Search Results

I can’t let this day go by without noting the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Below is a clip from President Reagan’s 1987 speech: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” It still gives me chills. The Berlin Wall was a symbol of separation. Not a protective or defensive wall to keep invaders out No, it was a prison wall intended to keep its people in. To separate them from others. To control their relationships with others. That’s what it was about and what totalitarianism is always about. I think there are lots of Berlin Walls in life. Political correctness, cult mindsets, and manipulative behaviors all serve to build walls around us and between us, separating us from others. We need to be vigilant when folks try to build them around us, and we need to tear them down, speaking truth in love. Below is a video from that incredible day in 1989 when the wall came down. In the end, the truth will always out.

Consider the case of Matthew Attonley in the clip below. There was a lot of media hype in Britain about his “transition to female” but now he wants the National Health Service there to reverse it. You can also click here for a link to the story in a British paper I don’t think “gender identity dysphoria” is being effectively treated at all. (Did I hear that right from this confused young man when he recalls how he felt the need to “get [his] boobs”?) No, surgery and hormones don’t “treat” this condition. The condition is being cultivated. The media and Hollywood are cultivating it and seem blithely unconcerned about any of the underlying psychological reasons for it. Individuals who are being hyped as examples — increasingly children — are being used as guinea pigs in a social experiment in which we are all, in fact, subjects. Let’s think this through. Transgender law requires that we all accept the false premise that our sex was “assigned” to us at birth. Not identified, but “assigned.” In other words, your biological maleness or femaleness is not real. According to this scheme, your physical sex is simply in your head. When what’s in your head doesn’t “match” your genitalia, that’s called gender identity dysphoria. When it “matches,” well there’s a fairly new and highly weaponized word for that: “cisgender” which simply means you accept your body as is and don’t perseverate about your biological sex. In the trans scheme of things being “cisgender” means you are “privileged.” Hence, the laws about everybody’s sexual identity (through the catchphrase “assigned at birth”) must be changed for the sake of “equality.” If this is written into law across the board — and it already has been in many states and municipalities — we will eventually have no choice but to discard our sex as a legal distinction of who we are. Each and every one of us. The implications are vast for legal recognition of motherhood, fatherhood, childhood, families, and, in fact, all human relationships. The gender dysphoria craze illustrates the depths of dysfunction that our society has fallen into. To begin with, it’s a grand fallacy to try to get the world to go along with an internal perception of who you think you are when that perception conflicts so directly with physical reality. But the main fault lies with a tiny elite who are intent on enforcing the notion that human biology is meaningless, and that sex differences ought to be erased. The snake oil of gender identity is the vehicle by which our biological differences are written out of law. In that way mothers and fathers are written out of law, as is the family. This does great violence to children. And, in the meantime, it does great violence to those who bought the snake oil, used it, and then woke up to find themselves physically and psychologically mutilated. As did Alan Finch. Alan Finch decided to transition from male to female during his 20’s, a resident of Australia. At 36, Finch told the Guardian newspaper in a 2004 interview: “transsexualism was invented by psychiatrists . . . You fundamentally can’t change sex . . . the surgery doesn’t alter you genetically.  It’s genital mutilation.  My ‘vagina’ was just the bag of my scrotum.  It’s like a pouch, like a kangaroo.  What’s scary is you still feel like you have a penis when you’re sexually aroused.  It’s like phantom limb syndrome.  It’s all been a terrible misadventure.   I’ve never been a woman, just Alan . . . the analogy I use about giving surgery to someone desperate to change sex is it’s a bit like offering liposuction to an anorexic.” Alan went on to sue the Australian gender identity clinic, at Melbourne’s Monash Medical Center, for misdiagnosis.  The reaction from the transgender community was fast and furious and abusive, particularly in the Susans.org discussion forum. Next time, I'll provide a couple of links on what some physicians have to say.

So, if my Federalist article is linked on Drudge, I suppose I ought to blog about it, right? This is just a short post to note that. You can click on my article here: “Trouble in Transtopia: Murmurs of Sex Change Regret. I hope you’ll read it. It’s fantastic to see the subject of sex change regret getting exposure on a high traffic site like Drudge. A sense of confusion about one’s body is no doubt a horrid thing for anyone to have to go through. But how much worse it must be if you went ahead with irreversible elective surgery like that and then lived to regret it? And some regret it immediately after surgery. It must be absolutely devastating, no matter the begging and the consent that may have preceded it all. And though we’ve been led to believe that it’s “rare,” it’s such a horrid thing that people should be allowed to discuss it, no matter how rare. But I suspect it is not as rare as we’ve been led to believe. Because as far as the transgender lobby is concerned, such things are not supposed to be discussed in public. And since the trans-agenda is protected through most media outlets, through Hollywood, and through academia, there are precious few places to find opposing views. In fact, other points of view tend to be squashed on internet forums too, as I discuss in my article. So there are plenty of roadblocks to knowing what’s really out there. I suspect there’s much festering beneath the surface. Until next time . . .

You may have come here from Drudge Report today, which linked to my Federalist article Trouble in Transtopia. So this seems like a good time to post again. This time, a few words about physicians. John Money (1921-2006) is perhaps the doctor most responsible for promoting the idea of surgical sex changes. He was widely known as a pioneering sexologist, and was responsible for founding of the gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins University. Below is a documentary of Money’s most famous case today, the tragedy of David Reimer. Money was so passionate about his gender identity theory, that he jumped at the chance to put it into practice on a baby. David Reimer (born Bruce, 1965-2002) was an identical twin whose penis was destroyed by a botched circumcision. Money convinced David’s parents to raise him as a girl. It didn’t work and the story is thoroughly tragic. Biology trumped the social experiment, as biology always does in the end. Dr. Money had kept pushing for surgery to construct a vagina, but David (“Brenda”) resisted, and his parents decided to stop seeing Dr. Money. They soon after told him he was a boy. At that point, by the time he was 14, David then dropped all of the charades Money foisted upon him. But before he was 40, he committed suicide. You can read David’s story in John Colapinto’s 2001 book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who was Raised as a Girl. There are physicians who are skeptical of such blind passion for gender reassignment surgery, though you wouldn’t know it as you watch the transgender project go into media hyperdrive these days. One of the skeptics is Dr. Paul McHugh, the psychiatrist responsible for shutting down the gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins in 1979. McHugh wrote about his experiences at Johns Hopkins in a 2004 First Things article entitled “Sexual Surgery,” and then recently reiterated his arguments in an op-ed this past summer in the Wall Street Journal. If you’re interested in this topic, it’s worth checking those links. Here’s an excerpt: We at Johns Hopkins University—which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into "sex-reassignment surgery"—launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as "satisfied" by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn't have the surgery. And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a "satisfied" but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs. In Britain, Az Hakeem was almost as concerned as McHugh, writing in a 2007 article entitled "Trans-sexuality: A Case of the Emperor's New Clothes," that transgenderism was a "delusional disorder."  Having come under extraordinary pressure from trans advocates, Hakeem has pretty much recanted that view since then. Nevertheless, he apparently still runs a psychotherapy program in a clinic that allows those who are pondering surgery to speak in a group setting with post-operative patients who express regret about their decisions.  In this way, he hopes to make sure that anyone considering surgery has a chance to talk it through as much as possible before making irreversible life-altering decisions to refashion or remove healthy body parts. In reading Hakeem’s website, particularly the FAQs, it’s clear that he is hyper-sensitive to the concerns of transgender activists who have in the past called him "transphobic." Since the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association both seem to work in lockstep with the transgender lobby today, they will likely continue to place increasing pressure to silence and discredit any psychiatrist who questions surgical sex, as does Paul McHugh.  If they have their way, you'll likely see the story of David Reimer get suppressed and then see social experimenter John Money get resurrected as some kind of a hero.  In the meantime, more psychiatrists like Az Hakeem will be nudged and pressured to get with the trans program.

Professor Robert Lopez and I dealt with a bunch of spoiled kids representing the LGBT lobby when they crashed our event at Catholic University the other night. They didn’t want us presenting topics of interest to the Anscombe Society there: Lopez on the rights of children and I on political correctness. During Q and A things got loud and aggressive and very disruptive. The shills came out of their seats and did their thing: juvenile chanting and flag waving, intended to shut us up. This turned out to be an unwitting performance of Stella’s talk about the coercive tactics of political correctness. ’ll write more about it all, but I’d like to refer you to an article today about the phenomenon. Please look it up by clicking here: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9376232/free-speech-is-so-last-century-todays-students-want-the-right-to-be-comfortable/

I hope each and every one of you reading this had a wonderful Thanksgiving. This post is a follow up from my last post to let you know about my most recent Federalist article which I co-authored with Robert Oscar Lopez. You can read a full account of our experience by clicking here. (Just so you know: in case the photo and headline strike you as a tad radioactive, we did not pick them!) The Federalist piece goes into some detail about our speaking engagement at Catholic University being disrupted by protesters. You can see them chanting in the clip below, as the room cleared out: Here’s a brief synopsis of what Bobby and I had discussed: Bobby spoke about the new Children’s Rights Movement. It is building awareness of child trafficking, particularly through abuses by the growing industry of artificial reproductive technologies and exploitative and lucrative adoption industries. Unfortunately, those lobbies are increasingly selling services that result in and depend upon the deliberate separation of children from their biological parents. Social scientists have used various statistics to claim that it doesn’t matter for children if you separate them from their biological parents. But it does matter to children, and it matters deeply. We know from millennia of history and literature and experience that children suffer a primal wound from such separation, even when their caretakers provide good homes. They develop coping mechanisms, to be sure. But that doesn’t make it right. So speaking up for the right of a child to know their origins is something those lobbies, as well as the LGBT lobby, wish to suppress. I followed Bobby’s talk with a presentation about how to speak out in a culture of fear. “Political Correctness” is a euphemism for the silencing tactics of power elites who are pushing power-consolidating agendas. It works by isolating and marginalizing anybody who might get in the way of those agendas, through smears and threats and psychological manipulation. I think it’s critical that each and every one of us build awareness of those tactics — as well as an understanding of our own human weaknesses — so that we can keep ourselves and our minds free. Free speech is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. If we don’t push back, we will lose it. The protesters will lose their freedom as well, though, sadly, they don’t realize that. Two major ironies here. First, that Catholic University was under attack for being, well, Catholic. Second, the protesters gave a live demonstration of my presentation.

Today at the Federalist I write about how the Minnesota State High School League wants to inject gender politics into school sports.  It's quite an overreach and an assault on families.  And it's a top agenda item for the transgender lobby, which is pushing it hard. The idea is to allow students to play on either a boys or girls team, depending on their "gender identity," not their biological sex which is rooted in physical reality. Unfortunately, we live in an age in which we are compelled to point out the obvious because so many have become detached from physical reality, including folks who are just plain tired and wish to bury their head in the sand hoping it will all go away.  It won't go away on its own.  We need to confront assaults on reality and common sense whenever they're imposed on us.  Otherwise we end up in the Twilight Zone.  Down the rabbit hole.  And the world will just keep getting more surreal and less healthy for us and our children. The MSHSL plans to vote on this policy on Thursday morning, December 4 at 9:30.  The place is the MSHSL Board Room at 2100 Freeway Blvd., Brooklyn Center, MN  You can get more details by clicking here. If you are concerned about it and in the area, it's definitely worth showing up, perhaps with a sign or placard to express opposition. The other side -- flush with cash and media support -- has always depended on projecting a manufactured illusion of support, always way disproportionate to any actual level of public support.  Be prepared for that. In my article, I list 12 reasons why the MSHSL is a terrible idea (for those who need to hear them): Today at the Federalist I write about how the Minnesota State High School League wants to inject gender politics into school sports.  It's quite an overreach and an assault on families.  And it's a top agenda item for the transgender lobby, which is pushing it hard. The idea is to allow students to play on either a boys or girls team, depending on their "gender identity," not their biological sex which is rooted in physical reality. Unfortunately, we live in an age in which we are compelled to point out the obvious because so many have become detached from physical reality, including folks who are just plain tired and wish to bury their head in the sand hoping it will all go away.  It won't go away on its own.  We need to confront assaults on reality and common sense whenever they're imposed on us.  Otherwise we end up in the Twilight Zone.  Down the rabbit hole.  And the world will just keep getting more surreal and less healthy for us and our children. The MSHSL plans to vote on this policy on Thursday morning, December 4 at 9:30.  The place is the MSHSL Board Room at 2100 Freeway Blvd., Brooklyn Center, MN  You can get more details by clicking here. If you are concerned about it and in the area, it's definitely worth showing up, perhaps with a sign or placard to express opposition. The other side -- flush with cash and media support -- has always depended on projecting a manufactured illusion of support, always way disproportionate to any actual level of public support.  Be prepared for that. In my article, I list 12 reasons why the MSHSL is a terrible idea (for those who need to hear them): It’s totally anti-privacy. It drives children to consider physically unhealthy and drastic, irreversible options. It encourages children to reject their bodies and discourages children from accepting their bodies. It’s psychologically destabilizing. It attacks the child-parent relationship. It shows no respect for child development. It’s totally anti-Title IX. It promotes a double standard about rights and responsibilities. It contributes to destruction of any universal code of human dignity. It creates unprotected categories for bullying. Conscience protections are a lie. It assaults independent thought and enforces cult-like conformity.

In the 1950’s the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote a slim volume entitled The Undiscovered Self. At some point I want to delve into it. But for today, please consider this excerpt: “It is the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else. . . .  The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual.  The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa. I’m convinced that power elites use political correctness as a means of separating people.   It causes "psychic isolation of the individual," which serves to divide and conquer.  People become more and more polarized politically when they are unable to express what they believe and how they feel to others.  PC squashes mutual understanding.  That's what it's for. If you think it through, I think you'll also come to realize that civil discourse is the biggest impediment to centralized power.  How so?  When people fear expressing their innermost thoughts to others, friendships cannot develop.  Personal associations are nipped in the bud.  And when friendships in society are minimized, people become less trustful of others.  They become more isolated and atomized, more dependent upon the "mass State" Jung refers to.  Political correctness only serves the consolidation of central power.  Nothing and nobody else.

In today’s Federalist I have an article that examines how people of different political stripes have enthusiastically embraced the “The Hunger Games.” Below you can watch the trailer for the third movie in the series entitled “Mockingjay, Part I,” which was released last month. (There will be a fourth and final film next year.) Click here to read “The Strange-Bedfellow Politics of the Hunger Games.” Both liberals and conservatives have enthusiastically embraced the movies, which are based upon a trilogy of young adult novels by Suzanne Collins. It’s set in a dystopian society in which youth are chosen by lottery to fight in brutal gladiator style “hunger games” that entertain the ruling class. The political left views it all as a tale of socio-economic inequality, police brutality, and environmental pollution. Resistance for them means uprisings like “Occupy Wall Street” the unrest in Ferguson, movements which it seems the makers of the film hope to encourage. But conservatives see in the “Hunger Games” a strong warning against unchecked centralized power, i.e., Big Government. Most interesting to me is the chagrin and shock of some on the left – most notably Donald Sutherland who plays the evil President Snow – to discover that conservatives, including the Tea Party, love the story as a warning against policies of the left that grow centralized power. But why should this be a shock? It seems everybody ought to know that absolute power corrupts absolutely. But apparently not. So how did this interpretive divide happen? I think the answer lies in what we euphemistically call political correctness. By silencing people who disagree with the politically correct line, advocates of PC have essentially cut off civil discourse. PC serves to isolate and polarize people so much that there are no avenues for mutual understanding. Only mutual vilification. So, in the end, PC only serves centralized power and big government, what Carl Jung refers to as “the mass State.” I discussed some of this in my previous post quoting Carl Jung. The silencing of dissent has got to stop. If we continue to tolerate it we’re at risk of descending into a dystopia ourselves.

Do you have an idea about what constitutes the “perfect society?” As you imagine your utopia, you’ll realize that there is one absolutely mandatory ingredient: Universal Compliance. Aye, there’s the rub. From time immemorial, all attempts at Utopia have required terror to put down dissent, whether active or passive. You can get a grasp of the history and the scope of all of this in a superb series of lectures called “Utopia and Terror in the Twentieth Century,” by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius. They’re available from The Great Courses, and are engaging and filled with astonishing connections in human history. My take is this: As long as human beings are unique, as long as even one of them thinks independently of others, Utopia is a total pipe dream. Compliance must be forced. Or human beings must cease to be human by giving up their uniqueness. Either way, what you end up with is something that always morphs into dystopia. In a dystopia people usually take one of two routes: 1) They are unsettled and self-censoring as they battle “living within the Lie,” as Vaclav Havel wrote. Or 2) they simply become automated and content to live a machine-like existence. Nothing utopian about either alternative. So the whole idea of utopia is self-refuting. At least for humans. Which brings us to a regime like North Korea. Just look a little bit at the video above in which its citizens wept hysterically over the announcement of Kim Jong-Il’s death three years ago. What does this tell you? Its citizens are utterly dependent upon the government and have psychologically succumbed to the Cult of Personality. Out of fear and conformity and compliance, they ape one another in their grief, which is in one sense real and in another sense not real — not natural –at all. It suggests total psychological isolation of people who cannot freely associate. Slaves. I’m especially amazed watching from 1:19-1:25, two youth are standing behind the man who is in paroxysms of wailing. They aren’t sure what to do, but looking around they realize they are *supposed* to get down on their knees. So they do. Earlier this week Sony bowed to that regime’s pressure not to release the movie “The Interview” because it was offensive to Kim Jong-Un’s regime. Setting aside the whole issue of cowardice on the part of Sony, let’s focus on why North Korea would go so far as to conduct a cyberwar to get Sony to back down. Suggesting the Supreme Leader could be assassinated? Well, yeah, there’s that. But it goes even deeper. The movie (which doesn’t look to be a very good one, anyway) disrupts the North Korean narrative that it’s achieved Perfection rather than the institutionalized slavery of all of its people. Such regimes are always subject to any straw that could break their back since their whole existence is built on a lie that will collapse under its own weight.

For those who have been checking this blog for updates: My apologies. The hustle and bustle of the holidays — such as they’ve been — were a major distraction. But another distraction is the constant machinations of power politics around us. Just witnessing the dysfunction and delusion feels paralyzing at times. Take a quick gander back at 2014 and you’ll see: Rioting is replacing the rule of law. The transgender project is replacing the physical reality of sex distinctions by legally erasing those distinctions from your identity. Communism is making a comeback in the world, including in Eastern Europe. These are just a few of the trends, but they comprise just the tip of a very deep iceberg. On the surface these agendas are all about freedom, blah blah blah. But dip below and you’ll hear loud and clear Orwell’s 1984 proclamations that “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength.” I’m going to attempt a running list of secular books that I hope can help level headed folks piece together what exactly is going on in our brains and in our relationships that seem to be producing the delusional state our society is in. The books are mostly about understanding how propaganda — and political correctness — affects us, divides us, and destroys us. Some of the questions I grapple with are these: Why does there seem to be a blockade on cohesive and independent thought? Why are we so susceptible to propaganda and political correctness? Why do we never learn? Why do we keep falling for promises of utopia? Is there a way to stem the tide? (In the future, I also hope to offer some titles from a specifically Christian perspective.) Below are a random mix of a few non-fiction titles I recommend as reading in 2015. I plan to present short reviews of and/or excerpts from each in the weeks and months to come, and I will add more books and essays to the list. I wish we could all be in a book club together to discuss them! The Undiscovered Self,  by Carl Jung (1956) (discussed in an earlier blog post) Prisons We Choose to Live Inside , (1986) by Doris Lessing. The Rape of the Mind , (1956) by Joost Meerloo. The Power of the Powerless , (1978) by Vaclav Havel The Hidden Persuaders , (1957) by Vance Packard. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains , (2010) by Nicholas Carr Propaganda , (1928) by Edward Bernays May the year ahead be illuminating for us all. Happy New Year!

Corruption of the language seems to be surrounding us as never before. On one front, we see how the transgender lobby is selling the snake oil of “gender identity.” This insists that being female and male does not exist in physical reality, but only in our minds. So at root, it’s not really an agenda about gender per se or equality. It’s an agenda to corrupt the language and every single person’s perception of reality. You will see this become more prevalent if “Leelah’s Law” — a reaction to the recent suicide of a transgender youth — is pushed. I hope to write more about it, but the idea is to ban any counseling for kids that doesn’t affirm transgenderism. Under the guise that it only bans something called “conversion therapy.” On another related front, we can see how the push to control language is causing mayhem globally. After the massacre at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, there is a new debate about the limits of free speech. The magazine publishes a lot of content hostile to religion – all religions – but the killings were based only on its depictions of the prophet Mohammed. At The Federalist Sean Davis reminds us How CS Lewis Predicted Charlie Hebdo Censorship: Western news organizations are falling all over themselves to censor images that raise the ire of violent terrorists, and C.S. Lewis predicted their exact behavior over 70 years ago when he published “ The Abolition of Man, ” his treatise on how the corruption of language leads inevitably to the corruption of mind and soul. When we allow language to be so manipulated that it distorts reality, that puts civilization itself on the path to suicide. I love the way CJ Ciaramella leads his article, also at the Federalist: “Everything you Need to Know about Voxsplaining the Charlie Hebdo Massacre:” Sometime in the Paleolithic past, one guy said to his friends, “Hey, have you ever noticed how small Steve the Chief’s brow is? Look at me, I’m Steve No-Brow.” Everyone laughed, then Steve the Chief caved the guy’s head in with a rock. Human affairs with regards to unauthorized satire remained the same for the next 100,000 years or so, with the only difference being who was holding the biggest rock. So how do you balance free speech with irresponsible speech?  The answer lies in something we call “Civil Society." It subsists upon a common uncorrupted language and agreement to allow the free exchange of ideas.  Unfortunately, civil society is ceding authority to the corruption of  language enforced by political correctness.  If civil society is ever to be rebuilt, PC must be resisted and always fought.