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Fox News demagogue Tucker Carlson announced the start of a holy war against the trans movement in the wake of the tragic shootings at a Nashville Christian school by an apparent trans man. On his show Tuesday night, Carlson declared that the trans movement was the “natural enemy” of Christianity and should be treated as such.
His argument, if you want to call it that, was that the trans movement is antithetical to Christianity because trans people want to play god by changing their bodies. “People who believe they’re God can’t stand to be reminded that they are not,” he asserted.
So, Christianity and transgender orthodoxy are wholly incompatible theologies. They can never be reconciled. They are on a collision course with each other. One side is likely to draw blood before the other side. … Yesterday morning, tragically, our fears were confirmed.
Carlson is imputing a kind of collective guilt upon the trans “side,” suggesting that if one trans person commits a crime, all trans people are guilty. It’s not that one trans person committed a horrible crime; it’s that the “trans side” drew blood.
Incredibly, as a transphobic movement led by fundamentalist Christians demonizes drag queens and introduces bill after bill virtually criminalizing trans existence in state legislatures nationwide, Tucker suggested that there was no rational reason for trans anger. “Why are some trans people so angry, and why do they seem to be mad specifically at traditional Christians?” Carlson asked, feigning incredulity.
Carlson warned of what he suggested would be a coming wave of “trans terrorism.” Citing several examples of violence by trans people, he ominously concluded that “there could be more” to come.
Carlson wasn’t the only one to rail against “trans terrorism.” Indeed, a small army of right-wingers- some famous, some not- also took up the call. “Is ‘Trans Terrorism’ the Next Big Thing?” asked Ben Bartee of PJ Media.
There is no shortage of video evidence available on the web to confirm the theory that hate-filled identity politics and mental illness drive this newly described form of violence. …
The conditions are all present to manufacture trans terrorists.
They have the requisite identity-based grievance. The corporate media fuels their self-righteous anger and cheers them on.
And now we have precedent — something for the children to mimic in the form of the Nashville shooter. Monkey see, monkey do.
Elsewhere on PJ Media, another headline declared, “Like Muslims, Trans Terrorists Are Lashing Out Due to ‘Grievances.’”
Meanwhile, on CD Media, L Todd Wood, railed against “transgender domestic terrorists.” Transgenderism, he declared,
is being pushed on our kids by diabolical evil.
These people are mentally ill.
Big Pharma and their government, Marxist enablers are spreading this mental illness.
The mental illness is mutating into a domestic terrorist threat.
It’s time to shut this threat to our children down at the source – the teacher’s unions, the corrupt medical community, and the government.
In the meantime, get your concealed carry license and protect your family.
And one needs only do a simple Twitter search to drum up countless examples of this escalating rhetoric.
Some even suggested that trans people were somehow more likely to be violent terrorists than, say, white men.
On Infowars, John Nolte tried to use math to prove his point.
In less than five years, we’ve had four people who identify as transsexual committing a mass shooting….
[T]hat’s four mass shootings committed by people who make up about one-half of one percent of the population. So that works out to around 2.75 mass shootings per million transsexuals over four years.
Suppose the roughly 325 million American heterosexuals committed mass shootings at that rate. In that case, you’d be talking about somewhere around 900 mass shootings over four years, and I’m talking real mass shootings—schools and places of employment—not the BS “mass shootings” fabricated by fake media outlets like CNNLOL.
Gee, maybe de-listing gender dysphoria as a mental illness wasn’t such a good idea…?
This is, of course, a parade of bullshit. Trans people are actually far less likely to commit mass shootings than cis people, especially cis men, who are responsible for the overwhelming majority of these tragedies. Even if we just focus on recent years, the difference is stark. Since the start of 2018, a little over five years ago, there haven’t been “just” 900 mass shootings, defined as shootings of four or more victims; there have been a staggering 2,861, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Of these, three have been by trans people. (The Colorado Springs shooter, who targeted LGBTQ+ people, claimed to be nonbinary, but that seems to have been an attempt to troll the media; his lawyers use he/him pronouns.)
Three out of 2,861. That’s 0.1% of the total. Even considering that trans people make up only 0.5% of the American population (1.6 million), that’s a tiny number.
To say that these three shootings represent some new wave of “trans terrorism” is not only disingenuous; it’s absurd. This has never stopped right-wing propagandists before. So expect a lot more talk of “trans terrorism” to come.
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real funny that the same people who always say “not to politicize tragedies” after mass shootings are politicizing this tragedy, it’s almost like they only say that to defend white men commiting hate crimes. also love the way they’re clutching their pearls over the trans rights with guns shirts but are normally pretty pro gun shirts in general. i feel like i’m living in opposite world but then again the contradictions are the point
So I guess when people on the right own guns they’re exercising their second amendment rights ,when marginalized people on the left own guns they’re terrorists
What an evil, empty sicko TC is. For purely useless, evil, cravenness – and for no reason except the adoration of the shittiest people now alive – he even beats out T—p.
OT; This site is fantastic and related, so I’ll suggest this article, related to our sad, ugly topic here.
I hope this isn’t out of line.
On dating advice and men – Going Medieval (going-medieval.com)
Why can’t we see the manifesto? I dunno, that is strange. Every other time there has been a major shooting they rush to show us that sort of thing in the middle of an active investigation, right?
Tucker Carlson is a terrorist.
I admit to not paying attention to how long it typically takes for the manifesto to become publicly available when there is one. But if it’s being or becomes held back, then I’d put good odds on something it says being really inconvenient to someone. Regardless of some people’s impatience, it might be a bit early anyway.
I’m darkly amused at the idiots who are demanding that this be prosecuted as a hate crime. The shooter is dead, there’s not going to be any prosecution.
I’m a Christian, I’m nonbinary, and I feel myself sinking into a deep depression.
And yet a TN Rep declared, on camera, that there was nothing that could be done to stop anybody from killing other people.
I need to go hug Mr. Parasol.
Well, sure. The man has a job to do. Those rugs on his head aren’t going to pay for themselves.
Like the shooter, I was AFAB. So I suppose I’m to blame also?
And I’m a white person. And American. And living in the twenty-first century. Lock me up?
When my local paper here in Colorado repeated the “nonbinary” claim, I wrote and suggested that they take the claim with a boatload of salt.
It was ludicrous on its face. And, unfortunately, I’ve seen some lawyers pull some shit.
What’s always so sickening about these people to me is that they never believe that the discussions had in the wake of shootings when they are (almost inevitably) committed by cis men/boys is that they are conducted in good faith – that people think that gun control and examining the society which creates these killers will actually contribute to solving the problem and save lives.
Nope. They just always assume people are jumping on a bandwagon to take a crowing swipe at their political enemies, so when something like this happens and the perpetrator is a trans man, they can shout GOTCHA! HA! TWO CAN PLAY AT THAT GAME! They don’t care about the victims at all.
@Lily, others:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
This seems to apply to the far right more broadly. And I think I know why.
The far right is something like cancer. Normal cells have proteins, patterns of gene expression, etc. that adapt them well to their functions, and ultimately to long term survival of themselves and the larger organism of which they are part. In some sense their “beliefs” are grounded “in the real world”, as their gene expression has to produce functionally useful results. Cancer cells cease to operate that way and become “selfish”, reproducing themselves at the host’s expense. To that end they cease to use their genes and proteins normally and begin to switch on and off whatever is convenient for the moment. They become misshapen and distorted, as does what they produce, and they cease to correspond with the world around them. In the end they kill the golden goose, then promptly themselves starve, if not stopped sooner than that. And the only thing that stops them is violence.
At the level of human society we see the same thing. Most people are grounded in reality, at least enough to function: get paid, keep a roof over their head, obtain food. Generally that involves contributing, in some way, to the society that in turn provides housing and infrastructure. Members of the far right, on the other hand, have lost this grounding in reality. Their claimed beliefs begin and end in mid-air and frequently shift to suit their needs of the moment. Even as they claim to be clinging to some purportedly-besieged identity (white; Christian; etc.) they seem to lose all semblance of actual identity and become a writhing polymorphic amoeba of no definable shape, beliefs-wise … much like a cancer cell. And the proliferation of this likewise threatens the host society, and leads eventually to ruin if not put down with violence. Punch enough Nazis and society may survive; don’t, and they take over and run it right into the ground, or else start wars on unsustainably many fronts (as Germany did) to try to stave off collapse after squandering resources.
Needless to say, this can only get a start among a privileged class, since non-privileged people need to remain at least somewhat grounded in reality or they don’t eat. Unsurprisingly, the wellspring of Nazi-esque movements (and of most terrorist organizations, for that matter) tend to be downwardly mobile middle class, rather than the working class, with some funding by wealthy upper class types.
I think the underlying cause might also be the same: a privileged “cell” attempting to maintain homeostasis during a belt-tightening of some sort. In the case of actual cells, those would be energy-hungry ones trying to survive a situation of reduced food or oxygen for whatever reason. (This could be a bodily-internal problem, such as a clot in an artery somewhere starving a small patch of tissue somewhere not ordinarily important.)
In the societal case, it’s hitting the carrying capacity. Until then the rich get richer, the middle class get somewhat richer, and the working class get by. After that, continued growth isn’t possible and someone has to tighten their belt. Of course, those with more money and thus political power ensure that it’s someone lower on the socio-economic ladder before them, so the working class is devastated first, while the middle class and rich pull up the ladders. As the crunch worsens, the rich, to homeostatically maintain the lifestyles to which they have been accustomed, start to put the screws to the middle class as well, which becomes downwardly mobile. The middle class has been accustomed to landing on their feet and generally being able to find jobs and benefits whenever needed, so has a greater ability to get away with being somewhat unmoored from reality than the working class, and when hit with downward mobility, bam, cancer. Or rather, Nazism. Whatever beliefs will rationalize expropriating some outgroup to shore up their own group. And the rich will fund some of these to use as a cudgel against rising working class militancy (itself non-Nazi and remaining firmly grounded in reality, so seen as much more of a threat).
The resulting far-right cancer has only one underlying drive: to reappropriate the resources that have gone missing. And only one logical target: the working class and other marginalized groups, since the rich are far more capable of defending themselves. To that end though it will clothe itself in whatever cloak of words will further those ends, to exploit whatever existing social fissures (religious, racial, gender, etc.) might be handy. Like a cancer cell amping up the production of proteins that break down extracellular matrix and allow it to invade surrounding tissue.
The self-contradictions come from the fact that it’s lost its identity. It is just a growth engine now, shorn of any specific job or niche, doing whatever. Sociopaths are naturally that way; fascism is when a whole group of at-least-middle-class people become functionally sociopathic as an adaptation to resist downward mobility.
It’s also why they cling to some superficial trait as a supposed identity; “white”, for example, or “Christian” from having been raised one, despite no longer really operating according to the tenets of the belief system. The less one has a real, actual identity the more one clings to something to call an identity. Except the natural-born sociopaths, who simply do not care. That might be the creepiest thing about them: that there’s a howling void at the center of them, and they have no problem with that.
Some really dark and terrifying times are upon us.
One wonders if he has ever exercised, or cut his hair, or perhaps even dyed away some grey …
@TIAS:
Oh, no doubt. They’ve had (or perhaps somehow manufactured) their Reichstag fire moment, and there’s blood in the water. Things will escalate fast from this point. I hope you’ve all got your bug-out bags packed and some sort of escape-to-Canada-or-Mexico plan in place for when the SHTF; or else a plan to be part of some resistance fight-back.
You say that like it’s a hypocritical absurdity, and if you believe in equal rights and equal protection under the law, it is. The problem is, conservatism, at its core, has always been about hierarchies and keeping people in their place. To Carlson and his audience, only the “right” people really have second amendment (and other) rights; the “wrong” people trying to exercise the same rights in the same way are an affront and threat to the “proper” order of things, and that’s the worst crime they can imagine.
This is one of several issues related to the “property exchange” multi-paragraph post which I recently did on another thread, about why the US can’t just swap people around according to politics and/or lifestyle preferences. Most conservatives would feel like all was good and right in the world if they were in the top half of a strong hierarchy. And the small number of ones who would be satisfied as (or even prefer to be) humble servants would rather not be a heavily abused underclass, which is what would happen in the current political climate.
In the short run, I suspect that scenario would result in most conservative states forcing out “undesirables” who would rather not leave for whatever reason, only to engage in bloody conflict over which of the remaining subgroups get the most privilege; and for a few states to refuse to let oppressed people leave or even manufacture a new underclass (let’s say, for example, Missouri tries to draw in black conservatives with promises of freedom and better lives… and later, reveal the plan all along was the return of antebellum chattel slavery.) It’s not going to go well, is what I’m saying.
In the long run, even if the “perpetual exchange” addendum which I suggested mostly works like it’s supposed to, we’re still going to end up with a lot of conservatives in liberal states who either left because being permanently forced into the underclass was intolerable, or refuse to move to a conservative state despite having a strongly conservative-leaning personality due to the risk of ending up in an underclass (or in the middle of a new conflict over privilege) being unacceptable. That’s a group of people who will be resentful due to feeling “locked out of paradise”. Those people will still be a headache for liberal states to deal with.
In all it just makes things more polarized, without even clearly making things better for most people.
As someone descended from German Jews, I am all too aware that Krystallnacht was claimed to be a response to Nazi official Ernst vom Rath murder by a Polish Jew. As if the Nazis were not already plotting in 1938 to invade Poland and murder all the Jews there! This is going to get very, very scary very, very quickly.
Jesus fucking christ. This is nothing but an encouragement to genocide.
[Reposted after the site went back up]
…I am not against people forming specialized or idealized communities, those happen in the real world (they’re called “intentional communities”). The problem is, few which have been created so far have been stable long-term, and creating new ones is only realistic for privileged and economically-well off people who are willing to effectively give up most of the advantages they have for a specific unusual lifestyle. There are all sorts of political, logistical, and economic issues with making this within the reach of ordinary folks and scaling some kinds of communities up to a more practical level (one of the reasons for the instability issue is that some of them really needed to be a lot bigger to work, but only a tiny communities are really possible at present), and cults would be a real problem, but it would probably be a better world. The key is that this needs to be a bottom-up thing (with the top enabling and monitoring but mostly standing aside) not top-down. The whole “property exchange compromise” thing I was picking apart is a top-down thing.
Though as I also mentioned elsewhere, this would merely be a consolation prize for most US conservatives (and I assume, a lot of conservatives everywhere), and for a lot of them, a pretty crappy prize at that. It would also be a huge boon for some liberal subcultures, which would just be rubbing it in their faces.
Also I apologize for hijacking this thread to continue an off-topic subject from an earlier thread.
I have to wonder if the only long-term stable solution to this thing is to create empathy-inducing P-zombie robots and permit them, and only them, to be abused. So, an artificial outgroup/underclass to draw the conservatives’ lightning, while no actually conscious entities are harmed.
Of course, the conservatives won’t be fooled; that isn’t the intent. The intent is to give their drive for social dominance through bullying a harmless outlet. The hope is that this would suffice, the way masturbation generally suffices to sate the sex drive even though you know intellectually that you’re not potentially getting/causing a pregnancy.
We’d need to have a much better understanding of intelligence and consciousness to build such a thing, though, while knowing for certain it was not conscious and suffering. The good news is, the robots might not even need to be all that smart or lifelike to suffice; most masturbators are satisfied with an old sock or a suitably-shaped vegetable rather than a RealDoll, let alone a fully fledged sexbot, after all.
The real question mark is probably how conservatives would actually react. Would a faux underclass to abuse actually sate them, or just whet their appetite?
Meanwhile, the damage conservatives are doing to America continues to accelerate. They know that the Trump-sabotaged Supreme Court makes the whole country effectively a Constitution-free zone, and are increasingly emboldened to violate it left and right, particularly the Establishment Clause and freedom of speech (“don’t say gay” laws, obviously). They’re also increasingly moving to trap the targets of their abuse from leaving (which greatly undermines Snowberry’s various proposals, which seem to assume there won’t be any conservative fightback). For instance, this:
https://truthout.org/articles/idaho-poised-to-pass-first-bill-banning-interstate-travel-for-abortion/
States aren’t allowed to restrict interstate travel, under the US Constitition. (14th Amendment, §1.8.13.2) That doesn’t seem to faze these misogynistic chucklefucks, no doubt because they believe (probably correctly) that the Kavanaugh Court will uphold their stupid law anyway. Rapists protect their own, after all.
Defeating the Republican Presidential candidate in 2024 won’t unfuck the country. At a *bare* minimum unfucking the Supreme Court is mandatory to achieve that. And that unfucked Supreme Court would have to move quickly to declare not only all these religious-bigotry and other laws unConstitutional but also gerrymandering, flooding elections with Amazons worth of dark money, and a bunch of other shit that’s been fucking up the political system and allowing the wealthy, particularly, to paralyze Dem administrations into near-uselessness while tilting the electoral playing field toward Republicans.
Back on topic, more Tucker: Apparently I missed that at some point he “clarified” that he wasn’t against Trans people having their 2nd Amendment rights taken away (I think this was just before he went all mask-off genocidal, but not 100% certain because he’s been on a rapid-fire anti-trans kick for the past week or so, and I’m not quite clear on the order of events) but that he supposedly meant that trans people arming themselves could be taken as an “incitement to violence”. I think he was trying to imply that trans people arming themselves en masse would provoke others in to attacking them in self-defense, but it’s hard to say because he dove headlong into WTF territory during that particular speech. Apparently if Biden cared about trans people the way he cares about Ukraine, he’d give them tanks and fighter jets, checkmate libs.
I swear sometimes that he’s trying to fill the void left by Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones.
@Fabe:
Yeah, I was just thinking about all those gun-brandishing photos in Republican legislators’ Christmas cards and all the rest of the “cold dead hands” propaganda. If showing pictures of guns and proclaiming you intend to defend your rights is now an indicator of terrorism, we won’t have enough jails to hold all the Republicans we’ll need to arrest.
@Surplus to requirements:
To be clear, some of the “proposals” which I have been presenting over the past couple years aren’t mine; the “property exchange compromise” which I have been talking about recently isn’t. I did point out what kinds of addendums would be needed to make that idea even sort of workable, to show how its backers haven’t fully thought things through, which admittedly could be considered my contribution to the idea… but my conclusion is that even in a workable form it would almost certainly be too much short-term pain for too little long-term gain.
Even my own proposals have major issues, which I will freely admit, and even point out. Usually I will completely gloss over the whole “conservative pushback” thing as “political complications” because that’s an entire conversation in itself (which I am only now just touching on) because that would add far too much to my already-too-long posts, but I am very aware of that issue, and how it might be severe enough in some cases to make an otherwise decent-to-good solution unworkable.
I just read an article saying that Hale was specifically looking for a pastor associated with a church and the associated school, who was allegedly counseling them.
This led to a dark thought with little actual evidence at the moment: Suppose that this pastor was abusive to Hale growing up and potentially other children, such as his own daughter? Hale may have considered themselves as acting in vengence and ending the torment by any means necessary.