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Notes -
An interesting "false flag" in the transgender culture war: a mystery group is impersonating a transgender group and sending texts and flyers to the wrong people:
https://www.kxan.com/news/texas-politics/texans-receive-texts-impersonating-transgender-advocacy-group/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/trans-student-mailers-hit-texas-210015782.html
As far as I can tell, of course, the transgender groups in question have no disagreement with the contents in these messages, but they have been sent to the wrong people. They want this content to stay on the down low and for parents not to know about it. As on twitter poster put it "The trans people wouldn’t be stupid enough to send this out right before midterms unless they thought you were trans" (emphasis added). The pages on the websites that the pamphlets and texts linked to have been taken down, though archive links show they had content on them previously: https://web.archive.org/web/20261005063417/https://transtexas.org/trans-texas-takeover-tour/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260807023304/https://transtexas.org/resources/ which is a very interesting thing to do for a group that presumably wants people to attend their tour and have access to some resources.
This does reinforce the idea that the trans project is both unpopular and/or secretly transing kids without their parents knowing, as they reacting with horror that parents are being exposed to their message.
This hiding behavior is certainly not standard among all groups. Most groups would be thrilled to get free publicity pointed to their website, even if the messages are coming from an anonymous benefactor (assuming it doesn't get them on a spam shitlist or something). Nevertheless, it does seem like democrat ideology mandates that they support the maximalist trans movement, and their solution is to distance from it.
It's not a difficult mystery at all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_propaganda
The Republican midterm strategy has been to repeatedly yell transgender and immigration over and over and over again at voters like the 9/11 family guy skit, hoping to get people to look past the financial disaster/corruption/etc.
We have motive. We have means. We have opportunity. They seem to be targeting right wing families in particular.
And we have evidence of it being a psyop already given the supposed group has no previous history and the only existing organization it has any attachment to has said it's an unauthorized usage of their name.
If those issues are so unimportant, then why don’t you just… give them up? Why not just capitulate and become anti-trans and anti-immigration so there will be nothing more to talk about, and we can get onto important issues like economics and corruption?
The fact that you resolutely will not do that under any circumstances shows that those issues are, in fact, important and worth talking about.
Because Dem primary voters aren't just out of step with the country as a whole. They're out of step with democrats as a whole.
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I've argued with people on the sports thing many times. They believe sports is a salami-slicing strategy the right is using towards the end goal of criminalizing being trans. Thus they believe the appropriate response is to push back hard on the first slice and give the right no leverage. Well, that and to be precise, Dems have never claimed "protecting trans people/immigrants" is unimportant, just [insert scenario involving trans people] is unimportant.
"I'd agree to this if I could trust you" is a respectable sentiment, but it's never uttered so I don't think the "salami-slicing" argument is what they actually believe.
That's fine, but still means they should concede the issue around that specific scenario (sans the salami-slicing excuse).
Depends on A) who you're talking to and B) what you mean by "actually believe." I generally see three arguments from the left on sports, not always from the same people:
Athletic ability isn't fair anyway, so it doesn't matter if trans people compete.
Hormones reduce MTF athletic ability to the level of women
Let the sports bodies decide.
Only a subset of the pro-sports even bother to argue 1 and 2, but pretty much all of them use point 3. They will never concede the argument because they think 3 is the true neutral option given their deference to science (specifically the science that confirms what they want to believe). The other part is that I don't think the left is entirely wrong about the right wanting to criminalize being trans, in that there are is a spectrum of resistance from "I'll use pronouns but internally I think this is kinda silly" to "Hell yes I want to criminalize being trans." The left, in keeping with their tendency to catastrophize, just treats the end of the spectrum as the norm. In keeping with that, they are genuine in believing the salami-slicing argument.
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I think the most charitable answer to this question is that (1) there is a small core of True Believers in the Democratic party which would freak out and sabotage things if the Party adopted the popular positions on trans issues and immigration; and (2) the Democrats genuinely and in good faith believe that if they get into power, the True Believers won't actually get to set the agenda. Therefore, from the Democrat perspective these issues are moot and irrelevant.
But to me, this is one of those partisan politics kind of things where partisan hacks from both sides engage in total and shameless hypocrisy. Democratic Party supporters don't hesitate for a millisecond to seize upon any issue which can be used to gain a political advantage, regardless of the overall importance of the issue and whether it's being used as a distraction. So it's hard to take this sort of complaint seriously.
(2). I think the most active Democrats in power believe they will just do the things they want after winning the election. Right side of history beliefs. So toning down and lying during the election is fine. (1) lie about your position (2). Do the thing (3) everyone likes the thing once it exists (4) continue winning elections.
The average Dem voter might believe they won’t do the thing when in power, but people who are more involved in politics are to the left of their voters.
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Support for "victim" groups like trans and illegals is inseperable from leftist ideology. Low information voters may disagree with the object level but ideological believers and thinkers are overrepresented in the party power structure
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I'm not following. If it's a small number of True Believers, and they wouldn't get to set the agenda, why not just openly oppose them and ignore their little freak-out?
To be clear, I'm not saying that they definitely wouldn't get to set the agenda, just that the mainstream Democrats sincerely believe that they won't.
But anyway, to answer your question, the primary issue I see is that major candidates need to have an organization supporting their candidacy. These organizations are staffed heavily with low paid and volunteer campaign workers, who tend to come heavily from the ranks of True Believers. So that if a candidate went against the True Believers on a hot button culture war issue, there would be a serious chance of a mutiny, sabotage, mass-quitting, etc. And the person's campaign would be in deep trouble even if the candidate's overall appeal to voters on the issues had improved.
Even putting aside the issue of campaign organizations, provoking a sense of betrayal among the True Believers could result in a lot of damage in obvious ways.
By contrast, once the candidate is elected, appeasing the campaign workers and other True Believers is less of a concern. And the agenda of the True Believers can be stalled in ways that are not overtly confrontational, for example if the candidate, having been elected, votes for some progressive bill but the Democratic party doesn't make an aggressive effort to get the bill through.
By the way, I'm not an expert on this issue but what really stuck in my mind was the most recent presidential election. Kamala Harris and other Democrats desperately needed support from male voters but were largely unable to release the kind of advertisements which would have resonated with male voters. And they were unable to release an ad countering Trump's infamous "they/them" ad. What I attribute this to is the campaign worker problem.
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They can play kingmakers or saboteurs
So purge them, what's the issue?
They're sufficiently entrenched now it's very hard to purge them
Ok, but then trying to tell people that an issue that will throw your entrenched establishment into active rebellion is "unimportant" feels just a tad dishonest.
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I don't think that logic holds water. If A and B disagree on many things, A cares deeply about X, and X is largely indifferent to B, it may well be that B pretends to be extremely worked up about X to fight A. In fact, there is a clear strategic advantage in doing so: as long as B is attacking A about X, A will have to sink energy into defending X that it could be using to defend other things, but if A ever decisively wins the battle over X, B, who never actually cared, won't actually have lost anything it cared about, so it's all upside.
This could be true if contesting X costs B less than A, but that's certainly not true here: trans issues are losers at the ballot box for democrats and everyone knows it. 'Kamala supports free gender-affirming care for illegal immigrant convicts' was disastrous for her campaign. She certainly didn't bait right wingers into attack her on that point as some devious stratagem to waste their efforts, they dug and dug to find a statement that could be interpreted in that way because they knew it was a winning issue for them. She, very simply, would obviously have been better off giving the issue up -- her especially, given she skipped right over the primary.
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Well in that case, it wouldn't really make logical sense for B to argue that A's beating the drum on issue X is just an attempt to distract from some more important issue. Both sides are taking the position that issue X is important. Ok, so B is being dishonest and hypocritical, but so what?
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Tell me which issue you want me to vocally support or oppose in return for vocally opposing immigration and transgenderism in progressive spaces, and I'm pretty sure I will give it to you.
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If you think Reds are "largely indifferent" to trans ideology and its integration into taxpayer-funded schools, I think you will find the real world a very surprising place going forward.
I can't actually think of a single real-world example where this pattern plays out. A similar pattern, I think, is the one where objectively-small-potatoes policies are seen as a test of control, and so have massive resources dedicated to them, because both sides understand the power of precedent and control of the default.
This is in Texas. Trans ideology is illegal in government schools.
Now that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but it does mean that at a government policy level, the sort of thing that might be changed by a single election(and if democrats win a trifecta in Texas then they've probably also won the power to override vetos in the federal government and will simply pass whatever they want) is a thing that the reds have decisively won.
I don't believe this, and I don't understand why you would claim it. Undocumented immigration is illegal. Affirmative action is illegal. Weed smoking is illegal, or was until very recently. The Constitution itself offers ironclad protections to free speech and the right to keep and bear arms, in a purely hypothetical way that has no actual impact anywhere Blues win political power.
Laws that can't and won't be enforced should not be referenced as reassurance that the things the law bans aren't a problem worth worrying about. Show me the people in jail for breaking the law, and then we can talk.
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(tried to belatedly edit the following into the first post - here it is as a reply)
I'm not saying that in this case the right's opposition to trans rights or immigration is displaying this kind of hypocrisy. But I don't think the left's refusal to concede those points proves otherwise. Lawfare is a good example: the Left may keep suing Trump over January 6th without actually caring about it half as much as they pretend, because they already maximally hate Trump whether or not he really tried to do a coup - but whether Trump himself wants to be seen as a guy who attempted to do a coup is a completely different question and it would be hugely damaging for him if he conceded "yeah, whatever, I confess, I tried to become dictator-for-life" in some bizarre effort to prove his accusers don't actually care about that.
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