The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘A Herd of Savages’

Posted on | May 19, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘A Herd of Savages’

MS-13 ‘animals’ in custody after being captured in El Salvador.

This past week, President Trump inflamed liberal fury when, in a White House discussion of California’s “sanctuary state” laws, he made a remark about the MS-13 gang: “These aren’t people. They’re animals.” Because the media deceptively portrayed this as an insult aimed at all immigrants, there were hours of tut-tutting by cable TV talking heads that continued even after it was made clear that Trump’s remark was in response to a comment by Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims, complaining about how California’s law makes it more difficult to fight the vicious Salvadoran gang: “There could be an MS-13 member I know about — if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it.” When we consider the unspeakable atrocities committed by MS-13, to call them “animals” is certainly appropriate. However, this incident provided Democrats an opportunity to say ignorant and foolish things.

 

This remark by Sen. Schumer expresses the “nation of immigrants” mythology, beloved by advocates of open borders. In this telling, all Americans are descended from Ellis Island immigrants, as if there were no Americans here before the great wave of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe that began in the 1880s and continued into the mid-1920s. This mythology, which involves frequent appeals to the 1883 poem of Emma Lazarus (“your tired, your poor, your huddled masses . . . the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”), relies upon a bogus guilt-trip morality. Because we are “a nation of immigrants,” it is suggested, Americans have no right to enforce our own laws regulating immigration.

Sen. Schumer invokes “our great-great-grandparents [who] came to America” as if everyone’s fourth-generation ancestors were among the “wretched refuse” who went through Ellis Island back in the day. This might be true of many, if not most, of the senator’s New York constituents, but it is not true of Americans like me.

All of my ancestors as far back as 150 years are buried in a couple of cemeteries in Randolph County, Alabama, and having done quite a bit of genealogical research, I can trace my ancestors back as far as the first census (1790) in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. My ancestors came to this country when the future American nation consisted of a few scattered frontier settlements on the edge of a vast wilderness, threatened by rival powers — principally the Spanish and the French — as well as by hostile natives. My pioneer ancestors didn’t come here in steamships; there were no factory jobs awaiting them; nor was there a Statue of Liberty lifting her lamp “beside the golden door.” More than 200 years before Emma Lazarus wrote her poem — and before Sen. Schumer’s great-great-grandparents arrived — my ancestors were Americans.

Those of us descended from old colonial stock are never supposed to mention this, of course, because to do so is interpreted by some people as casting aspersions on their more recently arrived ancestors. We are compelled to listen to this “nation of immigrants” nonsense babbled endlessly by politicians and media commentators, and never permitted to mention those who built the nation to which later immigrants came. Somebody had to build that “golden door” and light the beckoning torch of Liberty, and yet these earlier Americans are rhetorically erased, so to speak, when an eminent fool like Sen. Schumer implies that there was nobody here before his great-great-grandparents arrived.

One of my great-great-grandfathers, Benjamin Berryman Bolt (b. 1806, in Laurens County, S.C.) was the father of five sons who served in the Confederate army. The younger two, including my great-grandfather Winston Wood Bolt (b. 1839) and his brother Robert, served in the 13th Alabama Infantry, while three of their older brothers (John, James and William), who had moved to Texas a decade before the war, served in the 9th Texas Cavalry in the brigade of the famed Lawrence Sullivan Ross.

My ancestors were mostly farmers, and my great-grandfather, who was captured at Gettysburg, was so illiterate he signed his name with an “X.” By contrast, my blogger friend and podcast colleague John Hoge can trace his lineage to much more prestigious forebears in the Old Dominion, including William Hoge, who was born in Scotland in 1660 and was a pioneer settler of what is now Frederick County, Virginia. The Hoge family tree includes eminent Presbyterian clergymen, planters, publishers, and lawyers, so that I suppose I must doff my cap and tug the forelock in respect to my friend, a scion of the Virginia gentry.

A true aristocrat, of course, does not habitually boast of his illustrious heritage, as this would be a breach of courtesy, and I would not have raised the subject, had it not been for Sen. Schumer’s absurd and insulting insinuation of the “nation of immigrants” mythology in the context of President Trump’s MS-13 comments. Trump’s ancestors were German, a reminder that New York once had a very large and proud community of German immigrants. Because we fought two world wars against Germany in the 20th century, this German-American community suffered a terrible opprobrium, despite the fact that the Allied commander in World War II (and subsequently, a popular Republican president) was Dwight Eisenhower, himself of German ancestry.

The Germans historically have been a warlike people, going back to ancient times when tribes of fierce barbarians menaced the Roman legions that guarded the frontiers of the empire. It so happens that I have been lately re-reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and in Chapter IX, he describes the ancient Germans:

The most civilized nations of modern Europe issued from the woods of Germany; and in the rude institutions of those barbarians we may still distinguish the original principles of our present laws and manners. . . .
The Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilized people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. . . .
The religious system of the Germans (if the wild opinions of savages can deserve that name) was dictated by their wants, their fears, and their ignorance. They adored the great visible objects and agents of nature, the Sun and the Moon, the Fire and the Earth; together with those imaginary deities, who were supposed to preside over the most important occupations of human life. They were persuaded, that, by some ridiculous arts of divination, they could discover the will of the superior beings, and that human sacrifices were the most precious and acceptable offering to their altars. . . .
The same ignorance, which renders barbarians incapable of conceiving or embracing the useful restraints of laws, exposes them naked and unarmed to the blind terrors of superstition. . . .
Such was the situation, and such were the manners of the ancient Germans.

These barbarians — an ignorant “herd of savages” who practiced human sacrifice — ultimately overran the Roman empire and it required the passage of more than a thousand years to rebuild the civilization of Europe, from whence the colonial settlers of America arrived here.

My own ancestors, of course, were from the British isles, which have their own barbaric past. Not long after Christ was crucified by the Romans under the prefect Pontius Pilate, a Roman army commanded by Aulus Plautius invaded Britain (44 A.D.), and by 122 A.D., the Emperor Hadrian built a wall from the River Tyne to the Solway Firth, marking the northern limit of the Roman Empire. Twenty years after that, the Romans pushed their frontier about 100 miles further north, where they built the Antonine Wall from Old Kilpatrick to Carriden. Yet the Romans never did succeed in taming the wild barbarians of present-day Scotland, and not only were the Roman legions unable to maintain the line of the Antonine Wall, but by 180, the savage hordes sweeping down from the north broke through Hadrian’s wall and killed the Roman governor of Britain. And I proudly claim those ferocious savages as my ancestors.

Is it possible that, a thousand years from now, the descendants of today’s Mara Salvatrucha “animals” could become civilized humans? History suggests it is possible, but if we don’t want to see our nation descend into utmost barbarism — overrun and sacked like ancient Rome — in the meantime, we must enforce our laws and protect our borders.



 

 

Category: History, Immigration

The Parental Trump

Posted on | May 19, 2018 | Comments Off on The Parental Trump

by Smitty

I wear my conscience on my sleeve. When made sincerely aware of offense given, fixing the problem now, Now, NOW! is an imperative to me. As a child, Dad would send me to my room to stew over my indiscretion for a while, prior to summoning me for discipline. As a father, I get that he was cooling off before switching roles to Judge, but the dread of the discipline almost made the discipline an afterthought. Almost.

Thus, the rolling out of the IG Report may be a study in parenting-as-politics. Swift justice is a Good Thing. But in politics, especially at the national level, swift justice would have permitted Her Majesty and the Thralls to make the discussion about Vengeful McHitlerTrump, and not about the fact that the Left had tried to run the country like a banana republic.

On Twitter, Stealth Jeff is a fascinating tweep:


No idea who this guy is, where he’s sourced, or his batting average. But he has the ring of truth about his threads.
Roger Simon observes:

Whether Barack Obama himself will be looped definitively into the IG’s report, we don’t know at this time. But we all know where the fish rots from and we also know that Obama, despite his denials, knew well that Hilary was using an illegal server. He wrote her there himself under an assumed name, showing he was only slightly more computer savvy than John Podesta.

These next few weeks are going to be among the most interesting in our lifetimes — especially for our friends in the press. We know from the NYT earlier this week they are preparing their excuses. Let’s hope they don’t have enough.

Stealth Jeff says be prepared for a longer wait:

As with dad sending me to the room, the psychology at work (beside the mid-term jockeying) has the effect of allowing more of the detail to leak out. The Bad Guys get to punish themselves. As with so much of the Trump Deal, this is not how I’d do it. But, then, I don’t have the stomach or talent to win the Presidency. So I’m left to admire the results.

Category: Uncategorized

Late Night With In The Mailbox: 05.18.18

Posted on | May 19, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Paul Ryan’s Farm Bill Fail
Twitchy: Sharryl Atkisson Breaks Down Why The Deep State Didn’t Want Trump Elected
Louder With Crowder: Parkland Activist Emma Gonzalez Argues It’s Cheaper To Take Away The Guns
According To Hoyt: A Shining City Upon A Hill
Monster Hunter Nation: Statement Concerning My Being Disinvited As The GoH For Origins Game Fair
Vox Popoli: The Suicide Of The Conservative Movement

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Africans Gonna Africa Edition
American Power: Crossfire Hurricane – Obama’s FBI Spied On The Trump Campaign
American Thinker: To Know Muhammad Is To Know Islam
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Alien Octopus Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For May 18
BLACKFIVE: Owen Laukkanen, Gale Force
Bring The HEAT: World Of Warships – How To Carry
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: An Open Letter To The Cheesecake Factory On Behalf Of Trump Supporters
Don Surber: Cavuto Turns Off Trump Viewers
Dustbury: Eventually This Will Be Mandatory
The Geller Report: Oklahoma Muslima Stabbed Daughter 50-70 Times, Hit Her In Head With Pickaxe, also, West Virginia Middle School Instructs Kids To Write Out Their Submission To Allah
Hogewash: Blogsmoke, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Joe For America: Cate Blanchett Realizes #metoo Means Pound Me Too In Cannes Protest
JustOneMinute: Another School Shooting
Legal Insurrection: Senate GOP May Cancel August Recess, And That’s Bad News For Democrats, also, Gunman Yells “Anti-Trump Rhetoric” Before Shooting Up Trump Golf Club
Power Line: Richard Pipes, RIP, also, Thoughts From The Ammo Line
Shark Tank: Diaz-Balart Praises HUD, Transportation Appropriations Bills
Shot In The Dark: Shot In The Dark – Today’s News Fifteen Years Ago
STUMP: Senseless In Seattle
The Political Hat: Ebola Outbreak In The Congo? Vox Blames Trump
This Ain’t Hell: Confirmed! also, Air Force Apologizes For Tweet
Victory Girls: Yes, MS-13 Gang Members Are Animals, And Here’s Why
Weasel Zippers: Clapper Says It’s A Good Thing FBI Was Spying On Trump Campaign, also, John Brennan’s “Exceptionally Sensitive” Issue
Mark Steyn: A King In Kafiristan


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Category: Linkagery

Dimitrios Pagourtzis Identified as Perpetrator of Texas School Shooting

Posted on | May 18, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

This morning, as news of the shooting at Santa Fe High School was being broadcast on my office TV, I ignored it. No sense rushing into this latest atrocity before the murderer had been identified. Until a suspect is identified, usually you can’t even begin to guess the motive for these atrocities beyond the simple label “evil.” Now more information is available, and the motive seems to be . . . just evil:

Ten people were killed in a shooting Friday morning at a high school south of Houston, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said. School district Police Chief Walter Braun said that explosive devices were found in Santa Fe High School and the surrounding area.
According to law enforcement sources, nine students and a teacher were killed in the shooting, CBS News senior investigative producer Pat Milton reports. At an afternoon press conference, Abbott said that another 10 people were wounded.
The suspect in custody was identified as Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, Galveston County Sheriff Henry Trochesset said in a statement. He was being held without bond on a charge of capital murder. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said the suspect was believed to be a student at the school.
Abbott said that two people in interest were being interviewed by authorities. He didn’t identify them.
According to a law enforcement source, the suspect posted to social media “Dangerous Days” with a pentagram on Friday before the shooting, Milton reports.
Abbott said the suspect had said that he wanted to commit suicide after the shooting.
“He gave himself up and admitted at the time that he didn’t have the courage to commit the suicide,” Abbott said.
Police found pressure cookers and pipe bombs around the school, a law enforcement source told CBS News.

Oh, he had enough “courage” to shoot 10 people, but not enough to shoot himself? What an evil little twerp. The liberal media are eager to portray the twerp as some kind of “alt-right” neo-Nazi type (in other words, to blame Trump) but guess what? Pagourtzis is the son of a Greek immigrant, so we could just blame Greeks and immigrants instead. The collective political blame-game approach to commentary on mass murder is never played by neutral rules, you see. I’m sure feminists will blame “toxic masculinity,” and Democrats will blame the NRA, but as for me, I’ll stick with the anti-Greek/anti-immigrant explanation.

If any of my readers are Greek immigrants, understand that I’m not saying all Greek immigrants are mass murderers, just like feminists don’t blame all male college students for campus rape. Right?

UPDATE: Some things are so predictable.

UPDATE II: Ace of Spades:

Suspect in Santa Fe Shooting Has Trenchcoat Adorned With Symbols of Imperial Japanese Kamikazes, Baphomet (a Devil), Cthulhu, the Soviet Hammer and Sickle, and the German Wehrmacht Iron Cross.

My theory? Crazy People Are Dangerous.

 

Category: Crime, Education, Texas

It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas!

Posted on | May 18, 2018 | Comments Off on It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas!

The lyrics of the Rolling Stones’ hit “Jumping Jack Flash” were used as the code name for a domestic political espionage operation:

Wall Street Journal reporter Kim Strassel shared some stunning analysis of her bombshell report detailing how the Obama administration weaponized the FBI and CIA to rig the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton by planting a spy inside the 2016 Trump campaign and illegally surveilling his aides.
Anonymous former operatives of the Obama FBI confirmed Strassel’s reporting to the New York Times, where they revealed that the covert operation to spy on Donald Trump when he was a private citizen was called “Crossfire Hurricane.”
In a tweetstorm, Strassel discussed how the leakers who had spied on the Trump campaign are using the New York Times to push their own narrative before the Inspector General releases his own findings, which will undoubtedly be damning.
Strassel pointed out that the New York Times downplays the illegal spying activity of the Obama FBI to “fix” a U.S. election. Keep in mind that the liberal media — especially the NYTimes and CNN — brutally mocked President Trump when he insisted that the Obama administration had spied on him.
“[The New York Times] makes it out like it isn’t a big deal,” Strassel tweeted. “It is a very big deal.”
It turns out that not only was Trump correct in his assessment, but the illegal and unethical surveillance by the Obama FBI and CIA were far worse than anyone had ever suspected.

Yeah, Trump was ridiculed as paranoid for claiming that the Obama administration had spied on his campaign, and now that he’s been proven right, the anti-Trump media are pretending that this revelation is inconsequential. But of course, they’re in the “fake news” business.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)

 

Category: Donald Trump

In The Mailbox: 05.17.18

Posted on | May 18, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #259
EBL: Donald Trump Is Blessed With Some Really Stupid Enemies
Twitchy: Anyone Defending MS-13’s Humanity Needs To Read This Thread RIGHT NOW
Louder With Crowder: Mike Rowe Tackles Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, And Safe Spaces

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: A Fortunate Life
American Power: “I Know Who I Want To Take Me Home…”
American Thinker: Millennial Conservative Candace Owens Causes Nationwide Snowflake Meltdown
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Seattle Stupidity News
BattleSwarm: Twitter Admits Shadowbanning Users
Da Tech Guy: Matt Light Made The Patriots Hall Of Fame For Being Ashamed To Be A Patriot
Don Surber: Obama Spied On You, Too, Mitt
Dustbury: Quote Of The Week
The Geller Report: The Future Of Europe Is Civil War, also, Sheffield’s New Muslim Lord Mayor Says He Wouldn’t Toast The Queen
Hogewash: It’s Coming, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Joe For America: Don’t Talk About Gun Control When You Can’t Even Get Your Facts Right
JustOneMinute: Jumpin’ Jim Comey, He’s A Gas Gas Gas
Legal Insurrection: #FakeNews Story About Trump Calling All Immigrants “Animals” Is Why People Hate The Media, also, Someone Called 911 To Report Man With Bassoon
Power Line: Who’s An Animal? also, The Solution To School Shootings
Shark Tank: Putnam Releases New Ad Attacking “Liberal Elites”
Shot In The Dark: Why Does The DFL Hate Poor People?
The Jawa Report: Maybe Communism Not So Bad After All
The Political Hat: Academic Feels – Emotion As Knowledge, Feminist Science, & Feminist Geography
This Ain’t Hell: Dixon Police Officer Stops School Shooter, also, Boulder Bans “Rapid Spray Firing” Weapons
Victory Girls: The Empire Strikes Back – Trump Answers MS-13 Criticism, And It’s Perfect
Weasel Zippers: Nancy Pelosi Defends Violent MS-13 Gang In Response To Trump, also, White House Announces President Donating His Salary To Veterans’ Affairs
Mark Steyn: The Max Factor


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Category: Linkagery

Has #MeToo Finally Gone Too Far?

Posted on | May 17, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

If you’ve watched MTV’s Catfish, you may remember Ayissha Morgan, a lesbian who was the victim in 2015 of an online-dating deception that the show’s hosts, Nev Schulman and Max Joseph, were able to unravel. Now, she is claiming she was sexually harassed by Schulman:

The show, now in its seventh season, began airing in 2012. In it, Schulman investigates online relationships, attempting to verify whether people are who they say they are on the internet.
In a video posted May 12 on YouTube, Ayissha Morgan, who appeared on the show in 2015, alleges that she was sexually harassed by Schulman throughout the production.
A lesbian, Morgan claims Schulman . . . pushed her to “reevaluate” her sexuality and have sex with him. In another video, posted May 14, Morgan alleges that a female production assistant, “Carol,” got her drunk and took advantage of her. The next day, she claims, Schulman invited her into his hotel room, where he allegedly propositioned her.
In a statement sent by his publicist, Schulman denied the charges.
“The behavior described in this video did not happen and I’m fortunate that there are a number of former colleagues who were present during this time period who are willing to speak up with the truth,” Schulman said. “I have always been transparent about my life and would always take responsibility for my actions — but these claims are false.”

If this accusation were proven true, as Shakespeare might say, it would be a grievous sin, and grievously shall Schulman answer it. However, the scenario alleged here seems wildly improbable to me, and there are reasons to doubt the veracity of Schulman’s accuser.

She has attempted, without much success, to parlay her 15 minutes of Catfish fame into a career (her YouTube channel has fewer than 4,000 subscribers) and her most obvious motive for making these allegations against Schulman would be to garner publicity. Is it possible that Schulman would “go for the two-point conversion,” as we used to say in college of guys trying to put the move on lesbians? While we can’t say that anything is impossible, the real question is not even whether this accusation is true, but whether it was wrong. Schulman got married last year, but in 2015, he was still a bachelor. If he found Morgan attractive, was he guilty of “harassment” for expressing interest in her?

“But she’s a lesbian! He pushed her to ‘reevaluate’ her sexuality!” you say.

To which the appropriate response is: So?

If you say it’s wrong for a heterosexual man to express interest in a self-identified lesbian, does that mean it’s also wrong for gay men to express interest in heterosexual men? Because this happens all the time, without anyone automatically considering it “harassment.” Heterosexuals would be accused of homophobia if they objected too loudly to propositions from gay people, but perhaps it is absurd to expect a sense of fair play from the #MeToo movement. There is no statute of limitations, no due process, no standards of evidence — a man is accused, his reputation is instantly destroyed and his career is automatically ended.

Let us stipulate, as a hypothetical, that there is some element of truth to what Morgan says. If Schulman “propositioned” her, should this alone be sufficient cause to cast him into outer darkness? Unless his behavior was grossly insulting, threatening or violent, I’d say no harm, no foul.

As it is, Schulman says his co-workers can attest that nothing of the kind actually happened and we therefore have a “he-said/she-said” controversy, not unlike the 2006 Duke lacrosse rape hoax in which liberals rushed to believe the alleged “victim,” who proved to be a liar.

 

Category: Sex Trouble

Synthetic ‘Community’: Social Media and Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria

Posted on | May 17, 2018 | 4 Comments

Kids want to belong. In the confusing storms of adolescence, defining yourself as a member of a group becomes a source of security. Historically, this has taken the form of tribalism — ethnicity and family as the basis of identity, typically reinforced by religious belief.

When a crowd of Irish Catholics turn out for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, they are celebrating a shared sense of self, rooted in the organic reality of their common ancestry and group heritage. The security of organic community is to be contrasted with artificial or synthetic “communities” which in modern cultures are largely produced by the media. For example, why does someone identify as a “gamer”? They spend their time immersed in the hobby of playing videogames, and begin to think of other people participating in online multi-player games as friends or enemies. This digital fantasy environment becomes a basis of identity, so that the obese teenager in his mom’s basement thinks of himself in the heroic game role (e.g., a Navy SEAL fighting jihadis) and his self-esteem is invested in his success or failure in the online game.

Such synthetic “communities” can have dangerous consequences, as when impressionable and alienated young men are attracted to neo-Nazi groups or are radicalized as Islamic terrorists. Feminists have blamed online communities of “men’s rights activists” (MRAs) for the murder rampages of Elliott Rodger in 2014 and Alek Minassian in April 2018. If participation in online “communities” can promote hatred and terrorism or influence the behavior of mass murderers, should we doubt that such activity can affect perceptions of gender and sexuality?

Critics of the transgender movement have described a phenomenon they call “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” in which young people develop a sudden belief that they were “born in the wrong body” and insist on seeking gender “transition” following a few weeks or months of intense immersion in the online transgender community. A remarkable increase in the number of adolescents calling themselves “non-binary” or “genderqueer” — labels unheard of a few years ago, but popularized via websites like Tumblr — further demonstrates how online communities are influencing the sexual attitudes and behaviors of young people.

Feminists and other critics accuse transgender activists of using online communities to promote a “cult” mentality among teenagers.

 

 

 

All cults operate through the methods of “ideological totalism”:

A totalist group, or cult, will operate under an ideology that is held to be true for all people at all times. This doctrine, or dogma really, is held as the ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. It appears to be both inspired and scientific all at once. Psychiatrist Robert Lifton calls this a “sacred science.”
Whether or not the cult is religious or uses terms like “sacred” is irrelevant. The dogma is shown to be sacred in other ways- such as the forbidding of questioning the basic tenets. A cult does not need a central leader or a central God, because the ideas can be a kind of God. In the blending of transcendent ideas (the essence of womanhood, gender is a feeling, my gender is innate, etc.) and exaggerated claims of logic and scientific precision, it becomes not only a moral vision but an ultimate science. Therefore, anyone who would get in the way of this perfect scientific and moral system is a threat and must be silenced. Anyone who would question it, or even harbor alternative ideas, becomes both immoral and unscientific.

Parents say this cult mentality is also promoted by many therapists:

To put it bluntly, professional psychology has been captured by the transgender cult. Parents of teens find themselves tag-teamed, pressured into “acceptance” and “support” for “transition.”
What is apparent, from such first-hand accounts, is that transgender activists have created a narrative — a script — that is being promoted in the mental-health establishment, and the online transgender community then acts as Pied Pipers leading vulnerable youth toward “transition.”

Teenagers who immerse themselves in online communities are often socially isolated — treated as outcasts at school or otherwise alienated from the majority of their real-life peer group — and this isolation makes them especially vulnerable to those who seek to influence them. By identifying as transgender, these isolated teens may easily gain a sense of belonging that is lacking in their day-to-day interactions with peers.

Synthetic communities appeal to adolescents because group membership is a source of identity at an age when young people are struggling to define themselves as individuals. The greater a teenager’s feelings of alienation, the more outlandish their chosen identities are likely to be. Young people who are basically happy with their family and social lives, and optimistic about their futures, are as unlikely to announce they are “genderqueer” as they are to become radical Muslims. However, the ordinary emotional turbulence of adolescent life is such that even a popular and relatively well-adjusted teenager may at times be vulnerable to exploring synthetic communities. A growing body of research indicates that anxiety and depression are correlated with higher levels of social-media usage, and the association of rapid onset gender dysphoria with intense online involvement is almost certainly not coincidental:

Reports online indicate that a young person’s coming out as transgender is often preceded by increased social media use and/or having one or more peers also come out as transgender. These factors suggest that social contagion may be contributing to the significant rise in the number of young people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria. . . .
Young people can find plenty of in-group validation online. There is an incredibly positive climate around being trans in many places on the Internet. . . .
Young people on reddit and other social media sites explain that they started wondering whether they were trans because they enjoyed creating opposite-sex avatars in online games and liked the clothing or hairstyles of the opposite sex.

To get an idea of how this process occurs, consider the following account from an interview with a 24-year-old “transman” (i.e., born female) who began testosterone injections at age 20 in November 2014:

Growing up I’m definitely part of the generation . . . I grew up with computers and with internet access. I pretty quickly through that found LiveJournal and MySpace. Different platforms, social media where you’re suddenly like, okay, my friends are on here that I know but then also oh look, there’s all these other people that I don’t know yet I see them on here. It evolved, MySpace goes to Facebook then I got a Tumblr . . . then suddenly I was doing a lot of online. . . . Suddenly I was like, okay, I’m seeing a lot of people who are in the LBGTQ community and that was ringing true for me so I eventually came out as bi through knowing about the fact that that was a thing through online spaces. I’ve seen people be public about it.
I was influenced by people who are public about it. Finding out that I was queer, at first that I was bisexual, then . . . I was lesbian, then I was gay, then I was queer, then I was genderqueer, then I was trans. It’s just continued — all of these, all of my different identities have been going have all been very much influenced by the fact that I’m seeing people living these lives online. And sharing their experiences online. When I first, I’ve had a Tumblr since 2009 or so [i.e., at age 15], been on there basically through almost the entirety of my coming out experience. I’ve been seeing all these different blogs of people — that was for me, that was a space where you can also live this journey, where you’re living it in life, where you’re going through life not really not really know[ing] what the heck is happening but then you can go back online and be like, okay, here’s all these other people. Five months ago you can go back into Tumblr, okay, this is where they were at this stage in their transition or in their journey and you can self-relate just have a lot more access to different people. And then going to college, meeting a lot of other people and seeing their own online presences. I had quite a few friends that were very popular on Tumblr and different social media spaces. Honestly, it was always there. Also it was just another way to really document my trans journey for myself, just with photograph instead of having to actually physically take photos and print them. Making a scrapbook. I could just make a scrapbook online really easily. I was able to just everyday I could take a photo and put it on there and track the progress of when I was actually was starting hormones.
It was always there and always a thing for me. Especially so when early when I first started my transition blog. I’ve steered away from Tumblr. I don’t have enough time for it anymore. When I was on it I was a lot of messages I was getting was just thank you for being active. Thank you for sharing your story. Also I was very active on Facebook when I was coming out in terms of the social media bubble at my college. It’s always been a thing that I do. In high school I was very, I was the head of our GSA [Gay-Straight Alliance], I was in the pride parades. I went to the gay center in the city. I was just always been active and doing things. Social media was just another space.

Seeing “a lot of people who are in the LBGTQ community . . . through online spaces,” this person first identified as bisexual or “queer” around age 15, then as lesbian, back to queer, then “genderqueer,” finally becoming transgender at 20. Because of social media, young people have access to alternative identities being modeled for them (“seeing people living these lives online”) in a sort of identity-shopping expedition.

The desire to belong — to “fit in” somewhere, to be popular — is a natural human instinct. For the awkward or emotionally troubled teenager, transgenderism may seem like an ideal solution to their problems. For young people who feel like social failures, escaping their “gender” and transforming themselves into a simulacrum of the opposite sex offers the hope of becoming someone socially successful. Participation in an online community offers reinforcement for that escape fantasy.

Part of what makes the online transgender community so influential is that criticism is excluded as “negativity” or “hate.” Anyone who expresses doubt or discouragement toward the transition process is accused of transphobia, so that the community’s collective message to participants is a repetitive echo-chamber of reinforcement. This may tend to increase the isolation of the teenage community member, who is unlikely to find such pro-transgender attitudes among their friends and family.

Conflicts with parents and ostracism from peers can produce a sort of siege mentality, where the would-be transgender adolescent believes that everyone they know in real life is an enemy, and only members of the online community are their friends. The gender-critical feminist site 4th Wave Now published an account by a 19-year-old lesbian named Sarah who, from ages 14 to 16, identified as transgender, but who subsequently abandoned that identity. Her transgender identification, Sarah explained, was applauded in her Tumblr community, which provided “constant validation of trans people”:

The most harmful message to come out of the cultist ideology of trans rights is that you are x because you feel like x. . . . I didn’t feel like a woman, which according to trans ideology, meant I wasn’t ‘cisgender’, and so from that the leap was easy for me to make: I must be a man.

Making subjective feelings the basis of identity — a triumph of emotion over reality — is a basic appeal of all synthetic communities. Consider the world of sports: If a fan’s favorite basketball team wins the NBA championship, his identification with the team gives him a sense that their achievement is somehow a victory for him. In fact, of course, the fan has no role in the team’s fortunes, nor does their championship make any actual difference in his life, but his emotional investment as a fan of the team becomes part of his identity, even if he never attends a game in person, but only watches on TV. Similarly, a person may become intensely interested in partisan politics, so that he is elated when his party’s candidate wins an election, even though it is unlikely that he (the voter) will experience much actual benefit from his candidate’s victory. Although the outcomes of elections matter more than do the outcomes of NBA games, the motives that cause someone to identify as a Democrat or a Republican are often irrational, and the partisan’s subjective feelings may be drastically at odds with objective political reality.

Both politics and sports fandom offer examples of how synthetic communities operate and, as with transgenderism, the Internet becomes a means by which people can express and reinforce their various affiliations and interests, to seek support and a sense of belonging.

Recognizing the nature of the problem — the insidious effects of cult psychology on the alienated adolescent — is obviously the first step toward protecting young people against such appeals. Parents (and other responsible adults) must warn young people against immersing themselves in online communities, and must also be observant. Not every teenager is equally vulnerable to the appeals of the transgender cult, but none are immune. And what if your child falls prey to this mentality? Sarah says that a key factor in her case was that her mother refused to cooperate with her transgender fantasy:

I remember posting all the time online about how abusive she was for deadnaming me, or not letting me bind, which I now feel terrible about. I didn’t feel like I could talk to her about anything (especially gender things) because I had made up in my mind that she thought my very existence (as a trans person) was invalid. Her resolve was beyond admirable, though, as well as her patience for my angsty bulls–t. . . .
One of the biggest problems I think with being transgender is it comes out of an unhappiness, and that the impossibility of the accepted solution amplifies the unhappiness. Having short hair doesn’t give you an adam’s apple, testosterone injections won’t change your bone structure, a phalloplasty won’t let you produce sperm. The closer you get to the real thing, the bigger the gap between you and being a real male grows. Freeing yourself from the task of climbing a mountain whose peak can never be summited is your only chance of ever actually being happy.
I eventually stopped looking for validation as something I would never be, and started the process of loving myself.

Read the whole thing. Sarah recognized that the transgender fantasy — escaping personal unhappiness through “transition” — is a lie.  At the time, she was angry about her mother’s refusal to cooperate with her fantasy, but by the time she was 17, she realized that her “friends” in the online transgender cult were not really her friends. Within the Internet echo-chamber where the “ideological totalism” of transgender cult belief prevails, allegiance to the synthetic community is the supreme value. It is the decline of organic community — especially the loss of loyalty to church and family — which makes so many young people vulnerable to such cults. A child with a healthy sense of identity based in real life is to some extent inoculated against cult recruitment; it is chiefly because our culture has become hostile to church and family that there are so many confused youth so desperate for a sense of identity that they would consider transgenderism an acceptable “solution” to their problems.




 

 

Category: The Transgender Cult
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