Via Twitchy, New York's AG Letitia James, who earlier subjected Trump to a witch trial, has arranged a Drag Queen Story Hour for your children and she really wants your children to get within touching distance of the drag queens.

So that's nice.

Apparently it's sold out. I hope David French was able to get tickets before they ran out!

And -- say! -- speaking of...

David French wrote a pro-transgender-treatment-for-children column for the New York Times, surprisingly enough!

Note that just two months ago, GLAAD denounced the New York Times for hiring the "anti-LGBTQ" French:

"It is appalling that The New York Times hired and is now boasting about bringing on David French, a writer and attorney with a deep history of anti-LGBTQ activism," GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said in a press release. "After more than a year of inaccurate, misleading LGBTQ coverage in the Times opinion and news pages, the Times started 2023 by announcing a second anti-transgender opinion columnist, without a single known trans voice represented on staff. A cursory search for French turns up numerous anti-LGBTQ articles and his record as an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group that actively spreads misinformation about LGBTQ people and pushes baseless legislation and lawsuits to legalize discrimination, including just last month at the Supreme Court...."

Well! Now that David French has positioned himself as a former conservative who tells the leftwing media everything they want to hear about bad conservatives, and will never work for a conservative outlet again -- not even the National Review -- French has to trim his grift to completely please his new paymasters, and that's going to mean appeasing GLAAD and letting all future leftist employers know that David French is Safe For Hiring and Ready to Do Some Business.

And so he wrote a column in the New York Times denouncing any restrictions on transitioning underaged children, insisting that this was only a matter of parental choice.

Can a parent choose to f*** his children, too, David?

We'll get to that in a minute. Here's David French, in his new "Libertarian" drag clothes.

Don't Let a "Culture War" Degrade the Constitution

[I]f a government both enacts contentious policies and diminishes the civil liberties of its current ideological opponents, then it sharply increases the stakes of political conflict. It breaks the social compact by rendering political losers, in effect, second-class citizens. A culture war waged against the civil liberties of your political opponents inflicts a double injury on dissenters: They don't merely lose a vote; they also lose a share of their freedom.

This isn't new ground for David French: He has always taken a position of "ah well that's too bad, but what can you do?" on leftwing culture warring and governmental coercion against the right, but then fulminates mightily whenever his sensitive faculties detect the right might be engaging in counter-culture-war.

It's only the right that provokes him into these gaseous eruptions.

Note that hear he offers a weak "to-be-sure" CYA bit, condemning Gavin Newsom for declaring that the state would no longer contract with Walgreen's to provide medicines for prisoners, because Walgreen's... complies with state laws about abortion pills in other states.

That sets him up to turn to the real criminals: Parents who don't want gay porn in schools, and states that set age requirements for medical transitioning.

But no, Im not letting red America off the hook.

We never thought you would, C*ckhen. We understand your game and understand that you play this "both sides" game halfheartedly, to justify your real objective, which is attacking the right for the pleasure of your new leftwing benefactors.

The educational culture wars are inspiring a host of educational gag orders across states that purport to block advocacy of disfavored ideas about race and gender. Many of those statutes are aimed at K-12 education, where the government has considerable control over teacher speech.

But others are aimed at speech in public universities and private corporations, where states have much less control. Indeed, a federal court has already blocked enforcement of Florida's so-called Stop WOKE Act to the extent that it limits free expression on public campuses and in private boardrooms.

It limits these entities' ability to force students and employees into Racial Struggle Sessions where they'll be hectored and attacked about their skin color.

David French would spit up a rat if he heard any Evil Conservatives were scheming to get rid of protections for black employees in the workplace. He would defend that until his last breath, claiming that it's perfectly Constitutional to regulate businesses and tell them what speech they may and may not direct towards their black employees. Or to women. Or to gays.

But the minute he hears that someone's trying to protect a conservative-leaning bloc -- white men, the only group corporations castigate in Racial/Sexual Struggle sections -- only then do his alleged "libertarian" inclinations rise to the fore and he begins screaming that protections for conservative groups only violate the Constitution.

Everybody at National Review is like this. Ask them about repealing some of the laws protecting gays, women, and minorities in the workplace. They'll scream that you're a racist/homophobe/sexist.

But then propose that white men be explicitly added to the protected list. Now they'll start up with the rhetoric about how we must respect Our Cherished Corporations' rights to abuse men and white people. It's just their free speech rights, see?

I'm ignoring his attacks on DeSantis for taking on French's favorite groomer corporation, Disney.

Here's where he gets to defending medical transitions for children:

B]ecause every culture war action against civil liberties has its mirror image on the other side, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas issued a directive to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate as "abuse" both surgical and pharmaceutical interventions for transgender children, regardless of the good faith and desires of the parents, children and caregivers involved.

To understand the gravity of the state interference with parental authority, it's worth remembering the words of Chief Justice Warren Burger in the 1972 case Wisconsin v. Yoder, in which he wrote that the "primary role of the parents in the upbringing of their children is now established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition." To simply presume that parents are abusive because they may dissent from state consensus on transgender care is to violate this principle of American law.

French doesn't know much about the law for someone pretending to be a lawyer. The courts have repeatedly ruled that parental rights are not absolute when it comes to making harmful medical decisions about their children -- most often, in cases where parents refuse medical treatments for their children, on grounds that their religion forbids them.

I guess French was absent the day they taught law at law school.

If a court can order a child to get a blood transfusion against his parents' deeply-held religious beliefs, I'm pretty sure the legislature can restrict what cosmetic surgeries a child can get and tell them to hold off until they are three years away from being able to purchase cigarettes and alcohol.

Seth Dillon
@SethDillon

Replying to @DavidAFrench @roddreher and @realchrisrufo
In what sense do you oppose it? You put "abuse" in scare quotes, mocking those who think of it as such. You said our presuming child mutilation to be abusive violates the legal principle of the primacy of parental authority. Opposing it would mean backing legislation that treats these interventions as harmful and abusive. You don't oppose it. You oppose those who oppose it.

This is a very common National-Review-approved position: Claim to oppose something, but then oppose all tangible legislative action to actually oppose the thing you say you oppose.

Again, they tend to support -- or at least not strenuously oppose -- the left's campaign to make government and corporations impose their mores upon unwilling citizens and employers.

But when the right engages in similar tactics, only then do they get angry and fulsome in their denunciations of using state power to vindicate any goal. Including, especially, the ones they claim to support.

This makes them the perfect Polite Company Conservatives -- you can hire them at MSNBC and the New York Times to pretend you're hearing "the conservative POV," all the while knowing that when it comes to actual political fights -- fights in which government policy is at stake -- they will always support the left wing and denounce the right wing's attempt to wrest government control back from the left.

When it comes to the left's priorities, they support government action, or, at least, would never be so gauche as to seriously threaten to repeal the left's success in encoding their moral structures into the law.

But when it comes to the right's priorities, suddenly we see what the "libertarian" in "libertarain-leaning conservative" means -- it means they start talking up libertarianism only when the right is successful in putting their priorities into government policy.

Christopher Rufo actually just did a video about this. It's about, superficially, the breakup of the "Intellectual Dark Web," a union of rightists and liberals who opposed the extremism of current day "liberalism."

But the IDW broke up when the right began to actually fight back against this extremism and post some victories. The liberal members of the "Intellectual Dark Web" only wanted to critique the left. They didn't want to ever take actual action against them. They only wanted to try to persuade them to voluntarily step back from using the government and media for purposes of extremist coercion.

And if persuasion didn't work -- oh well! I guess conservatives and normies will just have to accept being ruled in body and mind by extremist woke Maoists! Because you can never use your own coercion against the coercers! (At least if the coercers are on the left.)

This explains David French's positions, and the positions of most of National Review. They accept that the left will constantly use the government to batter down its enemies and impose their toxic morality on the world.

And against this menace they are willing to deploy the tool of... critique. Critique, critique, critique. We will critique them forever. We will endlessly point out their hypocrisies and double-standards!

Then one day the left will understand that what they are doing is just plain wrong and on that day, perhaps 600 years from now, they will finally succumb to our relentless Critiques and Barbed Sarcasm and give us back our freedom.