From Matt Taibbi‘s “What is a Woman? Should Be Reviewed More, For One Thing,” posted on 6.8. The subtitle reads “Matt Walsh pranks the pants off America’s silliest intellectuals, and the sad thing is, it wasn’t hard at all.”
Excerpt #1: “The message of What Is A Woman? is not only are there no simple answers to the questions and reservations felt by millions about ‘gender affirmation’ (including huge numbers of Democrats, as polls in places like Florida show), but the movie shows academic after academic and activist after activist seething at the mere implication that they should have to explain themselves. Their attitude is positively medieval: ‘We keep the Bible in Latin for a reason!”
“They invent new nomenclature almost daily (making a priesthood of interpreting academics central to the new religion). The problem is to the uninformed, all the ‘simple truths’ seem to run in the other direction, like that it sure doesn’t look like fair competition when swimmer Lia Thomas massacres pools full of assigned-at-birth-girls.
“If you’ve been on Twitter you’ve seen it, but in the movie there’s a real interview with a real professor who goes ape when Walsh invokes the word truth, which ‘sounds transphobic’ to Herr professor:
This was perhaps the most utterly insane scene of the entire documentary, hands down… @MattWalshBlog pic.twitter.com/qF9MXvsmtv
— Kyle J. Maxwell (@khendriix_) June 2, 2022
“It’s as if these interview subjects believe winning over people who don’t already agree with them is not only not important, but offensive and beneath them. Certainly the subjects in What is a Woman? go out of their way to dismiss as utterly insignificant those who don’t share their worldview.
“When Walsh interviews gynecologist Dr. Marci Bowers, he begins by asking, ‘The critics on the other side of this issue…’ He has to pause, because Bowers recoils in exaggerated fashion, shaking her head like a person waked by revolting smelling salts.
“’There aren’t many,’ she scoffs. ‘But go ahead.’
“’There aren’t many who would disagree with what you’re saying?’
“’Well, the dinosaurs of the world are certainly out there.’
Excerpt #2: “It’ll be easy enough for mainstream critics to ignore this film, and they will. In a democracy, though, at some point you have to answer the population’s questions in a way that makes sense to them. Otherwise, they will flock to the first person who does offer a comprehensible answer.
“I saw this [syndrome] with the financial crisis, where candidates like Hillary Clinton tried incomprehensibly to blame 2008 on ‘shadow banking,’ offenders who by an extraordinary coincidence didn’t overlap with any of the roughly ten million financial institutions who’d paid her millions in speaking fees. The public had dealt with banks firsthand and didn’t buy it, believing Donald Trump more when he pointed the finger at firms like Goldman, Sachs.
“Ignoring popular discontent or confusion on principle isn’t a strategy that can ever work, for any political movement. Walsh’s movie exposes this, and give him credit — he got the people inclined to hate him the most to make his arguments for him.”
