Sometimes people wear shirts that are nothing but a declaration of the obvious. The most famous is the one that just says “COLLEGE.” At the risk of overexplaining the joke: it works because actual colleges print their names on shirts, so the guy making fun of that prints the category instead. If he’s really committed to the bit, he misspells it with one “L.”
Whether or not you find that funny is beside the point. It’s a shirt.
Now imagine a shirt that says “BEARS POOP IN THE WOODS.”
Silly, yes. Also true. Anyone who has ever seen a bear, met a bear, or read a book about a bear has known this since the dawn of time. Bears do not poop in outhouses. Bears do not poop in refrigerators. Bears do not poop at the Pentagon. Bears poop in the woods, and nobody disputes it.
Except a couple of years ago, a small and extremely loud contingent decided to dispute it.
At first, the anti-bear-pooper truthers only claimed that bears sometimes also poop in bathrooms. Not true. But the group was so small that nobody took them seriously enough to argue, and rather than absorb any cultural friction, some people decided they’d just play along.
Give a mouse a cookie.
Because it didn’t stay there. Soon it wasn’t that bears don’t have to poop in the woods — it’s that a bear can poop in a movie theater. At an Apple Store. In mourning. That last one isn’t a location, which is exactly the point. The anti-bear-pooper truthers had arrived at the position that there is nowhere a bear cannot poop, physically or emotionally.
Watching this thing gain more ground than anyone was comfortable with, some normal people started printing those innocuous shirts. COLLEGE. BASKETBALL. BEARS POOP IN THE WOODS.
The anti-bear-pooper truthers were not amused. They were enraged.
Enraged enough that at a modest gathering around an unremarkable sporting event, the anti-bear-pooper truthers got the BEARS POOP IN THE WOODS shirts covered up. Put something on over it, or leave. Nobody could articulate why a completely true statement somehow required a jacket.
Here’s the bottom line. Wearing a shirt or a hat that states the obvious is not a crime. It is especially not a crime in a moment this degraded, where we are apparently now trying to regulate which true things get printed on cotton.
I understand this is an odd little anecdote. It’s silly. It’s silly precisely because of how odd it is.
Now go back through and replace the anti-bear-pooper truthers with trans activists.
The story doesn’t get any less stupid. It just stops being about bears.
Get more of Jobob’s perspective on today’s most important stories on Turning Point Tonight, which airs Monday through Friday evenings on Real America’s Voice.
