Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The president he so admired.

(Third story: his enemies lie about him. This one is handy for wiping up any lingering cognitive dissonance.)

Usually listening to Trump for any length of time is proof enough that he’s a narcissistic, bullying, thin-skinned, know-nothing, blowhard who shouldn’t be put in charge of a lemonade stand, let alone a government, but that’s just me. Maybe he’s actually brilliant, and all I’ve seen are Deepfake clips manufactured and strung together to make him look like a complete fucking moron. That nobody seems to be claiming this gives me some confidence that this is not the case, and that his manifest self-centered cruelty and stupidity is real, and neither manufactured nor some elaborate, long-form performance-art piece designed to highlight and mock the lethal weaknesses of the Americamn political system to the allure of a celebrity, would-be, populist dictator.

Of course it doesn”t help “our” side when at least some of the media really are lying to the public about gender ideology It is truly corrosive of public trust and a danger to democracy. It’s a journalistic own goal, an unforced error that they won’t or can’t admit that they’ve made. “If they’re lying to me about this, what other lies are they feeding me?” How do we answer that. It’s infuriating. It’s another example of the maxim I have stated before:

“Any movement that is, at its very foundations, so fundamentally reliant upon lies and the secrecy required to maintain them, will inevitably and unavoidably corrupt any individual or organization that embraces and supports it.”

Or, in its short form:

“Every organization that embraces trans ideology turns to shit.”

Unfortunately, the press has willingly fallen victim to this to a very great extent. They didn’t have to. Nobody told them they had to use “preferred” pronouns; there is no power that could compel them to if they chose not to. There is no reason consistent with the public interest that says they should conceal the sex of any person of interest in a news story. “Humans have only two sexes” and “Humans can’t change sex,” are not hateful or even controversial statements, and should not be presented as such; to do so is to deny reality and take the side of a reality-denying movement. And so on. What the media gets for championing this “cause” I will never know, but I do know it can’t possibly be worth the price they have paid in doing so.