The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Cruel and Stupid Lies of the Media’s Transgender Victimhood Narrative

Posted on | March 28, 2024 | 1 Comment

For weeks, liberal media targeted Chaya Raichick (@LibsOfTikTok), wrongly blaming her for the death of Dagny “Nex” Benedict, who died after a fight at her school in Owasso, Oklahoma. The logic of this vicious smear was that (a) two years ago, Raichick called attention to a TikTok video posted by Owasso teacher Tyler Wrynn in which Wrynn declared, “If your parents don’t accept you for who you are, f–k them. I’m your parents now” and Wynn got fired; and (b) supposedly, the fight was part of transphobic bullying aimed at Benedict, who identified as “non-binary,” and (c) ergo, @LibsOfTikTok killed “Nex” Benedict.

Students of logic will say, “What? You call that a syllogism? It makes no sense at all!” Exactly my point, of course. The Left’s logic is so nonsensical — “word salad,” symptomatic of psychosis — that any attempt to formalize it as a syllogism immediately exposes it to ridicule. Which, now that I think about it, seems to be the basic idea of @LibsOfTikTok: Show the world what left-wing activists are saying amongst themselves, when they think no one else is watching, and expose the obvious absurdity. It goes without saying that people who can’t deal with basic logic also are usually not too reliable in regard to facts, and after “Nex” Benedict’s death in February, liberals couldn’t be bothered to wait for the facts to be determined. No, instead they leapt to the conclusion that Benedict had essentially been beaten to death by transphobic bullies. However, as it turned out (a) Benedict started the fight by throwing water on another girl, (b) she did not die as a result of any injury suffered in the fight, and instead (c) she committed suicide.

Even after these facts were revealed, Joe Biden still had the audacity to double down on the victimhood narrative:

Don’t even get me started on all the things wrong with this message, but suffice it to say, everything. The obsession with victimhood, and the transparent effort to imply that discrimination is to blame for this alleged “suicide crisis,” are part of a pancake stack of false assumptions surrounding transgenderism, in general, and distort the reality of what happened to “Nex” Benedict, in particular. It should not be necessary for me to say that I am against bullying, but notice how liberals (e.g., the White House staffers who wrote Biden’s “message”) seem to have no doubt that Benedict’s “non-binary” identification was the only factor involved in her being bullied, so that transphobia is the only explanation for her suicide. Hence, it’s a simple morality tale, with evil Republicans (who supposedly endorse bullying and “discrimination”) on one side, and virtuous Democrats on the other. Oh, but wait — more facts:

Now that we have the full autopsy report for Dagney (Nex) Benedict, many of the questions surrounding her overdose have been answered. The full report, released by the Chief Medical Officer and Board of Medicolegal Investigations on March 27th, 2024, confirms what the earlier Medical Examiner’s Office reported on March 13th, 2024. There were “massive” amounts of Diphenhydramine, more commonly known over the counter as Benadryl, in Dagney’s blood.
Dr. Paul Wax, the Executive Director of the American College of Toxicology, reviewed the results and confirmed she could have consumed 50 to 100 pills to reach that toxicity level. . . .
The report indicated, “The 11 pages released indicate handwritten notes ‘suggestive of self-harm’ were found in Nex’s room by family members, and that the teen has a history of ‘bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, self-harm (cutting).’”
While advocacy groups remain insistent that her distress sourced from bullying at school, Dagney did not indicate this in her last notes. . . .

(Got that? Dagny/“Nex” had a documented history of mental illness and didn’t mention bullying “in her last notes.)

On July 17th, 2019, when Dagney was 11 years old, an arrest warrant was issued for James Everette Hughes, Dagney’s father. He was arrested on July 31st, 2019, in Sebastian County, AR. The charge was for rape of a minor under the age of 14, during the time period between May 2017 and August 2017, when Dagney was nine years old. Among many witnesses was Sue Benedict, the grandmother who would adopt Dagney in 2019.
Hughes would accept a plea deal to sexual assault in the second degree on November 27th, 2019. He was sentenced to five years in prison with ten years suspended. He would be placed on the sex offender list and have no contact with his daughter. He was arrested again on January 25th, 2024, by the Little Rock Police Department for failing to comply with reporting as a sex offender, two weeks before Dagney would take her own life. . . .

You can read the whole thing, which has more details about this horrific crime. Whether there is any connection between this crime and Dagny/“Nex” subsequently identifying as “non-binary,” I will leave the reader free to speculate, but the more relevant point is that Dagny/“Nex” had serious personal problems that had nothing to do with any kind of “discrimination” that Joe Biden might wish to “work to end.” And, needless to say, those who tried to blame Benedict’s death on @LibsOfTikTok were wildly wrong. Beyond that, however, isn’t this a more or less representative case demonstrating the falsehood of the victimhood narrative that liberals have constructed around transgender identity? How many times have I called attention to how the Left compiles statistics about transgender murder victims — meaning to show a pattern of transphobic violence — when in fact nearly all these victims were killed in circumstances that had nothing to do transphobia?

The media’s habit of manufacturing bogus narratives like this — misleading the public, for reasons that are essentially about producing political propaganda for the Democratic Party — is harmful in many ways, not least of which is that it encourages misunderstanding of the issues involved. The last thing someone suffering mental health problems needs is a message that encourages self-pity by telling them they’re victims of unjust persecution. Good mental health requires a sense of personal agency, the belief that one is in charge of one’s own life. Depicting the world as controlled by menacing forces of “hate” — systematic in their oppressive power — is scarcely conducive to such an outlook. At the same time, decent people have long since become tired of being lectured constantly on controversial topics like this, and the media destroy their own credibility by producing such propaganda.

Yet there are still people who are apparently too stupid to see through this media charade, and so the world becomes more and more divided, between those who believe whatever they’re told by the media, and the rest of us, who have become skeptical of the media’s messages.



 

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One Response to “The Cruel and Stupid Lies of the Media’s Transgender Victimhood Narrative”

  1. Whenever there is a truth you cannot tell, that is a truth you must tell! – THE FIRST STREET JOURNAL.
    March 28th, 2024 @ 9:54 am

    […] Also see: Robert Stacy McCain, “The Cruel and Stupid Lies of the Media’s Transgender Victimhood Narrative“ […]