A roundup of news and commentary from around the interwebs.
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Carl Trueman has a scathing article in First Things titled “Playboy makes perversion woke,” in which he coins the fantastic phrase “rapid onset wokeness.” An A&E documentary is set to expose the vileness of Hugh Hefner’s sordid life, and Playboy is trying to do damage control ahead of time. Anyone who has researched this topic—and I have—knows that Hefner wasn’t just the aging, pleasant pervert o the Playboy Mansion. He was a truly vile figure and likely a rapist. I suspect these facts are about to be revealed in a way that those who frequented the Mansion will very much dislike.
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Over at The Upheaval, N.S. Lyons’ essential Substack, there’s a column on how Communist China, recognizing the need for some purpose to life outside of materialism, is setting up “civilization centres” to grant ensoulment to their slave citizens. Lyons is doing exceptional work on China that is especially important given the coming of the New Cold War.
Finally, Abigail Shrier continues to do incredible work exposing the dangers of gender ideology. Here’s how her latest essay in City Journal starts:
Before she decided to strip him of all custody over his son, Drew*—before determining that he would have no say in whether Drew began medical gender transition—California Superior Court Judge Joni Hiramoto asked Ted Hudacko this: “If your son [Drew] were medically psychotic and believed himself to be the Queen of England, would you love him?”
“Of course I would,” the senior software engineer at Apple replied, according to the court transcript. “I’d also try to get him help.”
“I understand that qualifier,” Judge Hiramoto replied. “But if it were—if you were told by [Drew’s] psychiatrist, psychologist that [Drew] was very fragile and that confronting him—or, I’m sorry, confronting them with the idea that they are not the Queen of England is very harmful to their mental health, could you go along and say, ‘OK, [Drew], you are the Queen of England and I love you; you are my child and I want you to do great and please continue to see your psychologist.’ Could you do that?”
“Yes,” Hudacko said. “That sounds like part of a process that might take some time, sure.”
“What process?” Judge Hiramoto said. “What is the thing that might take some time? Accepting the idea that [Drew] occupies an identity that you believe is not true?”
“The identity you just mentioned to me was the Queen of England,” Ted began. “I can tell him and I can affirm that to him, to reassuring him situationally; but objectively, he is not the Queen of England and that won’t change, and even the therapist in that case would know that.”
The then-54-year-old father of two teenage minor sons (Drew is the elder) felt that he was walking into a trap. For Ted, precision is not merely a requirement for his job but almost a constitutional necessity. His recall of every fact, date, and filing of the complicated court proceedings involving him and his ex-wife is astoundingly accurate—the sort of feat you might expect from a brilliant lawyer, not a distraught father battling the legal system alone for his son.
Read the entire thing—a desperate father fighting for his son while his wife and the courts insist his son is a girl. It is a chilling tale for our times.
