In response to the school shooting in Nashville on March 27th by a trans identified female, trans activists planned a “Day of Rage” at the Supreme Court on April 1st. To say the idea was tone deaf is an understatement. Fortunately, they cancelled it. Unfortunately, they released a statement crying about all the “harassment” they were receiving. But what was really happening was a lot of Americans had a mass peaking moment. They realized a “Day of Rage” by a supposed civil rights movement didn’t look familiar. It didn’t look like a peaceful sit-in, or a line of people walking with arms interlinked, or a little girl under armed guard walking into a school meant for people who didn’t look like her. And now a lot of Americans are finding out, belatedly, that this “civil rights movement” has redefined truth as hate speech, having taken advantage of the hate speech laws so carefully crafted and painfully enacted by prior civil rights movements to end oppression.
I grew up during the end of the Cold War. The tail end. I remember the Berlin Wall falling and I remember the collapse of the Soviet Union. I remember finding an old textbook in a closet of my old church, where an octopus was encircling the globe with tentacles, with the threatening title of Communism: The Global Enemy. When I took Russian in my Junior year of high school, my grandfather pulled me aside and asked me in a firm, low tone, just what I was doing learning that language. The Soviet Union had dissolved the year prior and so there was a desire for a cultural exchange that hadn’t happened before, but it wasn’t enough for my die-hard grandfather. He made it clear he disapproved.
My teenage rebellious self, stirred by the talking-to, got an interest in all things Russian. Including the history. Like all late teenagers, I got a copy of Atlas Shrugged and loved it. I felt I was reading my first “grown up” book about “grown up” things. Of course as I got older I started to see the flaws in Rand’s logic, but my initial response was “Holy wow!” Because I was a kid, I had been told No by an adult and my rebellion took the form of seditious books about radical politics, flawed as they were.
Wanting to read more of Rand’s work, I got a copy of We the Living. Here is a book that had actually been banned from the Middle School library, so I got a copy from the Adult Library in the Adult Section. When the librarian raised her brows at me at checkout, it only solidified my feelings of teenage rebellious righteousness.
We the Living is the book that has stayed with me through adulthood. I re-read it at least once every other year. It flows like a Mary Sue fantasy through Communist St. Petersburg, but I still love it. Other women have romance novels, I have Kira Argounova and Andrei Taganov. The final scene of Kira dying in the snow rather than submit is a powerful image, like the author or not.
I haven’t picked up We the Living in a while. It mirrors too much of my current reality to be the “heroine in the face of oppression” fantasy it once was. Increasingly I find myself in Kira’s position and realizing this is a lot harder than she made it seem. When Sonja laughs in Kira’s face and says, “You miserable bourgeois are only doing club service to keep your measly jobs. We see you,” it kinda hits me differently these days. The phrase “we see you” is on a lot of memes.
I’m also seeing parallels between real people and the characters of Pavel Syerov and Victor Dunaev. These are two well-off teens who joined the Revolution not because they were hungry or poor or oppressed, but because they felt morally superior for it. They spend the novel acting like entitled brats, stepping on their own siblings, berating their own parents, cheating their friends, sleeping with each other’s partners, turning on the real Revolutionaries who said, “Hey, wait a minute,” and eventually scamming the very system they helped create and exploiting the people they professed to want to help.
Sounds like a lot of Gender Influencers. Statistics show (and the backgrounds of their internet videos confirm) that most of them come from white, middle class neighborhoods. They are not poor, they are not hungry, they are not homeless, they have plenty of clothing and animé and Hello Kitty. They have a decent school and good roads to get there on. The trash gets picked up and the HOA handles the rest. And yet they make endless Tik Tok videos crying about how they are oppressed, threatened, put upon, and bullied. To hear them speak, their existence is an endless torment, day and night. It’s almost as if all these rainbow-coated special events to “uplift trans voices”, or the dozens of Pride parades sponsored by JP Morgan Chase, are just not having any effect. The “visibility weeks” and the colonization of International Women’s Day to include a handful of males are not enough.
Communism appealed to the “proletariat” in Russia, but more than that, it appealed to people who wanted something bigger than themselves to believe in. Pavel and Victor’s wealth had brought them nothing, and so they imagined themselves to be a part of the proletariat with the idea that aligning themselves with a cause, they could give themselves meaning. It was a noble goal.
Arnold Toynbee in L’Histoire says, “The proletariat is, in effect, a state of mind rather than the consequences of external conditions…. (It is) an element or a social group that exists inside a given society but is, nevertheless, truly a part of it…. The true mark of the proletariat is neither poverty nor humble birth, but the awareness and the resentment of being disinherited.”
Teenagers feel disinherited by design, but American teenagers have a good reason to feel this way. They have grown up in a country racked by scandal after scandal, interspersed with various wars that no one can really explain because we don’t understand those countries – it just looks like oil profiteering from a safe distance (plus that fits on a meme). They trust none of their politicians nor the system they work in. Faith in the democratic vote has been shaken. America is on a visible downward decline – no one can speak, much less agree. Our options are down to choosing between the lesser of two rapists, and every week someone in Congress opines for the advent of the second Civil War.
Social media has only served to make this disaffection of American youth go quicker and saturate more deeply. In the past, if a Congressman said something dumb, it only got around to a few local circles. Now, when a Congressman says something dumb, he does it on a social media platform where it is used to whip up a frenzy in about twenty minutes.
Americans and their obsession with youth have carried themselves into an eternal teenagerdom. Saddled by insane debt from a college education that has fulfilled none of the promises of a degree, they begin to believe they were crippled at the outset and give up. Fuck being an adult anyway. Fully grown men and women proudly display cases of toys, complain about their dead end jobs, diagnose themselves with any number of mental illnesses and generally continue the disaffection. It seems safer than growing up. While their complaints are not without merit, the response is less than ideal.
Enter genderism, identity politics and eternal victimhood. Jules Monnerot says communism “presents itself as a promotion for those who think they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from a radical change, namely, all who without being truly underprivileged, nevertheless feel they are on the fringes of society.” If we change communism to genderism, it still works.
When Trump got elected, we all said we would take a stand against fascism when we saw it. The problem was, we were looking for people goose-stepping through the streets, or graffiti scrawled on the businesses of minorities, or piles of burning books. Our history books, which were good on facts but bad on nuance, told us that this is what fascism looks like.
When fascism did come to America, it had to look like something else. So it picked up the symbology of “resistance” that every American was familiar with – rainbow flags, civil rights marches, pretty meme quotes, language like “love” and “inclusion” and “stop hate” and “hate has no home here,” and ran with it. It made T-shirts and sold pronoun pins. It remade the Pride flag into the Progress Pride flag, which is harder to sew at home. It infected the media into saying anyone who disagrees is a racist, taking advantage of a wave called Anti-Racism that had good intentions but poor methodology and worse practitioners. Much like the octopus from the old communist text wrapping its tentacles around the globe, it wove all the “isms” and “phobias” together in a toxic blend of intellectual sounding words and confusing rhetoric that winds back on itself. Now, instead of saying “paraphilias rarely exist alone,” we have to say being transphobic means you’re likely also racist. Instead of understanding that the FBI’s number one indicator of criminal sexual behavior is cross dressing, we must say that “othering” men in dresses is literal violence against them. It then proceeded to define truth as hate speech, taking advantage of the hate speech laws so carefully crafted and painfully enacted by prior civil rights movements to end oppression. They exploited those laws, so now speaking the truth can get you oppressed.
Fascism came to America not in red flags and organic street marches. It came to America in rainbow glitter parade floats with men in thongs, sponsored by Goldman Sachs and BP Amoco. The new fascists do not goose-step. They are not that coordinated and asking them to be coordinated will be called “ableist”. They twerk and swing baseball bats in a playful supposed joke about what they will do to people who disagree with them.
It was all a joke up until Monday.
Monday, March 27th, when a trans identified female did the quintessential modern American thing – walked into a school and killed three children and three adults with the quintessential American AR-15. Her manifesto, it is said, cannot be released because “it would do harm to the LGBTQ community”.
Remember, truth is now hate speech. Even if that truth comes from one of their own.
The activists here had planned a “Day of Rage” at the Supreme Court on April 1st, a few days after the shooting. To say the idea was tone deaf is an understatement. Fortunately, they canceled it. Unfortunately, they released a statement crying about all the “harassment” they were receiving.
What really happened is that a lot of Americans had a mass peaking moment. They realized a “Day of Rage” by a supposed civil rights movement didn’t look familiar. It didn’t look like a peaceful sit-in, or a line of people walking with arms interlinked, or a little girl under armed guard walking into a school meant for people who didn’t look like her.
This supposed civil rights movement is behaving in a way no other civil rights movement ever has. Past civil rights movements wanted things like the right to vote, or the right to own property in their name. Freedom from slavery, equal pay. Concrete actionable items that were a clear indicator of an injustice. This civil rights movement is demanding to alter language, control perception, deny reality, insert males into women’s bathrooms, and give middle schoolers pornographic materials as part of the curriculum. It wants to put males in women’s prisons. It wants public money to fund genital surgeries on minors. Hell, on anyone. All based on subjective feelings, an identity category that can be slipped into as easily as a T-shirt with bowie knives printed on it alongside the seemingly innocent phrase, “Protect trans youth”. Let’s not forget the one printed with the same AR-15’s in pink and blue that killed those kids.
I believe trans rights activists wanted to incite violence on their “Day of Rage”. They wanted to tip it off so they could cry victim. Nothing can make me think otherwise. They wanted their images in history books, right alongside Martin Luther King and Gandhi, because that’s what they believe themselves to be. They consistently fail to understand that in coercing someone’s thoughts, they are the fascists. By employing extremist tactics with an extremist ideology, they are slowly but surely marching themselves up Moghaddam’s Staircase Model of Terrorism.
Trans women are men. Anyone trying to make me believe otherwise, be it through the “friendly reminder” comment on social media, a veiled threat such as “we see you,” open intimidation with the phrase “That’s not a good look for you, you might want to reconsider,” or outright hostility in the form of “educate yourself before you see consequences of your bigotry,” is a fascist. I see these types of comments daily on social media and I always want to ask, “Do you hear yourself?” Not a day goes by that I do not see a demand for a Maoist style struggle session for someone to “overcome their internalized bigotry and hate” in reply to an innocuous comment about pronouns or questioning gender identity or the strange notion that everyone is racist by default.
Americans are on a dark path. They just don’t see it because they are confusing light with the reflection from the rainbow glitter.
Andrei Taganov’s decline begins when his supposed friend Pavel Syerov sells him out. He starts to see the problem with what he’s done. He has started to see the cracks in the ideology that gave his life meaning, sees how it has polluted his friends and destroyed the woman he loves. He can’t recognize anyone anymore. He realizes too late he missed his chance to speak up.
His suicide is hard.
There was a short-lived group that called itself “The Church of Prismatic Light”. It was founded by a woman who had a child who wanted to be the opposite sex, and she believed she was fighting a just cause for the safety of her child and other people’s children. She quickly gained fame, appearing on TV shows, getting federal recognition as a religion, endless donations and thousands of followers. She even made up a little “Baptismal” ceremony that involved tossing a handful of glitter over oneself and a declaration of being “one with the light” or something. The glitter was what stuck out.
But then something happened. Something about donation money and a trip to DC that involved too many drinks and a questionable visit to an adult entertainment venue. The founder was then hounded out by the members she selected to help her. The church collapsed less than a year after its founding. The media and public that had gushed at the founding paid no attention to the disappearance. The only people aggrieved by it were the generous donors who rightfully felt scammed. Watching the social media fallout on Reddit was like reading the same scenes in We the Living, only Pavel died instead of Andrei and no one cared.
The leopard comes for everyone’s face in the end. That’s how the saying goes. More often than not, a rebellion winds up being a simple reshuffling of the ruling class. I think about that whenever I see a rainbow flag with a pink and blue chevron stamped alongside the corporate logo on the pen I borrow at the bank.
A phrase I’ve seen repeated by gender identity activists is, “You don’t have to understand it, you just have to accept it.”
How anyone can read that and not see it as the fascist demand that it is, is beyond me.