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| Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice (left) dances with Donald Trump after a town hall conversation in which Trump said that schools are performing surgeries on trans children. Justice later admitted that Trump was lying but also said she was happy for the lie. |
CNN just called out Trump's lie that schools are performing surgeries on trans kids. It's a very good write up. And in the midst of it was something interesting pointed out to me by Joe Jervis (JoeMyGod).:
CNN reached out to four conservative organizations that monitor how schools handle gender issues to check if they had any evidence that might corroborate Trump’s claim. None of these organizations said they had – though the two that responded in detail defended Trump’s remarks nonetheless.
Tiffany Justice, the Moms for Liberty co-founder who conducted the public conversation with Trump, said in a Tuesday interview: “Are kids getting surgery in school? No they’re not.” But she continued that she was still “thankful to President Trump” for making the claim – since, she said, his remark has drawn attention to the important issue of schools facilitating children’s social transitions without parental consent. Justice said of Trump’s claim: “It grabbed your attention, and we’re talking about it now, and that makes me very happy.”
These conservative groups and personalities - Justice in particular - are aware that Trump told a lie, but they don't care because the lie gets people talking. And while they are busy basking in the attention, Justice and the rest also don't seem to care that Trump has wrecked their entire premise They claim that gender-affirming healthcare is harmful to children and that schools are attempting to usurp the right of parents to raise their children by pushing this healthcare and various other nefarious endeavors. But if this were true, then why are they defending an obvious - and absolutely pathetic - lie which damages the credibility of their narrative. Probably because their claims were full of sh!t from the start.
That's the common thread in all anti-LGBTQ propaganda. By design, its intent is to shock and exploit people's fears and prejudices. In the early 1980s, a discredited researcher named Paul Cameron (google him on this site. I've talked about him a lot) told a lie about gay man mutilating a young boy in public restroom. That story garnered enough attention to kill a pro-gay ordinance even though it was proven to be false.
Decades later, we see how this hasn't changed via the various lies told about drag queens supposedly exposing themselves to kids or encouraging kids to fondle them. These stories were proven to be lies, but they were still effective in creating anti-drag laws.
To people like Justice, it's never been about protecting kids. It's always been about garnering power through prejudice and fears. The only good thing I can say about Donald Trump is that he encourages people like Justice to dispense with all of the proper talking points and show their true faces of bigotry.