By Tom
Hey, let’s take a break from baseball deep dives to remind you of something more important than Jordan Walker’s sprint speed or Tink Hence’s curveball: your queer friends are in danger because conservatives want them to die!
This latest round of genocidal frothing comes from conservative commentator Michael Knowles, a failed actor who decided to hop aboard the grift mobile for Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire.
Knowles’s values could best be described as fascistic, so we’ll run through a couple of them: at a 2018 Politicon panel he supported the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi because he was an “Islamic terrorist,” as well as the suspension of due process for undocumented immigrants. In addition to the aforementioned xenophobia, he has said countless racist shit, some of the hits being Derek Chauvin was unjustly convicted in murdering George Floyd, defending people who believe in birtherism because Barack Obama “doesn’t speak like an American”, and denying that Andrew Jackson committed ethnic cleansing. There are so many others that it would boggle your mind.
Oh and he’s been extremely anti-vaccination from the get-go, and supports Jan 6th as a boiling point from all the government overreach in response to Covid–this was under the Trump admin, by the way–he admires Joseph McCarthy, condemns BLM, is incredibly anti-gay marriage, believes whistleblower Chelsea Manning should still be in prison, and supports a constitutional amendment banning flag burning.
He’s also engaged as a provocateur as well. You may remember this clip of him appearing on Fox News to refer to climate activist Greta Thunberg as mentally ill, and after stumbling over his own asshole attempted to cover his ableism by saying she was being exploited over her Asperger’s diagnosis–Knowles has no problem with exploiting the likeliness of a child, if let’s say a teen killed two people with a firearm. He was also assaulted–correctly–after giving a transphobic speech at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 2019, and just recently at the Conservative Political Action Conference–CPAC–said this unhinged shit.
Michael Knowles is a fascist. He’s also a pussy. Like everyone else that appeared at this year’s CPAC to the thunderous applause of like, 20 people, Knowles’s speech served as more rabble-rousing against the conservatives’ favorite boogeyman: trans people.
Never mind that CPAC is currently chaired by a sexual predator in Matt Schlapp, who just six months ago assaulted a Herschel Walker campaign staffer. Or that they gave stage time to bumbling doofus Kari Lake who continued to further her rake-stepping career by suggesting parents ask their kids what BDE is in reference to Ron DeSantis; they also gave stage time to public figures who have their fair share of sexual and/or workplace abuse, like James O’Keefe, Lauren Boebert, Eric Bolling, Jim Jordan, and Donald Trump. And if you needed more cherries on top of this shit Sundae, they gave speaking time to white supremacist Jack Posobiec, Brazilian fascist–and presidential loser–Jair Bolsonaro, and transphobe and genocide enabler Chaya Raichik.
Anyway, enough about the integrity of CPAC, Michael Knowles said, “for the good of society…transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely–the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”
Now if you do not currently have a brain parasite, you might be thinking, “hmmm, how does one eradicate trans ideology, whatever that is?” It turns out Knowles is just banging the war drum for what conservatives want from the queer community: to fucking die.
Knowles has faced considerable scrutiny for making such a claim. After publications like The Daily Beast and Rolling Stone published articles about this kind of genocidal language, Knowles and The Daily Wire legal team leapt into the fray to threaten lawsuits. While The Daily Beast caved, Rolling Stone doubled down–after initially caving–to point out how ridiculous it is to make a claim that called for erasing an “ideology”–which transness isn’t an ideology as Knowles and other goons would like you to believe.
Because not only is Michael Knowles a tremendous pussy and fascist, he’s also dumb. On his own show he said:
“I called to ban transgenderism entirely…they said that I was calling for the extermination of transgender people. They said I was calling for a genocide…One, 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…Nobody is calling to exterminate anybody, because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category–it’s not a legitimate category of being. There are people who think that they are the wrong sex, but they are mistaken. They’re laboring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion.”
Oh wow, neat! You can’t commit inhumane acts of cruelty against trans people, because they’re not a legitimate category, they’re just confused folks and we need to correct them on that confusion! Hey, is there any evidence that may point to the contrary?
There is! Like how everything Knowles and his cohorts suggest would actually create more societal harm and suicidality for this “illegitimate” group of people. It’s like he doesn’t really care about being right.
Fellow Christian-fascist, and man with conflicting views on age of consent, Matt Walsh did more to defend Knowles’s point. Walsh along with ghouls like Raichik–the LibsofTikTok lady–have peddled more than enough misinformation to endanger queer people in this country. They spearheaded the harassment directed at Boston Children’s hospital last year, that resulted in a bomb threat being called in. Of course this level of stochastic terrorism didn’t result in either of these charlatans paying any kind of political or criminal price. Walsh has sponsored anti-trans legislation in the US, more recently speaking after Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves signed a bill banning puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery for minors in his state.
Walsh, to his credit, has always been a stupid and cruel asshole. People like him, Knowles, and Raichik are just a cog in the conservative outrage machine that only results in more harm befalling marginalized people. In fact, they don’t even recognize that people are marginalized or oppressed, except for themselves. Take this Walsh tweet:
What exactly were trans people doing all this time besides slowly, and incrementally, earning a little bit more dignity than in previous years? Calling Knowles and these clowns out for hypocrisy doesn’t accomplish much, in fact it may bring them more unneeded attention than they deserve. If anything I want this documented and provided to you that these bumbling fascist morons are getting their way, and are wanting to commit a genocide against a group of people with little to no political power; people who are heavily scrutinized and violated by their surroundings who have spent centuries hiding in fear of retribution and have in decades past paid for their meager social status in gallons of blood. They pose no threat in the same way every other class of citizen does. But here we are passing laws to protect children from drag shows, unfounded bullshit claims of forced hysterectomies, and very minor queer representation because we’re worried that trans/queerness is somehow contagious, nevermind that the people peddling this rhetoric have values that reek of predation, cruelty, and violence. They want nothing more than to kill these people.
Reminder, you have a moral obligation to protect your trans and queer friends, no matter what.
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