Don’t call me one of those terrible Republicans!
As I’ve done a deep dive into the transgender phenomenon and its current abuses regarding the medical treatment of children, I’ve watched an enormous number of really informative videos. I’ve only linked to a couple here, but there are many many more. The podcasters at A Wider Lens are especially good. They’re very knowledgeable therapists themselves and they interview extremely well-informed and articulate people.
Here’s one of their videos I highly recommend. Most are about an hour long, but although I recommend watching the whole thing, you can still get something out of watching only part of it. Another trick I’ve mentioned before, if you tend to be impatient like me, is to click on settings and speed up the talk; usually it’s still very understandable. Here’s one from a whistleblower speaking about a gender clinic where she worked, run by Washington University in St. Louis:
That’s the main topic of the video, but that’s not really the main topic of this post. I was struck by this section that I’m about to highlight, which is about politics. I see this sort of thing in video after video from other people critiquing the current medicalization of children identifying as transgender, or from detransitioners themselves: the phenomenon of the person speaking being very adamant about the fact that he or she is not on the political right.
On the one hand, that’s quite heartening, because I have long thought that this is an issue that should transcend politics. The headlong rush to give troubled young people dangerous blockers, hormones, and surgery, without even taking time to explore their other problems that might be factors in the genesis of their dysphoria, is something that all people who care about children and parents, and who want to protect them, should be against. And yet, sadly, with politicians and legislators it breaks down rather cleanly along political lines, with Democrats being for and Republicans against.
And that is why people such as the ones in this podcast are at pains to describe themselves as liberals, and to say that their opponents who accuse them of being puppets of the right are incorrect. I would like to ask them two further questions: are you still a liberal, and why? And do you also think of the right as a bunch of mindless Neanderthals (nothing against Neaderthals, but one of the people in the podcast uses the expression), and if so, on what is that based?
Anyway, here’s the clip. It’s quite short (the woman with the headset is the whistleblower, and the woman to her right on the screen is her lawyer). And please don’t let this little bit put you off from watching the rest of it, which is truly excellent and very eye-opening:
I maintain that, even in many clear-thinking and intelligent people (including many I know), this idea of Republicans as troglodyte-ish haters is very strongly entrenched, and keeps them from seeing that most of their actual opinions and positions are in accord with the right rather than the left. The activist left – including the MSM – is highly aware that this perception is instrumental in keeping the left in power, and they take every advantage to fan the flames and keep that viewpoint going. It probably accounts for at least 20% of the Democrat vote, and maybe more.
I have a daughter who is a lawyer and an FBI agent nearing retirement who is a hard leftist. I don’t do political discussions with her because it is useless. I think some may be related to her mother, my ex-wife, who treated her almost as a boy as a child. She was dressed in boys’ clothes (by her mother) and would tell people, “I’m a girl !” She grew up to be a beautiful girl but was awkward with men and boys. When she went through the FBI academy she was gorgeous. She was running 7 miles a day and looked terrific. She is now morbidly obese and a convinced leftist. What a shame.
I believe this is the reason Democrats push transgender though it seems counterintuitive. It gives them yet another cudgel to bash Republicans as bigots, which they need because Democrat policies are not that popular. Eg I saw a recent internet headline “Republicans ban care for transgender kids” because of the efforts to control hormones and surgery on minors.
Believing that some other group is despicable is a way that immature, morally defective people have felt better about themselves for many generations. It has a long sordid history.
It has nothing to do with facts or logic. Never has.
Left/liberals/progressives/Democrats are a religious cult. They joined the cult for emotional reasons. They enjoy the cult for emotional reasons. They pledge loyalty to the cult for emotional reasons.
And, contrary to Republicans, they derive some of their identity and some of their self-worth from their membership in the cult. These aren’t healthy people.
The devolution of the left wing of the Democratic party into insanity, and the failure of the rest of the Democratic party to rein it in, is also bad for conservatives, because the sane people who aren’t comfortable feeding children to Moloch are still going to want ban guns, still going to want big government, etc, and are going to turn the Republican party into Clinton Democrats.
One reason we should be wary of all the triumphalism around the exodus from the big blue states into Florida and Texas is that these refugees are bringing their politics with them and will turn these states blue.
I know lots of these people. They’re sure that there’s nothing wrong with the blue-state model that can’t be fixed by putting better people in charge or by having more tractable demographics.
And do you also think of the right as a bunch of mindless Neanderthals (nothing against Neaderthals, but one of the people in the podcast uses the expression), and if so, on what is that based?
Yeah, but Neanderthals get an unfair bad rap. They should apologize.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0trj6jCsm6E
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When expanding my social sphere in blue-land, my interactions have been blessedly free of politics. By intent, it’s been mostly people interested in music including some musicians, or dancing. In one instance, it came up that some of my new friends were raising money for the Democrat party with some event.
In another case, I was conversing with a lady who asked if I had heard about the flap over Bud-Light. Was that an honest query, or a test? Later, she expressed interest in shooting sports after I had brought it up. And I saw her auto’s satellite radio tuned into Fox News. Ahhh. Not all Democrats.
They live in such a well- fortified castle with a deep moat and high walls. It always amazes me how the D/left people I know understand so little about the right. Yet we on the right know so much about them.
Yes, truly a cult mentality.
I am proud of my 3% Neanderthal DNA. Both Ancestry and 23&me have concluded that my share of Neanderthal DNA is among the highest recorded. Maybe that is why my hat size is 7 1/2.
Several times over the last 23 years I have stood in front of stores (where we had permission to solicit signatures) asking people to sign petitions to get GOP initiatives on the ballot. Most people are courteous and either wave me off or sign the petition. However, I’ve occasionally had hard-core Democrat activists scream at me, curse me, and even try to take the petition away from me. In all cases these individuals acted like what I was doing was unethical, immoral, illegal, or worse. They really seem convinced they’re doing God’s work and that if you’re not on board with their ideas you’re a sinner, despicable, and deserve to be silenced. It reminds me of the line by the lawyer in the video that these people have “God complexes” and feel free to ignore laws of science or man.
Normal political practices and procedures are not allowed if you’re a Republican. Unless this changes, it won’t end well.
A moral compass requires an external point of reference. By definition, secularist’s point of reference is internal. As more and more democrat voters fully embrace secularism, their concurrent abandonment of an external point of reference leads them into a moral quagmire. Escape from which requires facing up to, not only having been played the fool but having been wrong about nearly everything. Few indeed have the moral courage to do so.
I have heard the Wash U. whistleblower speak on two other podcasts. I’ve probably listened to about 2 hours of her explaining herself.
God bless her! A truly wonderful woman. She is gay and in a relationship with a transvestite yet she would not cower from the truth when she was a witness to child abuse, despite immense professional and personal risk.
Mike K,
My late father was in the top percentile of Neanderthal DNA as well. I’m pretty high up there myself and my husband jokingly refers to my father and I as Frozen Caveman Professor and Frozen Cavewoman Wife. SNL reference there.
When I visited him not long before his death at 95 he still had all 32 of his teeth and stood – at 6’2″ – as straight as an arrow. We were compatible intellectually and throughout my childhood and adolescense this wonderful man stood between me and a hypercritical and driven mother. This daughter is eternally grateful for the gift that was. Not critical – just genuinely curious – where were you?
I had dinner last night with my very good middle school friend of almost 60 years. He’s gay. He’s a personable, likable guy.
And he’s an MSNBC progressive. I mentioned Tim Scott as a candidate and he basically circled around to Biden as the best candidate for ’24.
I think I now understand what progressivism means to him. It means a government that takes active steps to ensure the rights of all people – gay, minority, trans, etc. He definitely sees that it took an activist gov’t to bring about the normalizing of his own gay life, and so he sees the trans movement in the same way, the gov’t support for African Americans in the same way. Which means using the coercive power of gov’t to guarantee their right to their way of life, if that’s what it takes. And he sees the republicans as willing/wanting to take those protections away (ie., Roe vs Wade, AA, DeSantis vs Disney and schools in Florida) and therefore as an existential threat. Trump’s additions to the Supreme Court were disasters.
All other considerations are secondary.
I think a lot of progressives think this way.
I believe the media and obviously education have a lot to do with this herd mindset. Without an honest, impartial media which shows us arguments for both sides of any and every issue it’ll be extremely hard to break out of this conundrum. On the one hand, therefore, it’s hard to fault these people for their unwillingness to face reality.
On the other, though, I really do wonder what it would take for such clearly intelligent people to expand their world a bit and start reading books and magazines which make them question their own suppositions. I suppose the same could be said about myself, as I, too, at this point all but ignore the legacy media and find only stuff to read which confirms my worldview. But I’ve ALWAYS questioned the mainstream and have started digging deeper into many topics which piqued my curiosity before coming to foregone conclusions. These folks have dug a very deep well of knowledge when it comes to the transgender issue, and have drawn “conservative” conclusions as a result, but then look at climate change and think, “this is an existential threat to our planet and we need to stop using fossil fuels at once.” There is clearly no interest to know what they don’t know outside of the narrow scope of their personal interests.
To me, it testifies to intellectual laziness and even a lack of character. If you’re equipped with such a set of brains, you better damn well use it.
I also ignore the legacy media, but what they’re saying is mentioned often in the conservative new media, usually with links that allow me to get the whole leftist story in context if I choose to double-check it. Sometimes I do double-check, and I seldom find conservatives have misrepresented what was said on the other side.
Well, just for myself, I check out CNN and MSNBC web sites every day. I want to know what they are reporting after I’ve read the right wing media. I do find an occasional decent reporting on a minor story I did not see on the right. They also, almost every day, blare the the latest on Ukraine, which I also find to be not reported on the right, so they can be useful to get a feel for that war. They NEVER report anything that would let people know about the corruption of entire Democrat establishment from Biden on down.
It’s really pretty simple, it’s boiled down to my outfit is a bunch of sob’s, but I like my sob better than your sob!
There’s several important observations in the comments above 1) The hardest thing for a person to do is admit is they were wrong. 2) It’s almost a religious thing with the Left. 3) They’ve made the decision to play this out to the bitter end, win or lose.
one looks at the local fishwrap the sentinel from orlando and the news journal from daytona, they carry the narrative dutifully, same for wesh the local tv station, add the times and the post, only the new york post gets close to the truth,
“Yet we on the right know so much about them.”
Much like vegans, they won’t shut up about it.
“A moral compass requires an external point of reference. By definition, secularist’s point of reference is internal.”
Apparently not:
sec·u·lar·ist
NOUN
a person who advocates separation of the state from religious institutions:
ADJECTIVE
advocating or relating to separation of the state from religious institutions:
“1) The hardest thing for a person to do is admit is they were wrong.”
LOL!!! Everyone should become an experimental physicist. And for added spice play golf! As my students quickly learned when interning in my lab, if one never admits they are wrong nothing ever gets done in experimental work. The entire process is looking for errors and then correcting them.
physicsguy, I am sure you will have seen the story about the 2022 Nobel Prize-winner for physics who says there is no climate crisis. Sadly, I’m sure my physicist friend, if I told her, would say he’s not an “expert” in the field.
Kate, I did see that. The problem is that citing him is an appeal to authority which is a logical fault; but then the other side does it all the time. There’s about 30k of us who signed the Oregon petition many years ago and it included a large number of physicists; some unknown like myself, and some big names. Didn’t make a dent. Much like the Barrington declaration during covid.
Some psychological historian is going to have a beautiful thesis come out of explaining this climate change hysteria. It’s gone on now for over 30 years with too numerous to mention failed predictions. Like much else in our society, logic and evidence are now in disrepute. And because the general population has lost its way, the political exploiters are continuing to gather their power.
Ah, so as Fauci called the Great Barrington signers “fringe epidemiologists,” you and your co-signers were “fringe physicists.” A badge of honor, since you’re right.
Kate,
I think you misspelled that. They are not “fringe physicists” but “frigen’ physicists”, as in real physicists. 🙂
Excellent, informative video. Thank you for bringing the video and the channel to our attention.
Physicguy,
I play golf (easy to learn very difficult to master) and I agree with you.