We Hunted The Mammoth
It was apparently Twitter’s suspension of the Babylon Bee for transphobia that inspired billionaire manbaby Elon Musk to put in a bid for the social media company in the first place. Now Musk has completed his mission at Twitter, such as it was, announcing today that he has restored the account of the terminally unfunny “satire” site, as well as that of Canadian fusspot psychologist Jordan Peterson, who had also been suspended for a transphobic tweet.
The rhetoric of the anti-trans movement — and Republican politicians — is getting more apocalyptic and eliminationist by the day. And anti-trans violence is getting worse. Last week, a man in Tulsa, Oklahoma, firebombed a donut shop after it held a drag event.
Bounding into Comics, one of the more boneheaded of the culture war blogs, which routinely blasts what it sees as excessive “wokeness” in comic books and films, has turned its attention to the latest comic book version of Star Trek, demonstrating in the process that it has completely missed the point of the whole franchise.
Less than a week away from the midterm elections, and things are looking dire for the Democrats — who could lose both House and Senate in a possible “red wave.” And if the Dems lose on both a national and a state and local level, things could be even more dire for trans people and their allies, who face a plethora of bills that could curtail their rights to free speech and, some warn, possibly even their rights to live as trans in public.
I get mail, some of it nice, some of it not so nice. And people try to leave comments that are insipid or vile, which I don’t let through moderation.
But once in a while, I like to share some of these with you all because they are quite special in their own way.
Last night, Elon Musk, the new Chief Twit, tweeted that under his reign, “comedy is now legal on Twitter.” He did this after reports that his Twitter takeover had encouraged a nearly 500% increase in the use of the n-word on Twitter, as fans expecting looser rules tried out the limits of Musk’s “free speech absolutism” to see how many times they could use the word “n*gger” in a tweet.
Even Freud, as obsessed as he was with the darkest aspects of human desire, would have an aneurysm reading through the posts on Incels.is.
In a Livestream yesterday, Christian hate preacher Greg Locke told his followers that pronouns like the singular “they” and “them” are “demonic.”
When the Federalist teased its essay “We Need To Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives” on Twitter on Thursday, some people, including myself, joked that the new word they were looking for was probably “fascists.” This turns out to be not much of a joke, as the essay, by Federalist senior editor John Daniel Davidson, preaches a revanchist authoritarianism that in many ways resembles classical fascism.
The “moral panic” over drag shows seems to have reached a disturbing inflection point. 33 GOP House members have just introduced a federal “Don’t Say Gay, Don’t Say Trans” bill that could ban institutions getting federal funding from hosting drag shows or making books featuring gay people available to children.