“Leftists Hate Fun.”
This was posted recently on the X feed of Taylor Silverman. Silverman is one of America’s best female athletes and was one of the earliest to speak out against the nonsense of transgenderism in sports. Silverman has competed against biological males three times in skateboarding contests. In two of the three competitions she came in second, losing to a man who claimed to be a “trans woman.” “I deserved to place first, be acknowledged for my win and to get paid,” Silverman wrote on Instagram. “I am sick of being bullied into silence.”
For several years, Silverman has been loudly preaching common sense. Like this post on X:
When someone pretends to not know the difference between men and women they can no longer be trusted on anything. All credibility is lost.
Let’s be real here- these aren’t people who genuinely are confused about what a woman is.
These are people who are liars.
These are… https://t.co/TR1i3X4LU8
— Taylor Silverman (@tmsilverman) August 2, 2026
These are people who are liars.
These are people who are cowardly.
These are people who do not have any morals and values to live by.
These are people who want to confuse and abuse children.
Silverman even blasted the National Organization of Women, telling Fox News:
I take the National Organization for Women claiming that fairness in women’s sports is white supremacy about as seriously as I take them claiming men can be women. They are blinded by this lie and desperate to scare people into silence. Men in women’s sports impacts all women, including minorities that the National Organization for Women seemingly want to erase to push their ridiculous narrative.
Yet one thing is also noticeable in Silverman’s social media and in her press appearances. It is Silverman’s sense of fun. Her Instagram page is loaded with shots of her skating, snowboarding, at amusement parks, modeling beautiful dresses and becoming “a lean mean alcohol free machine” after giving up drinking. Taylor Silverman loves life.
Silverman is also a practicing Jew who is vocal about her faith and has endured abusive and anti-semitic attacks online. The paradox of Silverman expressing such joy in life while speaking the truth and taking flak from the haters made me think of something that seems to be part of the conservative temperament. Conservatives, especially religious ones, seem to be happier than liberals. They don’t complain as much. These same conservatives also have a deeply realistic perception of how much suffering, unfairness, and evil is in the world. Taylor Silverman is not griping unjustly. Her anger is righteous, not petty.
It was only years ago when I came across the work of the great historian and social scientist Christopher Lasch that I began to understand this. Here is Lasch in his 1996 book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy:
Religious faith asserts the goodness of being in the face of suffering and evil. Black despair and alienation—which have their origin not in perceptions exclusively modern but in the bitterness always felt toward a God who allows evil and suffering to flourish—often become the prelude to conversion. An awareness of “radical evil” underlies the spiritual intoxication that finally comes with “yielding” and “self-surrender.” The experience of the twice-born, according to William James, is more painful but emotionally deeper than that of the “healthy-minded” because it is informed by the “iron of melancholy.”
Another great scholar with insight into this is the late Jesuit James V. Schall. In his great book On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Praying, Believing, Schall argues that the most important things in life are the times that we are trained to believe are not important — the times when we are playing, dancing, gardening, loving our spouse. These are the things that remind us that we cannot create utopia and should not spend our lives trying to, and that times away from what we consider important can connect us with what truly is important.
Celebrating “the goodness of being” despite it all is one of the main reasons conservatives seem happier than liberals. However, it’s also accurate that more than a few on the right these days seem to get mired in their own culture of complaint. The movies are woke, the Marxists are rising, kids are not being raised properly, and there are people on their lawn. We can’t let realistic observations become a contagion of negativity that shuts out God.
Taylor Silverman’s expressions of righteous anger at the men who want to invade sports, coupled with her posts about the joy of riding, her cool friends, and the fun she is having, are not a shift in tone but the expression of a person who believes in the goodness of being — and of the ultimate Goodness of the Ultimate Being.
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