elon musk, mark zuckerberg, J.K rowling! Are the names that come to mind.
3 from different background: a African immigrant benefiting from government spending, an American smart young engineer, and a female English successful writer.
They are no politicians, and cant be accuse of trying to gather some vote. Multi-billions amongst them.
I get they lean to the right to protect their cash, with less tax and regulation. I get they are racist because they fear some poor people will take their cash.
But why the hatred for trans people ? It’s 1% of the population, they cant do anything, dont threaten anyone. There is no rational or psychological reason
*EDIT: I read all the comments. A lot of interesting explanation: smokescreen/scapegoat, maintaining the male/female power structure, new face of anti-gay , projection / self-hatred , just louder voice …
I realize, may be, I didn’t post a good question. May be it is less about the ultra-rich but more about why that rhetoric work on the general population (else it would not have taken hold as it does). For that I have a 2 cent theory: The raise of the cult of Nature we have since the global warming. The idea, that everything natural is better. The ugly version is only natural male and female are worthy*
You must log in or register to comment.
Scapegoating
Oh so now we’re blaming the goats
what the heck!
My personal opinion is twofold:
- they need a diversion. Like a magician (or more accurate a pickpocket) they will take anything to make people blind while they amass their power. It is a sickness of the mind. They are addicted to power and ever anxious to loose it. Minorities are a good enemy for the people to blame the problems on that these people either cause themselves or dont want to take care of. In the past it was witches, nowadays it is other minorities.
- minorities have been fighting for a place in the world for a long time and there have been significant improvements. But that is not a positive development if you want to rule supreme. If you‘re power crazed, you need people to fall in line. Otherwise it wont work. We have ample evidence that only a sufficiently subdued population will not rise up against authority.
You can’t get ultra-rich while being a compassionate person
This, and all the more nowadays, because anything progressive has been intrinsically linked to a change of the Status Quo. And those trillions of fun bucks in the mattress (as well as their self-importance and self-perceived relevance) must be protected from those pesky Socialists!
Most people agree with the ultrarich on this issue (at least initially, before social media insanity), but only the ultrarich can afford making arbitrary people hate them without any good reason. That’s why it looks like only the billionaires are doing it.
Then they go to Twitter with these opinions and go insane and the whole thing enters a neverending tailspin.
Elon is slightly different insofar that one of his own kids is trans. So that’s not entirely due to Twitter, but there’s also some lived experience at the bottom of it all (I assume here that he spent time with said child).
“Most people agree with the ultrarich on this issue (at least initily, before social media insanity)”
Are you saying most people are anti-trans? And that people who aren’t anti-trans are somehow not of sane mind?
Are you saying most people are anti-trans?
No, I think it’s more nuanced than just black-or-white allies and anti-trans people. The level of pro- or anti-transness within individuals falls on a spectrum that’s shaped like a bell curve, and the majority in the middle are usually amenable to trans rights if they bump into the issue in a way that resonates with them. Like for instance in their personal life with friends or family.
But less amenable if they mostly face the issue on TV, social media or via angry activists. You might then recognize these people as anti-trans, especially if the issue is deeply personal to you.
And that people who aren’t anti-trans are somehow not of sane mind?
No, that’s not what I was trying to say. In fact, I’d say that genuinely anti-trans people (the other end of the bell curve) are the insane ones. Socio- and/or psychopathic. My claim (possibly a bit extraordinary claim in this day and age) is that most people are not at that end.
I agree with what you’ve said for the most part but I find no correlation between it and what your initial comment said. Maybe I’m just tired.
Because there are alot of ignorant people in the world afraid of what they perceive as different.
In your first two examples, regardless of not being politicians it’s clear that by helping put politicians in power they benefit, so whether they genuinely care or not, it’s just about money and lack of compassion to them. And continuing to drive class warfare continues to benefit them.
In your last example, I think that person is just in the ignorant and afraid of change category with an unfortunate amount of exposure.
They will pick whatever group they think will suddenly put as many idiots as possible under their control when they say “GROUP A IS BAD”.
Most of them don’t care they are trans, they only care that they can take advantage of the oppression of a minority group in order to consolidate control over people so that they can oppress more people.
When everyone alive and dead is either oppressed or under your control, you become god. This is the goal, but they don’t care about the process to get there.
Trans people’s very existence requires the rest of us to question our own upbringing. There are a lot of childhood experiences that boil down to you doing something or not doing something on no basis other than the fact that you were told.
You were told by your family, you were told by your friends, you were told by random strangers, you were told by the media, and they were all telling you the same thing. So you listened, even though you didn’t know why they were saying it. Surely EVERYBODY can’t be wrong, right? Some people might have told you something contrary but they were the losers, the outcasts, the villains. You don’t want to be any of that, surely?
For someone to transition, they are required to do the exact opposite of what so many told us all. They embrace the very outcome we were threatened with when we failed to conform, that we would not actually be the gender we were failing to conform to.
To accept that they are valid in doing so requires us to admit that many of our own guiding forces were actually just bullshit. We have to question why we are the way we are anew. If what they’re doing is strong, what we did, what we’re continuing to do, was weak.
When confronted with the idea that we were all just raised wrong and that much of what we collectively spend our time and energy stressing about is stupid and pointless, how many people do you know that will just shrug and say “oh well” and then move on with their lives? Easier to find an excuse to keep doing what you were already doing. “They’re just lying because they’re perverts that wanna cheat at sports.”
Some of these rich people are insidious and manipulative, no doubt, but the loud ones are usually just idiots no different from the uncle you don’t want to talk to except that being rich means they’re able to yell louder.
It’s called smokescreen. Turns the attention of the masses away of their wealth and power
In the case of Rowling, it wasn’t a smoke screen so much as black mold.
I get it. But that smokescreen is achieved with anti-immigrant rhetoric. Throwing Trans in , seems so random
Reality has a left leaning bias. Immigrants have largely become normalized, so they need something else to scrape goat.
This smoke screen around LGBTQ+ and anti immigration has been stoked for nearly 30 years in order to veer away from the actual discussion and laws around wealth inequality, healthcare, etc. It’s all a guise against minority groups who can’t fight back. Sometimes positive sometimes negative, but at the end of the day billionaires stoke the fear around these minority groups and they get to keep growing their billions without restriction.
The rhetoric against immigrants serves as a more general purpose blaming scheme. Economy bad because immigrants. You’re unemployed because immigrants. Crime because immigrants. Your bad grades are immigrants.
LGBTQ+ rights have always been a contentious point because it has always worked incredibly well for diverting attention on all sides, especially the media. The right always paints them as these depraved monsters that will convert children into gay communist sex on schools, which is a “threat” that’s “up close and personal”
They may not be politicians but they spend money to get themselves into positions of political power as these few days have shown with Musk. And these people get most of their power from the masses that are dumb enough and bigoted enough to be swayed by a shared common hatred of groups to scapegoat for everything.
There are a lot of other good answers, but it seems worth remembering lots of poor powerless folks hate trans folks too.
Part of the reason they’re coming after trans people is because it’s human nature to hate or fear those you don’t understand and who are different. A dark, and sad part of human nature, but part of human nature nonetheless
All the other stuff folks are talking about is also a true, but it’s not like they’re unique in their contempt for people who are different
It is a useful distraction from the surplus value extraction from the proletariat to the bourgeoisie.
The Bourgeoisie hire workers and pay them for their work. But with what money? The money made by selling a product or service. But who did the work to create said product or service? The workers did. So workers do work, which makes money for the company. But do the workers receive all of it? After all, they did all the work. But no, no they don’t. If the Bourgeoisie gave all the money the workers to back to the workers, them how could the Bourgeoisie make a profit? It thereby must follow that the Bourgeoisie pay their workers less than the value they produce, thereby stealing that money from the workers.
You might say “but the bourgeoisie own the company! And they also do some work themselves! Some people’s work just contributes more than others.” Yeah, yeah, but who gets to decide how much of the pie each person gets? How much should be reinvested and what not? Who gets to decide what is done with the money made? The Bourgeoisie! But why them? Why do the workers not have a say in how the money they made is used? Because the Bourgeoisie had enough money to buy the means necessary to make money (the factories, infrastructure or whatever) and the workers did not. How did the Bourgeoisie get all that money you ask? By stealing worker’s wages.
What does this have to do with trans people?
- All it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.
This whole anti-trans thing is a useful distraction. Bad people will believe it’s those dam trans people’s fault their country is shit and not investigate any further. Good people will be distracted arguing against the bad people on why being trans isn’t evil, all the while the real culprits laugh as we fight each other.
Remember: Desperate people make great workers and distracted citizens. Keep people busy with basic necessities and they won’t have time or energy to realize who is really exploiting them.
- It makes trans folk more exploitable
Racism a misogyny is useful for the Bourgeoisie as it allows them to pay lower wages. The bourgeoisie want to pay their workers a little as possible. Desperate jobless people are more willing to take a bad deal because any job is better than homelessness. That means the more desperate people there are, the lower the wages they can pay, as they can replace workers who demand a higher wage with workers from this reserve.
Racism keeps people of color in poverty allowing them to be more easily exploited. Misogyny justifies paying women half the wage of a man, which is exactly what the Bourgeoisie want.
Likewise, if trans folk are illegalized that will make it hard for them to find a job, adding even more people to the reverse army of labour.
They want you fighting a culture war to keep your mind off the class war.
The mainstream “left”, such as the Democrats benefit from this too.
Draw the national party lines between bigoted and non-bigoted. Now everyone can fight over that and nobody has to address the fact that two thirds of the country want universal healthcare.
preface: conjecture
musk and zuckerberg benefit from “othering” a group so that the majority of people get caught up in arguing about the rights of that group. While you’re busy being distracted by that they can push for agendas that benefit their companies and personal wealth, which inherently fuck you over.
musk does seem to have a personal vendetta as well given his issues with his trans daughter but I truly think this is ancillary to enriching his wealth and power. He also seems to love getting involved in topics that rile people up because deep down he’s a 14 year old reddit troll
rowling is double down and attention. She has a shit take, posts about it, people call her out. She’s a literal billionaire “beloved author” used to being surrounded by hangers on so being challenged wrecks her shit. Rather than reflect and look at scientific consensus she doubles down on her shit take. Because of people like above this gets her increasing amounts of attention and relevance so her beliefs are reaffirmed and deepened constantly. Now she’s consulted to speak authoritatively on the matter despite having no actual qualification other than being a rich lady who got into twitter arguments about it
Many of these apply to nobodies as well. Your stupid anti trans neighbor benefits from “othering” someone because it gives them someone to deflect blame onto. For most of American history it was black people, or Hispanic people, sometimes Jews, basically any minority. They also will double down when called out on shit takes and will absolutely respond to attention given for shit takes.
Correlation is not causation.
Personally I just think they’re just pandering some group of people who have real power to determine how money flows in a society and they happen to be right wing conservatives.
US democracy is collapsing and the future throne is probably already set and they might have inside information.
Like you said, trans people can’t really do anything. Perfect target when you want to show where you are planning to stand.
Mostly a people to blame and for others to fear monger, it’s a way to make people look the other way also, a common “enemy” instigated from the true enemy. And sense there is not a lot of trans people statistically it’s hard for them to defend themselves. It’s all about manipulation and control over the people
