks them! They try to google for an answer and they don't find any. You see them start to panic before your very eyes. Like I said it's sad to see.
Have you put in the time to do that? I have, and I've done it dozens and dozens of times at this point. It works. Eight or ten or twelve hours of argumentation is a small sacrifice to save someone's life. It works! On the other hand, if you quote the bible, they'll just say "lol christfag." Argue, don't preach.
> Have you ever put in the time to prove to a trans-identifying person that the concept of trans is nonsense? Most of them will block you fast - but not all. Some of them really try to argue for it. It's sad to see - they really think they'll win. They've been told over and over and over again that they're right, right, right. And it shocks them when they find that they have no response to a simple question like "Define woman without reference to sex-based stereotypes." It shocks them! They try to google for an answer and they don't find any. You see them start to panic before your very eyes. Like I said it's sad to see.
> Have you put in the time to do that? I have, and I've done it dozens and dozens of times at this point. It works. Eight or ten or twelve hours of argumentation is a small sacrifice to save someone's life.
> They still think there are rules - they think there must be rules. They think there must be some sense to it all, surely, and someone somewhere can explain how it all makes sense. They aren't ready to deal with the fact that so many of the people they trust are abjectly stupid or abjectly cowardly.
The "experts" they trust believe in the post-modernist idea that there's no such thing as objective truth.
That's all well and good, but when the other side is trying to frame rational objection as religious zealotry, please don't help them do it. If you'd like to make the argument that government-mandated genderism is the state imposing a religious belief on people regardless of their own faith, please do that.
Or use progressive arguments against them by pointing to immigrant groups & underprivileged groups with deeply held religious beliefs that conflict with genderist mandates. Bring up Hispanic-American Catholics or Iraqi-American Muslims and ask so-called progressives how they, as privileged white people, dare trample on the deeply-held convictions, lived experiences and faith traditions of these less-privileged groups.
That's the key to winning this - all the critical nonsense isn't even internally consistent, and it's badly wanting some holes poked. This is easy to do, even playing by their rules. That's how you flummox, plant seeds of doubt, and wean people off the cult rhetoric. Relying on your own particular faith will just make them close ranks around theirs.
> Or use progressive arguments against them by pointing to immigrant groups & underprivileged groups with deeply held religious beliefs that conflict with genderist mandates.
It seems you don't have the courage to make the argument in your own name, consider why that is.
> Bring up Hispanic-American Catholics or Iraqi-American Muslims
Why are you Ok with Hispanic Catholics and Iraqi Muslims arguing from their religion, but not Ok with Pamela arguing from hers?
Sir, I come from an ancient time when nobody was supposed to give out their real name on the internet. I preserve my anonymity so that I can say what I like without the persecution that most certainly would have come my personal way already for saying what I like. Were it just me making my way alone in this stupid world, I would not care if they fired me, beat me, chained me, or deported me, but as fate would have it I have a lover.
And I'm not okay with anyone "arguing from their religion." It's rather that I'm not okay with anyone imposing their religion on anyone else. That's why I'm not okay with so-called progressives making Psychology a state religion. What they are doing is wrong because they are imposing a religious belief on other people under color of law. We don't even need to get into the specific insanity of the religion in order to say that, and we certainly don't need to start with the cheugy bible quotes like we're at Hillsong.
America is a secular nation - the only one ever to be so founded & constituted. If you consider America's success to be God's intelligent work, why can't you also consider that God intelligently designed America to be secular, in order more effectively to unite God's children in peace and liberty?
> Or use progressive arguments against them by pointing to immigrant groups & underprivileged groups with deeply held religious beliefs that conflict with genderist mandates. Bring up Hispanic-American Catholics or Iraqi-American Muslims and ask so-called progressives how they, as privileged white people, dare trample on the deeply-held convictions, lived experiences and faith traditions of these less-privileged groups.
The very concept of "privilege" as used by progressives is nonsense. Attempting to fight nonsense with nonsense doesn't work. I'd rather fight nonsense with Truth.
Actually, in logic, the way to prove something false is to find that it leads to a contradiction. Once you have found a contradiction, logic stops, because anything can be made to follow.
If one starts with the rules of "privilege" that so-called progressives declare, and from there one reaches a contradiction within those rules, then one has proven the given rules unworkable. This is in fact the most direct possible attack on the framework of "privilege."
What a hellish world this American nightmare has made of the American dream; meanwhile so many citizens suffer from ill fitting healthcare and lack of proper housing, employment or food. One big joke only the narcissism of The Joker Wokeness could produce. I loathe them .
Tell them. They have social media, they have emails, they have offices, they have work addresses. Send them messages on every platform calmly grilling them for being deranged. And do you know what the fun part is? A heck of a lot of them respond, in the exact sniveling and arrogant way you'd expect they would. If they don't block you, make them block you (by stating facts they don't like), then go to another platform and do it again. When you've made someone block you everywhere, send them a letter. Then find someone else and start again. And I don't just mean Democrats.
I started to do this because screw them. Screw them for trans and screw them for Trump. They have made our world so absurd that people just don't care. Go and shout at them! Yell in their faces! They parade grotesquery down Washington's streets and Lincoln's roads! Yet like a shit in the face, what they've done will never be expunged! Out damn spot! I shall scratch the skin from our face if that's what it takes to get clean!
Admire your warrior spirit....it's what's lacking in conservative movement. As well as in Rep party. As an ex-D am very frustrated w/conservatives....lack courage to even voice an opinion, much less publicly support each other. This IS why the DeMons run all over them, laugh and spit in their faces.
Same situation. Don't agree with most Republicans on much, but the radical genderism from Democrats is disqualifying. Shocking how fast it took over. Party of science, decency, logic, reason - poof! Welcome to insanity.
There are anti-Trump Republicans, but there aren't really non-genderist Democrats anymore - or rather no electeds are willing to speak up publicly, which to me is disqualifying cowardice, even if they secretly think it's nuts. Even while Trump was in office, there were Republican electeds like Romney who were critical of him - we have no such voices on the left criticizing the trans debacle. None. Any that there were have been cast out. The behavior is just psychotic.
So many people that you just can't ever trust again. Either they were for it, or they let it happen and said nothing and did nothing - and the danger wasn't hard to see. Disqualifying - and they don't remotely have popular support on the issue either. As more people become aware of what "trans" really means, or rather how it is extended to mean more and more things by the day, support for ideas like "there are more than two genders" is falling rapidly. Among Gen Z, agreement with that statement fell from 60% to 40% in just the last two years. I think a charismatic Republican candidate who is immune to accusations of racism would catch Democrats with their pants on the floor, and I personally think the best person to do that is Tim Scott.
That's why I said "accusations of racism." They will happen no matter what and they will resonate with certain people as they always do. It's a tired formula at this point - I'm very well aware. That's what makes Tim Scott such a good choice. They'll have to write an entirely new playbook - and no small number of elected Democrats have already stepped in it by calling Tim a "token" or some such. Won't it be fun to watch them squirm? They'll want to call him a race traitor so damn bad, you'll be able to watch their mouths pucker up keeping it in.
I remember the ancient days of 2005 when Republicans were actually trying to get intelligent design taught in schools. Lots of elected Republicans still deny that human action could possibly affect the global environment. (And here's the thing - we don't even need to talk about long-term warming or cooling or change or what have you. Putting more CO2 in the atmosphere will deleteriously acidify ocean waters according to a very basic chemical formula, no climactic history or theoretical feedback loops needed. Nature may adjust in time but the short-term effects would be no goodster.)
Democrats in that day were generally opposed to mixing government & religion. Republicans by contrast mixed their religion gladly with politics. The difference now is not that Republicans have stopped - as we see by the comments on substacks such as this one - but that Democrats have become fervent acolytes of a new religious order, the church of Psychology & its various genderist and racialist sub-orders. Now there is no party of science and I must choose between the zealots. Of these I'll take the Christians any day - they don't accuse you of hate crimes if you call a priest bro instead of father.
> I remember the ancient days of 2005 when Republicans were actually trying to get intelligent design taught in schools.
I'll take it you believe in evolution. Let me ask you some questions about your belief.
Do you believe humans evolved?
Do you believe various human groupings adapted to the different environments they found themselves in? If not, why not?
Do you believe these adaptations involved all kinds of traits, or that there was no evolution of traits related the brain, personality, or intelligence? If not, why not?
> Lots of elected Republicans still deny that human action could possibly affect the global environment.
Ah, yes "climate change" has been ten to twenty years from destroying the planet for the past forty years.
> Democrats in that day were generally opposed to mixing government & religion.
You say "mixing government and religion" like it's a bad thing. Frankly, separating Truth from government quickly leads to separating truth from government, as even you are starting to notice.
"A cult-like belief system...the replacement of the system of self-governance with a system of ideological rule" A cult. It is a cult. Not cult-like, an actual cult. Specifically a gnostic and hermeticist cult, implying special knowledge ("educate yourself") and alchemical abstraction of thought ("trans bodies.")
Gnostic cults are parasitic, meaning that they glom onto other ideologies and beliefs like the Blob, transforming whatever cultural or governmental or regulatory or educational or bureaucratic or faith institution it touches into a source of contagion, redirecting its resources to the replication of the gnostic virus. If I sound a bit like James Lindsay, that is because I discovered his work whilst studying the phenomenon of "gender identity" as a faith formation from an historical perspective, informed by a lifetime of studying cults and magical woo thinking of all kinds. "Trans" and "gender identity" fit the all-American pattern of patent medicine fraud, which was imbued with religious marketing gimmickry and began as a psuedoscience. It remains more scientism than scientific. Chucking the "gender studies" department is therefore like closing the parapsychology department. Results should matter in science.
Only faith demands that we ignore results and rely on the sanctified, tearful testimonies of children instead. Only faith. Refuse to enter the wizard circle or repeat the magic pronoun cant. Refuse to participate in the mandatory faith fun. You will stand on solid Constitution and they will only blow wind at you.
>Chucking the "gender studies" department is therefore like closing the parapsychology department
You're so, so close. Drop the "para." All of the current nonsense we're dealing with from genderism to "violent words" stems directly from Psychology. Genderism is a sect of Psychology, which is a religion with a capital P.
"If the state can force you to lie about basic reality—man and woman—then it can force you to lie about anything." - That, in my opinion, is the key sentence in the whole article.
This is psychological warfare against the citizens. If the government can force you to lie about things which are obvious, then you have essentially given up, capitulated. If you totally give in to the government, you become a tool of the government, you are a useful idiot. At that point freedom is gone, the American Dream is gone and it is total tyranny. Obviously, that is the goal of the Biden regime, the goal of the Marxist elites in the establishment. Their goal is to be the wealthy, elite ruling class forever and have the rest of society be the 'worker bees'. They want all the money and all the power, and the rest of society would be divided between being their servants and being collateral damage.
Jordan Peterson opposed his federal Canadian government forcing citizens to likewise lie via compelled gender pronouns in the proposed new speech laws. I also opposed being compelled to introduce myself via pronouns in my doctoral seminars in 2020-21. I also firmly yet politely refused to place my pronouns on a 2022 conference badge because i said it was “not a safe space for me”to mention them. They didn’t know I understand my he/him pronouns identify me as the villain/oppressor in the room. Why would I willingly use queer/gendered discourse to ostracize and humiliate myself for ‘oppression’ I’m not responsible for? My professors stopped requiring us to introduce ourselves via pronouns 👍. Compelled speech violates not only reality but our consciences. Damn compelled speech laws.
The pronoun people are fighting back. At least one large company in my local area is following a policy of using "they/them" in their brochures and websites when writing about employees who have declined to state masculine or feminine pronouns. This then gives coworkers and users of the company's services the idea that the person referred to as "they" could be a "nonbinary" or "trans" person. Creating this impression may or may not benefit the person being so labelled and definitely could be harmful to that person's reputation.
That’s what I think, and why I believe that gender theory is “a hill to die on”.
I recently asked a new mom (mid-30s)of my acquaintance if she thinks that her child “IS a boy”, or “was assigned male at birth”, and she couldn’t/wouldn’t answer the question! That’s absolute madness. And these people VOTE.
OTOH, this lawsuit shows that I finally agree with the Biden administration on something: gender theory is a (mental) disability.
Further proof of the real civil war we are fighting. You can all keep trying to do it the right way, but playing by the rules will land us all in concentration camps. I think I’ll choose to fight fire with fire.
You are a front line soldier in this fight for our country and please know there are millions of us standing with you. In our own spheres we are fighting as well and always ready to assist you should you send out a call.
The left is doing its best to obliterate opposition by lawfare, intimidation, and cheating. Several prominent conservative leaders have gone down in flames, have bowed out, have been "turned", or have lost their moorings. Under such vicious pressure, who can be surprised? Perhaps when we look back on this dark period of our national life we'll see that it was a few courageous individuals - "brave men and true" - who stood firm and were used by God to achieve the impossible and turn the tide. I hope so. Thank you for doing your part. Praying for you.
In the end it really comes down to the courts, which are the last stronghold of conservatives in American political life. I think the odds are strongly in your favor, but even with conservative judges (some of whom have gender-something offspring) you never can be sure. I'm hoping this ends with a solid slap-down of the neo-Stalinists.
How do you stop this steamrolling? Honestly feels like we are losing and there isn’t much hope. They figured out how to manipulate elections so that a conservative will never gold presidency again.
We use the term "liberal democracy" freely without ever considering that it's an oxymoron. The "liberal" grounds laws in universal best-practices and rights that must govern society regardless of the will of the people. The "democrat" believes laws should reflect the will of the people. In America, this tension was historically held in check by federalism: democratic control at the local level backed by universal rights limiting the federal level. The Civil War dented this architecture; the Progressive era started the wrecking ball, and demolition was completed by the Civil Rights Act.
This is where I part ways with you Chris. I love what you're doing, but I think you're failing to see what time it is. We conservatives need to accept that we've lost. We live in a unitary government now; local control and democratic federalism are no longer options. The choice is between a Left-wing, progressive, liberal state and a Right-wing, illiberal state.
What many people call "populism" is the beginnings of the latter. If we're lucky, such an illiberal state could preserve liberty while grounding it in some kind of universal moral claims (Christian democracy or Aristotelian virtue as Patrick Deneen says). If we're unlucky, we end up grounding it in racially tinged language that differs from the Left only by which races are favored. In this sense, Richard Spencer and Ibram Kendi are mirrors of each other. However, this is a risk we must take, and we must be willing to embrace state power to do it (since we lack the ability to claim any other kind.) What you're doing is a necessary step, but it often feels like you're looking for a road back to Jeffersonian democracy. Alas, such a road no longer exists. Perhaps New College graduates can reconstruct it, but that's a long way off, and they won't get the chance if the Left consolidates power further.
If anything, your hint at the drastic consequences of losing this lawsuit understates the danger. If we do nothing, the woke will win and institute a progressive, Left-wing theocracy. At least the Right presents a road (however narrow it may be) that ends in something good. I wish it ended in Jeffersonian democracy, but the destination is closer to a cross between Burke and Hamilton.
We must stop using the easy and puerile word “woke” - we must call this religion by its true name. These are the lesser orders, missionaries & lay brothers of the church of Psychology.
This religion wears the clothes of science, and it performs a caricature of the scientific method when needed, but it is not bound by science's limits. The dicta of Psychology are accepted without factual evidence and without waiting for scientific research. We see that when science contradicts Psychology, Psychologists abandon science. We see that "Psychology" is not an "-ology" any more than Scientology - it is a religion.
The "psych" of "Psychology" is not the brain - that would be neurology - it is the psyche, the spirit, the mind, the soul. We may observe the brain, we may observe the body, we may observe behavior. We may observe how chemicals, conditions & chromosomes affect the body, affect the brain, affect behavior. Yet the study of the unobservable mind - this is not in the remit of science. It definitionally can not be.
This is not a pedantic distinction - this is fundamental. When one attempts to study the unobservable, one steps outside science. The mind is studied with the mind, the soul with the soul, the spirit with the spirit. The study of the psyche by the psyche for the psyche - this is called art, this is called literature, this is called music, this is called religion. So-called Psychologists have set themselves above all these. They have set their purported true understandings of the psyche above art, above science, above everything.
Only the psyche may study the psyche. A psyche studying the psyche can communicate its findings on the psyche by art, by literature, by music. It can not purport to declare empirical truth. To do so is to found a religion. It will not matter how disturbed & bizarre the doctrines grow. Psychologists have claimed moral & scientific truth theirs to pronounce.
We must firmly restrict Psychology to the religious domain. As long as we fail to bind it thusly, its shifting dogma & whimsical clergy will rule us by clerical fiat.
Thank you, Chris, for standing for truth.
“Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil.”
Ephesians 6:11
You’re right. This is mostly a spiritual battle.
You have science, truth & decency on your side, *they* have nothing but raw ideology. Pound science & truth. Don't be stupid and set up a fight between two ideologies. They falsely claim science & truth - meet them there and show why they are wrong with the language of science and truth. If your retorts are instead religious, onlookers will think that they are right and you're a nut.
> truth & decency on your side
Truth and decency (and even science) come from God. In rejecting God the left has rejected truth and decency. They consider truth and decency White-supremacist patriarchal homophobic social constructs. To fight them it is necessary to reject the whole relativist package.
If you can stump someone even when arguing by their own crazy rules, that's 100x the win.
Except you won't because they're rules amount to "there are no rules" which in practice means the rules are whatever they say they are at the moment.
The thing is, most Democratic voters don't get that yet. They still think there are rules - they think there must be rules. They think there must be some sense to it all, surely, and someone somewhere can explain how it all makes sense. They aren't ready to deal with the fact that so many of the people they trust are abjectly stupid or abjectly cowardly.
You have to take them by the hand and lead them in a long, long circle. You have to show them contradiction after contradiction after contradiction. You really have to rub their faces in it sometimes. They don't like it. They get mad. But it works!
Have you ever put in the time to prove to a trans-identifying person that the concept of trans is nonsense? Most of them will block you fast - but not all. Some of them really try to argue for it. It's sad to see - they really think they'll win. They've been told over and over and over again that they're right, right, right. And it shocks them when they find that they have no response to a simple question like "Define woman without reference to sex-based stereotypes." It shocks them! They try to google for an answer and they don't find any. You see them start to panic before your very eyes. Like I said it's sad to see.
Have you put in the time to do that? I have, and I've done it dozens and dozens of times at this point. It works. Eight or ten or twelve hours of argumentation is a small sacrifice to save someone's life. It works! On the other hand, if you quote the bible, they'll just say "lol christfag." Argue, don't preach.
Or abjectly corrupt
> Have you ever put in the time to prove to a trans-identifying person that the concept of trans is nonsense? Most of them will block you fast - but not all. Some of them really try to argue for it. It's sad to see - they really think they'll win. They've been told over and over and over again that they're right, right, right. And it shocks them when they find that they have no response to a simple question like "Define woman without reference to sex-based stereotypes." It shocks them! They try to google for an answer and they don't find any. You see them start to panic before your very eyes. Like I said it's sad to see.
> Have you put in the time to do that? I have, and I've done it dozens and dozens of times at this point. It works. Eight or ten or twelve hours of argumentation is a small sacrifice to save someone's life.
Can you see why your approach isn't scalable?
> They still think there are rules - they think there must be rules. They think there must be some sense to it all, surely, and someone somewhere can explain how it all makes sense. They aren't ready to deal with the fact that so many of the people they trust are abjectly stupid or abjectly cowardly.
The "experts" they trust believe in the post-modernist idea that there's no such thing as objective truth.
Yes, relativism is part of the problem.
I will never be ashamed of my religion. I stand for Jesus Christ and God’s truth.
If that is ‘nuts’ to some; so be it.
That's all well and good, but when the other side is trying to frame rational objection as religious zealotry, please don't help them do it. If you'd like to make the argument that government-mandated genderism is the state imposing a religious belief on people regardless of their own faith, please do that.
Or use progressive arguments against them by pointing to immigrant groups & underprivileged groups with deeply held religious beliefs that conflict with genderist mandates. Bring up Hispanic-American Catholics or Iraqi-American Muslims and ask so-called progressives how they, as privileged white people, dare trample on the deeply-held convictions, lived experiences and faith traditions of these less-privileged groups.
That's the key to winning this - all the critical nonsense isn't even internally consistent, and it's badly wanting some holes poked. This is easy to do, even playing by their rules. That's how you flummox, plant seeds of doubt, and wean people off the cult rhetoric. Relying on your own particular faith will just make them close ranks around theirs.
> Or use progressive arguments against them by pointing to immigrant groups & underprivileged groups with deeply held religious beliefs that conflict with genderist mandates.
It seems you don't have the courage to make the argument in your own name, consider why that is.
> Bring up Hispanic-American Catholics or Iraqi-American Muslims
Why are you Ok with Hispanic Catholics and Iraqi Muslims arguing from their religion, but not Ok with Pamela arguing from hers?
Sir, I come from an ancient time when nobody was supposed to give out their real name on the internet. I preserve my anonymity so that I can say what I like without the persecution that most certainly would have come my personal way already for saying what I like. Were it just me making my way alone in this stupid world, I would not care if they fired me, beat me, chained me, or deported me, but as fate would have it I have a lover.
And I'm not okay with anyone "arguing from their religion." It's rather that I'm not okay with anyone imposing their religion on anyone else. That's why I'm not okay with so-called progressives making Psychology a state religion. What they are doing is wrong because they are imposing a religious belief on other people under color of law. We don't even need to get into the specific insanity of the religion in order to say that, and we certainly don't need to start with the cheugy bible quotes like we're at Hillsong.
America is a secular nation - the only one ever to be so founded & constituted. If you consider America's success to be God's intelligent work, why can't you also consider that God intelligently designed America to be secular, in order more effectively to unite God's children in peace and liberty?
> America is a secular nation
That means the government can't interfere with the churches, not that people shouldn't have their religion inform their politics.
> And I'm not okay with anyone "arguing from their religion."
Then why were you fine with "underprivileged" groups doing it?
> It's rather that I'm not okay with anyone imposing their religion on anyone else.
Sorry, but I'm willing to impose "thou shalt not murder" on society.
> Or use progressive arguments against them by pointing to immigrant groups & underprivileged groups with deeply held religious beliefs that conflict with genderist mandates. Bring up Hispanic-American Catholics or Iraqi-American Muslims and ask so-called progressives how they, as privileged white people, dare trample on the deeply-held convictions, lived experiences and faith traditions of these less-privileged groups.
The very concept of "privilege" as used by progressives is nonsense. Attempting to fight nonsense with nonsense doesn't work. I'd rather fight nonsense with Truth.
Actually, in logic, the way to prove something false is to find that it leads to a contradiction. Once you have found a contradiction, logic stops, because anything can be made to follow.
If one starts with the rules of "privilege" that so-called progressives declare, and from there one reaches a contradiction within those rules, then one has proven the given rules unworkable. This is in fact the most direct possible attack on the framework of "privilege."
Unfortunately arguments by contradiction tend not to survive being broken up into soundbites.
What a hellish world this American nightmare has made of the American dream; meanwhile so many citizens suffer from ill fitting healthcare and lack of proper housing, employment or food. One big joke only the narcissism of The Joker Wokeness could produce. I loathe them .
Ditto all of that!
Tell them. They have social media, they have emails, they have offices, they have work addresses. Send them messages on every platform calmly grilling them for being deranged. And do you know what the fun part is? A heck of a lot of them respond, in the exact sniveling and arrogant way you'd expect they would. If they don't block you, make them block you (by stating facts they don't like), then go to another platform and do it again. When you've made someone block you everywhere, send them a letter. Then find someone else and start again. And I don't just mean Democrats.
I started to do this because screw them. Screw them for trans and screw them for Trump. They have made our world so absurd that people just don't care. Go and shout at them! Yell in their faces! They parade grotesquery down Washington's streets and Lincoln's roads! Yet like a shit in the face, what they've done will never be expunged! Out damn spot! I shall scratch the skin from our face if that's what it takes to get clean!
Admire your warrior spirit....it's what's lacking in conservative movement. As well as in Rep party. As an ex-D am very frustrated w/conservatives....lack courage to even voice an opinion, much less publicly support each other. This IS why the DeMons run all over them, laugh and spit in their faces.
Same situation. Don't agree with most Republicans on much, but the radical genderism from Democrats is disqualifying. Shocking how fast it took over. Party of science, decency, logic, reason - poof! Welcome to insanity.
There are anti-Trump Republicans, but there aren't really non-genderist Democrats anymore - or rather no electeds are willing to speak up publicly, which to me is disqualifying cowardice, even if they secretly think it's nuts. Even while Trump was in office, there were Republican electeds like Romney who were critical of him - we have no such voices on the left criticizing the trans debacle. None. Any that there were have been cast out. The behavior is just psychotic.
So many people that you just can't ever trust again. Either they were for it, or they let it happen and said nothing and did nothing - and the danger wasn't hard to see. Disqualifying - and they don't remotely have popular support on the issue either. As more people become aware of what "trans" really means, or rather how it is extended to mean more and more things by the day, support for ideas like "there are more than two genders" is falling rapidly. Among Gen Z, agreement with that statement fell from 60% to 40% in just the last two years. I think a charismatic Republican candidate who is immune to accusations of racism would catch Democrats with their pants on the floor, and I personally think the best person to do that is Tim Scott.
> I think a charismatic Republican candidate who is immune to accusations of racism
You do realize "racist" means anyone who opposes the Democrats' agenda?
That's why I said "accusations of racism." They will happen no matter what and they will resonate with certain people as they always do. It's a tired formula at this point - I'm very well aware. That's what makes Tim Scott such a good choice. They'll have to write an entirely new playbook - and no small number of elected Democrats have already stepped in it by calling Tim a "token" or some such. Won't it be fun to watch them squirm? They'll want to call him a race traitor so damn bad, you'll be able to watch their mouths pucker up keeping it in.
1) They don't care about being hypocrites.
2) Giving into them and nominating a Black simply for the purpose of having a token ultimately plays into their hands.
> Party of science, decency, logic, reason - poof!
It never was any of those things. You had just been falling for their propaganda.
I remember the ancient days of 2005 when Republicans were actually trying to get intelligent design taught in schools. Lots of elected Republicans still deny that human action could possibly affect the global environment. (And here's the thing - we don't even need to talk about long-term warming or cooling or change or what have you. Putting more CO2 in the atmosphere will deleteriously acidify ocean waters according to a very basic chemical formula, no climactic history or theoretical feedback loops needed. Nature may adjust in time but the short-term effects would be no goodster.)
Democrats in that day were generally opposed to mixing government & religion. Republicans by contrast mixed their religion gladly with politics. The difference now is not that Republicans have stopped - as we see by the comments on substacks such as this one - but that Democrats have become fervent acolytes of a new religious order, the church of Psychology & its various genderist and racialist sub-orders. Now there is no party of science and I must choose between the zealots. Of these I'll take the Christians any day - they don't accuse you of hate crimes if you call a priest bro instead of father.
> I remember the ancient days of 2005 when Republicans were actually trying to get intelligent design taught in schools.
I'll take it you believe in evolution. Let me ask you some questions about your belief.
Do you believe humans evolved?
Do you believe various human groupings adapted to the different environments they found themselves in? If not, why not?
Do you believe these adaptations involved all kinds of traits, or that there was no evolution of traits related the brain, personality, or intelligence? If not, why not?
> Lots of elected Republicans still deny that human action could possibly affect the global environment.
Ah, yes "climate change" has been ten to twenty years from destroying the planet for the past forty years.
> Democrats in that day were generally opposed to mixing government & religion.
You say "mixing government and religion" like it's a bad thing. Frankly, separating Truth from government quickly leads to separating truth from government, as even you are starting to notice.
Good luck, Chris. We will ALL be pulling for YOU.
"A cult-like belief system...the replacement of the system of self-governance with a system of ideological rule" A cult. It is a cult. Not cult-like, an actual cult. Specifically a gnostic and hermeticist cult, implying special knowledge ("educate yourself") and alchemical abstraction of thought ("trans bodies.")
Gnostic cults are parasitic, meaning that they glom onto other ideologies and beliefs like the Blob, transforming whatever cultural or governmental or regulatory or educational or bureaucratic or faith institution it touches into a source of contagion, redirecting its resources to the replication of the gnostic virus. If I sound a bit like James Lindsay, that is because I discovered his work whilst studying the phenomenon of "gender identity" as a faith formation from an historical perspective, informed by a lifetime of studying cults and magical woo thinking of all kinds. "Trans" and "gender identity" fit the all-American pattern of patent medicine fraud, which was imbued with religious marketing gimmickry and began as a psuedoscience. It remains more scientism than scientific. Chucking the "gender studies" department is therefore like closing the parapsychology department. Results should matter in science.
Only faith demands that we ignore results and rely on the sanctified, tearful testimonies of children instead. Only faith. Refuse to enter the wizard circle or repeat the magic pronoun cant. Refuse to participate in the mandatory faith fun. You will stand on solid Constitution and they will only blow wind at you.
Great post!
>Chucking the "gender studies" department is therefore like closing the parapsychology department
You're so, so close. Drop the "para." All of the current nonsense we're dealing with from genderism to "violent words" stems directly from Psychology. Genderism is a sect of Psychology, which is a religion with a capital P.
Psychology has always suffered for being too close to a pseudoscience of the soul. The therapy profession has a lot to answer for as well.
"If the state can force you to lie about basic reality—man and woman—then it can force you to lie about anything." - That, in my opinion, is the key sentence in the whole article.
This is psychological warfare against the citizens. If the government can force you to lie about things which are obvious, then you have essentially given up, capitulated. If you totally give in to the government, you become a tool of the government, you are a useful idiot. At that point freedom is gone, the American Dream is gone and it is total tyranny. Obviously, that is the goal of the Biden regime, the goal of the Marxist elites in the establishment. Their goal is to be the wealthy, elite ruling class forever and have the rest of society be the 'worker bees'. They want all the money and all the power, and the rest of society would be divided between being their servants and being collateral damage.
Jordan Peterson opposed his federal Canadian government forcing citizens to likewise lie via compelled gender pronouns in the proposed new speech laws. I also opposed being compelled to introduce myself via pronouns in my doctoral seminars in 2020-21. I also firmly yet politely refused to place my pronouns on a 2022 conference badge because i said it was “not a safe space for me”to mention them. They didn’t know I understand my he/him pronouns identify me as the villain/oppressor in the room. Why would I willingly use queer/gendered discourse to ostracize and humiliate myself for ‘oppression’ I’m not responsible for? My professors stopped requiring us to introduce ourselves via pronouns 👍. Compelled speech violates not only reality but our consciences. Damn compelled speech laws.
The pronoun people are fighting back. At least one large company in my local area is following a policy of using "they/them" in their brochures and websites when writing about employees who have declined to state masculine or feminine pronouns. This then gives coworkers and users of the company's services the idea that the person referred to as "they" could be a "nonbinary" or "trans" person. Creating this impression may or may not benefit the person being so labelled and definitely could be harmful to that person's reputation.
That’s what I think, and why I believe that gender theory is “a hill to die on”.
I recently asked a new mom (mid-30s)of my acquaintance if she thinks that her child “IS a boy”, or “was assigned male at birth”, and she couldn’t/wouldn’t answer the question! That’s absolute madness. And these people VOTE.
OTOH, this lawsuit shows that I finally agree with the Biden administration on something: gender theory is a (mental) disability.
Further proof of the real civil war we are fighting. You can all keep trying to do it the right way, but playing by the rules will land us all in concentration camps. I think I’ll choose to fight fire with fire.
I shake my head every day at the nonsense coming from these “wokesters”. Fight the good fight, Christopher. We are with you.
Keep up the good fight Chris! Stay strong🙏
You are a front line soldier in this fight for our country and please know there are millions of us standing with you. In our own spheres we are fighting as well and always ready to assist you should you send out a call.
Thank you for all your vital work Chris! Sadly, the crazies seem unstoppable
while they are conjoined with our malignant government.
The left is doing its best to obliterate opposition by lawfare, intimidation, and cheating. Several prominent conservative leaders have gone down in flames, have bowed out, have been "turned", or have lost their moorings. Under such vicious pressure, who can be surprised? Perhaps when we look back on this dark period of our national life we'll see that it was a few courageous individuals - "brave men and true" - who stood firm and were used by God to achieve the impossible and turn the tide. I hope so. Thank you for doing your part. Praying for you.
In the end it really comes down to the courts, which are the last stronghold of conservatives in American political life. I think the odds are strongly in your favor, but even with conservative judges (some of whom have gender-something offspring) you never can be sure. I'm hoping this ends with a solid slap-down of the neo-Stalinists.
Stay strong, Chris. Only the truth makes us free!!
We are behind you!
How do you stop this steamrolling? Honestly feels like we are losing and there isn’t much hope. They figured out how to manipulate elections so that a conservative will never gold presidency again.
I think that we have already lost. That is hard to deal with, but may not be the end of the story.
We use the term "liberal democracy" freely without ever considering that it's an oxymoron. The "liberal" grounds laws in universal best-practices and rights that must govern society regardless of the will of the people. The "democrat" believes laws should reflect the will of the people. In America, this tension was historically held in check by federalism: democratic control at the local level backed by universal rights limiting the federal level. The Civil War dented this architecture; the Progressive era started the wrecking ball, and demolition was completed by the Civil Rights Act.
This is where I part ways with you Chris. I love what you're doing, but I think you're failing to see what time it is. We conservatives need to accept that we've lost. We live in a unitary government now; local control and democratic federalism are no longer options. The choice is between a Left-wing, progressive, liberal state and a Right-wing, illiberal state.
What many people call "populism" is the beginnings of the latter. If we're lucky, such an illiberal state could preserve liberty while grounding it in some kind of universal moral claims (Christian democracy or Aristotelian virtue as Patrick Deneen says). If we're unlucky, we end up grounding it in racially tinged language that differs from the Left only by which races are favored. In this sense, Richard Spencer and Ibram Kendi are mirrors of each other. However, this is a risk we must take, and we must be willing to embrace state power to do it (since we lack the ability to claim any other kind.) What you're doing is a necessary step, but it often feels like you're looking for a road back to Jeffersonian democracy. Alas, such a road no longer exists. Perhaps New College graduates can reconstruct it, but that's a long way off, and they won't get the chance if the Left consolidates power further.
If anything, your hint at the drastic consequences of losing this lawsuit understates the danger. If we do nothing, the woke will win and institute a progressive, Left-wing theocracy. At least the Right presents a road (however narrow it may be) that ends in something good. I wish it ended in Jeffersonian democracy, but the destination is closer to a cross between Burke and Hamilton.
We have laws, but laws are collections of words, and when those in power change the definitions of the words, the laws have no value.
For example: When genital mutilation becomes 'gender affirming care'.
If the judicial structure accepts those perversions, our legal system has been destroyed.
We must stop using the easy and puerile word “woke” - we must call this religion by its true name. These are the lesser orders, missionaries & lay brothers of the church of Psychology.
This religion wears the clothes of science, and it performs a caricature of the scientific method when needed, but it is not bound by science's limits. The dicta of Psychology are accepted without factual evidence and without waiting for scientific research. We see that when science contradicts Psychology, Psychologists abandon science. We see that "Psychology" is not an "-ology" any more than Scientology - it is a religion.
The "psych" of "Psychology" is not the brain - that would be neurology - it is the psyche, the spirit, the mind, the soul. We may observe the brain, we may observe the body, we may observe behavior. We may observe how chemicals, conditions & chromosomes affect the body, affect the brain, affect behavior. Yet the study of the unobservable mind - this is not in the remit of science. It definitionally can not be.
This is not a pedantic distinction - this is fundamental. When one attempts to study the unobservable, one steps outside science. The mind is studied with the mind, the soul with the soul, the spirit with the spirit. The study of the psyche by the psyche for the psyche - this is called art, this is called literature, this is called music, this is called religion. So-called Psychologists have set themselves above all these. They have set their purported true understandings of the psyche above art, above science, above everything.
Only the psyche may study the psyche. A psyche studying the psyche can communicate its findings on the psyche by art, by literature, by music. It can not purport to declare empirical truth. To do so is to found a religion. It will not matter how disturbed & bizarre the doctrines grow. Psychologists have claimed moral & scientific truth theirs to pronounce.
We must firmly restrict Psychology to the religious domain. As long as we fail to bind it thusly, its shifting dogma & whimsical clergy will rule us by clerical fiat.