https://defector.com/men-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown
'"Tim Walz is not trans," the reactionary influencer Christopher Rufo tweeted
on Tuesday. "But he knows about cross-sex hormones. He's familiar with breast
binders. He has a soft spot for tucking." Rufo's post goes on like that for a
while, in a tone that seems to be aiming for comic escalation and which lands
closer to skronking free jazz. The last sentence is, "They will cry when they
hear our transgender patriots roar!" Rufo's post is a quote-tweet of a 2019
post by Minnesota Governor and Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz,
in which Walz writes, "Our transgender military members are true patriots. They
deserve to be thanked, not attacked." Walz was responding to a Trump
administration policy that all but banned transgender people from serving in
the military; Rufo, five years later, was not so much responding to that
response as he was performing his disgust at the concept of trans people
existing in any context. The idea was that this would make Walz look bad.
As with so many similar distress signals from the American right, Rufo's post
is easy to understand at one level—it's a man getting upset about something in
a strange and theatrical way—and pretty much impossible to parse at every
other. The tiresome meta-debate over the strategic merit of tagging Trumpist
Republicans as "weird" notwithstanding, it is honestly just hard to think of
what else to call this sort of thing. It helps a bit if you know what Rufo's
particular job is, and how Trump's own bottomless and babyish appetite for
umbrage, flattery, and spectacle have reshaped conservative politics into
something designed to generate those above any other end. If you think of Rufo
as an influencer in the classic hey-guys-please-like-and-subscribe sense,
pulling faces and cutting spiteful little promos for his audience of addled
conservative elites, the stilted and overstated tone at least begins to make
sense.
Both greasy strivers like Rufo and also your more warped and willful elected
officials on the right all understand their jobs this way and behave
accordingly. If they seem somehow unlike actual people, if they are too big and
too mad and too much, it is because they are now full-time content creators,
and so actually not quite like actual people at all. They are all pinned into a
deteriorating orbit around the dense collapsing star at the center of the
conservative universe, but they have committed to at least make their turns
around Donald Trump's imperial bulk as loudly as possible. Again, this is the
job.'
Via Violet Blue’s
Cybersecurity Roundup: August 13, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-13-110000477
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
