One of the best known observations on our side is that conservatives surrender. They never conserve anything, and are always well pleased to be seen as not causing too much trouble. While this is clear and obvious, less well known is how surrender happens.
We’ve all read scores of “The Conservative Case For” articles, but these always appear at the end of the battle, making the surrender formal, like signing a peace treaty. The real work of bowing to decadence begins before these appear.
Let’s see how it’s done in one of the main organs of regime propaganda, the New York Times itself, in a piece by one of its staff conservatives, Ross Douthat. The piece is “How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War“.
Ostensibly, this is a piece that surveys transgender mania and says, in language NYT readers believe is spoken by deplorables, “Hold up! Wait a minute. Some’un ain’t right! Let’s slow down and take a good long think about what’s a goin’ on heah. You might be pleased to call a man ma’ma now, but y’all could end up feelin’ nasty bad ’bout what you’re a doing.”
Suitably admonished by the very real power of the press, the woke will cease pushing so hard for insanity to be official policy.
But neither will they, of course, cease pushing altogether.
Here’s the admonishment bit people are quoting, coming right at the end of M. D’s piece:
…I will make a prediction: Within not too short a span of time, not only conservatives but most liberals will recognize that we have been running an experiment on trans-identifying youth without good or certain evidence, inspired by ideological motives rather than scientific rigor, in a way that future generations will regard as a grave medical-political scandal.
Which means that if you are a liberal who believes as much already, but you don’t feel comfortable saying it, your silence will eventually become your regret.
Sounds as if it’s a straightforward Reality-based spanking. Which, because of where it was presented, gives one hope. Yet its placement naturally enough sucks away some of the dissident energy to fight. Why struggle if the battle is won? This is a key component of surrender: false signals that the battle is won, or the fight is over something too small to bother with.
Let’s go back to the beginning of the piece where the real spirit deflation happens. This is a popular move we can call The Sly Surrender.
Douthat gives three scenarios to explain the current transanity (brief quotes, but all contain the gist):
1.
This is great news. Sexual fluidity, transgender and nonbinary experience are clearly intrinsic to the human experience, our society used to suppress them with punitive heteronormativity and only now are we getting a true picture of the real diversity of sexual attractions and gender identities. (Just as, for example, we discovered that left-handedness is much more common once we stopped trying to train kids out of it.)..
2. “We shouldn’t read too much into it. This trend is probably mostly just young people being young people, exploring and experimenting and differentiating themselves from their elders…”
3.
This trend is bad news. What we’re seeing today isn’t just a continuation of the gay rights revolution; it’s a form of social contagion which our educational and medical institutions are encouraging and accelerating…
So what we need now is probably more emphasis on biology, normativity and reconciliation with your own maleness or femaleness, not further deconstruction.
The first interpretation is woke, the second progressive, and the third conservative. The first two are cheers for transanity, unquestioning recommendations, really, with quibbles only about the speed of implementation. These are restatements of how the woke agenda is correct.
So is the third. Why? Because Douthat cannot bring himself to condemn the madness. He never defends, or attempts to defend, Reality. His purpose is to show the left that the Right is not entirely to be feared; that the Right can be lived with. But certainly not capitulated to.
He never shows why the first two interpretations are idiotic, or says why they are anti-Reality and anti-human. He weakens the third point with that “probably more emphasis on biology”. Probably? His overwhelmingly leftist readership are implicitly given a free pass to hold either the first or second interpretation, and are asked only to forgive the third.
If any reader should venture to the third, again they will find no challenges to their Fantasist world view. All they will conclude is that, as in the admonition, that maybe perhaps kinda sorta we should slow down a bit, here and there, maybe.
The surrender has happened. It is over. The battle has been conceded, but so softly we didn’t even feel the knife slipping between the shoulder blades.
Now you may say Douthat himself, in his soul of souls condemns the madness and is not stupid enough to fall for the idea that a man believing he is woman is in anyways acting sanely. Maybe, even, you know Douthat and have heard him say such things in private.
It doesn’t matter. He was not able to defend the idea of biology and Reality-based metaphysics. He never even tried. All he could do is throw out that insipid “probably.”
There it is. Right there. This is why conservatives never win. He has surrendered by never coming out to fight. Fitting in was his goal. And it was achieved: until the left charges down the slippery slope demanding new territory. He will then surrender again.
Buy my new book and learn to argue against the regime: Everything You Believe Is Wrong.
Subscribe or donate to support this site and its wholly independent host using credit card or PayPal click here; Or go to PayPal directly. For Zelle, use my email.
And this is why when people ask, I laugh and tell them that I’m not a ‘conservative’.
Conservatives always surrender
https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/robert-lewis-dabney-a-prophet-for-our-own-times/
It’s madness. The urge to not make a fuss overwhelms the chance to state the truth: that the would-be trans “movement” demeans both men and women. When has any of those espousing this received a prostate transplant or a fully functional womb, or a chromosome alteration? Mr. Douthat is not someone I would want to share a foxhole with.
Its because of the attempt to play nice with atheists.
My local supermarket (15 miles away) got rid of all the long time help during the plague and replaced them with an assortment of green haired, graffiti faced amorphous-androgynous beings. My “helper” had a name tag with DJ and (they/them) on it. The checkout area looked like a package of m&m’s with needles stuck in the candy.
The nearby liquor store has a sign in the window: This is not a gun free zone.
Our representative, in name only, is a carpetbagger rapper with an affirmative action certificate from Harvard. Delgado thanked his comrades in a video when he was “elected.”
“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.” – Thomas Sowell
The Left are the barbarians that were never civilized and the Conservatives seem to be on the whole too sheepish and insecure to do the civilizing.
Not to worry people if the U.S. assisted in the the sinking of the Russian ship
the Moskva all this will seem like tiddlywinks.
USA targeting of Moskva ship is Russia’s “Pearl Harbor” …
https://newstarget.com/2022-04-21-usa-targeting-of-moskva-ship-is-russias-pearl-harbor.html
“We’ll Be Grinding Up NATO’s War Machine” – Russian State TV Host
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bxF0qPupS8&t=3s
“We’ll civilize them with the Martini-Henry and the Maxim gun.”
Yes, of course–the transgender and non-binary experience is just like left-handedness! Why didn’t that analogy-as-explanation occur to me??
But, if that analogy is followed, how is the genetic (XX, XY) reality of sex, when subject to chemical intervention and surgical alteration similar to training physical coordination and manipulation of tool use (handedness)?
As a child, I was acquainted with an elderly lady–born in the 19th century–who had been taught to write right-handed, though was left-handed. This seems to be a relic of 19th century public schools and universal education. My family has left-handedness in each generation, and no where else–nor since–have I heard the ancient history of teaching right-handed writing to all.
Nominally Catholic Lil’ Russ is the lap dog of the left. Were he not, he’d not have his gig.
He is just as much a girl as the putative Catholic chick who used to write her shite for the Times, Maureen Down.
They all sell their souls for progressive pottage.
The good thing is more and more men are coming to understand that the media is evil – satanic even – sure, its a small percentage of men but at least the percentage exists and Briggs is doing yeoman’s work in increasing the percentage
“He was not able to defend the idea of biology and Reality-based metaphysics. He never even tried.”
That is because, unfortunately, really defending those things in this context would ultimately require taking a stance found intolerable in this sentimentalized age: That those few gender dysphorics whose psychological misery is so acute that the only option (other than extended forced hospitalization, which has ethical issues of its own) to prevent their suicide, for even a reasonably functional period, is an enabled simulacrum of sexual “transition” should be allowed to die rather than be helped in this manner.
This is the leverage being used for emotional blackmail by the entire queer/libertine movement, among others: Enable us to live the way we want, even if it is on some nitpicking irrelevant practical level “false”, or we will be condemned to tragically shortened lives of unnecessary suffering. And unfortunately the argument that it is better to endure suffering and loss than betray truth was lost decades ago, enabled partly by the very medical-scientific establishment whose essentially functionalist attitude has provided so much relief from suffering in other ways.
In that context, there may be some practical merit in arguing not to win a battle that was lost before you even got onto the field, but merely to minimize the victors’ rapine and pillage afterwards, as much as can be done.
“This trend is bad news. What we’re seeing today isn’t just a continuation of the gay rights revolution; it’s a form of social contagion which our educational and medical institutions are encouraging and accelerating…”
My preferred revision:
“This trend is bad news. What we’re seeing today is just a continuation of the homosexual attack on normalcy; it’s a form of social indoctrination which our educational and medical institutions are encouraging and accelerating…”
Pray, asking God to place in all children’s hearts, the truth of His creation of human sexuality, so that when the counterfeits are presented to the children, they will know for certain that the counterfeit teachings and beliefs are not of, nor are they from, God.
God bless, C-Marie
I don’t know the reasons that some people couldn’t accept the way they are and feel, and want to go through transitions or plastic surgeries or whatnot. However, not knowing biology is probably not one of them.
Conservatives never win. NEVER! Is ‘drama queen’ a synonym of ‘manly man’?
Anyway, what does it mean to win in this case?
Mr. Briggs, I believe you have lost a great deal. The loss is not caused by what a small group of conservatives and liberals have said and done. I understand it is not easy to tolerate people and things that don’t fit your ideal, and to accept people of different opinions, beliefs (and who wear jeans) into your group. Is it possible to make peace with yourself?
“If any reader should venture to the third, again they will find no challenges to their Fantasist world view. All they will conclude is that, as in the admonition, that maybe perhaps kinda sorta we should slow down a bit, here and there, maybe.”
Note how “they” is used twice as the pronoun for “reader.” Talk about “surrender.”
Thanks for all that you write, Dt Briggs. As the lone conservative in my office of the woke mass hypnotised, your writing is about the only thing keeping me sane in Australia.