The Right's Cancel Culture Comes for Disney (VIDEO

This is from Charles Sykes at the Bullwark.  

I don't like these people, although I'm interested in this story. 

Here, "You can be forgiven if you didn’t have “Right-Wing Jihad Against Disney” on your bingo card for 2022":

But I regret to tell you that the entrepreneurs of culture war have grown tired of ginning up indignation about “Drag Queen Story Hour,” CRT, and the cancellation of Dr. Seuss. And so they have found a bright new shiny object of outrage, that bastion of moral decadence and wokeness, the Walt Disney Company.

This is, of course, the Disney of Mary Poppins, Frozen, Snow White, Moana, Encanto, High School Musical, Finding Nemo, 101 Dalmatians, Fantasia, Coco, Epcot Center, Bambi, Cinderella, Ratatouille, Splash Mountain, Beauty and the Beast, Mister Toad’s Wild Ride, Space Mountain, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Toy Story, The Princess and the Frog, Remember the Titans, The Mighty Ducks. Old Yeller, and the It’s a Small World After All ride.

But the company has now spoken out against Florida’s new law regulating instruction about sexuality (read gayness), and, since clickbait doesn’t click itself, the new hotness is canceling Disney.

[Image of tweet from activist Christopher Rufo.]

You remember Rufo, of course. He’s this guy:

Rufo has become one of the go-to critics of CRT. His work has appeared in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Fox News, and the NY Post; he has also been featured by Hillsdale College; and touted by the Heritage Foundation.

Rufo also reportedly inspired Trump’s personal interest in the issue…

But here is Rufo, essentially giving away the game. For Rufo, it is all about “branding,’ and the audacity of his charlatanry is breathtaking:

[Another couple of tweets from Rufo, who is a dogged oppenent of the leftist culture agenda, though he goes to far in calling for a ban on *all* instruction in critical race theory, all the up to the university level. That's actually dumb. Grappling with stuff like CRT, which started in law school journals decades ago, is what you do at university.]

Now, he’s moved on, leading the attack on all things Disney. This week, Rufo fired up the jihad with what he excitedly described as a SCOOP: “Disney corporate president Karey Burke says, "as the mother [of] one transgender child and one pansexual child," she supports having "many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories" and wants a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities.”

And he attached a video with the smoking wokeness...

Here's the video:

Keep reading.  

Governor Ron DeSantis Floats Revoking Disney Company's Independent Governing Status in Florida (VIDEO)

This is blowing up the culture war, dang!

At Fox News, "DeSantis broaches repeal of Disney World's special self-governing status in Florida":

Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis addressed on Thursday the suggestion of repealing a 55-year-old state law that allows Disney to effectively govern itself on the grounds of Walt Disney World, following the company’s public opposition to a controversial parental rights law in Florida.

"What I would say as a matter of first principle is I don’t support special privileges in law just because a company is powerful and they’ve been able to wield a lot of power," DeSantis said during a press conference in West Palm Beach, Florida on Thursday...

Laura Ingraham's video is embedded at the article, "Angle: Disney turns its back on millions of Americans."

'Real Time' Panel Discusses Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' Legislation (VIDEO)

I hate this debate. I'm just sickened by it. 

I also hate attacks on opponents as "groomers." Maybe their are some, but those at the forefront of the opposition are radical trans activists pushing cultural Marxism on society to destroy the nuclear family and incite social revolution (as if that's not happened already). "Groomer" is a bigoted attack on legitimate interest group actors, and it's puerile. 

Fucking just beat these people at the polls, damn! 

The bill, now signed into law, is called "CS/CS/HB 1557 - Parental Rights in Education," and if you read it, it's just common sense. 

Anyways I watched this episode below on HBO because Batya Ungar-Sargon was scheduled and I like her a lot. 

If you haven't yet, get your copy of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. It's an outstanding book which should be winning all kinds of awards. 

WATCH: 

Disney Admits It Wants to Queer Your Kids

From Rod Dreher, at the American Conservative, "Well, here you go."

BONUS: It's Karol Markowitz, at the New York Post, "I’m quitting Disney after seeing it boast about pushing ‘gender theory’."

Groomer Teachers Are Absolutely Determined to Talk About Their Sexual Fetishes With Your Children

At AoSHQ, "Teachers organized a 'Pride' march inside a publicly funded government grade school -- in Texas. Check out the video. Teachers are waving rainbow flags at elementary school students on their 'Pride' march."

Abigail Shrier

She's wonderful.

See, "What I told the students of Princeton."

What I told the students of @princeton tonight:

Show some self-respect and reclaim your freedom.https://t.co/he3Um6oSjQ pic.twitter.com/JFJce3ImWP

— Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier) December 9, 2021

Oh Look! Medical Schools Join the Crazy Train!

It's Katie Herzog, writing at Bari Weiss's Substack, "Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex: Professors are apologizing for saying ‘male’ and ‘female.’ Students are policing teachers. This is what it looks like when activism takes over medicine."

It turns out Ms. Herzog's doing a series of essays on this:

During a recent endocrinology course at a top medical school in the University of California system, a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for something he’d said at the beginning of class.

“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it,” the physician says in a recording provided by a student in the class (whom I’ll call Lauren). “Again, I’m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.”

His offense: using the term “pregnant women.”

“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.”

It wasn’t the first time Lauren had heard an instructor apologize for using language that, to most Americans, would seem utterly inoffensive. Words like “male” and “female.”

Why would medical school professors apologize for referring to a patient’s biological sex? Because, Lauren explains, in the context of her medical school “acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”

When sex is acknowledged by her instructors, it’s sometimes portrayed as a social construct, not a biological reality, she says. In a lecture on transgender health, an instructor declared: “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.”...

Ms. Herzog's great, and Ms. Weiss is a national treasure.

Still more.

'Far-Right' Koreatown Protests

Previously, "Koreatown Protests: Cops Fire Rubber Bullets at Violent Demonstrators (VIDEO)."

Now at the Los Angles Times, "How far-right rage over transgender rights at an L.A. spa led to chaos in the streets":

The activists arrived outside the Wi Spa in Westlake Saturday morning, some prepared for the worst.

Several wore bike helmets and vests with extra padding. N.W.A.’s “F— Tha Police” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” filled the air.

They were met by far-right extremists who over the last few weeks had turned a debate over transgender access at a Korean spa into a rallying cry.

It didn’t take long for the dueling protests to dissolve into disarray.

By the end, the LAPD had used projectiles and batons and arrested 40 people — mostly for failure to disperse. Several said they sustained injuries at the hands of police.

“I knew it was going to be violent. I didn’t know it was going to end up like that,” said Jessica Rogers, a 31-year-old who had come to document the event and support transgender rights and was among those arrested.

In the aftermath, the police are facing questions about whether officers used excessive force. But the incident has also exposed the power of a viral video given widespread attention in the right-wing press and social media.

The spa has become the latest hot spot for clashes between far-right groups and the left in L.A., kicked off by the video taken by an irate customer in late June.

The video showed a woman arguing with Wi Spa employees after she said she had seen a customer with male genitalia in an area that is reserved for women. The Wilshire Boulevard facility has some gender-separated areas with changing rooms and Jacuzzis.

The footage was quickly amplified by an international network of right-wing activists, pundits and media outlets, including Breitbart, the Gateway Pundit, RealClearPolitics and TheBlaze, a publication founded by Glenn Beck. Message boards where anti-trans activists gather, including Mumsnet, saw thousands of comments.

The spa told The Times Monday that they are required to follow California law that prohibits businesses from discriminating against customers based on race, gender, sexual identity or expression.

“Like many other metropolitan areas, Los Angeles contains a transgender population, some of whom enjoy visiting a spa,” it said in a statement, adding that the spa “strives to meet the needs and safety of all of its customers.”

Brian Levin, director of the nonpartisan Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, said the protests are indicative of a “democratization of hate” that has allowed far-right groups with a variety of ideologies to come together around flash-point events after they are amplified online and in conservative media...

Still more.

And notice how leftist media outlets like L.A.T. always label mainstream conservatives as "far-Right." *Eye-roll.* 

Koreatown Protests: Cops Fire Rubber Bullets at Violent Demonstrators (VIDEO)

At the Los Angeles Times, "LAPD makes arrests after protesters clash over transgender rights at Koreatown spa":

Dueling protests outside a Koreatown spa over transgender rights Saturday prompted a large police response and resulted in more than a dozen arrests.

LGBTQ activists gathered outside the Wi Spa on Saturday morning to counter a protest against transgender access to the spa’s facilities. The Los Angeles Police Department declared an unlawful assembly in front of the spa near Wilshire and Rampart boulevards around noon when the two groups of protesters began to clash, according to police and videos posted on Twitter.

LAPD Det. Meghan Aguilar said authorities declared the unlawful assembly after protesters began throwing projectiles, including at officers. Videos posted to social media show police in riot gear shooting bean bag rounds and 40-millimeter hard-foam projectiles at protesters.

It was not immediately clear how many protesters were in the area. Protesters demonstrating against the spa’s policy waved signs saying “Save our children” and “Stop defending pedos.”

“Most people did leave the area, but currently there are a number of arrests made for failure to disperse,” Aguilar said.

No injuries have been reported. A reporter from the Guardian US who was covering the protest wrote on Twitter that she was chased and “thrown to the ground by right-wing anti-pedophile protesters.”

The demonstrations, similar to those that occurred at the spa earlier this month, were apparently spurred by a viral video taken by an irate customer at the spa in late June.

The woman in the video, which was posted to Instagram, complains to staff at Wi Spa that a man had allegedly walked into the women’s section and showed his genitals to young girls. The customer the woman complained about reportedly identified as a woman. “He is a man,” the woman can be heard saying. “He is not a female. There are girls down there, other women who are highly offended by what they just saw and you did nothing. You sided with him.”

Wi Spa defended its policy in a statement to Los Angeles Magazine.

“Like many other metropolitan areas, Los Angeles contains a transgender population, some of whom enjoy visiting a spa,” the statement said. “Wi Spa strives to meet the needs of all its customers.”...

Keep reading.

And watch, at ABC News 7 Los Angeles, "Video shows LAPD officer shoot protester with rubber bullet at close range," and "Dozens arrested after LAPD sends alert warning of unlawful assembly during Koreatown spa protests."

Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage Now Out in Paper

At Amazon, Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Paperback).

BONUS: Ms. Abigail's got an essay up at Bari Weiss's Substack, "The Books Are Already Burning."

Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage

At Amazon, Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.

Jack Phillips Said 'No', Again

This is a really excellent piece, and hits so close to the bone, it's almost too good.

From Bill McGurn, at WSJ, "The Christian Baker Who Said ‘No’":  

Jack Phillips is America’s most famous baker. People have taken him all the way to the Supreme Court in hopes of getting it to force him to bake them one of his custom cakes. This week he’s back in the dock, again defending his refusal to bake a custom cake with a message he says goes against his Christian faith.

Mr. Phillips owns Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., and holds traditional views on marriage and sexuality. The first legal action against him came via the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, when in 2012 he declined to bake a custom cake for a same-sex wedding and found himself accused of unlawful discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. This time he’s being sued because he wouldn’t bake a cake celebrating a gender transition.

“Jack is being targeted for his religious beliefs,” says Kristen Waggoner, general counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, who defended Mr. Phillips in his first case and continues to represent him. “His opponents are weaponizing the law to punish and destroy him because he won’t create expression that violates his Christian faith. They want to make the law an arm of cancel culture.”

In the first go-round, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 for Mr. Phillips. But it did so narrowly, on grounds that the commission had displayed “clear and impermissible hostility” to Mr. Phillips’s religious beliefs. (One commissioner compared Mr. Phillips’s invocation of his Christian beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust.) The court left unresolved the key constitutional question: Can the government compel people to create speech or artistic expressions to which they profoundly object?

The latest trial started Monday in Colorado state court. It dates to 2017, when Autumn Scardina called Mr. Phillips’s shop. She requested a custom cake—pink on the inside, blue on the outside—reflecting her gender transition. When the shop refused, she complained to the commission.

The commission pursued the case but dropped it in 2019 after Mr. Phillips filed a federal lawsuit against the state. Ms. Scardina then filed her own suit. Given that Mr. Phillips has already lost 40% of his business because he has stopped making his signature custom wedding cakes, these suits are plainly aimed at harassing him into submission.

A 2017 New York Times profile opened with this lead: “Jack Phillips bakes beautiful cakes, and it is not a stretch to call him an artist.” As an artist, he argues that his custom cakes are speech, and that he shouldn’t be compelled to create cakes with messages he deeply objects to.

In her court filing, Ms. Scardina says she asked for a birthday cake, not a cake celebrating her transition, and accuses Mr. Phillips of refusing her because she is transgender. But her story has shifted. In her original complaint to the commission, she wrote that she’d told the bakery the design was “intended for the celebration of my transition from male to female.”

After Masterpiece turned down this cake, Ms. Scardina called to request another. This one would feature Satan smoking a joint. Mr. Phillips declined, again because of the message...

Still more at that top link, and I do hope and pray Mr. Phillips prevails again in court, even if, once again, it goes to the Supremes.

 

The Nuking of the American Nuclear Family

I should also be blogging Michelle Malkin more often, but, as noted, my blogging's been light of late, due to big family and work responsibilities. 

That said, I should have more "hotties" posted over the weekend.

Anyway, at the Unz Review:

“Gay poly throuple makes history, lists 3 dads on a birth certificate.”

That’s an actual headline from The New York Post, which last week featured an unsettling trio of men who recruited two female friends to help them conceive and deliver a baby girl named Piper.

Piper is now 3 years old and has a 1-year-old brother named Parker. According to the “gay poly throuple,” Piper told her preschool classmates how proud she was of her plentiful progenitors by bragging: “You have two parents. I have three parents.”

Actually, the “throuple” is really a quintet. If you count Piper’s egg donor and birth surrogate, we’ve now traveled from “Heather Has Two Mommies” (the infamous children’s book normalizing same-sex adoptions published in 1989) to “Piper Has Five Parents.” And in 2021, if you have any discomfort or reservations at all about the nuking of the nuclear family by throuples or quadrouples or dozenouples, then woke society tells us there’s something wrong with us, not them.

Dr. Ian Jenkins, one of Piper’s polyamorous pops, wrote in a newly released book about their “adventures in modern parenting” that the arrangement is “just not a big deal.” Nothing to see here, move along. Two, three, whatever. “Some people seem to think it’s about a ton of sex or something,” Jenkins complained, “or we’re unstable and must do crazy things. (But) it’s really remarkably ordinary and domestic in our house and definitely not ‘Tiger King’ (the creepy Netflix hit series about convicted murder-for-hire zookeeper Joe Exotic, who headed up a three-way “marriage to two men).

Weirdly, one of Piper’s other dads, Jeremy, is also a zookeeper like Joe Exotic whom the other two met through an online dating service. All very “remarkably ordinary and domestic.” Ho-hum.

Neighborhoods, cities and nations are safer, healthier and more prosperous where nuclear families are the norm. But for the sake of social justice and modern progressivism, we are all just supposed to shake our heads politely and keep our alarm about the sexual slippery slope to ourselves. As University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox summarized in a 2020 article reviewing the benefits of two-parent married households for The Atlantic magazine, “sadly, adults who are unrelated to children are much more likely to abuse or neglect them than their own parents are.”

Never mind all the scientific studies showing an elevated risk of child sexual abuse in households where children live with unrelated adults. Never mind the CDC data showing that introducing men unrelated to the children in a family elevates the risk of physical, sexual and emotional abuse of those children by about nine times higher than the rate experienced by children raised in normal, stable nuclear family of married biological parents and their children...

Still more.

 

The Equality Act Makes Women Unequal

It's Inez Feltscher Stepman, who's a very classy babe, at WSJ, "H.R. 5 Erases ‘Sex’ as a Legal Category, with Dire Consequences":

All people are created equal, but Congress is considering a bill that would make some people more equal than others.

H.R. 5, styled the Equality Act, would redefine “sex” under federal civil-rights laws to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” overriding basic biology along with millennia of tradition.

This isn’t only a question of semantics. Nor is it merely an attempt to prohibit employment discrimination against sexual minorities. A 2020 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court already does that.

The Equality Act would go much further by making it illegal to distinguish “identity” from biology and thereby prioritize transgender people over women. By erasing sex as a distinct legal category, the measure threatens to open up female-only spaces and opportunities designed to increase representation for girls to biological men, which can endanger the safety of women and girls.

The Equality Act would threaten the existence of women’s prisons, public-school girls’ locker rooms, and women’s and girls’ sports teams. It would limit freedom of speech, freedom of association, accurate data collection, and scientific inquiry. It would threaten the rights of physicians who doubt the wisdom of performing life-changing, reproduction-limiting procedures, and parents who seek to protect their minor children from such treatment...

The thing is, of course, none of this is a surprise. China Joe's minions, and his far-left Democrat congressional enablers, don't care about the rights of women. They care about power, and they care about ramming unpopular policies down the throats of Americans, all the while pushing massive distractions, like the bogus threat of "white supremacist domestic terrorism," which in turn, justifies the continued deployment of thousands of National Guard troops in D.C., hunkered down behind barricades and barbed wire.

It's really sickening, in fact. But if it's not this piece of legislation, it'll be one of the literally dozens of "executive orders" that will come back to bite Biden in the butt. The border crisis, to take yet another example, just can't be swept away now as "all Trump's fault." The far-left radicals in power, again, have no clue about how devastating their policies are, and they frankly do not care.

The 2022 midterms will be a real reckoning, I'd put money on it. Former President Trump is expected to speak at CPAC this weekend and it's gonna be hella lit. The left is doing everything they can to damage Trump, and that's to say nothing of the 74 million patriots who voted for him, including the larger (and getting larger) number of ethnic minorities (especially in Florida and Texas) who pulled the lever for the red ticket.

I'm not enjoying politics much right now, and I teach this stuff for a living. But it's gonna be pure schadenfreude when the voters' hammer comes down on the heads of idiot Dems in less than two years from now. 

There's more from the beautiful Ms. Stepman, at the link.

'Andrew Sullivan detects anti-gay bigotry: "So you agree not wanting to have sex with someone because they have a vagina is a form of bigotry, right?...'

 At Althouse:

Does genitalia matter? I can see thinking that a person's inner being matters far more than what's on the outside, and that "gender identification" is part of what's on the inside, but when it comes to sexual attraction, we're not required to go solely by what's on the inside, and indeed, if only the inside — the mind — counts, why are we having sexual intercourse at all? How can you say genitalia is irrelevant when what you're talking about is something you do with your genitalia?

More.

 

Abigail Shrier: My Book's Getting Cancelled by Silicon Valley Gender Activists (VIDEO)

She's the author of, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.

At Quillette, Abigail Shrier, "Gender Activists Are Trying to Cancel My Book. Why is Silicon Valley Helping Them?":

*****

The notion that this sudden wave of transitioning among teens is a worrying, ideologically driven phenomenon is hardly a fringe view. Indeed, outside of Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and college campuses, it is a view held by a majority of Americans. There is nothing hateful in suggesting that most teenagers are not in a good position to approve irreversible alterations to their bodies, particularly if they are suffering from trauma, OCD, depression, or any of the other mental-health problems that are comorbid with expressions of dysphoria. And yet, here we are.

The efforts to block my reporting have been legion, starting with staff threats at a publishing house, which quickly reversed its original intention to publish my book. Once I obtained a stalwart publisher, Regnery, Amazon refused to allow that company’s sales team to sponsor ads on its site. (Amazon allows sponsored ads for books that uncritically celebrate medical transition for teenagers).

Because the book tackles an interesting phenomenon, a number of established journalists wanted to review it. The issue of trans-identification has seemed to come out of nowhere with Gen Z, the generation begun in 1995 whose large-scale mental-health crisis already has us so on edge. And the issue has created surprising bedfellows. Religious conservatives are concerned about the trend—but so are lesbians, who look upon the shocking numbers of teen girls transitioning with abject alarm. Many suspect that all this transitioning of girls is effectively euthanizing a generation of young lesbians.

In any case, every major newspaper and legacy magazine summarily turned interested journalists down. Whether they would have reviewed my book favorably or unfavorably, I have no idea—and it doesn’t matter. Kirkus, which reviews 10,000 titles per year, including self-published and obscure works—pretended my book didn’t exist. Its editors, too busy heaping praise on the Trans Teen Survival Guide, When Aiden Became a Brother, Jack (Not Jackie), Rethinking Normal, and of course, Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out.

Alternative media rushed in where legacy media feared to go. Joe Rogan hosted me on his show, and for two hours, we explored why a growing number of researchers believe social contagion is at play when clusters of girls suddenly announce, as if as one, that they are boys. Gender dysphoria has always existed, but until recently, afflicted males almost exclusively. While gender dysphoria has always been vanishingly rare among females, social contagion has not. These are the same high-anxiety, depressive (mostly white) girls who, in previous decades, fell prey to anorexia and bulimia or multiple personality disorder. Now it’s gender dysphoria, sometimes along with some or all of those other conditions. Parents are being presented with the seductive idea of transition as a utopian cure-all... 

*****

And at the Joe Rogan Experience:

The Left is Not What It Claims to Be

It's Paul Godfried, "The Modern Left Is Not Marxist, It's Worse":

*****

Is the current left Marxist? In a provocative commentary, Bill Lind explores this genealogical question, and, unless I’m mistaken, the left and much of its media opposition would second his conclusions. Since Antifa describes itself as Marxist, when it’s not calling itself anarchist, and since leading figures of the Democratic Party, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have certainly not shunned the Marxist label, it would seem today’s left is authentically Marxist.

But, except at its edges, the present left is not what it claims to be. Today’s left has a different origin and orientation from what has been historically understood as Marxist or Marxist-Leninist; and using that term to designate the characteristics of our current left is at best problematic. Neither Marxists nor Marxist-Leninist governments evidenced the cultural radicalism that today’s left expresses every day. Although there have been Communist Party members in Western countries who have been sexual exhibitionists, and even a brief period in Russia after the November 1917 Revolution when free love was allowed, generally communists have been on the conservative side of issues like homosexuality and the questioning of fixed sexual identities. The traditional left would have attributed our LGBT activities to “bourgeois decadence.”

In the Soviet Union and for a long time throughout the Soviet bloc, artistic experimentation was frowned upon, including music of the Second Viennese School’s twelve-tone technique, as well as abstract expressionism. Communist regimes sent gays to labor camps, and communist revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara raged against homosexuality and, in Guevara’s case, blacks.

It is hard to view these Marxist revolutionaries as precursors of the present intersectional left. Indeed, corporate capitalists stand much closer to this force than traditional Marxists do or did. Are the executives at PepsiCo, Citibank, and the NFL, who support Black Lives Matter (BLM) and wish to stamp out opposition from the cultural right, economic revolutionaries yearning for a socialist society? Pardon my skepticism!

Real Marxism has been about socioeconomic contradictions and transformations, not about the need for transgendered restrooms and the abolition of gender roles. Communist parties in Western Europe after World War II vehemently opposed the immigration of cheap labor from abroad, viewing it as an attack on the indigenous workforce. The current left, by contrast, is about open borders and filling Western countries with impoverished Third World populations as an act of contrition for white Christian racism, or as a source of so-called cultural enrichment.

The Soviet regime and Communist parties outside the Soviet Union condemned the Critical Theory philosophy of the Frankfurt School as a distortion of Marxism. One can only imagine what they would have thought of the further evolution of what Lind and others have styled “cultural Marxism.” Lind correctly observes that the Frankfurt School in interwar Germany provided the cradle for this movement, which tried to fuse Freud’s theories about sexual repression with socialist economics. But the result looked much more like a cultural war against reactionary social attitudes than a serious effort to plan a Marxist economy.

After Critical Theory migrated to the U.S. by way of Columbia University in the 1930s, it came to look even less like Marxism and much more like a prelude to our current cultural revolution. Some socialist boilerplate remained attached to this brand of thinking, but it became extraneous to its real message, which is the subversion of what seemed to me as a child in the 1950s to be a normal society.

I am unwilling to concede to cultural Marxists a Marxist pedigree simply because they have claimed that ancestry. Nowadays, media and political celebrities claim all kinds of labels for themselves, and one can easily prove the falseness of most of them. What makes a lesbian feminist on Fox News a “conservative” other than the fact that she appears on a generally Republican channel and claims that she votes for the GOP? What makes a culturally radical commentator on CNN a “liberal” other than the fact that some in high places decided to apply this term to themselves? What does columnist Jonah Goldberg have in common politically or philosophically with Edmund Burke, or for that matter, CNN anchor Jake Tapper with Thomas Jefferson? If I decide to call myself something I am not, it does not become any more true regardless of how much media support I can find to back me up.

I concede to Lind that today’s cultural radicals, who are unfortunately becoming mainstream, are of the left. They are leftists because they are driven by four defining leftist principles or practices. One is globalism or universalism, which in the case of the current left takes the form of a boundless revulsion for Western Christian society and its majority white population. The left in its essence denies particularity and the sanctity of local and national traditions.

The second quintessentially leftist principle that informs our cultural revolutionaries is the worship of equality as the highest value. One can easily imagine non-leftists recognizing some limited good in the idea of equality, for example, granting legal equality to all authorized citizens or subjects of a state. But the left is fixated on equality and seeks to harness political and educational power to obliterate human distinctions.

The third leftist principle or practice is the call for expansions of what they call human rights, since the historically grounded natural rights do not advance equality or “human dignity,” by which they mean the extinction of social and historical distinctions. This inverts Aristotle’s sage advice at the beginning of Book Four of the Politics, that laws (nomoi) should fit specific governments (politeiai). The leftist position is exactly the opposite: Long established customs and conventions should give way to what journalists and academics deem conducive to greater equality.

A fourth leftist belief concerns the putative fluidity and malleability of human nature, seen for example in the insistence that all gender identities are subject to change. Public administrators and courts must defend our right to redefine our gender whenever we want; and others should then be required to treat us in accordance with our changing gender identity. This last leftist belief stands in striking contrast to the conservative notion that human identities are rooted in tradition and nature. Perhaps nowhere more than in this emphasis on gender fluidity do we behold the most radical form of the left, perhaps in an even more grotesque manifestation than in such harebrained schemes as nationalizing the economy...

*****

Still more at that link. 

Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Rules Against Norman Varner in 'Preferred Prounouns' Transgender Case

At the Hill, "Judge: Referring to transgender people by chosen pronouns 'courtesy,' not law."

And from Vodkapundit, at Instapundit, "MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Sanity at Last: Court Refuses to Kowtow to Personal Pronouns Like ‘Xemself, Faerself’":

On Wednesday, a panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals refused a male prisoner's motion that the name on his order of confinement be changed and that he be addressed by female pronouns on account of his female gender identity. The ruling on personal pronouns sets an important precedent for free speech, judicial impartiality, and the basic meaning of pronouns against the transgender movement's bastardization of language.

The case involves Norman Varner, a federal prisoner who pleaded guilty in 2012 to attempted receipt of child pornography and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, partly due to his previous conviction on child pornography and his failure to register as a sex offender. In 2015, he claimed to have transitioned to being female, and asked to be referred to as "Kathrine Nicole Jett."

A lower court had denied his motion and he appealed. The 5th Circuit panel ruled that the lower court lacked jurisdiction to consider the request because Varner's motion was not authorized by any statute...

Still more.

Leave Your Pronouns!

At the door, that is.

It's Boy George, of Culture Club fame, at Instapundit, "WHEN YOUR GENDER-BLENDING CAMPAIGN HAS LOST BOY GEORGE."

And Twitchy, "Does he really want to hurt SJWs? Boy George wants everyone to ‘leave your pronouns at the door!’"

Leave your pronoun's at the door!

— Boy George (@BoyGeorge) January 6, 2020

BONUS: Flashback to 1995, at NYT, "Boy George: Switching Pronouns."

Jonathan Yaniv's Human Rights Case

Jonathan Yaniv is the tranny "Jessica" Yaniv, and he's the one who's been able to get feminists kicked off Twitter, Lindsey Shepherd most recently. Also Meghan Murphy, who covers the latest in the scandal at Feminist Current.

See, "Women warned you: Yaniv’s human rights case is the inevitable result of gender identity ideology: Women warned the media, politicians, activists, and the public about the repercussions of gender identity ideology and legislation, and now that those repercussions are being played out in real time, those warned remain silent."

The brilliant & brave Meghan Murphy on the JY case - and the publication ban has been lifted! It's Jessica Yaniv, @trustednerd, who wants Canadian human-rights law to be used to force unwilling women to wax her testicles, on pain of fines & public shaming https://t.co/5m8Z1G3bf3

— Helen Joyce (@HJJoyceEcon) July 18, 2019