"LIVE NOT BY LIES"
Trans Totalitarianism: Time For Moral Panic
People
have been propagandized out of having a healthy reaction to a moral horror --
the colonization of children's minds and bodies -- overtaking our society
By Rod Dreher
Aug 16, 2022
The phrase "moral panic" refers to a fear-driven mass
overreaction to a phenomenon that is either false or minor. Witch hunts are the
usual manifestation of a moral panic. There are no witches (well, technically
not true, at least these days, but the witches didn't poison the well), so to
freak out and persecute women because they might be a witch is a classic
example of moral panic. The Satanic abuse craze of the 1990s is another. Again:
a "moral panic" ensues when there is a mass freakout over something
that doesn't exist, or is extremely minor and in no way justifies the size and
intensity of the reaction.
The other day, I saw on Twitter someone saying that they are a
good liberal and all that, but they are really worried about what they're
seeing regarding the emerging culture of the medical and teaching professions
encouraging children to transition to the opposite sex. "But," said
this person, "I don't want to surrender to a moral panic."
I submit to you that a moral panic is
precisely the correct response to this egregious phenomenon. That is,
what is happening is so hideous, and so widespread, and the reaction by most
people to this point has been so muted to non-existent, that if you are not
panicking, you are not paying attention.
Most people are not on Twitter, and if you're one of these people,
you may not be aware of the extent of the insanity. The media are not covering
it, of course. It falls to badasses like Matt Walsh, Chaya Raichik (who runs
the Libs Of Tik Tok account), Christina Buttons, and Chris Elston, the guy who
runs the Billboard Chris website and
Twitter account, to sound the alarm.
The things they document are not nut-picking (the practice of
finding extreme weirdos, and falsely using them as an example of the whole).
They are completely mainstream. These are things that, if we had a functional
media instead of a Narrative-massaging industry, would be widely reported, and
discussed intensely. (...)
Libs of TikTok has an important essay about
the Left's attempts to sever the relationship between parents and children.
This phenomenon is one of the clearest and most alarming examples of the
totalitarian nature of the contemporary Leftist project. When I was
researching Live Not By Lies, people who escaped Communism kept
telling me that one of the characteristics of the totalitarian regimes they
escaped was the State inserting itself between children and their parents. This
is well known to historians, as a matter of fact. The theory was that the State
is the true parent, and as such, needs to defend the rights of children against
their parents, who are carriers of old, oppressive values. This was necessary
to liberate children from the past, and from its evil values.
I remember first learning about this aspect of Communism many
years ago, and thinking that this is one thing that would never, ever be
accepted in America. People would go to the mat to defend their children, and
the sacred relationship between parents and children. But now it's here. (...)
Various states across America have begun implementing laws and
policies to allow children to make healthcare decisions without a parent or
guardian’s consent — and the medical industry is promoting it. Many of these
states are using these new laws to allow for drastic medical decisions to be
made without parental consent including hormone therapy, gender reassignment
surgery, and medicated mental health treatment.
More:
New York has hopped on the bandwagon of removing parents from the
treatment room as well. New York-Presbyterian recently sent out emails to their
patients explaining that accounts for 12-17-year-olds must be updated to
reflect the adolescent’s personal email address as the primary contact as New
York State law allows children “to keep their sensitive medical information
private and to consent to some of their own medical treatment.”
Do you get what they're doing here? Major hospitals and liberal
states are making it possible for minor children to choose to have hormone
therapy and other interventions to change their sex without their
parents consent, or even knowledge! If you aren't morally
panicked by this, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
(...)
Why haven't you read about this stuff in the media? Well, why do
you think? Ideological capture by the illiberal Left in the USA is all but
total.
And children are being heavily propagandized in some classrooms,
from the earliest age, to doubt that their body tells them anything meaningful
about their sex. One of the most frequent kinds of posts on LOTT are of
teachers who brag about how they're queering their classrooms, and introducing
doubt about gender categories into the minds of their captive child audiences.
(...)
Believe me, I could go on. They are castrating boys. They are
chopping the breasts off of girls. They are mutilating young women to create
pseudo-phalluses. They cover it all up in Orwellian neologisms like
"gender affirmation surgery," but here is the reality, from a medical site's photo of
what surgeons do to a woman's forearm to get the tissue they need to make her a
Frankenpenis: (shown above).
"Oh, Rod, why did you have to gross me out with these
pictures?" you might be saying. Well, maybe your complacent self needs to
be grossed out. The answer is because I am sick and tired of these Mengeles
hiding behind euphemism. You have to see this stuff to believe how horrible it
is. This is what they are setting children up for. This.
Once again: you are not going to learn about this stuff in our
mainstream media. Even Fox News uses the loaded term "gender affirmation"
to describe this stuff. Thank God for people like Matt Walsh, Billboard Chris, Libs of TikTok, Christina Buttons, Chris Rufo, and others
who are taking the lead, and taking a hell of a lot of heat for it.
What can we do? First, spread the word. Educate yourselves and
others. Your family is not safe, and if you think it is, you are
lying to yourself. Last summer, a Slovenian Catholic father told me his
12-year-old daughter was mired in severe depression over her gender identity.
The year before, he and his wife got her a smartphone, like all the other kids
in her class had. The girl made contact online with some older American
teenagers, who convinced her that she might not be a girl. The dad was
gobsmacked. He had thought they were safe in little Slovenia. There are no safe
places. If you buy your kid a smartphone, you are opening up doors for them
that should not be opened. And it's beyond smartphones. It's in the classroom.
Did you know that more and more schools are installing "gender affirmation
closets," in which clothing is stored for kids who believe
they are transgender, so they can change into cross-sex clothing when they get
to school, then get back into their normal clothes before going home -- this,
to keep mom and dad in the dark.
Do you know what your kids' teachers are saying in the classroom?
Do you know what your kids' school's policies are regarding transgender
identity and the parents' right to know? Do you know what your family doctor's
practices are on this front? You had better!
Second, pressure leaders to get active. Are your pastors or
bishops staying silent? Ask them why. What about your school board member? We
have to elect politicians who have been red-pilled on the issue, and who are
willing to use the power given to them by the people in our democracy to fight
this tooth and nail. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been a good example, but we
need much, much more of this from Republicans. Do not listen to normie
Republicans who blather on, like sweet summer children, about "small
government" and "free markets". The only power capable of
stopping this monstrous exploitation of children is the State. The Left
has captured every major institution in America now with its insane gender
ideology (DEI too, but that's another story).
This is what soft totalitarianism is: the
implementation of a single illiberal ideology within a society within a
liberal, free-market society, through total capture of its institutions. As I
explain in Live Not By Lies,
you don't need to threaten people with the gulag when the schools, big
business, the media, academia, medicine, law, the military, and everyone else
are all on the same ideological page.
We still, for now, have the power to fight this, if we can gain
political power, and are not too squeamish to use it. But trust me, we would be
total fools to put all our trust in political victory. The political scientist Eric
Kaufmann has shown using survey data that Americans under the age of 30 prize
cancel culture's values more than liberty. Either we are going
to have to see a massive generational shift in attitudes, and soon, or the
window is closing on traditional American liberties -- and that means they will
be able to come after your kids, permanently. If that's not worth panicking
over, what is?
I am quite pessimistic about the long term, because of the woke
ideological takeover of all of society's institutions, especially its
culture-forming ones. I hope I am wrong, but I don't see middle-class culture
ever rising up meaningfully against this stuff. Few people overall are going to
risk their status in bourgeois society to stand against this evil.
(...)
The latest piece of insanity is the claim made by trans advocates
that very small children "know" that they are trans, and show it by
playing with toys associated with the opposite sex. Once again, these claims
are not being made by a loony-left fringe: they are endorsed by the top medical
authorities in the field
(...)
Finally, we absolutely have to start preparing for the long
resistance to this totalitarianism. For example, forming an underground
railroad for parents to protect their children from these ghouls, and get them
out of states where Child Protective Services can legally seize the kids and
administer hormones. There seems to be a misunderstanding among some
conservatives, who think that preparing for resistance in defeat undercuts our
commitment to fighting trans totalitarianism politically. This is dangerously
wrong. To repeat: we absolutely should throw ourselves passionately into
fighting this child-abusing madness! But we should also be working on
a Plan B, in case we lose this fight, which, I regret to say, is
likely.
| Fr Kolakavic |
I dedicated Live Not By Lies to the memory of
the late Catholic priest Tomislav Kolakovic, who in 1943 escaped the Nazis and
hid out in his mother's homeland, Slovakia, teaching in the Catholic university
in Bratislava. The good news, he told his students, is that Nazi
totalitarianism was going to be defeated. The bad news, though, is that Soviet
totalitarianism was going to be ruling over them when the war ended -- and that
the first thing the Communists would do is to persecute the Church. As I
explain in the book, Father Kolakovic knew he had no time to waste to prepare
the unready Catholics of Slovakia for the coming persecution. Excerpt from the
book:
Father Kolaković knew that the clericalism and passivity of
traditional Slovak Catholicism would be no match for communism. For one thing,
he correctly foresaw that the communists would try to control the church by
subduing the clergy. For another, he understood that the spiritual trials
awaiting believers under communism would put them to an extreme test. The charismatic
pastor preached that only a total life commitment to Christ would enable them
to withstand the coming trial.
“Give yourself totally to Christ, throw all your worries and
desires on him, for he has a wide back, and you will witness miracles,” the
priest said, in the recollection of one disciple.
Giving oneself totally to Christ was not an abstraction or a pious
thought. It needed to be concrete, and it needed to be communal. The total
destruction of the First World War opened the eyes of younger Catholics to the
need for a new evangelization. A Belgian priest named Joseph Cardijn, whose
father had been killed in a mining accident, started a lay movement to do this
among the working class. These were the Young Christian Workers, called “Jocists”
after the initials of their name in French. Inspired by the Jocist example,
Father Kolaković adapted it to the needs of the Catholic Church in
German-occupied Slovakia. He established cells of faithful young Catholics who
came together for prayer, study, and fellowship.
The refugee priest taught the young Slovak believers that every
person must be accountable to God for his actions. Freedom is responsibility,
he stressed; it is a means to live within the truth. The motto of the Jocists
became the motto for what Father Kolaković called his “Family”: “See. Judge.
Act.” See meant to be awake to realities around you. Judge was a command to
discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be
true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a
conclusion, then you are to act to resist evil.
Václav Vaško, a Kolaković follower, recalled late in his life that
Father Kolaković’s ministry excited so many young Catholics because it
energized the laity and gave them a sense of leadership responsibility.
“It is remarkable how Kolaković almost instantly succeeded in
creating a community of trust and mutual friendship from a diverse grouping of
people (priests, religious and lay people of different ages, education, or
spiritual maturity),” Vaško wrote.
The Family groups came together at first for Bible study and
prayer, but soon began listening to Father Kolaković lecture on philosophy,
sociology, and intellectual topics. Father Kolaković also trained his young
followers in how to work secretly, and to withstand the interrogation that he
said would surely come.
The Family expanded its small groups quickly across the nation.
“By the end of the school year 1944,” Vaško said, “it would have been difficult
to find a faculty or secondary school in Bratislava or larger cities where our
circles did not operate.”
In 1946, Czech authorities deported the activist priest. Two years
later, communists seized total power, just as Father Kolaković had predicted.
Within several years, almost all of the Family had been imprisoned and the
Czechoslovak institutional church brutalized into submission. But when the
Family members emerged from prison in the 1960s, they began to do as their
spiritual father had taught them. Father Kolaković’s top two
lieutenants—physician Silvester Krčméry and priest Vladimír Jukl—quietly set up
Christian circles around the country and began to build the underground church.
The underground church, led by the visionary cleric’s spiritual
children and grandchildren, became the principle means of anti-communist
dissent for the next forty years. It was they who organized a mass 1988 public
demonstration in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, demanding religious liberty.
The Candle Demonstration was the first major protest against the state. It
kicked off the Velvet Revolution, which brought down the communist regime a
year later. Though Slovak Christians were among the most persecuted in the
Soviet Bloc, the Catholic Church there thrived in resistance because one man
saw what was coming and prepared his people.
I should add here that Father Kolakovic faced initial opposition
from his own bishops, who accused him of what we now call "moral
panic." They could not see, and they did not want to see, the dangers that
lay ahead. They thought everything would be fine if Catholics simply kept quite
still and waited. That kind of complacency was deadly -- and Father Kolakovic
knew it.
The people who escaped Communism to the West, who talked to me for
the book, know it too. That's why they are trying hard to warn us about what we
are living in, and what's to come. It is not hard to find these people. If you
know someone in your own life who emigrated from a Communist country -- not
only the Soviet bloc, but also China, Cuba, or Venezuela -- ask them what they
think of what's going on in America today. Live Not By Lies has
become a bestseller since its initial publication in September 2020. Last week,
we crossed the 170,000 sales mark in the US; it is now either in print, or soon
will be in print, in ten other languages. It has been by far the biggest seller
of my career, selling almost twice as many copies as my next biggest
book, The Benedict Option.
This has been a heavily word of mouth success story, because the mainstream
media, which covered The Benedict Option heavily,
has totally ignored this one. It's a word of mouth success story because a lot
of people know what time it is, and they know that the ideologically-captured
media are lying to us all. They also know that most religious leaders are like
the fraidy-cat 1940s bishops of Slovakia: afraid to face the reality of what's
happening around them, and to jeopardize their respectability by actually
protecting their flocks from the gathering wolfpacks.
In the year 2000, I wrote a piece for The Weekly
Standard about the courageous stand two Massachusetts
parents, Brian Camenker and Scott Whiteman, took against the stealth
introduction of radical sexuality into the lives of public school students in
that state. What we now know is that gay activists had already captured the
educational bureaucracy in Massachusetts, as well as the media and other
institutions. Here's what the men documented in a state-sponsored educational
seminar:
Furthermore, Whiteman was called a "slanderer" by a
member of the Board of Education, he says. "I knew I wasn't lying. I knew
I wasn't making it up. I knew I wasn't an alarmist."
Frustrated by official indifference, Whiteman secretly took his
tape recorder along to the 10th annual conference of the Boston chapter of
GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, at Tufts University on
March 25. GLSEN (pronounced "glisten") is a national organization
whose purpose is to train teachers and students and develop programs to, in the
words of its Boston chapter leader, "challenge the anti-gay,
hetero-centric culture that still prevails in our schools."
The state-sanctioned conference, which was open to the public but
attended chiefly by students, administrators, and teachers, undercut the
official GLSEN line -- that their work is aimed only at making schools safer by
teaching tolerance and respect.
The event, backed by the state's largest teachers' union, included
such workshops as "Ask the Transsexuals," "Early Childhood
Educators: How toDecide Whether to Come Out at Work or Not," "The
Struggles and Triumphs of Including Homosexuality in a Middle School
Curriculum" (with suggestions for including gay issues when teaching the
Holocaust), "From Lesbos to Stonewall: Incorporating Sexuality into a
World History Curriculum," and "Creating a Safe and Inclusive
Community in Elementary Schools," in which the "Rationale for
integrating glbt [gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender] issues in the early
elementary years will be presented."
Whiteman sat in on a "youth only, ages 14-21" workshop
called "What They Didn't Tell You About Queer Sex & Sexuality in
Health Class." If "they" didn't tell you about this stuff, it's
probably because "they" worried they'd be sent to jail.
The raucous session was led by Massachusetts Department of
Education employees Margot Abels and Julie Netherland, and Michael Gaucher, an
AIDS educator from the Massachusetts public health agency. Gaucher opened the
session by asking the teens how they know whether or not they've had sex.
Someone asked whether oral sex was really sex.
"If that's not sex, then the number of times I've had sex has
dramatically decreased, from a mountain to a valley, baby!" squealed
Gaucher. He then coaxed a reluctant young participant to talk about which
orifices need to be filled for sex to have occurred: "Don't be shy, honey,
you can do it."
Later, the three adults took written questions from the kids. One
inquired about "fisting," a sex practice in which one inserts his
hand and forearm into the rectum of his partner. The helpful and enthusiastic
Gaucher demonstrated the proper hand position for this act. Abels described
fisting as "an experience of letting somebody into your body that you want
to be that close and intimate with," and praised it for putting one
"into an exploratory mode."
Gaucher urged the teens to consult their "really hip"
Gay/Straight Alliance adviser for hints on how to come on to a potential sex
partner. The trio went on to explain that lesbians could indeed experience
sexual bliss through rubbing their clitorises together, and Gaucher told the
kids that male ejaculate is rumored to taste "sweeter if people eat
celery." On and on like this the session went.
When the men made the tape public, they became instant pariahs in
Boston. The media and the legal establishment turned on them as alarmist
bigots. I wrote at the time in that piece:
But will their expose ultimately make a difference? GLSEN/Boston
boasts the most advanced programs of its kind in the nation. As goes
Massachusetts, in time, so may go the rest of America.
And so it has.
What are you doing to prepare yourself, your family, and your
church, synagogue, or mosque community? (By the way, though Live Not By
Lies is written from a religious perspective, it has been embraced and
promoted by left-wing atheists like Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, who
understand that its anti-totalitarianism message and advice are universal.)
Here's some good news, maybe: Live Not By Lies will finally
be out in paperback on October 11 -- you can preorder it here. This
will make the book more affordable for group study. I hope you won't simply
read the book, but will act on the advice the anti-communist dissidents give
for how to prepare for resistance. For those who have bought the book, or who
intend to do so, here is a link to a free,
downloadable study guide I prepared to help guide group
discussion.
I am perhaps more sensitive to this than most because I am
extremely focused on child protection. As longtime readers know, I became so
engrossed in writing about the systematic sexual abuse of children within
Catholic clerical circles, and the systematic cover-up of same, that I burned
out, and lost my ability to believe as a Catholic. I am grateful to be an
Orthodox Christian now, but I wish I had managed my anger better. But I don't
regret my outrage itself, because it was entirely appropriate to the scale of
the moral horror. Part of what drove me over the falls with anger was the
obstinate complacency of so many in the Catholic laity, in the face of
revelations of what some priests did to children, and what many bishops did to keep
the public from finding out about it. Far too many lay Catholics preferred to
keep their peace of mind, even though it was based on sheer denial of the
reality of evil in their midst, than to take a stand.
We are at this place again, except the monstrous child abuse is
not happening behind closed doors. It's happening out in the open, in major
hospitals, schools, and other institutions. Like eugenics in the early 20th
century, it is celebrated by all the most progressive institutions in our society.
All of us are propagandized daily to accept and affirm it. What the criminals
in clerical collars who violated the innocence of children never dared to do
openly, the trans-totalitarians in doctor's coats and other symbols of
authority now shout from the rooftops. As Chris Rufo recently documented, these activists have infiltrated
schools with an army of sex-and-gender radicals. Meanwhile, from the
rest of us? Aside from resistance here and there, nothing.
What are you going to do about it? What are you going to tell your
children one day? Chris Rufo, Matt Walsh, Christina Buttons, Chaya Raichik, and
Billboard Chris Elston will be able to hold their heads up in honor, if they
will have been allowed to keep their heads, that is. How about you, pastor? How
about you, doctor? How about you, Mom and Dad?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rod
Dreher
Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American
Conservative. A veteran of three decades of magazine and newspaper
journalism, he has also written three New York Times bestsellers—Live
Not By Lies, The Benedict Option, and The Little
Way of Ruthie Leming—as well as Crunchy Cons and How
Dante Can Save Your Life. Dreher lives in Baton Rouge, La.Trans Totalitarianism: Time For Moral Panic - The American Conservative
"Better that only
a few Catholics should be left, staunch and sincere in their religion, than
that they should, remaining many, desire as it were, to be in collusion with
the Church's enemies and in conformity with the open foes of our faith.” —St.
Peter Canisius (1521-1597
|
Is this to do with a transgender operation? I wish people would least qualify what it relates to?
ReplyDeleteI say:
Just click on the link and you'll see that yes, it refers to transgender surgery (FB had blacked out the image heading this post as 'sensitive comment').
Mark Moriarty:
Oh sorry. I didn't think to do that. It's horrific to put minors through that. Manipulating vulnerable minds for irreversible procedures and incredible suffering and mutilation. Satan would love it. He gets to hurt God through hurting his creation made in his image.
I say:
Satan does love it. it's his inspiration. demonic. In this particular incident however it wasn't a minor involved, but an adult.