And a Child Shall Mislead Them - Arch-"skeptic" Penn Jillette: the latest -- and most ironic -- convert to Troonism

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And a Child Shall Mislead Them

David Cole
October 19, 2021
And a Child Shall Mislead Them

photo credit: Gage Skidmore
Penn Jillette


This week, we take a focused look at how the West’s most destructive superstition can grip the mind of even the most strident “rationalist,” and what that means for those of us who don’t partake in the séance.

Penn Jillette, the tall half of the hugely successful magician duo Penn & Teller, is one of the entertainment industry’s most outspoken atheists. For decades, Jillette has smugly condemned all manner of religious, psychic, and pseudoscientific irrationality. He also has a fan base on the right, because as a self-described libertarian, Jillette’s often mused about how “taxation is theft” and government compulsion is bad.

Penn Jillette: a man with no gods, including government. A man who falls for no (to use the title of his Showtime series) “bullshit.”
Then his teenage daughter decided that she’s a man. And the world witnessed how quickly the “smug” vanishes from the rationalist when the bullshit hits too close to home.
About a year or so ago, Jillette’s daughter, Moxie Crimefighter (yes, that’s her name), decided that she’d been “assigned the wrong sex at birth.” And she demanded that her parents no longer use female pronouns for her, like, ever.

Back in 2014, Jillette bragged on his podcast about how he’d raised Moxie to “laugh at God.”

There’s an old saying I just coined: “When you laugh at God, He laughs back and best.” Because now Jillette—Mr. “no pseudoscience,” Mr. “no cults or flimflam”—has become the spokesperson for the biggest pseudoscientific cultlike flimflam of the 21st century. The guy who’s spent a career deconstructing magic (“no, the bouquet of flowers didn’t actually become a rabbit; it was sleight of hand”) is now a true believer that a girl can actually become a boy overnight, by the sheer power of mentalism!

Abracagender!

In theory, none of this is our concern. What transpires in the Jillette household is solely the business of the Jillettes.

But Penn makes it our business.

As part of Jillette’s conversion to spiritualist, he’s publicly renounced his libertarianism (on CNN, no less!), he’s embraced burdensome government, and he’s thrown his support full-throttle behind Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom as they promote policies that strong-arm us to “see” Jillette’s spooks and spirits (Newsom in particular is arguably the most “compulsory” politico in the country when it comes to forcing people to accept tranny theology). Jillette supports politicians who want to force girls to shower, change, and go to the bathroom alongside biological boys. Those same politicians have eliminated cervical cancer smear test outreaches to women (because it’s a hate crime to say that only women have a cervix), and the Mayo Clinic—joining the madness—has scrubbed its cervical cancer awareness page of any mention of women.

“This is cultlike behavior; there’s no other way to put it.”

To be clear, women will die from the elimination of targeted cervical cancer outreach, and girls will be, and have been, raped by boys playing tranny to infiltrate the girls’ bathroom. Jillette used to be a campaigner against “psychic surgeon” frauds who endanger people by pretending to cure their disease, thus prompting them to neglect legitimate treatment. Yet now he supports politicians who put women at risk because of a belief system no less irrational than psychic healing.
Jillette’s also pledged to ban gender pronouns from his CW series Fool Us:

I have tried to eliminate all gender pronouns from our show. That’s very difficult for me, because I’m uneducated. I have that autodidact, irritating quality of reading old grammar books. So it’s very difficult for me to use third-person plural as third-person singular, but I’ve done it. I used to say he or she a lot, but I learned the binary gender thing was impolite and inconsiderate.

Dude’s apologizing for being erudite (he literally says being well versed in grammar means being “uneducated”).

Jillette’s also stopped using the term “female magicians” in favor of “people who self-identify as women in magic” (that’s not even remotely cumbersome). And most batshit of all, he supports the use of “gender-free playing cards,” in which king, queen, and jack are replaced by “gold, silver, and bronze.” It’s not even clear to me why a tranny would be disturbed by a face card; if boys who think they’re girls really are girls, and if girls who think they’re boys really are boys, then what’s offensive about seeing a female queen and a male king? They can identify with whichever one they feel like that day.

Yet Jillette asks no such questions (the “man of logic” is long gone). It’s not possible to overstate the magnitude of the “genderless deck” thing. Here’s a fella who’s devoted his life to magic, not just as a practitioner, but a historian. And yet he favors altering something that’s not only fundamental to his field but historical.
This is cultlike behavior; there’s no other way to put it. He’s obviously a loving father, but in his desire to support his daughter, he’s undergone a personality change. That’s not being a supportive dad; that’s being brainwashed.

Jillette’s podcast, titled Sunday School to mock Christians, has ironically become an actual pulpit, a place where he can preach tranny theology and flagellate himself as a sinner. “Our dinner table conversation is I would say at least one-quarter correcting pronouns,” Jillette revealed on a recent episode, castigating himself for still occasionally calling Moxie “she.” When his cohost responded, “Well, at least it sounds like your children respect the effort,” Jillette, reproaching himself for his failures, bitterly replied, “Maybe I should just do it fuckin’ right.”

Jillette also apologized for having trouble with the proper pronouns for Moxie’s friends, who “have they, him, her, and it and some of them change day by day.” That’s a startling admission (though Jillette’s too blind to understand why): How committed to the bit are these kids if they “change day by day”? It’s one thing to claim that a girl suddenly discovers the boy living within. That’s nutty enough.

But changing “day by day” suggests unseriousness. Yet Jillette supports authoritarian politicians who want to remake society based purely on the “day by day” whims of children.
It’s instructive to recall that six years ago I interviewed a trans activist I’d known since childhood, and I reminded her about a dear mutual friend who was almost raped in the girls’ bathroom at our school. The rape was interrupted by a teacher who saw the rapist enter and ran over to enforce the school’s “no boys in the girls’ room” policy. With boys now welcome in whatever bathroom they “identify” with, I asked the activist, “What’s going to stop assaults like the one our friend endured?”

Her response? “It’s not like suddenly a child is going to school all boy, masculine, maybe even in sports, and then comes to school in a dress declaring they are now a girl. When a child is trans, they know from the get-go. These are not just any boys who declare, ‘I’m a girl now!’”

I knew that answer was bullshit, and Jillette inadvertently confirms that with his “day by day” observation.

On another podcast episode, Jillette condemned Moxie’s grandma for “fucking up the pronouns,” and he called himself “stupid as soil samples” for committing similar infractions.
Tell me that’s not cultish. Cults are all about making you condemn yourself (for your old sinful ways), your family, and your profession. Cults are about forcing renunciation and rebirth. It’s what authors Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman call “snapping.”

Here’s an example of the extent to which Jillette has “snapped”:

In 2014, he was called out by a Muslim journalist for trolling the musician formerly known as Cat Stevens on Twitter, purposely using his “dead name” and not his Muslim name (Yusuf Islam). I’m no fan of Muslims, but to be fair the guy’s been Yusuf Islam since 1977, and Cat Stevens was a stage name anyway.

“Would be nice if you called him by the name he wants to be called,” journalist Shakeel Hashim tweeted to Jillette.

“I think it’s funny to use that name. I do not respect this decision in any way,” Jillette replied.

Jillette basically said, “I do not respect this person’s choice to change his name and identity. In fact, I find it funny.”

But that was back when Jillette was a “skeptic.” Before the cult got him. Indeed, I’d argue that the tranny cult is worse than any religious cult, because it lacks the concept of a loving God. There’s no hope of redemption; only the promise of more haranguing and correction.

As Conway and Siegelman point out, most people “snap” because an emotional weakness is exploited, or because something happens in their life that “disrupts continuity.” The tranny cult got to Jillette through his child, through his obvious love for her, and through the continuity break that occurred when the girl he raised declared she’s not a girl. That’s how they hooked an otherwise intelligent 66-year-old man. But the cult demands more than that he just accept and love his daughter; he needs to cleanse himself of disbelief, and he needs to back politicians who strive to cleanse us.

Many on the right tend to think that the tranny cult targets kids in order to estrange them from their families. And in many cases, that’s true. But as the Jillette example starkly illustrates, hooking the kids can be an effective way to hook the parents. Brainwashing can flow upstream. A loving parent (like Jillette) accepts pseudoscience (a person can think themselves into changing their biological sex). In accepting this as truth, it logically follows that those who disagree—those who see childish fad and body dysmorphia, not “assigned sex vs. willed sex”—are harmful to “trans” children. So they must be stopped.

And that’s how you pull off the magic trick of turning a cynical libertarian into a woke social justice true believer who supports politicians who use all manner of force and coercion in the name of enforcing tranny dogma.

Several weeks ago in a Twitter thread discussing my column (and hey, follow me on Twitter before I get banned!), I was reminded that in Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud observed that social pressure to avoid saying something can lead to people no longer thinking the thing they’re not supposed to say. In other words, the mind conforms to the boundaries. We simply stop thinking things we know we can’t speak aloud.

The self-washing brain.

Parents seeking to patronize a child immersed in tranny faddism will soon stop thinking what they’re not allowed to say. Privately harbored skepticism will vanish the longer it isn’t allowed to be verbalized. And soon enough, you have converts. Old knowledge of gender reality is lost, replaced by the cult’s redefinition.
On Fool Us, Penn & Teller award a trophy to any magician who can fool them.

Penn deserves the biggest trophy of all…the dude literally fooled himself.

An impressive achievement, and one that certainly excites those who wish to remake America…just as it depresses the remaining anti-cult holdouts who still cling to the term “rationalist” like it means something.
 
George Carlin wasnt aging into a leftist, he was aging into a nihilistic cynic. It's way off to think Carlin would embrace SJW; wokism is rank hypocrisy, which was one of Carlin's most frequent targets.
Carlin was a product of his time. Most of his stuff has aged like milk, and he wasn't versatile enough to come up with a new bit. His career would have followed Penn's, or Colbert's, or whoever's into the SJW lockstep, or it would have ended. Simple as.
 
For real. I re-watched a Carlin show just recently and it was pretty much all whining about white men and Christians. Seeing it from today's perspective just kills any and all enjoyment of it. Compare that to watching old Chris Rock, Chappelle or other well known edgy comedians and they still have me roaring with laughter because their jokes don't carry that undertone of whiny bitching.
 
Carlin was a product of his time. Most of his stuff has aged like milk, and he wasn't versatile enough to come up with a new bit. His career would have followed Penn's, or Colbert's, or whoever's into the SJW lockstep, or it would have ended. Simple as.
I think he would've just retired around the time when the SJW ascendancy started in earnest. Then returned after Charlottesville or 1/6 to go on some long rant about Trump and the evil white men who support him.
 
I think he would've just retired around the time when the SJW ascendancy started in earnest. Then returned after Charlottesville or 1/6 to go on some long rant about Trump and the evil white men who support him.
Don't know about that.
Since his early hippie days Carlin liked to feed on social justice bullshit and I really doubt he would have fucked off at any time.
Just to add, I would love nothing else than seeing what kind of freakout George would have had if he lived up to now. Some say he'd be a raging leftard like Penn or what's his face, but I think he'd go ultra alt right and eventually become an islamic jihadi.
 
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I think I can settle the issue about what position Carlin would have taken had he lived to the present day: Carlin would be yelling at all the "dumb anti-vaxxers" while wearing a BLM t-shirt.

Case in point, here he is whining about "White Fascist America":


George Carlin was a moderately eloquent basic-bitch grifter who pointed out surface-level capitalistic inconsistencies to midwit Boomers and Gen-Xers who believed these observations to be revolutionary.

He was only considered "controversial" because people like to pretend the Christian right had actual power then. They didn't, they just complained and got a bit of lip service openly, mockery through mouthpieces like Carlin, and otherwise ignored when actual policy came up. Christians were only marginally more powerful then than they are now. He was preaching to a self-congratulatory group of so-called rebels and Gen-X edgelords.

Carlin also proves he doesn't even know what Fascism is (like practically all people who decry it as being "evil" on both the left and the right) by agreeing with Bill Mayer's incorrect definition of the Fascist economic system of corporatism, disingenuously equating it with corporatocracy, which is just a form of supercapitalism.
 
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For real. I re-watched a Carlin show just recently and it was pretty much all whining about white men and Christians. Seeing it from today's perspective just kills any and all enjoyment of it. Compare that to watching old Chris Rock, Chappelle or other well known edgy comedians and they still have me roaring with laughter because their jokes don't carry that undertone of whiny bitching.
I watched a clip of an HBO special of his from 2005 on YouTube not too long ago and he came off as incredibly and bitter and cynical in a way that mostly came off as incredibly dated, he ranted about how much he hated shopping malls, but who doesn't look at modern ghost town malls and miss when they were busy and well populated? At least it gave people an excuse to go out of their house, he got his wish and malls are dead but I wouldn't call that an improvement on things.

He also ranted about fat people in a way that was pretty funny because it was so genuinely hateful, would really piss people off today, but overall his attitude was that life was miserable and America was terrible circa 2005, the dude literally hadn't seen anything yet.

He never got to be put in a position where his values and morals would truly be tested due to him dying before everything turned to shit.
And he died the year things started to go to shit, the year 2008, with the election of Obama, the Great Recession and the start of the feminization of pop culture with Twilight.
 
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