They Care More About Bathrooms Than Broken Collarbones

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I’m in New York this week doing a ton of media, which means I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the serious and genuinely disgusting allegations against Max Miller. One of those stops was Piers Morgan’s YouTube show.

If you’ve ever watched me on Piers Morgan, you already know the drill. At some point — no matter what I was actually invited on to discuss — Piers is going to blow up the entire segment so he can, once again, complain about transgender athletes in women’s sports. Then he and his guests get to yell at me about it and act like I’m the weirdo, when they’re the ones who cannot stop obsessing over this stuff.

And that’s exactly the point. Every conversation gets dragged back to the same, stale, handful of culture-war fights—even when we’re supposed to be talking about something else entirely.

The two conservatives screaming at me yesterday about trans kids love to lecture Democrats like me about keeping women safe. Women’s safety, they tell me, is sacred. That it is the defining issue of our time.

And yet — when an actual woman or child is harmed? When the abuse isn’t hypothetical, but sitting right in front of them (sometimes at the same dinner table)? Suddenly they’re nowhere to be found. Max Miller breaking his toddler daughter’s collarbone. The violence against his ex-wife and his daughter. A disgusting public display of a man attacking his own family, and a Republican Party that just turns a blind eye. The President of the United States calling Max Miller “a good man.” The Speaker of the House working to guarantee his reelection anyway. On all of that? Silence.

Most of them have nothing to say about Epstein either — or about what it implies about Donald Trump and so much of the billionaire class tangled up in the trafficking and abuse of little girls. One of the panelists on Piers, Clay Travis, once sat across from me and literally questioned whether the Epstein survivors are survivors of any crime at all.

So it begs the question: why are these people so obsessed with shitting on trans kids, and so completely uninterested in the very real abuse happening in this country — abuse committed by Republican politicians and influencers against women? Why won’t the Republican Party police its own? Why is there an ocean of outrage for the one thing and not a single drop for the other?

Because if you’re arguing about bathrooms, you’re not asking why the people screaming loudest about protecting women and children never seem interested when women and children are actually harmed.

The answer is isn’t complicated. It’s profitable: They’re scoring cheap political points. They know most people don’t understand the lived experience of transgender Americans, and that fear is easy to exploit. They know it polls badly for Democrats — I get it, I recognize the politics. But I am not going to attack trans kids who want the same thing every kid wants: to feel safe and to belong. That’s what this is actually about. Beyond that, I think individual sports leagues are perfectly capable of deciding who plays in their sport, and the federal government has no business in it. Piers and the rest hate that answer — because for all their small-government cosplay, they very obviously want to use the full power of the state to force their will on everyone.

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But back to the real point, because this comes down to two things.

First: There is an entire political class and media ecosystem whose success depends on keeping us—fellow citizens, neighbors, even family members—at each other’s throats instead of asking what they’re actually doing. They manufacture stories about the people we’re told to fear — trans kids, gay people, minorities — because our hatred is their business model. The social platforms pay them for the most salacious content they can produce. And all of it is a magic trick, designed to pull your eyes away from the actual theft happening in this economy. We are living through the single largest transfer of wealth in the history of this country — out of the pockets of the poor and the working class and straight into the accounts of billionaires like Donald Trump. As long as we’re screaming at each other about trans issues — which matter, but affect a genuinely tiny number of people — they get to keep robbing us blind.

Second: and here’s the crazy part—they still think this works. They still think it wins elections. In their minds, this is what beat Kamala Harris in 2024 — that infamous “they/them” ad.

But they’ve never understood why that ad worked. They spent so much time measuring the ad that they never bothered to understand the frustration underneath it. Which is why they’ve run some version of it in nearly every race since Trump took office. And they have almost uniformly lost.

Look at the Omaha mayor’s race, where Republicans went all in attacking the Democrat on trans issues — and got answered with a simple, devastating message: these guys care more about bathrooms than they do about fixing your potholes. That’s it. Be responsive to what people actually need. Drag the conversation back to where people actually are: trying to survive an economy Donald Trump has decimated. That’s how you beat this, every single time.

So I’m sick of it — but I’ll keep going on the shows, because you all know my rule: I’ll talk to anybody about anything, and I’ll make my case. They think they’re scoring an own goal on me every time they pull this. It just reads as pathetic, because that’s what it is. It’s sad. No new ideas. No new messaging. A president losing his mind. A party that can’t even locate Mitch McConnell. This entire MAGA movement is falling apart, and all they’ve got left is manufactured outrage about trans athletes and Fauci’s journal and whatever else the right-wing echo chamber cooked up this week.

They’ve got nothing for the real things. They’re not angry that Donald Trump is stealing from the American people. They’re not angry that Max Miller broke his daughter’s collarbone. They’re not angry about an economy that’s crushing the very people they claim to represent.

They’re angry wherever the algorithm tells them to be angry next.

And that’s the whole scam. Keep people fighting each other long enough that nobody asks what the people in power are actually doing.

But they don’t get it. And honestly? I hope they keep handing themselves the rope.

Because every time they try to change the subject, they remind people they don’t actually have an answer for the problems keeping myself or my fellow Americans up at night.

So I’ll keep showing up. I’ll keep dragging the conversation back to what actually matters. And every time they try to change the subject, I’ll remind them why they wanted to change it in the first place.

Eyes on the ball, folks.

With urgency,

—Mike