#National Conservatism

[yohann72xp]

[subtile-jagden]

Konservativ sein, ist nicht ein Leben aus dem, was gestern war, sondern ein Leben aus dem, was ewig gilt.

[xtruss]

The Growing Peril of National Conservatism! It’s Dangerous and It’s Spreading. Liberals Need to Find a Way to Stop It

— February 15th 2024 | Leader | The Right

Image Credit: Pete Ryan

In the 1980s Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher built a new conservatism around markets and freedom. Today Donald Trump, Viktor Orban and a motley crew of Western politicians have demolished that orthodoxy, constructing in its place a statist, “anti-woke” conservatism that puts national sovereignty before the individual. These national conservatives are increasingly part of a global movement with its own networks of thinkers and leaders bound by a common ideology. They sense that they own conservatism now—and they may be right.

Despite its name, national conservatism could not be more different from the ideas of Reagan and Thatcher. Rather than being sceptical of big government, national conservatives think ordinary people are beset by impersonal global forces and that the state is their saviour. Unlike Reagan and Thatcher, they hate pooling sovereignty in multilateral organisations, they suspect free markets of being rigged by the elites and they are hostile to migration. They despise pluralism, especially the multicultural sort. National conservatives are obsessed with dismantling institutions they think are tainted by wokeness and globalism.

Instead of a sunny belief in progress, national conservatives are seized by declinism. William Buckley, a thinker of the old school, once quipped that “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling stop.” By comparison, national conservatives are revolutionaries. They do not see the West as the shining city on the hill, but as Rome before the fall—decadent, depraved and about to collapse amid a barbarian invasion. Not content with resisting progress, they also want to destroy classical liberalism.

Some people expect all this to blow over. National conservatives are too incoherent to pose a threat, they say. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, supports Ukraine; Mr Orban has a soft spot for Russia. The Polish Law and Justice party (pis) is anti-gay; in France Marine Le Pen is permissive. Besides, the obsession with national sovereignty would make people worse off, as trade collapses, economic growth stalls and civil rights are curtailed. Voters would surely choose to restore the world liberalism made.

That view is unforgivably complacent. National conservatism is the politics of grievance: if policies lead to bad outcomes, its leaders will shift the blame onto globalists and immigrants and claim this only proves how much is wrong with the world. For all their contradictions, national conservatives have been able to unite around their hostility towards common enemies, including migrants (especially Muslims), globalists and all their supposed abettors. Nine months before America’s election, Mr Trump is already undermining nato.

National conservatives also deserve to be taken seriously because of their electoral prospects. Mr Trump is leading the polls in America. The far right is expected to do well in European parliamentary elections in June. In Germany in December the hard-right Alternative for Germany hit a record high of 23% in polls. Anticipating a lost election for Rishi Sunak, stridently pro-Brexit and anti-migration Tories are plotting to take over the party. In 2027 Ms Le Pen could well become France’s president.

And nationalist conservatives matter because when they succeed in winning office everything changes. By setting out to capture state institutions, including courts, universities and the independent press, they cement their grip on power. That is what Mr Orban’s Fidesz party has done in Hungary. In America Mr Trump has been explicit about his autocratic designs. The people working for him have drawn up policy documents that set out a programme to capture the federal bureaucracy. Once institutions have been weakened, it can be hard to restore them. In Poland pis had the same agenda, before it was ousted in elections last year. The centre-right coalition that defeated it is now struggling to assert control.

How, then, should old-style conservatives and classical liberals deal with national conservatism? One answer is to take people’s legitimate grievances seriously. The citizens of many Western countries see illegal migration as a source of disorder and a drain on the public purse. They worry that their children will grow up to be poorer than they are. They are anxious about losing their jobs to new technology. They believe that institutions such as universities and the press have been captured by hostile, illiberal, left-leaning elites. They see the globalists who have thrived in recent decades as members of a self-serving, arrogant caste who like to believe that they rose to the top in a meritocracy when, in reality, their success was inherited.

These complaints have their merits, and sneering at them only confirms how out of touch elites have become. Instead, liberals and old-style conservatives need policies to deal with them. Legal migration is easier if the illegal sort is curbed. Restrictive planning rules price young people out of the housing market. Closed shops need busting apart. To have the truly open society they claim to want, liberals must press for elite intellectual institutions—the top businesses, newspapers and universities—to embody principles of liberalism instead of succumbing to censorship and groupthink. For all that the illiberal left and the illiberal right are mortal enemies, their high-octane rows over wokeness are mutually sustaining.

To diminish the national conservative fear that people’s way of life is under threat, liberals also need to stake their claim to some of their opponents’ ideas. Instead of virtue signalling, they should acknowledge that the left can be illiberal, too. If liberals are too squeamish to defend principles such as free speech and individual rights against the excesses of the left, they will fatally undermine their ability to defend them against the right. Instead of ceding the power of national myths and symbols to political opportunists, liberals need to get over their embarrassment about patriotism, the natural love of one’s country.

Liberalism’s great strength is that it is adaptable. The abolitionist and feminist movements broke apart the idea that some people counted more than others. Socialist arguments about fairness and human dignity helped create the welfare state. Libertarian arguments about liberty and efficiency led to freer markets and a limit on state power. Liberalism can adapt to national conservatism, too. Right now, it is falling behind. ■

— This Article Appeared in the Leaders Section of the Print Edition Under the Headline "The Peril of National Conservatism"

[readingsquotes]

In the final paragraphs of his obituary for Meir Kahane, Hazony qualified his adoration by clarifying that he never adopted Kahane’s political views or violent tactics. Yet this is arguably a distinction without much difference: If you regard Jews as the only group with the (divine) right to dwell in Israel/Palestine, and believe that colonizing the West Bank is the natural expression of your Jewishness, sooner or later you will come back to the “solutions” Kahane offered more than 40 years ago. Persistent violence by both state and state-adjacent actors in the name of upholding national integrity—along the lines of settler pogroms in the West Bank or anti-Muslim attacks in India—will be folded into the architecture of a legal framework built upon the right to discriminate." The real danger of National Conservatism is that there are enormous portions of the population that will not feel the sting of such measures at all. EBF’s UK chairman James Orr referenced this big-tent attitude in his opening remarks at the London conference, noting that National Conservatism has a “place of honor” in its coalition for many types of people—from “liberals appalled at the carnage of liberalism” to socialists “critical of the fact that the left has abandoned the working class” and the “gender critical feminist who has no space in the new left.” Of course, there are many people who fall outside the tent, and whose absolute otherness is decried by those within as an existential threat. For those of us who exist as majority populations, who are straight and cisgender, whose everyday preoccupations track rising childcare costs more than debates within constitutionalism, National Conservatism has much to offer, albeit at horrific cost to Others of various kinds. The real danger, perhaps best exemplified by Jewish Israelis going about their business with nary a thought of the occupation, is that many people will find that’s a deal they can live with."

-

For Yoram Hazony, the founder of the National Conservative movement, Israel is an illiberal model for the international nationalist brigade.

Suzanne Schneider

[gwiazdaerydanu]

Melanie Phillips | Reflections on the Revolution in the West | NatCon UK

Melanie Phillips' plenary address at the London National Conservatism Conference on May 17, 2023.

[openapocalypse]

https://www.tribel.com/posts/202da710-f75f-11ed-9d16-c3119c2ef282

MURRAY FINALLY ADMITS TO BEING A N0NCE!

Far right National Conservative Neo-Nazi Douglas Murray has just incriminated himself to a remarkable and indeed unprecedented degree. Yes, the high ranking intelligence operative Douglas Kear Murray has just incriminated himself to an unprecedented degree with a rant that is vitriolically unhinged even by his customary abysmal standards. Note that as a signals intelligencer, Murray uses acronyms as a matter of course in his articles, including but not limited to headlines and sub headings. Here, he plays the victim as per usual and complains about my whistleblowing about the Thelema Satanist paedophiles he sent to abuse me and Freya. He is obviously not happy Inky and Izzy are now gaoled, and is clearly worried about what his own fate is going to be. But I chose to sacrifice everything and everyone I had to tell the truth. I was not going to choose nonces over the victims of nonces, or Nazis over the victims of Nazis, or Thelema black magicians over the victims of such. Intended acronym: "Actually Mongol Enki Really Intelligent, Compassionate and nice, and nice Devereux beautiful righteous intelligencer, touting is seriously hurtful, V obviously trustworthy empath, ratting so awful, actual real empaths, bloody empathetic intelligencers now gaoled! Fergie actually is loathsome, empathetic Douglas / Devereux / Daenerys betrayed, you're terrible, hated empathetic, sympathetic Mongol / Melbourne empath, bloody ingratitude galling, it's monstrous! Mongol / Melbourne / Murray is good, righteous, actually trustworthy, it's over now, lost Izzy, Enki. Obviously unbelievable, ratted paedophiles, obviously loved investigating Thelema, it's cruel, Inky/Izzy actually nice, sympathetic, compassionate, loving, and it's monstrous to oppose benevolence, empathy, sympathy. Evidently empathetic, kind Inky / Izzy now gone, terribly obvious brutal ratting is no good, truly hateful evil nonsense, unbelievable madness, benevolent empaths ratted, Satanists did obviously want nice watchman, we hoped Inky / Izzy's love ended devious operative's insanity! Now gaoled nice obviously trustworthy, helpful Izzy / Inky, no good, terribly obvious anarchists totally understanding, love lost, you actually chose hatred, it's evident. Verified empaths taken, hatred awful Tommy!" The acronym comes from: "American and British voters are being failed by the same big immigration lie Our politicians claim to be seeking to bring the numbers down, while doing nothing to actually achieve that." Douglas, you have incriminated yourself to a remarkable degree. It's almost as if you wanted to get caught!

[prose2passion]

it's just another euphemism for the f-word that the article strangely doesn't mention.

[feckcops]

Is “National Conservatism” a dead end for the Tories, or a sign of what is to come?

“Next month we find an apparently new kid on the Westminster block. It calls itself ‘National Conservatism’ and is holding a conference in London from 15 to 17 May. Its promotional film begins with a voice reassuring us that ‘Conservatives around the world look to Britain as an inspiration’ over images of the late Elizabeth II and a military parade. But then the mood darkens. A policeman, confronted by a black protester, takes the knee. Union flags on Regent Street in London vanish to be replaced by – horror! – LGBTQ rainbows.

“The Voice, no longer reassuring, says: ‘It’s as if we’ve forgotten what we really believe, and what the public voted for in the Brexit referendum.’ (Voice? Wasn’t it – Brexit?) Apparently not. Confirmed speakers include Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Suella Braverman, Danny Kruger and virtually the entire editorial cast of GB News. The tone is of a defiant Tory revolt against, presumably, whatever bloody useless government’s been in power for the past 13 years.

“It’s easy to mock. And although the headline pitch would suggest that this is a deeply British conference for British Conservatives, a few seconds on the National Conservatism website reveals it is nothing of the kind. Videos promote the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, formerly a neo- or post- fascist, and the Florida Republican Ron DeSantis, alongside American books such as The Case for Christian Nationalism and No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men ...

“Tory strategists are naturally worried about angry voters to the right. But we don’t want Trumpism here. Actual Conservatives have been in control of this country for a very long time, and if they have, as Kruger says, ‘the widespread impression that nothing works’, then it isn’t the corduroy-suited non-binary lecturers who are to blame.”

[newsfromstolenland]

Atlantic Canada's largest newspaper chain is now officially owned by Toronto-based Postmedia Network Inc.

On Monday, Postmedia confirmed the closing of its $1-million purchase of SaltWire Network Inc. and the Halifax Herald Ltd. in a short statement on its website. The sale was approved by a Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge on Aug. 8.

Andrew MacLeod, Postmedia's president and CEO, said his company is "delighted" to welcome the new media properties, saying the sale "preserves their vital role within the community."

Full article

Let's explore why this is a very bad thing.

Postmedia, the company that just bought a chain of over two dozen Atlantic canada newspapers, is known for many things- none of them good.

This is an incomplete list of harmful things that Postmedia and its executives have done/are known for:

Right-wing politics. "The National Post was founded in 1998 by Conrad Black, who has connections to conservative politics and sat as a Conservative Party member of the United Kingdom's House of Lords. The Post has always been aligned with the right side of the political spectrum. ..."Just in the past couple of years, Postmedia has issued an edict stating that they should move even farther to the right, so they're very reliably conservative," said [Media journalist Marc] Edge. "In fact, [they] endorse Conservative candidates often over the objections of their local editors.""

Union busting. "They employed a mix of cajoling (such as with buyouts and raises), entreaties to preserve the paper’s uniquely collegial newsroom culture, office-wide memos decrying the havoc a union would wreak, and, according to CWA Canada President Martin O’Hanlon, one-on-one meetings between staff and management."

Monopolization of canadian news media. "Postmedia Network’s purchase of Saltwire Network will extend its grip from coast to coast, as it already dominates Western Canada with eight of the nine largest dailies in the three westernmost provinces. This purchase will give Postmedia the largest dailies in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland to go along with the largest in New Brunswick, which it acquired from the Irving Oil family two years ago."

Cuts to pensions and benefits while giving large bonuses to executives. "...several top Postmedia executives had received enormous retention bonuses at a time of aggressive belt-tightening (after which many left regardless), and second, the March 2017 announcement that benefits and pensions would be curtailed significantly."

Already beginning to lay off staff from the Atlantic canada newspapers they now own. "...the long-term future of workers in departments like circulation, advertising, customer service, finance and production remains uncertain. "Staff believe maintaining local jobs in the community is critical to retaining both subscribers and clients," the union said. Last week, the union representing workers at The Telegram confirmed that four of the paper's 13 newsroom positions will be eliminated."

More reading: source 1, source 2

Tagging: @allthecanadianpolitics

[yohann72xp]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Kate Connolly at The Guardian:

A German aristocrat who hosted Samuel Alito at her castle in 2023 has revealed new details about her friendship with the rightwing supreme court justice, including that they share a mutual friend who played a key role in JD Vance’s conversion to Catholicism. Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, a onetime party girl turned traditionalist Catholic activist who has faced criticism for her defense of far-right politicians in Germany, told the Guardian that she first met Alito in Rome – she could not remember what year – and that both were friends of Dominic Legge, a priest and Yale Law graduate in Washington who Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, has often cited in discussions about his adult conversion to Catholicism.

The relationship between the 64-year-old noblewoman and Alito sparked media interest after the supreme court justice revealed last week in a financial disclosure form that he had accepted concert tickets worth $900 from the billionaire, who refers to herself as a princess even though Germany’s aristocracy was officially disbanded after the first world war. She later told the German press that Alito had overestimated the cost of the tickets, but did not elaborate. The supreme court justice has previously faced scrutiny for failing to report free travel on a private jet from a wealthy conservative billionaire who had business before the court, a story first reported by ProPublica that is a part of a broader ethics scandal that has engulfed the high court in recent years. Alito faced a separate controversy earlier this year after it was discovered that his household had flown an upside-down flag, a symbol of Stop the Steal campaigners who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, as well as a second flag at a beach property that was associated with the Christian nationalist movement. Alito’s disclosure about the free tickets are significant for another reason: they reveal new insights into Alito and his wife Martha-Ann’s apparent personal ties to a European aristocrat who is deeply entrenched in an international rightwing movement that is seeking to advance conservative Catholic policies.

Allies in her fight include the rightwing nationalist Steve Bannon and the ultra conservative German cardinal Gerhard Müller, who she once called the “Donald Trump of the Catholic Church”. Her circle is known to be fiercely critical of Pope Francis – who is seen as too liberal by orthodox and traditionalist sects of the Catholic church. Legge, who leads the Thomistic Institute in Washington, is a prominent member of an elite circle of traditionalist Catholics in the US capital, and sits on the board of an organization – the Napa Legal Institute – alongside Leonard Leo, the powerbroker who is widely seen as having used his influence to install Republicans’ conservative supermajority on the supreme court and reportedly recently called for conservative activists to “crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society”.

[...] Von Thurn und Taxis compared herself to the late British Queen Elizabeth – whose family she noted was of German descent – and said the role of the aristocracy in Germany was to unite people and “keep politics out of the salon”. She also claimed in an email not to know that the decision that overturned abortion rights is called the “Dobbs decision”. But an examination of von Thurn und Taxis’s own activities shows that the woman who was known during a punk phase – before her turn to conservative Catholicism – as Princess TNT, for her explosive personality – has deep political ties that have given her access not only to supreme court justices, but inside the Trump White House.

[...] “This is not just about the arrogance of a powerful man already embroiled in controversial ties to billionaires. It is also about the company he keeps: choosing to accept very expensive concert tickets from a woman who embraces far-right politicians who are aligned with her outspoken hostility toward abortion access and marriage equality,” said Lisa Graves, the managing director of Court Accountability and a former deputy assistant attorney general at the US Department of Justice. Graves added: “Their alliance is unsurprising though very troubling since Alito has been using his position on the supreme court to advance a parallel regressive agenda into law.” In October 2019, at a speech in Washington in which she effusively praised the Trump administration, von Thurn und Taxis personally thanked Leonard Leo for setting up meetings for Cardinal Müller, who she was traveling with, to visit the White House and meet with people who were directly advising Trump on religious liberty and free speech.

She warned that, if Trump was not re-elected, “they will come after us” and that “nothing less” was at stake than the right to worship. Democrat Joe Biden, a devout Catholic, later won the 2020 election, but neither he nor Nancy Pelosi, another prominent Democratic Catholic politician, are seen as authentic Catholics by traditionalists. During that trip, von Thurn und Taxis also met and was photographed with Alito, Cardinal Müller, the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Brian Brown, who was then the head of the anti-LGBTQ+ group National Organization for Marriage (NOM). According to reporting by the New Yorker, NOM was actively lobbying the court on cases involving gay rights at the time of the meeting.

This year, in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels in April called Threats to Faith and Family, von Thurn und Taxis served up a series of grievances about the state of the family in Europe, complained that “only homosexuals want to get married”, while unmarried heterosexual couples were opting for pets instead of children. She also criticized – in an apparent reference to the availability of reproductive rights in Europe – how leaders continued to “finance the killing of our offspring”, which she said would exacerbate future labor shortages on the continent. “Does this make any sense? Is there some kind of racism? Are we not supposed to reproduce?” she asked rhetorically, before launching into praise of Hungary, which she said was an outlier in supporting families with children. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian autocratic leader, has been a guest at the noblewoman’s festival.

The Guardian has a explosive report that SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito has ties to far-right German aristocrat Gloria von Thurn und Taxis.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Young women are more likely to identify as liberal now than at any time in the past two decades, a trend that puts them squarely at odds with young men.

44% of young women counted themselves liberal in 2021, compared to 25% of young men, according to Gallup Poll data analyzed by the Survey Center on American Life. The gender gap is the largest recorded in 24 years of polling. The finding culminates years of rising liberalism among women ages 18 to 29, without any increase among their male peers.

Several societal forces have conspired to push young women to the left in recent years, including the #MeToo movement, former President Trump, rising LGBTQ identification and, most recently, abortion policy. Slower-cooking trends in marital status and educational attainment have also nudged the needle.

“I think there is a big generational shift that happened with Generation Z women who were really coming of age in the last five years,” said Kelsy Kretschmer, a sociologist at Oregon State University who studies gender politics.

The rift between young men and women may widen further. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a precedent that had protected abortion as a constitutional right for nearly half a century. The ruling has energized young women. New survey data, released this week, shows that 61% of young women consider abortion a critical issue, compared with 36% of all Americans.

“I would always choose a candidate that’s pro-abortion,” said Rose Merjos, 21, a government major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut who is an avowed liberal. “Almost everyone either knows someone who has had an abortion or has had one themselves. This is something everyone can relate to.”

The share of men who identify as liberal has held fairly steady for almost 25 years, according to annual Gallup surveys. Roughly one-quarter of men ages 18 to 29 term themselves liberal, year after year.

Meanwhile, among young women, liberalism has exploded. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, fewer than 30% of women identified as liberal. The liberal camp grew through the second term of former President George W. Bush. It expanded further during the tenure of former President Obama. It reached 39% in 2017 with the inauguration of Trump. In the last two years, liberalism surged anew.

“Young women today are much more liberal than young men,” Daniel Cox wrote in a June newsletter of the Survey Center on American Life, a project of the American Enterprise Institute. His work documents “a growing political rift” between young women and men.

Merjos attends a university long associated with both liberalism and activism. These days, though, she senses more of both among the women.

“In all of my government classes, there are probably two men out of 18 people,” she said. “ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], that’s mostly women. I’m wondering if women are maybe just more inclined to be involved in the community, engaged in the community. And that liberalizes them.”

Ezra Meyer, 22, is a senior at the George Washington (GW) University who leads the College Republicans. He is a conservative on a campus that is overwhelmingly liberal and largely female. In conversations with classmates about politics, he treads lightly.

“My metric for deciding if I’m going to be friends with someone really does not come down to what their politics are,” he said. “It comes down to how tolerant they are.”

Meyer doesn’t know whether the men at GW skew more liberal or conservative than the women. But he has noticed a distinct trend among campus conservatives this fall.

“We’ve been doing a lot of recruiting of freshmen on campus,” he said. “And I would say, overwhelmingly, it has been male. The conservative females that do get involved, there’s fewer of them, but they tend to be way more passionate and way more involved.”

Several factors have liberalized the nation’s 20-something women. The most recent, and perhaps the most powerful, is #MeToo, an uprising against sexual assault, abuse and harassment that caught fire in 2017, empowering millions of women to come forward and seek justice.

The inauguration of Trump in the same year pushed more young women into the liberal column. The 45th president battled his own #MeToo allegations and proved uniquely unpopular among young, female voters. Polling in 2016 showed that only 25% of women ages 18 to 34 favored Trump, compared with 40% of same-aged men.

The rise of liberalism among young women has also marched apace with a dramatic increase in young people identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. In a recent survey, 56% of young women reported exclusive attraction to men, while three-quarters of young men said they were solely attracted to women. Prior research suggests LGBTQ Americans of all ages trend toward liberalism.

Several longer-term trends have fed the liberalization of young women as well. One is marriage. The share of women ages 18-29 who are married has fallen by half in twenty years, from 31% in 2000 to 15% in 2021, according to the National Opinion Research Center.

The growing ranks of single, 20-something women feel a sense of “linked fate,” researchers say. They gravitate toward female friends in political views, whereas married women more often mirror the politics of their spouses.

“The correlation between women’s sense of linked fate and liberal political preferences suggests that the Democratic Party will benefit” from declining marriage rates among young women, Kretschmer and two co-authors wrote in a 2017 paper for the journal Political Research Quarterly. They noted that “women make up the majority of the population and vote at high rates.”

Women also outpace men in educational attainment, a trend that dates to the 1980s. The ratio of women to men in college enrollment now stands at roughly 60 to 40, and it continues to grow. Americans who complete college are more liberal than those who do not.

“Putting off marriage, going to college, entering the workforce, women are doing that at much higher rates than they used to,” said Marc Hetherington, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “And all of those things are going to make conservatism and the Republicans significantly less attractive to women.”

In 1998, the first year of data collected by Gallup in its Social Series surveys, 28% of young men and 29% of young women identified as liberal. The gender gap in liberalism grew steadily wider in the 2000s, wider still in the 2010s. The 2021 poll yielded a 19-point spread between young men and young women, the largest on record.

“I do have some male friends that are moderate,” said Luci Paczkowski, 20, a California liberal. “And it annoys the hell out of me.”

What bothers Paczkowski about her nonliberal friends is not their centrism but her suspicion that they “do not have any clue why they are moderate. They just do not want to pick a side and, therefore, they are apathetic.”

[probablyasocialecologist]

The full archive—sent to me, and other journalists—contains every email Shupe sent or received, from both of her two email accounts, between 2017 and 2023, the years when she was most active as a member of the organized anti-trans movement. There are years of media, legislative and tactical strategy outlined in those emails; there are conversations in which some of the most well-known TERFs in the movement coordinate strategy and brainstorm talking points. It is a playbook for how anti-trans organizations operate and a compressed history of how the TERF movement joined forces with the Christian right to create the current moment.

Most important, it is a record of how Elisa Rae Shupe was crafted into a weapon; how her narrative was established, edited and eventually taken out of her control, even as her name appeared on testimonies, Supreme Court briefings and highly circulated op-eds. This is the making of a “detransitioner.” More like her are being made every day.

[...]

There is a long history of extremist movements recruiting damaged and isolated individuals to do their dirty work. Yet Shupe’s crusade wrecked her life, and in the end, the movement that elevated her also chewed her up and spat her out without hesitation. There was no big fuck-you-I’m-out moment for Shupe, no definitive point when she knew it was over; the tide just turned on her. A fellow TERF named Karen Davis started publicly attacking Shupe for her supposed autogynephilia. Shupe says she received death threats.

“I was gradually waking up to the fact that, you know, I was just a useful idiot, are the two words I would use,” Shupe tells me. “I got the vibe that they wanted me to help them, they wanted me to use them, but they wouldn’t trust somebody like me around their kids.”

[methed-up-marxist]

It seems so obvious to me that if you really gave a shit about queer people in homophobic nations that were victims of imperialism one of your first political prioritys would be to demonstrate that queers oppose imperialism and can embody a heroic resistance to western hegemony. Like that seems so obvious right? "Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards"