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talkingpointsusa · 11 months ago

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Rebel With A Far-Right Cause; Debunking the December 12th edition of the Ezra Levant Show

If you're an American you probably read that title and went "who?" however if you're a Canadian on the left you probably made a grimace of disgust.

So, who is Ezra Levant and why is he going to be a recurring character on this blog alongside more famous figures on the alt-right/alt-lite spectrum?

Ezra Levant is the founder of "Rebel News", a far right media outlet that is basically the Breitbart or InfoWars of Canada. And if you think that InfoWars comparison is a little extreme, keep in mind that Levant literally guest hosted for Alex Jones once. It is famous for platforming notorious alt-right figures like Faith Goldy (who was fired for attending the Charlottesville Rally, presumably in an attempt by Rebel to save face) and Proud Boys founder and known antisemite Gavin McInnes. Ezra's history with platforming antisemites is particularly odd considering that he himself is Jewish.

As a Canadian myself, I feel like I can't criticize all these American figures without addressing the people in my country, and who better than the one who is prominent enough in the alt-right to host for Alex Jones? So expect to see Ezra show up on the blog whenever something big happens in Canada.

So, let's get into it shall we?

00:00: "Hello my friends, I wanna take you through the CBC's latest hit job, a smear against Elon Musk."

OK, so the right is still in the middle of it's love affair with Elon Musk and it appears that sentiment carries on up here in the great white north. CBC is, for the uninitiated, basically Canada's answer to NPR and Ezra hates it. He acts like Justin Trudeau has complete editorial control over the CBC when in reality the CBC has been critical towards the prime minister in the past.

Anyway, carrying on.

00:08: "And it's so lame and it's so awful and it's done by one of the worst journalists in the entire Canadian Broadcasting Corporation who was recently chided by their own ombudsman for his lack of ethics."

Ok, the journalist in question here is Jonathan Montpetit. As for the ombudsman complaint, I read the document Ezra provided and it doesn't say what he thinks it says. This was in response to a person named James Sali who lodged a complaint with the CBC about an article that Montpetit did about the freedom convoy, here is the link to the document.

But in case you don't want to read all that, here is what the ombudsman said his final verdict was.

"The ultimate conclusion of my review, though, is that CBC’s article adhered to the appropriate standards. I found no violation of policy."

Some chiding. I get that Ezra doesn't think his audience will check sources, and they probably won't or else they would have stopped listening to Rebel Media, but for crying out loud at least make an effort to accurately report on what you are citing.

00:20: "I'll take you through it line by line"

Me with Ezra Levant today.

01:19: "You know, I'm on Twitter and TikTok on my phone and both track me through my phone. I'm the same person whatever I type, whatever I search for, whatever I read, whatever I say into my phone, both apps get the same information from me. So it's amazing to see the difference between what those two social media platforms serve up to me based on their algorithms. And I should tell you that there's about 100 times more raw antisemitism and anti-black racism on TikTok than there is on Twitter."

A): The source is "just trust me bro" B): Does Ezra not realize what a massive self-own admitting that the algorithms think that you're into antisemitism and anti-black racism is? I wonder why that is? Could it be that Ezra is a raging racist who employs people who hang out with Neo-Nazi's? I wonder.

02:10: "I can't tell you how many times Nazi war songs have been served up to me on TikTok."

Well, if it happens so often I will gladly invite Ezra to provide links to some of these antisemitic TikTok's since he sees them oh so often. Until then I'm going to just assume that this never happened.

02:35: "Sometimes I laugh when people publish ads. They take a screenshot of an ad that shows up on website they're watching about and they complain about that ad. Usually they'll say 'Oh these dating sites' 'all these sexually suggestive ads'. And it's funny because that person obviously doesn't realize that the ads served up on any given website are personalized, they're tailored to the individual user. So if you're getting ads to meet single women in your area it may be you, not the website you're on, you may have been Googling that."

Yeah, it's hilarious. I recently was listening to this guy named Ezra who was complaining about the algorithm showing him antisemitic TikTok's without realizing that maybe his racist beliefs and the alt-right crowd he hangs out with might have influenced that. Oh wait.

If you have ever wondered why Ezra Levant is such a laughingstock in Canada, this is why.

03:08: "But I promise you, as a Jew I am not searching for Nazi stuff or anti-black stuff on my phone."

Nice save, well not that nice but at least he acknowledged that his argument can be turned back around on him so easily.

03:58: "CBC's in house ombudsman, who usually just whitewashes the state broadcasters ethical lapses, was so grossed out by one CBC story that they actually chided their own reporter for smearing Trudeau's enemies as conspiracy theorists."

He actually said the opposite, quote:

"But I am telling you that it is only a theory. A theory that there is a conspiracy to make people dependent on government, and a theory that has not been proved. In other words, CBC was fully reasonable in referring to this as a conspiracy theory."

I have a theory and if it is true it shows how dumb Ezra and his cohorts over at Rebel Media are. What I think happened was that they found this report, read the complaint, and assumed that it was what the ombudsman was saying instead of the complainant.

I never thought it would happened, but it just did. Ezra Levant is officially the single worst journalist I have covered on this blog.

At least Tim Pool can kind of hide behind the veneer of just being a guy talking shit on YouTube and at least that time he misreported on a tweet he found on the internet could be generously viewed as Tim being misinformed by a poorly framed tweet and foolishly running with it. This is just pure laziness and not bothering to read the document that you are sourcing for your own article!

04:59: "We've got thousands, tens of thousands, of pro-Jihad extremists, most of them Muslim marching in our city streets."

So, kind of like how Matt Walsh thinks more about trans people than most trans people, Ezra Levant thinks more about Muslims than most Muslims.

I've said it before, the protestors aren't "pro-Jihad extremists" and I challenge any of these right wing talking heads to show me evidence that they are outside of isolated incidents.

This kind of rhetoric is exactly how an Islamophobic hate crime occurs and Ezra knows it!

05:36: "They're extremist gossip rebranded as investigations"

Ezra Levant accidentally describing Rebel Media.

06:21: "Yeah, it's not a conspiracy theory that the Canadian government wants us to eat bugs. They say they do and they're giving government grants of taxpayers money to a factory that produces insects as food, both for pets and for people."

What Ezra is talking about is a factory in London Ontario owned by Aspire Food Group, a company that produces cricket protein protein. The government invested $8.5 million into this factory and people on the far-right ran with it. Small bits of insect matter are put into food, for example, certain red dyes are insect-based. Nobody is forcing people to eat bugs, there is no proof that anybody is forcing people to eat bugs and according to Aspire only 10% of their factories resources are devoted to human consumption whereas the rest is devoted to pet consumption.

09:33: "The headline; Bell Media, Angus Reid and other Canadian brands halt ads on X amid extremism concerns. (Ezra reads this headline in a sarcastic voice)"

Yeah, that's a factual statement. Those companies did indeed withdraw advertising from X citing extremism concerns. I love how in EzraLand reporting on the facts is considered a "smear-campaign" if the facts don't make a guy you like look good.

Here's the article Ezra is complaining about.

10:38: "He sure goes after the Jews, which again is a Trudeau kind of move. You'll see in the story ahead he talks about 'Libs of TikTok' which is an account that basically just republishes some of the goofy things that liberals say. It's run by an Orthodox Jewish woman named Chaya Raichik."

Being Jewish does not isolate you from criticism in the same way that belonging to any group does not isolate you from criticism. Chaya Raichik has made a career out of arranging targeted harassment of LGBTQ+ people, some of which has led to bomb threats of hospitals providing gender affirming care. If Chaya was a Muslim, Christian, or Atheist, I would find her disgusting all the same.

Also Ezra leaves out the part where Montpetit calls out Richard Spencer, a noted antisemite, for his antisemitic rhetoric. Quote;

"Ads for Montreal's Major League Soccer team, CF Montréal, and for the Jewish advocacy group B'nai Brith Canada appeared in the feed of Richard Spencer, a well-known white nationalist who helped lead a march in 2017 where followers chanted "Jews will not replace us."

11:25: "This was not an investigation by Jonathan Montpetit, that's not the essence of this story. This was Jonathan Montpetit using his CBC letterhead to contact advertisers and basically, in the guise of interviewing them actually threaten them."

Citation needed. Also I doubt that this massive corporations and organizations would feel so threatened by one guy from the CBC that they would pull advertising from a major social media platform.

Also, Montpetit was reporting on the advertisers pulling out and the requests for comment were probably reaching out for comments about why they pulled out. What would he have wanted them to do in this situation Ezra is proposing? Pull out more?!

12:08: "Pressing an advertiser with false information ginned up by the CBC which is a competitor to Twitter."

What?! I had to rewind that twice to make sure I was hearing that correctly. In what world is a news organization a competitor to a social media platform?! That's so dumb it's almost hilarious. To put it into perspective, that's like if I said Toyota was a competitor to McDonald's.

I know I said this in the Tim Pool episode and I'll probably say it again in the next episode but this is the most embarrassing news show I have ever seen.

12:48: "Look at the caption on the photo there. 'X, formerly known as Twitter, amid the unchecked rise in hateful content.' Is that true? Has there been an unchecked rise in hateful content? Is there any source for that information? In fact it's the opposite, Elon Musk has shown that the number of hateful or bigoted or antisemitic tweets has declined."

Elon stated that in a tweet without providing any proof. Again, "Just trust me bro" isn't a legitimate source. I love how Ezra is asking for sources that there has been a rise in antisemitic content, which by the way here's one, yet doesn't provide a source that shows that antisemitic content has declined.

13:29: "The fact is that Twitter has far less hateful content than the other platforms, especially TikTok which for some reason the CBC itself continues to use."

Hey Ezra, didn't you just say that you use TikTok and use it regularly enough for the algorithm to know your tastes and for you to have seen countless antisemitic videos? So which is it? Is using TikTok such a moral sin due to these antisemitic videos that you still haven't cited or are you allowed to regularly use it?

13:53: "And again and again in this piece they call Elon Musk an antisemite, you can see here, 'Elon Musk's seeming endorsement of antisemitic and other far right conspiracy theories.' but they don't actually name one."

Then I will! Elon Musk endorsed a tweet that Jewish people have “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” as "the actual truth".

Also what happened to going through this article line by line?

15:27: "So who is the Tech Transparency Project? A watchdog group. And I did my own investigative journalism using a machine called Google and in less than 30 seconds I found their website and I found their about us page for who pays for them, and George Soros pays for them."

An organization founded by Soros funding the Tech Transparency Project, which was cited in the article that Ezra is talking about, doesn't change the antisemitic remarks that Elon has made and him reinstating known far-right figures like Alex Jones and Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin.

18:43: "They're gonna call him an investigative reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation but there really isn't any Canadian content here at all is there?"

There's this thing called international news you see....

Also, it's reporting on Canadian advertisers leaving X. That is your Canadian content.

18:51: "They're citing foreign experts, and foreign donors, and foreign websites, about foreign companies like Samsung."

I love how he's just casually ignoring the mentions of CF Montreal, Bell, Pathway's Alliance, and others.

20:11: "It's a bit weird for the CBC and their hate journalist Jonathan Montpetit to be on Twitter telling other companies to get off Twitter, it's almost as if they don't mean it."

It's a bit weird for Ezra Levant to be on TikTok despite his claims that it is a deeply antisemitic platform, it's almost as if he doesn't mean it.

Ezra rants more about the article but it's just stuff we have addressed like the ombudsman thing and his bizarre crusade about TikTok. His next segment is on the climate conference.

26:59: "Hey welcome back. Well, the UN framework commission on Climate Change if I've got that right, that's a fancy way of saying the UN Global Warming Conference, is wrapping up in Dubai."

We already talked about this when Matt Walsh made this argument but global warming refers to the Earth's overall temperature going up, cold weather is weather as opposed to climate. Also, I didn't touch on this before but the notion that the term climate change was made up to save face is untrue. The term climate change has been used for years. It had roots in the 1950's and was being actively used in the 1980's.

Since he needs to talk about climate change even further, he decides to interview Marc Morano. Before the interview begins, let's talk about who Marc Morano is. Marc Morano runs the website climatedepot.com which itself is run by a right-wing think tank called Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. As is the case with most of these climate denier types, you can find oil money behind him. CFACT is funded by Exxonmobile and Chevron, conflict of interest much? Marc will be labeled as "MM" and Ezra will be labeled as EL to avoid confusion.

A lot of the early stuff in the interview is unimportant, just talking about how nice Dubai is without acknowledging that a lot of it was built using slave labor. It is kind of funny to hear Ezra Levant, the guy who once went on an entire crusade to "prove" that the Quebec mosque shooter was Muslim (he wasn't), talk about how great a city that is primarily Muslim is when someone else is in the room.

33:50: MM; "The UN Scientists admitted it, it was in the ClimateGate emails Ezra. They said it was pulled from thin air."

The ClimateGate emails didn't say they "pulled it from thin air". Where the controversy came from was the accusations that scientists manipulated data to support findings about climate change. Investigations have been done showing that these emails were misrepresented.

I'm fairly certain the email he is talking about is this one;

‘I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.’

On it's surface it sounds like this scientist was fiddling with the data, however that is ignoring the broader context.

The Mike that this scientist was referring to was a professor by the name of Michael Mann. The trick was combining records of temperatures measured by thermometer and estimates that they made with tree rings. It's absolute nothingness and that's why nobody talks about it anymore except for hardcore climate deniers like Marc and Ezra.

34:58: MM; "Even if you look at LGDPQ (Marc's words, not mine) marriage. You know people will say 'Oh, it's a repressive Muslim dictatorship'. Even that, even the worst critics have nothing to say."

Being gay is punishable by death in the UAE. There are underground gay scenes in Dubai but the UAE has a long history of persecuting LGBTQ people. For example, in December of 2013 two transgender women who were visiting Dubai from Brazil were detained by the Dubai Police for "imitating women" (Which is transphobic language which mirrors some of the guys we have covered on this blog like Matt Walsh) and had their passports confiscated, effectively trapping them in the country, until they were deported in March of 2014 (but not before being made to pay a $2,722 fine).

Essentially, Marc's claim that there is nothing bad to say about the UAE's treatment of LGBTQ people is completely false.

37:29: MM; "It opened with a call to phase out all new coal production. This was endorsed by Al Gore, by John Kerry, and this was pretty frightening because coal is the most strategic of all the energy sources. The United States of course is the Saudi Arabia of coal. You have your own domestic supply that doesn't require any kind of importing and begging hostile regimes and even friendly neighbors for any of your energy."

This argument completely ignores that renewable energy sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro exist. You don't have to beg hostile regimes or friendly neighbors for the wind or the ocean.

38:20: MM; "What is the UN Climate Fund? It is literally the United Nations picking the poorest nations leaders, dictators in some cases, who are best able to keep their citizens locked in poverty."

There are some concerns with the UN Climate Fund being used for corrupt purposes. However, the UN has checks and balances to ensure that this does not happen. The countries that are receiving the funds have to disclose what they are doing with them.

Think about it this way, would it make sense for the UN to just give away money without some form of oversight?

41:56: MM; "The UK Guardian a few days ago had an exclusive article of the United Nations IPCC scientists now wanting, instead of being in an advisory role like they've been since 1988 when the panel was formed, they want the power to implement policy."

Despite them not linking this article in true journalistic fashion, I found it and read it. Here it is.

The scientists weren't talking about making actual policy, they were talking about making policy prescriptions, namely suggestions. Quote;

"Yamina Saheb, the lead author of a chapter in AR6, said: “I would like to see a situation where scientists make recommendations and then you track them. You ask governments to sign off on what they will do and then you evaluate how much progress they have made.”

So recommendations and prescriptions, not actual set in stone policy.

The next little bit is Ezra explaining that Rebel Media didn't have press credentials for the climate conference. Then he asks about if there are "good guys" in the conference, Marc replies Saudi Arabia. Interview ends after that. Then the show starts up again for it's last stretch. He comes back on to complain about CBC and then reads letters to the editor, irrelevant. He then talks about how great Alex Jones being reinstated is, again irrelevant. The show ends.

Conclusion;

Well, that was Rebel News and Ezra Levant. So, what did I think of my first ever experience digging into Ezra Levant? Well, he seems to think that Canada is under dictatorial rule despite us being a democracy and he does some pretty godawful journalistic moves like not reading the things he is allegedly trying to cover. Really bad stuff. Might cover that time he guest hosted on InfoWars soon.

Also, since Ezra Levant has a habit of suing his critics, I would like to state that under Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms I am exercising my right of freedom of expression in criticizing a media figure.

Cheers and I'll see you all in the next one.

#ezra levant #rebel news #rebel media #right wing bullshit #journalism #conservative bullshit #fact checking #bad takes #conservatives #canada #canadian politics #politics

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wirewitchviolet · 3 years ago

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A Little Horrifying Primer on Transphobes

Some time ago, I put together a Little Fact Checking Primer on Trans People, as a basic resource for disabusing people of some of the many completely ridiculous yet absurdly widespread beliefs about trans people that simply have no basis whatsoever in reality. And wouldn’t you know it, every single lie exposed in that primer is not only still widely believed, but is presently being used as a basis to sign some absolutely horrific human rights abuses into law. So it’s high time I follow that up, in this case focused more on who keeps actively spreading these lies and why. I’m going to try and keep things as light as I can here, but we’re going to be looking at the most monstrous side of human nature, so apologies in advance if this is a dark read.

First, let me just note that there are two things I don’t plan to do in this piece. I’m not going to waste time debunking the arguments of the people I’m highlighting (much of this is already covered in my earlier primer, others have done the work in cases where I haven’t, and frankly these people’s claims should be self-evidently utter nonsense to begin with). I am also going to be very selective in what I link to, or even share related images of, as I would frankly not like to fill a post on a blog I generally try to keep safe for all audiences with media directly dealing with, for instance, child sexual assault, and much of the relevant information also involves stochastic terrorism against innocent people, and I would prefer not to throw more fuel onto such fires.

Transphobes lie constantly, about everything.

To some degree this is obvious. We’re talking about people who scaremonger about the possibilities of trans women dominating competitive sports and assaulting people in restrooms, despite the status quo already reflecting the conditions they insist would make these inevitibilities for decades and centuries respectively, and their grim visions never once having come to pass, and also constantly insisting that the woman in the photo below is actually a man, going further to say this is evident to anyone giving her the merest glance.

It goes beyond that though. There’s at least a little plausible deniablity in claims like this, or that “science is on their side” if they were simply uninformed about the world they live in, never actually looking into what laws exist, what science actually says, and never actually meeting a trans person or even seeing a picture of one of us. I’m talking really bold lies here. Like wholecloth fabricating a story that a convicted murder was trans, including anecdotes about wigs dresses and a planned name change, in a major newspaper. Or to cite an old favorite of mine, the time a pack of bigots walked up to a crowd of people peacefully picketing a transphobic legal proposal, started roughing them up and taking closeup photos of members of the crowd to stalk online when they got home, got sufficiently riled up for one to straight up assault an innocent person half her size, filmed the whole thing, uploaded it to youtube, and used stills of that assault as acomanying photos when they went home to write articles about the assailant being a “grandmother” attacked by rowdy trans women. And yes, they did monkey’s paw my wish to see that specific image on newspapers. Interesting side note, when it came to real public light that J.K. Rowling endorsed this sort of hatred, it was because she accidentally pasted some profanity laden rambling about how the imagined moral character of the other party in that incident, years after the fact, into a post praising a child’s fan art of her work.

To be a little less niche, transphobes can’t get enough of spreading the lie that the young fellow in this photo is a girl. Specifically a trans girl, providing proof that all their scaremongering about the dastardly threat of trans girls in competitive sports has finally come to pass.

To be fully clear, that’s a man (or a boy if you want to split hairs about him being 17 in that photo). Mack Beggs. A rather insidious choice for this sort of story, considering the actual context for that photo. See, Beggs attended high school in Texas, during a (still ongoing as I write this) period wherein that particular state had caved to this exact sort of propaganda, and in order to head off a wholly imagined wave of trans girls competing on girls’ sports teams, and enacted a law mandating that in all such competitions must compete under whatever gender is stated on their birth certificates. And as it happens, the first, and to my knowledge ONLY time this has come up was with Beggs here, who again, is a man, as no one with a grip on reality could argue against, has “female” on his birth certificate. Which is another way of saying he is a trans man. The guys in the same boat as trans women who we talk about a whole hell of a lot less because their existence is extremely inconvenient to the majority of transphobic propaganda. Case in point. And this is all information it is really impossible to come across if you’re coming across this photo in any sort of respectable source. Take this story, which is as unambiguous about this as you can get. And yet, in the very comments section of that story, there they are. Carrying on like this story about a trans guy, forced by a transphobic law to compete as a girl, which he absolutely did not want, and received horrific threats over, using phrases like “female to male” and bringing up that he was assigned female at birth and is on testosterone-based HRT, is about a trans woman cheating the system. Or to quote word for word, “Now also transgender female want to be male also compete in female sport. biological born“ That’s not “being confused,” that’s standing next to you in a white desert and complaining about being adrift in a black ocean, bald-faced, not even trying to be convincing just make a power play, lying through one’s teeth.

I could spend this whole article on just this point. Lying about who they are, various people’s falsified credentials, whole websites full of “anonymous parents of children who think they’re trans” turning out to be one single woman documenting the abuse of her very much trans son, or of course the people behind the whole “bathroom bill” panic candidly admitting it was all based on utter fiction. I do have other points to cover though.

Transphobes are firmly entrenched in the media.

It is extremely difficult to find oneself in a position of having to explain to people that a particular group of people is effectively in control of press outlets, as that is rather classically a claim conspiracy theorists absolutely love to toss around at various marginalized groups (including trans people hilariously enough, but of course the most common and lingering version of this is the antisemitic variant). I really can’t get around it here though. Specifically in the U.K., you honestly can say that transphobes control the media. I already touched on this with the assault case I mentioned above and the fabricated story about the murderer, but this is a pretty well-documented situation. I mean, even The Guardian calls out The Guardian on this, and that’s the outlet that gets the most attention because it’s the one with the most otherwise respected name, but every paper in the country has been running transphobic propaganda pieces on a weekly if not daily basis for years now, and while they do get reprimanded by watchdog groups and have mass walk-outs over the worst of it, it’s not like there’s some governing body with the authority to step in about it. Meanwhile the BBC is constantly inviting diehard zealots like Graham Linehan to news programs where he compares being trans to being a nazi, and hosting debates where someone just sits down and repeatedly chants the word “penis” at a trans woman.

Things are better in the rest of the world, but we still have right-wing creeps like Jesse Singal both writing horrific propaganda pieces (we’ll get back to that one) and blackballing trans writers out of covering trans issues ourselves (and personally stalking the hell out of those of us who try). We’ve got our Joe Rogans and Tucker Carlsons out there (no way in hell I’m linking videos here, have a real information link and a still).

The line between diehard transphobes and straight-up nazis basically does not exist.

What even is there to say here? You can easily poke around havens for nazi activity for yourself and compare the particular unique vocabulary used there to the primary bastion of anti-trans hate speech on the internet (the “feminism” section of what was originally a site for parenting tips before violent fascists took the forums over) or just peruse the follows of the thousands of people I’ve blocked on social media and see if you can sort out a clear division in the networks of channers with frog avatars and the accounts with names like GoodieXXrealwoman, or you can read up on Gab and Spinster, the two twitter alternatives that are just different portals to the same server, set up by the same guy. Maybe do some research into “the LGB Alliance,” or WoLF but any way you slice it the only real difference to be found is the general purpose nazis take a little time off now and then to watch borderline pedophilic anime and the really dedicated transphobes think to use language that sounds vaguely well-educated and left-leaning. I mean, this came from the “feminist” side of the fence:

And not to belabor the point here, but the ones claiming to be a bunch of “feminist mums” sure do let the mask slip any time they’re confronted with the fact that “women” includes black women, and oh just have a whole thread about all the weird conspiratory theories these people have about how trans people’s whole existence is some sort of Jewish plot for world domination. I swear a few months ago they were all passing around a story about some bank having an above average number of trans employees and they were all just “and we all know who controls the banks, right?” about it.

Transphobes endorse an awful lot of people who are openly pro-pedophila.

This is the part where I am really loath to link the many many specific examples I have on hand. Or to talk about this at all for reasons of good taste. Or, for that matter, to talk about this in a tumblr post when there’s an ongoing problem of people with backgrounds strongly tied to this site making baseless accusations of pedophilia against every queer person they can find, so let me be very clear just what I’m talking about while avoiding anything too graphic.

That’s James Cantor. Transphobes love him for being one of the closest things they have to a scientist on their side. And I am featuring him in a screenshot here showing that he is followed by current queen of the transphobes J.K. Rowling, while speaking to both another big name in transphobic circles, Debra Soh, and based on their names, what I’m guessing is at least one straight-up nazi. And in case you think “the P” he’s talking about adding to LGBT (or “GLBT” as weird anti-queer bigots who also have issues with women often write it) might stand for ��poly” or “pan” he’s all too happy to clarify that.

This is the entire thrust of Cantor’s work and life. He is the world’s biggest pedophile rights advocate. He wants it declassified as a mental disorder, all stigma on it removed, and tirelessly pushes forward the idea that the majority of.. people who feel compelled to sexually assault children are good people who present no potential harm to anyone and should in fact be lauded.

I am not generally one to claim that someone with a PhD is spewing out questionable garbage with regard to their field, but the reason I am aware of Cantor at all is that other transphobes keep trying to hold up a particular post on his blog as "a study” (which it is not) that offers “proof” (in the form of a blurry jpeg of basically some random numbers) of some ridiculous quackery about how trans kids will “grow out of it” if exposed to conversion therapy (another way of saying torture), which Cantor himself seems to be pushing, so I am somewhat skeptical of his academic chops. And I am, of course, REALLY suspicious that all these other bigots gravitate to him purely because they’re that desperate to find anyone with a PhD in anything that backs them up against literally every scientist in a relative field, to the point that they merely forgive his particular advocacy they are plainly all aware of, particularly when such a common fig leaf used by transphobes is “keeping children safe from sexual deviants.”

And of course, Cantor is most often invoked when coming to the defense of Kenneth Zucker. This Kenneth Zucker.

Those are separate papers. Zucker isn’t controversial though for organizing panels to discuss how attractive people agree small children are (at least not exclusively). Mostly, he’s known for running a conversion therapy center which subjected gay and trans children to various sorts of torture in an effort to “fix” them, which at least for those trans "patients” I have spoken with involved a fair amount of having them strip completely naked and talking a lot about their genitals.

Zucker is something of a controversial figure with the transphobic scene, as they are extremely on board with his sexual torture of queer children, but he does actual work (for some value of the term) involving trans people and thus is not able to commit as fully as they would prefer to making life horrible for trans people, due to a professional obligation to acknowledge reality now and then. As an aside, the similarly positioned Ray Blanchard, while not to my knowledge particularly interested in the attractiveness of children, lives in a similar purgatory of trying to reconcile his career, bigotry, and sexual hangups, yielding compromises like this:

Of course, that’s just looking at the straws transphobes grasp at when looking for scientific credibility. Real leaders of the movement include Germaine Greer, author of The Beautiful Boy, which is about what you are afraid it might be, and features a very young child in a cover feature he did not consent to posing for. Or Julie Bindel, who among other things is rather infamous for writing whole articles on subjects like whether a teenage girl she came across maybe has a huge penis you can totally see if you really squint at her skirt. Again, I will not share a link to go along with that one.

Transphobes terrorize and attempt to defund charities and other unambiguously good organizations.

Graham Linehan, previously best known for cowriting some sitcoms and possibly spending a year angling to get into my pants so awkwardly I didn’t pick up on it is now best known for trying to pull the plug on a children’s charity, in a story that somehow also involves Donkey Kong. Well, and the interview about nazis. And possibly the other interview about “defending me from nazis” until it got into his head that I might not be as young and hot as he imagined. Rather not link to a far right extremist youtube channel though.

There’s also a current effort to replace Stonewall (an organization named after the location where a pair of trans women kicked off a riot which is generally agreed to be the start of the LGBT+ rights movement) as the UK’s primary LGBT+ rights organization with the “LGB Alliance.” The hate group mentioned above, with the skull face and the rifle. Closest I can find to an article on that effort on short notice that isn’t propaganda.

Transphobes paper areas in truly disgusting propaganda.

I don’t want to directly link to grown adults skulking around children’s playgrounds and bathrooms plastering surfaces with mass printed stickers of crudely drawn penises, but would encourage you to read this very long post, being sure to load all the images, to really understand how deeply strange this behavior gets.

Finally, I cannot stress this enough, this really extreme behavior I’m citing, and the specific people involved in the examples I’m giving, these aren’t random cranks on the fringe of things. The people going on televised panel discussions, writing up news stories, and testifying before lawmakers in efforts to pass horrifically discriminatory if not literally life-endangering laws (there is a major ongoing effort to legally end all medical care for trans people, and I don’t just mean care directly relating to being trans) are literally the same people involved in the sexualization of children, nazi collaborations, and roving gangs assaulting people in the street. At a bare minimum I urge people, when booking guests and handing out writing contracts, to do background checks and see if they’re platforming actual terrorists. If we could actually bring legal consequences to bear against the worst of this, that would be great too. As things stand though, the whole world is just consistently citing a bunch of racist, woman-hating, serial liars with no real credentials, and questionable attitudes towards the sexual abuse of children, as “trusted experts” and refusing to seat actual trans people or people who have legitimately committed lifetimes to academic and practical work with trans people any seats at the table.

#trans #transphobia #educational resources

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