And a Child Shall Mislead Them - Taki's Magazine
(www.takimag.com)https://www.takimag.com/article/and-a-child-shall-mislead-them/ Penn Jillette, the tall half of the hugely successful magician duo Penn & Teller, is one of the entertainment industry’s most outspoken atheists. For decades, Jillette has smugly condemned all manner of religious, psychic, and pseudoscientific irrationality. He also has a fan base on the right, because as a self-described libertarian, Jillette’s often mused about how “taxation is theft” and government compulsion is bad.
Penn Jillette: a man with no gods, including government. A man who falls for no (to use the title of his Showtime series) “bullshit.”
Then his teenage daughter decided that she’s a man. And the world witnessed how quickly the “smug” vanishes from the rationalist when the bullshit hits too close to home.
About a year or so ago, Jillette’s daughter, Moxie Crimefighter (yes, that’s her name), decided that she’d been “assigned the wrong sex at birth.” And she demanded that her parents no longer use female pronouns for her, like, ever.
Back in 2014, Jillette bragged on his podcast about how he’d raised Moxie to “laugh at God.”
There’s an old saying I just coined: “When you laugh at God, He laughs back and best.” Because now Jillette—Mr. “no pseudoscience,” Mr. “no cults or flimflam”—has become the spokesperson for the biggest pseudoscientific cultlike flimflam of the 21st century. The guy who’s spent a career deconstructing magic (“no, the bouquet of flowers didn’t actually become a rabbit; it was sleight of hand”) is now a true believer that a girl can actually become a boy overnight, by the sheer power of mentalism!
Abracagender!
