This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca!
Last week, the New York Times published one of the dumbest, most insulting graphics I’ve ever seen in my life, in an article titled “10 Columnists and Writers Rate What Mattered in Trump’s First Full Month.”
Like, you already know from the headline that this is gonna be some bullshit, right? Ten New York Times writers want to tell me what mattered? Meaning that they also want to tell me what didn’t matter?
I mean, look, Trump and Elon Musk spent their first month in power completely flooding the world with as much awful bullshit as possible, in an attempt to overwhelm the average person and make them feel like it’s hopeless to do anything but comply. And so all anti-fascist communicators have a duty right now to help the general public by breaking down individual actions, explaining them, and helping to brainstorm potential responses. That is not what this is. This is one of the most respected newspapers in the country using a fun scatter plot meme to let some of the dumbest men on the planet tell you that trans people don’t matter. They included a few women, too, but my god, the men are so dumb they should be studied by science, in another country where science still exists.
Just to give you an idea, before I get to the meat of this, Daniel McCarthy, “editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review,” and Matthew Schmitz, editor of Compact magazine, both think that a child who goes by “Big Balls” has had a large and very positive impact on US when he stole a bunch of data and fired a bunch of people critical to the health and safety of Americans.
And on the topic of Trump planning to genocide immigrants, Adolf Twinkler and The Thumb are joined by Walking Bad Take Machine Ross Douthat in agreeing that that’s good and impactful.
And so finally, when it comes to agreeing that trans people really SHOULD be punished, those three smooth-brains are joined by David French, a rightwing loser who sucks so much his own church told him to pound sand and then he cried about it in the New York Times.
Let me be clear: everyone sucks here, including the usually on-point Tressie McMillan Cottom. As Alex P. pointed out with this excellent notated graphic on BlueSky, the only morally correct position here is that Trump’s abuse of trans people is as negative as possible, and as consequential as possible. Yes, even if you, yourself, are not transgender.
Let’s go over what has happened in that first month:
On January 20th, Trump signed an executive order “declaring that the federal government will no longer recognize transgender people by defining sex as strictly male or female based on characteristics at birth. The order requires federal agencies to remove references to gender identity from policies, mandates that government IDs reflect only sex assigned at birth, and eliminates accommodations for transgender individuals in federally-funded spaces like schools, shelters, and workplaces. It directs prisons to house transgender women with men, rescinds federal funding for gender-affirming healthcare, and eliminates federal protections against discrimination based on gender identity, including under Title IX.”
Three days later, Marco Rubio froze all passport applications requesting the “X” gender or asking for a change of gender. Trans actress Hunter Schaeffer reported on TikTok that she needed a replacement passport, not one that needed to be changed at all, and it arrived marked as “male.”
On the 27th, Trump banned trans people from the military.
The following day, he signed an order stating that federal funds could no longer go towards trans care for people under the age of 19, meaning they could no longer use Medicaid to cover treatment. The order also “targets hospitals and universities receiving federal funds that provide gender-affirming care, directs the Department of Justice to pursue litigation against the practice, and encourages Congress to pass laws allowing people who received care (or their parents) to sue providers. It also calls for investigating states that protect access to gender-affirming care and those that shelter patients traveling from states where it’s banned.”
The day after that, Trump signed an executive order banning trans people from all public schools, forcing them to use the bathrooms, sports teams, and names that align with the gender they were assigned at birth.
On January 31st, the Trump administration began removing all reference to gender from all government websites, deleting resources like CDC pages set up to help trans and nonbinary youth and State Department advice on traveling abroad while trans or nonbinary.
The same day, the Social Security Administration halted all sex ID changes.
And on February 5th, Trump signed an executive order stopping trans girls and women from competing in sports.
Four of the ten brainiacs the New York Times platformed think that’s all just great. Another three think that it’s NOT great, but it’s inconsequential. Megan K. Stack “can’t say it’s exactly consequential, since so few lives are materially affected.” Like, okay, sure, the sports thing really stuck it to that one girl in Utah who wanted to play softball, but according to a Pew Research Poll, trans and nonbinary people make up at least 1.6% of the population, and that number may be higher due to how few people feel comfortable coming out as trans considering, you know, everything I just mentioned, which explains why that poll also found that 5% of young people said say their gender is different from their sex assigned at birth. But sure, let’s just go with 1.6%.
Guess how many people in Germany were Jewish in January of 1933? Less than .8%. Half as many. Were their lives inconsequential? And did the Nazis stop with them? Did no one at the New York Times learn the poem that starts, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist”?
Survivors told us to never forget, and to never let it happen again. We have all the information. When the first fascists started Sieg Heiling, everyone else couldn’t immediately know “Oh, yep, that’s a fascist.” But we know it. They’re Nazis. Elon even went out and got himself what we used to call the “Hitler Youth” haircut, to really make it clear. I assume he’s been toying with new facial hair styles, too, standing in the bathroom looking at the mirror and trying to convincingly say it’s all just a comedy act.
In 1962, Kurt Vonnegut published Mother Night, a fictional memoir of an American spy who infiltrated the Nazi’s propaganda organization, working his way up to the top in order to broadcast radio shows in which he would hide coded messages to the US. Years after the end of the war, he’s captured and put on trial for war crimes, and his contact in the US War Department says that he’s on his way to testify that he was a double agent the entire time. But instead of waiting for exoneration, the spy hangs himself for “crimes against (him)self.”
In the introduction to the book, Vonnegut wrote, “This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Think about it: would you pretend to be a Nazi, for any reason at all? Even professional actors wrestle with it, with many German and Austrian actors stating unequivocally that they will never play a Nazi, or placing certain limitations on what their character does. And they’re paid, to make art. Who goes out on a public stage and acts like a Nazi, for free, with no costars, no director, no script, and no comeuppance?
Simple: a Nazi. And with all of the bullshit executive orders and government ransacking Trump and Musk have done, much of it resembles what the Nazis did, but two areas are so precisely what the Nazis did, and are so precisely the most dangerous thing they did, that it cannot be ignored: the threat to immigrants and the threat to transgender and nonbinary people. We MUST reject the New York Times’ framing them as inconsequential and we MUST stand with them, because it’s the right thing to do. But if it matters, just know that if Trump and Musk are successful, they’re going to come for the rest of us eventually.
