Wokeness terrorizes liberals

AG Garland just got his fish in the mail. In the mob, there is no clearer message that your days are numbered than a newspaper-wrapped fish left at your doorstep...https://t.co/EJDKu5hART

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) April 8, 2022

The problem with being woke is you can never sleep. Liberal principles are fluid. They went from opposing gay marriage to supporting it to demanding kindergarten teachers talk about their gay marriages to their pupils.

This is crazy, and if anyone objects, the mob comes after them.

Ross Douthat of the New York Times carefully pointed this out in a column, "How to Make Sense of the New LGBTQ Culture War."

He began by pointing to a survey that shows young people are suddenly into LGBT. 21% identify as LGBT -- up from 3% among baby boomers.

He said the report divided people into three camps:

1. This is great news.
2. We shouldn’t read too much into it.
3. This trend is bad news.

Douthat then wrote something very, very dangerous for an NYT writer to admit.

He wrote, "There is no clear evidence that any of this is making kids happier or better adjusted; instead all we see is a worsening of teen mental health, blurring into a young-adult landscape where sex and relationships and marriage are on the wane. So what we need now is probably more emphasis on biology, normativity and reconciliation with your own maleness or femaleness, not further deconstruction."

Zounds. That is quite an admission that LGBT may worsen your mental health.

I am surprised it got past the censors.

He is saying we are tossing away: boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boy and girl marry -- which has guided our civilization for 100,000 years.

He admitted that transgendering boys to girls is a problem.

He wrote, "The main feminist concerns, associated most famously with J.K. Rowling (whose very name now summons a howling vortex of online controversy), are about the possible erasure of the biological sex differences that have traditionally been the basis of feminist analysis. This is a practical as well as a philosophical issue, manifest in the debates about whether transgender women belong in women’s sports or women’s prisons."

The liberal mob went after Rowling. The kids who became millionaires and world famous from her Harry Potter movies denounced her as adults.

Douthat took up Florida's Parental Rights in Education law. Liberals call it Don't Say Gay. They think a rise in LGBT identification is great, but don't you dare call them groomers..

He wrote, "The effects of this debate-ending impulse on liberal discourse is the third complexity lurking behind my initial categorization. Within liberaldom right now you literally cannot know, outside of private conversation, whether someone is fully in the first camp, more inclined to the second camp or even drawn toward the third. There is a gap between what people are willing say in public and what they really think that’s unprecedented on any controversial issue I have seen.

"This — call it discretion, if you want — is partly voluntary, based on a desire to be a good ally, to show maximal kindness, and not give any aid and comfort to conservatives, Republicans, Ron DeSantis.

"But it’s also enforced: A version of the Rowling vortex quickly surrounds anyone who argues skeptically about the rise in transgender identification or suggests that hormonal and surgical treatments are being overused, whether that person is a journalist, an author, an academic researcher, even a gender-dysphoria clinician."

Liberals do not fear conservatives. Liberals fear liberals. Seven years ago, Edward Schlosser wrote, "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me."

He wrote, "I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to 'offensive' texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik — and I wasn’t the only one who made adjustments, either.

"I am frightened sometimes by the thought that a student would complain again like he did in 2009. Only this time it would be a student accusing me not of saying something too ideologically extreme — be it communism or racism or whatever — but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that’s considered tantamount to physical assault. As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis writes, 'Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.' Hurting a student’s feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble."

University officials don't care. It is all about the Benjamins. Professor Schlosser should be comforted knowing that these little monsters will be saddled with student loan debt once they drop out or graduate from college.

Douthat and Schlosser and Rowling helped build this little hell they live in. I'd tell them to sleep well, but you cannot sleep when you are Woke.

By the way, the actual NYT headline was "How to Make Sense of the New L.B.G.T.Q. Culture War."

The acronym is LGBTQ. I tried to contact Douthat and could not. I corrected it in the quote because I do not want to confuse readers. We all make mistakes. When I make a mistake, please take the time to tell me at donsurber@gmail.com

Thanks.