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Even if trans people/allies decided en masse to give up, a single kid trying to transition or a single trans girl on a girl's team would be fomented against. We know this because even when there are zero trans people to campaign against, they will invent one! Just look at Imane Khelif.

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to understand this he would need to have the capacity to imagine a liberated world where everyone is free to express themselves and live without fear of social censure, and i truly do not think he can do this

Just a reminder that one of those "toxically unpopular" things is: "Doctors should be able to provide medically necessary treatment to their patients, when both the patient and the patient's legal guardian consent to said treatment."

Precisely this. "If you just give in on [x], they'll leave you alone. (Never mind that they're openly talking about moving on from there to [y] and [z])." Sheer idiocy. Yglesias's entire schtick of tone-policing and hippie-punching presumes a right wing that exists only in his mind.

It’s always the liberals have to be more accepting of the racists, xenophobes etc etc.

Excellent example of shortsightedness.

We can ensure a good harvest if we just drop a few maidens into a live volcano

That'd be like if the police responded to a hostage crisis by just killing all the hostages themselves. No hostages, no problem, right? In a sane world, we don't negotiate with the terrorists, BUT WE DO, AT LEAST, ATTEMPT TO SAVE THE HOSTAGES WHEN POSSIBLE.

i have my own version of his argument, where you pretend you have never heard of trans rights on the campaign trail, but then immediately abolish gender when elected . i call it project 2029

People like MattY are a critical part of the capture. They offer the "rebuttal" that actually legitimizes the right wing.

this doesn't go for everyone in that class, but at this point I straight up think Yglesias is a Conservative

It's not that complicated. Same with 'gender criticals' in the UK. They're weak, inadequate individuals. They enjoy hurting people with less social capital. There isn't any 4D chess going on. It's just middle school bullies with the capacity to intellectualise their dopamine hit.

What do civil rights protections in employment even mean if I’m not allowed to use the bathroom?

Maybe they are really just not very smart or actually good at anything except being tools for kleptocrats.

The problem is that a great majority of pundit class still lives on X and they think all the anti-trans BS is rooted in a popular groundswell of anti-trans sentiment that doesn’t exist.

of course they see it. of course they know it matters. of course they understand politicians could do something about it. a million percent sincerely, it really is just that they are cissupremacists.

The short and easy answer is they all want to wet their beaks/keep their jobs in the only source of money currently in U.S. journalism. Most liberal and left leaning folk still have presumptive good faith for journalism as a profession that has not been true for decades. Literal Watergate babies

The refusal of Dem leaders and pundits to attempt shaping (or, leading!) public opinion boggles my mind. Foxnews/GOP do it frequently, but for evil. Like, George Floyd gets murdered on video and GOP voters even support BLM … Foxnews goes on relentless campaign to demonize BLM and GOP voters comply.

Pssssst… it’s because they’re the elites. Fox News is going to look like Sesame Street by the time they’re done.

Including the internet. They have 90%+ of corporate TV and print news, and now basically the entire internet outside Wikipedia.

Correct. 25% of this country are reprobates and bullies like the people they vote for, deplorables if you will. But the other 25% are decent people who have been brainwashed and RW media is responsible.

Having the owner of X with a personal vendetta on trans issues has a lot to do with the RW obsession. They’re obsessed w him and he uses them to push his hateful agenda. Trans anything is close to the top of his hit list.

in particular focks news, but also specifically lush rambow, in the beginning

Fox News by itself is the worst thing that ever happened to the 'discourse' in our now-wildly-fucked-up country. That's not even counting RW radio saturation.

When it gets to the US, watch the excellent British series, The Hack. It reminds us of the sheer depravity of the Murdoch media machine in England. Americans are swallowing it whole.

💯 💯 💯 I can’t like this enough ☝️☝️

I feel like the fragmentation of the infosphere is the only thing saving us at present - though it is fragmented within platforms owned by oligarchs, making that fragmentation fragile.

Eternal obeisance to Mammon is all that this country knows, that religion runs deep in America's veins.

I’m reading Reaganland & understanding how far back the media rot goes. Even the “liberal” media are complicit.

as we know, a lot of NYT op ed paychecks depend on the kayfabe

💯 I've been saying it over & over again too, but it seems like voices in the wilderness, & I'm just a regular peanut gallery concerned citizen. And it gets worse every day - seems to be accelerating even. The way I phrase it is that we need a moonshot kind of counterpropaganda offensive in this /1

I blame internet.

In a nation where speech is money, and where the billionaire class owns the media, there is little chance to change this dynamic. But that doesn’t mean that we can stop. Imagine if we had a free press, what would they be absolutely hammering right now?

👍

Accelerated by the impending Ellison takeover of CNN (don’t kid yourself — Trump’s fluffer Carr will block Netflix, should WBD not go with Paramount).

Roger Ailes explicitly made this his lifelong mission while working in the Nixon White House.

The excellent civil war history Battle Cry of Freedom meticulously accounts how the rise of a new technology (newspapers) empowered wealthy slavers to gin up race hatred + panic among poor whites so they would fight and die to protect the slaver’s wealth. I think of that maybe three times a day.

I often think a Dem president needs to point out “this insane thing going around today on RW media” on a daily basis making it part of a larger picture that people can understand

🧵 👇🏻

from "Steve Jobs", by Walter Isaacson, 2011 Jobs met James Murdoch--he said-- "You're blowing it with FOX News," Jobs told him over dinner. "The axis today is not liberal and conservatives, the axis is constructive--destructive, and you can't cast your lot with the destructive people.

I know. Feel exactly the same. I think it was unfortunately inevitable though when Trump won this last time. It was a battle between capitalism and full fascism, and fascism won. Capitalism wasn't strong enough and got fully captured -- maybe willingly. This is part of what was on the line in 2024

The murdochs require caged. Their hyper media whores are the root of so much damage to our fragile USA liberties. Criminal level.

My main man, rush, proved to the world how dumb the American people can be.

Been screaming about this since 2001, only to watch it get worse and worse

💯 Rupert and Rush are responsible for so much of this shit.

Most Americans get their news from right wing media and I’m not sure they even know it’s right wing. I pity them too as fearing for your life from the threat of trans people, migrant convoys, kneeling nfl’ers, anti-facists, windmills and evil electric stoves must be awful.

Yeah, I laughed at what Elon (and the Saudis, etc.) paid for Twitter, and while on the balance sheet it has been technically a loss, the usurpation of a popular social platform to twist it to their own benefit has paid them back handsomely in the larger scheme

"... the entirely of the US political & media elite..." won't discuss it because (and this is evidence that) they are also captured.

Can't believe that is true. All of the professionals in entertainment and law I know, many at the majors, acknowledge the successful takeover of too many major media companies by RW billionaire lunatics with visions of controlling the "message" while pillaging the field. Hanging on by fingernails.

The capitulation to "people's like Chris Rufo is baffling. He goes out and says "I'm going to make disingenuous statements about issue X to stir up a ruckus" then makes those statements and people go nuts, EVEN WHEN ITS POINTED OUT! Are people just valueless and looking for any excuse?

“All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake "public opinion" for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.” -V.I. Lenin

Fox News is destroying this country

But, David, don’t you know all media is liberal? That’s what the liberal media keeps telling us!

Hi, Marxist here. The elite media and political class like this because consolidation of media suits the interest of the capital-owning class to which they belong. Not talking about it also suits their interests. There's a class war, they decided to win it.

This is correct and what Yglesias refuses to grapple with. What Dems did or didn’t do has practically nothing to do with what people thought the Dems believed and would do.

RW?

It’s how he was able to brainwash his cult members. My sister’s home has Fox News on the TV all day every day.

Yes x1000. I feel like it is discussed *less* now than it was in the blog era. RW control has massively increased since then and discussion of it has entirely disappeared. Crazy-making.

Choose your own quote. He had a lot of things that were ultimately rooted in truth. Unfortunately. www.azquotes.com/author/5626-...

📌📌📌

And the Russian infiltration of our society, Congress, media, and social media.

Thank you & please keep repeating it! In all the "what did Dems do wrong", no one addresses the elephants in the media ... the rw powerhouses that endlessly spread lies, lies and more lies.

He’s not the most reliable source but David Brock, having been an orchestrator of all this, wrote that the predecessor to RW media was an effective astroturf movement lead by MRC and AIM to bully mainstream and local media into “fair” coverage.

No no no you don’t understand. Good things are popular and bad things are unpopular. Hope this helps! 🤗

Culture wars die off with the generations of voters who made them thrive. Unnecessary deaths during the AIDs epidemic, anti gay marriage, ant gays in military, anti trans care. This perceived existential threat spans 50 + years for a few generations. Always shifting to another letter.

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They are all in cahoots.

if Matt Y is being used as a representative example, I'm pretty sure it's that they're liars who are in favor of abandoning trans kids on its own merits

Because they have blackmail that says don't discuss it?

And the centrist paymasters are all transphobes!

Matt Yglesias and the rest of the reactionary centrists are ruthlessly, dogmatically dedicated to the belief that there are Single Correct Ways (c) to handle all issues, that they know these Ways, and that the job of pundits and politicians is to ram the Ways into voters' skulls until they comply.

They are monsters who have only wanted to treat human beings like animals because that is the last thing that this society has kept from their rapacious consumption, and you should think of them like that. They inevitably will have bodies dug up around them if you look hard enough.

Short song from a while back that explains it all youtu.be/yKf40CLF9MU?...

For many of them I would say it's a deliberate disingenuousness, but Matty specifically is just fucking stupid.

And the thing is, even the Argument piece/poll that's driving all of this acknowledges that respondents aren't actually voting on this stuff. Voters don't care. They tell pollsters they don't want trans women playing women's sports, but they're not actually making electoral decisions based on this.

Do they just agree?

They're transphobes who want the Democrats to abandoned trans rights, which won't happen by the way. It's really no deeper than that.

They get paid a lot of money not to notice that

Perhaps an illustrative metaphor will help you figure it out:

Why are bigots always so unspeakably ugly?

Yes, why do large swaths of people feel comfortable giving into bigotry denying trans girls the right to exist _as_ girls and then to be evaluated on the same term as other girls? Why do large swaths of people feel entitled to shove predatory discourse into kids' lives when they just want to play?

Was Stephen Ewww already taken?

lol this is why you'll lose again get with the times, or get left behind

Those "genetic males" are also school aged children. Weird that you chose to leave that out.

I kinda suspect he's one of those "look at all the weird foreigners" kind of anthropologists.

why do weird transphobes think if they use the most obviously shitty rhetoric they can find they'll sound worth taking serously?

Hey man where’s the line between gassing children and letting them play basketball with their friends?

Large swaths recoil at the sight of your face dawg

Oh fuck that's a potent image, I'm gonna have to use it

I don't think you're legally allowed to be around "school aged daughters" sporting a mustache like that, man.

More like Stephen Ewwing 🤮 amirite?

Just swallowing and regurgitating the propaganda whole, huh?

maybe they are recoiling because they heard the words "school aged daughters" come out of your mouth and realized they need to keep theirs away from you

Go back to X to bellyache about the rude people on bluesky dickhead

shut the fuck up big dawg

You know who is part of that large swath of people? Epstein and his friends.

for someone who dislikes trump you sure seem to agree with him on everything

"genetic males" Brother you should go do some soul searching

Sent from at least 1000 yards away from any school building, per Court Order

Fuck off, you rabid cunt.

P.U-wen

Because they're gullible dipshits who have fallen for a propaganda campaign built on the misogynistic lie that women and girls are inherently weak, and funded by billionaire pedophiles for the sole purpose of making trans women and girls outcasts and, therefore, easier to sexually exploit.

Why do you look like a genetic Christmas ham in June?

Don't be a dumbass.

i think kids should be allowed to play games with their friends

dude wants to be driving the bus so he can aim it directly

Large swathes (if you're gonna use the word, spell it correctly) of people think assholes like you are reprehensible, but we're still forced to deal with feces stuffed intestinal tracts like you. If we can deal with you, you can deal with trans people, you whiny fucking snowflake.

I think they're just transphobes who are happy to have an excuse to try and get our side to not fight for trans people

They don’t see it because they are transphobic and so they assume everyone else is too. The anti-trans campaign is invisible to them because it confirms their prior assumptions and personal biases.

Do you think Yglesias is knowingly engaging? I'd always pegged this set as people who drift with the easiest path (definitely no offending of potential funders!). That means they are affected by information campaigns, and then in turn are unwitting participants in them. Is it more than that?