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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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@ .45
You wouldn’t need to murder three children to accomplish that though.
I’m all for analysing the causes of violence in the abstract; but I think the danger of doing so during the currency of a contemporaneous case is the risk of justifying or legitimising the acts. And also the general caveat that speculation is really just guessing. A lot of the time, the true facts of a case take months or even years to establish.
Peripherally related. Grand Jury has voted to indict Trump. No idea what the charges are yet. Might be a few days before that’s made public.
Quoting .45:
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?
The mere suspicion of such a motive would certainly be enough to cause everyone to scream about Hale being trans, in order to distract attention away from a real and well-known problem of clergy and church-school sex-abuse.
And speaking of which, I may be looking in the wrong places, but I have yet to see anything substantiating the claim (or is it still just in insinuation?) that the shooter actually was trans or non-binary. So…who’s making that claim, and on what basis?
The police chief said the shooter was named Audrey Hale and was a woman, but then said the shooter is trans and called themselves a man and used a different name. That made people think the shooter was a trans man, and Audrey was their deadname. But since then, all of the shooter’s acquaintances and relatives also used the name Audrey and she/her and did not mention the shooter being trans or any other name they were going by. So now, who knows?
EDIT: Apparently, there are some Facebook and LinkedIn posts under the name Aiden, but it isn’t clear if that was the name the shooter actually went by in day to day life or a pseudonym they adopted only for the internet and from when the identity is from.
@Alan Robertshaw: I don’t think we need to know the exact charges at this point; it’s related to the Stormy Daniels case, which already says “misappropriation of funds”. Could be campaign finance, could be something related to commerce given that shell companies were involved, could be something more obscure that I, a non-lawyer, would have little reason to know about.
@ snowberry
Yeah; I suspect we’ll get more details in the coming days. Presumably now Trump is weighing the PR value of attending voluntarily by appointment or insisting they do the handcuff thing.
The New York Times seems to be suggesting he’s being charged with skiing into Gwyneth Paltrow.
Hmm, if Trump doesn’t go voluntarily then he’ll need to be extradited from Florida. The relevant order will have to be signed by DeSantis.
This could get messy.
DeSantis refusing to extradite may be posturing. It seems he used the cover of the indictment to introduce a repeal of Florida’s “Resign To Run” law that currently requires him to quit being governor before formally running for president.
Truthfully, DeSantis should be only too glad to extradite Trump. DeSantis is never going to win the Republican nomination as discount Trump, when the real deal is walking around. But if something were to happen to Trump, DeSantis would have the best shot at taking his place. He’s got to already be thinking something along these lines.
Apparently he’s going to voluntarily attend for arraignment on Tuesday. No handcuffs.
@Alan
No handcuffs, but I wonder what he thinks would happen. He seems very fond of declaring his desired outcome, but he doesn’t always take logical steps to get there.
Well, not what I would consider logical, anyway.
@Dave
Oh, they wouldn’t have stopped there. The Nazis considered all Slavs, but especially Poles, to be Untermenschen, ultimately fit only for enslavement or extermination. Which is why it shocks me to see Slavic neo-Nazis… especially in places like Ukraine, where the Nazis were in essence planning to murder everyone, but only after they used the Slavs to get rid of the Jews and fight the Soviets first.
Speaking of gaol, Andrew Tate & co have been granted bail. But with a condition they remain under house arrest.
Does Tucker Carlson even listen to himself? “People who believe they’re God can’t stand to be reminded that they’re not.” Where does he get the idea all trans people believe that? What about trans atheists, by definition not god-believers?? For that matter, trans Christians, or any trans person who believes in a religion that says “there’s a god but it’s not you”???
David is charitable to interpret him metaphorically…
…but I don’t think Carlson put that much thought into making his rhetoric coherent. The hatred and attention-getting tactics were more the point.
Also, the tweets showing the “trans rights or else” shirt or sign have two photos in common, making a total of six people pictured. Now, I’m sure there are more people with that shirt and sign, but I doubt it’s as mainstream as the tweets suggest. I don’t like the image, I think using guns as a threat is a problem, but it’s also super disingenuous to present the people with these signs as a coordinated movement.
It’s a common Christian line of rhetoric that atheists or people with supposedly non-Christian lifestyles want to be God themselves. It kind of makes sense as an attempt to understand personal autonomy through a conservative Christian lens.
Here, Carlson seems to be using it as a mere buzzphrase, mixed up with the notion that wanting to modify your body or change gender is defying God’s plan for your life. There’s no logical reason why wanting to be more godlike would make you want to be another gender.
This is one of the articles circulating on Twitter. The shooter could have been an abuse victim, or known someone who was. https://www.courthousenews.com/church-accused-of-covering-for-molester/
I wonder if Tuck is okay with boob jobs and other plastic surgery? Or IVF? Or antibiotics? Or *stage whisper* boner pills?? If those things aren’t “playing god” then what is?
@Lumipuna:
Re: Christianity:
I must admit that “Your sole reason for existing is to praise God” is a hell of a take.
Only a pathological narcissist would create intelligent beings purely for that purpose.
Unfortunately, such a thing has actually happened on occasion, though of course it wasn’t actually a god, just a parent (usually, more specifically, a father) and invariably leading to an abusive and dysfunctional family dynamic.