Mastodawn

RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/116030091259678118

So many things about right wing ideology that seemed inexplicable to me become understandable as the #EpsteinFiles get released.

15 years ago, no one cared about #trans people. They were free to lead their boring lives. Then kind of all at once, demagogues around the world became actively anti-trans, spouting rhetoric and pushing legislation. "Why now?" I wondered then and to this day.

Because Jeffrey Epstein was anti-trans. He asked his friends to take up the mantle and of course they did. The wave of anti-trans sentiment we suffer through today is because people wanted to suck up to a rich pedophile. No deeper conviction than that, no coherent philosophy. Epstein said so and thus it was.

He is no longer around to ask but I can only assume his motivation was because while sexually abusing teenaged girls Epstein did not want to be surprised by a penis. This whole moral panic is because of the sexual abuse preferences of one billionaire influencer. Good job, everyone, carrying the torch of a pedophile.

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Kaia 🦚Feb 8

@geniodiabolico
you also have to remember that evangelical Christians built up a huge political apparatus for minority rule, that required a political wedge issue. They used abortion for decades, but then they basically won when the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade. The laws were already friendly to harming immigrants, so they turned their focus to trans people

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Dave Slusher - Tech Stuff Feb 8

@kaipeacock I'm sure you are correct and somewhere in some dickhead think-tank a group of awful people picked this off of a short list of wedge issues. That is extremely easy to believe. I have no direct evidence but my supposition is the reason it was on that short list bubbles up to Epstein ultimately.

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Kaia 🦚

@geniodiabolico
I interned at a law firm in college that is still actively involved in this kind of advocacy before I deprogrammed myself. Maybe their money comes from the rapist elites, but they had their own religious motivations about the mind of world they wanted to create.

It's easy to ascribe so much evil to one man, because that's narratively easy. But there are many people who have more mediocre motives, who still line up and invest extreme effort into the agenda that elites like Epstein were also in favor of. People who are smarter and more dedicated than he ever was. People like him are like CEOs, taking credit for work that other people did or simply observing the cultural current and deciding what they wanted to encourage because it would make them money or make trafficking the vulnerable easier