A righteous rant from Radley Balko

Some twerp named Michael Knowles who writes for a rightist propaganda outfit called the The Daily Wire suggested recently that  it was time for the “eradication of transgenderism from public life.” Knowles got pissed when folks drew the logical conclusion that this is the language of genocide for trans peope. But quibbles aside, that is what it is.

Knowles' demagoguery, along with more from his partner in bullshit Republican U.S. Senator Mike Lee, teed off that great civil libertarian and scourge of bad cops Radley Balko. (Here's more on Balko's masterful history of policing, The Rise of the Warrior Cop.) Balko is having none of Knowles' whining. 

It isn’t hyperbolic to send up the distress flares when prominent figures in your society first begin using the same sort of rhetoric previous aspiring authoritarians deployed to lay the groundwork for what later became atrocious crimes against humanity — even if you think the odds of similar crimes happening here on a similar scale are pretty low.

No society goes from “not at all like genocide” to full blown genocide without passing through countless “not exactly like Hitler, but still unacceptably Hitler-like” phases along the way. You needn’t wait until the ovens are running or until you stumble onto a pile of spent Zyklon-B canisters to raise alarms. It’s perfectly okay to say, “It’s pretty fucked up that a guy with 400,000 followers who works for a network with an audience of millions thinks trans people don’t exist in an ‘acceptable state of being.’”

... The point here is that Knowles knows exactly what he was doing, and what he’s doing is as common among aspiring demagogue bigots as part lines and flop sweat. You craft a message that you know your nuttiest, most foaming-at-the-mouth supporters will hear as reassurance — but that also leaves you with plausible deniability should one of them resort to violence. “Stand down and stand by.” “Really fine people.”

Balko apparently is no longer an opinion columnist for the Washington Post, a gig he had for nine years. But truth telling like this and an ongoing diet of sophisticated commentary on police misbehavior can be found at his Substack, The Watch. Highly recommended.