Our freedom of speech is freedom or death.

I'm in Arlington, Texas, as I write this, scouting a couple of guys at Globe Life Field for the 2024 draft. 

Regular readers likely know my opinion of the direction of Texas's government in the last few years at the state level, and often at the local level. I was sitting in a restaurant (Social Bar, which did a surprisingly solid fish and chips but had a too-sweet barrel-aged old fashioned) and caught a campaign ad for some Republican candidate who was endorsed by Gov. Greg Abbott. What stunned me was what the ad led with: in the candidate's prior position, he "banned men from women's sports" and "banned gender surgeries on children." 

I'm not interested in any arguments about the legitimacy of transgender people here, nor am I going to offer one. My issue is much simpler than that: This candidate, and many others nationwide, are weaponizing one of the most vulnerable and marginalized groups of our population to score political points. It's absolutely repulsive, and it is incumbent on every one of us to stand up against it.

I don't know many trans people, and I don't have any close friends who are trans. The issue for me is not personal at all, not that that should matter. It's about one side, one party, attacking a group that has little to no power and that is just asking for acceptance, including the right to exist safely in our society. It's part of the autocratic playbook; Hannah Arendt described it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, a book that everyone should be reading in high school or college given how accurate her summary has proven time and again. You find an "other" and you rally your base against them, even if the result is violence. Politicians railing against trans people, right-wing mouthpieces calling trans people "groomers" - this isn't any different than the Rwandan Hutu-led radio station RTLM broadcasting anti-Tutsi propaganda in the lead up to that African nation's genocide in 1994. We have one major party in this country telling the populace that trans people are trying to harm their children. It may help the party win elections. It has already led to violence and bomb threats, and we will live with those consequences for years.

I've said in many places that I'm nothing more than ten pounds of privilege in a five-pound bag. I'm white, European, cis, straight, male, and have never lived at a level below middle class. Our society was built to favor people who look like me and sound like me and live like me. I could live my whole life and say nothing about others' rights or about fairness, and I'd be fine. That's just not consistent with my values. I can't stand by and see some group of people, a group that is doing absolutely nothing to anybody, used as a punching bag by a bunch of demagogues, especially since that language is already leading to real-world violence that is only going to increase.

I'm familiar with the argument that goes "first they came for the Jews and I said nothing," but that line of thinking appeals on the listener's self-interest: Eventually, they'll come for me. I suppose that's true, but that's not a value. That's saving your own skin. If you believe that people matter, a truly humanist philosophy, you should stand up for everybody, even if you believe that They will never actually come for you after all. So when you hear or see or read attacks on trans people this year - or Jews or Palestinians or gays or any other group that isn't, well, People Like Me - I hope you will stand up and say something, not just at the ballot box but publicly, because I do believe, at heart, that there are more of Us than there are of Them and there always will be. I could stand up more. Maybe that’s a good goal for 2024.

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Nothing new at the Athletic this past week, although I have two draft-related posts scheduled for this week, one on the players I've seen so far this spring and one ranking the top 30 prospects in the draft class at this point.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Dragonkeepers, which looked like it would be a great family game but disappointed me in just about every way - it's too random and too complicated and didn't really offer a way to play it well.

On the dish, I've played some catch-up over the last ten days or so, reviewing the movies Oppenheimer, Maestro, Killers of the Flower Moon, and All of Us Strangers; the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Stay True; and the board game Stardew Valley. I also posted a new music playlist for February and a weekly link roundup just this past Saturday.

Thanks for reading.

Keith