What are the policy positions of Gays Against Groomers? Many people won’t know because corporate media on the left (I checked the NYT and WaPo) refuse to mention the organization. I recently asked someone who considers herself to be on the political left. She cringed and responded by saying that it sounds like a Republican or conservative group and that there is no grooming going on in America’s schools.
That seems like an answer to the question, but it isn’t. What just happened is subtle, but it is critically important. The person I was talking to completely failed to answer my question. Her answer illustrates Daniel Kahneman’s principle of “substitution,” which he discussed at length in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011).
[W]hen faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.
(p. 12).
In my experience, this is a go-to technique in the culture war conversations. Quite often, when people are asked factual questions about a person or organization they don’t like (or they assume they don’t like), they will substitute an easy question for the more difficult question of detailing the facts. The substituted easy question will often be something like “Do you like this person/organization,” even though that was clearly not the question asked. As Kahneman describes, the new simple question will be unconsciously inserted. With the new simple question substituted in, the answer is also simple. In culture war discussions, it often takes the form of an ad hominem attack. Consider this example:
Q: “What are the policy position of [a particular person/group]?”
This is a factual question that should either be “I don’t know” or it should be a listing of the policy positions of the person/group. If the is about an organization and the answer is anything other than “I don’t know,” it should fairly track the “About Us” page of the website the person or organization.
However, the hard question is often unconsciously brushed to the side and a new easy question is inserted. In my example, if the person thinks they don’t like the person or organization, they could be expected to substitute in a new simple question like this:
“Do you like [the person or group] and what detrimental things can your emotionally generate (e.g., what deplorable person/affiliation/ad hominem label can you reflexively pull out) to express your emotions?”
For people politically on the Left, the answer will often be something like: “That [person/group] is like Hitler, Republicans, Satan, etc.
On this topic of Substitution, here is another excerpt from Kahneman book (p. 101):
The idea of substitution came up early in my work with Amos [Tversky], and it was the core of what became the heuristics and biases approach. We asked ourselves how people manage to make judgments of probability without knowing precisely what probability is. We concluded that people must somehow simplify that impossible task, and we set out to find how they do it. Our answer was that when called upon to judge probability, people actually judge something else and believe they have judged probability. System 1 often makes this move when faced with difficult target questions, if the an¬swer to a related and easier heuristic question comes readily to mind.
Consider the questions listed in the left-hand column of Table 1.
These are difficult questions, and before you can produce a reasoned answer to any of them you must deal with other difficult issues. What is the meaning of happiness? What are the likely political developments in the next six months? What are the standard sentences for other financial crimes? How strong is the competition that the candidate faces? What other environmental or other causes should be considered? Dealing with these questions seriously is completely impractical. But you are not limited to perfectly reasoned answers to questions. There is a heuristic alternative to careful reasoning, which sometimes works fairly well and sometimes leads to serious errors.
The mental shotgun makes it easy to generate quick answers to difficult questions without imposing much hard work on your lazy System 2. The right-hand counterpart of each of the left-hand questions is very likely to be evoked and very easily answered. Your feelings about dolphins and finan¬cial crooks, your current mood, your impressions of the political skill of the primary candidate, or the current standing of the president will readily come to mind. The heuristic questions provide an off-the-shelf answer to each of the difficult target questions.
Something is still missing from this story: the answers need to be fitted to the original questions. For example, my feelings about dying dolphins must be expressed in dollars. Another capability of System 1, intensity matching, is available to solve that problem. Recall that both feelings and contribution dollars are intensity scales. I can feel more or less strongly about dolphins and there is a contribution that matches the intensity of my feelings. The dollar amount that will come to my mind is the matching amount. Similar intensity matches are possible for all the questions. For ex-ample, the political skills of a candidate can range from pathetic to extraor¬dinarily impressive, and the scale of political success can range from the low of “She will be defeated in the primary” to a high of “She will someday be president of the United States.”
The automatic processes of the mental shotgun and intensity matching often make available one or more answers to easy questions that could be mapped onto the target question. On some occasions, substitution will occur and a heuristic answer will be endorsed by System 2. Of course, System 2 has the opportunity to reject this intuitive answer, or to modify it by incorpo¬rating other information. However, a lazy System 2 often follows the path of least effort and endorses a heuristic answer without much scrutiny of whether it is truly appropriate. You will not be stumped, you will not have to work very hard, and you may not even notice that you did not answer the question you were asked. Furthermore, you may not realize that the target question was difficult, because an intuitive answer to it came readily to mind.
So, wow, that was a long detour at the beginning of a post in which I was simply going to describe the policy positions of Gays Against Groomers. I got distracted, though, because Google decided that the actual website of Gays Against Groomers shouldn’t be the first suggested link when I search for “Gays Against Groomers.” Instead, it was the fifth link Google suggested, following three notably anti-GAG websites. Google’s algorithm is yet another bit of evidence that Google continues to work hard to protect all of us from GAG’s disinformation. The #1 hit is Wikipedia, which begins: “Gays Against Groomers is an American far-right and anti-LGBT organization.” Interesting that Wikipedia begins not by informing us what the organization is but how the authors feel about it. All of this is made more surreal in that GAG was indeed founded by gay people, yet it is described as “anti-LGBT.”
I wanted to set the record straight on the policy position of Gays Against Groomers because I recently encountered a speech by Jamie Michell, the founder of Gays Against Groomers and an introductory video. I agree with many of their concerns about children and I can fully understand why many gay people no longer want anything to do with LGBT(etc) or PRIDE events given the modern version of gender ideology. From this point, I’ll let GAG speak for itself (unless Youtube pulls down this video, which is a realistic possibility because Google/Youtube feels compelled to protect us from harmful information):
I took the liberty of transcribing Michell’s talk below:
My name is Jamie Michelle, I am a lesbian woman and the founder and president of Gays against Groomers. We are a nonprofit of gay people who seek to end the sexualization, indoctrination, sterilization and mutilation of children happening under the guise of LGBTQI plus two z, ABC, I don’t know.
Gay people are not a monolith.I am here to tell you that not all of us are on board with this new modern rainbow movement we are seeing now. In fact, it is the majority of us who are not. That is why I started this organization, I can no longer sit by and watch this toxic ideology be foisted upon children in our name. In my name, I knew I wasn’t alone. There was just no unified front to voice or public dissent to what is being done. So I decided to create one. And now, in just a little over a year, we have 17 chapters across the United States, we do states, not counties . . . We have 17 chapters across the United States, over 100 members and more than 700,000 followers on social media. We’ve also been banned from 11 platforms in that short time, most notably being Pay Pal and Venmo, which was crazy. They’re clearly terrified about speaking out from inside the community and to be completely honest, they should be. Tthey don’t know how to handle us because they can’t dismiss us as homophobic transphobic bigots like they do all of you.
Although they certainly do try. Our Wikipedia says we’re an anti-LGBT hate group, which is it’s very confusing. Protecting and safeguarding youth should not be controversial. It should be something everyone can agree on. But clearly that is not the case anymore. The truth is, we never consented to pornographic filth being given to children in schools, we never consented to woke doctors sterilizing and mutilating children in our name. We never consented to radical trans activista taking over and speaking on our behalf. These people, as well as every major institution in this country, are actively manipulating the public and trying to use the rights that we fought for as an excuse for their grotesque behavior and the lies that they tell.
Yet these are the same people who preach about how they promote love and acceptance. We beg to differ. I think you guys do too. So called “gender affirming care” on minors has been banned in countries across Western Europe and has been appropriately labeled the biggest medical scandal since the lobotomy craze. Doctors and scientists in these countries have recognized that gender ideology and the medical practices that go with it are catastrophic for developing children. It is also deeply homophobic at its core, to be quite honest with you. Without medical intervention, more than half of the children who express feelings of gender discomfort would otherwise grow up to simply be gay adults. According to multiple scientific studies, there is no wrong way to be a boy or a girl, and telling them otherwise. telling children otherwise, is evil. It’s abundantly clear and cannot be denied that medically transitioning children is the new conversion therapy, only 1000 times worse, because these children are being treated as lab rats. And we’d Gays against Groomers have helped pass over a dozen laws and policies across the nation so far to ban this barbaric practice. We plan on making child sexual mutilation illegal in all 50 states whether these monsters like it or not.
This ideology is toxic, hateful violates boundaries and it lies to everyone. It lies to parents, to children, to us. It is not reality. It takes advantage of the most impressionable and vulnerable. Children cannot consent to these interventions. No child can make permanent decisions about anything, let alone becoming sterile and chopping off body parts. No child is born in the wrong body.
Not only is this true. This agenda hurting children, but us as well. The radicals who have hijacked our community are setting us back decades with their assault on children. The acceptance we as gays and lesbians fought for to achieve in this country is now being erased seemingly overnight and it’s devastating for us to watch. We are deeply grateful for Moms for Liberty who are willing to listen and work together. We sincerely believe that the most effective way to end the war on children is by uniting together. Despite whatever differences we may have. We all share the common goal of saving these kids.
No matter how many times they tried to censor us, the truth will prevail. They can try to shut us up but we will never keep quiet. We will not make peace with an ideology that seeks to sexualize, indoctrinate and amputate the healthy body parts of children. We will not let them continue this abuse in our name. We have a mission and we are not going anywhere. We hit the ground running in our first year and together we will restore common sense in reality and eradicate the social contagion that is poisoning the minds of our youth. If you would like to learn more about our movement or help us with a charitable donation, please check out gaysagainstgroomers.com for more and thank you so much for having me. Thank you.
