Gaines and Losses

Are leftist girlbosses becoming the intellectual Red Guard of American Maoism? Or are they the beginning of its end?

Though I haven’t asked her directly, I suspect that having just given a talk at San Francisco State University this past Thursday evening on the importance of women’s-only spaces and the intrusion into women’s athletics of biological men clad in sports bras and tuck tape, Riley Gaines — a decorated NCAA women’s swimming champion and now accidental activist for women’s sports — likely never imagined she’d soon after be assaulted by a male trans activist, then chased down a hallway by frenzied “protesters” before spending the next three hours barricaded inside a classroom, a vicious mob of rainbow-haired Minnie Maos gathered just outside the door discussing how best to financially capitalize (Marxism be damned! We’re talking weed money here, brah! ) on the release of their hostage.

Nor can you much blame her: after all, it’s a relatively new phenomenon to find yourself kidnapped or even shot to death by trans victim-tourists agitated into a Marxist fervor of radical-chic cosplay. The capture of our institutions of higher education, which has been key to the capture of all of our major institutions, has created an army of histrionic and raw Paolo Freire-constructed “activists” where once students educated in the traditions of western classical liberalism calmly and confidently stood. Many of us have for years warned that this was happening. But our principled “conservative” pundit class was too busy luxuriating over twerking trannies initiating captured toddlers into Queer Theory — “a blessing of liberty!” they assured us, stroking vigorously the shaft of their tumescent principles — to pay us any heed. To we ickies, fighting the culture wars was a poor use of resources, they explained, marshaling the mannered patience of scotch-sodden cigar saints. What we really need to fortify our country’s status as the moral conscience of the globe is to find some backward country and bomb it into democracy. For freedom!

Somewhere, Woodrow Wilson smiles upward.

Gaines, soon after her ordeal, tried to put the attack into perspective: “Imagine,” she wrote, “if the roles were reversed and a group of white, conservatives ambushed someone within the LGBTQ community, physically assaulted them, and held them for ransom for 3 hrs...

“There would be arrests and repercussions for the perpetrators and administration who allowed this.”

Of course, this is likely the case. But it nevertheless misses the larger — and I think far more bracing — cultural point: the double standard she decries is both brazen and entirely intentional. As I’ve explained elsewhere, it’s a show of force. An offensive. And the impotence with which our side reacts — including even the failure of police to arrest the attackers — makes us look weak, and is meant to dispirit us.

To add insult to unacknowledged injury, SFSU Vice President for Student Affairs and Enrollment Management Jamillah Moore released a statement in the aftermath of the event — which, mind you, had been captured on video — praising both her university and the activists involved in the public assault. Wrote Ms Moore:

Today, San Francisco State finds itself again at the center of a national discussion regarding freedom of speech and expression. Let me begin by saying clearly: the trans community is welcome and belongs at San Francisco State University. Further, our community fiercely believes in unity, connection, care and compassion, and we value different ideas, even when they are not our own. SF State is regularly noted as one of the most diverse campuses in the United States — this is what makes us Gators, and this is what makes us great. Diversity promotes critical discussions, new understandings and enriches the academic experience. But we may also find ourselves exposed to divergent views and even views we find personally abhorrent. These encounters have sometimes led to discord, anger, confrontation and fear. We must meet this moment and unite with a shared value of learning.

Not content merely to paper over an actual assault on free speech with airy, DEI-inflected pronouncements about the importance of its educational value, Ms Moore let her SFSU freak flag fly:

Thank you to our students who participated peacefully in Thursday evening’s event. It took tremendous bravery to stand in a challenging space. I am proud of the moments where we listened and asked insightful questions. I am also proud of the moments when our students demonstrated the value of free speech and the right to protest peacefully. These issues do not go away, and these values are very much at our core.

This feels difficult because it is difficult. As you reflect, process, and begin to heal, please remember that there are people, resources and services available and ready to receive our Gator community, including faculty, staff members, coaches and mentors who are here to support you.

It is easy to dismiss such empty pablum. Or — if we’re feeling daffy — spend just a few moments fretting over its obvious and scripted platitudes. As statements go, this one is after all precisely what we’d expect from a Vice President of Student Affairs and Enrollment Management for a left-coast liberal arts college: self-important, overwrought, verbose, dripping with unearned virtue, and the product of a stunningly diseased mind.

But beyond the obvious, including the obvious misstatement of facts — rarely outside of CNN is a riot where a woman is threatened with death considered “peaceful” — what is most striking about this statement is its very intentional, very stubborn attack on reality as we readily witness it. Published two days after the event, the statement Ms. Moore crafts completely whitewashes from the historical record any mention of Riley Gaines. Nowhere is the specific substance of Ms. Gaines’ presentation addressed or even acknowledged. The protests, when they’re mentioned, are presented without the context of the assault and the ransom demand, and are instead lauded as an example of the cherished value of campus free speech.

Up is down.

Black is white.

Thelma is Louise.

Worse still, the school’s students — and in particular, the trans activist cohort who tried to shout down and perhaps even murder a women for standing up against the cultural erasure of women increasingly demanded by the cult of Queer Theory — are ostentatiously infantilized: simply being exposed to the idea that women exist outside of post-modern constructivist theoretics takes “tremendous bravery”; the notion that biological differences between men and women give men an unfair and obvious advantage in collegiate athletics is a claim from which students must “begin to heal”; reflecting on what they’ve heard, students are encouraged to seek out “resources and services” to undo the profound damage of a talk that, up until about five minutes ago, would be about as controversial as a pair of sensible shoes.

In short, the aggressors are assured that it is they themselves who are the victims — tolerant, open-minded, and, crucially, diverse! — while the actual victim, Riley Gaines, is cast tacitly as the evil hetero-normative monster who forced the poor, powerless ciphers, targets of an ongoing genocide by the white power structure, to “fight back” and “be seen,” as the movement insists, by shouting down all opposition and attacking, even physically, any emblem of “hate.”

What is obvious, then, is that our institutions of higher learning aren’t interested in traditional western epistemology or its canonical works. What they are interested in instead is molding the audience they themselves desire — foot soldiers for the ideological coup they’ve launched against the Enlightenment, Useful Idiots reading from the hymnal without having understood any of the words.

In a similar way, but in a different institutional sphere, corporate America is engaging in an almost identical gambit. And this was made obvious when Anheuser-Busch put a Woke activist, the product of the finest assembly line of ministerial elitism our country has to offer, in charge of one of its most iconic brands, Bud Light.

Inspired by what she called a clear mandate to save a flagging brand, VP of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid, in a March 30 interview with the podcast “Make Yourself at Home,” explained that, in order to rehabilitate the brand, she’d have to kill off its “fratty” image, complete with inappropriate, outdated humor, and focus instead on “having a campaign that’s truly inclusive, and feels lighter and brighter and different, and appeals to women and to men.”

To accomplish this re-branding, Bud Light partnered with trans-activist and social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney, whose popular online minstrel act Heinerscheid hoped would bring in a new demographic — namely, Gen Z cultural Marxists-in-training who she hopes have a hankering for cheap beer and frenetic, condescending drag routines performed by a surgically-altered gay man pretending to be a tween Audrey Hepburn.

That is, Heinerscheid made the calculated decision that to re-brand Bud Light — a product that had grown stale and was, as she noted, “in decline” commercially — she was going to break ties with the old demographic, and market directly to a new, more socially-enlightened demographic, which had the advantage of being a demographic she actually doesn’t actively despise. A product of Harvard and Wharton, Heinerscheid’s lived experience with Bud Light is most likely to use it as a punchline when describing the kind of hairy men who likely never once attended the ballet or watched Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in its original Russian.

It’s an approach to marketing that doesn’t try to appeal to the product’s existing customer base or the interests of that market’s demographics; but rather to find the customer base it likes, one it wishes to associate with, and begin instead to pander to that demographic and its more virtuous interests. For Heinerscheid, the move is a win-win: the filthies may protest and boycott and, in a huff, remove their commoner stink from her newly Woke girlboss brand; while simultaneously, all the right kinds of people — the best kinds, the goods and the kinds and the tolerants who embrace all the attitudes and platitudes of wokeism — will fill in the vaccuum, positioning Bud Light as the undisputed Queen of Beers, drag or otherwise.

Many on the right — and even some apolitical traditionalists who just like a cheap beer — have begun to boycott the brand. And I support that action. But I’m also not so naive as to believe Bud Light didn’t know what it was doing when it launched this new campaign: the impressions on Mulvaney’s posts and videos number in the millions. The name “Bud Light” has been uttered more in the last week than at any time since Spud Mackenzie ogled swim suit models playing Spring Break beach bunnies back in the ‘80s.

To me, Bud Light is precisely a “fratty” beer. A fishing beer. A ballgame beer. A beer that belongs in a red Solo cup with a ping pong ball floating atop it.

It has served a well-heeled niche.

And trust me: I’d very much like to believe that, like a trans Icarus having flown too close to the sun, the Mulvaney-peddled hops water will plummet back to earth, a far-flung jetsam of melted pancake makeup, spike heels, and tuck slings left in its tragically blistered wake.

But we live in a time when the prevailing ideology of the culture is Marxian constructivism. Men can be women and women men, simply by virtue of claiming so. History has been erased. Year Zero has arrived.

So it shouldn’t be surprising when those steeped in that ideology, having moved up the corporate ladder, believe — with some measure of confidence — that they can, by sheer force of will, construct their own consumer base around the prevailing ethos of faux-virtue and a set of appropriated shibboleths the left treats as religious icons. Why wouldn’t they? In a country where it’s no longer safe to claim that biological women exist, anything new and subversive is possible. Sales of beet is not the point; the attempt to bend the culture to their will is far more important and noble an endeavor.

Still, take heart, normies. Once the entirety of corporate America begins glomming on to a social movement, the American urge to recoil from its commodification often kills it. Like, dead. The edginess of trans is beginning to wear off. People are tired of being bullied by Lamar and the rest of the Nerds. So while they still may pay it ideological lip service, the passion is waning.

With any luck, in fact, this constant onslaught of trans affirmation may grow so tiresome — even to its “allies” — that one of the most powerful tools for change in the American character is soon to be brandished with great and ferocious frequency: the cringe.

Because once that happens, even acknowledging you once owned parachute pants is enough to ensure your celibacy for a good year.

Or, you know. So I’ve heard.

…

Buy me a cup of coffee? Lunch? A sports car?