Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has long presented himself as a principled champion of “freedom.” In Congress, he was a founding member of the Freedom Caucus. He refers to himself as “governor of the free state of Florida.” And while laying the groundwork for a possible presidential run, he is promoting a book on his approach that he titled The Courage to Be Free.

[Read: The forgotten Ron DeSantis book]

On Wednesday, Florida’s biggest employer, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, filed a lawsuit alleging that DeSantis is violating its First Amendment right to freedom of speech. According to the complaint, “a targeted campaign of government retaliation—orchestrated at every step by Governor DeSantis as punishment for Disney’s protected speech—now threatens Disney’s business operations, jeopardizes its economic future in the region, and violates its constitutional rights.”

The case will subject DeSantis’s understanding of freedom and what protecting it requires to the crucible of constitutional law. And his position is likelier to shatter than to withstand the heat.

“The facts and law in this case are not good for Governor DeSantis,” former Representative Justin Amash, who was also a member of the Freedom Caucus, said on Twitter. “He and his allies took action not to make all companies live by the same rules but instead to target Disney with harsh conditions that apply to Disney alone—all as punishment for constitutionally protected speech.”

The controversy began in 2022, during DeSantis’s ultimately successful push to pass the Parental Rights in Education Act, which opponents have disparagingly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law. Among other things, the law forbids public schools from engaging in any classroom discussion or instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity prior to fourth grade.  

After legislators passed the law, as it awaited DeSantis’s signature, Disney employees protested the company’s silence, prompting Disney’s then-CEO, Bob Chapek, to speak publicly against it.

Soon Disney was declaring, “Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts, and we remain committed to supporting the national and state organizations working to achieve that”––a lawful stance that DeSantis treated as illegitimate. “It is one thing to take a position opposing the bill, even if by doing so the company is perpetuating the left’s false narratives,” he wrote in his book. “But it is quite another for Disney to pledge to work to seek the repeal of legislation.” With that promise, “supposedly family-friendly Disney was moving beyond mere virtue signaling to liberal activists,” he continued. “Instead, the company was pledging a frontal assault on a duly enacted law of the state of Florida.”

That formulation is strange. Opposing a bill’s passage and favoring a law’s repeal are equally legitimate civic actions. Neither is equivalent to violating, let alone assaulting, the law. Yet according to Disney’s lawsuit, DeSantis has been retaliating against the company for its lawful advocacy. For example, when Disney World was created, the Tallahassee Democrat explains, “neither Orange nor Osceola counties had the services to provide power and water to the remote 25,000-acre property.” So in 1967, “the Florida Legislature, working with Walt Disney World Co., created a special taxing district—called the Reedy Creek Improvement District—that would act with the same authority and responsibility as a county government,” and allow Disney to levy extra taxes on itself to improve roads and other infrastructure. After Disney spoke out against DeSantis’s bill, the governor and his allies eliminated that arrangement. Of course, Florida is within its rights to reconsider and end any of the special districts it has created for businesses––but the Constitution does not permit the state to take even otherwise lawful actions in retaliation for engaging in protected speech.

Not only is the ability to engage in political speech without being punished by the state a right that the Supreme Court has recognized for individuals and corporate entities alike; it is at the core of the First Amendment’s freedom-of-speech guarantee. But DeSantis has described an alternative view of what it means for the state to protect freedom: all the usual things, plus shielding the public from the left’s activism.

[Edward Wasserman: My newspaper sued Florida for the same first-amendment abuses DeSantis is committing now]

To understand his position, consider remarks he delivered last week at the College of Charleston, during a stop on his book tour. For long stretches of his speech, it was easy to mistake him for a conventional supporter of expansive freedoms. “We’re No. 1 for economic freedom, we’re No. 1 for education freedom, we are No. 1 for parental involvement in education, we’re No. 1 for public higher education … and famously––and as long as I’m around, permanently––we have no state income tax,” he bragged of his record in Florida. “None of that would have been possible had we not stepped up to the plate when COVID arrived on the scene. When the world went mad, when common sense suddenly became an uncommon virtue, it was Florida that stood as a refuge of sanity and a citadel of freedom.”

As a Californian, I understand that pitch’s appeal. Despite better food, weather, and scenery, and fewer shark attacks, lightning strikes, and predatory reptiles creeping around public spaces, my state is losing residents while Florida gains them. Our dearth of freedom to build new dwellings has burdened us with punishing housing costs and immiserating homelessness. Our dearth of educational freedom consigns kids from poor families to failing schools. Our higher-than-average taxes do not yield better-than-average public services or assistance. And during the coronavirus pandemic, far from being a refuge of sanity, California responded with a lot of unscientific overzealousness, like the needless closure of beaches and parks.

Precisely because I value freedom highly, I was alarmed by other parts of DeSantis’s pitch, where he construes what it means for Floridians to be free so expansively that he winds up advocating for the use of state power in ways that would stymie the freedom of his ideological opponents. As DeSantis put it in his College of Charleston speech, the people of Florida are on his side insofar as they want an economy where businesses “focus on their core mission of providing whatever service or whatever they’re doing in the economy and not getting mired into woke political activism.” He specifically attacked Disney and a recent Bud Light campaign for aligning with LGBTQ activists in the culture wars.

This line on corporations echoed his perspective in his book. “Woke capital exerts a pernicious influence on society in several ways,” DeSantis wrote. “Of course, it is a free country, and they have the right to take these positions.” Of course. But onstage in Charleston, he didn’t just complain that “you have different institutions in society that are trying to advance the woke agenda.” “We fight it everywhere we can,” he said of wokeness in Florida, explaining: “I don’t think you have a truly free state just because you have low taxes, low regulation, and no COVID restrictions, if the left is able to impose its agenda through the education system, through the business sphere, through all these others. A free state means you’re protecting your people from the left’s pathologies across the board.” I’d describe that as an anti-woke nanny state, not a state that values and protects freedom.

[Yascha Mounk: How to save academic freedom from Ron DeSantis]

Neither my freedom nor yours requires the state to protect us from an entertainment company urging the state legislature to repeal a bill, or a beer company putting a trans influencer on a can, or whatever else DeSantis regards as a pathology. Indeed, we remain free in part because the First Amendment prevents the state from engaging in that sort of viewpoint discrimination.

In Charleston last week, DeSantis questioned the legitimacy of seeking change through civil society rather than elected legislatures, a practice that is inextricable from life in a liberal democracy. According to DeSantis, the “constitutional” way to change policy is, “You run elections and you can put people [in office] to influence policy.” Woke companies, in contrast, “know their policies would never be able to pass muster at the ballot box. So what they’re trying to do is an end run around the constitutional system, use their economic power to impose these policies outside the normal system,” with no electoral recourse. “If you want to preserve freedom in this country,” he said, “we need to be fighting back against woke capital.”

But working for cultural change through nongovernmental institutions and associations is not an end run around the constitutional system––the Constitution explicitly protects our ability to associate with whomever we like and to speak collectively on behalf of or against any policy or practice, whether as Disney or Hobby Lobby, the ACLU or the NRA, Dylan Mulvaney or Matt Walsh. In our constitutional system, politicians who don’t like that cannot lawfully do anything about it.

DeSantis is not alone among governors in transgressing such boundaries. For example, as David French complained last month in his New York Times column, ​​”Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the State of California would not renew a multimillion-dollar contract with Walgreens—not because Walgreens had failed to comply with its contractual obligations but rather because it had responded to Republican legal warnings and decided not to dispense an abortion pill in 21 red states. Newsom used his political power to punish a corporate position he opposed.”

What’s more, denying that corporations have free-speech rights to influence the political process was coded as progressive until very recently. Much of the left was apoplectic in 2010 when the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have the same First Amendment rights that individuals do and that “there is simply no support for the view that the First Amendment, as originally understood, would permit the suppression of political speech by media corporations.” Regardless, that is the law of the land. In spite of it, DeSantis and his allies are treating opposition to their agenda as if it legitimates punishment. In doing so, they betray a dearth of confidence in their supposed conviction that we’re best off with freedom and shrink any faith I had in their willingness to respect mine.

Amid "rainbow washing" and "counter marches," drag queen Le Horla writes about what the return of Tokyo Rainbow Pride means to them.

Japan is alone among the G7 wealthy democracies in not having laws to ban discrimination against LGBTQ people or give legal recognition to same-sex unions.

Latest comments suggest president is trying to tone down proposed anti-homosexuality law, one of the world's toughest.

By almost any historic yardstick, President Joe Biden is beginning the reelection campaign he formally announced today in a vulnerable position.

His job-approval rating has consistently come in at 45 percent or less; in several recent high-quality national polls, it has dipped closer to 40 percent. In surveys, three-fourths or more of Americans routinely express dissatisfaction with the economy. And a majority of adults have repeatedly said that they do not want him to seek a second term; that figure rose to 70 percent (including just more than half of Democrats) in a national NBC poll released last weekend.

Those are the sort of numbers that have spelled doom for many an incumbent president. “Compared to other presidents, Biden’s approval is pretty low [about] a year and a half from Election Day,” says Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, in Atlanta. “It’s not where you want to be, for sure.”

[David A. Graham: Biden’s in]

And yet despite Biden’s persistently subpar public reviews, there’s no sense of panic in the Democratic Party about his prospects. No serious candidate has emerged to challenge him for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination. No elected leaders have called on him to step aside. And though some top Democratic operatives have privately expressed concern about Biden’s weak standing in polls, almost every party strategist I spoke with leading up to his announcement said they consider him the favorite for reelection.

There are many reasons for this gap between the dominant views about Biden’s immediate position and his eventual prospects in the 2024 race. But the most important reason is encapsulated in the saying from Biden’s father that he often quotes in speeches: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.” Most Democrats remain cautiously optimistic that whatever concerns Americans might hold about the state of the economy and Biden’s performance or his age, a majority of voters will refuse to entrust the White House to Donald Trump or another Republican nominee in his image, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

“I think there’s no question that neither Trump nor Biden are where they want to be, but … if you project forward, it’s just easier to see a path for victory for Biden than for Trump or DeSantis,” says the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who was one of the few analysts in either party to question the projections of a sweeping red wave last November.

Rosenberg is quick to caution that in a country as closely split as the U.S. is now, any advantage for Biden is hardly insurmountable. Not many states qualify as true swing states within reach for both sides next year. And those states themselves are so closely balanced that minuscule shifts in preferences or turnout among almost any constituency could determine the outcome.

The result is that control over the direction for a nation of 330 million people could literally come down to a handful of neighborhoods in a tiny number of states—white-collar suburbs of Detroit, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Atlanta; faded factory towns in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; working-class Latino neighborhoods in Las Vegas; and small-town communities across Georgia’s Black Belt. “Never have so few people had such a big impact in deciding the future of American politics,” Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser for Bill Clinton, told me.

On an evenly matched battlefield, neither side can rest too comfortably about its prospects in the 2024 election. But after Trump’s upset victory in 2016, Republicans have mostly faced disappointing results in the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022. Across those campaigns, a powerful coalition of voters—particularly young people, college-educated white voters, those who don’t identify with any organized religion, and people of color, mostly located in large metropolitan centers—have poured out in huge numbers to oppose the conservative cultural and social vision animating the Trump-era Republican Party. Many of those voters may be unenthusiastic about Biden, but they have demonstrated that they are passionate about keeping Trump and other Republicans from controlling the White House and potentially imposing their restrictive agenda nationwide. Biden previewed how he will try to stir those passions in his announcement video Tuesday: Far more than most of his speeches, which typically emphasize kitchen-table economics, the video centers on portraying “MAGA extremists” as a threat to democracy and “bedrock freedoms” through restrictions on abortion, book bans, and rollbacks of LGBTQ rights.

“The fear of MAGA has been the most powerful force in American politics since 2018, and it remains the most powerful force,” Rosenberg told me. “It’s why Democrats did so much better than the fundamentals [of public attitudes about Biden and the economy] in 2022, and that will be the case again this time.”

After the Democrats’ unexpectedly competitive showing in the midterm election, Biden’s approval rating ticked up. But in national polls it has sagged again. Recent surveys by The Wall Street Journal, NBC, and CNBC each put Biden’s approval rating at 42 percent or less.

Sosnik said the pivotal period for Biden is coming this fall. Historically, he told me, voter assessments of an incumbent president’s performance have hardened between the fall of their third year in office and the late spring of their fourth. The key, he said, is not a president’s absolute level of approval in that period but its trajectory: Approval ratings for Ronald Reagan, Clinton, and Barack Obama, each of whom won reelection, were all clearly rising by early in their fourth year. By contrast, the approval ratings over that period fell for George H. W. Bush and remained stagnant for Trump. Each lost their reelection bid. Economists and pollsters say voters tend to finalize their views about the economy over roughly the same period and once again tend to put less weight on the absolute level of conditions such as inflation and unemployment than on whether those conditions are improving or deteriorating.

With that crucial window approaching, Biden will benefit if inflation continues to moderate as it has over the past several months. He also could profit from more time for voters to feel the effects of the massive wave of public and private investment triggered by his trio of major legislative accomplishments: the bipartisan infrastructure and semiconductor bills, and the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act.

[Read: Biden’s blue-collar jobs bet]

But Biden also faces the risk that the economy could tip into recession later this year, which some forecasters, such as Larry Summers, the former Clinton Treasury Secretary who predicted the inflationary surge, still consider likely.

If a recession does come, the best scenario for Biden is that it’s short and shallow and further tamps down inflation before giving way to an economic recovery early in 2024. But even that relatively benign outcome would make it difficult for him to attract more supporters in the period through next spring when voters traditionally have solidified their verdicts on a president’s performance.

That means that, to win reelection, Biden likely will need to win an unusually large share of voters who are at least somewhat unhappy over conditions in the country and ambivalent or worse about giving him another term. Historically that hasn’t been easy for presidents.

For those who think Biden can break that pattern, last November’s midterm election offers the proof of concept. Exit polls at the time showed that a solid 55 percent majority of voters nationwide disapproved of Biden’s job performance and that three-fourths of voters considered the economy in only fair or poor shape. Traditionally such attitudes have meant disaster for the party holding the White House. And yet, Democrats minimized the GOP gains in the House, maintained control of the Senate, and won governorships in most of the key swing states on the ballot.

In 2022, the exit polls showed that Democrats, as the party holding the White House, were routed among voters with intensely negative views about conditions. That was typical for midterm elections. But Democrats defused the expected “red wave” by winning a large number of voters who were more mildly disappointed in Biden’s performance and/or the economy.

For instance, with Trump in the White House during the 2018 midterms, Republicans won only about one in six voters in House elections who described the economy as “not so good,” according to exit polls; in 2020, Trump, as the incumbent president, carried only a little more than one-fifth of them. But in 2022, Democrats won more than three-fifths of voters who expressed that mildly negative view of the economy.

Similarly, in the 2010 midterm elections, according to exit polls, two-thirds of voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Obama’s performance as president voted against Democrats running for the House; almost two-thirds of the voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Trump likewise voted against Republicans in 2018. But in 2022, the exit polls found that Democrats surprisingly carried almost half of the voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden.

The same pattern persisted across many of the key swing states likely to decide the 2024 presidential race: Democrats won the governors’ contests in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and Senate races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, even though the exit polls found a majority of voters in each state said they disapproved of Biden’s performance. Winning Democratic gubernatorial candidates such as Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, and Katie Hobbs in Arizona each carried at least 70 percent of voters who described the economy as “not so good.”

Why did Democrats so exceed the usual performance among voters dissatisfied with the country’s direction? The answer is that many of those voters rejected the Republican Party that Trump has reshaped in his image. The exit polls found that Trump was viewed even more unfavorably than Biden in several of the swing states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And nationally, more than two-fifths of voters who expressed negative views about the economy also said they considered the GOP “too extreme.” Particularly on social issues such as abortion rights and gun control, the 2022 results demonstrated that “Trump and these other Republicans have painted themselves into a corner in order to appeal to their base,” Abramowitz told me.

Biden may expand his support by next year, especially in the battleground states, if economic conditions improve or simply because he may soon start spending heavily on television advertising touting his achievements, such as new plant openings. But more important than changing minds may be his ability to replicate the Democrats’ success in 2022 at winning voters who aren’t wild about him but dislike Trump and the GOP even more. “While there are not an overwhelming number of people who are tremendously favorable to Biden, I just don’t think there is an overwhelming number of persuadable people who hate him,” says Tad Devine, a long-time Democratic strategist. “They hate the other guy.”

Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA, told me that dynamic would likely prove powerful for many voters. Even Democratic-leaning voters who say they don’t want Biden to run again, she predicted, are highly likely to line up behind him once the alternative is a Republican nominee whose values clash with their own. “The bottom line is that on Election Day, that Democratic nominee, even the one they didn’t want to run again, is going to be closer to most people’s vision of the world they want to live in than the Republican alternative,” she said.

In both parties, many analysts agree that in a Biden-Trump rematch, the election would probably revolve less around assessments of Biden’s performance than the stark question of whether voters are willing to return Trump to power after the January 6 insurrection and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “President Biden by every conventional standard is a remarkably weak candidate for reelection,” the longtime Republican pollster Bill McInturff told me in an email. But “Biden’s greatest strength,” McInturff continued, may be the chance to run again against Trump, who “is so terrific at sucking up all the political oxygen, he becomes the issue on which the election gets framed, not the terrible economy or the level of Americans’ dissatisfaction with the direction of the country.”

On both sides, there’s greater uncertainty about whether DeSantis could more effectively exploit voters’ hesitation about Biden. Many Democrats and even some Republicans believe that DeSantis has leaned so hard into emulating, and even exceeding, Trump’s culture-war agenda that the Florida governor has left himself little chance of recapturing the white-collar suburban voters who have keyed the Democratic recovery since 2018. But others believe that DeSantis could get a second look from those voters if he wins the nomination, because he would be introduced to them largely by beating Trump. Although Devine told me, “I do not see a path to the presidency in the general election for Donald Trump,” he said that “if DeSantis were to be able to get rid of Trump and get the credit for getting rid of Trump…I think it’s fundamentally different.”

One thing unlikely to change, whomever Republicans nominate, is how few states, or voters, will effectively decide the outcome. Twenty-five states voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and the strategists planning the Biden campaign see a realistic chance to contest only North Carolina among them. Republicans hope to contest more of the 25 states that voted for Biden, but after the decisive Democratic victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2022, it’s unclear whether either is within reach for the GOP next year. The states entirely up for grabs might be limited to just four that Biden carried last time: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin. And as the decisive liberal win in the recent state-supreme-court election in Wisconsin showed, winning even that state, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, may be an uphill battle for any Republican presidential nominee viewed as a threat to abortion rights.

[Read: The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment]

In their recent book, The Bitter End, Vavreck and her co-authors, John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch, describe hardening loyalties and a shrinking battlefield as a form of electoral “calcification.” That process has left the country divided almost in half between two durable but divergent coalitions with antithetical visions of America’s future. “We are fighting at the margins again,” Vavreck told me. “The 2020 election was nearly a replica of 2016, and I think that largely this 2024 election is going to be a repeat of 2020 and 2016.” Whatever judgment voters ultimately reach about Biden’s effectiveness, or his capacity to handle the job in his 80s, this sorting process virtually guarantees another polarized and precarious election next year that turns on a small number of voters in a small number of states.

One of Asia’s largest LGBTQ events, the event comes at a pivotal moment for Japan's LGBTQ community.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What is a position that you hold––or a question that you have––about any issue related to gender identity, transgender rights, gender medicine, or any of the associated cultural debates? Also welcome: reflections on relevant personal experiences, especially from trans readers.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

I’ll go first. Trans people have rights to liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and equality under the law, same as anyone else, and ought to be treated with respect and dignity––and although those baseline convictions would preclude the passage of various laws that some anti-trans bigots favor, they don’t resolve most issues Americans are debating, a debate that is more extreme than it would be if liberal discourse norms prevailed.

Even in the best circumstances, it would be challenging to join in as passionate partisans contest questions like “How ought we to understand sex, gender, and gender identity?”; “What, if anything, should the curricula at public schools say on these subjects?”; “What’s the best way to help a child who is experiencing gender dysphoria?”; “How should sports leagues be organized with respect to sex and gender?” (a subject that is now being taken up in Congress at the behest of Republicans).  

But our circumstances are not the best.

Observing the country’s major divides on gender and transgenderism, I see an issue that is as disorienting for participants and observers as any that our society confronts. Antagonists who inhabit different epistemic universes do battle each week on the internet, and merely understanding the most common perspectives can be burdensome. (If you set aside enough time to listen to this seven-episode podcast series from The Free Press and this nearly two-hour review of it on the ContraPoints YouTube channel, you’ll come away decently informed––not on all trans issues, but on the competing perspectives about how to understand the place of one author, J. K. Rowling, in the larger debate.)

Many Americans who observe the overall tenor of these online conversations are reluctant or even terrified to participate––to ask honest questions, to hazard tentative opinions, to try out arguments––because culture warriors on all sides of the issue police ever-changing taboos. Some are difficult for even the very-online to understand. For example, if a person were to say, “Sex is determined by one’s biology, while gender is a social construct,” would that be consistent with conventional wisdom, or seen as fighting words, or offensive to the left or the right, or somehow, all of the above? To merely ask others to clarify their views is to risk being castigated for “just asking questions”––internet vernacular for accusing others of bad faith that manages to stigmatize curiosity-driven dialogue––if not to be labeled as transphobic from one faction and “a groomer” from another. Little wonder that many decline to talk about the subject at all.

In theory, academic institutions are supposed to excel at truth-seeking by virtue of values and practices that prioritize it, even when the public square is full of venom or passionate intensity. But advocating for the widely held, if controversial, view that biological sex matters in gender-segregated sports recently got a woman mobbed on one California campus. To perform drag is to risk having one’s First Amendment rights violated, as happened at a Texas university last month.

Alex Byrne, a philosophy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, laments obstacles to publishing scholarship on gender, recounting his own experience probing and positing precise definitions of women; rather than seeing the importance of viewpoint diversity for truth-seeking, he argues, some in the field aggressively chill free inquiry. Underscoring his point about ascendant taboos, a Quillette article—an attempt to set forth competing gender paradigms—was published pseudonymously by the professor who authored it. And Jesse Singal––whose work I’ve found to be consistently humane, rigorous, and unjustly maligned, even after carefully reviewing the complaints of critics who lambast him and his journalism, and who may dismiss my viewpoint merely because of our divergent evaluations of his work––ably documents troubling flaws in youth gender-medicine research. It is hard to make sense of the world when our centers of sensemaking are compromised.

Red-State Gender Politics

In a recent segment, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes characterized recent legislative pushes this way:

In March of 2023, in the last few weeks, Kentucky, Idaho, Georgia, Utah, Tennessee, Wyoming, have all passed, signed and enacted laws that outlaw drag performance, that restrict bathroom access, that restrict youth participation in athletics for trans folks, trans health care.

I mean, this has been the number one priority, I think it’s fair to say. Republican state legislators around the country, keep in mind these Republican legislators, you know, their sessions started let’s say in January. So the first thing they did more or less in a lot of these states, we’re three months in, is go after trans youth sports participation; the bathrooms that trans folks can and can’t use; drag performance; and, most crucially, trans health care.

This is a four-alarm fire. It is a complete crisis. And I think it’s an outrage, and it’s despicable. And it’s an insult to the full dignity that equal citizens in our great nation are entitled to. Whatever their lives are; whatever their gender status is … it’s an offense against the basic pluralistic values that I hold dear, and I hope we all hold dear.

He spoke with Chase Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice with ACLU's LGBT and HIV Project, who added:

I litigate cases on behalf of trans litigants. I lobby in-state legislatures over the anti-trans bills that we’re seeing around the country. And then I live as a trans person with communities of trans people. So on every level, I feel like I’m sort of taking in the realities of what’s happening to trans communities at this moment.

I would say that in the legislative context, we are at a catastrophic point in terms [of] what we’re seeing: the volume of bills attacking the community, the subject of the bills attacking the community, and the pace at which [they’re] moving through state legislatures and being enacted into law.

A New York Times article about the same legislative push characterized it as follows: “Defeated on same-sex marriage, the religious right went searching for an issue that would re-energize supporters and donors. The campaign that followed has stunned political leaders across the spectrum.” In National Review, Madeleine Kearns counters that progressives initiated this front in the culture war, while The Economist editorializes that “the evidence to support medicalised gender transitions in adolescents is worryingly weak.” Citing that article, Judson Berger argues in National Review that conservatives can justly claim to be protecting trans kids by restricting such care, even as many LGBTQ activists insist that this same course will lead to harms including trans suicides. Like I said: the debate unfolds among participants who inhabit different epistemic universes.

Much Ado About Beer Cans

Then there’s a catastrophizing impulse among people who seem to have lost all sense of perspective. Did you hear Kid Rock was shooting his gun at Bud Light cans? At Vox, Emily Stewart explains how that improbably relates to the culture war over transgenderism:

In early April, Bud Light sent an influencer named Dylan Mulvaney a handful of beers. Mulvaney, in turn, posted a video of herself dressed like Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, using said beers to celebrate both March Madness and her first year of womanhood. One of the cans featured her image. It was part of a paid sponsorship deal and promotion for some sort of sweepstakes challenge where people can win $15,000 from Bud Light by sending in videos of themselves carrying a lot of beers.

This made some people very mad, and not because Holly Golightly wasn’t really a beer gal (her preference was the White Angel, a boozy mix of vodka and gin, which, whew). Instead, they were upset because Mulvaney is transgender.

Trans issues are currently front and center in America’s culture war. Anti-trans sentiment is sweeping many corners of the right, targeting children, drag shows, driver’s licenses, and health care, among other areas. It’s showing up in conservative media and conservative legislation and even working itself into the mainstream.

Now, Bud Light has found itself in the eye of the anti-trans storm. Kid Rock is shooting cans of the beer, and Travis Tritt says he’s banning the brand from his tour. Many on the right are calling for a boycott of the bestselling beer in the country. If this all sounds ludicrous, it’s because it kind of is.

One can find more sympathetic appraisals of the anti-Budweiser backlash. In National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke argues that when brands like Bud Light say they’re aiming to be more inclusive, as a marketing VP did in an interview that went viral during the backlash to the Mulvaney can, they aren’t using that word as most people understand it. In his telling, they’re actually using it in a way that includes only groups that are coded as culturally progressive, never groups that are coded as culturally conservative.

He writes:

I am not a habitual drinker of Bud Light, but, from my limited experience with the product, I can tell you that “uninclusive” is among the last terms that I would have used to describe it. Bud Light is the Amazon Basics of bad beer. I have drunk it on hunting trips with friends who have Second Amendment tattoos, and on the beach with friends who are gay. I’ve drunk it with Protestants and Catholics and Jews and Hindus. I’ve drunk it at football games, at baseball games, at NASCAR, and at concerts. I’ve drunk it with black friends, with Hispanic friends, and with white friends of both sexes. When Heinerscheid says that she wants Bud Light to be more “inclusive,” I must ask what that actually means? Putting the pope on Bud Light cans would be “inclusive.” Putting homeschooling parents on the cans would be “inclusive.” Putting feminists who find Dylan Mulvaney’s act infuriating on the cans would be “inclusive.” Hell, putting Old Order Amish people on the cans would be “inclusive.”

To me, regardless of the merits, getting excited or upset by the Bud Light marketing department is a fool’s errand, but in 2023 public discourse, there’s even a backlash to the backlash.

In The Advocate, John Casey writes:

Rather than come to the defense of a transgender woman, rather than defend a noble campaign that sought to reflect acceptance, and rather than let the campaign with Mulvaney speak for itself, Budweiser poured alcohol all over an extremist’s fire, and that will continue to singe our community.

Maybe the worst thing Budweiser did was leave Mulvaney all alone, twisting in the wind, abandoning any kind of defense of her. That is an utterly repugnant reflection of the brand.

Anheuser-Busch, weakly, did not stand up against hate. And while boycotts don’t work, they do make a statement. It’s not Kid Rock and Ted Nugent that should be boycotting Budweiser—it should be us.

Unless Bud has changed its formula, even pouring it over a fire would be of no great consequence.  

Plastics

In The Nation, Nanjala Nyabola inveighs against the material and the economic system that produced it:

Plastics are some of the most useful materials ever invented, and they are killing the planet.

Plastic is everywhere, and it perfectly encapsulates the notion that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Whether you are reading this on your phone or on your computer, you are handling the material. If you brushed your teeth this morning, odds are both your toothbrush and toothpaste contained plastic. Almost all artificial fabrics are made from plastic or its derivatives, including those presented as ethical alternatives like many kinds of vegan leather. If you are a person who menstruates, it is probably in the materials that you are using to manage that. That durability and malleability at relatively low prices is precisely what makes it dangerous to the natural environment. We consume it unthinkingly and in absurd volumes because the cost of accessing it is so low—yet it can last in the environment for hundreds of years.

The problem of plastic encapsulates everything that is wrong with whatever international order exists today. We miscalculate its balance sheet of utility because we don’t account properly for harms that cannot be easily measured in money. Decisions that look cheap on the surface look a lot different if we used a longer time horizon or stopped assuming that the planet has an infinite capacity to absorb human excess. Regions that are the most responsible for causing the problem are working hard to reallocate its consequences to other parts of the world. There would perhaps be greater cooperation if there weren’t deliberate choices taken to keep people oblivious to the scale of the problem. Companies happily brand materials like single-use water bottles as recyclable, knowing that even the most efficient recycling system cannot keep up with the rate at which they are consumed.

Although I share the author’s concerns about plastic in particular, and our general ability to consider all the negative externalities of our actions, I do not believe those problems are unique to capitalism––a point most persuasively illustrated by reading up on similar problems in noncapitalist systems.

Art, Morality, and Beauty

At The Atlantic, Judith Shulevitz argues that it’s okay to like complicated art by problematic artists:

We’re at the point when we could use a little more of the art-for-art’s-sake spirit; could let ourselves luxuriate in sensuality, beauty, and form; should offer more resistance to the pressure to find and deliver socially useful messages. I look back with a certain chagrin at how, as a young critic, I delighted in bucking my high-minded education by hunting down traces of a writer’s mixed motives, bad faith, petty and not so petty obfuscations in his writing. I took hubristic pride in my gotcha criticism and my eagle eye. But what used to feel subversive now feels like an imperative: Either scan the text for signs of immorality or be suspected of reactionary tendencies. You were hoping for aesthetic transport? Back to the consciousness-raising session with you!

She concludes with a warning from Oscar Wilde about the consequences of a world where morality somehow triumphs over art: “Art will become sterile, and Beauty will pass away from the land.”

Provocation of the Week

Gerard Baker, editor at large of The Wall Street Journal, praises anti-discrimination while denouncing a new aristocracy of elite progressive manners that he perceives as newly ascendant:

The past 50 years have been marked by the genuine eradication of barriers to opportunity for the underprivileged regardless of ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation or anything else. This is how we were genuinely starting to fulfill the promise of equality. But the cultural revolution that began in the past decade is re-erecting those barriers and creating new elite power structures, elevated not by talent or hard work, but, curiously, by membership of the self-approved class, signaled by the right luxury beliefs and articulated by the right “inclusive” language.

Adrian Wooldridge, who has written a book on the rise of meritocracy, frames this in a recent article in the Spectator. The left, he says, is “creating a new social order based on virtue, rather than ability.”

Bear with me because I am going to extrapolate from these baneful developments to a much larger worry about the geopolitical conditions we confront. As we survey the competition between global civilizations in the multipolar world we now inhabit, we see that the West is challenged as it hasn’t been in centuries. It’s axiomatic that a rising China and perhaps other powers look like formidable contenders for global leadership—with implications for our own security and prosperity.

But if we are losing that struggle, it isn’t because of the superiority of authoritarian, communist or autocratic systems. We know that liberal capitalism has done more for human prosperity, health and freedom than any other economic or political system.

If we are losing, it is because we are losing our soul, our sense of purpose as a society, our identity as a civilization. We in the West are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood, embraces societal self-loathing and enforces it all in a web of exclusionary and authoritarian rules, large and small.

That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

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After three years of muted celebrations, Tokyo's main LGBTQ party hopes to roar back to life with an in-person, public event.

After three years of muted celebrations, Tokyo's main LGBTQ party hopes to roar back to life with an in-person, public event.

The woman came to Japan in 2020 after claiming she was beaten by police in Uganda for being a lesbian.