The Left Is Still Denying Reality  

It’s not every day that ideas from quantum physics pass into political discourse. (Not in this dimension, anyway.) But extremely online leftists believe not only in the existence of alternate realities implied by quantum theory, but also that we’re in one. We have been since 4 a.m. on Election Night last year. That’s when they had “a shared mystical experience,” indicating that our reality had branched from the true one in which Kamala Harris won the election, according to Gia Prism, a self-proclaimed psychic and medium. That’s one way to cope with an election loss.

The so-called 4 a.m. clubbers may sound deranged. That’s because they are. But almost nine months since Donald Trump won the presidency back, others on the left are also still denying reality in different ways, especially on trans issues.

The Democrats’ ongoing electoral woes are clearly a serious crisis — for them. And Rahm Emanuel has never been one to let a crisis go to waste. Such occasions present “an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before,” he said shortly after Barack Obama, for whom he would serve as chief of staff, won the presidency in 2008 amid a recession.

For Emanuel of late, that has meant breaking from the orthodoxy transgender activists have imposed on the Democratic Party. He recently appeared on Megyn Kelly’s podcast. Kelly asked whether he thought boys should play in girls’ sports, whether men should be in women’s prisons, and, most pointedly, whether a man can become a woman. He responded “no” to each. Remarking on the ease of his answers, Kelly wondered why other Democrats struggled. “Because I’m now going to go into a witness protection plan,” Emanuel quipped.

Funny. But not exactly true. Outlets have begun reporting on Emanuel’s presidential ambitions. There is also almost certainly some opportunism in his recognition of this particular opportunity. But his quip conveyed some truth about the opprobrium he anticipates. Look at the headline Media Matters, which did something useful for once by transcribing the exchange, gave to it on its website: “‘Rahm Emanuel rejects trans identities in appearance with Megyn Kelly: ‘Can a man become a woman? No.’”

Consult also a rant by Substacker (and Media Matters alumnus) Parker Molloy, recently published by the New Republic. Molloy’s jeremiad correctly perceives that Emanuel has moved away from the left on this issue, is urging others to do the same, and is identifying it as a source of Democrats’ election loss. “We weren’t good on kitchen table issues or the family room. The only room we really did well in the house was the bathroom. And that’s the smallest room in the house.” That’s how Emanuel, who knows his way around a bathroom, put it on Gavin Newsom’s podcast. (Speaking of opportunism. . . .)

Molloy’s proportion of correct views drops precipitously beyond that, however. Emanuel’s counsel is, we are told, “complete bulls***.” Supposedly, in 2024, Democrats “remained virtually silent on the issue,” allowing Republicans to “turn trans people into a boogeyman because they were too scared to defend basic human dignity.” It is Democrats who have “been playing defense against a coordinated Republican assault on a tiny, vulnerable minority.”

This assessment does not accord with the past decade-plus of leftist agitation on transgender issues, on which the left has indisputably been the aggressor in attempting to redefine reality. It is the right that has played defense. During Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, moreover, she had the explicit or implied support of the most forceful and powerful activist groups on transgender issues. Though perhaps cagey on the subject in the few interviews she did, she never abandoned her base-demanded stances.

But even if Harris were deliberately hesitant, and even if Democrats were silent, Molloy ought to ask: Why? Cowardice is a self-affirming ideologue’s preferred explanation. So it is here. The truth, however, is that some Democrats who actually wanted to get elected realized the political toxicity of these views. Aware of this because of their political survival instincts, but unable to jettison the electoral baggage thanks to the sway of their activist class, they may well have defaulted to comparative reticence out of the sheer incompatibility of competing imperatives.

The full extent of Molloy’s denial of reality — a double one, really, given the issue itself — is evident in the counsel provided. (I will pass by a reference to the “stolen” 2000 election, but award points for stubbornness.) Democrats apparently “need to reframe the debate” so that Republicans become the “ones obsessed with bathrooms, genitals, and controlling people’s bodies.” Because, as we all know, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has shown that “calling out the fundamental strangeness of Republican obsessions can be devastatingly effective.”

Tim Walz’s strategy may have been effective in the reality 4 a.m. clubbers believe we left behind. But it is not the reality we inhabit. Molloy and others are welcome to deny that as long and vociferously as they like. That’s the best way for them to remain in a different political world. The rest of us will stay in this one.

Jack Butler is submissions editor at National Review Online, a 2023–2024 Leonine Fellow, and a 2022–2023 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.

Reprinted with permission from National Review by Jack Butler.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.