Backfill: The Landwehr Files, Part 2
In Which I Vented About Clay Wirestone & Put Brenda Landwehr in The Interrogation Room
[Probably a TERRIBLE day to post this, given that Zuckerberg has kinda-sorta deleted the Kansas Reflector’s content from Facebook and maybe everywhere, I’m unsure. Just a note about that.
First, I think they’ll get it rectified. Second, we’re all at the mercy of digital oligarchs, in case you didn’t know. Third, I reference the Reflector a lot because I subscribe and donate to them, because they cover Kansas well, because my local paper was gobbled up by hedge funds, because Wichita and KC have paywalls and I’m but a lowly janitor, and because the Reflector does something akin to good old fashioned journalism crusades in that they employ people with consciences who pound tables on certain themes to keep them alive, which all papers should do. When/if they return to digital existence, give them money.]
Back to business.
More, backfill, folks. I’m working on two newer items. One is a kind of update or “for further reading” that revisits references or issues raised in previous posts for those curious.
The other is, well, still in that murky zone of cloud computing I call the Murder Board in My Addled Brain, what with the string and pins connecting weird, disparate items in ways that probably seem conspiratorial…until you actually, you know, live in America, meet the GOP, read books, and whatnot.
Today’s backfill, I didn’t want to include at first. Because it was kinda harsh to Reflector opinion editor Clay Wirestone, who I appreciate and who became suitably more hair-on-fire about all this and more later on.
And because I need to stop with the backfill eventually.
But not because it was mean as hell to Brenda Landwehr, who deserves so much worse. I’m not done with Landwehr yet and until she quits public “service” and completes some as yet undetermined lifelong regimen of penance for her sins and crimes, I hope no one is. I believe in militant decency, and sometimes that requires being mean as hell to really awful people in the cause justice.
Plus, the contents of this one are still relevant, not just to the on-going Landwehr Files, but to the creeping fascist morality and policy of the state of Kansas and the state of the world.
March 12, 2024
I once tried to explain to a friend why I found Clay Wirestone’s opinion pieces so often frustrating. It was something to the effect of “His heart’s in the right place, but he needs to at least hint about Molotov cocktails.”
Thus, my rant about Wirestone’s latest piece in the Kansas Reflector, which is fine and all, but dammit, insufficient.
It's about Kansas Rep. Brenda Landwehr, she of the recent Gestapo-style hearing on trans rights, who will shortly be morphing completely into Dolores Umbridge with a glowing endorsement and campaign contribution from raging transphobe JK Rowling, who is also a flaming pile of garbage. (In my opinion, he hastened to add, thanking the stars for the US libel laws in light of Jo’s frothingly litigious habits.)
“When people show you who they are, believe them.”
Clay Wirestone (hereinafter CW) describes Landwehr’s “shocking abuse of power,” prompting a George Pylean cinematic reference to Rick Blaine and Capt. Louis Renau in Casablanca.
Landwehr’s conduct is only shocking if we somehow hadn’t noticed the GOP’s huge addiction to gambling with the lives, health and rights of the constituents they don’t believe really matter. Not for nothing, the baddies in that movie were also Nazis.
Instead, CW tries to articulate the wrongness of Landwehr’s behavior and beliefs. But because CW is such a…proper liberal…working for a respectable institution…he just can’t bring the necessary fire. (Plus, he can’t cuss in the Kansas Reflector, and sometimes, you just fucking need to.)
As to Landwehr’s behavior, CW quotes an ACLUer bemoaning procedural dirty tricks involved in hiding a committee hearing and vote. Translation: FAIR PROCESS WAS ABRIDGED!
He cites the indefensible practice of gut & go, whereby an already-Senate-passed bill gets emptied of content, then filled with the anti-trans vitriol Landwehr is peddling, such that, on paper, the Senate has already approved it and can’t alter it but must vote it up or down as transmogrified. Ooh: UNDERHANDED PROCEDURALISM! DECIDEDLY NOT CRICKET!
A media lawyer notes that Landwehr may have “overstepped her bounds” in running her hearing by evicting speakers who caused “discomfort” but not “disruption.” AH, SURELY A SUCCESSFUL COURT CASE WILL, IN 3 YEARS, NULLIFY HER ANTI-TRANS LAW! WHAT? IT WON'T? Oh.
He lists some responses to a (very valuable and appreciated: seriously, go watch it again) video compilation of Landwehr’s behavior he made, after screening out the comments that “crossed all bounds of restraint, good taste and profanity.” WHEN THEY GO LOW, WE GO HIGH!
(Such a comfort to know that, as Republicans strip away as many rights as possible from the most vulnerable and marginalized populations, raising risks of self-harm and targeting by, well, assholes, our white plumes remain unsullied by reading anything inappropriate or beyond the pale. So unprofessional to be troubled by hearing the dying screams of those who got murdered.)
Among the remarks that made the cut were that Landwehr “lacked compassion and empathy” and “silenced discussion.” WOWZERS! THEM’S FIGHTING WORDS, SON!
(Psst! Simply having debate or discussion on the existence or rights of human beings is itself giving away the game. It makes the existence and rights of people “debatable,” something “up for debate.” Something we countenance. Something no longer beyond the pale. “Today’s topic for discussion: ‘Should we even have trans people?’”)
CW dares to go so far as to share his deep trepidation: “I can’t shake the feeling that many [legislators] would welcome the opportunity to roll back LGBTQ+ rights even further.”
REALLY, CLAY? YOU THINK? THEY’RE GOING AFTER TRANSFOLK BECAUSE TRANSFOLK ARE MORE VULNERABLE. IF THEY THOUGHT THEY COULD GET AWAY WITH LG ROLLBACKS, THEY ABSOLUTELY WOULD.
Now that I’ve purged from my system the last vestiges of rant-comic Lewis Black’s apoplexy, I can note that, incredibly, CW takes Landwehr’s bait and begins to argue on her ground, about whether she has “hate in her heart.”
He grants (?) that “a person’s heart may be virtuous and kind” but argues that such a “heart” doesn’t do what Landwehr demonstrably does.
I guess this is CW’s tip-toeing way of whispering SHE’S A HATER! But he doesn’t really say even that. He pivots to…a different offending organ?...saying that, actually, it’s “the totality of the person, including their intellect” which does the kinds of heinous evil Landwehr engages in. Okay, so…brain?
I just plain don’t know.
What I do know is that bigots have been using this cop-out, this get-out-of-jail card since…forever. At least for 58 years, when James Baldwin wrote, “I can’t believe what you say because I see what you do.”1
It’s the standard, weaponized, intentional misunderstanding of racism, just repurposed to transmisia: only frothing, hate-criming street thugs looking to murder a transwoman out of sheer, slavering animus can be bigoted and agents of oppressive systems. That is, only the elusive hate-in-their-hearts people, drooling neanderthals toting clubs, never the matronly lady in the Billy Jack hat (what’s that about?).
Getting sucked into the “how to know what’s in her heart” debate is a chump’s game. So is trying to shift the question to some other part of the body, like Landwehr’s brain.
Better would be to offer alternate motives besides hate, because here we really open up the discussion and get meta, something conservatives never want us to do.
Look, conservatives don’t win on policies. They win by appealing to symbols and gut emotions evoked by those symbols. They paint with big, broad, ideological brushes to tar every non-conservative as an enemy of all that people hold dear, freedom, family and children especially.
They don’t do well with broader call-outs that target what games they’re playing, what the through-lines of their actions really are. What’s really motivating them (screw this good-faith presumption shit that liberals think we’re honor bound to proffer). Lay it out and make the damn accusations. Say it loud, what they are trying to do, again and again and again, first because it’s plain, second because you have to be a broken record for this to get through, and finally, because only by hammering ceaselessly can you force them to either cut it out or get off their prepared scripts and give some different or better answers.
So, time for Brenda Landwehr to sit for her interview:
Okay, Brenda, you say you don’t have hate in your heart. And you’re right: we can’t “see” into your heart. But we can see what you do, and it sure looks pretty hateful towards these people, your constituents, whose rights you’re supposed to uphold and protect, whose interests you’re supposed to serve, but maybe hate really isn’t what’s driving you.
Maybe it’s…contempt. You know, like how some pitiful, really beneath-you group that should really know their place and quit farting around and bothering important people like you just keeps making noise and getting underfoot. It’s not really hate, see, like you’d hate a rival. A rival is an equal, and these “people” are so far beneath your dignity to even have to think about that you can’t summon up hatred. It’s more like a scientist trying to figure out how to kill off or contain some nasty fungus that keeps cropping up.
Is that closer to what you’re feeling Brenda?
How about disgust? Kinda related. I mean, when someone puts a disgusting thing right under my nose, I have a real problem not showing my disgust, and that can really look like visceral hatred, but when it’s not anywhere in my sight, I really don’t think about the thing that disgusts me. Like, I’m not obsessed about the disgusting thing. I don’t join weird chatrooms to plot how to eradicate the disgusting thing. When the servants put the disgusting thing on my dinner plate, I fire the servants and reiterate my strong preferences to the remaining staff, like on Downton Abbey. I just want it to never ever trouble my sight again.
So would you say it’s more like a visceral disgust, Brenda?
Okay, okay, maybe something milder. How about frustration? Or irritation? You know, like these pesky little weirdos with their sick ideas about gender just keep getting underfoot. Like they just do not understand who the Alpha is here. Like they honestly think they are going to get their way. They just keep coming back, nipping at me, these tiny, annoying mutts. Sometimes you just want to rear back and kick ‘em, am I right? So, is it more like kicking a puppy, Brenda?
Sorry to be so negative, Brenda. You could very much be feeling something quite positive in your heart, like, for example, righteousness. You know, how you have the wisdom and the experience and the proper upbringing and the right mindedness from your years of making good decisions and earning the place where you are, so you know what’s best for these whiny, feckless, godless, amoral, incomprehensible, attention-seeking freaks with unnatural colors in their hair and silly names. Is that more on target?
Maybe it’s good old-fashioned ignorance. You know, how your committee brought Ivan Abdouch to testify about trans “social contagion,” when that’s based on debunked grifter work from nearly a decade ago that surveyed a bunch of freaked-out parents posting on an anti-trans website.
Did you grapple at all with the sheer numbers involved in the medical and psychological associations endorsing gender affirming care compared to the whack-job splinter groups opposing it and calling it an “ideology”?
Here’s a hint: you could fit all those anti-trans associations inside my home town with plenty of housing to spare, while you could fit several of my hometowns inside the pro-trans associations and still have whole New York city blocks to spare.
Here’s another hint: the primary “alternate” medical association out there trying to “protect the children” against the evils of transness, besides having a membership only 1 percent the size of the legitimate version (like, I have more Facebook “friends” than they have members, lady) broke away specifically to work against LGBTQ+ acceptance.
You know, the people in the capitol you say you are “fine with” even though you “may disagree with [their] lifestyle” (which, by the way, is a huge red flag telling pretty much everyone who’s actually tried to educate themselves about gay rights and struggles since, say, the 1990s, that you do, in fact, have some very big issues with gay and lesbian people).
But I see your only educational achievement was graduating high school one year before women were legally allowed to have credit cards in their own names, so maybe these things didn’t occur to you.
I know, that last one was a low blow. Just because you’re older and don’t have much formal education—I don’t either, I just read a lot—doesn’t make you stupid. It could very well be an indication of how women of your generation were unfairly and systemically held back by laws and expectations of how women must be, so your intelligence got channeled into family and church and whatever the hell your business, LT Care Solutions, Inc., is.
But that seems to suggest you’d have empathy for others now being corralled into narrow confines of conformity based on politicians ignorantly presuming they know more about people than they do themselves.
Or maybe it morphed into an icy cold bitterness: “Since I had to settle and conform to these binary options, I must believe those are the only options. If they aren’t, if people can just fight against what’s dictated to them by legislators, the Catholic Church and other authorities, then maybe my brains, my ambitions, my potential all those years ago was really unjustly channeled against my will…maybe I didn’t freely choose my life, as much as I have loved it and as much joy as it’s given me…maybe I was suckered…and I just cannot accept that possibility, can’t even countenance it for a moment, can’t even entertain it because it threatens to rip the foundations out from under too much of what I’ve built my life and identity upon. So I will proceed as if everything portioned out to me was true and proper and right, and I’ll listen to reminders from Lucretia Nold from the Kansas Catholic conference when she tells me to (with pity in my heart for those poor, defective, misguided freaks) have compassion for all sinners, and yet coldly never waver an inch, never open my mind a micron, as they beg and plead and argue the case for their own rights in this secular democracy.”
Landwehr says, “I don’t hate.”
Well, here’s the thing. Whatever she calls it, however she conceives of it, whatever label she puts to the color she sees when she looks up at the sky, her actions, her language, the bills she pushes and sabotages and guts, the witnesses she fluffs, the witnesses whose leashes she mercilessly yanks—all this tells us who she thinks she’s better than, who needs to be put in their place and kept there.
It speaks to arrogance, elitism, self-righteousness, contempt, bitterness, ignorance, irritation and frustration and annoyance with the “little people” (if “people” they even qualify as).
Add all those up, mix in some icy, suppressed twistedness from a Catholic girlhood in the 1960s that never got questioned much less critically examined, and she’s a cryogenic marvel from an earlier time holding court over the rights and freedoms not just of trans people in Kansas, but all people, because her vision of the world is one in which people like her, right-minded, proper, under no obligation to consider facts or stories that threaten her worldview, get to decide—and then literally dictate—what you or I or our children may do with our lives.
Hey, maybe I’m wrong about Landwehr. It’s possible, especially since she considers herself above speaking to these kinds of probing questions and issues. And thanks to her position and the unjustified authority and insulation it brings, she can get away with it. So we’ll never really know.
But in the absence of absolute confirmation, you have to go with what an entire mountain of circumstantial evidence is telling you.
As Maya Angelou told Oprah: “When people show you who they are, believe them.”
Please, let the credit go to James Baldwin and not Ike Turner. Or compromise: Let it go to Tina. Because fuck Ike Turner.