The Left has an uncomplicated revulsion for Judeo-Christian religion, American traditions, American symbols, our founders, and individual rights

The author of Irreversible Damage (How The Trans Craze Is Harming Our Daughters), Abigail Shrier has had it up to here (hand high above head) with Chest-Thumpers and ‘Aw, Shucks’ Conservatives Who Personify the Right’s Love Affair with Losing (thanks to Gail Heriot). For Conservatives, says Abigail Shrier,

The way forward is not to enter a victimhood contest with intersectional Leftists (“We’re offended too!”), because the victimhood contest is a degrading distraction—and one all non-Woke are destined to lose. But it’s also disingenuous: because the mothers who are pulling the freight train of America’s next generation are not victims and society doesn’t see them as such.

They are too busy raising a family to enter victimhood contests with overgrown children. What women need—what we deserve—is a forthright defense of our rights, everywhere they are threatened. Dear Members of Congress: Mothers are not “birthing people,” and to call us that is a disgrace. To refuse to call us mothers is an abomination, too. Sex-based rights are not yours to give away.

And if Republicans can’t say that, they should pack up their things; at least they won’t be in the way. The last thing America needs right now is more wallpaper over cracks. Time to toss out the “Aw Shucks Conservatism” of navy blazers and boat shoes, the sort that believes matching jammies on Christmas suffices to save a country on the brink. That approach may have excelled when churches and civil society were strong and conservatives needed only to get married, raise a family, and perform the simple heroism of showing up. Today, it’s a loser. 

Its mistake is not in any of the hand-written niceties it revels in, which make life orderly, cozy—even lovely. Its mistake is that it treats Leftist ideologues like quirky out-of-town guests arriving for brunch. It assumes we all want the same things and are equally devoted to the perpetuation of bedrock American commitments: free speech, free exercise of faith, equal protection, rule of law.

But the Woke are not zany guests. They are home-invasion robbers. The structure they intend to leave behind will contain but a handful of the cultural artifacts they encountered. Bringing down statues of Abe Lincoln, books by Dr. Seuss and schools named for the country’s founders? That’s just their casing the joint. The large-scale heist hasn’t even started.

Aw Shucks Conservatives are willing to disagree with the Left, but they first want to get all the terminology right—“Now, which is it again: is ‘non-binary’ the same as they/them? Or ‘she/they?’” They don’t understand that the chaos is the point. While they strain to avoid a faux pas, they don’t even feel the dagger going in. They chuckle with their buddies that Woke beliefs are “nonsense upon stilts,” to use Bentham’s term—and that voters will surely respond in the next midterm election. They do not fight Silicon Valley—they are confused about whether their belief in free market economics allows it. They do not fight for women—not if it means any mud splashed on their full-break trousers. They have lost every important cultural battle and - if given over to their protection - we would lose America.

They pine for a return to debating the Kiddie Tax or privatizing Social Security. They are polite and naïve. To the activist Left, they look like a meal.

 … The Left wages war every day, in every school system in America and, no doubt, many a summer camp. It knows the stakes are high and it comes prepared to fight. It has an uncomplicated revulsion for Judeo-Christian religion, American traditions, American symbols, our founders, and individual rights. It despises the nuclear family, like good Marxists do—which is the real reason it cannot abide the words “mother” and “father.” (It understands no one was ever moved to family formation by the dream of becoming a “gestational parent.”) It does not disguise its plan to replace all of these things.

The Aw Shucks Conservatives meet the Left reluctantly and meekly, praying like hell the other side will forfeit. (It won’t.) They allow themselves to be convinced that the current madness will burn itself out, or that they could not possibly respond to even the most outlandish of Woke claims—like whether biological men’s participation is healthy for women’s sports—without a PhD in kinesiology. They dream that America will come to its senses.

The Chest-Beating Conservatives at least do not underestimate the task at hand. But they lack discipline and restraint and occasionally even seem to revel in ignorance. They find their personification in Marjorie Taylor Greene, the greatest thing to happen to the Left since Roy Moore. 

 … Here, then, is a solution for conservatives: Stop playing the Left’s game of victimhood, stop straining to adopt its lingo. I’m not suggesting that you speak disrespectfully. I’m suggesting that you’ll never win a victimhood contest, in part because you don’t believe in victimhood contests (to your credit) and it shows. The point of the Left’s quick-changing lingo is to confuse, to make it impossible to form an argument or respond to one. The lingo is very much a trap, and if you’re straining to master it, you’re already caught.

 … Speak as plainly as you can. … Nor should you accept that the point of public dialogue is to avoid offense. That has never been the point of language, though it is often the point of its opposite (silence). The goal of language in the public sphere must always be to speak truthfully and as clearly as possible. If you can avoid offense, so much the better. If you cannot, then at least you’ll have been understood.

When a member of the Administration replaces the word “mother” with “birthing people,” you don’t Aw, Shucks, as if you’ve encountered the last native speaker of Etruscan. You’re faced with a direct assault on women and the family. And you respond in kind.

Back in early February, I asked, Why Are Conservatives So Naïve That They Refuse to See the Beam in the Eye of Those Who Hate Their Very Existence?

More recently, Stephen Kruiser, who is also frustrated, asks:

How long do the mainstream media hacks have to keep exposing themselves as frothing-at-the-mouth haters of conservatives before conservatives get it?