A friend told me recently about a confrontation she had at age 12 with a bully. She was new to her school and the bully, with some grinning hangers-on, approached her on her first day.
As they shook hands, the bully wrenched my friend’s arm violently and painfully downward. Though she was smaller in stature than her attacker, my friend responded by slapping the bully’s face. The bigger girl’s cheeks flushed and her eyes brimmed with tears. Then, supported by her gobsmacked sidekicks, she went complaining to their teacher. My friend was rebuked for her violence.
The moral inversion effected by the mean-girl gang against someone defending herself is like the one being attempted every day by gender activists and their media acolytes. They are trying to wrench our culture aggressively toward acceptance of a baneful ideology, but they squawk as though wronged when they meet resistance. As a result, they’re commonly known by the nickname “crybullies.”
Their aim is to force parents, officials, and people at every other level of society to normalize child sexualization and gender reassignment. It’s part of their sub-Marxist effort to destroy traditional families. Yet when parents, officials, and others push back, the gender militants snivel that their opponents are overweening bigots.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) Parental Rights in Education Act, for example, has been dishonestly assailed as a tyrannical “Don’t Say Gay” law. What it actually does is prevent lessons about sexual orientation and other matters of gender from being taught to children under fourth grade. It takes the reasonable view that children aged 9 and under should be shielded from such stuff. But the Left hates being stopped from using the aegis of education to foist arcane, confusing, controversial theories about sex on society’s most vulnerable members.
The radicals’ gender education agenda looks like what it is — an effort to catch minors early and convert them to an understanding of sexual orientation and gender fluidity at odds with traditional values, natural beliefs, and, most importantly, the truth. It is effective. There has been a massive increase in the number of schoolchildren identifying as “gender nonconforming,” which is almost certainly due to temporary and innocent perplexity among boys and girls subjected to activist misdirection.
A random sampling of headlines offers a glimpse of how radicals and their handmaidens invert moral positions in the cultural battle. The Human Rights Campaign, an activist group, boasted last year of its efforts to “defeat Tennessee’s slate of hate”; UCLA’s school of law claims “the recent slate of anti-LGBT law in the US signifies an existential threat to democracy”; NBC refers to 240 pieces of legislation as “anti-LGBTQ bills.”
This is straight out of the lexicon developed in 50 years of dispute over abortion, in which both sides insist they’re pro-something (pro-choice or pro-life) rather than anti-anything, which sounds less appealing. Like other left-leaning outlets, NBC also describes the laws as “targeting” transgender people, a word choice suggesting radical activists are innocent creatures being hunted. It is ordinary people who are the haters.
This is a remorseless campaign to gaslight Americans into doubting the merits and even the coherence of the values and norms handed down to them through generations. They are being told it is morally wrong to believe what they see with their eyes and, with every nerve in their bodies, want to defend.
President Joe Biden and the Democrats have got themselves on the wrong side of this issue but were rescued from dire midterm election consequences last month only because voters decided that crazy Trumpian candidates peddling election fantasies had to be dealt with first. But that doesn’t mean ordinary people are not fed up with the crybullies and their societal destruction.
The Republican Party, which for years has been aligning itself with ordinary people who feel ignored and scorned by an arrogant governing class, can take advantage of this, but only if the GOP stops picking candidates whom voters won’t accept. Picking dishonest election whiners on the Right will do nothing but cede power to Biden and the crybullies of the Left.
A new conservative base is being cemented in place by economic, strategic, and cultural disquiet. Despite the surface message of the GOP’s disappointing midterm election results, the Left is alienating a great mass of sensible swing voters (which is why there is so much remedial rhetoric from Democrats about being on the side of ordinary people).
Indeed, cultural radicals are pushing middle-class suburbanites into following blue-collar workers across the partisan divide and are inadvertently helping create a new coalition — one in which people of all political, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds can find common ground thanks to a very basic truth: Men are still men, women are still women, and efforts to deny and distort this biological reality are doing much more harm than good.
