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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.
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.
"A cares a lot about X" needn't mean "X is a vote-winner for A"; it could mean that A's elites are sincerely morally committed to X, that a Harris couldn't sleep at night if she won a cynical victory by throwing her trans immigrant sisters under the bus. Though I don't think it's trivial that she "would obviously have been better off giving the issue up" even cynically; it may very well be the case that she was stuck in a catch-22 where abandoning trans issues would have alienated as many leftists as endorsing them did moderates. (Obviously the far leftists weren't ever going to turn red, but they could have abstained, and, even more importantly, the activists cadre could have turned on the campaign in a very damaging way.)
Er, isn't Harris supposed to B? @Primaprimaprima asked @magicalkittycat why they were unwilling to give up their (leftist) perspective on trans issues if they don't actually matter. My point is that
Could certainly be the case, but her cynically playing up trans issues she doesn't really care about so the republicans waste their time on a meaningless battlefront doesn't make sense, because that 'meaningless' battlefront hurt her chances in the election. It could well be that republican politicians don't really care about trans issues and they only push them to win elections, but that wasn't what I thought you were suggesting.
(But of course republican politicians aren't telling people trans issues are an irrelevant distraction from the things that matter, even if that's what they truly believe; they're trying their absolute hardest to keep the focus on them, because they help win elections.)
OK, 'not trivial' I'll grant. It's not impossible things would have played out that way. But I still kind of doubt it. I said just 'giving up' the issues, not coming out with a full-throated denouncement (which might or might not have helped, but would have been a lot more risky). If she just mouthed platitudes about human rights and categorically refused to allow herself to get pinned down to any particular policy proposal, it's hard to see how that could have hurt. There are some issues you can't afford to shrug at, but while trans activists are surprisingly influential pound-for-pound, they never had that much reach. Did anyone even know she voiced tepid support for free gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrant convicts before republicans dug it up? I don't think it won her many votes at all, even in the form of solidly blue voters who would have otherwise stayed home.
No, at least not in my mind; I intended A to be Blues for whom disavowing trans ideology is categorically unacceptable, and B to be Reds who don't actually care half as much as they've been pretending to ever since they discovered that grilling Blues on the normie-unfriendly aspects of trans ideology is a surefire way to make them look bad to which the Blues have still never found a genuinely popular antidote.
I thought the point was that @magicalkittycat was saying "the Republicans don't actually care about trans; they only pretend to so they can distract the Democrats from talking about the economy", and @Primaprimaprima countered that if the Democrats believed that they could simply stop caring about trans so that the Republicans' cynical attacks would lose their raison d'etre. So I was arguing that the Republicans' attacks could still, in principle, be opportunistic and insincere even if the Democrats' support is sincere and immutable.
(I will stress again that I don't think this model is true; I believe most Republicans are in fact sincere in their opposition to trans, not opportunistic. I was only disputing the faulty epistemology of "if the Democrats genuinely believed the Republicans were being opportunistically insincere, we should expect to see them giving up on trans; therefore, if they don't give up on trans, they must not really believe the Republicans are faking their opposition" as a bit of reasoning.)
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