Testing. Testing. *Tap, tap, tap.* Testing. *Tap, tap.* Is this thing on? *High-pitched echo screech.*
Sorry, patient reader, I just want to make sure the Google censors don’t cancel this column from the get-go. Here goes…
Steve. Sailer.
…
Are we still live? Has this piece been blacklisted, shadow-banned, de-boosted, had an opaque sack shoved over its head, dragged into the back of an unmarked van, and tossed over the nearest seaside cliff? Has a White House flunky demanded freethepeople.org’s delisting from search engines? What’s that? We can’t tell yet? Well I’m going anyway.
Twenty years ago, biodiversity writer Steve Sailer infamously proposed a Miracle-Whip slathered electoral strategy for Republicans: become the explicit party of white America. (Just so we’re clear, biodiversity is a byword for inherent IQ differences between the races, e.g. whites are smarter than blacks, and Asians always crush the mathematical Olympiad.) The so-called Sailer Strategy wasn’t so much “American History X” as it was doing as Democrats do with minorities and courting the pale-skins. And if the left calls the strategy racist, well that just shows how racist peau politics really is. A perfect argumentative catch-22! Republicans forever lock in the Dairy-Land vote or repeat Dems r the real racists1!! ad nauseam.
Fortunately for skittish Republicans who go whiter than Lindsey Graham at a Bed Bath & Beyond bankruptcy sale at the thought of coming across as the teeniest bit racist, the Sailer Strategy never took off. The latest marketing pivot is rebranding the GOP as a “multi-ethnic working-class party.” How the historic harem of Wall Street is supposed to translate its bootstrapping message to third-shifters with EBT cards is a question no RNC consultant can or wants to answer—lest the retainer checks stop.
That doesn’t stop the right from doggedly trying to sniff out a new edge in a cultural-political war they’ve ceded all ground in. Most times, when conservatives seek out a way to get over on the left, they latch onto charlatans, mental defectives, or both. (See the brief fling with rapper-turned-goose-stepper Kanye West.) But the right is at capacity with Ben Shapiros—slick talkers who goad pink-haired college kids into tossing White Claw cans and tussling with campus police. What’s needed isn’t another dais-helming syllogist who runs up the retweet count. The right needs a man of action, of trolling praxis, who precedes the Owl of Minerva in forging a path to really, truly, finally, definitively own the libs.
In a twist, conservatives can find their hero by peering beyond Trump’s unfinished wall to our southern hemisphere. An Ecuadorian gentleman has gone to extreme lengths to regain custody of his children, subverting existing law to his favor, all while undermining progressive priors. In Ecuador, as in the United States, mothers are typically favored in custodial fights over fathers. But that wasn’t going to stop René Salinas Ramos from freeing his daughters from what he calls an “abusive environment.” So what’s a down and out dad supposed to do when the courts, ‘crats, and culture all undermine his paternal duties? Go madre!
Employing a 2015 law, Ramos legally changed his gender to female in order to give himself a leg up in the parentage battle. Not only that, but he adopted the argot of LGBTQ activism in doing so, covering all logical bases. Here’s what Srta. Ramos told a local news outlet last December: “The laws say that the one who has the right is the woman. As of this moment, I am female. Now I’m also a mom, that’s how I consider myself. I am very sure of my sexuality. What I have sought is that I want to be a mother, so that I can also give the love and protection of a mother.”
Read it again, because it’s a real masterclass in assimilation. You don’t have to respect the left’s abuse of self-regarding language to admire Ramos’s skillful co-optation of it. The phrasing is spot-on: “As of this moment, I am”; “how I consider myself”; “I am very sure of my sexuality”. By the left’s own lights, Ramos’s stated conviction is unimpeachable. Being a woman is his truth. Period. Full stop. Got a problem with it, bigot? Maybe you should be forced to see a shrink like Jordan Peterson.
Except the left is taking exception to Ramos’s swap to the fairer sex. The PC pearl-clutchers at Vice are aghast someone would abuse a law to his—or is it her now? No, no, definitely his!—advantage. Basically, Ramos got a lot of stick for his stick. An aghast Nathaniel Janowitz reports: “LGBTQ groups are concerned about the man’s use of a law designed to promote transgender rights, and what effect it could have in the future.” Some multitudinous thing called the Ecuadorian Federation of Organizations LGBTI pouted out a statement on its ‘90s-era site. The org’s director and former Diane Rodríguez whined to Vice, “This man’s private matter, to obtain custody of his daughters, isn’t the spirit of the law.”
Au contraire, Sr., Srta., or Xrta. Diane. Nothing Ramos did ran afoul of the law, which simply permits Ecuadorians to alter their gender marker on government-issued IDs. In the eyes of the law, Ramos is reticule-rockin’, stiletto-stompin’’, sheath-stylin’, bi-X chromosomed woman. And you’re going to hear him her roar!
Them’s the rules, after all. When gender is simultaneously malleable and unquestionable, why shouldn’t someone wield those precepts to make hay? See Lia Thomas, Gabrielle Ludwig, June Eastwood, Natalie Fahey, Chloe Anderson, Terry Miller, Andraya Yearwood, and on and on and on.
This isn’t to pick on the transgendered nor deny that gender dysphoria exists. But the dogmatic insistence that cross-gendering must be accepted and affirmed leaves an opening for the kind of wily scheming used by Ramos. Fluidity and certainty are antonyms. Insisting on both—and not just insisting, but martialing the entire socio-political-education-media apparatus to mute naysayers—creates an easy-to-extort ideological gap. Ramos can be pilloried, doubted, deprecated, accused of the most malignant of motivations, but he’s operating within the confines of the left’s identity mos maiorum.
Just like the Sailer Strategy, the Ramos M-to-F turnabout should serve as a cautionary tale for both flimsy logic and epistemological surety—traits tendentious liberals have in greater supply than ethically sourced oat milk. Nobody likes do-as-I-say-not-as-I-doism. But I’m not holding my breath for a great revelation. Progressive fideism is too strong a shield to drop. One determined father can poke gaping holes in an ideology, but it matters little if its acolytes keep the faith.
Oh, well. Onto the next both-sides-hypocritical squabble. Looks like Joe Biden left some classified documents on top of an oil stain in his garage. And his prodigal, seedy son had open access! Perhaps the left will admit their overreaction to Trump’s absconding with top-secret memos—just as soon as they acknowledge Ramos’s new-found motherhood, of course.
Add comment