Radical leftists are currently getting a dose of their own medicine.  Saul Alinsky might say that, anyway, given the advice he handed down to them in his Rules for Radicals.

“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon,” he says.  “It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule.  Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”

Democrats have attempted to follow Alinsky’s advice by labeling Donald Trump and J.D. Vance “weird” in 2024.  That’s an insult that doesn’t really land.  Trump has been a largely positive staple of American pop culture since the 1980s, and Vance is nothing short of a modern-day Horatio Alger story.

But there’s nothing weirder than Democrats’ digging in to defend the importance of ensuring that the government provide tampons in schoolboys’ bathrooms, just as Tim Walz ensured for schools in the state of Minnesota. 

Social media responded appropriately.  The Minnesota governor was quickly dubbed “Tampon Tim,” complete with a hilarious meme portraying Walz’s smiling mug on a box of Tampax.

Part-time CUNY professor and full-time race-hustler Marc Lamont Hill was infuriated, however, and reacted to conservatives’ advantage, just as Alinsky predicted.  In response, he posted on X: 

Republicans are mocking Tim Walz for ensuring that menstrual products were provided in his state’s schools.  Other than hating women and being obsessed with controlling their bodies, I can’t imagine why they’d mock him for this.

Proving that college diplomas don’t necessarily confer smarts, he truly seems to be confused as to the nature of the debate.  That’s a feat of genuine stupidity, given that this debate isn’t anything new.

Well, maybe that’s not an entirely accurate statement.  It is a fact that women and girls menstruate.  Men and boys do not.  Throughout the entirety of human history, there has never been any legitimate question on this matter.  But by 2019, some radical progressives had certainly begun a debate on the subject without the consent of the liberal Democrat herd.  Bill Maher was blindsided in that year by Dennis Prager’s suggestion that some Democrats believe that “men can menstruate.”  Maher chuckled as his audience laughed, saying, “I missed this whole story.”

Yeah, he certainly did.  But Marc Lamont Hill reminds him of the position that Democrats took up while he was looking elsewhere.

“The menstrual products [that Tim Walz ensured were in every boys’ bathroom] were for any student who menstruates, regardless of how they express their gender identity,” he says.  “Do you think trans students who menstruate should not be allowed to have pads and tampons?”

As it turns out, both Maher and Hill and any other Democrat who may have an interest in a Democrat winning in 2024 haven’t been paying attention.  Betting the farm on the public’s falling in love with a trans-forward social agenda isn’t a smart idea. 

If you’re looking for evidence of that contention, you might ask the marketing executives at Bud Light or Target.

Trans issues aren’t just poison for corporate marketing campaigns.  They’re poison for political campaigns, too. 

Back in 2015, for example, Houston mayor Annise Parker was in her final year as the “first openly gay mayor of an American metropolis.”  But her early years as mayor weren’t marked by pushing social agendas.  She was best known in the early years as a pragmatist who was willing to make difficult budget decisions as Houston was recovering from the Great Recession “that waylaid America’s cities,” including hundreds of millions in spending cuts and a notable battle with firefighters over the city’s contribution to pension funds. 

Nevertheless, her being an open lesbian made her widely known as “a national figure in LGBT politics” with aspirations to be become governor, according to Krissah Thompson at the Washington Post.

Five years into her mayorship and having largely avoided the pursuit of any social agendas, one might have believed that she was on such a path.  But the pre-Obergefell political climate was simply too much for the gay-rights-activist-turned-mayor to resist flying ever closer to the sun.  She began to push heavily for the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, or HERO, as leftists lovingly called it.  It was passed by the city council in May 2014. 

That ordinance had a different name among those Texans in the greater Houston area, both on the right and the political center.  Simply, we referred to it as “the bathroom bill.”  And it carried a memorable slogan: “No Men in Women’s Bathrooms!”  The legislation included “a provision that would allow individuals to use the restroom that best fits their gender identity.”

Public backlash was swift, and Parker channeled her inner leftist by issuing subpoenas for the sermons of pastors who supported overturning the ordinance.  In the end, HERO was roundly defeated by a public vote in November of 2015, 61-39%.

Leftists pontificated about what this public rejection of progressive legislation meant about the city of Houston.  Were they all bigots?  How welcoming could Houston be considered by the rest of the country, leftists wondered, if they didn’t march in lockstep with the broad steps of “equal rights” that the rest of the country seemed to be marching toward in the years of the Great Obama?  This same question would later be weaponized by the left in the boycott of an NCAA tournament in North Carolina.

But here we are, nearly ten years later, where it still has to be explained to Marc Lamont Hill, a supposed “Scholar” (according to his X profile), that the reason conservatives are mocking Tampon Tim isn’t because he wanted to put tampons in bathrooms for people who might need them.  Rather, it’s because he wanted to put tampons in boys’ bathrooms, where they should never be needed. 

As I pondered all of this today, I found myself in the men’s room at the Seattle-Tacoma airport, where I happened upon this free dispensary for any women-pretending-to-be-men who might be in our presence, I guess. 

Then I wondered if my federal taxes paid for that dispensary in any way.  And if not, did Washingtonians’ taxes pay for it?  Or local taxes? 

That led to the eventual question: are there any normal, societally adjusted human beings with whom you could have a five-minute conversation, who believe that their tax dollars are best spent by putting tampons in the boys’ school bathrooms or men’s public restrooms?

I haven’t met one.  Chances are, neither have you.  But Democrats seem to be betting that there are 70+ million of them out there? 

Color me skeptical.

Tim Walz photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.