Case Study Of How Conservatives Surrender: Douthat & Men Who Think They're Women

One of the best known observations on our side is that conservatives surrender. They never conserve anything, and are always well pleased to be seen as not causing too much trouble. While this is clear and obvious, less well known is how surrender happens.

We've all read scores of "The Conservative Case For" articles, but these always appear at the end of the battle, making the surrender formal, like signing a peace treaty. The real work of bowing to decadence begins before these appear.

Let's see how it's done in one of the main organs of regime propaganda, the New York Times itself, in a piece by one of its staff conservatives, Ross Douthat. The piece is "How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War".

Ostensibly, this is a piece that surveys transgender mania and says, in language NYT readers believe is spoken by deplorables, "Hold up! Wait a minute. Some’un ain't right! Let's slow down and take a good long think about what's a goin' on heah. You might be pleased to call a man ma'ma now, but y'all could end up feelin' nasty bad 'bout what you're a doing."

Suitably admonished by the very real power of the press, the woke will cease pushing so hard for insanity to be official policy.

But neither will they, of course, cease pushing altogether.

Here's the admonishment bit people are quoting, coming right at the end of M. D's piece:

...I will make a prediction: Within not too short a span of time, not only conservatives but most liberals will recognize that we have been running an experiment on trans-identifying youth without good or certain evidence, inspired by ideological motives rather than scientific rigor, in a way that future generations will regard as a grave medical-political scandal.

Which means that if you are a liberal who believes as much already, but you don’t feel comfortable saying it, your silence will eventually become your regret.

Sounds as if it's a straightforward Reality-based spanking. Which, because of where it was presented, gives one hope. Yet its placement naturally enough sucks away some of the dissident energy to fight. Why struggle if the battle is won? This is a key component of surrender: false signals that the battle is won, or the fight is over something too small to bother with.

Let's go back to the beginning of the piece where the real spirit deflation happens. This is a popular move we can call The Sly Surrender.

Douthat gives three scenarios to explain the current transanity (brief quotes, but all contain the gist):

1.

This is great news. Sexual fluidity, transgender and nonbinary experience are clearly intrinsic to the human experience, our society used to suppress them with punitive heteronormativity and only now are we getting a true picture of the real diversity of sexual attractions and gender identities. (Just as, for example, we discovered that left-handedness is much more common once we stopped trying to train kids out of it.)…

2. "We shouldn’t read too much into it. This trend is probably mostly just young people being young people, exploring and experimenting and differentiating themselves from their elders..."

3.

This trend is bad news. What we’re seeing today isn’t just a continuation of the gay rights revolution; it’s a form of social contagion which our educational and medical institutions are encouraging and accelerating...

So what we need now is probably more emphasis on biology, normativity and reconciliation with your own maleness or femaleness, not further deconstruction.

The first interpretation is woke, the second progressive, and the third conservative. The first two are cheers for transanity, unquestioning recommendations, really, with quibbles only about the speed of implementation. These are restatements of how the woke agenda is correct.

So is the third. Why? Because Douthat cannot bring himself to condemn the madness. He never defends, or attempts to defend, Reality. His purpose is to show the left that the Right is not entirely to be feared; that the Right can be lived with. But certainly not capitulated to.

He never shows why the first two interpretations are idiotic, or says why they are anti-Reality and anti-human. He weakens the third point with that "probably more emphasis on biology". Probably? His overwhelmingly leftist readership are implicitly given a free pass to hold either the first or second interpretation, and are asked only to forgive the third.

If any reader should venture to the third, again they will find no challenges to their Fantasist world view. All they will conclude is that, as in the admonition, that maybe perhaps kinda sorta we should slow down a bit, here and there, maybe.

The surrender has happened. It is over. The battle has been conceded, but so softly we didn't even feel the knife slipping between the shoulder blades.

Now you may say Douthat himself, in his soul of souls condemns the madness and is not stupid enough to fall for the idea that a man believing he is woman is in anyways acting sanely. Maybe, even, you know Douthat and have heard him say such things in private.

It doesn't matter. He was not able to defend the idea of biology and Reality-based metaphysics. He never even tried. All he could do is throw out that insipid "probably."

There it is. Right there. This is why conservatives never win. He has surrendered by never coming out to fight. Fitting in was his goal. And it was achieved: until the left charges down the slippery slope demanding new territory. He will then surrender again.

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