There was a time not long ago when even the most based conservative was willing to live and let live with all manner of divergent and bizarre people, but live and let live has become “I live and you submit” and that’s just not going to work out in the long run. The tolerant have been rewarded for their tolerance with intolerance, and if you look, you can already see the backlash brewing.
The breaking point may have been when the man who won the women’s swimming championship and all the smart, moral people of our garbage elite demanded we celebrate it. Or it might be weirdos trying to chat up our kindergarteners about sex. Or it might be CRT. Regardless, people are getting fed up. There’s a difference between living your life as you wish and making the rest of us live their lives as you wish too, especially when it’s a lie or when it means some freak gets to groom our kids.
Tolerance is good, but tolerance only works if it goes both ways. And that’s not happening anymore. It’s been weaponized, and if dumb people don’t stop their idiotic provocations they are going to see the emerging backlash grow and grow. It’s human nature – and human nature, contrary to the fantasies of the Marxists, has not been repealed.
Cultural aggressions like CRT are bad, but it’s the gender insanity that has really become intolerable. Tolerance has given way to intolerance in return, and the pushback is coming; in fact, the signs are that it is here. Regular folks are done with people demanding that we pretend men can become women, or that women can become men (and who never seem to want to compete in men’s sports), or that anyone can ever be a non-binary two-spirit gender-bent otherkin.
And we’re not pretending that the demand for access to our little kids for cringey conversations is okay – it’s not. At best – and at best it’s still pretty bad – it means trying to enlist our children into the ranks of the gender-confused. At worst, it’s the Lincoln Project. Regardless, the creeps insisting our kids belong to them have gone too far. Look at Virginia. Look at Florida. You’re looking at the future, a future of “Oh, hell no!”
A person can have the moral high ground when he/she asks to be left alone and not hassled. But that person gives up the moral high ground when he/she demands that for the rest of us to join them up there, we must validate whatever delusion turns his/her crank.
Tolerance is a two-way street, and we tolerant people keep getting run over. In the long run – hell, in the short run – that’s bound to decrease our tolerance for tolerance.
People are getting angry, angry not because some other people are odd but because some other people have played on most folks’ inherent kindness and desire not to add to troubled souls’ pain. You feel you’re a girl, Brian? Does wearing a dress and being called “Shelly” ease your pain? Hey, we wish you well. Do your thing. We’ll do our thing.
Except we don’t get to do our thing anymore.
Suddenly, girls who worked for years to be the very best swimmers end up with consolation prizes because some dude who couldn’t cut it among the boys decided he was a girl, and the organizations that are supposed to promote and protect the girls…won’t. They’re too afraid of offending the people backing the faux-femme who also allegedly cruises around the gal’s locker room with full-on man-junk.
But if you object, you’re the problem. So shut up, both your mouth and your eyes, and be happy with your second-place trophy – that is, until another man decides to dominate your league, and then another. You girls can all sit on the bench and watch the competition.
And when people protest this nonsense, they are faced with vicious attacks and the loss of their dreams or even their livelihoods because they refuse to take the next step and speak the lie that gender confusion is really gender revelation. It’s not enough to tolerate; everything, except boring normal stuff, must be affirmed! 2 + 2 = 5 and some men menstruate!
And that’s not okay.
Is this growing anger an offensive in some Handmaiden’s Tale-like fundamentalist culture war? No, it’s a counter-offensive in a culture war that most people thought they were avoiding by saying “Live and let live.”
People feel betrayed. They really expected tolerance to go both ways. Normal folks extended tolerance to all manner of different people and it never occurred to them that they would experience bigotry in return. The idea of tolerance is, at its core, a good one. But everyone has got to be tolerant, and everyone has got to be cool.
The thing that these cultural aggressors do not get is that outside elite institutions, the support they have is wide but not deep. It was based not on agreement with some of the nuttier ideas but on the idea that you do not inflict unnecessary pain on others. Yet it seems the aggressors imagine that people really believe their lunacy. They don’t. And when they get angry, that will become apparent.
You are going to see more laws protecting women’s sports. You will see more laws banning sex indoctrination of kids and CRT as well. Just wait until people take aim at the government-subsidized universities, the hothouse where these ideologies sprout. The whole edifice of this strange successor ideology will burn as leaders arise who will take on the new intolerants.
It’s kind of a cliché when libs howl that Ron DeSantis is even worse than Trump, but in fact, the governor will be much worse. Trump was elected to stop the elites’ new order. DeSantis will be elected to destroy it because Americans will no longer tolerate leftist intolerance.
The opinions expressed by the author are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of ThinkCivics.com.
Authored by Kurt Schlichter via Townhall.com
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