Zero Dark Trump

Since he first announced last Saturday that he would be arrested by New York City police the following Tuesday, millions of Trump-obsessed Americans have now waited nearly a week for the big day to arrive.

This may be the only chance in a lifetime for so-called journalists like us to write ledes like, “The former president may be perp-walked for paying hush money to a porn star.”

But even before the big day arrived, the overproduction of elites had created an overproduction of “deep fakes,” made by A.I., of Trump being arrested.

Naturally, Trump supporters were having none of it.

“As per sources on the ground,” tweeted another deep faker, @MadMikeOfficial, “Trump has taken command of the NYPD and has become the undisputed warlord of Manhattan.”

Wait, Wait It’s Even Weirder Than That

The people who have taken upon themselves the great burden of spying on and censoring their fellow citizens for wrongthink — the hall monitors within the Censorship Industrial Complex — have been warning for years that deep fakes like the Trump images above would result in “disinformation” campaigns and “influence operations” by “malign actors.”

Funny, then, that it was one of the leading members of the Censorship Industrial Complex, Eliot Higgins of the creepy Bellingcat, who was the first to create and tweet out the Trump deep fakes.

Here’s his best one:

“Making pictures of Trump getting arrested while waiting for Trump’s arrest,” tweeted Higgins cheerily. “This blew up etc, so donate to Bellingcat so we can catch bad guys and make scenes like this real.”

Higgins’ Bellingcat has been funded by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy, a widely-acknowledged C.I.A. front group, that is supposed to act nonpartisan, at least in public.

Watching Higgins use deep fake disinformation to attack his political enemies was a bit like learning the homophobic preacher was caught with a choir boy.

“Ironic,” responded a Twitter user to Higgins, “that YOU’RE the bad guy, in this case (fake pictures, spread across the internet..yeah, you said it was “AI created”, but you KNEW, people would believe it!”

“Well,” responded Higgins, “I can’t help stupid.”

Feminists Strike Back

Few have been more influential in making the case for transgender rights than radical feminists. Case in point is Gayle Rubin, author of the long essay, “Thinking Sex,” and Judith Butler, UC Berkeley author of Gender Trouble. Their writings were foundational to the construction of what is today known as “gender ideology.”

But now, leading feminists in the U.S. and U.K. are raising powerful concerns that cover a range of issues, from the rush to prescribe puberty blockers and breast removal surgeries to girls to the placing of convicted trans rapists in women’s prisons to the victories of intact natal males like Lia Thomas in women’s sports.

Last week we published an essay by British philosopher Nina Power, (“If You Had Asked Me At 11 If I Wanted To Be A Boy, I Would Have Said ‘Yes’”). She is out with a new essay this week in Compact (“TERF Island”) where she notes that, when it comes to pushing back against extreme gender ideology, “it is women at the forefront. In the face of death threats, job losses, and ostracism, many have stood up to defend their rights and to protect children from harm.”

“The umbrella of transgenderism,” writes Power, “bundles together whole groups of people who have nothing to do with one another: teenage girls who feel unhappy in their bodies alongside men in their 50s who fetishize what they imagine it’s like to be a woman. In reality, there is nothing that links these two groups. The whole language of transgenderism needs to be dismantled. The British women who began doing just that when it was institutionally unpopular—and dangerous to their careers and even their lives—deserve our gratitude.”

And they will get some gratitude, along with a heavy heaping of hatred.

Hear Her Roar

“I’m a woman,” tweeted progressive YouTube journalist Ana Kasparian, of the Young Turks, yesterday. “Please don’t ever refer to me as a person with a uterus, birthing person, or person who menstruates. How do people not realize how degrading this is? You can support the transgender community without doing this shit.”

Since then, the tweet has been viewed 23 million times, and retweeted more than 20,000 times.

It has also been replied to 19,000 times.

While the most-liked response to simply called Kasparian a Nazi, the more sophisticated response came from @mattxiv “hi ana,” he wrote, “no one is asking you to call yourself or be called anything other than a woman. anatomy-oriented language is used in a clinical context, where anatomy is relevant. this argument is like a mouse trap set up by TERFs, please don’t take the bait.”

But what he said wasn’t true. In fact, it was “DISINFORMATION!” as a couple of minutes of googling “birthing person” proved.

“What the Supreme Court just did was that they chose to endanger the lives of all women and all birthing people in this country,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez less than a year ago.

There’s no question that Kasparian knew the whirlwind she would stir up. “Your ‘side’ is gonna roast you now,” tweeted Zuby. “I hope you’re ready for the tolerance.” Replied Kasparian, “They have the right to speak their piece, as do I.”

Amen. The best response to bad information is good information. Nobody should want to “bounce” or “de-amplify” @mattxiv. He needed to be corrected, not censored.

Everybody’s pro-nuclear, But We Still Need Gas