• arotrios@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Regardless of her credentials, this was clearly written to cast Newsom in the worst possible light. The article is rife with hyperbole and only targets selected statements in the transcript.

    And it’s absolutely misleading to say someone “completely aligns” with someone on an over-arching concept like trans rights when they agree with one subset of the argument.

    It was this statement in particular that changed the tone from an opinion piece to a hit piece IMHO:

    When Newsom platforms someone like Charlie Kirk, he isn’t fostering a “discussion” on transgender people in sports—he is handing a known hate monger a microphone to denigrate an already vulnerable community. That’s the real objective. Newsom isn’t engaging in open dialogue or debate; he is recalibrating his political stance to make targeting transgender people seem palatable, selling that shift to his base as a strategic necessity. And he’s doing it by giving one of the most notorious anti-LGBTQ+ extremists a seat at the table.

    Emphasis mine. Here the author makes the claim that Newsom is deliberately targeting transgender people to score political points - yet he’s not. In the interview, Kirk brought those topics up, and when they came up, Newsom was describing the political landscape, not justifying it.

    I mean, hell, go ahead and call Newsom out for the dumb shit he does (and this shit was not bright), but forcing a purity test on the man who made gay marriage legal is counterproductive. Claiming that he’s deliberately trying to target transgender folk is just plain false.