Politics & Public Opinion

When Worlds Collide

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Scott Adams like to say that Trump-supporters and Trump-haters are watching the same screen but seeing two different movies.

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Leftist Lockstep

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Victor Davis Hanson writes:

[Rep. Ayanna Pressley] just outlined the classic anti-Enlightenment mindset: we are all permanent captives of our superficial race, religion, and sexual orientation. We must at all times think, act, and speak in such tribal fashion—and do so monolithically and collectively, in adopting the party line as set down by such elites as those like Pressley herself.
Blacks who oppose affirmative action, or Muslims who recognize Israel, or “queers” whose sexual preferences are incidental, not essential to their personas are thus declared not authentic and thus not to be welcomed by Pressley into the new racialist Democratic Party.
In practical terms, Pressley assumes that whites, reportedly about 70 percent of the population, tune her logic out. That is, they should never take her own racist advice and vote en masse according to their superficial shared skin color. If they did, the 55 percent of actual voters who are white in her otherwise minority-majority congressional district might never have elected someone who, according to her own rationale, is not part of their own tribe.

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They Who Control Speech…

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Peggy Noonan writes:

Offices and schools are forced to grapple with all the new gender-neutral pronouns. … It’s wrong, when you meet a new co-worker, to ask his pronouns. (We don’t say “preferred” pronouns—that “implies someone’s gender is a preference”!) You don’t want him wondering if you think he’s transgender or nonbinary. Instead, introduce yourself in a way that summons his pronouns: “Hi, I’m Jim and my pronoun is he/him.” Use “they” a lot. It’s gender neutral. Suggested sentence: “I spoke to the marketing director and they said they’d get back to me.”
This is grammatically incorrect but so what? Correct grammar, and the intelligibility it allows, is a small price to pay for inclusion and equality.

Also:

An odd thing is they always insist they’re doing this in the name of kindness and large-spiritedness. And yet, have you ever met them? They’re not individually kind or large-spirited. They’re more like messianic schoolmasters.

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LGBT Queer Left Still Attacking Mayor Pete

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Update: The “New Republic” pulls the article and apologizes. But really, what we’re they thinking.

The full article is archived, as least as of this writing, here. Another eye-popping passage:

Mary Pete is a neoliberal and a Jeffersonian meritocrat, which is to say he’s just another unrepentant or at least unexamined beneficiary of white male privilege…. Like Kirsten Gillibrand, he believes in “healthy capitalism,” which is a bit like saying you believe in “healthy cancer”: Yeah, you can (usually) treat it, but wouldn’t you rather be cured?

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Support Drops as Gay Movement Becomes Trans Movement

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Andrew Sullivan on “The Gender-Theory Backlash” (second item in column):
For the first time, we’re seeing a sharp drop in tolerance of “LGBTQ” people among the younger generation. …

Or check this out: 62 percent of young men regarded themselves as “allies” of LGBTQ people in 2016; only 35 percent now say the same — a near-halving of support. Women “allies” have dropped from 65 to 52 percent. The turn began in the year that the Obama administration — with no public discussion or congressional support — imposed critical gender theory on America’s high schools, determining sex to be whatever a student says it is. The imposition of trans ideology by fiat on the entire country’s young — along with severe public stigma for those with even the slightest questions — was almost textbook left authoritarianism. Well meant, perhaps. But dictatorial.

Even GLAAD, the culture police for the gay left, concedes that the transformation of the gay-rights movement into a trans movement steeped in critical gender theory in the past few years is likely the reason: “The younger generation was coming in contact with more LBGTQ people, particularly individuals who are non-binary and don’t identify simply as lesbian or gay.” GLAAD of course blames Trump, and social media, and vows to crack down ever more firmly on those who aren’t fully onboard with its agenda. The last thing GLAAD would do is ask itself if it is actually exacerbating the problem, and that the redefinition of almost everyone’s sex and gender to accommodate less than 1 percent of the population is why this resistance is happening.
Here’s another reason for the drop in support in the U.K.:
Fully 52% of UK Muslims thought there should be a punishment for homosexuality. Compared with only 5% of the wider population. If one community is growing in size, and that community has 10 times the negative attitudes of the wider community, then it would ordinarily be thought inevitable that there will be some impact on the wider society’s attitudes towards the matter. Either because they influence the views of wider society or because as their proportion among the population increases so the representation of their views increases.

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All Pete, All the Time

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He’s taking up all the bandwidth, except for the theatrics around the Equity Act.

On moronic right-wingers, Brad Polumbo writes: >>Most mainstream conservatives denounce Wohl and his antics, but many people will now have the greasy grifter in mind when they think of conservatives and sexual assault. Some on the left will inevitably try to cast undue blame on the entirety of the right. This is truly a shame. In the age of #MeToo, where controversies like the charges against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh claim headlines, conservatives have been the ones standing up for due process and the rights of the accused. But any association with rape hoaxers, no matter how distant, provides weight to the otherwise baseless attacks that the right doesn’t care about survivors or take assault seriously. Now, conservatives are left playing catch-up, all because a few foolish internet trolls decide to smear a good man, rather than challenge his politics honestly.<<

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