Among the “counter-protesters” bullying feminists in Brighton on Sunday was one Carly-May Kavanagh, a “journalist” and staffer to misogynist MP for Brighton Lloyd Russell-Moyle. She won her 30 seconds of fame by yelling in the face of a man carrying a baby. (I don’t think I would take a baby to a protest, to be honest, but that’s a quibble.)
Kavanagh, along with another woman who has not been identified, hounded a father holding his small baby, taunting him and saying “you’re raising a little fascist.”
You can watch (and listen to) her doing it.
“You fucking fascist,” Kavanagh said to the man, a few feet from the face of his child. “You think that’s a good idea, to raise a child who believes this filth? To raise a child that doesn’t accept trans people? It’s 2022, you’re disgusting!”
MP Russell-Moyle, who did not respond to a request for comment, has previously been in hot water over his own extreme trans-activism, when he accused author JK Rowling of “using her own sexual assault” as “justification” for discriminating against trans people.
According to The Guardian, this was in response to a blog post from Rowling in which she said she is deeply protective of women-only spaces as a result of being sexually assaulted.
Kavanagh says she is embarrassed by her “actions” but she’s not so embarrassed that she says what they were and then apologizes.
There’s a second tweet in which she regrets the effect on trans people, but her tweets are protected so I don’t know exactly what she said. But this first installment is quite an object lesson in how not to talk about one’s bad behavior. The issue isn’t that she “got angry,” it’s that she confronted him and yelled in his face, and that she’s wrong about everything she says. It doesn’t matter whether she’s “embarrassed” or not, let alone whether it’s deeply or not – what matters is whether she understands what an asshole she is and intends to stop being one. Above all nobody needs to hear any guff about “acting rashly” in any “heat of the moment” – what people need to hear is “I was an asshole and I’m very sorry.”
I really hate notpologies. I hate all that tedious evasive circling around the issue without ever confronting it. I hate the pretending to apologize while never actually doing it. I hate the cowardice, the selfishness, the self-admiration, the indifference to others. I hate all of it.
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5 responses to “Don’t be like her”
I hate it when people apologize on the net generally… if you don’t think you did anything wrong, don’t apologize. It solves nothing…
Now you may well be wrong about doing that wrong (see this lady up here), but it’s still better than being dishonest in that way.
I did see a story, but can’t recall where, the man and baby were not participants, but passersby who stopped to watch the march.
Maybe we’re supposed to be thankful she just screamed, and didn’t assault the baby.
From the article:
Somewhat related, Ibram X. Kendi published Antiracist Baby as a picture book (2020). The publisher says it’s for ages 3 months to 3 years. I reviewed it on the Barnes & Noble web site, and they sent me a link to share with my friends. The link opens a window with my review over the product listing for the book. To be clear, my 5-star review is being ironic:
https://network.bazaarvoice.com/r/SAFIKASWhgWbrmuU
The other tweet said that she was unequivocally sorry but not to the man or to the fascist baby, but to the “trans community”. Unfortunately. I didn’t take a screenshot, but that’s what it was:
It wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t even a not-pology. She was playing a get-out-of-purity-spirals-free card.