Antifa Doesn't Really Care About "Transgender Rights" or Anything Else
They just want an excuse to beat people up
This year, everybody’s favorite anarchists celebrated America’s birthday the only way they know how: by beating up people who disagree with them.
Last week you might’ve seen the story about the Los Angeles woman at an upscale spa who complained about a “trans woman” walking around with his dick out. Get this: Women don’t really want to see that at the spa. Go figure!
(Note to trans people: Other human beings actually exist and aren’t just there to reinforce your delusions about yourself.)
There was a protest at the spa on Saturday, and a bunch of angry kids in black bloc decided to take the opportunity to run around punching people.
Seems pretty clear-cut, right? It’s a mob of black-clad freaks screaming at people through bullhorns and physically assaulting anybody they decide they don’t like. They’re the aggressors. They’re wrong on the facts, and what they’re doing is wrong.
But here’s the typical framing of this sort of thing in liberal media whenever Antifa’s violence draws national attention, courtesy of the faceless drones at Twitter who type up the trending topic summaries:
Men exposing their genitals to women and girls = “transgender rights”?
Just think about the mental gymnastics required to justify this nonsense: Men are evil, unless they identify as women, in which case their rights supersede those of genetic females, who are bigots for not wanting to see naked men, who are evil, unless they identify as women, in which case...
Everyday people of all races went to that spa to peacefully protest laws allowing men to expose themselves to women. Those protesters are the villains now. And the screaming, feral children who harassed and assaulted the protesters without provocation are the heroes. That’s what you need to tell yourself in order to be a leftist.
Men are now beating up women on the streets of LA because the women want to be protected from predatory men. It’s the most misogynistic thing I’ve ever seen. And it’s sanctioned by the press and all the other lefties because they don’t want to be seen as “transphobic.”
Those people protesting that spa had the right to express their opinion. If you want to argue with them, even yell at them, you have the right to do that. That’s what this whole weekend is all about. But you do not have the right to surround them in a shrieking mob, steal their property, and beat them up.
And responding to anybody who dares to say so by blurting out “Nazi” and “fascist” isn’t doing you any favors either. Come up with some new material, kids.
On a related note: A few hundred miles northwest of LA, San Francisco District Attorney (and red-diaper baby) Chesa Boudin is requiring everyone in his office to use criminal suspects’ preferred pronouns. Because after all, they’re the real victims. Being imprisoned just because you did something wrong is bad enough, but just imagine the additional indignity of being misgendered and deadnamed. Systemic transphobia!
There’s no way criminals will abuse this to their advantage. After all, why would they?
Let this be a warning to you, dear reader: If you get robbed and beaten in San Francisco, you’d better hope the prosecutor doesn’t acknowledge human biology.
Great news for Antifa!
So, What Else Is Going On?
The ice cream media are at it again:
Just imagine, folks: two scoops. Not one, but two! Congratulations, CBS News. Can a Pulitzer be far behind?
Hey, wait a minute… didn’t the last guy get in trouble for having two scoops of ice cream? Well, whatever.
Team Biden’s strategy on dealing with the easily distracted press is becoming clear: Just keep an ice cream cone in Joe’s hand at all times.
“Mr. President, what can you tell us about these allegations of--”
“Sorry, can’t talk, got this ice cream.”
“Ooooohhh, what flavor?”
My new friend Nick came up with the perfect name for this brand of “journalism”:
Apropos of nothing, craving sweets can be a sign of dementia. Shrug emoji!
Andrew Cuomo’s daughter just came out as a demisexual. If you don’t know what that means, it doesn’t matter. Oddly enough, though, her father is also demisexual. When he sees women in da office he wants to have sex with, he grabs dem.
This July 4th, I hope you did as you were told.
I love July 4th in principle, and I believe it’s the most important date in the history of western civilization, but man, do I hate fireworks. Not for what they represent, but because of all the damn noise.
It’s been a long time since I had a panic attack (they were really bad for a while after I was crippled 11 years ago), but all the nearby explosions really triggered one yesterday. Shakiness, shortness of breath, heart racing, eyes can barely focus, feel “exposed” even indoors, etc. Then hypervigilance, then sheer exhaustion. Whenever it happens, I just want to jump out of my skin.
It made me want to drink, but I didn’t. 1,282 days sober. I just put in some earplugs and cranked up my white noise app and rode it out.
I’m okay now, but it sucks and it’s part of my life so I’m writing it down. If you hate fireworks too, we can be patriotic-but-fireworks-hating friends. We’ll call ourselves No-Sparkle Motion.
(And no, I’m not telling anybody not to celebrate the 4th. Do what you want, I’m not stopping you. I’m not calling for a ban. I’m just telling you where I’m at.)
Housekeeping
This newsletter is a one-man show. I don’t have any editors checking my work, so every day I read and reread and rewrite what I’ve written, over and over, until the post auto-publishes at noon. A deadline is a deadline. I started off my “career” as a proofreader, and I was a book editor for several years, so I take clean copy very seriously.
But sometimes a typo slips through the cracks. Even after I fix it in the web version, it’s too late to fix the version that was e-mailed to subscribers.
This typo, from Friday’s newsletter, would have me tearing my hair out if I had any left:
Dammit. Dammit!! AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHH
See, that’s why a spellchecker isn’t enough. Nor is my dumb brain.
Well, look, I’m doing my best here. I may not write well, but I do try to write legibly. No matter how hard I try, though, I won’t always get everything rihgt.
Another housekeeping item: The other day I got a question about Substack’s footnote feature.1 See? It’s easy!
Mainly I just think footnotes are funny. One of these days I need to get around to finishing Infinite Jest…
Over at the official Substack blog, Substack co-founder Chris Best sums up what makes this platform different. Instead of the ad-based model used by most of the internet, which relies on getting clicks by any means necessary, the subscriber-based model takes away the perverse incentives that are ruining our lives:
“With money, you know exactly what you’re paying and to whom, and you can cancel payments when you want. Transactions become transparent, and incentives become properly aligned. While platforms that depend on ad sales must harvest attention any way they can, platforms that depend on people’s willingness to pay must foster trust and satisfaction. Writers succeed only if readers are happy, and in turn platforms succeed only if writers are happy. In this world, users are finally at the table rather than on the menu.”
Speaking as someone who has labored on the web for over a decade, I can tell you that grinding away for clicks just makes everybody miserable. Forcing people to file posts multiple times a day makes it almost impossible to write anything that’s accurate or even makes sense. SEO is a malignancy. The whole system is designed to make you click on garbage, which makes you angry and frustrated. And the more numbed you are to such cheap attention-getting tricks, the more desperate these ploys become. The higher your tolerance, the more dope you need.
If a post gets a lot of eyeballs, it’s good. It doesn’t need to be well-written. It doesn’t even need to be true. It just needs to put money in the bosses’ pockets. If you can’t do that, you’re of no use to them.
No wonder everybody’s burned out.
It remains to be seen whether Substack will cure what’s ailing the internet, but I can tell you I’m really enjoying this newsletter. The last few weeks have felt like my early blogging days, except now I’m starting to get paid. (Not a living wage, but it’s a good start.) I hope you beautiful people who’ve subscribed are enjoying it too, so you’ll keep paying me.
And on that note, thanks for reading my newsletter, and I hope you appreciate my hard work on a federal holiday. The government can take a break, but I gotta keep grinding to help fund it!
This is probably my last chance to make a living with my writing, and I can’t do it without your help. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do. And then please click the Share button and tell everybody you know how great this newsletter is. Also, leave a comment if you want.2
It might seem awkward at first, especially when there are a bunch of annoying footnotes, but you don’t need to keep scrolling up and down and losing your place. Just go over to the left of this paragraph, click the number, and it takes you back to where you were in the main text.
It turns out that when you make the comments subscriber-only, you weed out most of the commenters because they tend to be people who hate you. But you’re also not desperate for clicks in the first place, so you don’t need the crybabies who do nothing but complain about every single thing you say. So it all evens out.
Last Friday I messaged someone at work “ You no what? I’m going to post this elsewhere” homophones are killing me.
I am thoroughly enjoying the new format, not just for Jim Treacher’s substack subscription, but for the other writers that I follow and have moved to substack. There is no website clutter and distractions, but the opinions of the writers are less inhibited which makes for a more fulfilling experience. I look forward to my daily delivery.