November 10, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM THE MARGARET DUMONT PARTY: Rich Lowry writes that “Trans Moralism Is Killing the Democrats.”

This is what happened on trans issues in the election. Donald Trump’s “she’s for they/them” attack ad was the most effective and consequential political spot of this century.

After writing up “Progressive” Jay Michaelson’s performative struggle-session freakout on CNN when “Republican strategist Shermichael Singleton said a lot of families don’t think that boys should play girls’ sports,” which we mentioned yesterday, Lowry provides additional examples:

The longtime chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, Gilberto Hinojosa, just got defenestrated at least in part for daring to say the obvious on the trans issues.

“You can support transgender rights up and down all the categories where the issue comes up, or you can understand that there’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support,” he said in an election postmortem.

He’d have been better off saying that the party should in the future call for the official end of the gender binary, by violence if necessary.

* * * * * * * * *

A top aide to Democratic representative Seth Moulton resigned after the congressman had the temerity to say that his party may have gone too far on the trans stuff. “I have two little girls,” he said. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Well, he’s supposed to be afraid for a reason.

The co-chair of the Bay State Stonewall Democrats said his remarks were “harmful to the queer community.” Mass Equality called him out for using the terms “male or formerly male,” which, of course, are “harmful and factually inaccurate.” And so it went.

The Left’s moralistic browbeating may succeed in reinforcing the trans orthodoxy among its own, despite the bitter electoral consequences. As we learned last Tuesday, though, the rest of the country won’t play by these poisonously stupid and illiberal rules, nor should it.

That was the game the DNC-MSM tried to play for years by attempting to toss the phrase “illegal immigration” down the memory hole amongst polite company, until June, when Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, decided he wasn’t going to play along on MSNBC when confronted by former Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris flack Symone Sanders-Townsend: “That’s Sweet. They’re illegal aliens.”

As one of the characters working on the ever-shrinking “Newspeak Dictionary” in Orwell’s 1984 said about his job, “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words… Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” Which in the modern left’s fantasies means not voting for Republicans, ever. And when the voters have temerity not to follow the Inner Party’s rules, as James Piereson writes, their operatives with bylines lash out at them: Democrats and never-Trumpers blame the voters.

Jill Filipovic, a feminist author and columnist: “In the coming days there’s gonna be a lot of opining about what the Harris campaign did wrong, but this election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America.”

Peter Wehner, a fellow at the Trinity Forum: “This election was a CAT scan on the American people, and as difficult as it is to say, as hard as it is to name, what it revealed, at least in part, is a frightening affinity for a man of borderless corruption. Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.”

George T. Conway, a never-Trumper: “America did this to itself. And now we must all suffer through it.”

Jonathan Last, of The Bulwark: “Joe Biden was given the choice of betting liberal democracy on structures and the levers of power, or on the innate goodness of the American people. He put his entire chip stack on the American people and lost.”

William Kristol, also of The Bulwark: “The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open. . . . After everything . . . the American people liked what they saw [in Trump]. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.”

David Frum, an author and columnist for The Atlantic: “Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt.

Yes David, but we eventually got through the Obama years just fine. Speaking of whom:

As he’s been doing throughout the past week, allow Scott Jennings to put things neatly into perspective: ‘Fainting Party:’ Scott Jennings Advising the Democrats About Why They Suck Is Hilariously Brutal (Watch).

Exit quote: “Even Van Jones laughed at that.”

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll