If you don’t use Twitter, you’re probably doing wonders for your mental health, because it’s one of the primary battlegrounds of the culture war.
“But Leo the incredibly charismatic supergenius,” I hear you cry, “How can that be, when only 1/5 of Americans have Twitter accounts, and most of them aren’t active users?”
Well, my lovely and wonderful audience, here’s the deal: oftentimes the most important battle in a war isn’t the largest battle or the most well-known one, but the one that sets the stage for the battles to follow. And social media sites like Twitter are where much of the battle over language is being fought.
Bear with me, please – this is all going to require a bit of background.
Ever wonder why cultural battles are over so quickly nowadays – regardless of who wins – and why new battles spring up immediately afterwards? When the battles of yesteryear were being fought in academia, the sheer amount of time it took to write papers and actually get people to read and respond to them kept the warfare to a dull roar. But nowadays each new battle can reach everyone likely to participate in it very quickly, massively ramping up the tempo of combat.
And I do mean combat. I realize the military veterans here will bristle at my use of the term, but there’s a real sense that these cultural battles are deciding more of the fate of the civilization you were fighting for in your service than the actual fighting you did. Don’t believe me? Consider how quickly the removal of Confederate monuments turned into the removal of decidedly non-Confederate monuments.
What makes those removals possible is the culture war.
Each time the side you’re on in the culture war loses a battle, the opposition will take some ground from you. They’ll be coming for the Vietnam and Korean War Memorials eventually – I’m guessing within 3 years. And they’ll be demanding that those monuments be replaced with ones dedicated to deceased drug dealers.
If you think I’m kidding, consider how many schools have announced that they’re considering removing the names of the Founding Fathers from their institutions – and how that would have been unthinkable for them to even admit to even 5 years ago.
One of the constants of warfare, however, is that you can judge the effectiveness of a weapon by how the enemy reacts to it. The Imperial German Army didn’t hesitate to use poison gas and flamethrowers on the Allies during the Great War, but how quickly they started caring about war crimes and the Hague Convention when the incoming Americans began deploying shotguns! (Sabaton has nothing to do with my piece today – I just love them)
In a culture war, most of the weapons are rhetorical. Ists and phobes and isms are the big ones used by the Left, and lots of them have proven very effective in advancing their agenda. ‘Racist!’ ‘Sexist!’ ‘Homophobe!’ ‘Islamophobe!’ – you should remember these. When you understand that these terms are meant to be weapons, meant to harm their enemies rather than to make accurate observations, the willingness of the Left to throw them at all and sundry – and to ignore accusations of hypocrisy when their own erstwhile allies show themselves to be among the guilty – will make more sense.
Of course, effective weapons get used more often: there was a period following WW2 when most of America’s military strategy revolved around nuclear weapons. And when a weapon gets used too often, the enemy becomes resistant – witness how much harder the Left has to work to get the public to care about accusations of racism now, compared to a few years ago. This marginal decline of effectiveness should help explain why more and more things are described as racist now than before – you have to shoot more when the enemy has better armor than he used to.
Now, if you’ve been at all abreast of transgender politics, understand that the proverbial tip of the spear for the Left is that you are a transphobic bigot if you don’t want to have sex with a transgendered person.
Please understand, I wish I was kidding about this. I wish this was a joke. But it isn’t – examples of this precise position abound on #BlueTeam social media.
The actual explanation for this position re: transphobia is that if transwomen are women, the hypothetical straight man has no reason other than transphobia to distinguish between a woman with a penis and a woman with a front hole (which – I shit you not – is the actual term some organizations have been using to describe biological women).
This position is pure nonsense – what sexual organs my intended romantic partner possesses actually does make a difference when it comes to actually having sexual intercourse, even if I don’t want to have children with them. I’m not religiously opposed to sodomy, but I definitely agree with the old adage that it’s gay if the balls are touching, and that’s a bit hard to avoid when buggering a transwoman. But again, the Left doesn’t use language to convey ideas – they use language to accomplish their goals. If advancing nonsense wins the battle, then they will advance nonsense. This is very much in keeping with the idea – advanced by Marx himself – that ideological differences are merely cover for class differences (which has transmogrified to include racial differences in the neo-Marxist movement of the present).
I should take a moment to ask for some sympathy for the lesbians: they’ve been hammered (no pun intended) by the transgender activists much, much harder than the straights have – mostly because there are so few lesbians compared to straights. I expect the sex differences play a role here: trying to browbeat a straight man into taking a bearded tranny to bed is much, much harder than intimidating a petite lesbian into blowing one. And I do mean intimidating – some of these people are all-too-willing to get violent at the first sign of opposition.
All of this brings us to the new term: superstraight.
As stated, you can judge how effective a weapon is by how the enemy reacts to it. For example:
Apparently they’re allowed to invent new sexual identities on the spot, but we’re not allowed to do the same.
Between #superstraight and #BlueAnon, we launched a few retaliatory nuclear strikes this week. Do your part and launch more of them, and one day we will have peace.