Greetings from the new TAC website. The good news is that the massive slowdown in writing on the old dashboard in this past week was apparently due to migrating all the content to this new place, so that is over. The bad news is that a) I don't know what's going on with the comments situation, and b) I'm taking forever to ooch my way through this new system (think of an old man navigating his way across an icy parking lot in penny loafers). Thanks for your patience, and we're trying to work the comments problem and other glitches out.

Lo, I finally made it onto Jordan B. Peterson's podcast, where the Great Man and I talked about Live Not By Lies and soft totalitarianism. Here's a link to the interview on JBP's YouTube channel. 

I insist that this is "soft" totalitarianism, because nobody is being sent to the gulag or for interviews with the secret police over their unorthodox opinions. But they are being compelled to pay a price for saying things that were perfectly normal the day before yesterday.

Take the case of the singer Macy Gray, who defended the traditional definition of woman (versus transgender revisionism) on British TV the other day, and told her critics to stuff it. But then:

https://twitter.com/conservmillen/status/1545432482220236800?s=20&t=MkllSLFWjLBeOsLknMA0kQ

Wonder how they got to her and forced her to confess? It's chilling, isn't it? Macy Gray is a big star, a Grammy winner, even. They broke her in a day or so. We all know what she really thinks ... and we all see her humiliation. Actually, I hope that we are only seeing humiliation here. The scary thing would be is if she accepted what Orwell called "the Party's final, most essential command": that she should stop believing the evidence of her own eyes. 

Did you see that the US military is now requiring soldiers to share the shower with pre-op transsexuals? The chick with a dick is going to be showing his female penis to women soldiers, sailors, and airmen, by order of the Secretary of Defense. Progress! Meanwhile, all branches of the military are struggling mightily to reach recruitment goals. With only three months left in the fiscal year, the Army has hit only 40 percent of its benchmark. I'm sure it's nothing as simple as reaction to trans, but I would bet money that the Great Awokening rolling through the officer corps, beginning in the Obama era, has a lot to do with it. My guess is that the kind of young men most eager to serve are not keen on entering a military so hostile to their values -- to say nothing about being sent out to fight forever wars by an imperial power whose ruling class back home treats conservatives and traditionalists with contempt, and who sees white heterosexual males as a particular problem. 

You can break Macy Gray. You're going to have a harder time breaking a country boy from Alabama. As I told my younger son when he was thinking about signing up for the military, I'll support you whatever you choose, but I want you to think long and hard before you put yourself in a situation where you will have to choose between obeying your conscience and obeying your commanding officer. He's going to trade school instead. He would have made a damn fine soldier, too. He's strong, brave, loyal, and smart. But he's a Christian and a conservative, and that means he is persona non grata in today's woke military -- this, according to Christian conservative military folks I know personally, and others who read this blog and who have written to me. 

Back to Macy Gray: what they did to her is an example of what they will do to anybody who dares to speak out against transgender totalitarianism. If you want to have a successful career in entertainment, or a middle-class profession, you must salute the female penis. Most of us over a certain age understand how insane, morally and scientifically, that is. But the schools are working hard to brainwash the younger generation.

Take a look at this testimony by the mother of a young self-proclaimed trans girl. She says 25 percent of her little girl's class identify as trans. Excerpt:

The first issue is with what the school is teaching children. My daughter’s trans identity started when the school taught a module on ‘identity’ during which they told a group of 11-year-olds that, if you feel uncomfortable in your body, it means you are transgender. My daughter had just had her first period two months prior to this class. Of course she was feeling uncomfortable in her body. She went home, looked up ‘transgender’ on Tiktok, and that was it. She was now trans.

The second issue is a related one, and that is to do with the school’s non-stop celebration of LGBTQI+ identities. I used to be proud that my children attended a progressive school that is anti-racist, inclusive, and believes in social justice. We chose the school for these qualities. But in the last two to three years, this has meant a relentless stream of identity flags and rainbows. Transgender ‘heroes’ like Jazz Jennings are worked into any part of the curriculum that they even vaguely fit. This is a school for kids aged 9 to 13. I’m no prude, but I also don’t think a constant parade of sexual politics is appropriate for such young children.

The third issue is with how the school is approaching the children ‘coming out’. Their official policy seems to be to just go with whatever the kids say without informing the parents. If a child says they have a new name and pronouns, the school just rolls with it—and they create the scenario where an already distressed child ends up cycling through four names in six months.

(I say it ‘seems to be’ the policy, because this policy is nowhere written down or official. My child’s name and pronouns were changed by the school without my knowledge. We didn’t get so much as a phone call, when we have been at the school for years, we know the teachers well, and we have been active members of the school community.)

None of this would matter if it was just about flags and fun identities. But it is not. For my daughter, the name and pronoun change (which we foolishly went along with, on the advice of a therapist) was a tipping point into depression and self-harm. It has made her miserable.

When I spoke to the school about the harm they are doing, they would not hear it. They told me that they celebrate all identities, that they pride themselves on being inclusive. They cannot see the transgender issue as anything other than fun flags and inclusivity and respect. They do not see the dark side that we parents do: we are trying to protect our kids from bone-crushing puberty blockers; from taking cross-sex hormones when they’re too young to have had sex; from having radical surgery on their developing bodies. Some days it feels like we are holding back a tsunami.

Read the whole thing. Incredibly, the mother still has her daughter in this insane asylum of a school. 

I'm still in Hungary, where the government last year banned this kind of thing for children. The European Union screamed bloody murder over it, but Hungarian mothers and fathers can thank God that they have a government on their side, and on the side of their children. Yesterday, when I was working in a Budapest coffee shop (one of the ones named after Sir Roger Scruton), a man in there with his teenage daughter recognized me, and asked me to sign his copy of Live Not By Lies, the Hungarian edition. His name is Richard. He asked me to sign it to his son, who is 17, "and who is totally in love with America, but the America of Ronald Reagan, not what you are today." 

Richard looked genuinely anguished talking about America, and what has happened to us. "You used to be such an inspiration to us," he said. "What happened to you?" He said he used to work over here for an American multinational company. "About five years ago, suddenly everything was about race, gender, and sexuality," he said. "What does that have to do with anything? If you can do the work, fine, and if you can't, then find another job. That went out the window. They started hiring people on the basis of race, sex, and gender. Why? I don't get it. Why don't you Americans see what you are doing to yourselves?"

I told him he's preaching to the choir. I asked him if I could take his picture and share it on my blog. He said yes. I have never really thought about what this woke insanity is doing to the image of our country abroad, but this kind of thing happens to me with some frequency wherever I go in the former communist countries of Europe: middle-aged people or older asking, What happened to the America we loved? The one that gave us hope?

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We chose to live by lies, is what happened. And we chose to humiliate and punish those like Macy Gray, who for one moment, at least, refused -- until she was re-educated, and learned to love the Female Penis. 

Here's Richard, who refuses to live by lies.