Category: Politics

Trans Misogyny

Mike CotéLeave a comment

Trans activism is often a one-way street – and females are in the way.

Over the past few years, no realm of political activism has grown faster or become more central to our disputes than gender ideology and transgenderism. It has rapidly transformed from something at the fringe of current events to a topic that inserts itself into every other news cycle. The pace of change, especially after the Obergefell Supreme Court decision which legalized gay marriage across the country, has been blistering. Trans activists are common on television, punch above their weight online, and exert serious pressure against dissenters and neutral institutions. Even minor pushback to this revolutionary movement – and yes, redefining our understanding of our sexed bodies is radical – has been routinely labeled as bigoted, transphobic, or, in the case of trans women, ‘transmisogynist’.

Transmisogyny is a term, coined by the trans writer Julia Serano, for prejudice against transgender women (natal males). This idea is of a piece with the broader intersectional movement, which posits that “all forms of inequality are mutually reinforcing,” creating a hierarchy of victimhood in which the more identity boxes one checks, the more ‘oppressed’ one is. In just a few years, the incidence of this term has positively exploded across the Internet, with major news outlets using it repeatedly and scholarly articles abounding. But the real transmisogyny isn’t as Serano described it; the term is a more apropos of the severe misogyny of the trans activist movement.

Transgender activism only seems to look one-way: at women. Activist focus on trans men (natal females) is practically nonexistent, and they are far less ubiquitous in media. Theoretically, both sorts of transgender person would merit activist attention, but this is not how things have played out in reality. Instead, the vast majority of trans activism centers exclusively on inculcating the idea that trans women (again, natal males) are in fact no different from natal females. The activist attempt to usurp womanhood is a shot across the bow of feminism and more often than not reinforces misogynist stereotypes.

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Against ‘National Divorce’

Mike Coté1 Comment

Bad Idea or Worst Idea?

The idea of a ‘national divorce’ – a parting of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states into separate national agglomerations – has been floating around the conservative ecosystem recently, especially on the fringes of the too-online far-right. This idea has bubbled up several times over the past decades on both sides of the aisle – usually when a preferred presidential candidate loses an election. From the 2004 election spawning ‘Jesusland’ versus ‘United States of Canada’ maps, to the radical right-wingers pushing secession after the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012, to the talk of ‘Calexit’ just days after the shock 2016 victory of Donald Trump, secession memes have been rife in 21st century American politics.

As our culture becomes more intensely partisan, partially driven by the virality of social media, this old idea has recurred more frequently than before, each time with a greater animosity and a broader appeal. Now, these online fantasies have found their way into Congress, with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene espousing the idea repeatedly. For Greene, a Republican from Georgia, ‘national divorce’ is a serious potential solution to “the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s [sic] traitorous America Last policies,” among other ‘evils’. That a sitting Congresswoman said this publicly is egregious, but it lends an air of seriousness to the idea that it had not yet obtained. In that sense, it must be taken seriously.

So, is ‘national divorce’ a reasonable idea? Perhaps <gasp> even a good one?

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Against the State of the Union

Mike Coté1 Comment

A brief polemic against the most monarchical, overblown, tedious piece of political entertainment in the American system.

Tonight is President Biden’s second State of the Union address (his first address to a joint session of Congress in 2021 was technically not a SotU because he had just been inaugurated). Most likely it will be far too long, constantly interrupted by Stalin-esque continued applause, and full of total nonsense. Biden will call out people in the audience that are brought in specifically for the purpose of being used as political pawns, he will make promises that everyone will forget about 5 minutes later, and he will occasionally go off-script to make him feel down-to-earth. The speech will be phony, the reception will be obsequious, and the TV coverage will be wall-to-wall.

How do I know this? Because every State of the Union address is exactly the same song-and-dance. Can you tell that I don’t like this “tradition”?

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To Love “a Good Hate”

Mike Coté2 Comments

The democratization of outrage via social media has overturned the historical relationship between media and audience, allowing us to indulge in our worst instincts.

Rage is an emotion buried deep within the human character; it is omnipresent, contributing to wars, murders, arguments, jealousies, and assaults since time immemorial. Anger can drive humans to incredible feats of courage, honor, and justice just as easily as it can power unparalleled atrocities and destruction – sometimes in pursuit of the very same hatred. Wrath, a feeling which is quite uncomfortable for most people, can – paradoxically – be addictive.

The confluence of interest and outrage has been exploited by powerful actors for centuries. Christians, slaves, prisoners, and other dissidents were publicly executed to the cheers of baying Roman crowds; itinerant preachers pressed Crusades on an ever-willing public with tales of woe betide Christians in the Holy Land; increasingly absurd antisemitic lies were lapped up by peasants across Europe and used to justify expulsions and pogroms; the list goes on and on. Since the advent of print media, the addictiveness of outrage has been of prime benefit to the press. Newspapers helped drive the American and French Revolutions, publishing polemics against government policy and promoting a robust disputation of ideas about politics. Radical abolitionist papers pushed Americans to deal with the reality of slavery and the moral and economic arguments against it, often through the stoking of righteous indignation.

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The (Other) Business of Congress

Mike CotéLeave a comment

When divided government spells legislative gridlock, the Congress still has a critical role to play: oversight.

For once, Congress has retaken its rightful place at the center of the American political world. It has been the talk of Washington recently, displacing even the President as the focus of attention. Unfortunately, it has seen a return to the spotlight not due to some revival of traditional constitutional thought, but instead because it has been an utter circus for the past few weeks.

The election of the Speaker of the House – in the modern era, usually a rote exercise which is decided well in advance of the first ballot – took 15 rounds of voting and dragged out over several days. After this unusually-long process, California Republican Representative Kevin McCarthy was finally elected to lead the lower house of Congress. For nearly a week, the floor of the House resounded with cajoling, negotiating, persuading, conspiring, and arguing. In short, it sounded like a legislature should: fractious, cacophonous, lively. But instead of hearing those proper legislative noises during a floor debate on a serious policy topic, we heard it in relation to internal party infighting and procedural moves. Was the extended election a national security issue, as some claimed? No, but it was embarrassing that the House only got its debate on for such a parochial partisan affair.

Still, the fact that Congress sucked up so much media oxygen during the Speaker fight shows that the Article I branch has at least some political cachet remaining. Despite the divided nature of government – the Republicans tenuously hold the House, while the Democrats tenuously hold the Senate and White House – Congress still has an incredibly important non-legislative role to play: that of oversight. Will the Republican-led House of Representatives embrace that critical responsibility, or will they waste their time and political capital on fruitless investigations into Hunter Biden, social media companies, and woke corporations?

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