Poster wars!

It’s happening again. Our local [SATIRE!] campus troglodytes and assholes, the College Republicans, are splattering corkboards with their messages of resentment. They really don’t like the fact that we’ve got students who don’t think like they do and expect to be tolerated, so they’ve been putting up argumentative, emotional posters in reaction to statements of fact. Like these two in the science building.

Uninformed Liberals?

On Your Campus?

Its More Likely Than You Think.

Your Gender Identity

and Pronouns are not real

& not Valid

Freedom of Speech

applies to both genders equally

Stand up for your fellow


Even if they have differences

This Poster is Produced and Paid for by your student fees, Hey UMM, GROW UP, LIVE IN REALITY. -CR’s’

Transphobic Bigots?

On Your Campus?

It’s More Likely Than You Think.

Your Gender Identity

and Pronouns are Real

& Valid

Freedom of Speech

Not Freedom From Consequences

Stand up for your fellow


Respect their existence

This Poster Is Produced and Paid For By A Private Individual, And Does Not Necessarily

Express The Opinions of Any UMM Club, Organization, or the University of Minnesota

Morris. Hey UMM, Protect your Trans Students.

I can tell that the College Republican poster is a feeble attempt at parroting the language of the tolerant students because they end up undermining their own claims. Should I let the College Republicans know that that is kind of a self-own? Do they really mean to tell a gang of indignantly cis people that their pronouns (he/him, she/her) are not real and not valid?

It’s almost amusing how pissed off the CR’s are at people who affirm their own identities, that they then have to print up posters insisting that “NO, WE KNOW YOUR IDENTITY BETTER THAN YOU DO. SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.” Except of course that these conservative clowns want to pass legislation to restrict everyone’s freedoms, and some of them are likely to express their hate with violence.


  1. mathman85 says

    Makes me wonder if they’d heard Ben Shapiro’s incoherent rant about the singular “they” that ThoughtSlime skewered the other day. I could only bring myself to listen to part of it, not least because the very first thing that Shapiro complained about was “made-up definitions of words”—as though there were such a thing as a definition of a word that isn’t made-up. Or a word that isn’t made-up, for that matter.

  2. Nemo says

    I probably shouldn’t even try to respond to such word salad, but… what exactly do they imagine that we’re uninformed about?

  3. Akira MacKenzie says

    Yeah, this is the sort of shit I would have thought was edgy and revolutionary back when I was a CR. Yeah! We conservatives are the REAL rebels. It’s the liberals, feminists, Marxists, and PC academics who are the actual tyrants!

    God, how I hate younger me.

  4. says

    Your Gender Identity and Pronouns are not real & not Valid

    That’s going to be a shock to the cis men and women who read that. I wonder how whoever made it will react to be misgendered all the time.

  5. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    I think they forgot to bold a word, IE

    YOUR gender Identity and Pronouns are not real&Valid

    to imply the only real and valid ones are those assigned to you by Gawd in his oh so holey wizdum [misspelling deliberate].

  6. says

    I never thought like that even when I was a CR. Then I grew up and realized that the CRs were fascistic, conservative asshats with no positive agenda, just unthinking hatred of everyone who wasn’t just like them. All the talk of a big tent was just that, talk. “Come into our tent and change into one of us. Equality is slavery. Differences of opinion must be crushed. Change is evil. Recognizing the necessity of change is evil. God is our only hope. Worship our 2000 year old book. Nothing has really changed since the bronze age.” I was right to leave.

  7. says

    I have become far more left leaning (basically a card-carrying communist according to US standards, which is pretty much a moderate liberal by European standards) over the years.
    And I think it’s due to one simple observation: I might not know who’s right at any time and place, but I know who’s consistently wrong. Things inevitably change, and the ones that protest it the most are 99 out of a 100 times the biggest assholes.

  8. unclefrogy says

    yes that seems to be essence of all the conservatives I know and not just the political conservatives either, there is this desperate need to keep change at bay and prevent honest questioning of the basis of our thought and understanding of things that occurs into adulthood.
    the “alt-right” takes it to its extreme followed close by the mainstream republicans and the religious, in there as well are the reactionary intellectual atheists noted here so often.
    We are so susceptible to illusion it is very hard to overcome.
    uncle frogy

  9. Larry says

    What I never can understand about the CRs and their brethren is why someone’s identity matters so much to them.How does the existence of transgender people, whom they don’t know and are unlikely to ever meet, affect their daily lives in any but a neutral way?

    Just one of life’s mysteries, I guess.

  10. says

    I do not understand why rethugs care about people’s gender/preferences are? It is their own business and their partners if they have one.

  11. says

    @#9, Larry:

    Same way all distraction issues help people: by obsessing over one thing and refusing to talk about anything else, they can avoid talking about utter failures in other ways. It’s deliberate — Republicans deliberately picked up abortion as an issue to obsess about in the 1970s when it turned out nobody, not even the people in their own base, cared about interracial marriage any more. Most of the other talking points Republicans have had since then are the same — emotionally satisfying to their base, almost entirely without a practical application in the lives of most of them (however important they may be to a much smaller group), and carefully selected to be either impossible to resolve or to require years and years of fighting over what amounts to trivia to resolve. Otherwise, the base might start to to wonder why all the jobs are gone, why money is so tight for most people, why they’re dying of meth addiction, little things like that. Lately they’ve even abandoned the pretense that the issues have to have any significant relation to reality — Pizzagate, Benghazi, etc. That works even better because there’s no danger of a counter-narrative arising. Nobody can counter your breathless condemnation of a child prostitution ring run out of a restaurant basement when even the basement does not exist.

    And, as with so many other bad things Republicans do, the Democrats have started doing it, too — while the Heritage Foundation’s proposal from the early 1990s explicitly created as a way to avoid universal coverage (excuse me) Mitt Romneycare (oh, sorry) the Affordable Care Act was under discussion, they refused to even talk about anything else (I know because I went to my local party reps and tried!) — such as the way we were continuing Bush’s wars and not investigating or prosecuting any of the actors responsible for the 2008 meltdown. Now we’re all supposed to be so sputtering with outrage over Trump that we don’t notice the Democrats spent 8 years under Obama expanding ICE, drone bombing (even after the CIA admitted it was counterproductive), protecting the financial industry while promoting austerity for everybody else, building more nukes, committing war crimes like Libya, trying to push through a “trade agreement” which would have permitted corporations to ignore regulations more or less at will, deporting immigrants in such large numbers that even Trump can’t keep up with the 8-years-ago-today level Obama set, and much else. Trump may in many practical respects be indistinguishable from Obama — for example, Obama tried to indefinitely imprison ICE captives and got slapped down by the courts just like Trump — but he’s abrasive and ugly and fat and tacky and says stupid things on Twitter. Let’s all laugh at the abrasive, ugly, fat, tacky orange man, and focus on impeaching him, and then we’ll put Biden into office and get… exactly the same policies but with a bland and placid face which does not use Twitter at all, so we can all relax again and go back to sleep while the very rich continue destroying us all, which is of course what the modern Democratic Party has come to represent.

  12. says

    Just like homosexuality a lot of right wing folks think people choose to be trans, or are tricked/coerced into being trans. So their kids might decide to be trans if they know trans people exist, or if they’re treated as normal human beings instead of dangerous freaks. Of course there are some who don’t really care, but will never pass up a new group they can bully, or use as a tool against their supposed left wing enemies.

  13. unclefrogy says

    from their reaction to everything ‘liberal” or new and different I think that they think it is not real or it should not be (there is a lot of that in all of their thinking) and that people are trying to change reality on them to force reality to be something they think is wrong and impossible.
    So anyone else who thinks differently or believes differently is clearly wrong and the beliefs should not exist.
    they seem to have a fundamental conflict with reality and want everything to be simply defined just as they have always done so regardless of any evidence to the contrary.
    their god resembles sithrak more then “loving jesus”
    fear lurks in all of their hates
    uncle frogy

  14. says

    @9, Larry

    From past experience (I was pretty bigoted before the age of, say, 20) plenty of them probably don’t really think about it, they’ve just absorbed the outrage, self-righteousness, and general reactive attitude. It can even apply to trivial things like which video game console is “superior”, and apparently seriously vociferously blathering about that and arguing with people despite having next to zero experience with or knowledge of the other console.

    But there are some who really do seem to believe that society has to kept strictly to a basically traditionalist order, otherwise civilization will collapse or whatever. Here’s Orson Scott Card saying something like that, regarding…gay marriage! Also, Jordan Peterson’s stuff about monogamy, if I recall.

  15. wzrd1 says

    @WMDKitty #15, frankly, Obama wasn’t a shining light for the left, he was fairly right leaning, leaned on the CIA acknowledged “counterproductive” drone blow shit up program, regardless of collateral damage and protected businesses in spite of deleterious recovery numbers.
    Obama wasn’t a saint, he dealt with the dogshit left in his bowl, adding a bit as he skirted around it, Trump simply rolls in the dogshit, calling it perfume.
    One was a politician and realist, the other, well, we have a choice.
    Call it the Offal Office or Oaf Filled office, six of one, half dozen of the other.
    Each pandered to both sides, Trump, the least, being utterly, uniquely incompetent.
    Although, I do have a fairly rare prejudice, my wife and I had the misfortune of actually meeting him at a tristate (NJ-DE-PA) chamber of commerce function.
    A function that suffered a 90% attrition, the following year, fearing what other monster would be the guest of honor.
    Seriously, remember “doe-rae-me”? Trump was and remains stuck on meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

    For context, Warren is far right of most of my views.

  16. says

    I’m glad to see their bold stance on pronouns. O hope they completely stop using them from now on.
    “Mitch Marshall the third would like a coffee.”
    “Excuse me, sir, who’d like a coffee?v
    Young Republican, wildly pointing at himself: “Mitch Marshall the third! Why doesn’t hthe barista give Mitch Marshall the third a coffee?”
    “Excuse me, sir, I’m going to call security.”

    WMD Kitty
    The Vicar is still justifying why rather having Trump than Clinton was the moral thing to do, so don’t expect too much affinity to reality on that side.

  17. unclefrogy says

    besides the lying for power and profit bent of many of the repub pols. the conservatives problem with the world as it is is the same as the kid who refuses to understand the santa is not real even when they see all the evidence that it is just mom and dad because an immortal magic santa is so much better than just a mom and dad who care.
    they want the illusions to be true cause the all powerful market is some how benevolent and not the mindless monster it looks like most of the time, the climate could not change because of what we are doing because I am so small and the planet is sunshine and moon beams and not hurricanes and famines, and people like what they like and love what they love and need what they need and have always been like this, life is messy and inexplicable and does not ask you to approve and will not “behave” to suit you or me or anyone.
    it is the conman’s gift that he knows how to tap that desire and feed it with lies so he can feed off of it
    uncle frogy

  18. square101 says


    I’ve heard that if you believe really hard, say “Trump may in many practical respects be indistinguishable from Obama” 3 times into a bathroom mirror, turn one complete revolution and click your heels you magically wake up in a world were Bernie won 2016 and everything is a socialist utopia so I’m sure The Vicar is just practicing for the next attempt.

  19. rockwhisperer says

    I’m cis. I’m definitely binary. For that matter, I’m het. Use whatever pronouns you want for me, Republicans. I’m an obese (sigh) older woman with very short, teal hair. When my hair was gray, I got used to being addressed as ‘sir’ from the back. I’d turn and the person addressing me, if pale enough, would flush to approximately the color of a freshly boiled lobster. Whatever their skin color, they’d look properly abashed. I’d always smile a genuine smile and deal with whatever they wanted. Honest mistakes are what they are. We’re all human.

    Now, nobody ever addresses me with male pronouns, even from behind. The only difference is the teal hair dye. All fat people with teal hair must be women, I guess. Really?

  20. rockwhisperer says

    Oh, and, as an aside, I LOVE the teal hair dye. Before I turned gray, my hair was best described as ‘dishwater blonde’; the color of the dishwater after you washed the last pot with lots of burned-on stuff. Then it turned to boring but pleasant gray, while I was pursuing a late MS degree. Lots of people have brightly dyed hair at universities, even some students in my general age cohort. It gave me ideas. But I didn’t start playing seriously with bright hair dyes until this year, though I got that MS in 2013. I guess it takes awhile for the concept to sink in.

  21. John Morales says



    My dishwater goes a brownish-grey after such.
    How that’s in any sense “blonde” is beyond me.


    “Blue-rinse brigade” is a trope, so it’s only a heuristic.

    Not that I don’t get your point.

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