In a matter of weeks the rankest Qanon conspiracy theories have gone mainstream in the GOP and conventional journalism has barely noticed. https://t.co/MdtphHfTZ2 via @TPM
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 22, 2022
… below the surface, paddle like crazy!
One of the abiding features of early 21st century American politics is that a lot of change on the right happens in the subterranean world of what we used to call “the Crazy.” In the pre-Trump years it’s not that any of this was really hidden. It wasn’t subterranean in that sense. But it was off the radar of most of conventional journalism and the mainstream political discourse because it wasn’t serious. It wasn’t real. It was just crazy antics on the margins. But as we’ve tried to chronicle for decades now, that was never the case. That was the real GOP politics. It controlled and drove the presentable mainstream leaders — the Boehners, Ryans, McConnells and more. The ascension of Donald Trump was in many ways a simple inversion of this dynamic, putting “the Crazy” in formal and open leadership of the party.
Something has happened as recently as the last four to six weeks that follows this pattern, is important and dangerous and is still mostly coasting under the radar of “proper” U.S. political discourse and reporting…
… Any discussion of gender identity or homosexuality in schools is now “grooming” kids for pedophiles. Even same sex marriage — which is, of course, by definition for adults — is another part of the “grooming” agenda. Disney is now routinely attacked as a hotbed of “grooming” and pedophilia as a downstream effect of the corporation begrudgingly taking a position against Florida’s “don’t say gay” law…
Rise of the pedocons:
I used to think the far right was turning on Disney *despite* the fact that they have greatly improved in terms of not sexualizing their teenage girl characters.
Now I think they are turning on Disney at least partially because of it.
— Matthew Downhour (@MatthewDownhour) April 20, 2022
The 80s/90s princesses, pretty much the same thing. They had more assertive personalities but were also more visibly sexualized pic.twitter.com/jb0m2zeGon
— Matthew Downhour (@MatthewDownhour) April 20, 2022
And a few *turn down* marraiges they were entering into too quickly pic.twitter.com/brLJECf0TF
— Matthew Downhour (@MatthewDownhour) April 20, 2022
And *that* is what is driving the far right crazy, I think. These young women/teenagers are more modestly dress and behave more 'appropriately', like conservatives say they want. But in reality, they *want* the media preparing young women for one particular lifestyle –
— Matthew Downhour (@MatthewDownhour) April 20, 2022
And a section of the population is losing their minds at the idea that the educational system or mass media could present any other possible lifestyle.
— Matthew Downhour (@MatthewDownhour) April 20, 2022
The lack of a “marriage plot” in the last few definitely upset conservatives. Douhat had a whole column about it in National Review for Encanto.
— AMB (@aimesalot) April 20, 2022
Sidebar — this is good, too:
Can you identify a deviously political Disney movie when asked? https://t.co/vAPnPcTN7a
— Philip Bump (@pbump) April 22, 2022
sab
Just woke from a nap. Dobby is horrified that I would sleep, much less donate, to anyone especially in his name.
Mallard Filmore
@sab:
The baby snatchers say wut?
lollipopguild
Snow White living with 7 men and she is not married to any of them! Western Civilization is under attack!
Dan B
The “Groomer” propaganda seems to be gaining traction rapidly. It’s growing as quickly as the BLM rioters, China Virus, and similar branding of minority groups has in the recent past. The violence is bubbling up as well. Even David Brooks seemed on the verge of losing control on PBS yesterday. He got red in the face. Seems the elite media is finally starting to notice. Will pushback at this point be productive or too late to hold back the hordes
As a gay man in the 60’s and 70’s I lived through this, and then there was the “diseased” horror of the 80’s. A backlash now could be even more gruesome.
debbie
It’s been in the 80s here today. TFG should be sweating like a greased pig at his rally tonight.
Baud
Aladdin is my favorite.
I didn’t care that much for Encanto. The story was too abstract for me.
debbie
@Dan B:
Brooksie condemning groomers???
sab
Things to live by. Came out of the bath room. Shadow the mean kitty was on the cat tree in the hall. I picked her up and carried her to our bedroom. She was so shocked that she didn ‘t try to rip my face off until after she landed on our bed. One of life’s little victories
ETA Someday she will trust me to hold her. Dobby trusts me now. Six months ago he didn’t.
Dan B
@debbie: Surprise! He was furious at people spreading the groomer/ men* raping girls in bathrooms. Johnathan Capehart, while righteously pissed, was much more in control. He’s lived his entire life aware of prejudice and the role the wealthy play in weaponizing it. Brooks is just now realizing that his wealthy heroes are more than just complicit but actually embrace autocracy and demonization of minorities. He still wants us to be polite and have calm discussions about “issues”. Sorta hard to have “civil” discussions when the other half of the discussion wants you to disappear and be punished for your “lifestyle”.
Dan B
@sab: Congratulations! Can you accomplish the same with the RWNJ’s?
Kent
Reading about the latest book burnings out of FL it occurred to me that a great project for some tech-savvy folks would be a censorship map of the US.
Basically create a big zoomable and clickable map of the US in which every instance of school and library censorship is indicated with an icon of a burning book or some such.
And then when you zoom in and click on each burning book it opens a pop up box showing the names and pictures of the censors who were involved in the actual deed and the details of their actions for the whole world to see. Give them zero anonymity. Make them infamous nationally and internationally for all to see for all time.
Make it open-source so that local people everywhere in the country and post up local details about their friendly neighborhood book burners.
Any takers?
sab
@Dan B: Hopefully we (not nuts straights) will have your back this time. We know who our friends and relatives are. Back then we didn’t.
Dan B
@Kent: There’s a book club for banned books. They supposedly ship them to you at your request. My partner wants to send them to his Foxified siblings.
Baud
@Dan B:
When you’ve lost David Brooks…. nothing has changed.
karen marie
That last tweet with the Wapo “quiz” is a good example of why I not only won’t subscribe to that paper but I didn’t bother clicking through last week when I could “read for free.”
I may not have paid money but I would have paid with my blood pressure. No, thanks.
Dan B
@sab: Thanks ! I wish it was the same for women who have abortions. It’s not possible to defend, or even support, the invisible.
Another Scott
Obligatory Chicago Tribune – What Does Disney Have Against Dads? (from 1998):
No, not TheOnion. James Bert Neely (prof at SW Texas State in San Marcos).
He’s kinda got a point, but not the one he’s thinking of… I think the point is that Disney found a formula and beat it to death then beat it some more.
Cheers,
Scott.
Dan B
@Baud: I fear for David’s veins and arteries.
sab
@Dan B: Don’t think so. I don’t even talk to my RWNJ brother. Breaks my heart, but he is apparently beyond redemption and I don’t have the energy to reject him yet again.
Oldest sister thinks he is salvagable. Her kids and my youngest sister think no. So I give up.
ETA Have a niece who used to be a nephew. Sweet lovely person. Favorite of my oldest sister’s kids.
CarolPW
@karen marie: The quiz was actually funny.
Kent
I want to make the book banners infamous. Not only in their own communities but nationally. Such that when anyone googles their name it brings them to a page with their photo and the explanation of which book they banned and why.
JoyceH
I just saw a commercial on CNN that was against Levi’s. Because they’re “woke”. Anyone know what the heck that’s about?
JPL
@Another Scott: Even though the duck was a cross dresser, he was a pretty good day.
JPL
@JoyceH: I assume it’s because they give health care to gays.
just guessing though
Another Scott
I did not know that. Good for Hoss.
(via Popehat)
Cheers,
Scott.
Sister Golden Bear
It’s hard to remain calm and unruffled when you’re the duck who’s being actively shot at. Check in with your LBG, and especially T, friends — we’re not doing real well right now. This year is on pace to see a record number anti-transgender bills passed by states. More than 300 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been proposed so far this year, and record numbers of them are passing.
And they’re winning the framing war. Even this otherwise good article cites “the increasing prevalence of gender identity instruction in schools” as one of the causes — when, like CRT, this simply isn’t happening.
Plus, I’d thought the Trump years were scary, but this is a whole new level of terrifying, especially with the eliminationist rhetoric getting mainstreamed and metastasizing extremely quickly. It will kill people:
Ken
@JoyceH: Gay couples in their ads? Or maybe Black people, Latinos, women, ….
Dan B
@sab: Yep. You have one wildly successful phone call where he finally sees your viewpoint. Then he’s back to 16 hours a day of FOX and social media copycats.
My partner’s siblings believe we’ve got all we need with the “settled precedent of hay marriage”. Yeah, let’s see how long that lasts. If the GQP gets back in control how long will it be until kids are removed from their parents?
Glidwrith
@JoyceH: Best guess was they had a CEO(?) that went full antivaxxer/antimasker crazy that was bad enough to embarrass the company, so threw her ass out the door.
debbie
@Dan B:
I guess better late than never, but maybe he’ll continue condemning this bullshit.
Dan B
@JoyceH: Jewish supporters of Dems?
sab
@Sister Golden Bear: My niece (used to be nephew ) is you. When I heard of his/ her transition I thought that child finally makes sense.
JPL
@karen marie: Everywhere Babies is banned in some FL districts and the Post had an interesting article with the illustrators and author. Grand imp is already indoctrinated cuz of his grandma and ma. It’s possible that if books are recommended for LBGT parents, they are put on a list to be reviewed and possibly banned. It’s scary as shit and I appreciate the Washington Post writing about it.
This is the banned book Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers – Bing video
Sister Golden Bear
One of the more obscene tactics that pedocons are now using is to claim that even the elements of social transitioning — allowing a child to wear clothes appropriate to their true gender identity, using appropriate pronouns, letting a child use a name they feel is appropriate — involve “psychological treatment services,” so that anyone who does so is practicing medicine without a license (and by implication should be prosecuted).
sab
@Dan B: But at least you don’t die. Pregnancies can kill people. My heart is not up to a pregnancy. I know a person who died of the same condition. But few doctors nowadays would stick their necks out to say so.
Ruckus ??
The right is who they always were. It’s just that the open adulation of their leader, SFB, and their election thereof gave them permission to let their freak flags fly like they are in a hurricane. Add in that much has changed over the last few years that doesn’t agree with their bullshit and they are absolutely sure that the world is going to hell in the next 15 minutes. Thing is they don’t need any reality, any democracy, any respect of others, because no matter what they are right. Just ask them. I didn’t say they are correct just right sided. Anyone else remember in grammar school that everyone had to use their right hand to write with? That was because the conservative side can’t abide by anything not done by the right and the same as everyone else. It was bullshit 60+ yrs ago and it still is. They are afraid of anything different. Because they don’t understand different. Because they don’t want to understand different or individualism. If I can’t get an abortion – and of course I can’t, because there’s no reason I might have ever needed one, but still, if I can’t get one why should women be able to – that’s conservative rational – the shittiest excuse for rational thought ever.
sab
@Sister Golden Bear: We are supposed to hate NPR but 1A has been great on programming about this last month.
Calouste
Talking about grooming, the 40-year-old leader of the anti-vax party in Japan is in the news because he impregnated a 16-year-old girl he’s been in a “relationship” with since she was 13.
It’s always projection.
sab
@Calouste: Yikes and sigh.
Glidwrith
@Sister Golden Bear: Amazing how they can claim a clothing change is practicing medicine without a license when they are free to commit medical fraud with their ball-tanning, doctor-banning, forced birther fuckery.
sab
@sab: Left her husband widowed with a newborn. Three weeks after the birth she died of a heart rhythm problem. The doctors all warned her. Her sister has chosen not to have kids.
JPL
@Glidwrith: It’s horrifying.
Dan B
@sab: There is plenty of dying of LGBTQ people. Every minority is at higher risk in a society in which the majority believes the minorities are demented and to be feared. Aligning the minorities to a common cause is the challenge.
A cousin had an abortion in Mexico. When she got home she was bleeding but couldn’t risk going to get medical help. She never told anyone in her family except her sister who paid for the trip and procedure, and me, the gay radical activist.
RSA
@Kent: Nice idea! This sounds up Major Major Major Major’s alley, if there’s an available dataset, or maybe even just a Web page for scraping.
kindness
I really do believe that there are many on the right that are doing everything they can to drum up an actual civil war between Americans. These Republicans are trying to get liberals killed and it’s gonna happen.
VOR
Claiming everyone who disagrees with the GQP line is a pedophile is a pretty scary thing. They already demonized any BLM protesters as radicals, see Antifa under their beds, but now they are attacking mainstream institutions like Disney. We are getting closer to Radio Rwanda genocide territory.
And yes, there are people on the right who want an actual civil war. That’s the goal of the Boogaloo movement.
NotMax
@Dan B
You don’t have to be Jewish….
:)
Dan B
@sab: This story is heartbreaking.
It breaks through the statistics, the dogma, and the legal barriers. It deserves to be told.
Kay
@kindness:
I think it gets much, much uglier before it gets better. They get more extreme every day and there’s no moderating factor or influence in that Party. They’ll consider any win from here on out as an endorsement of the extremism and an invitation to double down.
Just think of the radicalism of what they’re doing to Disney. They can do that to any business, large or small. They don’t like that you wrote a letter to the editor opposing an anti-gay law? They’ll just make it very, very difficult for you to renew any state licensing you need, or rezone your location so your taxes go up. It’s thuggery, and if the petty little tyrants on the national level will do it to a 200 billion dollar corporation the petty little tyrants on the local level will do it to a 100k a year coffee shop.
Imagine the next cohort of Republicans coming up- the bench they’re creating here. We’ll be lucky if they’re idiot clowns like Madison Cawthorn or MGT. That’s the best case.
Dan B
@NotMax: Good one!
Cameron
@JoyceH: “Woke” is just another word or acronym that the Morlocks interpret as “badliberalsocialistgaynegro.” They have no idea what it means.
Starfish
@Kent: The areas doing this do not respect FOIAs and laugh at the idea of government transparency. The most we learned about the math books banned in Florida was the name of the publishers.
sab
@Dan B: I think we are arguing on the same side. You aren’t likely to get pregnant and die of it.
We both are at risk of being murdered by angry men.
JPL
@Kay: this. It’s happening, and it can happen here.
karen marie
@CarolPW: I have no sense of humor when it comes to Republicans trashing the lives of millions of people. See comment #26. None of this is funny. We’re fucked because the media keeps treating all of this like it’s a joke.
Baud
Musk is going to need to up his offer.
Kay
@kindness:
It isn’t even just Disney. Disney is just the latest target. They spent 6 months defaming and smearing two perfectly ordinary election systems companies, Smartmatic and Dominion, for no other reason than because they lost an election and they couldn’t admit that to their crazed base. So they lied. Over and over and over, at the highest levels.
This is what Dominion had to do:
Baseless claims about Dominion Voting Systems and the November 2020 election have been fully debunked by election authorities, subject matter experts, and third-party fact-checkers
Their sin? Why they were targeted by the Right? No real reason. They just felt like destroying a company because they lost an election.
karen marie
@JPL: For every one article that isn’t “bothsidesing” and minimizing real problems faced by real people because of what the GOP is doing, there are ten that are.
I am not going to encourage that by subscribing.
Dan B
@sab: Sorry. I thought I was adding to your view that the consequences of far right prejudice, rooted in fear, is suffering – and death. It’s not just, as David Brooks opined for decades, that the degradation of civility was the most terrible disaster. People suffer and people die needlessly when prejudice is treated as a rude inconvenience.
Starfish
@JoyceH: Jennifer Sey who was high up in the C-Suite of Levi’s was opposed to school closures. She was very vocal about this, and she was forced out. Anyway, I think maybe they are saying that forcing Sey out was the action of the “woke mob.”
Kay
@JPL:
Have you seen the next rung down? The state representatives? They are still more extreme than the national leaders. And you can’t get rid of them, because they’ve tucked them all into safe districts where there’s no competition at all.
The biggest anti abortion group in Utah floated the idea of getting rid of the mothers life exception to abortion. They’ve already gotten rid of rape and incest and the health of the mother exceptions. Next it will be her life.
CarolPW
@karen marie: The quiz specifically and intentionally (and humorously) pointed out the absurdity of Republican claims about Disney. Sometimes levity gets the point across better than screeds.
Dan B
@Kay: An embryo is innocent. It is pure. It is more sacred than the woman who is carrying the embryo.
Dogma is fiendish.
sab
@Dan B: Told you so. We are on the same side.
Sure Lurkalot
@JoyceH: I don’t know but bwahahaha, my RWNJ brother worked for Levi for some 30 years or so. Not that he’d see the “woke” commercial on CNN because sheep like him don’t watch CNN.
Going to have to ask him if he’s planning to cancel his pension payments…that woke money might be dangerous.
Kay
I just don’t see what stops the relentless march Right in that Party. The base? Hah. Fat chance. They get more extreme every month. Conservative media? Nah. They’re raking it in. It’s profitable. Republicans in Congress? There are what, ten maybe who didn’t support the coup?
Does anyone really believe Mitt Romney is going to turn this around? It’s a bare handful of conservative leaders that are even “normal” let alone “moderate” and none of them have any influence or power over the base.
JPL
@Kay: That is why I stepped back from local politics. Although it is non-partisan, my group supported an anti-masker. That is probably the wrong approach though, I should have stayed in and fought back.
JPL
@Kay: Ireland turned it around because of several high profile deaths, and that is what it might take.
sab
80 degrees here in Ohio and I have the window open and three cats and one dog passed out in my room. I have no idea what the other two cats are up to. Probably building bombs. If they were well adjusted they would be asleep upstairs with all the other cats.
@
prostratedragon
@Kent: I’ll look, but do you know any data?
Ohio Mom
@JPL: I watched the video of the book Everywhere Babies being read aloud and was mystified. I didn’t see “two men embracing,” just babies and their adults doing everyday things like playing and eating.
Then I did some googling and after a Where’s Waldo-type search, finally found the offending image. In the midst of a busy street scene, in the back of the crowd, are two men walking together, one has his arm over the other’s shoulder. That’s not “embracing.”
Another made up problem in the book is probably the page that goes something like Everyday, everywhere, babies are being fed by bottle, by breast, by spoon..
Breast!
It’s a lovely book. If it had been around when Ohio Son was a baby, I imagine we would have owned it and read it, again and again and again.
JPL
@JPL: Most likely it will be the poor dying since they are not able to seek medical treatment outside of the state. It’s doubtful that anyone notices.
JPL
@Ohio Mom: It is, and Hooray for Babies is even better. What was so mystifying to me is only those with evil minds would spot anything. DIL is apolitical and she was just so sad that could happen to such a lovely book.
Starfish
@JPL: I dissolved the Indivisible group I was involved in rather than lead it with someone who was an anti-vaxxer. This was before the anti-vax thing became a Republican thing.
JPL
@Ohio Mom: If I was a democrat running for governor, I would read that book at every stop and say the current governor wants to ban this.
Ohio Mom
@JPL: There will be some “nice” married women dying too. Sometimes pregnancies can get deadly dangerous very quickly and an abortion is the only thing that can save the woman’s life.
How many dead “nice” women it will take for things to reverse, I don’t know. I agree that the deaths of poor women won’t have any effect.
Mike in NC
Just spoke to friends in Tampa who got free tickets to an Elton John concert tomorrow night. I warned them since it’s Florida just to “Not Say Gay” when they go.
JPL
@Ohio Mom: Maybe they didn’t take care of themself.
hey I’m over seventy so I remember those days.
JPL
There’s no bottom for these guys
Desantis’ lap dog in the legislature, Rep. Randy Fine, threatened to use his influence to pull state funding for the Special Olympics after they invited a local School Board member he didn’t like to an event.
debbie
@Ohio Mom:
This sounds like the brouhaha over the Buster (Arthur) cartoon where one child has two mothers. Google says this was back in 2005! This has been sneaking up on us longer than we realize.
I remember watching Arthur with my nieces and nephew. Buster was my favorite. ?
Miss Bee
@Kent: How about including easy ways to buy or borrow the banned book?
Ksmiami
@Dan B: Republicans are deeply weird people- let’s fight back with that label
JPL
@debbie: Candidates need to fight back though and embarrass those banning books. Going after picture books, looking for something offensive is beyond offensive.
Everyday everywhere babies are born, fat babies, thin babies, small babies, tall babies.
I’d campaign all over the US with what books FL is banning and you could be next. I’d read the quote.
JPL
Ksmiami
@Kay: I just want to make red areas poor, stupid and isolated to the extent they eat eachother barring that, well chances are the next more deadly pandemic kills them off
@karen marie: we need to start threatening the media as hard as the Rt does
Mallard Filmore
@Ohio Mom:
Anti-abortionists claim that they are “saving” babies, yet these laws will kill women. What is the acceptable trade off? A million saved babies to every dead woman? A thousand to one? One more baby than mommy?
Maybe they will claim “it’s God’s will” … yet these same people will quickly and without regret thwart God’s will by taking medicine. You want God’s will? Join the Christian Science Church.
There is NO way to save them all. The blood on their hands is as red as the blood on an abortion doctor.
Another Scott
@Kent: It might be worthwhile to see what the American Library Association is doing. They run “Banned Books Week” every year (September 18 – 24 this year) and have lots of information and resources (including help for libraries/librarians that are fighting book bans). In my poking around, I don’t see a list of politicians doing various things – perhaps that’s intentional (we know that repeating memes even to fight them makes them stronger). Dunno.
ALA.org – Banned Books Week – Activity.
It looks like they could use some help in updating their web pages.
Just a thought. Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Sister Golden Bear: Thank you for the tip. I have been checking in with Spawn the Elder, and he is taking the approach of not paying attention. It’s probably for the best. He turned 18 in December and is taking the GED instead of finishing high school. At first, I was nervous about this course of action, but now I think it’s wise.
Sure Lurkalot
@Ohio Mom: My married niece had a late term abortion without which her life would have been endangered. This was in Texas, 18 years ago. Had her bifurcated uterus repaired and has 2 teens, whom despite being at challenging ages, I love bunches.
Raven
@Suzanne: Ah, I could have used him in my dissertation! I got my GED in 1967 and my doctorate in 2000! I looked at why people quit school, why they went back and finished and what they made of the process. One of my conclusions was that quitting school was a good idea for many who did.
prostratedragon
@Another Scott: Just now turned up some ALA links by searching “censorship laws data u.s.” They seem to have some recent efforts, but I’m on my phone right now …
Geminid
@Ksmiami: Coming to a state near you:
There will be some attack ads coming out of this. We’ll see how effective they are.
Ohio Mom
@Miss Bee: The Brooklyn Public Library is offering free library cards to teens across the nation so they can access ebooks and audiobooks that might be censored in their areas (or any other book they like): https://www.bklynlibrary.org/media/press/brooklyn-public-library-94
It depends on what’s in the Brooklyn Library’s collection of course but I imagine they are making an effort to make sure they have ebook copies of the typically censored books, and are following the news to see what other books they will need to get ecopies of.
What a great idea, I hope the died gets out to the teens it is aimed at.
Ohio Mom
@Ohio Mom: I hope the WORD gets out…
Thanks, spellcheck //
Kent
@prostratedragon: You could get started with news reports. But you wouild have to make it open-source where local folks could submit their own entries so that one person or a small group wouldn’t have to cover the entire country.
Also, including links to the banned books would be good too. Online versions and links to order the paper versions.
Eolirin
@Ohio Mom: How many deaths to assault rifles have we been willing to tolerate? How many school shootings? I don’t think we’ll be able to pull off a reversal like in Ireland here. The people who aren’t already convinced won’t rise up in a way to force change, and there’ll be a blocking coalition as long as the Republican party remains viable no matter how bad the public opinion or how high the body count.
They need to be defeated and that’s all we can do.
James E Powell
The press/media are responding like the people in that infamous focus group. They were told Romney’s policy positions, but they just refused to believe them.
Added to that, the press/media are all very high income & high status. They will never believe that anything the Republicans do will ever affect their lives or the lives of people they care about. Ordinary people, whether they are old white people in diners or young non-whites looking at uncertain futures, are just props to them, characters in a drama they get paid to write & talk about.
Omnes Omnibus
So I went to the pro-trans/anti-TERF gig at the Madison public library today. There was a good crowd of people there, pretty much what looked like the full gamut of LGBT+ community. Maybe 100 people. The TERFs were there for a conference at the library. Maybe 25 of them. There was some back and forth between the groups. And one of the TERFs went nasty very fast, asking one of the trans kids to pull down their pants. Just shitty. For the most part, the pro-trans side kept their cool and used humor. For example one woman cracked me up when the TERFs were singing, saying “Your music is terrible.” At these things, I usually stay in the crowd just be be there and be supportive, but somehow I found myself on the front line (in khaki shorts and a blue Timberland shirt so I fit in). One of the TERFs shouted some thing about how they supported women, and I found myself shouting back, “Don’t you see the women over here?” There were a few people who were coming to use the library who stopped and asked what the protest was about. Universally, they were supportive when people explained it to them. Anyway, so that was my day.
Sister Golden Bear
@Suzanne: People do what they need to do to stay sane amid all this madness, and there’s times when I’ve had to force myself to take a brief break. Unfortunately, ignoring it won’t mean it goes away.
Admittedly, I probably pay more attention than a lot of other LGBTQ+ folks, but hyper-vigilance has been one my coping strategies from growing up in a time when being perceived as “girly” would get me beaten up. My therapist says she thinks almost every LGBTQ+ person (at least my age range) has some level of CPTSD
@Omnes Omnibus: Thank you for remembering ally is a verb. And yes, TERFs usually get quite vile, quite fast. They’re just as obsessed with what’s in trans kids’ pants as much as the reactionary haters.
Omnes Omnibus
@Sister Golden Bear: The nastiness was really shocking to me. Most of the people on the pro-trans side were very young, just kids really.
Suzanne
@Sister Golden Bear: Spawn is doing much better now than he was two years ago. I think it’s a combination of transitioning, the right medication regimen for his bipolar disorder, some good old-fashioned maturation, and avoiding certain stressors. School was difficult for him in many ways, even with a supportive set of teachers and friends. So when the pandemic happened, I have to admit that it was not a difficult decision for him to just not go. There was no way he would have been successful with that. He’s also never been the most physically robust kid, and his doctor said the testosterone shots have some negative effect on the immune system, so I was like FUUUUUCK he did not need to go to school and get exposed to Covid. But the biggest stressor is just all the anti-trans shit going on in this country.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, …
rofl.
(via EclecticBrotha)
Cheers,
Scott.
Sister Golden Bear
@Suzanne: Good hear he’s doing better. He’s been dealing with a lot for a kid his age.
@Omnes Omnibus: Unfortunately, TERF vicious nastiness is entirely on brand. They’ve had a decades-long history of it, including doxxing trans women who weren’t out (and making a point to out them to their employers, which usually got them fired).
Kay
Here’s the Trump candidate for Marcy Kaptur’s seat:
Only the best people.
J R in WV
@VOR:
BOOGALOOs are gun-crazy RWNJs..!? I thought they were just big fans of Insane Clown Posse?
There go two miscreants
@J R in WV: The ICP fans are known as juggalos.
fancycwabs
I don’t know who needs to hear this (okay, Matthew Downhour apparently needs to hear this) but the GOP does not care about portrayals of whatever in movies.
The folks at Disney are being called “groomers” because they stopped donating to Republicans.
Everything else is the same old bad-faith argument that marks that particular GOP brand of tyranny.