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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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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/

This week, some Texans reported receiving texts about “gender-affirming care in Texas” and a “complete guide on bathrooms and beyond for trans kids at school.” Those messages included links to the website of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, or TENT.

Questions about gender-affirming care in Texas? Start here. You can get the care you need: https://transtexas.org/resources

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/trans-student-mailers-hit-texas-210015782.html

This week, some Texans reported receiving texts about “gender-affirming care in Texas” and a “complete guide on bathrooms and beyond for trans kids at school.” Those messages included links to the website of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, or TENT.

"This was sent to my home. Addressed to the 'students' of our family from the 'Texas Transgender Student Union.' It coaches minors on what to do if their parents are not supportive of their 'trans' identity and walks them through getting emancipated," Gonzales posted.

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.

The thing that twinges my antennae a bit is that it was addressed to "Students of the XXX family," where XXX is the family that lived here about 10 years ago, for whom we still get mail from time to time, all sent from super right-wing organizations.

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.

  • -22

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.

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.

If those issues are so unimportant, then why don’t you just… give them up?

For two reasons:

First, because our reasons are important. If A supports P for reason X, and B opposes P for reason Y, it is entirely reasonable for A to accuse B of exploiting trivialities while refusing to concede on the matter, if X is more important than Y.

In the specific case of transgender and immigration, X = alleviating the actual suffering of actual human beings, who have suffered more than enough already. This leads into the second reason:

Because We Do Not Do That. It is a central tenet among many on the left, that throwing a few people, especially marginalised people, under the bus, for some nebulous notion of The Greater Good, is a thing that is simply Not Done.

It is the philosophy of Ana Thurmond from UNSONG:

I’m not God, I’m American. Universal salvation or bust.

It is the philosophy of House Pelekai from Lilo & Stitch (or if you were watching Netflix some years ago, Igor from Young Frankenstein):

ʻOhana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind.

It is the philosophy from the Talmud:

Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.

What sort of response would you like to the above? What sort of conversation are you hoping to generate?

If you were describing yourself, I could conceive of this being accurate; I'd be very skeptical that you yourself were such a paragon, but it's not completely impossible. But you are not describing yourself, you are describing your group. I do not know the precise boundaries of "your group"; perhaps you collectively really are the truest Scotsmen to ever Scot by virtue of some vigorous and arcane vetting process aimed at drawing a line around the set of "actually nice and unfailingly virtuous Blues who never have or would do wrong, whose every thought is tender and mild, and who are blissfully unaware of all inconvenient facts". But in the first place, I've never observed a group like that to actually exist, and in the second place human capacity for self-delusion is formidable, and in the third place, you haven't even attempted to sketch such a line or demonstrated that you understand why one might be necessary.

What you appear to be doing is describing Blues generally, and that description is.... unsupportable, given the facts. It is absolutely trivial to demonstrate ways in which "many on the left" are hostile to the idea of universal salvation, how they are absolutely willing to leave people behind (or to square the circle by simply denying humanity to those they disfavor), how their Universal Love comes with its own majority-dark-matter of caveats and carve-outs. A supermajority of leftists are absolutely willing to write people off, and frequently do so with bloodthirsty relish. I know this. You ought to know this, but then if you did, why write the above in the way you have?

So again, how do you want this conversation to go? Should we look at examples of "Many Leftists" failing basic humanity checks with moblike uniformity? Should we look at examples of toxic "compassion" applied to the direct harm of those being "sympathized" with? Should we look at examples of compassion inversion, where people find endless compassion for serial rapists and murderers while calling for the execution or murder of serious villains, ie their political opponents?

Or is the idea that we're just supposed to take your word for it, smile and nod?

My moral assessment of leftists, roughly translated to leftist-speak, would be "nazi". You are the lynch mob, the men in masks armed with clubs beating peaceful protestors while the cops and the judges look the other way or even prosecute the victims. You are the murderers of civil rights activists, and you are the bigoted public who mutter to each other that the victims had it coming. You are the redliners, the restrictive covenanters, the discriminators, the ones who build their identity around hatred of the Other. And if we should be generous, you are also the cowardly, the ones who simply go along, following the crowd, perhaps with a slightly worried expression and a few whispered objections, but never more than a half-step out of sync. That is my view of "Many on the Left", based on what they have done in the real world, and what those I have interacted with here have stood for in their arguments.

I am not going to smile and nod while you award yourself the "super nicest person ever" gold medal. You are, in my view, directly complicit in vast evil.

It is absolutely trivial to demonstrate ways in which "many on the left" are hostile to the idea of universal salvation, how they are absolutely willing to leave people behind (or to square the circle by simply denying humanity to those they disfavor), how their Universal Love comes with its own majority-dark-matter of caveats and carve-outs. A supermajority of leftists are absolutely willing to write people off, and frequently do so with bloodthirsty relish.

Yes thank you Mr fromSSC that thought has occurred to me several times over the past twelve years.

That is one of my two biggest beefs with the left coalition, that it has allowed itself to be hijacked by an ideology indistinguishable from right-wing racism except for a few find-and-replace operations!

You are the lynch mob, the men in masks armed with clubs beating peaceful protestors while the cops and the judges look the other way or even prosecute the victims. You are the murderers of civil rights activists, and you are the bigoted public who mutter to each other that the victims had it coming. You are the redliners, the restrictive covenanters, the discriminators, the ones who build their identity around hatred of the Other. And if we should be generous, you are also the cowardly, the ones who simply go along, following the crowd, perhaps with a slightly worried expression and a few whispered objections, but never more than a half-step out of sync. That is my view of "Many on the Left", based on what they have done in the real world, and what those I have interacted with here have stood for in their arguments.

No, I am one of those telling them not to do that, lest they horseshoe around to become the very thing they swore to destroy!