Right-wing commentators are expanding their attacks on the entire LGBTQ community, digging up old, false tropes equating anyone who does not identify as heterosexual as a threat to children and families.
As the annual Transgender Day of Visibility came to a close Thursday night, two Newsmax hosts went all-in on attacking transgender people, with Benny Johnson falsely declaring the “transgender push” is about “separating children from their parents.” He offered zero evidence to support his claim.
“The goal is ultimately to make sure that the children are items that the state can control, that they have control over their opinions, their minds,” said Johnson, a top official at the far right-wing Trumpist organization Turning Point USA. He added, again baselessly, that the goal is also for young people to be told their sexuality is the most important part of their lives.
Speaking in very broad terms Johnson falsely suggested support for LGBTQ rights is “the kind of stuff that is society and civilization killers, because they want to destroy the family units.”
Newsmax host Grant Stitchfeld interjected to add: “You take away masculinity, I promise you the family unit disintegrates,” which is also an attack on all single mothers. He then attacked one of the highest-ranking officers in the U.S. Military, Lieutenant Colonel Bree Fram. The Daily Beast last year said she “is an active duty astronautical engineer in the U.S. Space Force, currently assigned to the Pentagon to lead space policy integration for the Department of the Air Force.”
Stitchfeld and Johnson continued their attack, with the former claiming Fram is an “inspiration” to China and Russia who want the entire U.S. Military to be “filled with Brees,” and the latter baselessly fear-mongering America is be defeated in battle because of transgender service members.
“We’re going to lose a major war in my lifetime if we keep going down this route of making our military, making our beloved theme parks, making our schools gender indoctrination centers,” Johnson wildly claimed. “There is absolutely zero reason that teachers, pink-haired freakazoids, should be teaching our children about their sex lives.”
“There certainly is absolutely no reason for it in our military. You have to look at it like this Grant. You have to see it as indoctrination through the sword. It’s conversion therapy, but for radical gender ideology,” he claimed. “It’s a religion to these people and they convert it that’s the purpose and they take over the institutions and they wish to turn them into their churches, because they have no churches and they have no God. And so this is what they serve.”
Watch this excerpted clip, or the full video below: