How's it going America,
Check out the latest episode of The Pod Millennial! I talk to Phil Labonte, Katie Uhlaender, and Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, but I also talk about Morrissey's new single and the fandom that reaches back to my teen years.
Let's get into it:
The trans school shooter in Tumbler Ridge, a tiny town in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, has been referred to as a "female" by nearly all the media outlets in Canada. The lie that Jesse Strang, or Jesse Van Rootselaar, was a woman didn't stay with the Canadian press but traveled around the world.
Canada Press, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, CTV, and other Canadian news outlets all referred to the shooter as a woman. Van Rootselaar began gender transitioning at the age of 12, with what looks to be the reluctant support of his mother, who now lies dead at his hands. Reuters, ABC, NPR, People, The Independent, Yahoo News, The New York Times, the Toronto Star, and so many others all ran with the lie that the boy was really a girl. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police specified to the press that they would be using the preferred pronouns of the deceased.
Crime stats in Canada will mark this down under crimes committed by women, and Van Rootselaar, who was lied to by peers, family, friends, and doctors while alive, will now be lied about in death. The New York Times, the paper of record in the United States, actually printed "... the suspected shooter, an 18-year-old woman who appeared to have died from a self-inflicted injury, [was] found dead at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police."
"In all, the police said, the shooter killed nine people, including herself... The shooter also killed her mother, 39, and stepbrother, 11, before going to the school," the Times lied.
A quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began circulating on X, "We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying." That's what's happening.
People pointed it out all over social media, "they're lying to you!" They screamed in X posts. But the thing is that it doesn't seem to matter. The lies persist despite the truth being apparent and massive media companies, as well as entire national governments, including the EU Parliament, falling in line with that lie. For the proponents of trans, it's not enough that they believe the lie; they must make us believe it as well, and not only must we believe it, but we must say it—and they won't be satisfied until we do. The authoritarian is never satisfied until you repeat their lies to yourself.
It's infuriating, it's enough to make a person want to gnash their teeth and rend their garments and stand up and scream "stop lying to me, damnit, just tell the f*cking truth!" But these liars won't, they won't do it, they just keep lying. It's like a game of chicken, who will back down first, those standing on a foundation of truth or those blissfully bound by their own fabrications?
Those who uphold the lies do so for reasons of compassion, but there's no compassion in lying to someone, and there's no scientific or rational basis for the belief in medical magic. How can anyone who lies about something so fundamental be believed about anything?
The compassionate thing to do, when you are faced with a child who believes they were born in the wrong body, is to say "listen, spectacularly beautiful and wonderful child, you are absolutely in the right body, your brains are the right brains, let us work together to help you figure out how to navigate yourself through the world as the person you are, healthy and whole."
Don't drug the kid, lie to the kid, or throw the kid on the mercy of the mental health industry that profits from despair. My heart breaks for everyone in Tumbler Ridge, living and dead.
Libby