Has the fat lady sung? By J.L. Reiter
"The show ain't over 'til the fat lady sings" is an expression the origins of which are more obscure than I had thought - see here. However, we all know what it means. Those of us who've maintained some sense of reason and perspective on the socio-political issues of Covid, race, and sex during the past tumultuous few years have been waiting for some sign that the madness and ideological fervor has reached the high tide; that we've reached 'peak woke,' that the fat lady has, at last, sung and the endless nightmare clown show is about to end.
Mass psychosis episodes and revolutions have a common bell curve of craziness; they rise rapidly (weeks or years, not decades) before reaching a pinnacle, then subside quickly, though perhaps not all the way to the status quo ante. For example, look at the Salem witch trials, or the French Revolution, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Or take three newer ones: Covid, Critical Race Theory, and gender ideology. First, Covid. Now that actual data and perspective is building up, more than two years since the panic began, a long-delayed conversation is happening about subjects that were recently taboo. The crushing by the powers that be (notably Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health and Anthony Fauci of the NIAID) of the Great Barrington Declaration, in which hundreds of reputable experts raised the possibility of a Sweden-like response to Covid in which we protected the weakest but didn’t shut down the economy, now looks like authoritarianism run amok. It’s also starting to look like bad policy and bad science. We now have the data to show that Sweden’s overall excess death rate (the number of people who died in the Covid period above the normal average for that time) is no worse than that of comparable countries like the UK or France that shut down completely, multiple times. Sweden got the same result, albeit not at exactly the same rate, with lower damage to their economy and national education.
The suppression of Covid information and discussion on Twitter and other social media on the grounds that it was “mis” or “dis” information seems Orwellian in hindsight, and there is growing opposition to leftist big tech censorship. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine may, or may not, have any effect against Covid. Clinical trials can tell us that. However, in the heat of the moment, as both drugs had already been taken by millions of people for years, they being treated like fair-ground snake oil seems insane. While there was no reason for anyone to herald them as the silver bullet, there was also no reason not to throw them, and every other possible off-label drug, at the illness in case something worked. That’s how new uses for drugs have been discovered for decades.
In sum, our lesson from Covid seems to be to ‘trust the scientific method,’ not “the science.” Have a theory, then test it to try and disprove it, and don't just accept at face value the pontifications of the high priests of The Science that your government has raised above you. Listen to Fauci and Collins, but also virologist Robert Malone and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo. Now the initial Ebola-type panic is over, we should get back to thinking like rational people. In the long run, we may accept that Sweden was right and we were wrong.
Critical Race Theory may be the exception to the rule that mass craziness rises and falls equally quickly. The bell curve here is very wide at the base. It grew like a poisonous mushroom for decades in the closets of academia before emerging triumphant in our schools, colleges, and government. Capturing the curriculum in teachers’ colleges, which in the U.S. are the lowest rung of the higher education ladder, enabled CRT’s gradual seepage into K-12 education, where it is now doing the most damage. In a country which educates barely a third of public-school pupils to minimal standards, lessons about race essentialism and “critical theories,” however gussied up as “social emotional learning” or discussions of ‘privilege,’ waste irreplaceable class time. CRT will take hard work to uproot and defeat, if that is even possible. If you want to see its ultimate deleterious effects, look at this oath taken by a new class of medical students in Minnesota. These future doctors will be treating their patients through the “lens” of a pernicious ideology that sees some as more deserving of care than others.
Which leaves us with the last of the trio of current crazy, gender ideology. This is the set of beliefs that unlike other mammals, humans have more than two sexes; that “trans women are women” and vice versa; that humans can be born in the “wrong” body; and that the goal of parental, societal, and medical care is to “affirm” a person’s (often transient) gender identity without question with not just social acceptance, but hormones and surgery.
The Kayla Lemieux case in Ontario, Canada gives one faint hope that this fat lady has sung. The story first broke with a Twitter clip of a man wearing a blond wig and a Brobdignagian set of prosthetic breasts. Of all things, he was teaching woodshop, which required nimble work to keep his bowling-ball sized falsies off the table saw. To public incomprehension, his Ontario school district defended the teacher’s “gender identity and gender expression” and said that they were committed to “a safe, caring, inclusive, equitable and welcoming learning and working environment for all students and staff.”
This bizarre farce calls the bluff of radical activists and their enablers, or “allies.” If Canadians accept that this person is in fact a woman simply because he says so, then they are obliged to allow him to dress this way to teach woodshop, or gym, or sex education, or even kindergarten. But even in progressive Canada, not everyone is on board. Watch this reporter, dressed nearly the same as Lemieux, at a meeting of the same school board. The board refused to accept his petition from concerned parents and eventually walked out on the meeting.
Parents in the U.S., meanwhile, are finally waking up to the fact that they’ve outsourced their children’s upbringing not to Mr. Rogers, but to a blue-haired, non-binary, Marxist with an unhealthy interest in discussing sex with elementary school children. They are fighting elections to take back school boards and showing up for meetings. Long used to having the high ground over supposed bigots and transphobes, the Left is having difficulty answering simple questions from these concerned parents. Rank arrogance and bumptiousness alone won't work anymore.
See for example Jon Stewart, once the hip, funny answer to staid and formal nightly news, who has returned to much a smaller audience (Apple TV) in a new avatar as a supercilious, woke scold. His schtick once worked well against the demonstrably wrong or ignorant, but it comes across as elitist condescension when directed against opponents in what should be an informed debate about how to protect children from harm. Stewart looked like he had read two cue-cards by Dr. Jack Turban to prepare for his recent attack on critics of gender ideology. He had evidently not read any scholarly articles by Leor Sapir at the Manhattan Institute, much less an actual book on the subject.
A tiny but extremely vociferous minority of the Left have long suppressed discussion and opposition through aggression and fear, helped by Stewart and his ilk. Now, there seems to be a slow dawning of sanity on the sex debate, inspired by brave pioneers like J.K. Rowling, Helen Joyce, Brendan O'Neil, Bill Maher, Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle, Kelly-Jay Keene, and many others. Ordinary people are finding the courage to speak up.
The Red Scare led by Senator "Tail-gunner Joe" McCarthy in the 1950s didn't end by executive fiat; Eisenhower wisely didn't get in the way of McCarthy's eventual self-destruction. Similarly, don’t look for any Democrats or progressives to get in the way of the Covid, race, or gender insanity. Very likely though, when it’s all over, they will all say that they were members of the Resistance.