Prominent libertarian flips left when daughter goes trans. By David Cole.
Penn Jillette, the tall half of the hugely successful magician duo Penn & Teller, is one of the entertainment industry’s most outspoken atheists. For decades, Jillette has smugly condemned all manner of religious, psychic, and pseudoscientific irrationality. He also has a fan base on the right, because as a self-described libertarian, Jillette’s often mused about how “taxation is theft” and government compulsion is bad.
Penn Jillette: a man with no gods, including government. A man who falls for no (to use the title of his Showtime series) “bullshit.”
Then his teenage daughter decided that she’s a man. And the world witnessed how quickly the “smug” vanishes from the rationalist when the bullshit hits too close to home.
About a year or so ago, Jillette’s daughter, Moxie Crimefighter (yes, that’s her name), decided that she’d been “assigned the wrong sex at birth.” And she demanded that her parents no longer use female pronouns for her, like, ever.
Back in 2014, Jillette bragged on his podcast about how he’d raised Moxie to “laugh at God.”
There’s an old saying I just coined: “When you laugh at God, He laughs back and best.” Because now Jillette — Mr. “no pseudoscience,” Mr. “no cults or flimflam” — has become the spokesperson for the biggest pseudoscientific cultlike flimflam of the 21st century. The guy who’s spent a career deconstructing magic (“no, the bouquet of flowers didn’t actually become a rabbit; it was sleight of hand”) is now a true believer that a girl can actually become a boy overnight, by the sheer power of mentalism!
Abracagender!
In theory, none of this is our concern. What transpires in the Jillette household is solely the business of the Jillettes.
But Penn makes it our business.
As part of Jillette’s conversion to spiritualist, he’s publicly renounced his libertarianism (on CNN, no less!), he’s embraced burdensome government, and he’s thrown his support full-throttle behind Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom as they promote policies that strong-arm us to “see” Jillette’s spooks and spirits (Newsom in particular is arguably the most “compulsory” politico in the country when it comes to forcing people to accept tranny theology).
Jillette supports politicians who want to force girls to shower, change, and go to the bathroom alongside biological boys. Those same politicians have eliminated cervical cancer smear test outreaches to women (because it’s a hate crime to say that only women have a cervix) … Women will die from the elimination of targeted cervical cancer outreach, and girls will be, and have been, raped by boys playing tranny to infiltrate the girls’ bathroom.
Jillette used to be a campaigner against “psychic surgeon” frauds who endanger people by pretending to cure their disease, thus prompting them to neglect legitimate treatment. Yet now he supports politicians who put women at risk because of a belief system no less irrational than psychic healing.
Jillette’s also pledged to ban gender pronouns from his CW series Fool Us … Jillette’s also stopped using the term “female magicians” in favor of “people who self-identify as women in magic” (that’s not even remotely cumbersome). And most batshit of all, he supports the use of “gender-free playing cards,” in which king, queen, and jack are replaced by “gold, silver, and bronze.” It’s not even clear to me why a tranny would be disturbed by a face card; if boys who think they’re girls really are girls, and if girls who think they’re boys really are boys, then what’s offensive about seeing a female queen and a male king? They can identify with whichever one they feel like that day. …
This is cultlike behavior; there’s no other way to put it. He’s obviously a loving father, but in his desire to support his daughter, he’s undergone a personality change. That’s not being a supportive dad; that’s being brainwashed. …
“Our dinner table conversation is I would say at least one-quarter correcting pronouns,” Jillette revealed on a recent episode, castigating himself for still occasionally calling Moxie “she.” When his cohost responded, “Well, at least it sounds like your children respect the effort,” Jillette, reproaching himself for his failures, bitterly replied, “Maybe I should just do it fuckin’ right.”
Jillette also apologized for having trouble with the proper pronouns for Moxie’s friends, who “have they, him, her, and it and some of them change day by day.” That’s a startling admission (though Jillette’s too blind to understand why): How committed to the bit are these kids if they “change day by day”? It’s one thing to claim that a girl suddenly discovers the boy living within. That’s nutty enough. But changing “day by day” suggests unseriousness. Yet Jillette supports authoritarian politicians who want to remake society based purely on the “day by day” whims of children.
Aurinkoinen, on the obvious faddishness of trans:
That might be plausible if it weren’t for the fact that the increase in cases of transgender have been overwhelmingly comprised of adolescent biologically female people — one would have thought that if your hypothesis were true, there would be comparably large waves of older biologically female people coming out as trans, and indeed of biologically male people. Whereas, if it were a social contagion, it wouldn’t be a surprise if it primarily affected the demographic most likely to be swept up in social contagions generally.
Steve Sailer, and the dog that didn’t bark:
Good point. Older lesbians are relatively less often rushing to have themselves chemically and surgically altered into some kind of simulacrum of the opposite sex. Instead, it was older, masculine men like Bruce Jenner who hyped the fad, and now it is older, moody, naive teenage girls who are swept up in the current media mania.
What you don’t see are many middle-aged lesbians announcing, “Finally, society is allowing me to be who I really have been on the inside all these years — a man!
Hopefully not too many will make irreversible changes before the fad burns itself out.
