One of those random headlines you see, and almost don’t notice, and then back up to look at again…

Why Gascón reversed himself on sentencing of woman who assaulted 10-year-old

Wait, woman who what? What who assaulted a 10-year-old? What was that again?

Of course. The headline lies about it, the body tells the truth.

As he’s faced increased criticism from law enforcement, elected officials and his own staff, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón has staunchly defended his handling of a politically fraught case: the prosecution of a transgender woman charged with sexually assaulting a child in a Denny’s restroom.

Right. So don’t call him “woman” in the headline. Women don’t sexually assault children in Denny’s restrooms. They just don’t. Men’s crimes don’t become our crimes just because one of the men claims to be trans.

The sudden reversal came after Gascón’s staff learned that Fox News was preparing to publish jailhouse recordings in which Tubbs crowed about receiving a light sentence and spoke derisively about the victim, a 10-year-girl she attacked in a Palmdale bathroom.

He. He attacked a 10-year-old girl.

Paul Farmer:

Dr. Paul Farmer, global health champion, Harvard Medical School professor, anthropologist and co-founder of the nonprofit health organization Partners in Health, has died at age 62. PIH confirmed his death in a tweet on Monday.

According to the tweet, Farmer “unexpectedly passed away today in his sleep while in Rwanda,” where he had been teaching for the past few weeks at the university he co-founded. A source close to Farmer said he had been in Rwanda for the past several weeks teaching at the University of Global Health Equity, the medical school that he helped found with the country’s former minister of health, Dr. Agnes Binagwaho.

…

In addition to starting hospitals in Rwanda and Haiti, Farmer helped bring lifesaving HIV drugs to the people of Haiti in the early 2000s. But those who work with him say his legacy is even more sweeping than that.

…

In 1987, Farmer co-founded Partners in Health in Haiti with the mission to provide high-quality care to patients from impoverished backgrounds and those living far from health care facilities. Over the next three decades, PIH expanded to countries across Africa and Latin America, to Russia and to the Navajo Nation in the United States. Writer Tracy Kidder profiled Farmer in his 2003 book, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, which later became required reading for many a student and practitioner in global health.

The Free Speech Union writes to the Minister for Education about a situation at Cardiff University:

We’ve written to Jeremy Miles MS, Minister for Education, urging him to intervene in the situation at Cardiff University where several of our members and their colleagues, all academic staff, have been targeted by trans activists in a long-running campaign of intimidation. It began in June 2021 after the academics urged Cardiff to reconsider its continuing participation in the Stonewall Diversity Champion scheme. Following this, a leaflet was distributed on campus picturing a woman holding a gun, the names and pictures of the signatories, and the caption “ACT NOW”. A student whistleblower then revealed violent threats being made on the Facebook page of the Cardiff LGBT+ Society. This evidence was all presented to the University and the police, but neither Cardiff University authorities nor the police responded robustly to protect these academics. The University failed to conduct a thorough investigation in a timely manner and misplaced evidence. It defended messages referring to academics as an ”ignorant fuckface” and a call to kneecap them as legitimate expressions of free speech, even after one of the signatories had his car window smashed.

Incitement of violence is not a legitimate expression of free speech.

I suspect the University would confirm that if anyone were threatening to kneecap trans activists.

Originally a comment by Papito on People’s Republics.

“Me,” the most charitable interpretation anyone could make of your remarks is ignorance. I will try to be charitable. I will lay out the fundamental reasons, as I see it, that opposing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is in the national interest of all Western democracies.

Nobody here believes Washington always has the interests of everybody in the world at heart. Such a belief would not be supported by historical events. The American government has done terrible things the world over. However, nobody except the most insular of right-wing zealots believes that Biden – a man who has spent his life in service to his country – hates America. If one claims that Biden’s actions are not intended to protect America, that is an extraordinary claim which would require extraordinary proof.

The US government has never proposed protecting America by sending American troops to fight Russian troops in Ukraine; that has neither strategic nor tactical value, and is just a red herring in a long series of red herrings. The US government, however, does have an inherent interest in stopping the progress of totalitarianism in Europe and in supporting the spread of democracy. Ukraine is a democratic country, with competitive elections, and Russia is a totalitarian state with the penalty for political participation frequently being death.

Much to our surprise, history did not end with the fall of the Soviet bloc. Instead, though the periphery of the former Soviet bloc turned to a variety of systems of government, some more democratic and others more authoritarian, the centre of that bloc, Russia, turned to an authoritarianism that would make former fascists envious. Based on a concept of historic grievance, Russia turned itself towards the destruction of Western democracy – in a way a continuation of the Soviet project, but this time with more appeal to a fifth column within Western countries, which was never comfortable with the extension of the franchise to all. Divisions within Western democracies have been exploited and amplified by a remarkably competent psyops war waged by Russia.

The historic Soviet infiltration pales in comparison to the effectiveness of the new Russian fascist infiltration. America has a more divided society than at any time since the Civil War, and that has a lot to do with Russian influence. America suffered, for the first time in its history, a coup attempt, led by a president who was not wanted as president by the majority of Americans, and who would not have secured that position without Russia’s help. The Soviets never accomplished so much; their attempts to draw attention to the divisions in American society were clumsy at best.

Internationally, Russia’s goal is to bring an end to the relatively peaceful period of history, during which Western democracies have grown. After WWII, no armed conflict emerged among major Western nations, and no nuclear weapons were used in open conflict. The lack of major conflict in Europe sets this period of history apart from all previous. After the collapse of the USSR, the Pax Americana had a chance to live up to Kennedy’s dreams:

I have, therefore, chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived. And that is the most important topic on earth: peace. What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.

The formation of international institutions such as NATO and the European Union was fundamental to the maintenance of this peace, a peace which has allowed democracy to grow. To the autocrat, such as Putin, nothing can be so threatening as the prospect of democracy – democracy ends in a noose for the tyrant. Thus it is in the autocrat’s interest to undermine democracy wherever possible – in America by fomenting division and propping up a patsy; in Britain by supporting its separation from the EU, and in those wavering nations close to Russia’s borders by supporting autocracy or insurrection. The goal is as much inward as outward: in order to maintain power, Putin must prove that democracy is impossible in Russia.

For the person who believes in the classical liberal values on which Western democracies were founded, support of democracy abroad appears desirable. For the person who can read the room, and sees it rapidly filling with autocrats (to Putin, add Orban, Lukashenko, Maduro, Erdogan…), support of democracy abroad appears essential to the survival of democracy at home.

The Western interest in Ukraine isn’t about coal mines in Donetsk or trains in Luhansk. It’s about the idea that democracy should be growing now, instead of autocracy, about the idea that Ukrainians should be able to elect their own government and decide how their country belongs in the world. There is a new global struggle now, and it’s a struggle for the survival of democracy. Putin has no intention of stopping at the line of control in Donetsk and Luhansk, no intention at stopping at the borders of those two oblasts, and no intention of stopping with Ukraine. His goal is the recreation of a Russian sphere of influence – this time more fascist than communist – and, ultimately, the destruction of the West.

Which side are you on?

Suzanne Moore rebukes the New York Times:

[T]his New York Times ad is more than idiotic – it is dangerous. Imagine a world in which JK Rowling did not write the books we know she did. What happens to the author in this scenario, her intellectual property? Will her creation be removed in some Maoist obliteration? Imagine she does not exist. What does that actually mean? Let me spell it out.

Every death threat I have ever had, every woman I have spoken to about being stalked or abused, has heard these words. They have “no place”, they have “no right to exist”. It is a threat, and I felt sick when I saw that fox-killing egomaniac lawyer, Jolyon Maugham, tweet about the Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who is already anxious about her own security, saying: “There should be no place for her in progressive politics.” 

Fox-killing egomaniac piggy misogynist Jolyon Maugham.

Not everyone is happy to see the demonisation of a woman who stands up for women, which is all JK Rowling has ever done. That someone should whip up more hatred against her to sell newspapers shows a complete loss of moral fibre and a condescending attitude to readers. If you want publications edited by Twitter, then all you will get are publications without analysis, reportage and argument.

That this, again, involves tying a woman to the pyre and asking for a match – and thinking this is attractive – is a new low.

There seems to be no bottom.

The BBC did a story on the Ukraine famine last week.

Resentment of Moscow in Ukraine has deep historical roots. In the Great Famine of the 1930s, as many as four million Ukrainians died during the forced collectivisation of farms by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The BBC’s Fergal Keane has been to the eastern city of Kharkiv, close to the Russian border, and met some of the last survivors of the famine.

…Petro Mohalat, now aged 95, remembers the first food raids in the winter of 1932.

He was five years old when the communist “brigade” arrived in the village. His grandmother told the children to hide anywhere they could.

“It was very scary. The brigade had pitchforks and they came to every house searching for bread,” he recalls. “They used crowbars to come inside. Then they went to all the barns trying to find any buried bread.”

Acting on the orders of Stalin, Communist officials seized food and prevented peasants from leaving their villages to search for supplies. They were being punished for resisting the forced collectivisation of farms.

Ukraine calls the deaths of an estimated four million people in the famine of 1932-33 the Holodomor – killing by starvation.

Putin is against all this Critical Famine Theory.

Russia denies that Ukrainians were politically targeted for starvation because Joseph Stalin feared nationalist sentiment. Just over a decade before they had fought to establish an independent nation – but were defeated by the Red Army.

It says much for official attitudes that Russia’s Supreme Court recently ordered the closure of Memorial, Russia’s oldest NGO devoted to uncovering Soviet-era oppression.

Do they call it the 1934 Project?

Dr Drobovych is keen to point out that responsibility for the horrors of that period doesn’t lie with Stalin alone. The repression and the forced collectivisation could not have happened without the participation of vast numbers of Ukrainian Communist officials.

He sees in modern day Russia’s attempts to impose its will on Ukraine worrying echoes of the Soviet past.

“They protect Stalin, they hide truth, they attack us. They don’t recognise us as an independent country, why? We don’t understand why.”

The usual reason. The same reason trans activists and allies don’t recognize women as an independent sex. It’s a power play, it’s dominance, it’s Us Up and You Down, it’s aggression, it’s We Win You Lose.

As all nations know, memory is a powerful weapon. The story of the Holodomor is central to Ukraine’s idea of itself as a country that defies Russian domination.

So Putin is telling them oh no you don’t.

The Atlantic October 2017: Anne Applebaum on the famine Stalin created in Ukraine:

In the years 1932 and 1933, a catastrophic famine swept across the Soviet Union. It began in the chaos of collectivization, when millions of peasants were forced off their land and made to join state farms. It was then exacerbated, in the autumn of 1932, when the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside. Despite the shortages, the state demanded not just grain, but all available food. At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and local Party activists, motivated by hunger, fear, and a decade of hateful propaganda, entered peasant households and took everything edible: potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, and farm animals. At the same time, a cordon was drawn around the Ukrainian republic to prevent escape. The result was a catastrophe: At least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the Soviet Union. Among them were nearly 4 million Ukrainians who died not because of neglect or crop failure, but because they had been deliberately deprived of food.

This wasn’t the potato famine. The grain didn’t rot in the fields, it was seized by the state along with all the other food, and the doors were locked.

Foreign journalists didn’t report on the famine, partly because they were threatened with expulsion if they did and partly because they were limited in where they could travel (Ukraine was forbidden). An aide of Lloyd George’s named Gareth Jones got off the train south early and walked through part of Ukraine, uncovering the truth. Journalists united to say he was nuts, an opportunist, deluded, blah blah blah – he was a terf, in short. His story was largely buried.

On March 31, just a day after Jones had spoken out in Berlin, [Walter] Duranty himself responded. “Russians Hungry But Not Starving,” read the New York Times headline. Duranty’s article went out of its way to mock Jones:

There appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with “thousands already dead and millions menaced by death and starvation.” Its author is Gareth Jones, who is a former secretary to David Lloyd George and who recently spent three weeks in the Soviet Union and reached the conclusion that the country was “on the verge of a terrific smash,” as he told the writer. Mr. Jones is a man of a keen and active mind, and he has taken the trouble to learn Russian, which he speaks with considerable fluency, but the writer thought Mr. Jones’s judgment was somewhat hasty and asked him on what it was based. It appeared that he had made a 40-mile walk through villages in the neighborhood of Kharkov and had found conditions sad.

I suggested that that was a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country but nothing could shake his conviction of impending doom.

It wasn’t the popular narrative at the time, so Duranty laughed it off, knowing it was true.

Duranty continued, using an expression that later became notorious: “To put it brutally—you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” He went on to explain that he had made “exhaustive inquiries” and concluded that “conditions are bad, but there is no famine.”

But there was, and he knew there was. He wanted to stay in Moscow and keep his role as the bigshot NY Times reporter on the Soviet Union, so he waved away Jones’s reporting.

Misogyny spotted in the wild.

Speak out, the man says, so a woman speaks out, and he swats her away as if she were a mosquito. I do not like this Michael Cashman.

Internecine war continues.

Is he?

Yes.

Not wrong. Claimed rights of trans people – that aren’t actually rights, but the ideology insists that they are – to be “validated” as the other sex and to take over the other sex’s spaces and prizes and sports and jobs do indeed conflict with the rights of women. Lia Thomas is one current illustration of how that works. Cashman is either wrong or lying when he says trans rights don’t conflict with the rights of women. No skin off his ass is it, since they’re not his rights.

Hadley Freeman on why she stopped being a good girl, i.e. a people-pleaser. The shift began in 2014.

I was reading the New Yorker one evening and came across an article with the headline “What is a Woman?”. It was, according to the standfirst, about “the dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism”, a subject about which I knew nothing. I read it, vaguely interested in the social shift that meant being “transgender” no longer refers to someone who has undergone a sex change operation, but is now “how someone sees themselves”, as the writer Michelle Goldberg put it. This meant, Goldberg continued, that women-only spaces were increasingly changing to women-and-transwomen spaces, even if those transwomen still had male bodies — and to query this risked accusations of bigotry.

I remember that article. I remember reading it, and agreeing with it, and not feeling free to say so. I remember specifically not talking about it, I remember deciding not to talk about it, especially after seeing a lot of “she’s a terf” reactions from friends. I remember wrestling with the fact that even a thoughtful, careful article like that, by a thoughtful intelligent feminist writer like Goldberg, drew a torrent of venomous othering. I remember feeling frustrated that the subject was off-limits. I think I knew or half-knew that this couldn’t go on forever – that I couldn’t keep biting it back forever. I didn’t know how fast and abrupt it would be though.

What really interested me was how quickly institutions were falling into line with this new ideology: venues cancelled talks if a radical feminist was on the bill; all-female bands pulled out of women-only festivals for fear of looking transphobic. How strange, I thought, that those with authority capitulate to the obviously misogynistic demands of a few extreme voices.

Same.

Hadley has a lot of friends who are angry about all this.

They talk about JK Rowling, vilified for saying that women — not people — menstruate and calling for single-sex spaces to be preserved. They talk about Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor, who had to leave her job at Sussex University due to ongoing harassment from gender activists. They talk about political parties which explicitly describe women’s sex-based rights as transphobic, including the Green Party and the SNP. They talk about politicians who say things so stupid about gender it’s impossible to believe that they truly believe what they are saying, from Dawn Butler’s claim that “a child is born without a sex”, to Layla Moran’s insistence that she doesn’t care about a person’s sex because she can see “their soul”, to Keir Starmer’s stammering insistence that it’s wrong to say “only women have a cervix”.

Much of the Left would like to ignore these women talking, Hadley continues, but we’re not going away.

People who claimed to care ever so deeply about women’s physical safety during the MeToo movement now sneered at any woman who expressed doubt about sharing private spaces with male-bodied people. The most obvious example here was JK Rowling, who wrote about how her experiences with domestic violence informed her views, an inconvenient truth her critics conveniently ignored. Women are raised to fear male strength, and with very good reason. And now we’re called bigots for doing so.

Called bigots and punished as severely as possible.

So I questioned myself. Of course I did. Would my children be ashamed of me in twenty, ten, five years time? “Am I the baddie here?” I asked myself. But I just couldn’t make it square up: how can feelings (gender identity) always take precedence over material reality (biological sex)? Trying to convince myself that I was wrong and the gender ideologues were right was like trying to convince myself that one plus one equals a unicorn. How can you shut your eyes to your own experience and say something that makes no sense? Apparently some people can, but I could not.

Again: same. I test it regularly – “does it seem any more credible now? Now? Now?” And it never does. It just goes right on seeming like childish magical thinking, unbecoming in adults.

It felt at times like men’s rights activism as a religion. Whenever I or a female colleague dared to voice our doubts about gender ideology, we were pilloried; whenever a male colleague did, he was given a free pass. It was, in the vast, vast main, women who were condemned as bigots, all because they didn’t believe the right things, because they were trying to defend their legal rights. Left-wing men — both in person and online — told me that unless I repeated the mantra “trans women are women”, I was a bigot.

“Terf” is a hate-word for women; there is no equivalent for men.

Many of the people demanding these institutional shifts were and are not transgender themselves. They are bullies who set themselves up as moral arbiters, using self-righteous hysteria and factually questionable claims to demand censorship, instilling fear that anyone caught engaging in wrongspeak or even wrongthink will be publicly shamed and professionally destroyed. Bullies who insist they need to reshape women’s rights entirely, and then accuse any woman who even wants to discuss this of being hateful, stupid and dangerous.

At last it’s permissible to bully women again. They can’t believe their luck.

I’m currently writing a book about anorexia. Multiple doctors have confirmed to me what I already suspected, which is that there are obvious parallels between what gender dysphoric teenage girls say today — about their hatred of their body, their fear of sexualisation, their assumptions about what being a woman means — and what I said while in hospital as a teenager.

This is a fact, and an important one about adolescent mental health, and yet when other people have tried to make similar points in print, they have come up against enormous barriers. Abigail Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage, which looked at the disproportionate rise in numbers of teenage girls seeking gender transition, was ignored by progressive newspapers and magazines, even though it sold well. A US supermarket stopped stocking it after protests by activists. The deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU, which still claims to be a free speech organisation, said that suppressing Shrier’s book was “100% a hill I would die on”.

Chase Strangio, that is – the worst thing that ever happened to the ACLU.

I don’t feel like I’ve become radicalised, because I don’t think anything I didn’t already think six years ago. I do, however, feel much better about myself for not just thinking it but saying it. I have learned that there is something worse than people telling me I’m a bad person, and that is allowing bullies to reframe the world, to dictate what we can all think and to define my reality. They might have triumphed over some institutions, but they haven’t triumphed over me. It turns out life is much better when you’re no longer the good girl.

Yer darn tootin’.

Putin’s going to do a tv talk soon.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to give a televised address soon and he’s expected to speak on whether to recognise the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”.

Russia-backed rebels in those areas – located in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region – have been fighting the Ukrainian military since 2014 but Moscow has not officially recognised their self-declared republics.

Step one. Step two is sending in Russian soldiers to defend the new “republics.”

Sure enough, he backed out.

Graham Linehan on Jon Ronson on Michfest:

His documentary about Michfest is, of course, a disgrace: the denigration of second-wave feminists is so facile that it actually includes a reference to them “not shaving their legs”; his barely-disguised cheerleading of third-wave feminism—what a coincidence, the porn-positive feminism that most benefits Jon—is grimly revealing. Jon’s compassion is infinite… if you’re male. If you’re female, your rights are subject to the whims of fashion.

Not shaving their legs? Really? Does Jon Ronson shave his?

And of course, there is the unmistakable attempt, one with which feminists are wearily familiar, to place trans-identified males inside the same moral framework as black people experiencing racism. This relentless propaganda, combined with the ambient soundtrack which swells every time words like ‘intersectional’ come up, have the effect of making it feel like a cult initiation recording.

Most insultingly, he portrays AGPs bullying a lesbian festival out of existence as if it was the Camp David accords. It’s a grotesque piece of revisionism. In one section, the principles behind the protest are breathlessly described.. “…headway was made at Camp trans, not least because of the guidelines that Nancy and her friends drew up. “Most festival goers are thoughtful and open minded. Listen carefully and remain calm and patient. Do not call anyone names or belittle their point of view or imply that they are irrational. An atmosphere with love and joy will attract people to us, anger and hostility or turn them away.””

Be polite and tactful as you invade a women-only festival and demand to be incloooded.

Isn’t that lovely? But the worst aspect of the program is not what it contains but what it does not. Ronson fails to even mention that Michfest ended—properly ended—when two lesbians and their adopted son were murdered by one of the Camp Trans protestors.

That would harsh the mellow.

Not a good sign.

BBC Live says all signs are that Russia is invading Ukraine.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace says “All the indicators point to increasing numbers and readiness of Russian forces.”

He says the pledge to withdraw Russian troops from Belarus at the end of their joint military drills “was not carried out”.

“The exercise has now been extended until further notice,” he says.

Not good.

And the rest of it.

This is excellent. GB News was looking for volunteers on Twitter earlier because someone else had to back out, and Dennis raised his hand and so did Jon Pike.

Help friends harm enemies: Republican ethics in a nutshell.

Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, is backing a controversial proposal to strip $200m in education funding from Democratic counties that defied his executive order last year banning mask mandates in schools.

The Democratic counties did what they thought would help protect students and teachers from a dangerous virus, while the Republican ones took the “don’t tell us what to do” route, which is not always clever in matters of public health. In other words the Dem counties didn’t do anything actually wrong or malicious. It seems very piggy to punish the schools in those counties for that kind of best judgement decision.

Promoting women is sex discrimination, giving scholarships to minorities is majority discrimination, free school lunches are wealth discrimination, yaddayaddayadda.

The Republican senator Ted Cruz complained on Sunday that Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to the supreme court was an instance of racial discrimination…

No it’s a correction of generations of racial and sex discrimination. I’m sure he understands that point, it’s not very complicated, but one must throw red meat to The Base.

“Democrats today believe in racial discrimination,” Cruz told Fox News Sunday. “They’re they’re committed to it as a political proposition. I think it is wrong to stand up and say, ‘We’re going to discriminate.’”

But it’s perfectly all right to discriminate in favor of white men as long as you don’t spell out that that’s what you’re doing.

Brendan O’Neill, in one of his getting something right moments, points out the flaw in Laurie Penny’s “feminism”:

Penny writes an awful lot about women for someone who doesn’t know what a woman is. Ostensibly this is a feminist tract, about how humanity faces a terrifying choice – it either carries on down the road to fascism or it embraces the corrective of Laurie Penny’s feminism. (Talk about a rock and a hard place!) And yet it’s a strange feminist tome that thinks men can be women, too. Penny gets it out of the way early. ‘In this book, when I talk about “men” and “women”… I am including everyone who locates themselves in those categories’, she says on page 8. So she’s not really talking about men and women at all. What a way to blow up your own thesis. Men have ruined everything, and only a progressive women’s politics can save us, but men can be women too if they want, so this progressive women’s politics will sometimes include men – that’s this book boiled down.

But Laurie Penny will just say they’re not men, because they say so.

And then there’s the part that crosses paths with the detransition article I quoted this morning:

I really wish that Penny – and all the other talking heads of our fashionably traumatised era – would just keep things to herself. Do we need to know that Penny starved herself as a teenager and ended up in hospital? Do we need to know that all her friends seem to have had terrible and frightening sexual experiences? (Where are they hanging out?) Penny says that she and others – the enlightened ones, presumably – have ‘realised and accepted that we are being abused and terrorised’. I call bullshit. Terrorised how? Again, why should we be made to suffer the neurotic cries of the leisured classes? Penny doesn’t need a political movement – she needs a therapist.

All these unconvincing claims to victimhood play an important role, however. They are the means through which the new commentariat launders its privilege and turns it into suffering.

Ah-ha. The same insight, you see. How does one get out of being a privileged white cishet Karen? By being trans or enby, or by telling us about a traumatic teenagerhood.

This is the fundamental function of identity politics – it allows those from wealthy, comfortable backgrounds to position themselves as the new oppressed. So Ms Penny – privately educated, time-rich, her labour unsold, her hands uncalloused, straight, married, etc etc – can magically reposition herself as a member of the downtrodden by announcing that she is genderqueer, a they/them, abused, terrorised, yada yada. And so do the privileged elites culturally appropriate the language of oppression and position us as the oppressors of them.

He’s not wrong.