A Message to My Conservative Friends

This post is for people who describe themselves as conservatives, MAGA fans, Trump supporters, and the like. Standing side by side with you over the past several years in the fight against gender identity ideology has been a real pleasure and an eye-opener. All sorts of things I once believed about “conservatives” turned out to be wrong. We have a lot more in common than I once believed and I’ve been impressed by how courageous, articulate, and compassionate you are.

Last fall, I posted Cliff Notes for My Progressive Friends. Now, I need to say a few things to my conservative friends. Please take my requests below in the spirit in which they are offered: respectful food for thought as we construct the movement we need to create the kind of world we all want.

Be consistent in your defense of civil liberties.

Conservatives consistently denounce censorship when it is used against opinions they share. Gender critics, for example, are labeled “hateful”, “anti-trans” and “hurtful,” and those labels are used to get us fired, kicked out of academic institutions, expelled from social media, banned from venues, blacklisted, and worse. You have staunchly defended the First Amendment from these attacks.

It’s disconcerting to see some conservatives support the very same censorship tactics when they are used against people with whom they disagree. Those critical of Israel, for example, are declared “hateful”, “anti-Semitic”, and “hurtful,” and these labels are used to silence them in in a way that is redolent of how gender critics are silenced. Yet many conservatives tolerate or even applaud this censorship.

Freedom of speech and other civil liberties mean nothing if they are enforced only for people with whom we agree. Failing to ensure that everyone’s rights are defended ultimately endangers our own rights. If we engage in censorship of our opponents, those opponents can and will censor us when they are in power. We will have provided them with all sorts of precedents to use against us.

Censorship also deprives us of information we need. It makes open discussion—the lifeblood of democracy—impossible. While one’s opponents’ perspectives and data may prove unpersuasive, it is still important to consider them, if only to be able to better defend and advance our own views. Moreover, at times, we may be persuaded to change our minds by what we hear.

By condoning the suppression of gender critical voices, many progressives foster their own ignorance on very important fronts. They believe outrageously false statements made by proponents of pediatric sex change, for example. This is a tragedy for children.

Meanwhile, many opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza—and I count myself among them—believe that a genocide has been taking place. If we are right, those who refuse to hear what we have to say may end up being complicit in a crime against humanity.

Regardless of what each of us believes, we must all loudly condemn the suppression of free speech wherever it occurs. We must denounce the firing of university Presidents who don’t tow the censorship line vis a vis Israel and Palestine. We must protest the deportation of those who oppose US military and diplomatic aid to Israel. We must oppose the firing of people who support Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), and others targeted for their beliefs and speech on various issues.

Redouble your commitment to rejecting cancel culture.

Formal actions implemented by governments, academic institutions, and other entities are just one part of the censorship regime deepening all around us. Another important part is the cancel culture mindset that now infects so many people.

I’ve written about how painful it has been to be expelled by vital social networks and shunned by loved ones as the result of my gender critical views. My experiences are nothing compared to what other gender critics have experienced.

Cancel culture is destructive. It has a massive chilling effect on free speech. It ensures that we all limit ourselves to “preaching to the choir” and to listening to that same choir, as well.

Thank you, my conservative friends, for welcoming me into your homes and your social circles despite my left-wing credentials and beliefs. That you have refused to cancel me and others like me gives me great hope. Yours is a mindset sorely lacking among self-proclaimed progressives and others who see themselves as on the left.

Obviously, if someone refuses to talk with us, because they think that their refusal places them on the “right side of history,” there is nothing we can do about that. The self-righteous purveyors of “no debate” cannot be reached. But plenty of other people are disgusted by cancel culture, and more than willing to have open respectful discussions with people who have views different from their own.

Please redouble your commitment to rejecting cancel culture. Keep talking with anyone who is willing to talk with you. Seek out people with disparate views who are open to “reaching across the aisle” and who don’t want there to be false divides between people based on political labels. Democracy cannot exist if people operate under the belief that they should only talk with people who share the same views.

Recognize that words important to you aren’t the only ones that have been destroyed.

Some people have outrageously declared that a “woman” is now anyone who “identifies as a woman.” They have grabbed an important word and presumptuously redefined it to mean its opposite. Presto-Chango, men are now women.

This co-optation and twisting of words is not an isolated event. Take the word “feminist,” for example.

As a young woman I had a T-shirt that said “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat...” For me “feminism” helped me see myself as more than a doormat. It was about insisting that females have a right to education, sports, being lawyers and doctors, serving in public office, and countless other things, just like males do. Feminism helped me understand that a man hitting his wife was not a slightly comical event. It helped me overcome the insecurities I had regarding my competency, my looks, and my opinions, as the result of a steady flow of toxic messages I endured regarding women’s capacities and rightful place. Feminism was also about making sure males were not unfairly limited based on their sex.

It's been enlightening to talk about the rights of girls and women, the harm caused by sexist stereotypes, and related topics with many of my conservative friends. To my amazement I have discovered widespread agreement with ideals I’ve always considered to be feminist.

Thus, it is jarring to me, to hear some conservatives declare that feminism is responsible for gender identity ideology and other ills. They say feminists insisted that there are no differences between men and women, so feminists are to blame for the identity-based policies now imposed on everyone. This is false. I and other women have always celebrated the obvious physical differences between males and females. This informed what we fought for, helping many of us quickly see that redefining “women” to include men is insane and undoes all the gains women have made.

At the same time, organizations that once were feminist have been gutted from within, so much so that many now embrace anti-feminist gender ideology. They have been transformed into entities that now fight against feminism. Exactly how this happened is an open question.

Infiltration is a very real phenomenon. A classic example is the FBI working to disrupt targeted groups via its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Field agents joined groups and then worked to influence their positions and plans, foster conflicts, provoke violence, alienate funding sources, and more. Feminist groups were among those targeted by COINTELPRO, and it’s just one example of how outside forces can infiltrate and gut groups from within.

I’m talking about all this because words, especially the “ism” words, don’t necessarily mean what the leaders of groups claiming to represent those words, say they mean. One of the best ways to attack a movement is to commandeer and gut its language. Without words to discuss what we believe, we can’t develop coherent strategies, and we can’t ensure that “winning” really is winning. We can’t ensure that people who agree with our agenda realize they’re in agreement.

This is another reason to resist the urge to cancel people based on your understanding of the labels they apply to themselves, be it “left-wing”, “feminist” or some other term you think of as something you oppose. The only way to understand each other, and the only way to forge a positive path forward, is to get together and talk. Don’t let the manipulation of language and the corruption of important words stand in the way of the alliances we should be building.

Acknowledge that our economic system produces Big Money forces that undermine democracy, and we need to talk about that.

“Socialism” is one of those words that has been so twisted and abused that it is losing any connection to its true meaning. I keep seeing conservatives treat censorship, gender identity, and all sorts of bad things as part and parcel of socialism. I see them claiming that the Democratic Party and its officials are implementing a socialist agenda. I see them use the term “Marxist” to describe gender ideology and other woke belief systems. All of this is absurd.

Yes, most socialist groups have taken outrageous positions on issues like gender ideology. But they don’t represent socialism any more than co-opted women’s groups represent feminism or the gutted ACLU stands for the defense of civil liberties.

In reality, censorship, gender ideology, and other things attributed to socialism are inconsistent with it. The Democratic Party and its leaders are staunchly capitalist. And Marx must be rolling over in his grave to hear the anti-material tenets of gender ideology described as Marxist.

I, too, am appalled by various things coming out of self-described socialist groups. But by and large, those wearing the mantle of socialism these days don’t represent the true meaning of that word.

Socialist organizations and leaders have long been targeted by powerful forces seeking to corrupt and erase them. COINTELPRO put a lot of energy into destroying socialist groups. Joe McCarthy and his goons went after anyone who had socialist sympathies. Many dynamic leaders, like Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, and even Martin Luther King, known for their socialist-promoting rhetoric, have been murdered and federal agencies are strongly implicated in those murders.

Note that King was gunned down after he started saying things like this:

“[W]e must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society...and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society.”

Occupy Wall Street spurred a new national discussion about the gap between rich and poor and the devastating impact of Big Money on our democracy. Many have noticed that the destabilizing madness of gender ideology took off with a vengeance right about the time of Occupy. Less than ten years later, the narrative of increasing representation of “marginalized identities” has replaced the more radical goal of empowering working people, and wresting control over our destiny from the one percent.

Powerful forces are using gender identity ideology to manipulate political discourse and outcomes. For example, a U.S. National Endowment for Democracy’s subsidiary—the International Republican Institute (IRI)—fomented the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Bangladesh via a strategy that included funding and promotion of LGBTQI people. IRI funded rappers and other artists, transgender dance performances, civil society organizations, trainings on how to use social media, other aspects of political organizing, and more. A full 24% of the 1,868 Bangladeshis who participated in IRI programs in 2019 and 2020 identified as transgender. (According to 2022 census data, only 0.007% of the Bangladesh population identifies as transgender.) IRI informed the U.S. State Department of its efforts, explicitly articulating a mission to “destabilize Bangladesh’s politics.” See this and this.

There is every reason to believe that gender ideology has been deployed elsewhere, including here in the U.S., to destabilize political movements, demoralize populations, and create deep divisions and animosities.

So, please, don’t assume that what comes out of self-proclaimed socialists’ mouths, accurately reflects the details and goals of socialism. Please don’t assume that toxic ideologies like gender identity have taken hold as a logical outcome of organizing for socialism.

I personally came to question capitalism as the result of giving my all for decades as an environmental attorney/organizer in the fight against toxic pollution. If you want to understand some of the things I was working on, listen to what RFK Jr. has said about pollution. A lot of what he talks about is precisely what I organized around years ago.

Eventually I realized that we were losing ground, not gaining it, and that the Big Money-controlled nonprofit industrial complex was part of the problem. To figure out what was going on, I wrote a book entitled What It Will Take. Rejecting Dead Ends and False Friends in the Fight for the Earth. Through descriptions of my own experiences and data from extensive research, the book lays out the myriad ways in which Big Money undermines democracy and our ability to adopt rational policies.

Everything I said in that book remains true today. We have to talk about this.

Our economic system produces ultra-wealthy individuals and ultra-wealthy corporations. And when Big Money forces exist, they end up calling the shots. They do that by controlling the flow of information, determining who gets elected, corrupting legislative and rulemaking processes, infiltrating our educational systems, buying up land and resources, smearing and otherwise undermining effective activists, controlling the jobs that are available to people, using philanthropy to shape nongovernmental organizations, and so much more.

If we, the people, make a gain of some sort, it is usually temporary at best. It is also overwhelmed by ground we have concurrently lost on some other front. The deck is stacked against us in countless ways. Concentration of wealth in the hands of the few is inconsistent with democracy and rational planning.

All of us need to be talking about this. Conservatives, progressives, and people who use other labels for themselves must come together and have a frank, unflinching conversation about systemic change and how to achieve it.

RFK Jr. and others in the Trump Administration speak of corporate capture—a very real problem encompassing every aspect of our attempt to self-govern. But rules to block the revolving door between corporations and regulatory agencies and other measures laid out by Kennedy will not be enough to solve our problems. Big Money has too many tools at its disposal, many hidden from public view.

None of us can have illusions. Relying on the oligarchs of the Republican Party to foster democracy and policies we all want is as foolish as relying on the oligarchs of the Democratic Party. The “deep state” serves the financial interests of ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations, and it has all sorts of ways of morphing and hiding in order to maintain its control.

Note that in the Bangladesh scenario described above, it was a Republican organization that took the lead. Much of what I described happened during the first Trump Administration. Perhaps Trump didn’t know about it, but the point is this: Republicans and their organizations had no qualms about pushing gender identity ideology even as they denounced that ideology in public statements.

During the chaos of the last 10 years, incredible new alliances have formed. Defying cancel culture, people embracing various political labels, have come together to resist false narratives advanced through massive propaganda. These alliances may be the seeds of the broader movement we need.

Conclusion

I never expected to be working with so varied a cohort to defend women’s rights, protect children from abuse, stop censorship, and more. I am so glad to have made your acquaintance, my conservative friends, and to be working with you for a better world.

Lots of forces are in play to keep people isolated and demoralized. Let’s keep defying those forces and building the kind of cancel-culture-rejecting, censorship-denouncing, clear-thinking movement we need at this time in history. Let’s recognize the barriers that stand in the way of humanity achieving our goals and use our collective power to tear those barriers down.

We need lots of one-on-one and small group get-togethers of people who think of themselves as progressive, conservative, and neither-of-the-above to discuss what’s going on in our world. We also need larger summits that convene people who share common values despite embracing different political labels. One summit, I would love to attend would bring together those who took principled stands on various majorly-censored issues like Covid, gender ideology, Ukraine, and Russiagate. (Contact me via substack direct mail if you know of such endeavors.)

Thanks for reading this essay. And thanks for all you do.

P.S. At the end of Cliff Notes for My Progressive Friends I listed principled journalists (like Glenn Greenwald) that I recommend as good independent sources of information, and I provided links for each of them. Please, take a look at that list.