In between his attempts to colonize Mars and convert our own planet to clean energy, Elon Musk has spent the last month driving liberals into a state of inconsolable apoplexy. Musk, who almost surely initiated a hostile takeover of Twitter after the social media giant suspended satire site the Babylon Bee for calling a transgender woman Man of the Year, has tweeted his way through his haters. The tweet that seemed to incense the most vociferous of Musk’s critics? A meme.
This meme is obviously, and in a way that is almost childishly so, correct. And one need only look at the issue that impelled the world’s richest man to shell out the rough equivalent to the gross domestic product of Paraguay to purchase Twitter.
In my own lifetime, Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, and Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency on opposing gay marriage. Neither of these was simply to pander to uniquely bigoted swing states. Fewer than 14 years ago, California of all states voted to put a marriage equality ban in the state’s constitution. That’s how far “right” even the liberals were then. Now, they and the whole political spectrum have moved well to port.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2022
Within the decade, Donald Trump, a Republican, would become the first president to enter office openly supporting marriage equality as settled law. His appointment of Ric Grenell as acting director of national intelligence marked the first time an out gay man occupied a Cabinet-level position in the country’s history, and Grenell went on to spearhead the White House’s campaign to decriminalize homosexuality around the planet. Trumpworld rallied around the long-shot California gubernatorial bid of Republican Caitlyn Jenner, arguably the highest-profile trans woman in the world, and nationwide, conservative legislatures have all but killed the bathroom bills that would require trans adults to use the bathrooms that align with their biological sex.
But that is no longer enough for the loudest activists on the left.
Even if you are a Republican who supports the state issuing gay marriages, refers to Jenner as “she” and “her,” and has no problem with what people wish to do in their own bedrooms, intersectional activists without a shred of irony still will consider you anti-LGBT for supporting the Florida bill mandating that taxpayer-funded schools wait until students turn 10 and reach the fourth grade before they learn about gender identity. This coalition of woke cry-bullies doesn’t merely demand that the state make you bake the cake, bigot — you must explicitly encourage children to declare their preferred pronouns and embrace pansexuality.
Just one example, among many: In her heinous bid to dox the woman behind the Libs of TikTok account and brand her as some sort of homophobe, Taylor Lorenz highlighted a video posted by the account of a woman “teaching sex education to children.” The woman in question runs a “sexy summer camp” for children whom she teaches about masturbation.
For better, conservatives have chilled the hell out on social issues — Republicans now push for over-the-counter birth control while backing the thrice-married guy for president — while the Left has embraced puritanical lunacy. For worse, the GOP has abandoned whatever veneer of fiscal conservativism it once had. While Trump may seem positively miserly next to the Democratic socialists who dream of tens of trillions of dollars in spending on the Green New Deal and Medicare for all, he still ran in the 2016 primary expressly on preserving the entitlement state and won. Even before he racked up unprecedented debts during the free-for-all spending of the pandemic, he heralded a continuation of Obama-era monetary expansion with the Trump tax cuts and his public campaign to convince the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates near zero despite approaching the longest bull run in history.
Seriously, on what single issue has the GOP moved to the right in the past two decades? To his credit, Trump helped purge warmongering neocons out of the party and into the greenrooms of Joy Reid. The conservative legal movement may make major headway with the Supreme Court decision of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization abortion case, but as far as actual legislation goes, schools, where taxpayers have the obvious legal mandate to reclaim control from bureaucrats, may be the only arena in which conservatives have moved any further to the right.
Conservatives may have grown more adept at playing defense, but that’s only because we’ve had enough. Sure, we may be meaner now, but don’t mistake a big bark for a bite. If only Musk were indeed right and we could translate our ability to meme into legislative might.
