What we’re seeing is not the pendulum swinging back toward the right after the left went too far. We’re seeing a moral panic, a society-wide assault on a phantom leftist who wants to ban Dr. Seuss and arrest you for using the wrong pronouns and put kitty litter boxes in classrooms. - ThreadSky

michaelhobbes.bsky.social • 15 days ago

What we’re seeing is not the pendulum swinging back toward the right after the left went too far. We’re seeing a moral panic, a society-wide assault on a phantom leftist who wants to ban Dr. Seuss and arrest you for using the wrong pronouns and put kitty litter boxes in classrooms.

Comments

adept2u.bsky.social•15 days ago

Looks like the same centuries of brutal White supremacist independent of any pendulum or defined political orientation racist pit of evil America has been every moment of its cursed enslaving genocidal Japanese concentration camp Klan in the Congress existence to me.

nancynina.bsky.social•13 days ago

The left doesn’t go “too far.” It doesn’t go far ENOUGH.

mwsl.bsky.social•13 days ago

Why would someone lie to be elected? What could they have to gain?

braak.bsky.social•15 days ago

extinction burst

brooklynkid53bskys.bsky.social•13 days ago

This is so useless
What would be helpful is a long, well written, well sourced blog post or similar piece discussing the facts

1nonlybabyyoda.bsky.social•15 days ago

Man. Y’all gotta stop attacking kitty litter. That shit is useful for everything! Specially in classrooms with dirty, messy little tiny shitheads. Kid threw up? Kitty Litter. Kid poured out a glue bottle? Kitty litter. Etc

tanyaeverywhere.bsky.social•14 days ago

Active shooter in your school and a student needs to pee. Use the kitty litter and cat box pan (because that’s why some cat boxes were installed.)

1nonlybabyyoda.bsky.social•14 days ago

No shit? That’s kinda dope. Not the shooter part.

tanyaeverywhere.bsky.social•14 days ago

Yeah that’s the reason the cat boxes were put in some class rooms.

shiftercat.bsky.social•13 days ago

OMG, that's depressing.

But they couldn't allow themselves to think for long about school shootings, so they invented a folk devil to rail against.

aoiky.bsky.social•13 days ago

Cant get the bus up the driveway? Kitty litter

awolfson.bsky.social•15 days ago

"Utopian" is the key word from the excerpt that makes your point here obvious. What is utopian about not wanting people to die of preventable diseases? Not wanting to separate families? What is utopian about allowing people to live their actual identities? Letting people choose what books to read?

haredurer.bsky.social•15 days ago

Yeah, simple reformist ideas like diverting police spending to better uses were treated like Mao's Cultural Revolution.

thegreatduggo.bsky.social•15 days ago

I hope you know this but the kitty litter was if the kids needed to pee or poo while on lockdown.

psychoalpastor.bsky.social•15 days ago

Yup, while hiding from school shooters.

aoiky.bsky.social•13 days ago

Mad that they had to wash their hands for a year

Pathetic

dawnalene.bsky.social•15 days ago

The Overton Window always shifts to the right

welarson.bsky.social•13 days ago

President ordering the concept of diversity being purged from every aspect of the government and DOJ threatening to prosecute private companies over it is controversial. Random twitter user including pronouns on their profile is the left going too far.

brettwolfe.bsky.social•13 days ago

True. Democrats, particularly Biden, are to blame. Not due to policies, but because their lazy messaging and media management let these insane ideas take hold without pushback. Face it, if Biden was capable of holding these daily interactions with press he could have better shaped the narrative.

rjnerddad.bsky.social•15 days ago

They've raised an army of strawmen to fight.

bathshebablue.bsky.social•13 days ago

It’s called a massive (international) right wing disinformation machine … and it’s working.

captcelery.bsky.social•13 days ago

Maybe classrooms SHOULD have kitty litter boxes. This would make it easier to have classroom cats, which sounds wonderful. Like classroom hamsters, but so much less likely to die at somebody's house on the weekend.

one-eyed-jack.bsky.social•15 days ago

This is exactly right. And it’s why I have had it with being lectured about needing to engage with Trump voters to understand their concerns. They are enraged over made up culture war bullshit like “The War on Christmas” and they lash out when challenged on it.

shepherdone.bsky.social•13 days ago

Nobody expects the phantom leftist.

michaelhobbes.bsky.social•15 days ago

The right has invented a woke guy to be mad at — and Chatterton has aided in their effort every step of the way.

stlkirk.bsky.social•13 days ago

I have seen many liberals, Monday morning quarterbacking, bemoaning Harris running on "providing prisoners sex-change operations".

She wasn't running on this. Trump incessantly claimed she was running on this.

sharonblady.bsky.social•15 days ago

Woke was never a movement. Progress, humanity, and gaining space to call out inappropriate, but accepted, language and policies were growing organically. The scales were tipping towards justice. Folks who didn't like the changes cast it as a movement, gave it a name and created a target to attack.

bindlestiff.bsky.social•15 days ago

🎯

hrryan.bsky.social•15 days ago

Williams reminds me of David Brooks - he poses as something other than what he is.

darkrose.bsky.social•15 days ago

I reposted before I saw this post and was like "Oh. Him."

pennystwocents.bsky.social•15 days ago

I'd say someone should the man this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man ...

But we live in the age of the shameless "double down".

jimothy63.bsky.social•15 days ago

you’d think a Hannah Arendt Fellow would be a little more astute

michaelhobbes.bsky.social•15 days ago

Exactly. Reactionary movement always phrase their concerns in the most sympathetic light. "I'm not against school desegregation, I just want local parents to have a say in education!"

The idea that all of this was necessary is absurd and only serves to coddle power.

https://bsky.app/profile/missingjigsaw.bsky.social/post/3lhw4b35xmk26

clearcutcontempt.bsky.social•15 days ago

Nearly every conservative that is still mask-on describes themselves as a centrist, as being reasonable and rational before going on to describe blood libel as something that’s literally happening. 1984 happened right in front of our eyes and the fourth estate was paid to ignore it.

anineffablegrump.bsky.social•15 days ago

The entire revisionist school of reconstruction history blamed the abolitionists for "forcing" the issue with emotion, the whole "the civil war was unnecessary" camp

taylorlorenz.bsky.social•15 days ago

I hope you write about this!! you're so spot on

feliciahart.bsky.social•15 days ago

And there's a reason the Enlightened Centrists took the bait: they desperately need to believe the social hierarchies that gave them such privilege are just. They don't want a better world for all because they are afraid that'd mean less for them.

spaceminks-hijinks.bsky.social•14 days ago

📌

jarocats.bsky.social•15 days ago

"I'm not a homophobe -- I just don't want gays near my kids!"

xybutch.bsky.social•15 days ago

"I'm not against school desegregation, I just want local parents to have a say in education!"

No one less than Hannah Arendt wrote basically this.

https://www.normfriesen.info/forgotten/little_rock1.pdf

xybutch.bsky.social•15 days ago

To be clear, I think she was being a reactionary when she wrote it.

fightingmongeese.bsky.social•14 days ago

This is why morals and manners teach separating statements from actions.

The media would do better to report the actions and outcomes rather than the disingenuous bloviating.

arfness.bsky.social•14 days ago

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swinterste.bsky.social•15 days ago

"My heart bleeds for the trannies, but..."

annabellelecter.bsky.social•14 days ago

Or my favorite. 'I believe the funding should follow the student.'

Follow the student.... to a religious institution?

hrimhari.bsky.social•15 days ago

"States' Rights!"

thesarahrose.bsky.social•15 days ago

📌

rouhiroo.bsky.social•14 days ago

Sympathetic? I’d say coded and intentionally misleading. “States rights,” “school choice,” NIMBY.

darkkristallized.bsky.social•15 days ago

I'm not against interracial marriage, I just worry the kids won't know what they are. 🙄

jfpgaffney.bsky.social•15 days ago

"I'm not against affordable housing, I just want people to have a say about their neighborhood character."

gravitasproblem.bsky.social•15 days ago

It's the same shit of self proclaimed "sensible" racists and "moderate"reactionaries of all stripes tut-tutting about what those awful extremists are doing without even a new coat of paint.

nostaticatall.bsky.social•15 days ago

it's all so fucking transparent it's insulting to even have to say it

jfpgaffney.bsky.social•15 days ago

Right????

wohyeahwohyeah.bsky.social•15 days ago

"I'm not against immigrants, I just wish they'd speak with an English accent so I can understand them"

myfreecats.com•15 days ago

Someone will turn up to that with the thickest regional British accent, and the racists will "speak English, go back where you come from!"

stonia2.bsky.social•6 days ago

"They're not like us" yeh, thank fuck for that.

jfpgaffney.bsky.social•15 days ago

MLK's concern about the "white moderate" is still valid 60 years later.

edbott.com•15 days ago

Dr. King had a thing or two to say about this attitude in the Letter from Birmingham Jail

paladin4justmercy.bsky.social•10 days ago

I think they literally invented him to bait progressives and further their goal of preserving white power.

eternal-expanse.bsky.social•15 days ago

Somehow makes sense the dude is named after an art forger who killed himself at the first reality-test of his elaborate delusions

jamieober8590.bsky.social•15 days ago

Tommy Chatt was obsessed with the Portland protests and Tweeting about them on Jan. 6 and didn't stop until about an hour into the insurrection. I called him on it and Mr. Open Discussion blocked me. So of course he wrote this, he's incapable of any introspection.

doctoracularf.bsky.social•15 days ago

The proliferation of the word "woke", a bastardization of the way more specific phrase "stay woke", in and of itself is proof that the right has been leading centrists around on this debate this entire time

mjr1.bsky.social•14 days ago

Chatterton: "Trump is liberal's fault"
Will: "Trump is liberal's fault"
YApplebaum: "Trump is liberal's fault"
Brooks: "Trump is liberal's fault"
Bedbug: "Trump is liberal's fault"

It's almost as if a memo went out at Bari's University of Bullshit.

ktfalvey.bsky.social•12 days ago

"I'm not against trans kids, I just don't want boys on my daughter's soccer team."

paladin4justmercy.bsky.social•10 days ago

I agree. I have wondered often over the least five years if the left "going too far" was really the left?

Was it an orchestrated cointelpro-like initiative by online RW operatives disguised as progressives?

paladin4justmercy.bsky.social•10 days ago

Did real progressives unwittingly jump on a bandwagon that was always intended to mobilize white nationalists to vote by instigating hate and irrational fear? Of course, their ultimate goal being to roll back civil rights and preserve whiteness and white power.

maryvarshini108.bsky.social•15 days ago

Yes!

camvogt.bsky.social•13 days ago

I feel like their is a massive common sense/ critical thinking crisis in this country

three-rivers.bsky.social•15 days ago

I first heard the kitty litter tale about three years ago. A co-worker claimed they were putting kitty litter in her daughter's school to accommodate kids who "Identified as cats."

three-rivers.bsky.social•15 days ago

I pushed her for a source. She said her daughter told her. "So, there's kitty litter in her school bathroom? Right now?" "Yes!" "Have you contacted the school administration?" "No, not yet." "Why not?" "Well, the kitty litter isn't in there right now, but it will be, I saw it on TV."

three-rivers.bsky.social•15 days ago

"The local news?" "No, Fox." "So, your daughter didn't see kitty litter?" "No, not yet." She then went back to work, untrouble that she'd just been caught in a lie. I didn't make any more out of it either, which is on me.

daveishere.bsky.social•9 days ago

yup!

jthomasalbert.bsky.social•14 days ago

We're seeing the fascists trying to prevent the pendulum from swinging back to the left with one of those big rubber exercise bands.

It will eventually snap and hit them in the face.

shiftercat.bsky.social•13 days ago

Let's hope so!

mspeggyhill.bsky.social•13 days ago

I think those moral panic things might often be just things they say in order to get shitty things that they want.

bennyvimes.bsky.social•13 days ago

Always. They are always that. They are making up reasons to enact hateful policy, that is always why they do it.

maiett.bsky.social•15 days ago

One summer's worth of measly institutional recognition of racial injustice, and they're implementing apartheid.

acmerocket.com•15 days ago

Yes and... They know the planet is FUBAR and total collapse is coming, and this is a great opportunity to create distractions from the strip-mining and hoarding that they are doing to hasten that collapse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

columbojones2.bsky.social•15 days ago

Don't forget the 7 foot females who want to cut off gonads and rule all men( and of course not have sex with them).

sirosenbaum.bsky.social•15 days ago

still mad the Atlantic didn't take my pitch about therians

oneiriccanid.bsky.social•15 days ago

Wait you pitched the Atlantic about therians? Lol what was their response? xD

sirosenbaum.bsky.social•15 days ago

They felt it was a little too "out there"

thesandwichman.bsky.social•13 days ago

Nah, what we're seeing is the collapse of capitalism and the desperate efforts of billionaires to keep THEIR boats afloat.

boazhsan.bsky.social•13 days ago

Yeah, certainly part of the story.
Climate change and general entry into anthropocene era means we have to do things differently. Some highly greedy, selfish individuals are trying to hang on to the existing system for their own benefit.

thesandwichman.bsky.social•13 days ago

Yes, two things. Climate change and what Habermas called "legitimation crisis" A majority doesn't believe in the system. They are just at odds over what they do believe in.

tzikeh.bsky.social•15 days ago

Define "too far"

ianbobmorris.bsky.social•12 days ago

some docotr seuss books that always had issues were not selling well so they were not going to get reprinted and the right flipped their shit about it

samuelcspitale.bsky.social•13 days ago

💯 I wrote a book about how the right uses propaganda to fight social change for the benefit of the wealthy

samantha42.bsky.social•15 days ago

Cis het white people were asked to view others as equally human and this was too much for them.

jleep86.bsky.social•15 days ago

Every time.

fenny.moe•15 days ago

dr seuss, apparently notably pro-nazi according to the anti-woke crowd

bellchamber.bsky.social•15 days ago

THIS!!

'wokeness' is a propaganda project that's been used over & over again to simply put down and oppress any deviance from a white Christian nationalist (fascist douchebag) point of view. It's just an updated shorthand of referring to SJWs, radical leftists, liberals, progressives, etc etc.

librariansteve.bsky.social•13 days ago

The buzz-word in the Reagan-era was "liberal" as a slur. Then when that lost traction in the early 90's, "political correctness," then when that lost traction, "woke." In every case, they co-opted a term from the left & twisted it. They invent nothing.

dmmlejb.bsky.social•13 days ago

You have to admit we give them ammo, though. e.g., abortion. I support it. But I do not support a women having an elective abortion in third trimester. But Dems are afraid of saying they don't support unlimited abortion, so they refuse to say it and the right claims that they favor it.

jessthebp.bsky.social•13 days ago

This is literally the shadowboxing that is being talked about! There just... Aren't elective third trimester abortions. People have them because of medical issues-- or because they didn't know they were pregnant, which is a really really edge case. If Dems engage with this it becomes ammo

satanicmechanic.bsky.social•12 days ago

Late term elective abortions are a myth you brainwashed boomer. You are literally doing the thing OP is talking about. Turn off your fucking television

dmmlejb.bsky.social•12 days ago

I know that. I have said it, elsewhere. What I don't understand is why Dems are not allowed to make their positions clear on this issue. Their followers will condemn them for some inane reason. We're so afraid of the right we cower in fear of telling the simple truth.

adrienneleigh.bsky.social•12 days ago

The "simple truth" is that the only acceptable position is abortion on demand without apology. Period.

nikomikiri.bsky.social•13 days ago

This is a fallacious argument you seem to have bought wholesale in response to a post about how this moral panic happened when people saw these fallacious arguments and believed them.

dmmlejb.bsky.social•13 days ago

I would appreciate some detail about what is fallacious about it. We are not at fault, but we give their leaders ammo to fight us repeatedly by assuming that they can read our minds.

nikomikiri.bsky.social•13 days ago

The “point” that someone not directly condemning something that is a wild and made up accusation makes them responsible for the wild and made up accusations made against them in the first place is just on its face ridiculous.

strings.bsky.social•11 days ago

Also get it out of your head that we need to avoid “giving them ammo”. Denying them ammo only works if they cannot manufacture the ammo themselves (lie) and they are, unfortunately, extremely prolific ammunition manufacturers (liars)

dmmlejb.bsky.social•11 days ago

So, what do you suggest doing? Long explantions that the media won't quote because they are too complicated for the average viewer to pay attention to - or simple phrases like "That doesn't happen, but of course if it did I wouldn't support it"? Or just ignore the question - that is working so well.

nothingsmonstrd.bsky.social•15 days ago

It's good that the technical term "privilege escalation" is being removed from NSA documents, because that saves us all from the scourge of some undergraduate rolling their eyes when grandad talks about "colored people."

gueneuera.bsky.social•13 days ago

“Preferred pronouns annoy me so I want fascism instead”

kylora2112.bsky.social•15 days ago

Seuss Estate: "We don't want to publish these books with some really questionable images."
Reactionaries: "THEY WANT TO BAN HORTON HEARS A WHO!!!"

Schools: "We're going to stock kitty litter for emergency latrines in the event of a lockdown."
Reactionaries: "KIDS ARE IDENTIFYING AS CATS!!!"

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