It’s the kind of story that makes your heart sink: a truck plowed into a gay pride parade in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, killing one person and coming unnervingly close to a Democratic Congresswoman. When you hear about something like that happening, you can’t help but fear the worst.
You can refrain from talking about it too much on social media, at least until all the facts are known, though. But what am I saying? This is 2021, after all:
Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis, a Democrat, stated: "This was a terrorist attack against the LGBTQ community. He came here to destroy people. This was clearly no accident."
[…]
Others online blamed legislation signed by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, which provides some legal protections to drivers who are sued after running into protesters when they've felt threatened, but it does not, as many across the political aisle claimed Sunday morning, give residents free rein to run down protesters, nor does it give anyone the right to run over parade participants.
More than 12 hours after the event, the Twitter hashtag #DeathSantis continues to trend without any warning about misinformation, although the platform was quick to provide "context" anytime former President Donald Trump tweeted.
It wasn’t long before the truth came out: this was a horrible accident caused by a driver whose hit the gas pedal instead of the brake. A terrible tragedy, but not a terror attack.
Most of the people who blamed Ron DeSantis walked it back, but the damage was done. Once again, Florida’s Trumpy Republican Governor got to be the victim of a media witch-hunt.
The Democrats’ grifter-industrial complex isn’t nearly as well-developed as its GOP equivalent, but some shady characters have cashed in nicely on hatred of Trump and now DeSantis. There’s the lawyer who was momentarily famous for dressing up as the Grim Reaper to show how DeSantis was killing people by not closing beaches, or something. And, of course, there’s the increasingly ridiculous Rebecca Jones:
Jones had been fired by the state in May for insubordination but managed to parlay her firing into national celebrity by falsely claiming that it was in retribution for her refusal to cover up the state’s COVID numbers — something that she couldn’t have done because she didn’t have access to the raw data, as National Review’s Charles Cooke reported. She used the resulting notoriety to launch her own COVID dashboard, which also relied on the state’s data, but presented it in a way that suggested cases and deaths were higher than what the state had reported.
[Ph.D. candidate Jon] Taylor was curious about Jones’s methodology, so he emailed her in late July, roughly a month after his tracker went live.
Taylor struck a friendly and inquisitive tone in the email, which was reviewed by National Review. But he never heard back from Jones, whom he calls “RJ” in the practiced way of someone who refers to a person so frequently that he is forced to resort to initials.
That is until two days later, when Jones began attacking him publicly on Twitter, calling him a “quack” and a “fraud” in response to a blog post he wrote explaining how the state’s presentation of the COVID death data — the use of “event date” rather than the actual date of death — was leading to an overstatement of the severity of the situation.
Taylor was surprised that Jones took to Twitter to trash him after he reached out privately in good faith to hash out the differences in their respective approaches to the data. He argued with Jones on the platform briefly before deciding to drop the issue and move on.
And then came a lull, until October, when Taylor and his COVID tracker began getting some attention. Taylor was starting to get booked on local news shows and podcasts, and one of his tracker tweets went viral.
Jones jumped into the viral twitter thread, not to argue about Taylor’s methodology, but to accuse him and his academic adviser of sexual harassment, thereby stifling the original tweet, which was putting his tracker on the map.
Not only did Jones smear Taylor and his adviser as sexual harassers to her hundreds of thousands of followers, she also tagged their university, the university president, and university police.
Jones deleted the tweets, but Taylor preserved them as screenshots on the advice of a prominent academic who had previously been subjected to a characteristic Jones smear campaign. Jones makes a habit of deleting past tweets before arguing that she had never sent them in the first place, the academic told Taylor. Reached for comment, Jones also denied defaming Taylor and his adviser.
Of course there are many, many good reasons to dislike DeSantis. He ran for Governor with an ad showing him helping his kid build The Wallᵀᴹ out of blocks, and is now picking a fight with cruise lines over vaccination because freedom n’ stuff.
If his opponents would hammer away at this kind of thing instead of getting over their skis whenever something bad happens in Florida and then sheepishly walking it back, or falling for obvious con artists promising the magic bullet that will take him down once and for all, they might actually have a chance of unseating him in 2022. Instead, every time they shoot at him and miss, he only comes out looking stronger.
Part of the reason Trump got elected is because people were so numb to Republicans being called “fascist” that they stopped listening when an actual fascist showed up. Do they even teach about the boy who cried “wolf!” in schools anymore, or did they cancel it because it’s author wrote some bad tweets when he was young?
Atlantic Canada doesn’t get a lot of attention from the rest of Canada, much less the United States, so it’s always a bit startling when American commentators take note of a culture-war tempest taking place right here in my city.
It’s kind of like when you discover that people you know from completely different stages of your life just happen to Facebook friends with each other.
In this case, Bari Weiss turned her newsletter over to author Abigail Shirer, author of the Halifax Pride-disapproved book Irreversible Damage, to discuss the boycott campaign against the Halifax Public Library spurred by the presence of her book:
Halifax Pride, the annual LGBTQ festival, announced late last month that it would cut ties with the city’s library system over its insistence on carrying Irreversible Damage, calling it “transphobic,” and claiming that it “jeopardizes the safety of trans youth” and “debates the existence of trans people.”
So far, the Halifax Public Libraries have resisted. Their position is straightforward and apolitical: libraries exist to expose the public to the widest array of views, “including those which may be regarded as unorthodox or unpopular with the majority.”
The Halifax Public Libraries tried to compromise with the activists by pasting a note inside the book’s cover, directing readers to a list of “trans-affirming” resources. But the activists were unappeased. No ties with the libraries were restored. They want the book gone from the library and scrubbed from existence. Two copies in a library of nearly 1.2 million volumes are two too many.
Not even the Nova Scotia Library Association or the Canadian Library Association has come to the library’s defense, though their standing orders explicitly require member libraries “to guarantee and facilitate access to all expressions of knowledge and intellectual activity, including those which some elements of society may consider to be unconventional, unpopular or unacceptable.”
Silent supporters stand alongside the Halifax Libraries. They sign up to borrow the book, now nearly 150 of them, and post supportive messages on Twitter usually under pseudonyms.They know that the activists waging this battle — over who gets to determine what we can read, what ideas adults are allowed to explore, will, at some point, come for ideas they favor, or causes they support.
But like too many individuals and institutions who try to hold fast to liberal values in the face of an intolerant and illiberal onslaught, the Halifax Libraries stand alone in the public square.
I know how they feel.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, I’m somewhat skeptical about the thesis of the book. For at least some children, transitioning to a different gender when young seems to be exactly what they need.
But I resent Halifax Pride, or any other organization, trying to keep me from reading it for myself. If society is as transphobic and intolerant as they claim, public pressure campaigns to have offensive books removed from libraries is the last thing they should want.
Here’s an incredible video artifact for you, if you have fifteen minutes and you’re into Cold War ephemera: a short film made by British military police shortly before the Berlin Wall crumbled, explaining how to cross the “inner German border” from West Germany to West Berlin:
Not only could most East Germans get Western TV, they shared one of their autobahns with Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs heading for West Berlin. I wonder what they were thinking as they sputtered along in their Trabants.
The end of the paragraph introducing the first video reads:
the “inner German border” from West Germany to West Berlin:
Should it not read "EAST Germany to West Berlin"?