"Denying Reality Is a Loyalty Test"

Now if we could just get to reality...

AOC says the Trump administration is asking people “to not believe their eyes, to not believe their ears, and to not believe what they are seeing right before them. They are instead asking you to give up your belief in your own senses.”

@aoc

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Instagram: "I’m not asking you to b…

I agree. I am horrified by the Trump administration, and feel that when the gender resistance made a deal with the devil we had no idea the depths his devilishness would go.

But denying our senses is exactly what Biden and Obama required of Americans when they instilled gender identity as a facet of sex in law, policy, and forced belief.

Every day now, as I watch our polarization sharpen over the ICE raids, I hear smart people saying things that applied to gender, echoing sentiments of the liberals, feminists, lesbians and gays, and old-school transsexuals that were ignored for years.

On X, Garry Kasparov talked about how “Denying reality is a loyalty test.” Yes, yes! That was the loyalty test we were all subjected to when we were supposed to pretend that the boys competing against girls weren’t boys; to pretend that the man identifying as a woman to be housed in a women’s prison wasn’t a man; to pretend that when the depressed autistic teen girl felt bad about her body, we should cheer the removal of her breasts because she was being actualized as a boy instead of medically harmed.

A few days ago, as the country I once knew was officially coming to an end, I started reading Jan Jekielek’s forthcoming book “Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary.” (Boy do I know how to cheer myself up!) Here’s the thing: I haven’t even gotten to the actual manuscript yet, because there are many blurbs that are so long and detailed and fascinating that I’m busy highlighting them. (Can’t wait to read the actual book!)

In those blurbs I learned about the concept of Hilter’s. “little atrocities” from author Robert Y. Kiyosaki. You start small: making Jews put a sign in their window. Then bigger: the armbands. Then bigger still: rounding them up. Then: the Final Solution. The slow-boiling frog approach allows us to become acculturated at each step, so that when it comes time to gas six million Jews, everyday Germans were desensitized enough to participate. Also, Gavin de Becker’s blurb made this point: “Actual predators don’t announce themselves; they create systems that normalize the unimaginable and abhorrent.”

Jekielek’s book is about organ harvesting, which is truly shocking. But I think gender happened similarly. You start with a name change, or pronouns, and you end with rapists housed in women’s prison cells—and the gobsmacking response from Democrats that objecting to this is bigotry.

Over the last few days, I’ve watched as Trump loyalists have dug in, unwilling to admit that these ICE raids—lawful, apparently, because Trump says so—are leading to a rift that will take years to repair, to the deaths of American citizens trying to stand up for what they believe in their hearts is right (and for the record, I agree with them.) I’ve seen so many people dig in instead of take a step back. I’ve seen the same reality-denying in a new script, one that replays endlessly.

AOC is right (a sentence I haven’t written in a long time). It is wrong to insist that people deny what they can see with their own eyes. It is wrong to force people to deny reality in order to belong. It was wrong when my side did it, and it’s wrong now.