Rep. Becca Balint Models Best Practices For Talking To Fascist Anti-LGBTQ+ Scumbags
Do it like this.
If there is anything good ("good") about the increasing radicalization of Republicans into insurgent Nazi anti-LGBTQ+ hate terrorists, it's that more Democrats — hell, all normal people — are learning how to treat these people with the respect they deserve, which is none.
We're seeing it with the kickass Nebraska Democratic state senators, and people like Democratic Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow. Just last week we saw it among regular parents, teachers, and students in a Hernando County, Florida — not a notoriously liberal area — who came out to the school board meeting to tell book-banning right-wing culture-warring creepshows to take their babbling about "woke" and go fuck themselves. This is starting to happen in a lot of places.
Call This Michigan State Senator A Groomer Again. She Dares You.
And in Congress yesterday, it was Vermont Democratic Rep. Becca Balint's turn. It was a House Oversight subcommittee hearing on "ESG," which if you don't spend a lot of time huffing paint in the right-wing fever swamps you might not recognize as an acronym that's supposed to send you into a flying rage. If you are one of America's stupidest cow-people hybrids, though, you probably say those letters a lot, usually in the same sentence as words like "woke mind virus." (It stands for "environmental, social and corporate governance," and relates to investment strategies and how companies are scored on a number of factors related to how responsibly they act.)
Republicans had invited a cohort of babbling right-wing morons as witnesses, including a woman named Mandy Gunasekara, who was an EPA official in the Trump administration and is now with the Independent Women's Forum. She is billed as an "energy and conservation expert," and her online bios brag that she was the architect of the Trump plan to pull out of the Paris accords, so that's what we're dealing with here. Therefore naturally you'd expect that she spent a lot of her time obsessing over transgender kids in her testimony, because these people are demented.
In her written testimony, she said she would talk about how woke companies these days do "campaigns to defund the police or promot[e] 'gender transitions' in children." She said that the "recent backlash at Target, Budweiser, and American Girl makes clear the broader public's disdain for extreme social campaigns being pushed by ESG acolytes." Yes, there is no subject imaginable these days that deranged wingnuts can't make about kids' junk.
But again, this is the "energy and conservation expert." She's, like, a science person.
And Rep. Balint, Vermont's first-ever openly gay representative, was just fucking over it. "Do you really believe that garbage?" she asked.
“Balint: I want to know, do you really believe that garbage?”
— Acyn (@Acyn) 1686082399
Gunasekara appeared taken aback, as white right-wing creeps so often do when normal people say to their faces what they think of them. "It's not about believing, it's a matter of fact," said Gunasekara.
"OH! OH!" said Balint, like she was about to stuff the witness in a locker.
"So YOU BELIEVE that investing strategies are actually a secret — it's weaponized to support and promote gender transition for children. I just want to — is, essentially, is that what you're saying, or do you just use it as another opportunity to beat up on children? So do you believe this?"
Gunasekara, perhaps having one of those moments where her idiot religious beliefs were threatening to have a head-on collision with reality, said, "I'm not the one beating up on children, it's the people who are promoting gender transitions in children that are harming them, I was just walking through Target ..."
Yes, this goddamned loser was saying the words "I was just walking through Target" when Balint decided to kick her ass.
Balint explained that she had literally just been meeting with parents of trans kids who are suffering under lack of healthcare because of Republican policies, who asked her to fight for them the next time somebody uses their families as a bogeyman. Balint said she didn't think she'd get an opportunity within a half hour . But there they were.
“It feels like every single hearing that I am in, whether it is in Oversight, or whether it is in Budget, or whether it is in a subcommittee, somehow the witnesses find a way to bring in trans children into whatever conversation we’re trying to have here.”
This is how to do it. Drag these fascists for filth publicly and loudly. Every time you see a Christian supremacist start one of their little vile crusades against LGBTQ+ people, humiliate them. Ask them if they really believe that garbage.
Laugh at them. Laugh at them like the person in this TikTok, who has the best laugh on earth.
“It catches me off guard EVERY TIME”
— 𝙎𝙝𝙤𝙘𝙠 𝙅𝙖𝙘𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨 𝘿𝙚𝙢𝙮 is pro WGA (@𝙎𝙝𝙤𝙘𝙠 𝙅𝙖𝙘𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨 𝘿𝙚𝙢𝙮 is pro WGA) 1685977006
It will make them fucking crazy.
Also we just wanted to post that TikTok somewhere, because it kills us every time.
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I have never seen a plan put forth by Republicans that looked like it was hatched in a secret lair under a volcano.
But when she came out of jail after being imprisoned for standing up to Saruman's henchmen...