A quick note on Jim Geraghty’s excellent Morning Jolt about Malcolm Gladwell’s repentance for what he now acknowledges to be his hypocrisy during an earlier era of enforced ideological conformity. Back in 2022, at the height of the maximally claustrophobic, panopticon “Peak Woke” era, Gladwell chaired a conference panel on transgender athletes that (predictably) included transgender panelists who bullied an entire room full of polite liberals — Gladwell included — into accepting fundamentally absurd arguments like, “You have to let us win.”
Gladwell regrets it now, and he’s not alone, as a whole sector of center-left pundits and thinkers are taking this brief thaw in the Stalinist edifice of progressive politics to register their dissatisfaction with being required to pretend that men are women — at least when it comes to competitive athletics. (When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wins the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, one imagines these reservations will be stowed in a convenient memory hole.) But I was most taken by this line in Jim’s piece, and for slightly different reasons:
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