Wilhoit’s law says that “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
I have to say there is nothing more hilarious than the party of Donald Trump crying about “decorum”, except for the fact that it’s all they can do to prevent Democrats from calling them out over their permissiveness over mass shootings and their cruel authoritarianism over transgender Americans.
It’s why the former Comptroller for Erie County – a guy who people used to like when he was on Channel 2 – posts things like this on his Twitter.
Public art dispute: Casey Milbrand has been a key contributor to Buffalo’s robust mural scene & he has donated his designs many times. But his approach to enforcing his copyright has invited criticism from businesses big and small. https://t.co/YfJqTK4Ix4
Hey, did you know those Instagrammable murals could sink you into legal jeopardy? Now you do! If you use Instagram for commercial purposes – everything from promoting your business to “influencing,” you could be next on Mr. Milbrand’s and his counsel‘s “to dun” list.
It’s one thing to reproduce the image for your personal, non-commercial use, but if you use it as part of your efforts to promote a business, you may be on the hook to an extremely litigious IP holder.
Had I taken a picture of that mural to use it in this blog, he might threaten to sue me, or send me a bill. Even though this blog is hardly a commercial venture, I’ve had it happen before.
Mr. Milbrand is a solo artist protecting his copyright, and – in the abstract, with no other information – this is laudable and correct. But just because someone has the right to do something doesn’t mean one ought to do it.
I’ve been to a lot of cities, and so many of them have similar postcard-inspired murals where tourists flock to snap photos so they can share their travels with the world. I want to bring that idea home. And with new street art going up all over the city and tourism at an ultimate high, now is the time for our own mural that welcomes visitors to the Queen City.
So the whole raison d’etre of that mural is to have people take pictures in front of it, as Buffalo Bike Tours did with its customers. Anyone who suggests that the use of that mural on Bike Tours’ website is tantamount to an endorsement or indicative of a marketing deal between the two is being disingenuous.
To protect his copyright in a more good-neighborly, Buffalove-y way, the unnecessarily diplomatic and uncontroversial thing for Milbrand to do would be to have his lawyer draft a polite letter advising the bike company (and others) that he owns a copyright on the image and would they be so kind as to either remove it from their marketing materials or pay him a license fee pursuant to an attached schedule. Doing it that way maintains the spirit of the thing, protects and enforces his rights, and gives infringers a fair warning. People may be ignorant about the copyright status of artwork on the side of a building.
I would rather that than have Roswell Park divert $180,000 from cancer patients to a guy who painted a postcard on the side of someone else’s building.
Moscato said Wednesday that the amount is greater than his tours’ total revenue from last year, and that the image of the riders in front of Milbrand’s mural represents a “Kodak moment” from one of about a dozen stops along the history tour. Moscato said he has removed the images from his website and no longer plans to stop at Milbrand’s mural on the tour.
Seriously, who is winning here? Milbrand has protected his copyright, sure, but in such a way that is antithetical to the whole “Buffalove” vibe it purports to promote.
Had such a demand been made and deliberately ignored, then I would be fine with the invoice and threat. But unless you’re 100% sure they did it with malice, give people a chance to do the right thing .
I once used an image on a blog post that I found and copied from Twitter. I received a similar threat (albeit for half the amount) from a nationwide copyright trolling law firm. It was resolved because the aggressive preening was overly clumsy and the claimed copyright had been filed well after the date of my alleged misappropriation.
I saw Mr. Milbrand’s Instagram posts (here and here) where he defends his conduct. It is laudable for a local artist to protect his intellectual property. If he’s aggressively dunning for-profit mega-corporations with legal departments, I don’t necessarily have a problem with it. This isn’t a question about whether Milbrand is legally justified or correct – it is more to me a question of proportionality.
Is it really necessary to go after Buffalo Bike Tours – which featured this mural as a stop on one of its tours – with aggressive demands for $5,000 and threats of imminent litigation?
I’m here to paint murals that inspire and lift peoples spirits, and just like our city I REFUSE to be bullied by people that don’t know my HEART
“Greetings from Buffalo!” Spirits lifted? That’ll be $5,000 and a summons.
Who’s bullying whom? Buffalo Bike Tours merely shared an image of its happy customers – spirits lifted – in front of a local mural, painted on the side of a building. It is literally the point of the mural. While I get and respect the need to protect a copyright, I think that Mr. Milbrand could have done so in a gentler more “good neighborly” fashion.
The answer is no, we cannot be surprised. Trumpism and the MAGA movement, (which currently controls the entire Republican Party), is nothing more than a neo-fascist, eliminationist, nihilistic, strongman cult. I mean, these people are literally praying to Trump now, which goes well beyond the definition of “cringe.” He is not just their dictator, their king, their Leader – he is their God and deity.
VSP Graphics in West Seneca is thriving “DESPITE government, not because of it.”
Looks like a great company doing neat things!
It also received $450,000 in free money from the federal government to subsidize its operations and keep staff on hand during Covid. So, while I’m sure it is thriving for a variety of reasons, it is false to suggest that it has not also benefitted from public largesse, and it is foolish for a campaign to make such an allegation without literally checking its work first.
It’s funny because when this type of money is being given to poor people or people overladen with usurious student debt, Casilio and her supporters would call this socialism.
And this socialist scheme was to save and maintain around 20 jobs.
In 15 years on Twitter I never once wrote or shared a syllable I didn’t believe – or believe in – so as to “provoke” people or to “grow the algorithm,” whatever that means.
As an experienced public relations executive, Chrissy Casilio – the daughter of an elected official, a Republican committeeman, a spokesperson for other political candidates, and someone who has been very active in civic life in Clarence – is well aware of the fact that her past statements and positions are going to be scrutinized, especially because she is a newcomer to politics. No one has any idea who she is, what she has accomplished, or what she stands for. She is a political blank slate.
It’s not like anyone can go back and second-guess any decision she has ever made, because none exist out in the public.
Well, except her decision to lock down, attempt to sanitize, and then simply to delete her Twitter account.
Why is this still a thing? Because Casilio spent her time on Twitter engaging in stupidity. In horrible conspiracy theories. In shitposting. She dabbled in this on Facebook a bit, which is why I unfriended her there. I am not aware of having followed her Twitter, but really how many wackadoodle right-wing conspiracy accounts does one need to follow? One is too many.
“My view of social media, especially on Twitter, was to kind of provoke conversation and influence the algorithm,” Casilio said. “As a marketing PR person, I know how that algorithm works on Twitter. Whether I believe in a topic or not, I try to comment about it to get reaction, get likes, get comments.”
Conservatives legitimately think they can go out there to “provoke conversation,” which is a handy euphemism for “troll others,” and then complain about being blocked or “shadowbanned.” She thinks she is going to “influence the algorithm” by proclaiming silly things to her 250 followers, and that this provocative trolling will be promoted by “the algorithm” to more eyeballs.
“There were people questioning what was going on,” Casilio told The News when asked about the tweet. “I obviously said things that I regret. I wasn’t implying anything.”
How stupid do you think voters are? You weren’t “implying anything?” Good God, if no implication exist, then what is the purpose of the Tweet – what was “going on” that “people” were “questioning?” Hm? This is just another pathetic entry in the “Covid vaccines cause clots/strokes/heart attacks” meme that is running rampant in right-wing circles. Your base loves that shit, Chrissy – embrace it! The normies? Mm, maybe not so much.
It’s all fun and games when you’re doing it for the lolz or the “algorithm,” and it’s different when you’re running for office and you know a majority of the electorate isn’t in the Proud Boys or watching Newsmax.
What she is saying, frankly, is that being a combative weirdo on Twitter is good self-promotion. Well, if that’s true, she really needs self-promotion now that she’s running for office, so shuttering her “CaBoom” account seems counterintuitive.
The WNYmedia.net article also referenced a debunked conspiracy theory about the online furniture company Wayfair allegedly being involved in child sex trafficking.
The conspiracy theory, which police said was false, alleged that the company was involved in sex trafficking in part because the names of some of its products matched the names of missing children.
“If there is no truth…why did they pull the items down?” Casilio tweeted in 2020.
Casilio also wrote the “100 percent” emoji symbol – which signifies agreement – below a tweet by another Twitter user that stated, “There are not 2 parties. There is ONE Globalist Party with a few honorable Americans on the fringe.” The tweet stated that the country’s politicians “destroyed Trump for exposing the swamp, and created a pandemic and rigged an election to do it,” according to the Investigative Post article.
Casilio told The News she did not share those beliefs. She said she was “not going to let Mark Poloncarz and his cronies try to diminish me to these tweets, because it’s a distraction from the disaster that they’ve created.”
So, she didn’t believe that Wayfair was sex trafficking, but she happily fed that idiotic rumor. She approvingly shares ridiculous conspiratorial nonsense, but now when caught says she doesn’t believe them and it’s all Poloncarz’s fault.
“I honestly couldn’t explain to you what a globalist party even is,” Casilio said. “Everyone has things they probably have regretted on social media, especially if they have never been a candidate. That’s just the world we live in for 2023.”
But Ms. Casilio can only be “diminished…to these tweets” because it’s all we have. The sum total of what we know about her opinion about things is thanks to her social media, and it is replete with things that swing between “vile” and “stupid.” Why did she agree – using the red “100” emoji – to a conspiracy theory about a globalist party that she cannot even begin to attempt to explain?
“I have tweeted and said things to provoke, to get reaction, to grow the algorithm. I would poke because that’s what you do.”
What a sad endeavor – to Tweet things to get negative attention so that you can grow an audience and harvest even more negative attention. Most of us dropped that in middle school.
When I tweeted, I knew things I would say would get negative attention from some people, but that goes with the territory. I never purposely wrote things I didn’t comprehend or did not fully believe for the sole purpose of provoking a reaction in people. What a waste of time and effort that would be, to shitpost for the algorithm.
Casilio said she deleted the tweets because she “didn’t want it to be a distraction from the topics at hand.”
No, she deleted the tweets because whatever was there was dumb and shameful and would come back to haunt her repeatedly right up until November. Again – the electorate is not so stupid. Now, their deletion will haunt her until November.
Her efforts to deflect accountability for it and blame her enemies is weak, and her ongoing sanitization of her social media footprint is weaker still. If it was important enough for you to say to your 250 followers when you weren’t running for office, it’s even more important now that you are for a few hundred thousand prospective voters.
Deborah Silverman, the chair of the communication department at SUNY Buffalo State who has been teaching public relations for 20 years, said she was upset reading Casilio’s comments about her field. Silverman also is a former chair of the Public Relations Society of America Board of Ethics and Professional Standards, which advocates for honesty and accuracy.
That’s pretty damning.
You are there to build trust with people and you have to stand by what you say in public. If I were advising her as a public relations professional advising a candidate, I would never advise that person to behave in that manner. Never.”
“You don’t ever go on out in public in any social media or traditional news media, unless what you are saying is what you truly believe. And her comments made no sense to me,” Silverman said. “If I were running for public office, I would never say those things. It is all about trust.”
This is the biggest mystery of all – Casilio claims she doesn’t believe this crazy stuff she posted, so why use your public persona to come across as nuts?
You can tweet whatever you want but if it’s crazy and you’re running for office, voters deserve to know.
If you didn’t get it before, perhaps you’ll get it now.
Michael Knowles is not a political philosopher or thinker. He does not share novel ideas worth anyone’s serious engagement. He is a propagandist whose sole job is to provoke the left.
That’s it – he exists to trigger the libs.
Or to make libs cry.
Or to troll the libs.
Whether or not he truly believes that “transgenderism” is a thing that should be “eradicated” is not especially relevant. So what if he does? So what if he doesn’t? It doesn’t matter – it took him in one week from a guy you never heard of to a local cause célèbre, strutting about the college towns of the western Great Lakes region telling 19 year-olds that women should stay home, barefoot and pregnant.
The second sentence is the giveaway – “despite the Left’s best efforts“. This tour is about getting the left on campus angry and out in droves. Knowles’ job is to provoke. YAF exists to provoke. There’s nothing here about how insightful and interesting his thoughts or speech are, is there? Just that they’re “in demand.”
While even banal grifters have free speech rights, let’s not kid ourselves about this being about the free exchange of ideas in a citadel of higher education. This is a traveling circus with a prime goal of pwning the libs and getting them to protest and look scary, with only a minor, tangential aim of preaching to a shrinking choir.
It is all designed to let depraved small-minded goons complain about students who hold wholly on-point signs cursing fascists, such as YAF and Knowles.
I do not use the term “fascist” lightly. Knowles has become prominent due to his declaration that the state of being transgender is non-existent and that society should not allow it. Knowles derives power and influence through denunciations of people different from him, whose experience he does not know, and essentially incites a pliant mob to join him in his hatred and derision. But his central thesis – that “transgenderism” is a novel phenomenon that requires “eradication” – the obvious parallels to Nazi rhetoric notwithstanding – is factually false. His defamation of transgender Americans is little more than a 21-st century Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
How would he react if someone called for the eradication from the public square of “conservatism?” Obviously, one cannot have conservatism without conservatives. It’s not really all that complicated, and his protestations are absurd.
But fascism is also about the wielding of authority and power in a way that oppresses those whom the regime hates – dissidents, LGBTQIA+ people, etc. Witness this exchange between a UB YAF female and a young man at a bulletin board. The young man was moving flyers around on the board because YAF supporters had deliberately covered up anti-Knowles flyers with Knowles event flyers. She launches into a belligerent diatribe against him and sticks her phone in his face, and he calmly explains what he’s doing and why. Her only retort is that her YAF flyers are “approved by [the Student’s Association] and his are not, and therefore his are not allowed on the bulletin board at all.
Leftist LOSES IT after being confronted for taking down flyers ahead of @michaeljknowles speech tomorrow night in Buffalo: "I don't care if I'm rude to you, you're a fascist. F*ck you." pic.twitter.com/9VYEEhEgpj
Do you get that? The “shall not be infringed” Constitutional absolutist crowd demands that speech applies only to them at all times, but to no one else unless officially sanctioned by SA. It is an absurd argument and he was right to be rude and flip the bird at her. Good for him and I hope he has a Venmo for a beer fund or something for standing up to this absurd person whining about her flyer.
That left wasn’t “angry.” She asked a direct question. In response, Knowles, who is not there to debate but to provoke, responded condescendingly and rudely to the student. He looks like an absolute shit, and the woman asking a question looks perfectly reasonable.
The right does not, in fact, demand free speech. That’s not what it’s about. They demand that you be exposed to their speech. This is why they whine incessantly about things like the “Twitter Files” and make up false allegations about artificially reduced conservative reach on social media. They think that the libs must be exposed to their fascist rants and incoherent ramblings and Catturd against their will. It is Elon Musk’s reason for being right now, and it is why Twitter is dead. Musk rehabilitated the Keks and the Pepes and the rest of the Nazis because “free speech absolutism” demands that libs be told that Jews are the devil and Black people should be enslaved.
As for YAF, I first became aware of them in the mid-1980s when I attended Boston University. The student body held a walkout from class to protest a University award of an honorary degree to a South African whom many deemed to be a Botha regime collaborationist, and to demand that the University divest its holdings connected to apartheid South Africa. YAF were there, taunting the students walking out of class to protest systemic racial segregation. Not a great look, but the look isn’t the point. We were the crazy pro-Mandela leftist students and it was all about provocation to get an angry response so they could say, regard the intolerant left, who cannot countenance some good-natured ribbing about their earnest opposition to apartheid.
Michael Knowles is a professional provocateur, and YAF is an astroturf group run out of Reston, Virginia. Founded in 1960, I see nothing in its constituent document about eradicating gay people or transgender people or pwnage of libs.
This is what conservatism has devolved into – not any sort of ideology or platform. It has morphed from a Reagan personality cult into a Trump personality cult and it demands that you move aside so that they can achieve cultural and political hegemony without actually earning it through persuasion or votes.
So, I do not for a moment want anyone to think that I disagree with the protests against Knowles and YAF and their hateful, bigoted provocation. I personally think that mockery is best. But provocateurs like Knowles and Yiannopoulos revel in the biggest and most confrontational crowds. That is the real win for them – the speech is an afterthought.
And it will forever be thus – while transgender Americans are desirous of a world where they can live their lives with dignity and without discrimination, there will be a population of morally depraved self-righteous professional provocateurs to make their lives a living hell over bathroom stalls.
People who make a habit out of lib-pwnership will call transgender people “pedophiles” and “groomers” because those are the slurs that helped to keep homosexuals oppressed for generations before.
I think trans people have always existed, do exist, and will continue to exist, no matter what some washed-up failed actor says. I think it is hate speech for someone to deny their reality and humanity and to call for their “eradication.” The failed actor doesn’t need to believe in transgender people or transgenderism – they exist regardless of his “belief.” The question is whether the failed actor would gladly direct the power of the state to outlaw them, oppress them, segregate them, or otherwise to terrorize them. In an interview with WBFO Thursday, attorney Heidi Jones identified this phenomenon as “stochastic terrorism.” It’s what “Libs of Tik Tok” Chaya Raichik is expert in.
The professional provocateur, to the extent he has any beliefs at all, would indeed use the power of the state to oppress and “eradicate” transgender people. And he would do it for pretty cheap money. And a small handful of Gen-Zers attending a public university are jumping up and down with glee over the oppression of peers who never bothered them even once.
I recently spent a vacation in Italy, where the trains run more or less on time and the high-speed rail network is extensive and genuinely fast. On a dedicated track, our train reached 250 km/h (155 mph) for lengthy portions of travel.
The Northeast and Southern Canada are uniquely positioned to benefit – and profit – from high-speed rail. The Amtrak Acela service running between Boston, New York, and Washington can, since a recent upgrade, reach speeds of 160 mph on certain portions of the journey. The fastest portion runs from New York to DC, while the portion between Boston and New York averages out at 66 MPH, which is only marginally better than car travel. This is because Acela shares much of its track with freight and regional passenger train services that cannot accommodate higher speeds. This is a huge missed opportunity.
Another missed opportunity is the linkage of other destinations with true high-speed rail, which is generally considered to be anything over 110 mph. New York – Albany – Montreal would work. Albany – Syracuse – Rochester – Buffalo – Niagara – Toronto would work. Toronto – Ottawa would work, as would Toronto – Montreal and Montreal – Quebec City.
Because it would be slower than driving, it is anticipated that this would result in a $33 million annual deficit. A plan NYS DOT rejected to implement 380 miles of new track to accommodate 110 mph trains would cost about the same and result in a smaller deficit, but it would still result in a 7 hour and 22 minute ride. Yet another rejected plan would introduce 280 miles of two electrified tracks accommodating speeds of 125 mph. The alternatives are discussed here.
The NYSDOT refused multiple requests for an interview and declined to answer specific questions regarding the over 456-page Environmental Impact Statement that was released in early February.
Yeah? No shit, so would I. I also would be too embarrassed by this to associate my voice and face with it.
State Senator Pat Gallivan is right when he tells WGRZ that it doesn’t make sense. Spending $6 billion to go as fast as a kid in a slammed GTI only to lose a ton of money is ridiculous.
What would make sense is to allow for 160+ mph Acela-type trains to make a trip from the Falls to New York City in 5h and 17 m, including stops. This beats driving and, for most people traveling between WNY and Manhattan, would be at least competitive with flying. (A flight involves security, check-in, (1hr) boarding, taxiing, deboarding, (1h 20 m) walking through the terminal (10 m), and transportation from LGA, JFK, or EWR to Manhattan (1+hr).
The extra capital expenditure to implement a truly modern and rapid rail system would be well-spent. It would enable easier commutes between New York’s upstate cities. It would get people and their cars off the Thruway, which inexplicably runs only 4 lanes in each direction for almost the entire stretch between Williamsville and I-88.
The proposed plan is a boondoggle and a failure. One of the reasons given for not considering ultra high speed rail is the supposed need for reconfiguration of stations and rights-of-way in the Albany – NYC corridor. You cannot tell me that densely populated Italy can figure this out, but New York cannot.
Or maybe just open up bidding for a privately run service, such as the Brightline in Florida or Brightline West in California. The latter will run at 180 mph and reduce travel time between downtown LA and Las Vegas to just over 2 hours. The trip from Orlando to Miami will take about 3 hours, saving at least 30 minutes off driving.
The cost to do ultra high-speed right is 27 billion dollars. That’s 188 F-35s. Maybe we should be looking at spending public money on things that benefit our public at-large.
Ever since the days of Joe Illuzzi’s website’s unabashed paid shilling for the so-called Independence Party and its then-chairman, a Springville barber, I have assailed the inherent corruption of electoral fusion.
This quirk – unique to New York and only a few other states – allows parties a mechanism by which to endorse another party’s candidate for office. The lore goes that Democrats are loath to vote for Republicans, and vice-versa, so if a major party candidate appears on a “Conservative Party” or “Independence Party” line, that is a convenient way to allow for easier ballot splitting. The Independence Party is gratifyingly extinct, but the Conservative Party still exists, and at least locally it is not known so much for its tenets, platform, or beliefs, as it is for influence.
You see, if you run something called the “Conservative Party“, which boasts only 15,000 or so registered voters in Erie County, you have very little clout, all by yourself. But if you cross-endorse, say, a Republican candidate, a general election win in a heavily blue Erie County thanks in part to lending your line means someone owes you something like a patronage job for a committee member.
When former Erie County Legislator Joe Lorigo won a Supreme Court election, the vacated seat is supposed to go to a member of the same party – the Conservative Party.
Ralph Lorigo – the Conservative Party’s Erie County chairman for thirty years, and Joe’s father – wanted the seat to go to Joe’s wife, Lindsay Bratek-Lorigo. (Bratek-Lorigo may be perfectly qualified, but her selection would raise questions about nepotism and electability that the Republicans would likely want to avoid.)
Although the seat must by law be filled by a Conservative Party member, the act of filling it remained within the control of the Legislature’s Republican minority. So, they started a process. Of all people, fail-Zelig Stefan Mychajliw – who has not won an election since 2017 – was angling for the seat. He has spent the last seven or so years sucking at his job, trying desperately to make headlines, cozying up to Chris Collins and Steve Bannon to get the NY-27 nomination, running for Town Supervisor in Hamburg as if it was some sort of referendum on being “woke”, and he has failed and lost every step of the way.
Naturally, not being complete fools, the Republicans saved themselves from selecting Mychajliw, who now contents himself podcasting with insurance salesmen.
But the fact that the Republicans did not automatically rubber-stamp Bratek-Lorigo made the Lorigo paterfamilias angry in a way that resulted in an unprecedented lecture of the Republicans on the County Legislature from – of all places – the public gallery. In urging the Republican minority to select Bratek-Lorigo, he urged them to consider the value of “inclusivity” and not just allowing these seats to be recycled to “old, white men”.
In literally any other situation, such a plea would be derided as “woke.” Where’s Mychajliw’s execrable Twitter when you need it?
Lorigo also reminded the three remaining Republicans that they all sit “with [his] endorsement,” and admonished them to “do the right thing” in a blatant, shocking, and explicit political threat.
The problem here isn’t the replacement process itself. While certainly the fairest outcome in such a situation would be a special election, life isn’t fair and the statute does not allow for that. Plus, we don’t do parliamentary-style “snap” elections, so such a process would be long and costly. Underscored here is the stupidity of fusion. It is a system that enables Lorigo to issue threats regarding Republican endorsements in an open forum, without a hint of shame. The loosey-goosey election rules enabled the Republicans to bypass the law and offer up a candidate who they perceive to be more electable than the Conservative’s choice.
All of this – from the explicit nepotism to the explicit threats – is indicative of just how systemically corrupt the system is. Face it – without electoral fusion, the Republicans simply would be picking a Republican replacement and Lorigo would not be in a position to make threats or issue ironic paeans to “inclusivity.”
The quickest fixes to make elections better and fairer is to abolish electoral fusion and to simplify ballot access.
The hilariously misnomered “Young Americans for Freedom” right-wing club has invited Michael Knowles – a right-wing polemicist angling to be a dollar-store Julius Streicher for Gen-Z – to speak at SUNY Buffalo. Knowles made headlines literally just this week by calling for the “eradication” of “transgenderism” from “public life entirely,” then whining about coverage that correctly interpreted this as genocidal.
Universities are places of higher learning and by their very nature they should default to the free and open exchange of ideas. This is especially true with state-owned universities, since any act of censorship has direct First Amendment implications. So, the question becomes whether an overt public call for genocide is enough for SUNY Buffalo to disallow Michael Knowles from spreading his eliminationist rhetoric here in Buffalo.
Thing is, probably not. Even the expression of morally depraved ideas cannot easily be silenced.
Instead, this will devolve into a lowest-common-denominator, dumb culture war issue-of-the-week with right-wing commentators decrying how the “intolerant left” is trying to cancel this poor guy who just thinks transgender people don’t exist and should be eliminated somehow. The right will quite overtly find itself defending the free speech rights of a barely-known propagandist who simply rejects the fundamental humanity and existence of an entire group of Americans.
As always with conservatives, they’re punching down at one of the most defamed, misunderstood marginalized populations around.
Michael Knowles tells CPAC that "there can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. … Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely." https://t.co/57hJF4frgqpic.twitter.com/szvnC1qWrP
I see all the different attempts to silence, cancel, or otherwise to protest UB and Knowles, but honestly what is the best way to combat this genocidal clown? Personally, I would find great satisfaction if Slee Hall was literally filled with people who just laugh hysterically at his every pronouncement and condemnation. Point and laugh at the absurd right-wing blue check who says this with a straight face:
According to the event flyer, Knowles is going to give a speech about how “radical feminism destroys women and everything else.” That’s an oldie but a goodie. Radical feminism – in this day and age? What is this, a Limbaugh bit from 1993? When there’s big bank to be made calling overtly for extermination? Pretty lazy for this guy to take student money and fall back on passé right-wing greatest hits such as “women are men’s property and not individuals with free will.” Maybe they can get Andrew Tate to Skype in from his Romanian jail cell.
Honestly, the best argument for keeping Michael Knowles off campus is that he’s really really bad at this.
This banal, provocatively unbuttoned twit claims that some amorphous “they” is “encouraging” transgender people to “mutilate themselves” to be more like the gender with which they identify, and that this is incompatible with the “radical feminist” idea that men and women are the same. His argument is that normal people are inconsistent when they argue that, on the one hand, e.g., both women and men can be good at math or science, while simultaneously agreeing that “transgenderism” exists as a thing in the world.
This is what passes now for conservative thought? That the left’s belief that a person’s sex chromosomes or genitals don’t affect their abilities or intelligence is somehow incompatible with a belief that in some they might adversely affect how a person interacts in life and how they feel? I mean, what’s one more depressed or suicidal closeted transgender person to YAF and Michael Knowles, right? As long as they don’t have to refer to someone who looks, e.g., vaguely masculine as “they”, it’s worth it, right?
We know all about genitalia, Michael. They don’t affect one’s abilities or intelligence any more than skin pigments do. This UB speech is nothing more than a warmed-over reactionary EIB microphone eruption. Whatever it is, know that it will be as boring as it will be stupid. UB should shut this speech down because it is so fundamentally dumb as to defeat the purpose of higher education. Of what use is a “free exchange of ideas” when the idea itself is so facile? YAF and Michael Knowles, when “conservative intelligentsia” emphasizes the “moron” in oxymoron.
“Transgenderism” is the weasel word Knowles concocted to allow him to feign outrage and demand retractions from entities which rightly characterize his language as explicitly genocidal. He claims that he is not calling for the eradication of transgender individuals or the transgender community – but of “transgenderism.” He claims that “transgenderism” is some sort of ideology, but that’s not how he really defines it. What he is saying is that the state of being a transgender person is not something that exists.
“I don’t know how you could have a genocide of transgender people because genocide refers to genes, it refers to genetics, it refers to biology,” Knowles said on The Michael Knowles Show. “And the whole point of transgenderism is that it has nothing to do with biology.”
“Nobody’s calling to exterminate anybody because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category,” he added. “It’s not a legitimate category of being.”
See? It’s simple. Since being transgender is “not a legitimate category of being,” it’s ok for UB’s YAF chapter and Knowles to call for the extermination of the very idea of “transgender,” which by definition, (to anyone with a brain sharper than that of a garden slug), includes transgender people. Not being able to countenance people different from him being happy in their own skin, this is Knowles’ last answer. It’s his “final solution,” if you will.
Knowles isn’t clever. He’s just another in a long line of amoral but media-savvy people cashing in on hate. He justifies his eliminationism through a somewhat novel feint – by simply declaring that transgender is a made-up thing that does not really exist. He’ll sue you if you correctly decipher what he’s saying. He doesn’t have to say that transgender people are Untermenschen – they are Niemalsmenschen; not inferior, but non-existent and the bare idea of them is fair game for extermination. What if Knowles decided that “Catholic” was a wholly made-up thing that does not exist in nature. His argument would be that it was not actually genocide for someone to call for the extermination of Catholicism because (1) no one said “Catholics,” per se, and (2) etymologically, Catholicism is a belief and not “genetics” or “biology.”
As he mansplains genocide, Knowles ignores that one cannot have what he calls “transgenderism” without there being transgender people. Whether or not he believes in them is irrelevant, but his argument can be boiled down to: he cannot call for the extermination of that which does not exist.
The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles accused the left of attempting to “radically change American culture” through immigration in order to “flood this country with people who will — are more likely to support them politically.”
The normalization of professional Fox-hit pundits calling for the extermination of transgenderism-wink-wink-we-all-know-what-he-means is part of this pogrom.
The pogrom itself seeks to completely eradicate and eliminate from America anything and everything that is not explicitly heterosexual and cisgendered from public life, pushing it underground.
Why? Mostly because right-wingers are so deeply triggered by the idea of people not like them being happy; calling someone by their preferred pronouns. The thing that is evident to anyone with an even passing, casual knowledge of history is that pogroms are about violence, expulsion, and murder. There will be more and worse acts of violence against drag queens and gay people and transgender people. People like Knowles don’t think this is enough – they want this elimination and violence to be state-sanctioned, systemic, and final.
They will tell you to your face they don’t want to exterminate transgender people while they’re measuring the camps for bunks.
UB doesn’t have the power to silence Knowles the way Knowles would silence transgender Americans, female Americans, gay Americans, and whomever else he targets. We have the power to ridicule and condemn him and his hosts.
When someone deletes a Twitter account – the official term is “deactivate” – one typically has thirty days within which to reactivate the account and to restore it to its most recent published state. It is also possible for a person simply to change their username, and unless you know the new account name there is no easy way to determine whether this has happened.
It is also possible to download one’s Twitter data before deactivation.
Sometime in late February, Republican County Executive nominee/candidate Chrissy Casilio-Bluhm deactivated her “ChrissyCaBoom” Twitter account, wherein she offered her deep thoughts having to do with Hunter Biden, the Covid hoax, the January 6th ANTIFA false flag, and the secret death of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, among other whackadoodle right-wing social-media fueled conspiratorial nonsense.
The voters deserve to see it all in its brightest Facebook-fed, misinformational splendor. We need to see this material. It has become an issue in this race, and her efforts to make it go away are only making it worse.
Anything less than that is a deliberate cover-up, and the local media need to treat it as such.
