We Hunted The Mammoth
Bowing to public pressure, and perhaps also cognizant of the latest plunge in Tesla’s stock price, Elon Musk has restored the accounts of the journalists he impetuously banned on Thursday night. Well, most of them. He’s left behind several smaller lefty outlets, including It’s Going Down. And he’s newly banned the account of another journalist, Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, evidently for no other crime than writing critically about Musk.
Twitter suspended some journalists. You may have heard. On the off chance you haven’t already read one of the dozens of pieces on the subject, let me fill in a few of the main components of the whole sordid story before moving on to the right-wingers and their collective orgasm over the media bans.
Vladimir Putin has just signed a draconian bill into law prohibiting so-called LGBTQ “propaganda” in Russia. The bill, a bulked-up version of a less sweeping 2013 law, is so broad in its scope it will effectively ban any and all discussion of gay or trans identities in Russia, a ban enforceable by fines of up to 4 million rubles (or $64,000). The bill also bans the advocacy of pedophilia, as if that is even remotely in the same category.
Conservative cultural criticism is beyond parody these days. Consider the following reflections on Disney and its “Gay Black Hole” from someone called S. D. Wells on NaturalNews.com, which is neither natural nor news but rather a lot of health disinfo and right-wing conspiracy theories.
The midterm elections showed that most Americans aren’t fans of the Republican anti-trans crusade. But that’s not stopping GOP politicians across the country from pushing legislation that will strip trans people of basic rights and vital health care.
In the wake of the Republicans’ anemic performance in the midterms — the “red wave” that wasn’t — white nationalist Nick Fuentes, leader of the far-right America First movement, is declaring that he’s done with democracy. In a livestream Wednesday, Right-Wing Watch reports, he delivered a rant outright calling for a right-wing dictatorship to take over the country.
The rhetoric of the anti-trans movement — and Republican politicians — is getting more apocalyptic and eliminationist by the day. And anti-trans violence is getting worse. Last week, a man in Tulsa, Oklahoma, firebombed a donut shop after it held a drag event.
Luis Ramirez has a new theory about school shootings: they’re caused by a lack of testosterone. The freelance journalist, writing in the Tucker-Carlson-founded Daily Caller, offers a confused and confusing theory of mass shootings as the result not of toxic masculinity or the easy availability of guns but of wimpy, testosterone-starved kids gone wrong. “[T]here seems to be a correlation between the diminishing of testosterone volumes,” he writes, “and rise in mass shootings.”
Many political publications demonize their opponents, but few do it as literally as Gateway Pundit. The fact-challenged, frequently hysterical, conspiracy-minded far-right site that has been known to get more traffic than USA Today just loves calling their assorted enemies, from Democrats to the media, “demonic.” And by this, they seem to mean that literal minions of Satan are infesting or at least advising all these antagonists of theirs.
In a Livestream yesterday, Christian hate preacher Greg Locke told his followers that pronouns like the singular “they” and “them” are “demonic.”
