Five Quick Things: Transgenderism Embodies Our Cultural Collapse – The American Spectator

Boy, this has sure been a banner week for the good ol’ US of A, hasn’t it?

It’s starting to get more than a little difficult to not downright hate the people in elite positions in this country. We’re obviously not supposed to feel that way, except now there are caveats.

The first one being that the SOBs so clearly hate us.

In the last column in this space, I noted that we’re fully engaged in the Cold Civil War with the anti-American woke Left — or, better put, they’re engaged in it with us. Our side increasingly isn’t just the Right but also includes the Center. You can see that pretty clearly in the fact that some of the people who used to be opponents, like Bill Maher, Joe Rogan, Bari Weiss, Dave Rubin, Alan Dershowitz, Jonathan Turley, and lots more, aren’t finding themselves so much red-pilled as driven into our camp by the Hard Left having won the internecine war for control over the Democrat Party and its contributing institutions.

The Cold Civil War has to be fought. It will certainly be won because the Hard Left is only capable of winning by forfeit. They’re incapable of performing the tasks of societal governance, something they prove by turning every institution they control into a circus.

As Donald Trump said before the Cold Civil War turned as nasty as it is now, “everything woke turns to s**t.”

Well, America is turning that way, and fast. We’ll have to fight, and like the previous two columns this week have outlined, we’d better be willing to fight ugly.

And our first entry is a golden example of why.

1. Kill the Department of Education Before It Kills Education

A press release popped out Thursday afternoon from something called the National Center for Lesbian Rights:

Today the United States Department of Education released a new Title IX rule affirming protections for transgender students’ participation in sports. The proposed rule provides that categorically banning transgender students from school sports is unlawful and that any restrictions must be firmly supported by clear evidence and must minimize harm to transgender students.

Which of course made the rights-concerned lesbians quite happy, as the apparent Grand Poo-Bah of lesbian rights, someone named Imani Rupert-Gordon, said:

Transgender youth are an integral part of every school across this country. We applaud the Department of Education for recognizing that the law requires that transgender students must be treated fairly and equally and as respected members of their school communities.

Politico’s writeup of the new rule says there are caveats to the federal government’s new intrusion into local and state education policies. Apparently it does grant that states “may adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation.”

“In some circumstances.”

This will obviously be litigated, and it would be a bit of a surprise if the Supreme Court didn’t tell Miguel Cardona, the Biden regime’s secretary of Education, who for some reason was confirmed by the Senate despite the fact that in his previous job he shepherded into being the age of “transwomen” beating the hell out of girls in Connecticut track events, to get bent. That said, early returns on the issue with respect to SCOTUS are … disappointing.

And here’s what Trans Cardona had to say:

“Every student should be able to have the full experience of attending school in America, including participating in athletics, free from discrimination,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “Being on a sports team is an important part of the school experience for students of all ages.”

Except his stupid rule denies that full experience to girls, who are now supposed to just take it when sexually confused Lia Thomases, or the inevitable follow-on cynical LARPers coming next to your kids’ school sports programs, start trashing them on athletic fields with the full endorsement of the federal government.

And all of this is to be enforced using your tax dollars.

There is a very easy solution to the madness of Miguel Cardona, which is to actually do what Republican politicians have been lying to their voters about doing for decades.

Simply defund the federal Department of Education. Zero out the funding. Shut the place down. Like you’ve promised to do since Reagan was president and never got around to.

We are in the middle of a debt ceiling and budget fight that is actually existential to the country. The Biden regime sent up a federal budget that spends a half-trillion MORE next year than this year when we’re already running more than a trillion-dollar deficit, and it dares to claim that over the next decade it shaves $3 trillion off the federal debt despite the fact that it’s projected to rise from $33 trillion to $51 trillion by 2033.

We can’t afford the federal Department of Education anyway. We can barely afford the departments of Defense and Justice, much less something we didn’t even have before Jimmy Carter created it — oh, and American education has dived directly into a dumpster ever since this misbegotten sop-factory for teachers union racketeers and university-credentialed cranks was born.

Kill it. Don’t waste time trying to fight this rule. Chop off the head of the snake and put Cardona and all of the rest of his bureaucratic loons in that agency out of a job.

Republican pols get their feelings hurt when their voters call them names and declare allegiance to Donald Trump rather than people who’ve fought the good fight while Trump was paying off scumbags like Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel for the privilege of doing business in New York and Chicago, but this is why. When you let the Left weaponize the federal government against girls’ basketball players without taking away their tools for such abuses, you’re as much a part of the problem as the Left is.

Change that, and earn our respect. Get rid of the Department of Education and let red states preserve sanity.

2. Which Can Be Done, as Tennessee Proved Thursday

Here’s a feel-good story for you. In perhaps the greatest example of enforced political hygiene in America this millennium, the Tennessee General Assembly expelled two Democrats who took advantage of a riot in the state capitol last week to grab a bullhorn and shut down floor proceedings by shouting stupid slogans about gun control.

That riot, which honestly fit the new definition of an insurrection that our elite betters established after Jan. 6, 2021, could have been highly dangerous to members of the Tennessee Legislature had the state troopers not done yeoman work in keeping the crazies back. It happened last Thursday, which was the first day of legislative floor proceedings following the mass murder at the Covenant School across town.

The two legislators, who egged the demonstrators on as they screeched from the gallery and pressed to gain entry into the chamber, were a couple of machine pols named Justin Jones and Justin Pearson. Jones is an especially noxious demagogue for whom this caper was hardly out of the ordinary. On Monday, they were stripped of their committee assignments, and on Thursday the vote was taken to expel them from the Legislature.

There’s a supermajority of Republicans in both houses of the Tennessee Legislature. And they act the part. This is how you win.

3. Nothing to See Here, Folks, Move Along

And no sooner does the Biden administration push its trans-pandering into warp speed than this happens:

? #BREAKING: Manifesto reveals a trans person’s plans to carry out MULTIPLE school shootings in Colorado, as well as take out President Trump, calling him a “con-man”

William Whitworth, a biological male that goes by “Lily,” has been charged with attempted murder. pic.twitter.com/k8mmmrCJ74

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) April 6, 2023

Douglas Blair at the Daily Signal had a great piece forecasting precisely this; Blair said that if the trans advocacy crowd is allowed to get away with claiming some sort of “genocide” is going on among their people — a claim with no evidence whatsoever behind it — then you will have a rash of political violence like we haven’t seen in half a century or more.

Guess it didn’t take 24 hours to prove Blair right. Heaven help us with whatever is next.

4. Bye, Transheuser Busch!

Now is when you start to notice that this is an exclusively transgendered Five Quick Things, for which your author apologizes; I’m having trouble fully processing the collapse of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, the increasing likelihood of a two-front war against Russia, China, and the rest of the axis they’re assembling, with Ukraine and Taiwan serving as the immediate flashpoints, and a few other things.

Maybe we’ll hit meatier subjects in next week’s columns.

On the other hand, it’s worth it to talk about all of this because it’s a good stand-in for our cultural collapse.

And when Bud Light gave Dylan…