As the culture wars heat up between the American Left and Right, progressive journalists are increasingly falling back on a powerful and succinct statement to push the public into a nostalgia for the Obama years: This isn’t normal. None of this, they write and tweet and blog endlessly, is “normal”: Not the erratic presidential tweets, not the belligerent presidential tone, and not what they claim is Trump’s “treasonous” behavior. I’m not unsympathetic to many of the arguments being made about civility, decorum, and the rest of the things that keep George Will up at night. But I do think that the media are engaging in a sophisticated game of gaslighting in the meantime.
What the media is doing while shrieking about our vanishing standards of normalcy is waging an all-out war on the idea of the male-female gender binary itself. While they are highlighting the abnormal nature of a president who tweets out spur-of-the-moment policy, they are pushing child drag queens and transgender children and pregnant “men” and “women” with penises as if these things were not an absolutely revolutionary attack on the social fabric of the West. We are supposed to believe that a president lashing out at the media is a catastrophic assault on The Way Things Were, and a child drag queen is a symbol of our liberation.
