Note: Normal people might find some of this offensive. (We hope. Dear Lord, please!)
Note II: Dan Gainor, usually your intrepid guide through the fever swamps of the alt-left, is on temporary assignment elsewhere. I shall endeavor to fill his muck-spattered Wellingtons. As always, keep your hands and feet in the boat at all times.
Feminist site Jezebel, whose position on abortion is safe, legal and on demand anytime up until tee-ball, brings us a fascinating report about (wait for it!) not having babies. It seems that, “With Environmental Disasters Looming, Many are Choosing Childless Futures.” 
Author Madeleine Davies asks, “How do we justify bringing new life into a world that’s becoming environmentally unlivable?” Really? Granted, Chuck E. Cheese is every bit the hell you imagine it to be (experience speaking), but Al Gore’s doom-lisping is a lousy excuse to avoid it.
Davies quotes from a recent New York Times report saying young people are “saddled with painful ethical questions that previous generations did not have to confront.” Like what? Feeding your family in an honest-to-God, right-now, not-computer-model dust bowl? Worrying your sons will die fighting Axis powers? Of Typhus? Measles? Exposure?
“Some worry about the quality of life children born today will have as shorelines flood, wildfires rage and extreme weather becomes more common. Others are acutely aware that having a child is one of the costliest actions they can take environmentally.”
Stop laughing! Climate-generated reproduction angst is a serious problem for millennials, up there with revenge porn and securing paid pet adoption leave. And it’s a neglected subject. “As [NY Times’s] Astor notes, ‘few, if any, studies have examined how large a role climate change plays in people’s childbearing decisions.’” Perhaps because basing major life decisions on weather patterns is batsh*t crazy? It’s also a convenient cop out. Kids are time-consuming, draining and demanding. Climate models aren’t.
Now, some other things bubbling up from the Alt-Left’s primordial ooze:
Divesting: It’s Not Just For Anti-Semitism Anymore. You may recall that the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, is an attempt to pressure Israel to self-destruct “comply with international law,” by hurting Israeli companies and economic interests. It was all the rage at places like Harvard a couple of years ago. More recently, Mayor Sandinista in New York and the nation of Norway have decided to divest interests in smelly old fossil fuel companies. High Society Socialist Naomi Klein explains it’s “a process of delegitimizing” the sector and of affir
ming that it yields “odious profits.”
Now lefties are talking about divesting “the War Machine.” Drop the rolling papers, put down your BTO album and pay attention. Writing at Alternet, Code Pinkers Medea Benjamin and Elliot Swain bemoan the DOD’s $716 billion budget request and “how much money flows from weapons makers to the coffers of congressional campaigns for both parties.” Why, even Sen. Elizabeth Warren takes cash from those who make the firesticks that kill her people. So we should all divest from defense manufacturers.
The two write that, besides hounding Congress about taking campaign cash “from weapons manufacturers and war profiteers [“War profiteers?” Like Daddy Warbucks? Or the Monopoly guy?], we must mount a divestment effort at the institutional and municipal level. Investment in war must come at the cost of public disgrace.” (Disgrace? Killing bad guys in innovative, hi-tech ways -- heck, in old-fashioned low-tech ways -- is what I personally pay taxes for.)
And you may say Benjamin and Swain are dreamers, but they’re not the only ones, sadly. “In 2017 the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the national association of cities with populations over 30,000, adopted a resolution acknowledging the need to transform funding priorities away from war-making and into local communities.” They point to helpful literature for college students looking to make a nuisance of themselves, and say, “A new coalition of about 70 groups across the country has formed to launch a Divest From the War Machine campaign.” Terrific. By the time they get to Woodstock, they’ll be half a million strong.
Religious People Are SO Gullible! It’s always fun when lefties put on their “Junior Scientist” badges and tsk-tsk at the rest of us with our sky god and messiahs who don’t have “community organizer” on their resume. (Funny though, we seem to be the ones that believe in biology -- no offense intended. to the pronoun-sensitive out there.) Now, lefties are blaming us for the rise of “fake news.”
Alternet reports that writer and “linguistic expert” Kurt Andersen has a theory about why Republicans are so dumb and susceptible to fake news: According to Anderson, in the last 50 years, “Christian Protestant religion became extreme. It became more magical and supernatural in its beliefs in America than it has for hundreds of years or for any other place in the world.” Looked at another way, America is the only place its practiced at all anymore. Churches in Europe are empty.
“So, one thing that has happened, and one thing that has led the Republican Party to fantasy and wishful untruth more and more into its approach to policy … are now in the Republican mainstream,” Andersen argued.
“Falsehoods like President Barack Obama is a secret Muslim or climate change is a Chinese hoax are all issues that are easy to believe if ‘fantasy and wishful untruths’ are the norm.” Or 9-11 being an inside job, fire can’t melt steel, Russian collusion or Israelis running American foreign policy, or the CIA creating AIDS or voter ID is a scheme to disenfranchise blacks or …
“Trans-exclusionary” Rose McGowan is a Bad Feminist. Actress Rose McGowan, once lionized for her role exposing the sleaze of Harvey Weinstein and other Hollywood dogs, has been driven from her book tour for not being intersectional enough, or something. It seems she once criticized Caitlyn (nee Bruce) Jenner, and said something insufficiently enthusiastic about trans women (dudes who think they’re women and, I guess, become women).
Writing at Slate, Evan Urquhart tuts that “It’s clear from these comments that McGowan believes trans women fall short of full womanhood,” because they don’t experience all the physical stuff actual women do.
(Warning: severe alt-left language and thinking ahead.)
“This trans-exclusionary idea of womanhood leads to an impoverished and incomplete feminism, one that doesn’t just alienate trans people but also leaves out the experiences of many cis women.”
Urquhart points out that the hundreds of young female gymnasts abused by (subhuman scum) Larry Nassar train so hard some never develop breasts. Some women never have periods. “The point,” Urquhart says helpfully, “is not that a trans woman’s experience is identical to that of a cis woman but that the experiences of women vary widely, and that feminists who forget this -- or undermine it in order to exclude trans women -- weaken feminism immeasurably.”
So McGowan would rob trans women of the victimhood that is rightly theirs. At least I think that’s what it means. Hell, your guess is as good as mine.
Follow @mattphilbin on Twitter.
