“What’s left to conserve?” Some have asked this question over the years, of conservatives, in reference to what they see as the smoldering ruins of our culture. Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) host Matt Schlapp apparently has in mind one thing to conserve, however: “Transgender” activists’ language and suppositions.
This came to light with a recent tweet (below) — which inspired pushback from other conservatives — in which Schlapp addressed the controversy over University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) swimmer Will Thomas, who claims he’s female and has adopted the first name “Lia.”
Most troubling was Schlapp’s use of the feminine pronoun “her” to reference Thomas, as a timeless principle informs that the side defining the vocabulary of a debate wins the debate. More on that momentarily.
For some background, Thomas was an unimpressive UPenn men’s swimmer for three years before claiming womanhood. He then, coddled by politically correct school officials, was allowed to swim on his school’s women’s team and began breaking records along with competitors’ hearts. At least 16 Ivy League female swimmers have registered complaints, too, though they’ve done so anonymously fearing cancel-culture wrath.
The kicker is that while Thomas “has claimed to have ‘transitioned’ to being a woman [an impossibility],” reported Breitbart in January, he “has never gone through any surgical procedures and is still fully endowed with male genitalia.” He clearly has taken female hormones, testosterone blockers, or both, however, as evidenced by his obviously diminished muscle mass and definition.
As for diminished ideological muscle — Schlapp’s lapse — one conservative taking exception to it was Newsmax contributor Jenna Ellis. Her first response is below, beneath Schlapp’s retort to it.
Reflecting the above, Schlapp told Breitbart News in an interview that he “was not trying to use the language of the left — but was simply trying to show compassion to Thomas.” This is believable, too.
That is, conservatives generally don’t have to “try” to use the Left’s language any more than a baby has to try to cry.
They have to try not to use it.
In other words, with leftism being the cultural default — with the Lexicon of the Left being the norm in media, academia, Big Tech, and entertainment — it’s all around us like the air we breathe. And understanding this and rebelling against that lexicon is the only way to not conserve it.
Schlapp, an ex-George W. Bush administration official who’s also currently chairman of the American Conservative Union (ACU, which has hosted CPAC for several years), continued debating with Ellis (tweet below).
Dan Schneider, vice president of the ACU, also chimed in (tweet below), defending his boss and making an appeal to faith.
The Blaze’s Allie Stuckey, host of the Relatable podcast, entered the fray as well (two tweets below).
Breitbart presents tweets of other notable conservatives pushing back as well. As to Stuckey’s latter comment, it’s actually very easy imagining being that out of touch — because it’s quite common.
In fact, Schlapp made another fashionable error in a Tuesday phone interview with Breitbart. If “anybody misinterpreted CPAC’s commitment to ending the war and confronting the war on gender,” he said, “keeping this whole idea of gender confusion out of our classrooms and doing everything we can to protect girls and women’s sports, then that’s unfortunate, and I’d like to clarify the fact that I think we’re leading voice and all that,’” the site relates.
In reality, people don’t have “gender,” a term that some decades ago was confined almost exclusively to describing word categories (e.g., masculine, feminine, and neuter).
People have sex — as in the quality of being male or female.
The term “gender” was co-opted by the Left and, the social scientists will often tell you, is not synonymous with “sex”; rather, it relates to your perception of what you are.
In other words, using it in place of “sex” is to enable the idea that the latter should be subordinated to “gender,” that your “perception of what you are” is more significant than the biological reality of what you are. Is this the message you want to send?
It’s the same with pronouns. Central to the MUSS movement is the dogma that if, for example, a man identifies as a woman, he is a woman — no questions asked. Thus, when we call a man by feminine pronouns, we tacitly acknowledge this proposition’s validity. Of course, what follows from this is that he is a “she” and must be treated as a woman in all facets.
Then there’s the matter of “compassion,” which has become the coward’s excuse for all species of degradation enablement. Consider that Thomas does in fact parade about in the UPenn women’s locker room, fully endowed, making the women uncomfortable. But, said a female swimmer, Thomas “doesn’t seem to care how it makes anyone else feel.”
In other words, this UPenn attempt to make one person more comfortable has made most everyone else involved uncomfortable.
Compassion?
In a similar vein, since this is all governed by feelings and everyone has them, why don’t the feelings of the many outweigh the feelings of the one?
Of course, the deeper issue is that enabling the MUSS agenda, with deeds or words, makes one complicit in damaging the countless children harmed by its normalization. Make kids think the abnormal is normal, and many will descend into abnormality.
So the moral of this story for conservatives is simple: The act of conserving doesn’t yield victory when what’s being conserved is vice.
