by Matthew Vadum
The groomer lobby silences another courageous truth-teller.
Anti-woke scholar and activist James Lindsay has been banned for life from Twitter after he criticized people who encourage confused children to undergo irreversible sex-reassignment surgery, get sterilized, and take puberty-blocking drugs that damage young bodies.
It’s just the latest in a maddeningly long and still-growing train of abuses by woke tech overlords who refuse to allow people to express themselves on matters of public concern without interference. Conservatives know only too well that unapproved thoughts on social media lead to shadowbanning, suspensions, and permanent bans.
Twitter doesn’t give a farthing’s cuss about freedom of speech or fair play (though that’s hardly a revelation). If a tweet violates Twitter’s crazy, far-left party line, it disappears. When an offender racks up enough verboten thoughts, he disappears from the micro-blogging site.
This is what happened to James Lindsay. Lindsay is the author of several hard-hitting books including Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis, and Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond.
Lindsay’s work is important because he gets it and because he is skilled at breaking down difficult abstractions so everyone can understand them. These qualities are also what make him so threatening to the Left.
He told The Epoch Times that communists are trying to undermine American society by sexualization.
“This is a deliberate program that Marxists have employed since at least the 1910s, starting in Hungary, to try to sexualize children to cause sexual and gender confusion so that they become political activists on behalf of some other agenda,” Lindsay said.
In his 1965 book, Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School applied Marxist ideology to sexuality, which helped spur the 1960s sexual revolution and the comprehensive sexual education programs that are part of American schools today, Lindsay said.
Later on, post-structural feminists used postmodern theory to argue that gender is socially constructed and that sex roles are a species of oppression.
“They used postmodern theory to break down all boundaries whatsoever—not just the idea of gender being a social construct, but sex and sexuality and everything becoming socially constructed, as well,” he said.
“And those people have basically taken over.”
Today’s Marxists “focus more on gender and on the social fluidity of these concepts than you would have seen 100 years ago from older school Marxists. But the general thrust is the same,” Lindsay said.
Lindsay’s thought crime here was labeling those in favor of disfiguring young persons to match their imagined gender identities as “groomers” and “child sexualization specialists,” both of which are charitable descriptions of such people. “Groomer” refers to adults who engage in inappropriate friendships with children in order to ease them into sexual abuse, but the term is also used to describe people who subject young children to sexual material about gender identity and sexuality.
Operating behind closed doors, Twitter apparently recently banned the phrase “groomer,” claiming it constitutes hate speech. But this make-believe high-mindedness is a ruse: Twitter did it to help radicals who want to promote the ideology of transgenderism and uses any opportunity it can find to silence the movement’s critics.
Although hate speech is a nebulous concept, especially when deployed by left-wing extremists, it is fully protected by the First Amendment. Americans are allowed to express anger and hostility. Nothing in the Bill of Rights requires everyone to think happy thoughts and say nice things. Indeed, a proper discussion of public affairs, including a clash of ideas, necessarily requires some sharp exchanges from time to time.
But Twitter doesn’t take this view. It dictates what truth is and those who dare to disagree frequently feel its self-righteous wrath.
Lindsay had the misfortune of getting into a fight with so-called trans woman Alejandra Caraballo, a thin-skinned, attention-obsessed man who claims to be a woman. Caraballo, an admitted socialist who writes for left-wing rag Slate, describes himself as a “wise Latina” and hosts a weekly podcast called “Queering the Law.” He reported Lindsay for expressing an opinion.
In an attempt to burnish Caraballo’s credentials, some media outlets reported he was a professor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, but this is inaccurate. He is in fact a clinical instructor at the clinic, a position lower in rank than professor.
In a tweet August 4, Lindsay, under his Twitter handle @ConceptualJames, tweeted, “Ok, child sexualization specialist” at Caraballo.
It is not entirely clear what prompted or preceded the tweet because when Twitter bans someone the person’s tweets disappear down the memory hole.
It appears from a Twitter thread that Lindsay tweeted something about or responded to a tweet about Vice President Kamala Harris. The Canadian-raised affirmative-action pick is widely regarded as black even though according to leftist orthodoxy she isn’t actually, “authentically” black because she is descended from slave owners, as opposed to actual slaves. Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, is in fact of Indo-Caribbean ancestry. Her father is a black man from Jamaica; her late mother hailed from India.
On August 4, Caraballo replied, saying “Your misogynoir is showing.” The word “misogynoir” is obscure woke argot meaning a “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against black women,” according to one online reference source.
According to a screenshot apparently provided by Lindsay, Twitter notified him his account was permanently suspended for the “Ok, child sexualization specialist” tweet.
In its usual Kafkaesque form letter, Twitter claimed the tweet violated company policy by promoting “violence against, threaten[ing], or harass[ing] other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
Lindsay didn’t violate this rule. All he did was fire back in the heat of battle at a left-wing fanatic who is indifferent to the well-being of underage children.
After silencing his persistent critic, Caraballo performed an unseemly fascistic victory dance on Twitter, gloating about getting Lindsay banned.
“Good riddance[,]” Caraballo tweeted August 5. An hour later he followed up with, “Tell James, I want him to know it was me.”
The latter tweet was accompanied by a screenshot suggesting Caraballo had reported Lindsay to Twitter at least six times, which itself is apparently a violation of Twitter rules.
The August 5 notification from Twitter stated “VIOLATION FOUND[.]”
“We suspended @ConceptualJames’s account for breaking our hateful conduct rule. We found they broke our hateful conduct rule through different reports we received about their behavior.”
“They aren’t allowed to create new accounts. We let people know that they’ve been suspended, the safety rules they broke, and which content broke our rules.”
Lindsay has been targeted by the Left on Twitter for some time.
Ari Drennen is the LGBTQ program director for Media Matters for America, the fake George Soros-funded media watchdog whose mission is to assassinate the character of and ruin the lives of conservatives and anyone who opposes the leftist agenda. Like Caraballo, Drennen is an attention-seeking man who pretends to be a woman.
Drennen is a frequent apologist for the transgenderism movement and has clashed online with Lindsay. Drennen took umbrage at a July 19 Daily Caller article titled “Left-Wing Activists Urge Big Tech To Censor Anti-Pedophile ‘Smear.’”
The article begins:
“Media Matters, a left-wing activist organization, is urging Twitter to censor the word ‘groomer,’ which it characterizes as anti-LGBT.”
“The term ‘groomer,’ which describes an adult who befriends a child without proper boundaries in order to prime them for for [sic] sexual abuse, has been used by conservatives to criticize child drag events and lessons on sexuality and gender identity targeting young children. Media Matters argued that the word is being used to smear LGBT people as sexual predators and urged Twitter to crack down on the term.”
In a tweet, Drennen mocked the media outlet: “Daily Caller: we aren’t anti-LGBTQ, we’re anti-pedophile[.] Also the Daily Caller: uses a generic picture of young people holding Pride flags in their article[.]”
Lindsay apparently thought Drennen’s comment was unfair and replied to it with the phrase “ok groomer[,]” which earned him a 12-hour suspension for allegedly “hateful conduct.”
The transgenderism activists are now waging a campaign of terror against their critics, Laurel Duggan recently wrote at the Daily Caller.
“Transgender activists have accused Libs of TikTok and other prominent Twitter users of engaging in ‘terrorism’ in an attempt to have them removed from the platform for criticizing child sex-change procedures,” Duggan wrote.
“Libs of TikTok, commentator Matt Walsh, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo, and activist Billboard Chris shared several publicly available documents and videos purporting to show that Boston Children’s Hospital was performing sex changes on minors, such as a video promoting ‘gender-affirming’ hysterectomies.”
“Activists accused the accounts of ‘stochastic terrorism’ and demanded Twitter take action to censor the conversation and take down their accounts,” Duggan continued.
“‘In the last 5 days, Libs of Tiktok has tweeted and retweeted 14 posts about Boston Children’s Hospital. As a result, BCH providers are being inundated in death threats and harassing calls and emails,’ Alejandra Caraballo wrote. ‘It’s now affecting their services. This is stochastic terrorism, full stop.’”
Stochastic terrorism is a slippery concept embraced by the Biden-Harris regime to persecute its opponents when actual, credible evidence of wrongdoing is unavailable.
Government-funded academic Kurt Braddock has defined stochastic terrorism as “a form of incitement, where the speaker uses coded language, dog whistles, and other subtext to justify, promote, or advocate the use of violence without providing overt directives to do so.”
In other words, stochastic terrorism is whatever left-wingers say it is.
Braddock has used the term to smear Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, accusing him of somehow causing Payton Gendron, a disturbed 18-year-old white man, to shoot and kill 10 people May 14 at a Tops Friendly Market in a predominantly black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York.
Caraballo’s “post was retweeted by Ari Drennen, LGBTQ program director at the left-wing activist organization Media Matters, along with several other posts expressing concern about criticism of the hospital posing a potential safety threat,” Duggan added.
Conservative media personality Jack Posobiec was suspended from Twitter in April for describing Disney as “groomers” for fighting Florida legislation aimed at protecting children from sexually explicit material and trans ideology in schools, Allum Bokhari wrote at Breitbart News.
After Lindsay was banished by Twitter, he told the Post Millennial: “Twitter has inconvenienced me and simultaneously confessed that they have a vested interest in protecting the sexualization of children.”
“This also suggests the possibility of an untoward relationship between Twitter and Media Matters, which deserves investigation. I'm glad they've drawn so much attention to the issue, in any case. It has to stop. We must protect our children."
Matthew Vadum
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/twitter-unpersons-james-lindsay-matthew-vadum/
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