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Chris Rufo Vs Drag Queen Story Hour Groomers

They want you to think it's innocent, family-friendly fun. In fact, it's about annihilating traditional gender roles and family forms
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I am sure that many of you are tired of reading me griping about the trans phenomenon, and woke totalitarianism, but I really do believe it is an extraordinarily important thing. I am convinced that it is something very, very deep and destructive, in ways of which most people aren't aware. I am haunted by something I heard an academic who studies family and culture say back in 2015: that if we lose the gender binary, we are going to lose our civilization, because so much depends on it -- things we have never had to think about, because nobody has ever challenged this most basic fact of biology.

Well, we now have most institutions in Western life, especially the news and entertainment media, having given themselves over to promoting this decadent ideology. We even had the President of the United States inviting a mentally ill narcissist to the White House to share with him the party line:

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The President of the United States now advocates a position that would have been literally unthinkable for a man in his position a decade ago. In fact, it was only ten years ago that President Obama affirmed that he supports same-sex marriage. Now the Democratic POTUS wants the law to allow minors to get cross-sex hormones and mutilating surgeries, for the sake of trans.

Christopher Rufo has a fantastic, must-read essay about how Drag Queen Story Hour really is all about grooming children to embrace genderfluidity and queerness. If you read nothing else today, make it this piece. He demolishes claims that DQSH is just good clean fun. Excerpts:

The drag queen might appear as a comic figure, but he carries an utterly serious message: the deconstruction of sex, the reconstruction of child sexuality, and the subversion of middle-class family life. The ideology that drives this movement was born in the sex dungeons of San Francisco and incubated in the academy. It is now being transmitted, with official state support, in a number of public libraries and schools across the United States. By excavating the foundations of this ideology and sifting through the literature of its activists, parents and citizens can finally understand the new sexual politics and formulate a strategy for resisting it.

You think that's alarmist? You don't know what you're talking about. Read on:

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Start with queer theory, the academic discipline born in 1984 with the publication of Gayle S. Rubin’s essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” Beginning in the late 1970s, Rubin, a lesbian writer and activist, had immersed herself in the subcultures of leather, bondage, orgies, fisting, and sado-masochism in San Francisco, migrating through an ephemeral network of BDSM (bondage, domination, sadomasochism) clubs, literary societies, and New Age spiritualist gatherings. In “Thinking Sex,” Rubin sought to reconcile her experiences in the sexual underworld with the broader forces of American society. Following the work of the French theorist Michel Foucault, Rubin sought to expose the power dynamics that shaped and repressed human sexual experience.

... Where does this process end? At its logical conclusion: the abolition of restrictions on the behavior at the bottom end of the moral spectrum—pedophilia. Though she uses euphemisms such as “boylovers” and “men who love underaged youth,” Rubin makes her case clearly and emphatically. In long passages throughout “Thinking Sex,” Rubin denounces fears of child sex abuse as “erotic hysteria,” rails against anti–child pornography laws, and argues for legalizing and normalizing the behavior of “those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.” These men are not deviants, but victims, in Rubin’s telling. “Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation,” she explains. 

Rufo follows the chronology of the DQSH phenomenon through a couple of key figures, saying that queer theory reaches its subversive culmination in the drag phenomenon:

The goal of drag, following the themes of Butler and Rubin, is to obliterate stable conceptions of gender through performativity and to rehabilitate the bottom of the sexual hierarchy through the elevation of the marginal. “The act of paying a dominant/domineering woman, a male supplicant, a hapless wage slave, or a boy allows the audience member to temporarily embody one or more of a number of ‘bad/unnatural’ social positions, for instance the pedophile, the closeted gay chickenhawk, the predatory female cougar, the sugar daddy or momma, even the sexualized youth/child themselves,” Hankins writes. And the discipline of “genderfuck” takes it a step even beyond adult–child sex. As Hankins describes, this style of performance “foregrounds tropes of primitivism and degeneracy as tools of protest and liberation” and seeks to subvert taboos against “pedophilia, necrophilia, erotic object fetishism, and human–animal sex.” These performances constitute the end of the line: the culmination of more than a century’s work, from the silk-and-satin drag balls to the hyper-cerebral politics of deconstruction to the annihilation of traditional notions of sex.

We finally reach a couple of practical queer theorists who wrote a book about "drag pedagogy," explaining how the seemingly innocent pastime of drag for children in fact serves to radically unsettle traditional notions of sexuality and gender:

Kornstein also published the manifesto for the movement, “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood,” with coauthor Harper Keenan, a female-to-male transgender queer theorist at the University of British Columbia. With citations to Foucault and Butler, the essay begins by applying queer theory’s basic premise of social constructivism and heteronormativity to the education system. “The professional vision of educators is often shaped to reproduce the state’s normative vision of its ideal citizenry. In effect, schooling functions as a way to straighten the child into a kind of captive alignment with the current parameters of that vision,” Kornstein and Keenan write. “To state it plainly, within the historical context of the USA and Western Europe, the institutional management of gender has been used as a way of maintaining racist and capitalist modes of (re)production.”

To disrupt this dynamic, the authors propose a new teaching method, “drag pedagogy,” as a way of stimulating the “queer imagination,” teaching kids “how to live queerly,” and “bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children.” As Kornstein and Keenan explain, this is an intellectual and political project that requires drag queens and activists to work toward undermining traditional notions of sexuality, replacing the biological family with the ideological family, and arousing transgressive sexual desires in young children. “Building in part from queer theory and trans studies, queer and trans pedagogies seek to actively destabilize the normative function of schooling through transformative education,” they write. “This is a fundamentally different orientation than movements towards the inclusion or assimilation of LGBT people into the existing structures of school and society.”

Read it all. This is not innocent, the drag phenomenon. It is grooming. They perfectly well know it, and are lying to us. They don't care what they destroy. This is all pre-totalitarian decadence. From Live Not By Lies, this reflection on how sexual radicalism was a forerunner of Soviet totalitarianism:

The post-World War I generation of writers and artists were marked by their embrace and celebration of anti-cultural philosophies and acts as a way of demonstrating contempt for established hierarchies, institutions, and ways of thinking. Arendt [in The Origins Of Totalitarianism -- RD] said of some writers who glorified the will to power, “They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade.”

Her point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable intellectual theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed themselves in what is basest in human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation. Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality. Arendt wrote:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

Regarding transgressive sexuality as a social good was not an innovation of the sexual revolution. Like the contemporary West, late imperial Russia was also awash in what historian James Billington called “a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier Russian culture.” Among the social and intellectual elite, sexual adventurism, celebrations of perversion, and all manner of sensuality was common. And not just among the elites: the laboring masses, alone in the city, with no church to bind their consciences with guilt, or village gossips to shame them, found comfort in sex.

The end of official censorship after the 1905 uprising opened the floodgates to erotic literature, which found renewal in sexual passion. “The sensualism of the age was in a very intimate sense demonic,” Billington writes, detailing how the figure of Satan became a Romantic hero for artists and musicians. They admired the diabolic willingness to stop at nothing to satisfy one’s desires and to exercise one’s will.


The liberal elites and their COC (Controlled Opposition Conservatives) fellow travelers within institutions, don't care that they are destroying the capacity of our civilization to reproduce itself. They revel in transgression for the sake of transgression. When even the POTUS gives a respectful audience to that pervy flibbertigibbet Dylan Mulvaney, who calls a woman's vagina the "Barbie pouch," he doesn't elevate trans, but takes the presidency down into the Weimar America gutter. But this is where we are.

They really are coming after your kids. Chris Rufo has the receipts. Read him, and get busy defending kids in your town. Do you know if your kids' teachers are feeding them this garbage? You had better make it your business to find out.

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Bogdán Emil
Bogdán Emil
"inviting a mentally ill narcissist to the White House "

Throwing sharp and colorful epithets at annoying people is a weakness all of us have. Another weakness most of us have: repeating ourselves. So let me be utterly weak this morning, and repeat myself: casually diagnosing people with various kinds of mental illness is a good bit of Leftist fun, that's all. It means little, it's a slur, and it's Leftist because it's an invocation of pure materialistic determinism: you're mental, your brain is addled, there's nothing you can do, shut up and take some chemicals. This is how liberals tend to insult each other, usually.

Rod lovingly goes on to prove my point by describing a surprisingly coherent, logical, rational, calculated strategy, philosophically underpinned and argued for decades. Some mental illness, huh? I suppose studying Foucault and other heavyweights can all be put under the umbrella of "mental illness" and "narcissism," but in that case, I return to my earlier response about this kind of slur: illness demands healing, not mockery. So, if they're ill, then act like they're ill, and try to heal them. However, they're not ill. Instead, they're under the spell of a certain way of thinking, a coherent system of thought, which they seek to manifest with conscious purpose:

"This is not innocent, the drag phenomenon. It is grooming. They perfectly well know it, and are lying to us. They don't care what they destroy."

I agree, and it sure as hell doesn't sound like mental illness. I don't know what it is, precisely (the Liberal yearning for unconditional Oneness?) but mental illness is a valid defense in court, because people who are genuinely mentally ill can't help it, their will is compromised. Those people are a small minority.

Meanwhile, "that pervy flibbertigibbet Dylan Mulvaney" may well be a mentally ill narcissist in the loosest sense, Rod, we all know what you mean, it's the street vernacular. However, instead of nit-picking, I agree far more with your actual and substantial point: "that pervy flibbertigibbet Dylan Mulvaney" (I like this kind of Right-wing slur) is probably not mentally ill at all, and I'm no psychiatrist, but he definitely seems full of himself, and also, most importantly: he knows what he's doing. He might even know why.

Trans people who de-transitioned are proof that the phenomena is not mental illness. There's no "cure." This is a coherent ideology that people follow, simply because they're lost, they're looking for something. You can call them mentally ill jokingly, but that's all it is, a leftist joke. In reality, these are choices that people are making. And yes, they are responsible.

And yes, they can make different choices.
schedule 1 year ago
    Peter Kurilecz
    Peter Kurilecz
    "Trans people who de-transitioned are proof that the phenomena is not mental illness" those that transitioned have pointed out that none of the medical people they talked to thought of putting them through counseling to determine what was the underlying reason for their gender dysphoria. Lately the UK NHS has put forth a plan that those under 18 must go through extensive counseling. This is much like what happened with anorexia in the 70s and 80s
    I agree that the term "mentally ill" must be overbroad but what other term would you use
    schedule 1 year ago
    Bogdán Emil
    Bogdán Emil
    Peter Kurilecz:

    I wouldn't use any term, except in the way Rod is using it, as an epithet meant to get under the other guy's skin. I call people and ideas "insane" all the time, but I don't mean it literally, it's just how we talk.

    More seriously, what's the term for people who disagree with you, who see the world differently?

    There is no term for them. They're other people. They sincerely believe whatever they believe. They have reasons and justifications, they have an architecture of ideas.

    They're not mentally ill, they just believe different things than you, they believe in the Hermaphrodite as a sacred figure -- whatever strangeness they claim as true, you may freely call it mental illness, but then, what about all the mysterious and strange things that you believe, that all of us believe?

    The trans phenomenon arriving on the wings of ultra-liberal wokism has been correctly identified as a pseudo-religion, just one out of many possible answers to a universal, legitimate human yearning.
    It's a bad answer.

    But the proper response to false religions and false ideas isn't to call them "mental illness," but to offer true religion and true ideas instead, or at least better religion, and better ideas. I recommend starting with the basics: for example, Free Will.
    schedule 1 year ago
Lloyd Conway
Lloyd Conway
Last year I substitute taught a few times in a local public school. Most of the time when I do this, I don't see anything out of the ordinary. However, in the school district in question, a new tampon dispenser appeared in the men's bathroom that hadn't been there previously, and when I asked a class of 22 first graders to introduce themselves, one little girl, with a feminine name, stated that she 'was a real boy,' and a boy, with a masculine name, said he 'was a boy when he came out of his Mommy's tummy but wasn't now.' Six year olds! I no longer sub in that district. (Please note that the foregoing was an exception, not the rule, to what I see in public schools.) There is something going on, surely, and we will find out next week if enough people are alarmed about it to flip school board races in the district in question.
schedule 1 year ago