Genuine legitimate calls for genocide at CPAC but everything is fine don't worry don't overreact don't be mean https://t.co/gNkzjQjASs
— Taliesin & Evitel (@TaliesinEvitel) March 5, 2023
I never said Jews should be eradicated from public life. I said *Judaism* should be eradicated from public life.
I may be a buffoonish bigot who stirs rubes to violence, but my cowardice demands a smidgeon of plausible deniability. And you, sir, have libeled me by omitting it. pic.twitter.com/zbV89ZxF8I
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) March 5, 2023
Knowles is a failed actor with a degree from Yale who’s been kicking around the right-wing anti-Chautauqua circuit for the last few years, looking for a gimmick that would let him stand out from all the other nasty little bigots. CPAC just gave him a spotlight, and he’s gonna ride it right into a lifetime meal ticket — who cares what damage his little spiel might do to others?
We need to push back against this call for genocide, not because Knowles is important, but because there are dozens of would-be Knowles and thousands of would-be Colorado Springs nightclub shooters standing just off-stage from Knowles’ performances, waiting to see how ‘acceptable’ his eliminationist patter has become to us normies.
To be clear, when Michael Knowles denies he called for trans people to be "eradicated," this is what he means.
So a) no, he ain't suing anyone and b) he's talking about genocide and then claiming he's not with a winking emoji. https://t.co/SbJfETgevP
— Joe Katz is flipping the Wisconsin Supreme Court (@joekatz45) March 5, 2023
— pudding person (@JUNlPER) March 5, 2023
Just like @RollingStone, the @thedailybeast bowed to right wing pressure to change their headline. This is more than mere cowardice. This is joining in the campaign to reduce the very existence of trans people to a matter of ideological disagreement. pic.twitter.com/aUV0BwYy7f
— Ari Drennen (@AriDrennen) March 6, 2023
gosh I dunno that this person is sincerely outraged pic.twitter.com/C8QXJl3CxU
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) March 5, 2023
Somehow the definition of all these terms ends up extremely broad and somehow thousands end up dead. Every. Single. Time.
— Airship Chronos says TRANS RIGHTS!🇺🇦 (@CooperDoyle1) March 5, 2023
I don't often use this kind of language, but fuck everyone who is trying to make the eliminationism discourse okay. It isn't okay, and all we have to do is condemn this kind of thing. Don't argue and let it distract from defeating the Nazis and making a more democratic US. pic.twitter.com/cxYv71ZB8g
— Cheryl Rofer (@CherylRofer) March 5, 2023
"The final aim must be the uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether." – Adolf Hitler, 1919
"Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely." – Michael Knowles of @DailyWire, openly calling for genocide of #trans people at CPAC, today in America. pic.twitter.com/D3vyjJ3X57
— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) March 4, 2023
Actual U.S. Senator from Utah, amplifying the extremely fake outrage:
I wonder how Sen. Lee would understand a speaker who said that we need to “eradicate Mormonism from public life entirely” https://t.co/tMtNP1T0Ek
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) March 5, 2023
he knows exactly what he said & he’s a-ok with it but the way this puppet show works is one bloc says exactly the thing they want and the other bloc says oh that’s not what they meant how dare you, then rinse, repeat, because that’s how you boil frogs https://t.co/dU5VRd04JO
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) March 5, 2023
Yep, the ‘free speech’ outrage is fake… but the attempts to legislate transgender people out of existence are very real.
guy who wants to “eradicate” transgender people off the face of this Earth spotted in 4K partying w/ drag queens pic.twitter.com/KZ1jo9zWTq
— William LeGate (@williamlegate) March 5, 2023
Michael Knowles said "eradicate transgenderism from public life."
Republicans are doing exactly that.
28 states propose to:
– Strip us from meds
– Arrest us in bathrooms
– Take away kids
– Define us out of the lawSubscribe to support my work. 🧵https://t.co/1uqvAp6bdz
— Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) March 5, 2023
Omnes Omnibus
Fuck this piece of shit. Also, what Cheryl Rofer said.
schrodingers_cat
Finally! A thread on politics.. Thanks AL.
Speaking of the other end of the horseshoe, Nevada just ousted the guillotine loving Red Roses who had taken over the state Democratic party.
Chetan Murthy
They’re really building to a crescendo, aren’t they? You can just feel it. I feel like no matter what happens in 2024, they’re going to let loose with some bloodletting. You can’t get your hounds baying for blood like that, for years building it up, and then expect them to calm down and eat their dry puppy chow. Geez.
Mike in NC
Good for Cheryl Rofer. Would like to read more from her.
different-church-lady
When your fall-back position is “I’m only doing stochastic terrorism” then you’re not really hiding anything.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chetan Murthy:
Working up your hounds doesn’t always work out.
Warning: Game of Thrones scene.
different-church-lady
Isn’t the whole fuckin’ point of transgenderism that there IS a difference between the genders?
NotMax
Rancid peas in a moldy pod:
Michigan Man Charged With Threatening To Kill All The State’s Jewish Elected Officials.
Doc Sardonic
Ya know, ah never mind …….
different-church-lady
@NotMax: That’s some rather fuckin’ SPECIFIC economic anxiety right there…
Sister Golden Bear
@Chetan Murthy: There will be blood.
Thank you Anne for highlighting this. Trans people, including me, are exhausted and terrified from this shit.
Already hearing about another wave of trans refugees from FL, which is considering a bill that would legalize kidnapping trans kids — including from other states — to force them to detransition. No that it’ll be abused by vengeful exes, who will undoubtedly use it to not only gain customer of trans kids, but also any cis kids who show any hint of gender non-conformity (and others who don’t).
Sister Golden Bear
Also, despite the Niemöller poem, the Nazis didn’t first come for the socialists, they came for the trans people. That famous photo of Nazi book burning in 1933 was them destroying Berlin’s Institute of Sexology, which provided some of the first gender-affirming care in the world.
West of the Rockies
@Mike in NC:
That Diablo Neruda Tweet is unreadable anyway. Shitty writing by The Devil.
Jacqueline Squid Onassis
On one hand, it’s a relief that they’re baying it openly this week. On the other, very much more rational hand, it’s terrifying that one of the 2 major parties in this country has gone so far fascist that they’re calling for the elimination of millions of people.
The only way we stop this is if our cis allies (and just, you know, cis folks who aren’t okay with genocide) stand up and stop this.
Please don’t forget us. This is the time to speak up – loudly and often – to save your trans friends, family, neighbors, coworkers and coreligionists. After they’ve started getting rid of us, who do you think is next?
Matt McIrvin
The arguments that claim that isn’t advocating genocide are usually, themselves, advocacy for genocide.
Alison Rose
“correct that delusion” JFC. These people are terrifying.
Also friends, let’s not use their language. “Transgenderism” is the shitty word they use to make it sound like a mental disorder.
West of the Rockies
@West of the Rockies:
“It’s never not not a good thing that doesn’t not exist. “
Jacqueline Squid Onassis
@Alison Rose:
Thank you!
Argiope
@Sister Golden Bear: I didn’t know that. I appreciate the additional context. Niemoller’s quote and Timothy Snyder’s “Don’t obey in advance” are getting a workout these days.
HumboldtBlue
BG and I shared this photo today, I think it speaks for this website and its community as well.
TheMightyTrowel
@Sister Golden Bear: I mostly lurk these days, but please know I’m holding you and your trans siblings in my heart and in my mind. I spend a lot of time in classrooms with 20 year olds and this upcoming generation is so special – I can’t wait for them to come onto the international stage and I’m so fricking angry that all of this is confronting them just as they seemed to be ready to remake the world.
Recognising the anti-trans hostility sweeping the HASS disciplines (bloody TERF philosophers!), colleagues and I produced this 18 mo ago as a position statement (and detailed follow-up) for our own field and it seems to have made an impact in the discipline.
Argiope
@Jacqueline Squid Onassis: Friend, I opened a big jar of whoopass on some red state nurse practitioners who’d convinced themselves the bill the rest of us are yelling about was actually meant to protect children. These asshats —oops, I mean my esteemed colleagues—were ready to let the rest of us have our licenses yanked and/or be jailed for providing counseling or care to trans youth desiring transition. Trying to tell us (the majority, sane, sensible people engaged in the debate) that the bill was intended to be helpful. It did not go super well for them, and I am at least somewhat heartened that majority opinion was on Team Trans. The state conference next month is going to be interesting.
Another Scott
@TheMightyTrowel: Those are both excellent pieces. Thanks for sharing them.
Strength to our trans friends, wherever they are.
Cheers,
Scott.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
And this is the que for History Ruins EVERYTHING
Of course it wasn’t the Nazis, it was the German Army who came for the socialists
And guess what;
Niemöller was one of the Friekorps gunning down those commie workers for being uppity.
As for Niemöller and you know who….
Niemöller big split was with Nazis was Niemöller wanted to forcibly convert Jews to Christianity rather than just kill them. Kind of like Gay Conversion Therapy.
Niemöller was just like these “Moderate Republicans” wondering were these awful MAGA hats came from they been egging on for years.
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: I was gonna say something like that, but really it depends.
As my daughter had to explain to me, basically all nonbinary people are also trans because almost nobody is assigned nonbinary at birth. And they’re not necessarily insistent on a strong distinction between genders.
Also, some men and women (cis or trans) also identify as nonbinary or genderqueer–they may have a primarily male or female identity but also feel they’re outside of the strict binary categories. So there are a lot of variations here.
There’s a lying TERF attack to the effect that trans people and allies are actually the ones enforcing rigid gender stereotypes, because they’re telling people that if you don’t fit you must be trans and you need to get hormones and surgery. This is of course bullshit as anyone who actually examines the pro- and anti-trans movements will immediately see: it’s the antis who are allying with horrifying gender reactionaries and hounding butch-looking women in restrooms.
The advocates for trans rights, meanwhile, acknowledge that gender is weird and multifarious and that there’s this whole amazing spectrum of possibilities and this is what makes reactionaries’ heads explode. It feels like some kind of dangerous apocalyptic chaos to them even though it’s just people minding their own business.
Part of it is that without a strict gender binary, you can’t prescribe strict social roles for the genders and you especially can’t force people into the ones that suck.
Chetan Murthy
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Thank you for bringing this up. For us, most of whom are rabid progressives, the Niemoller Confession is just a sort of catechism we repeat to ourselves, to remind ourselves of the stakes. But for many “normies” and “moderate GrOPers”, his actual history is instructive: that you better buckle in for the entire Fascist ride, b/c if you ever try to get off, they’re gonna run the bus right over you.
Knowing the history is useful, b/c we can remind our normie friends about it.
Chetan Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: I’m an old, and back when I was a kid, LGBTQ folks had to hide for mortal fear for their lives. In the 90s, I remember reading that 10% of the population was LGBTQ. But recently I read of a Gallup poll ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-ticks-up.aspx ) where 20% of Gen Z identified as LGBTQ.
And I thought to myself: imagine how many millions of people from earlier generations suffered in silence, suffered in isolation, b/c of the mortal fear of what would be done to them if they let any hint be known, of their true self.
20% of the population. 20%. Twenty percent. Every fifth person I grew up with, in a town where they’d have been beaten to within an inch of their lives if it became known.
Matt McIrvin
@Chetan Murthy: I suspect the total effect is more than that: maybe I’m overgeneralizing from personal experience, but I suspect that a whole lot of basically conventionally cis-het people, those 80%, have occasional feelings that go outside the lines a little that they’ve been anxiously suppressing. That it’s this little day-to-day friction affecting almost everyone. And that that anxiety feeds into homophobia and transphobia too. Maybe if they just knew it was OK, it would help a lot.
Chetan Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: I wouldn’t be surprised, if Generation 1A (base-26 wot) had an even higher percentage of people identifying as LGBTQ. And then there would be people who feel some feelings from time-to-time, but not enough to change their identification. The crushing weight of the gender=sex binary …. ugh.
HumboldtBlue
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
This is why we read this blog.
JWR
ICYMI, hah f*ckin’ hah.
Great photo at the link.
JWR
Something tells me Stephen Miller had a hand in crafting TFG’s CPAC reading of words, and that Michael Knowles goes by the same Fascist playbook.
And:
TFG was talking about people from South of the border, but whether it’s “the Mesicans, or “Da Joos”, and now Transgender people, he and Knowles are on the same page. These people are truly awful. (And should be eradicated from society. /S!)
Sister Golden Bear
@TheMightyTrowel: @Argiope: Thank you for allying!
kalakal
The German far right had it in for gay and trans people from the early 1920s and Magnus Hirschfeld and the Berlin institute were high on their hit list.
The same language was used as the GOP use today “corrupters of youth” aka groomers. The Nazis were very keen on upping the birthrate of ‘pure blooded Germans’ just like that stupid proposed Texas law to give tax breaks to married, cis-het, couples who have lots of children ( the Nazis actually did introduce such laws later on ) and gays & trans people were attacked for lowering the birthrate and the Institute was attacked for promoting contraception and non child bearing relationships.
The Reichstag fire on 27th feb gave Hitler the chance to declare a state of emergency ( the Reichstag decrees), as well as banning the communist party and arresting communists the Nazis carried out a purge of gay people, banning all gay groups. The enabling act of March 23 gave Hitler dictatorial power and the first “official” concentration camp at Dachau opened at the same time. One of it’s first inmates was the lawyer for the institute. Ironically many of the leaders of the SA aka the Brown Shirts were gay including Ernst Rohm the chief, as they lost influence the purges intensified and Institute was attacked in May. The trans woman murdered there was Dora Richter.
Rohm and the other leaders of the SA were killed in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 when Hitler replaced the SA with the more disciplined SS and killed useful idiot right wingers.
You’re right and Niemoller was wrong, the Nazis didn’t have a to kill list of groups to be ticked off one by one, first… then… then. They had a lot of groups on that list and were quite capable of attacking more than one at once. Gay and trans people were attacked from the very beginning
Where Niemoller was right is that an attack on any is an attack on all.
Eolirin
@Matt McIrvin: At its root, gender is a purely social construct that only has meaning inside the context of a culture; pointing this out this really pisses off people that think it has some intrinsic connection to what set of genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics you have and is immutable. Culture changes, and consequentially so do social constructs. So there really isn’t such a thing as an immutable set of genders.
This is what “doesn’t exist” means to them; the idea that gender isn’t immutably biological is the same as saying gender doesn’t exist at all because they refuse to separate those concepts. Things need to be black and white and unchanging without any nuance.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I always thought that was Niemoller’s whole point: he’d been okay with all of the eliminationism until his number came up, that he didn’t realize how bad it was until it hit him personally, and that future generations should not repeat his mistakes.
Chetan Murthy
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Same here. I always interpreted the “Confession” as just that: a confession of misdeeds, and a warning to others to not make the same ones. In that sense, his being wrong about details isn’t as important as that he was correct about thinking none of it affected him, until …. it did.
Ksmiami
Fuck these asshats. Let’s shove them back under a rock.. or pave them over with concrete. They are traitorous trash not fit to be in Americans..
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Sad news – Larry Hogan won’t run for president.
marklar
@Chetan Murthy: The metaphor I use when I cover sex/gender in my classes is that it is similar to handedness. Many people are innately left-handed, and many more innately ambidextrous. However, because we live in a ‘dextranormative world’, most of those ambidextrous people (and even some lefties) end up being phenotypically right-handed.
As for being gender fluid, my interpretation is that it’s likely not that different from being culturally fluid (in which people literally change how they think/speak/interpret the world based upon the cultural milieu in which you find yourself).
Of course, as a Cis/het man (AFAIK), I might be completely missing the truth since my understanding is based on metaphors that I can grasp, as opposed to actual lived experience.
Tony Jay
@Ksmiami:
But how else are they going to replenish the stock of Heritage-Americans?
BethanyAnne
I haven’t transitioned, and there are a few reasons. Not wanting to be murdered is pretty high on the list. I was on the path to transition 15 years ago, living in San Francisco, undergoing electrolysis, taking hormones, beginning to dress femme in public. Then the bottom fell out of the economy in ’08, and I had to slink back to Texas. Now I care for my Mom in small town Arkansas. I’m 6’4″. I’ll never pass. And transitioning feels like I’d just live every day waiting for a redneck to murder me to save his kids. Nope.
sab
@BethanyAnne: Yikes. My niece (formerly nephew) is a so much happier person since her transition. But she says she is lucky to have so supportive a family, since her friends mostly don’t have that. But she had to flee her home state (Ohio) for California (where she also has family.)
Ohio politicians seem to be all about breaking up families now. Divide and conquer is all they do.
sab
@BethanyAnne: Keep safe.
BethanyAnne
@sab: Thanks
Princess
@BethanyAnne: Transwomen are women whatever you look like on the outside.. Bethany is a pretty name. We see you. Take good care of yourself.
tobie
@TheMightyTrowel: I just came out in opposition to a statement like the one you posted. For me the sticking point was the “must.” You “must” make gender fluidity and minoritized knowledges the focus of your research or else you are engaging in identity-based discrimination. An institution can insist on non-discrimination policies, and it should. An institution can demand an open dialogue and respectful environment attentive to voices that have historically been excluded, and it should. Telling people what they can and should research crosses a line for me. We can do better than this. There is a way to combat prejudice, ensure a safe work and study place, and expand the scope of scholarship without being prescriptive.
Paul in KY
@Omnes Omnibus: I would have had him flayed. Slowly.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@marklar: And then of course to take your handedness analogy further, you have people like my mom who was born left-handed and was forced to write with her right hand. It created a lifetime of clumsiness because the school also encouraged(aka tied her left hand down) her to eat, etc with her right hand as well…
Matt McIrvin
@Eolirin: Yeah, Matt Walsh can ask people “what is a woman?” and insist that the perfectly reasonable answer people give him is not an answer at all, because he wants a definition you can measure with instruments or impose from outside, not “someone who believes and will tell you she’s a woman”. For him it has to be in the same category as “what is a cat?” and not “what is a Republican?”