@caitlinmoriah.bsky.social and I actually spoke with @marisakabas.bsky.social recently about free speech and other intersecting topics like the Jimmy Kimmel situation; just saying. youtu.be/ZeRTcGv52Eg?...

Believe trans people when we tell you the 'science' behind the Cass Report is as solid as the 'science' behind paracetamol causing autism.

lol listen to the latest News Agent podcast and marvel how confused they are by people who latch on to one dodgy science report and who reject the evidence of experts. Pure performance art if you're a trans person.

For the record, there’s no empirical way to prove or disprove this. I will say that personally, Disney+ will get my re-subscription when they put the trans character storyline back into Win or Lose.

dudes rock

Jimmy’s opening monologue tomorrow: So the FCC won't let me be, or let me be me, so let me see. They tried to shut me down on ABC, but it feels so empty without me.

I’m old enough to remember when racists said that South Africa should go back to apartheid because Mbeki claimed that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.

In any case, Spanberger is known to be one of the better dems on this issue, as demonstrated by the fact that she’s aware of the Gavin Grimm case. This is not a defense of not taking a more vocal stance. It’s a call to let her know how you want her to, as she is 99% going to be VA’s next governor.

I mean if you really wanna have fun with it, the correct response is, “I believe all children are god’s children and how dare you suggest otherwise!”

This is one of those where something banal like, “All children are god’s children,” and then walk away, would signal the correct answer but also not give the Sears campaign the TV ad they want. Just don’t pull an Allred and backtrack on that.

$4 billion is literally what they paid Lucas for Star Wars.

I agree with Michael here. What I find bizarre is that she goes down this route while defending her deeply unpopular but also correct stance on gender-affirming surgeries for incarcerated people.

I cannot stress enough that no amount of virtue signaling saved “pro-life” Democrats from getting wiped out in the 2010 midterms because we had a Black president. One of the few things Dems have actually done very well in the post-Obama era is figure out how to win a House majority without them.

It also won’t work. Running as a “pro-life” Democrat was the 90s/00s a virtue signal for, “I’m not like the other Democrats.” It was not that there was a huge mass of people eager to vote Dem if not for that one issue. It was that abortion signified your side of the left-right cultural divide then.

I’m sorry but I think folks can often be too harsh with Sarah. 95 Ds voted YES bc of leadership, why single her out so often? She got elected statewide in Delaware. Her path is challenging and this time is terrifying. I think the disagreements w/ her can be less personal. I care about her safety.

What’s telling about this interview is how Jentleson ignores that Bernie jettisoned his right-leaning positions on guns and immigration in 2016 and ran on cancelling all student debt in 2020. Jentleson decries Biden’s watered-down version of that as out of touch with “working class voters”. /1

I have substantive differences with Sarah McBride, including today’s vote. But she’s the Congresswoman from Delaware, not the Congresswoman of trans people.

Two very dumb things about presidential democracy are… 1) We treat close presidential elections like a true barometer of the country’s beliefs rather than of peoples’ momentary frustrations with the status quo. 2) We don’t have no confidence votes and snap elections.

The reason that people with debate kid brain don’t do well in real world politics is that debate competitions have judges who grade you on whether you cite evidence for your claims. In the real world, there are no judges. This is how we get things like the Laken Riley Act based on one anecdote.

Thanks so much, @pemalevy.bsky.social and @motherjones.com, for the time and care you all took with this important story.

If I represented a safe district I’d 100% vote No. If I represented a swing district, I’d maybe vote present just to avoid the annoying TV ads saying I voted against “condemning violence”.

Former Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Joyce Beatty explains why she opposed the Kirk resolution: "The end of your story does not change the chapters you wrote. How you leave this world does not erase how you lived in it. I can grieve the tragedy without celebrating the legacy"

I gave my heart and soul to that place. Built entire sections for journalists pushed out of their home countries. When the writer I hired, Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi Arabia, they paraded me around as a symbol for press freedom. I put MY LIFE on the line to defend journalism and WaPo.

The correct narrative is that gazillions in ads about, “Boys playing girls’ sports” did not stop the Republicans from losing in a landslide, but I guarantee you’re not gonna read that in the New York Times.

Fewer girls are playing sports after govt erected barriers for girls to play sports. edmontonjournal.com/news/local-n...

Awful and dangerous to hear the Mayor echo the transphobic bigotry coming from the Trump administration. It's completely at odds with the values of our city and another reason why his single, disgraced term in office cannot end soon enough.

if only Black people went to Klan meetings to debate their humanity

👀

One of the great contradictions of Biden is that he instinctively understood the performative value of ragging on Trump for being an angry loser in the 2020 campaign. Then when he had the power to put him in prison for treason, he dragged his feet.

what ezra doesn't seem willing to accept is that charlie kirk was part of a political movement that does not think that "we are going to have to live here with each other" and is fact very interested in the elimination and/or subjugation of many, many people

It’s amazing how I can get 1.5 hours of entertainment out of a book that I would never even possibly consider reading.

Great Kahn memes aside, I don’t fangirl over presidential hopefuls, and I encourage you not to either. Inevitably they will disappoint you. That being said, I really am starting to think that Pritzker understands this moment in a way that the others just don’t.

My main problem with doing this isn’t that Charlie Kirk was a bigot. It’s that people are falling all over themselves to do this kind of thing on the assumption he was killed by a leftist who didn’t like his politics. But in reality, WE DO NOT KNOW WHO KILLED HIM OR WHY. /1

Jamie Reed getting disinvited from speaking at the SEGM conference would be one of the most hilarious things ever. It’s abundantly clear they find her to be a useful idiot.

Called it!

Vaccine hesitency (though way way too high) is still a very minority position. Vaccine mandate hesitency is much different. You have lots of Republcians who are personally smart enough to vaccinate their kids but also are convinced that requiring people to do so is the slippery slope to tyranny.

When you explain this as a requirement to attend public school, it's still 79%, which is basically the same as it was in 1991. The Gallup question asks about "government mandate". Republicans now think that means a federal agent literally holding your child down and putting a needle in their arm.

The NRA will actually go nuts over this. If there were laws already stating that being diagnoed with certain mental illnesses mean you don't have the right to own a gun, then they'd have no problem using it against trans people. As it stands now, you need to be involuntarily committed. /1

Boy howdy this is going to open up some brain exploding second amendment litigation.

The thing is that conceptually we challenge the established social order of segregation based on assigned sex at birth. In reality what we’re doing is saying, “Hey there’s literally one trans kid at your school. They’re a really great kid. Can you pretty please make an exception for them?”

Anyway, my favorite passage ever written on AGP is the one from Helen Joyce's book that basically says, "Well who amongst us doesn't get aroused putting on lacy underwear? But those trannies.... they're getting aroused putting on regular underwear!"

AGP is the blood libel against trans women. But I always start by explaining the HSTS part because it’s so fucking stupid on its face. It requires you to believe that gay men in the 1980s with lots of money decided it was better to spend it on having their dicks cut off than moving to San Francisco.

The correct take if you’re going to raise concerns about the arrest… “Glinner is a bigoted piece of shit. However, this doesn’t rise to the level of incitement as Americans would see it. And such laws here would get used against anyone who discusses the hypothetical of punching Nazis.”

It turns out that if you just tell voters that Trump is deploying the national guard to DC, they don't actually like it. The fact that Republican messages on crime (only one of which mentions the guard deployment) test well in David Shor's panel is not reason to avoid the issue. /1

Wonder if they’ve ever considered how it feels to be a trans person and have basically everyone and their mother claiming you’re the reason Harris lost the election.

a very high proportion of centrist punditry now just boils down to "progressives yell at me on the internet and i don't like it." you would think that getting paid millions of dollars per year would give you thicker skin

The entire premise here is also bullshit. The politico article interviews a bunch of unofficial “experts” who were personally conflicted over whether BLM protests were worth the risk of COVID spread. The actual people in charge of the COVID response were crystal clear that they were a major risk.

There's been a big fight over gender-affirming care after Gordon Guyatt and his team at McMaster released a statement contradicting their former funders' public policy. I wrote about the whole thing, and what "evidence-based medicine" really means. gidmk.substack.com/p/a-fight-ov...

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