State of the Culture: The Rule of the Mob

By Jonathon Van Maren

Well, what do you know. A prominent biologist has come out with a statement that should surprise no one: There is no such thing as casual sex. From the Business Insider:

Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist and author of “Anatomy of Love,” says sex triggers the brain regions linked to love and attachment. For her, there is no such thing as casual sex.

Take a minute to watch the video at the link. It’s well worth your time.

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Since not a week can go by without another update about the raging dumpster fire that is Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, here’s what Erick Erickson is living with these days:

Last night, as my family went to bed, a man in a car parked just down our driveway. He and his coworker roaming the neighborhood are the security now part of my life. It is the age of Trump.

In 2011 and 2012, I actively campaigned against Mitt Romney. In November of 2011, I had written that Romney would lose to Obama and conservatives would get blamed. That happened. He was a terrible candidate. But Romney supporters, despite vigorous disagreement, were not hurling threats my way or toward my family. They were not calling advertisers to my radio station making threats.

In fact, the only time I have ever experienced what is now happening is from far left activists outraged over my position on gay marriage. Those radical gay rights activists have appeared once or twice in my neighborhood. They have hounded advertisers and made threats. I’ve even once been swatted.

But even these radical activists were not as aggrieved or angry as Trump supporters. The new reality in which my family and I live is that of going to bed at night with security parked at the end of the driveway and our movements more regulated for our own protection.

In the Age of Trump, the worst and basest instincts of humanity are on display. Like the Islamic radicals they rail against, Trump supporters have adopted a “convert or die” attitude. They will not persuade you to the merits of Trump. They will not defend Trump. They will harass you, censor you, wish for your death, and threaten to kill you if you do not convert.

Having been to a Donald Trump rally, this doesn’t particularly surprise me. America is no longer divided between the Left and the Right. It’s divided between those who have a vision for the country, and an angry, homogenous, illiterate mob who want to burn the whole thing down. Trump supporters, Black Lives Matters thugs, Occupy gangsters—in the Age of Reason, nobody seems interested in reasoning any more.

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On the topic of the current civil war in the Republican Party, Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review continues to be far and away the number one commentator on the issue. He understands the divide in the conservative movement like no one else. Just as with the column I quoted from last week, this week again he manages to capture precisely what is going, something I’ve been trying to put my finger on for several years:

The Resentment Republicans are not happy warriors; instead, they are apocalyptic. For them, Black Lives Matters isn’t a destructive and sometimes thuggish protest movement but the announcement of a pending race war; so is La Raza; so is the fact that East Podunk State U. offers an undergraduate degree in African-American studies. (“Where’s the white-studies degree? Huh? HUH!” You can hear it.) When somebody makes a buck — or a few more bucks than they have — they see conspiracy, favoritism, the hand of the wily Oriental, the sweaty Mexican, or the nefarious Jewish banker at work, depending on how far down that sorry road they’ve gone.

Resentment is a very powerful force. Every reasonably knowledgeable conservative has had that discussion about balancing the budget during which someone insists that foreign aid (a minuscule part of federal spending that is largely laundered back into the American economy through defense contracting) is what ails us. Or maybe it’s food stamps, or maybe it’s all the blacks and illegals on welfare. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, these explanations can serve any purpose. Social Security insolvent? “Cut off foreign aid and kick all those dusky malingerers off of welfare.” Federal employees sit around watching porn all day? “Yeah, but what about foreign-aid spending and all those job-stealing illegals on welfare?” Can’t figure out what to do about Syria? “Kick all those lazy blacks off welfare and Assad will take care of himself, and why are we worried about these rag-heads in the first place?” (Sure, but I’m not exaggerating by much.)

The dispositional differences produce policy differences of course. Not only on the matter of trade, which Resentment Republicans regard as a scam, but also on things like criminal-justice reform. Hardline conservatives such as Rick Perry have come around to the view that a lot of what we are doing in the so-called war on drugs is destructive, and that we’d be better off pushing some offenders into treatment and other non-incarceration options. Resentment Republicans hate the idea of spending one thin dime on these degenerate drug addicts; remind them that keeping them in prison isn’t exactly cheap, either, and it’s back to foreign aid and the blacks on welfare.

Even when the two sides agree, they disagree: A great many Aspiration Republicans oppose gay marriage or permitting homosexual couples to adopt children because they believe that traditional family is a natural part of human life and that traditional families produce happier, healthier children and societies. Resentment Republicans oppose gay marriage because those perverts are disgusting. For them, the political is very, very personal.

This is exactly the case. I’ve seen many of these types on Facebook feeds, articulating their so-called conservative views with such venom I’m surprised they manage to sleep at night. These people are not reasonable. These people are angry. And right now, they’re fueling the rise of a trash-talking serial adulterer who inherited a fortune from his father and makes his living running casinos and strip clubs.

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Over the din of weeping activists shouting at everyone about the right of children to choose their own gender regardless of their genitals and the great struggle of the transgender movement, the American College of Pediatricians has released a statement that cuts through the insanity of gender ideology, stating bluntly that “Gender Ideology Harms Children.” Here is that statement in its entirety:

The American College of Pediatricians urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex. Facts – not ideology – determine reality.

1. Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: “XY” and “XX” are genetic markers of health – not genetic markers of a disorder. The norm for human design is to be conceived either male or female. Human sexuality is binary by design with the obvious purpose being the reproduction and flourishing of our species. This principle is self-evident. The exceedingly rare disorders of sex development (DSDs), including but not limited to testicular feminization and congenital adrenal hyperplasia, are all medically identifiable deviations from the sexual binary norm, and are rightly recognized as disorders of human design. Individuals with DSDs do not constitute a third sex.
2. No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one. No one is born with an awareness of themselves as male or female; this awareness develops over time and, like all developmental processes, may be derailed by a child’s subjective perceptions, relationships, and adverse experiences from infancy forward. People who identify as “feeling like the opposite sex” or “somewhere in between” do not comprise a third sex. They remain biological men or biological women.
3. A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking.When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V).⁵ The psychodynamic and social learning theories of GD/GID have never been disproved.
4. Puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous. Reversible or not, puberty- blocking hormones induce a state of disease – the absence of puberty – and inhibit growth and fertility in a previously biologically healthy child.
5. According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.
6. Children who use puberty blockers to impersonate the opposite sex will require cross-sex hormones in late adolescence. Cross-sex hormones (testosterone and estrogen) are associated with dangerous health risks including but not limited to high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke and cancer.
7. Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBQT – affirming countries.¹¹What compassionate and reasonable person would condemn young children to this fate knowing that after puberty as many as 88% of girls and 98% of boys will eventually accept reality and achieve a state of mental and physical health?
8. Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse. Endorsing gender discordance as normal via public education and legal policies will confuse children and parents, leading more children to present to “gender clinics” where they will be given puberty-blocking drugs. This, in turn, virtually ensures that they will “choose” a lifetime of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones, and likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts as young adults.

Finally, some reasonable voices. It’s about time.