You already know what’s happening. In Tennessee, the Legislature passed a bill that puts a stop to transgender surgeries for minors, and the Left went crazy. Not long after the bill passed, a biological female still living at home at 28 snapped, descending on a Christian school in a psychotic rage and killing three school staffers and three 9-year-olds before law enforcement gave her the suicide-by-cop she wanted. The shooter wrote a manifesto explaining the crime, which the police still refuse to release — a telltale sign that trans politics played a role.
The news media picked up on the Nashville massacre and immediately blamed it on the state Legislature, which led to a riot in the state capitol for … gun control.
The shooter in the Nashville massacre was in illegal possession of the guns used to kill those six people, an ironic fact that escaped the demonstrators completely.
Tennessee has been reported as a black eye for conservatives. It wasn’t. Tennessee was a battle, not immaculately won, in the war to stop transgenderism from being imposed on the American people as so many other faux “civil rights” aggressions have been.
One of the themes in this week’s episode of The Spectacle podcast gets clearer and clearer as this fight deepens in state legislatures — namely, that, as Tucker Carlson noted in that outstanding Heritage Foundation speech two Fridays ago before the doddering Rupert Murdoch fired him from his Fox News post in a fit of pique, this is no longer Right vs. Left but good vs. evil.
And, as S.A. McCarthy observed, recounting that speech, here at The American Spectator a bit more than a week ago:
Carlson then channels the great Christian author and thinker C.S. Lewis in defining both good and evil. “Good,” the journalist-cum-philosopher propounded, “is characterized by order, calmness — tranquility, peace, whatever you want to call it, lack of conflict — cleanliness.” Evil, he asserted, is characterized by the opposite of those simple but noble qualities: disorder, chaos, violence, and filth. “And by the way,” Carlson added, “I think the Athenians would have agreed with this; this is not necessarily just a Christian notion, this kind of a, let’s say, widely agreed upon understanding of good and evil.”
C.S. Lewis said nearly the same thing 80 years ago. In his 1943 nonfiction book, The Abolition of Man, Lewis described a set of objective, immutable principles he called the Tao. The Tao, or natural law, forms the basis of both Western and Eastern morality, according to Lewis. It is common to Greco-Roman and Norse pagans, Confucianists, Buddhists, and, of course, Christians. Guided by the Tao, Lewis is able to examine objective good and objective evil.
McCarthy is wholly correct to bring up Lewis’ writing. Lewis did his greatest work at the onset of, and amid, World War II, when the monstrous evils of Nazism, Italian fascism, and Soviet communism were rising as a threat to the civilized world. Lewis would recognize this time for many reasons, but perhaps most of all for the leftist revolt against the Tao.
Because disorder, chaos, violence, and filth — and, above all, naked untruth — is what the trans crowd offers.
For example, on Tuesday in Louisiana, the House Health and Welfare Committee held a hearing on HB 463, a bill by Rep. Gabe Firment, a Republican from the small town of Pollock, near Alexandria, that would ban transgender surgeries and other “gender-affirming care” (a bizarre and scandalously nonsensical term) for minors. This bill has overwhelming popular support, and it’s clearly good policy.
But what happened in that committee, during a hearing that ran more than six hours, was nothing short of a circus.
Here’s just a taste of it:
A drag queen testifies to the Louisiana House of Reps against a bill to ban pediatric gender changes:
"I am trans. I am a big gay baby. My pronouns are they/them. What are yours?" pic.twitter.com/yL8abAdkNO
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) May 2, 2023
There was a ton of that.
There was also a lot of this:
This lady says that she had a gut feeling that her daughter was a boy when she liked to play with male toys when she was 18 months old and is now going to start "gender affirming care" at 11 years old. pic.twitter.com/cEV2jVZ845
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) May 2, 2023
Those last two video clips — which were only two of a good many we could show you — were instructive, as they point to something that seems to underlie a great deal of the transgender craze among American children. As Timcast reported:
A study on gender dysphoria conducted in 1994 has resurfaced and is making waves over the conclusions it draws.
Researchers compared mothers of boys with gender identity disorder with mothers of “normal boys to determine whether differences in psychopathy and child-rearing attitudes and practices could be identified.”
According to the study, “mothers of boys with gender identity disorders had more symptoms of depression and more often met the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)” than mothers of boys who don’t exhibit issues with their gender identity.
More than half (53 percent) of moms of boys with gender identity disorders had been diagnosed with depression or BPD, compared to just six percent of the control group. Additionally, 44 percent sought psychiatric help for depression at some point in their life.
Researchers found that mothers of sons with gender identity disorders are “extremely dependent on their sons for emotional sustenance,” exhibiting “boundary problems and difficulty separating from their sons.”
“It was also observed that many women had symptoms of a narcissistic personality disorder,” the paper states.
The erratic behavior on display in the hearing room in Baton Rouge was off-putting. It was nothing compared to what happened in Montana, when a man dressing as a woman and calling himself Zooey Zephyr, a member of the state House of Representatives, turned the state’s legislative session into a circus over a similar bill:
So, there I was, sitting in the front row of one of the gallery wings of the Montana House of Representatives, surrounded by the kind of people I do not normally hang around. People masked up, covered in fake rainbows (real rainbows have seven colors, not six) listening as they whispered curse words and slurs to each other during the House floor proceedings. What followed was expected as the normally quiet gallery area erupted into a mini-riot with people hurling objects onto the House floor while screaming at the top of their lungs.
How did I end up here?
The week prior the House debated amendments to Senate Bill 99, a bill that simply prevented minors from attempting to surgically change from one gender to another. If they wanted to do that, they would have to wait until the age of adulthood. During the debate, Representative Zooey Zephyr of Missoula said, “I hope the next time there’s an invocation – when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.” The blood on your hands comment is not unusual by itself. This was different, in that Rep. Zephyr directed his slur at people of faith. This is against the rules of the House, rules that apply equally to all members.
Based on this statement, House leadership decided that Zephyr’s right to speak would be suspended until an apology was issued. Apologies in the House are common when a legislator says or does something they should not, or that they simply regret saying. But alas an apology would not come and the process of transitioning Zephyr from legislator to pretend martyr continued into the weekend.
Here’s what that looked like:
Which was a good deal more civil than what happened in Texas when a similar bill came up for discussion:
BREAKING: LGBT activists have occupied another state capitol, this time in Texas, to protest a bill to ban pediatric gender mutilations
pic.twitter.com/uKAhLotHsF— Greg Price (@greg_price11) May 2, 2023
Evil is characterized by disorder, chaos, violence, and filth.
And so disorder, chaos, violence, and filth are the weapons used against efforts to save children from the mutilation and sterilization that “gender-affirming care” represents.
The current generation is many times more likely to embrace transgenderism than its predecessors, which is a clear signal of social contagion and environmental mental illness. It isn’t hard to understand its source, either — the institutions the Left controls, namely mass media and academia, have been pushing it nonstop for years, not just in its pristine form but indirectly by presenting androgyny instead of masculinity and femininity as distinct traits of men and women. Those blurred lines have brought this fad into the almost-mainstream and at the same time have destroyed the lives of thousands of children unable to process the distorted signals they’re getting.
So efforts to restore order to the chaos must be met with more chaos.
In Montana, as everywhere else, the Left gins up oodles of freaks to descend on the capitols and make things as openly, obnoxiously unpleasant as they can. None of the advocacy — “I am trans. I am a big gay baby. My pronouns are they/them. What are yours?” — is aimed at persuasion. It’s aimed at intimidation, of a sort.
There’s an implied message: bring bills we don’t like, bills the public favors, and we will bully you. We will make you miserable. We will make you sit through hour upon hour of inanity, disrespect, contempt, and aberration.
And while it comes off as emotionalism, that isn’t what it is. It’s strategic. It’s calibrated to generate a perfectly reasonable response. It’s intended to make ordinary Republican legislators, the ones who didn’t sign up to fight the culture wars, throw up their hands and gripe at Gabe Firment and the others willing to take on this fight.
“I came here to build roads and do economic development. I just want to make the schools better and the taxes low. Why am I being subjected to this?” is that reaction. “Don’t bring any more of these damn bills and the freak show that comes with them.”
And this is how they win, without persuading a soul. Because disorder, chaos, violence, and filth … works.
Just like, as AOC said upon Carlson’s firing, “deplatforming works.”
They’re willing to sink lower than anyone else. That’s their path to power. They’re counting on our acceptance of the old quote by George Bernard Shaw — “Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”
But this pig must be wrestled with, or else he’ll destroy the garden.
HB 463 passed out of the House Health and Welfare Committee in Louisiana by a bipartisan 14–3 vote. It will go to the House floor, where it will almost certainly generate disorder, chaos, violence, and filth, as was seen in those other states. But it will likely pass, and then we’ll find out whether the Senate, populated chiefly by those Good Time Charlies who blame the author rather than the agitators for their inconvenience, will continue the fight.
Maybe they will. Or they won’t. This year. But the fight is continuing, and those degenerate tactics are getting stale. More and more, there is a realization that, unpleasant as it may be, the pig must be wrestled out of the garden.
