School officials in Metro Atlanta’s Forsyth County canceled two talks by a children’s book author last week after he used the word “gay” in a presentation to elementary school students about the history of the superhero character Batman.
The author, Marc Tyler Nobleman, has spoken to students of all ages all over the country hundreds of times about the superhero franchise’s co-creator without incident.
He calls it a suspenseful and inspirational talk that uses the word “gay” once because it’s a pivotal fact in research that led DC Entertainment to acknowledge Batman’s true origins.
“I did not come in to talk about sexual orientation,” he said. “The fear in that district of the parental backlash is so severe that one three-letter word overrode 57 minutes worth of other valuable content that I came to deliver.”
The sheer brazenness with which they will lie to your face when they say stuff like this is stunning.
But what is kind of terrifying is that I personally think that, in the moment that they are saying it, they genuinely fool themselves into believing it. They simultaneously know their true intentions and that the argument they are making is complete nonsense, but in the moment that they are making it, they convince themselves of it fully. That is a dangerous thing to get into the habit of.
Their entire ecosystem is set up to encourage wink-wink-nudge-nudge plausible deniability.
The veneer of conformity is what they want. It gives Xerxes in 300, “The [left] demands that you stand but all I ask is that you kneel.”
You’re overthinking it. They think arguments are that word game and we’re bad at playing it.
Reality is a team sport, to some people. They don’t care what’s true. No short-lived delusion is required, because they don’t really believe anything. They believe people. Truth is defined as whatever authority needs it to be, today. Contradictions do not exist. There is only the ingroup, which is always correct and virtuous and handsome, and the outgroup, which is always wrong and foolish and dumb. Even if they say the exact same thing.
And they think that’s all you’re doing, because they think that’s all there is.