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Below is an Oprah Winfrey propaganda clip from about five years ago. In it she interviews transgender supermodel Lea T. The idea was to promote and glamorize sex reassignment surgery. Today a primary goal of the transgender lobby is to push hard to get everyone to accept the transitioning of children. Before that, the focus was primarily on adults. We can look back and see Oprah working to soften the ground here, as always prodding us to align our attitudes and beliefs with hers: Of course, we’ve reached a new stage in the propaganda war to force feed transgender ideology to America at large. Last night the TV series “Transparent” won several awards at the Golden Globe Awards. The series centers around a family in which the father comes out as transgender. Audiences undergo a lot of emotional manipulation and emotional blackmail in this sort of propaganda. My Friday Federalist piece on Leelah’s Law was about the transgender lobby’s exploitation of a teen’s suicide to push their agenda a whole lot harder. The proposed law would essentially criminalize any counseling and psychotherapy that does not affirm transgenderism, and any parent who did not get with the Trans program would be guilty by association. Of course it uses the catchphrase “conversion therapy” to imply that this only applies to one type of therapy. It doesn’t. You can read my article here: “Leelah’s Law is Bad Law and Bad Medicine.” The message behind the proposed law is that if you do not accept the ideology of transgenderism, you are morally responsible for any suicide of a transgender child who does not feel accepted. The message behind the proposed law is that if you do not accept the ideology of transgenderism, you are morally responsible for any suicide of a transgender child who does not feel accepted. 1. It seems far more organized, focused, faster-and-more-furious than any propaganda campaign in history. (Which means it can’t withstand much scrutiny.) 2. It requires more than ever that the bystander reject physical reality in order to accommodate ever-shifting perceptions of others. This is huge. It comes with the territory that such laws require us to reject our own physical reality and question our own “gender identity.” 3. Under the phony guise of “anti-bullying” this type of propaganda exploits children and their peers as never before –physically, emotionally, and mentally. 4. The scope of the endgame is enormous: to legally and universally impose upon every human being a new definition — or rather, a non-definition — of what it means to be human. (Even if for the moment it seems like everybody simply has the “freedom” to identify as one wishes, that’s not sustainable. Because ultimately, the ideology of transgenderism rejects biology. It’s already begun to erase everybody’s legal identity as either male or female simply by writing into law the presumption that your sex is merely “assigned at birth.”) 5. It serves to abolish the family. When male and female are eliminated as legal categories, it goes without saying that “mother” and “father” must also be eliminated as legal categories, along with any inherent right to a relationship with your biological children. That’s the logical path transgender propaganda leads us down. If we want to survive, it’s high time we spit out this kool-aid.

Doris Lessing died in 2013 at the age of 94, just a few years after winning the Nobel Prize for literature. She identified as a communist for many years and was also known as an icon of modern feminism. But she came to firmly reject communism as well as the label “feminist.” A New York Times article from 30 years ago describes how her politically correct followers became confused and annoyed by her exploration into different ideas and trains of thought. What’s especially fascinating to me is how Lessing developed some keen insights into how humans behave in groups and how we handle dissent. She could see the noxious effects of groupthink on human relationships. It disturbed her so much that in 1985 she gave five lectures on the subject, which are contained in a little known volume entitled “Prisons we Choose to Live Inside” (1986). It’s a gem, especially given Lessing’s legacy and renown. Consider these two passages that pretty much sum up the mechanics of political correctness: “ .. . we can stand in a room full of dear friends, knowing that nine-tenths of them, if the pack demands it, will become our enemies. .. . But there is always the minority who do not and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody, depends on this minority." " . . .  whenever people are actually forced to recognize, from real experience, what we are capable of, it is so shocking that we can’t take it in easily. Or take it in at all; we want to forget it.” Lessing also contemplates the effects of technology and how poorly we use it: “I believe that people coming after us will marvel that on the one hand we accumulated more and more information about our behavior, while on the other, we made no attempt at all to use it to improve our lives.” In fact, our blindness to the realities of our own patterns of human behavior will be our downfall.  If we could just take a clinical look at the mechanics of groupthink and how it hurts us, we'd all become freer and happier. Lessing also ventured to say that she believed that critical knowledge of human behavior is actually being hoarded by elites in order to amass their own power, prompting her to ask this: “How is it that so-called democratic movements don’t make a point of instructing their members in the laws of crowd psychology, group psychology?” Today everyone would do well to read this handy 77-page volume.  You may not agree with every opinion Lessing includes in it (I didn't) but her insights are absolutely essential if we are to remain a free society.  I'll offer more quotes from Lessing's work in future posts.  I absolutely love it.

This post follows up on my last post about Doris Lessing’s treatise against groupthink. It also follows up on my previous list of recommended books. I chose them (and there will be more!) to help us “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.” It’s critical that we stand athwart the march to groupthink and shout “Stop!” The more of us who do this as individuals, the better. And in fact, Lessing noted that it is the Individual — not the group — who changes history. Here is a wonderful quote in which Lessing expects that systems allowing independent thought will win in the end over those who don’t — because of the power of the individual over the group: “In the long term, I think the race will go to the democracies, the flexible societies.  I know that if one looks around the world at the moment, this may seem a rather over-optimistic view . . .  But is it my belief that it is always the individual, in the long run, who will set the tone, provide the real development in a society. Looking back, I see what a great influence an individual may have, even an apparently obscure person, living a small, quiet life.  It is individuals who change societies, give birth to ideas, who, standing out against tides of opinion, and change them. This is as true in open societies as it is in oppressive societies, but of course the casualty rate in the closed societies is higher.  Everything that has ever happened to me has taught me to value the individual, the person who cultivates and preserves her or his own ways of thinking, who stands out against group thinking, group pressures.  Or who, conforming no more than is necessary to group pressures, quietly preserves individual thinking and development. . . . “It is my belief that an intelligent and forward-looking society would do everything possible to produce such individuals, instead of, as happens very often, suppressing them.  But if governments, if cultures, don’t encourage their production, then individuals and groups can and should." You'll find so much to think about in this little 77-page guidebook about why we must oppose groupthink.  Lessing writes about how brainwashing works.  She is astonished that there is virtually no information available to the public and schools about the mechanics of group psychology -- to help us build awareness of how it works within us.  She concludes the reason is that it's the sort of knowledge that would make it more difficult for elites to gain mass compliance. I'll end on a very politically incorrect quote from Lessing's words, which she wrote 30 years ago: “ . . . we are living in a time when the great over-simplifiers are very powerful – Communism, fundamentalist Islam." Order "Prisons We Choose to Live Inside" by midnight tonight!

If you fear we’re living in an age of mass delusion — as do I — then you must read this extraordinary book by Dutch psychiatrist Joost A. M. Meerloo. “The Rape of the Mind” is subtitled: “The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” Had it it seen more light of day since it was published in 1956, it may well have served as inoculation against political correctness and groupthink. Free speech is essential to preventing mass delusion. Meerloo wrote: “Where thinking is isolated without free exchange with other minds, delusion may follow.” He adds, chillingly, “Is this not what happened in Hitler Germany where free verification and self-correction were forbidden?” Meerloo’s writing shows immense compassion for our human frailties. He understood just how difficult it is to push back against the social pressures to conform. But push back we must. Meerloo’s first line of the foreward reads: "This book attempts to depict the strange transformation of the free human mind into an automatically responding machine." We should tremble at the fact that he wrote that back in 1956. Below is a bit of a synopsis. Part I “The Techniques of Individual Submission" describes how human beings can be conditioned to do just about anything.  Part II "The Techniques of Mass Submission" explores how totalitarian thinking gets rooted, how man becomes "robotized," and how demagogues use fear, emotional blackmail, and "semantic fog" to mobilize masses.  Part III "Unobtrusive Coercion" is perhaps the most fascinating of all the fascinating sections. In it, Meerloo provides his theory as to how totalitarians can be "molded" literally from the nursery. He delves into mental contagion and mass delusion and the primal human fear of isolation.  He describes the coercive creep of technology and its paradoxes.  Ditto the bureaucratic mind.  Finally, Part IV "In Search of Defenses" is a welcomed prescription on how to fight back. Before humans can preserve true freedom, we must first be aware of our inner contradictions: "Democracy, by its very nature will always have to fight against dictatorship from without and destructiveness from within.  Democratic freedom has to battle against both the individual's inner will to power and his urge to submit to other people ... Essentially, democracy means the right to develop yourself and not to be developed by others.  Yet to develop yourself is impossible without the duty of giving your energy and attention to the development of others." In the end, freedom truly depends upon friendship.  (You can read a great article on that here.) After all, political correctness is primarily a tool for separating people.  Clearly, our narcissistic society is oblivious to this. But for me, "The Rape of the Mind" cracks the code. It is a must read for our times.

Below is an old public service announcement in which baseball legend Willie Mays helps kids build awareness of the dangers of blasting caps (dynamite detonators) that they might come across while playing. The 1950’s was a time when children played more freely outdoors than they do today. Back then the answer to the problem of unattended blasting caps was to teach kids safety. Not to tell parents to shelter them indoors and supervise them in their play 24/7. This Willie Mays spot is astonishing in so many ways. It illustrates that kids back then were far more independent and self-reliant than today. We’ve fallen quite a ways in helping kids learn to navigate life. Last week I wrote about this in the Federalist here: “Kids are Casualties in the War Against Self-Reliance.” Constant hovering over kids to protect them teaches them dependence, not self-reliance. And the helicopter-parenting trend seems to correlate with a society that’s grown overly dependent on government. It also correlates with a consumerist society that seems to indulge in excessive doses of passive entertainment from ever-present electronic devices. Too many have forgotten that the process of growing up is really a process of controlled risk taking. If we delay children from learning life skills when they are ready to learn them, we stunt their growth as well as their ability to pass those skills on to the next generation. It creates a vacuum and it promotes a social climate more tolerant of a State that ever more aggressively monitors parents and families. I wrote about the case of two very attentive Maryland parents who have been harassed by child protective services for allowing their children to walk home from a park unattended. The kids were eager and ready to do so and had permission from their parents, but no matter. As government grows, we will see more meddling in the parent-child relationship. There is a connection between allowing parents to raise self-reliant kids and maintaining a free society. Okay, we’re living in a big fat nanny state. That’s a euphemism, though. The reality is that central planners have always viewed a child’s first teachers of self-reliance—mothers and fathers—as enemies of the State. The less people learn about basic life skills (think thrift or basic survival) and how things work, the better it is for the bureaucratic tyranny. We ought to keep this in mind every time someone questions our right to think for ourselves or exercise self-reliance.

During the 1950’s there was a surge of popular interest in what drives social psychology. And I think for that reason alone, the 1950’s was a much more intellectually vibrant decade than the one we inhabit today. People actually wanted to know if they were being manipulated. They were far less likely to simply give in to having their behaviors and opinions directed by the likes of Oprah or Dr. Oz. There was a trend towards more self-awareness in the 1950′ s because people seemed more willing to think independently about what drives our motives. So when Vance Packard started writing about how advertising was employing new methods of persuasion, people took notice and absorbed his message. But it seems that trend has been reversed — with the internet, with the dumbing down of education, with the breakdown of community. Whatever the cause of our new found ignorance, today we see very little awareness of the mass seduction that happens through “depth selling.” That’s advertising — or fundraising or any kind of campaign — that enlists the study of psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology in order to develop subtle methods of persuasion that exploit human fears and desires. If Superbowl advertising is any indication, more and more people seem to be in a fog, very content to live lemming-like lives from behind the virtual reality of their big screens and I-Phones. This placid and complacent mood is a perfect climate for cultivating mass compliance. So today, I am recommending a classic from the year 1957: The Hidden Persuaders, by Vance Packard. He wrote at a time when ad men were trying to perfect the art of “consumption engineering” and motivation research. As you might predict, Packard was trashed by the advertising industry who accused him of a “paranoid” reaction. This is the old and familiar tinfoil hat accusation that gets pulled out every time someone gets a bit close to the truth. Here’s one paragraph (among many) by Packard that sums up the theme of the book: “The manipulative approach to politics is of course not a discovery of the 1950’s or even the twentieth century.  Napoleon set up a press bureau that he called his Bureau of Public Opinion.  Its function was to manufacture political trends to order.” We're beyond the selling of soap or cereal.  The manufacture of political trends is where it all leads.  And that's exactly what has been going on by media and Hollywood elites.  Whatever the insane agenda item – whether it’s celebrating sex changes for 10-year-olds or Zeke Emmanuel’s claim that everyone should check out of life on their 75th birthday – you can be sure the goal is to promote hype, reform thought patterns, and manipulate political trends.

Sane folks study history because they know how important it is to understand human behavior and learn from experience. We ought to understand the psychological imprint on our society so that we might work with it to get a clearer picture of reality and thereby learn how to live freer and more harmonious lives together. Unfortunately, the instability and terror in the world today feels like deja vu all over again. Worse, the serious study of history in our schools and universities has been diluted and downgraded for decades now. Not good. According to historian Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius (whose superb lecture series “Utopia and Terror in the 20th Century” I recommended in a previous post)wars create psychological transformations that stay with a society and a civilization. That’s a chilling thought. Because it’s not enough to try to understand war itself. We need to understand the human psychology that is both cause and effect of human conflict. With this in mind, please listen to Professor Liulevicius speak brilliantly about the impact of World War I in the clip below: He notes: "The First World War should have taught us something about the intensity of emotions that can seize entire peoples, nations, and societies when they're in the grip of crisis conditions.  The tragedy of the First World War was so great, so extensive, so huge in scale, that afterwards people found it difficult to wrap their minds around the motivations that led people to fight, kill and die for a cause." As the philosopher George Santanyana stated: "Those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  I think we should all be able to understand this on a very personal level. Just imagine you have no clear memory of where you have been in life. You have no known experiences that can direct your intentions.  Only intense emotion.  Where would you go?  What would you do? Chances are, you'd just grope around blindly and live the proverbial brutish life that ignorance so often affords those detached from reality.  You'd mimic others. You'd be great fodder for demagogues. This ignorance of experience and psychology promises insanity and misery.  It also causes us to lose touch with our shared humanity as we descend into our collective dementia. Demagogues thrive on the ignorance of history because it's so effective in preventing clear thinking and civil discourse that puts a check on their power.  They also revise and distort the historical record until not much is left of it. They tend to create crises, and then exploit those crises.  And afterwards the survivors are left among the ruins, bewildered. Some wail in innocence.  Those who saw it coming may cocoon themselves.  Many indulge more in blind emotions -- of vengeance and rage -- than in sober thought.  The few Cassandras who tried to raise warning flags will either be lost to the writing of that history, or if victorious like Churchill, write it. But too many will scratch their heads with nothing better to say than "WTF?" That's why we must study history.

“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Vomitorium” is the title of my Federalist piece from the other day. I spoke about it today with R. Scott Clark in a podcast at Heidelblog.net. The main idea is that the movement to codify same sex marriage – supposedly only for the purpose of “equality” — has already let loose a lot of fringy sexual excesses into the mainstream. Things you would have likely not heard about before this stage of the sexual revolution are now being injected into general public discourse. For example, New York Magazine recently ran an article “What’s it Like to Date a Horse,” a graphic interview with a zoophile who complains that his sexual orientation is not respected by society. Following that one, they published “What’s it Like to Date Your Dad,” an interview with a young woman promoting her sexual relationship with her biological father as just as legit as any other romance. And of course we now have the impending release of the movie “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which serves to celebrate and mainstream the practice of sado-masochism. There’s lots more where that came from, and I provide a short catalogue in my article. It’s all about excess and uncontrolled appetites. The vomitorium — as understood in popular culture as a place where gluttony reigns so supreme that it can’t get enough of itself — seems to be where our society is headed. But at the end of this road lies a society that’s lost its moorings. It’s an escapist culture centered around the Self. At root, the sexual revolution wasn’t really about sex or even lust. It used sexual desire to put people in a prison of Self and an empty cycle of gluttony. It also served to create an easy means to escape responsible relationships. And we’re now at a phase when enough folks have swallowed that bait that their appetites have become unhinged. At a certain point this state of affairs becomes not only ridiculous and dangerous, but also (to use a favorite term of self-described progressives) unsustainable. This mindset of Self – brought to us by the sexual “revolution” — prevents people from seeing the world through the eyes of others, especially through the eyes of children. That’s an alienating and isolating mindset which creates a hostile climate for families and for all healthy personal relationships. Somewhere along this lonely path, the state will step more fully into that vacuum and take control of our personal lives, our relationships, and our conversations.

Planned Parenthood recently helped produce a video to introduce teen-agers to the sexual practice of sado-masochism. As though it’s a good thing. If you click on the link, you’ll see a rather ditzy young woman gush about it. The hype for that sexual practice in the “Fifty Shades of Grey” phenomenon has taken over like a science fiction Blob on the land. The “Fifty Shades of Grey” movie based on the bestseller (over 100 million copies sold) serves to mainstream sado-masochism as a perfectly normal sexual practice. In the process, youth are being bombarded with it like never before. Even the Vermont Teddy Bear Company has cashed in on it. My latest Federalist piece addressed the trend by introducing the reader to pediatric psychiatrist Miriam Grossman’s five-part blog series “A Parent’s Survival Guide to Fifty Shades of Grey.” Dr. Grossman has performed a major public service with her writing on the topic, which is important reading for everyone, not just parents. It’s odd that anyone would have to explain why Bondage/Domination/Sadism/Masochism (BDSM) is not a healthy thing, particularly for children and teens. But we’re living in odd times. The BDSM lobby (yes, they have one) claims that sadism and abuse is just fine as long as both parties “consent” to it. That’s utter nonsense. Domestic violence shelters are filled with women who thought they had to consent to real life abuse in order to achieve intimacy. And now the “role-playing” of sexual abuse gets a Planned Parenthood imprimatur for teenagers. That’s not just irresponsible, but cruel. Dr. Grossman explains that her patients are damaged by all of the mixed messages over intimacy and relationships. The 50 Shades trend adds even more weird and mixed messages into their consciousness. It shows a blatant disregard for the vulnerability of youth. And for anyone lonely who is having a difficult time understanding and finding true intimacy. It’s important to expose the BDSM snake oil for what it is, especially with your kids. So, damn the teen eye-rolling. Full speed ahead!

Propagandais a little volume, written nearly 90 years ago by Edward Bernays, who happened to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Both he and Walter Lippmann –who authored Public Opinion– wrote about the “manufacture of consent.” Or how to manipulate and control public opinion. I have three observations to share today about this work: 1) Its general theme about manipulation of the “mass mind” is more important than ever; 2) Much of it is outdated because the mechanics of propaganda today have grown ever more toxic; 3) It seems as though the folks most interested in manipulating the mass mind are the same people who control the study of propaganda in academia. I see virtually no discussion in the public square about how propaganda works. The general theme of Bernays’ book can be condensed in this assertion: “We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way our democratic society is organized.  Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.” So does this mean we all accept our ideas from these "men we have never heard of" for the common good, like obeying traffic laws?  Or does it mean we cooperate in building a mechanized society that attempts to squash civil inquiry in order to promote a monolithic agenda of central control?  Here’s another nugget from Bernays: “We are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.” In totalitarian fashion, Bernays sees this as a good thing, that controlling people’s behavior is necessary to avoid chaos and confusion in society. Bernays also stated that “Business today is taking the public into partnership.”  That may have seemed true in 1928, but it's now outdated. I'd say it’s actually the other way around.  The government is absorbing and amassing corporations at breakneck speed today. Whereas the propaganda of yesterday was more focused on the manufacture of consent, today the main efforts of propagandists seem to be the squashing of dissent in order to protect its monolithic machine. Most eerie to me is that those who would promote independent thought do not seem to be in the forefront of the study of social psychology and propaganda methods.   Instead, the study of propaganda and communications seems to be controlled by folks in our universities who have an affinity for central planning. For example, the author of the introduction to this 2005 edition of Propaganda is Mark Crispin Miller who seems cozy enough with politicians who seek to build a centrally-controlled society built on PC-controlled group think. In fact, the entire field of behavioral insight appears to be dominated by people who want to regulate our minds to the nth degree.  Many come out of the University of Chicago, including Cass Sunstein, Obama’s former regulatory czar, and co-author of Nudge. The extreme left linguist Noam Chomsky is another master of explaining propaganda and yet he is fine with the dictates of political correctness and seems intent on squashing independent thought in order to build a centralized state.  It doesn't take much reading between his lines to see this.  This is exactly the sort of hoarding of information about self-awareness that Doris Lessing warned against, and which I discussed in a previous post. I think the best antidote to living under a tyranny of extremist thinking is to cultivate truly independent thinking.  And independent thinking does not come about through adherence to political correctness. It happens through real relationships built on real trust with real people in real communities.

Propaganda often seems to start with a Potemkin Village. The Wikipedia definition of Potemkin Village happens to be pithy: “a fake village built only to impress.” It’s a facade that masks a false reality with an attractive illusion. Today we have “SuperTrans” figures cherry picked by Hollywood to present a impressive picture of transgenderism, to promote it particularly for kids and steer them down the rabbit hole of “gender identity.” Below you’ll see a clip of one of the daytime talk drones, Katie Couric, interviewing a transgender homecoming queen. The idea here is to destabilize the audience’s sense of reality by presenting a very female looking person with male DNA. Nevermind that just a tiny fraction of less than one percent of the population might identify as transgender. (From the Hollywood juggernaut, you’d think it was something like 25 percent of the general population.) And nevermind that sex change regret is so real that 90 percent of all transgenders are lost to medical follow up. So is Couric talking to just an ordinary teen-ager from an ordinary family? Don’t kid yourself. This looks like a “Ryland” situation, i.e., another fantasyland poster family for transgenderism. The youtube video for the child Ryland Whittington is a professional production. And so is this Couric number. The LGBT lobby is extremely well-monied with a huge power agenda that serves to cultivate gender dysphoria, particularly in kids. The parents who have signed on with it get loads of accolades and support. Those who don’t — like Joshua/Leelah Alcorn’s parents — are pilloried with threats to remove the child from the home. In any event, it’s very difficult for vulnerable children who look at this seemingly perfect situation and let their imaginations — and whatever past hurts they harbor — trigger them into believing that they were perhaps always the opposite sex inside. Plus, if they go along with it, they are protected thru the “anti-bullying” agendas that, incidentally, were developed to protect only LGBT kids and virtually nobody else. The parents who are enabling this agenda have — for whatever reason — bought into the hype. Their message to all other parents and all other children is this: if you don’t reject the physical reality of sex, you can expect to be attacked and vilified in the public square. According to them, your existence as either male or female is all in your mind. Couric and Oprah Winfrey have taken on the mission of pouring this PC kool-aid down the throats of all Americans. What we have here is a Potemkin Village interview. It’s meant to show a facade of the Trans-Agenda, implying: “Gee, if only kids could be given hormone blockers so that their bodies don’t develop in puberty, then wow, they can look more like the sex they claim to want to be. Everyone should let go of their doubts and drink up this koolaid. Doubt, by the way, is the equivalent of ‘hate.'” We ought to all just spit out this koolaid and give it a rinse.

This month six adult children from same sex households are submitting an amicus brief to the Supreme Court opposing same sex marriage. Two of them — Robert Oscar Lopez and Rivka Edelman — have co-authored/edited a just released book which explores the fallout from the social experimentation we are all living through. Please click here and “look inside” the text of Jephthah’s Daughters at Amazon. I hope you decide to buy a copy. The book is a rich anthology of articles and testimonials that describe experiences not discussed in the media. According to Lopez, “We can help the reader understand why something viewed by so many as beneficial was actually harmful to so many more.” I am honored to be a contributor, having written the introduction to the chapters on society and the globe. There are six sections in the book. The first, “Children,” explores the experiences of children who are separated from at least one natural parent. This can happen in many different ways, but children of same sex households are separated from a parent by design. Alana Newman who blogs at AnonymousUs.org was donor-conceived and wrote the introduction to this section. Section II “Women,” focuses on the effects of artificial reproductive technologies on the health and the lives and psyches of women. The introduction was written by Jennifer Lahl, founder and president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture. Section III “Society,” reviews the whole Pandora’s box that same sex marriage is unleashing against healthy human relationships, against children, and against freedom. Some of the vehicles are transgenderism, polygamy, incest, and sex education as a means of state control of children. Section IV, “Globe,” discusses the emergence of the LGBT ideology throughout the world and what the growing commodifying of children means for human freedom (hint: a form of bondage, a form of slavery.) Yours truly wrote the introduction, and I suppose the bottom line I can’t escape is that this movement is putting us on the fast track to centralized power, and probably on a global scale. In many ways, it’s a central planner’s dream come true. Section V, entitled “Gays” includes reflections by those whom the LGBT movement claims to help, but does not. Jean-Pier Delaume-Myard notes in his introduction that the LGBT agenda actually leads to inequality for gays, not equality. Section VI, “Bards” explores the McCarthyism of the LGBT agenda — in the arts, the media, academia and throughout society. Its introduction is written by Michelle Shocked, a world-renowned singer-songwriter twice nominated for Grammy awards. She asks: “How did a crusader for children’s rights become the target of a smear campaign? Answer: The same way a champion for artists rights did. By identifying the nexus of non-existent nonsense that is much easier to attach ad hominem to than the question at hand.” This is an extremely important book with perspectives that have been overlooked — and, in fact, blocked — throughout the entire debate on marriage. Bobby Lopez founded the International Children’s Rights Institute because, at root, his fight is really about the rights of children. Children have the right to know their origins. And nobody has the right to turn them into commodities.