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On Tuesday, because of how we are all pretty much gluttons for punishment at this point, we (well, Dok and Robyn) attended a Moms For Liberty chat at the Bradley Symphony Center in downtown Milwaukee. Are you so jealous? I bet you are! Anyway, instead of writing a whole post on it, we decided to just have a Slack about our favorite moments. Fun? Fun!
Robyn: Hey Dok! So HOW MUCH FUN did you have at the Moms For Liberty forum yesterday?
Doktor Zoom: Well, I got that new bandage from Walgreens on my blistered toe, so that was a real win!
Robyn: That was pretty exciting. I got a bunch of Vitamin C there because I thought it might make me less anemic. So that was also nice. But sadly, instead of spending a few hours in the Walgreens where I could happily stare blankly at the ELF section for a while (it’s makeup, okay?) we had to go to the Bradley Symphony center not to see the symphony but to see a bunch of weirdos talk about how they are SAVING THE VERY SOULS of the children, but not in any specific way.
Doktor Zoom: But it was very specific, Robyn. Moms for Liberty cofounder Tina Vescovich started with a warning that “there’s something going on in this country,” which is a definitely true statement that I dare anyone to refute. Then she explained it was a battle between good and evil, and that sure sounded scary. Also, I guess radical Marxists are coming for America’s children, possibly to buy them school lunch, but also for their souls. That’s clearly terrible, and I hope the children don’t have their souls taken, by some unspecified Marxist evil.
Robyn: I feel like it’s not a real battle for good and evil if there’s not a Hellmouth but ymmv!
To be specific, she said that the radical Marxists are coming for their children’s futures, which is actually pretty true in the way that the radical Marxists do hope that, in the future, their children will have health care, subsidized college, a living wage, and a planet that is not entirely decimated.
Of course, the real “radical Marxists” are people like me (I guess?) with literally no power to do any of that, nevermind making it so the workers own the means of production, so perhaps she assumes we’ll just give up and … eat babies?
Doktor Zoom: Oh, wait, that does sound like us, doesn’t it. We’re the baddies, then. Also there’s all the radical gender ideology and the books that will make children think about gay pornsex if they see a child in a picture book who has two mommies, but for some reason nobody in the discussion actually mentioned any of the things that Moms for Libertines is best known for.
Robyn: They did not! The only mention of any of that was when they announced that some college students who were polled agreed with them that girls should not “have” to compete with those who were assigned male at birth in sports. That was it! Otherwise absolutely zero mention of the LGBTQ+ kids they want to make life hell for or the “porn” they’ve found in school libraries. So weird! It’s almost as if they are realizing that most Americans think their social conservatism is a tad extreme and they’re trying to downplay it.
Doktor Zoom: They already know exactly what they’re doing, so with a shibboleth like “parental rights,” nobody needs to explain that’s shorthand for “no one can acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people lest my innocent child turn into one, which is how I think that works.” It’s like the very old joke that I heard in high school about the prison where all the jokes that could possibly be told already had been told, so to save time they just numbered all the jokes and people would break into laughter. Then a new inmate tries to get in on the fun, shouts “37!” in the dining hall, and everyone just stares at him, so he tries again with one he’s seen people cracking up over earlier. “41!” he yells, and the guy sitting across from him just shakes his head and says, “Man, some people just can’t tell a joke.”
Robyn: Oh, that’s absolutely what they’re doing. They’re making it all as vague as possible so they can say “What! We just care about children and their education and don’t understand why this is suuuuuuch a partisan issue! Why is the Left against our desire to protect our children from nothing in particular? Is it because they hate the children?”
Doktor Zoom: And isn’t it a terrible, terrible thing that the very people who are siccing the FBI on ordinary moms for speaking their minds at school board meetings, are actually calling Moms for Censorship “fascists”? If anyone’s a fascist, it’s these people on the Left who want TOTAL CONTROL OF OUR LIVES, and I don’t need to be more specific than that because what part of EVERYTHING don’t you understand?
Robyn: Oh yes! I really loved that bit yesterday about how we supposedly have no policy and therefore have to “demonize” them and tell everyone that they are bad fascists, because otherwise no one would be able to figure that out for themselves by the way they go around banning books from libraries and attacking LGBTQ+ kids. Also when Wisconsin’s Senator Ron Johnson started going off about how we want to control people’s lives, because that was just precious.
I mean, was it Opposite Day? Because I sure as hell don’t see us going around telling people what religion they can be, who they can have sex with, what gender they are, what books their kids can read, whether or not they can take their kids to drag queen story hours, etc. etc. The only ways in which one could say we “try to control” anybody are when we say they shouldn’t be allowed to be shitty to other people they work with or have guns with which they can kill 47 people in under a minute. Sorry, but it’s a lot weirder to tell people they need to follow your personal religion than it is to prefer they not murder you.
Doktor Zoom: OK. but don’t you see, we must want to control everyone, by making kids become gay degenerates through not banning the books with LGBT+ content. A highlights reel that ran before the discussion included a clip of Joy Reid asking about the rights of parents who want their own LGBTQ+ kids to have access to books that help them feel seen; Moms cofounder Tiffany Justice explained, “If a child feels seen by this story, that means they have been the victim of a predator.” It turns out the book in question was George M. Johnson’s award-winning YA “memoir-manifesto” All Boys Aren’t Blue, which The Federalist described after the Reid interview ran in January as a “book about child rape.” So no one could possibly want a teen to read that, unless they’re a child rape advocate, QED.
Robyn: They were pretty upfront, mind you, about their inability to empathize with others or understand why people disagree with them. On multiple occasions, the speakers exclaimed that their (nonspecific) views should not be partisan. Ron Johnson, however, really brought it home by explaining that he “just can’t get inside the mind of a leftist.” This is not surprising, as these are people who lack empathy and have also never really bothered to find out what “leftists” believe — which is probably why they think we have “no policy ideas.” (WE HAVE SO MANY POLICY IDEAS! Just not policy ideas about putting the Ten Commandments up in classrooms.)
The ridiculous thing is that it doesn’t even require “empathy” to understand why people believe or don’t believe certain things, because you can just listen to or read what they have to say! The Right does not bother to do this. Why would they, when they can just invent a bunch of strawmen?
Can I truly understand what it would feel like to believe in God or to care what gender people identify as or who they prefer to have sex with? Not entirely! But I can comprehend the fact that people like the Moms for Liberty and Ron Johnson and whoever else do think that way. It’s not hard.
Doktor Zoom: But everything is a spiritual war against the forces of evil that are trying to destroy America. So if you tried to understand what’s going on in the head of a leftist, or even worse, feel empathy for an LGBTQ+ teenager who worries that they’re a horrible freak who can never be open about who they are, then you’re only lending legitimacy to those people and their anti-American agenda of trying to control everyone. Worse, you might have to admit that you’re scared of boogeypeople who exist mostly in your own head.
The really ugly thing, of course, is that, as in the Joy Reid example, these folks say they’re the only ones who really care about the children. A parent might say their LGBTQ+ kid might benefit from reading about the awful things that George M. Johnson not only survived but overcame on his way to becoming a functioning, self-assured adult. But the only thing the Mad Moms see in the book is the child rape, so it’s a book about child rape and only a weirdo would want that in a public library.
Robyn: Honestly? End of the day I think it is less about anything like that for them than it is about the fact that they don’t want their kids to develop empathy for others and then, subsequently, believe that their empathy-lacking parents are jerks. Because reading something like a memoir or fiction is a way of doing that thing Ron Johnson is so unable to manage — putting yourself in someone else’s shoes for a minute. They just can’t do it.
Anyway! I vote that we wrap this thing up and head out to some equally terrible RNC thing. Any other favorite moments from … whatever that was? Mine, apart from the woman at the beginning singing “The Star Spangled Banner” so terribly (though in her defense … that is something that only sounds good if you are singing at an Aretha Franklin level) — I would have to say the whole discussion of charter schools, in which many of the speakers professed a desire to return to (swear to God) one room schoolhouses. There was also a consensus among the speakers that the Department of Education should be abolished and that both healthcare and education would be helped by “competition” — likely because they are all very detached from reality and that’s their solution for everything.
Well, everything except books and religion.
Doktor Zoom: I did enjoy how they confidently said that American parents are all really on their side, as shown by their many victories in school board elections that too many voters don’t pay attention to, at least not until the Moms’ candidates start wreaking havoc on the schools and accusing anyone who opposes book bans of being a pedophile. As we saw in the 2022 midterms and off-year elections last fall, once the schools get taken over by extremist christian nationalists, many voters can’t wait to toss them out.
Probably just goes to show how deeply the Marxist radicals have infiltrated society.
