‘Bacha Bazi’ For Americans
Further to my last post, the one asking what our military is defending, check these out:
“Bacha bazi” are the dancing boys of Afghanistan — boys who are forced to dress as females to dance and entertain Pashtun men, who make them their sex slaves.
Look, a drag queen named “Nicole Jizzington” (“jizz” is slang for semen) performed for elementary school children in San Fransicko:
Meanwhile, the Satanic Temple in Idaho is a co-sponsor of a “family friendly” LGBT event, and plans to be present handing out literature. But see, noticing these things is bigoted.
Some of you have complained in the comments that this blog has become too boring and shrieky in recent years. Maybe. But as the cultural decline that has always been key to this blog’s analysis rapidly accelerates, I feel like to the deaf, you have to shout. If I lose some of y’all, I’m sorry about that — seriously, not just saying it — but I don’t know what else to do. We are watching our country and even our civilization dismantling itself. This is no small thing. This is the biggest thing there is!
If you’ve been reading me for the past two decades, you know that nothing matters more to me than protecting children. It’s why I ran into the Catholic scandal fire, guns blazing, and didn’t come out with my faith intact. When I see what these left-wing creeps are doing to kids now in the name of sexual orientation and gender identity, everything in me screams: “Over my dead body, you monsters!”
I mean, look at this — look at what the genial host of NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me tweeted, first genuinely (I believe) not understanding why conservatives (and others) find child drag shows to be disgusting:
This is one of those things that if you have to explain it to people why it’s wrong to dress up little boys like women — not like little girls, but like grown women — and have the prance gamine-ishly on stage for the entertainment of adults, they’re lost anyway. Later, Sagal compares fighting the expansion of transgenderism to the Holocaust:
So now trying to save women’s athletics by preventing males masquerading as females from competing is now like a prelude to Bergen-Belsen. Great. Well, I’ll agree with him on one thing: America does seem increasingly like Germany, but I would locate it in Germany of the 1920s, without the interesting art. May God save us from becoming Germany of the 1930s.
What’s interesting is that Sagal and Clymer are following a strategy you see play out in Matt Walsh’s excellent documentary “What Is A Woman?”: when you’re a genderqueer-positive “expert” who can’t or won’t answer a hard question put to you by a critic, question their motives for asking. To be sure, I don’t think it’s unfair for people to ask, in good faith, why “drag kids” are so alarming. It’s just that I question the good faith of most of the people who ask it. It’s a rhetorical judo move to switch the interrogation from those doing the bad thing to those who dare say, “Wait a minute, why are you doing this bad thing?”
But maybe Sagal genuinely doesn’t get it. Maybe he genuinely doesn’t understand why the symbolic emasculation, sexualization, and feminization of prepubescent males is a horrible things. He should check out this thread by Christian Watson, on queer theory.
Excerpts:
“There’s something fresh happening on this playground,” said every child molester, ever.
Watson goes on to discuss the role that poststructuralism plays in queer theory. As he puts it, poststructuralism claims that all reality is socially constructed, and that the general point of queer theory is to disrupt “oppressive” traditional social constructs, including gender norms. Childhood is one such social construct. Watson:
In fact, I went back to read one of the papers cited favorably in one of the quotes Watson uses, the 2005 one by Michael Cobb of the University of Toronto, the source of the pervy playground quote. Here’s a link. Excerpts:
Making children sexy, making children queer, is playing with matches. And given the character of the current ultraconservative, values-worried political climate, some fire is sure to ignite.
Yeah, you think? More; emphasis below mine:
There’s something fresh happening on this playground, perhaps because a child can stand in for almost anything; with a child, as so many of my childbonded colleagues endlessly tell me, anything is possible: “they do and say the craziest” things. And it’s this elasticity, this playfulness, that helps some very smart people say some very smart things. The queer child thus tells me something that is no longer a secret: despite those who’ve been whispering in my ear that queer theory is dead, repetitive, or even “over,” queer theory, it seems, is nonetheless alive and kicking, which is lucky for us, because “now more than ever,” queers need critical, intellectually daring, and politically minded work to compete with the conservative family values (especially the value of straight, innocent children) that not only grounds the U.S. nation, but soon will apparently ground the rest of the world.
He quotes a queer theory book by a queer scholar, now teaching at Tufts, named Lee Edelman, who, in his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, criticizes the idea of the Child as a social figure whose existence forces us to think about the future. Here is part of the description of the book, from the Duke University Press catalog:
In this searing polemic, Lee Edelman outlines a radically uncompromising new ethics of queer theory. His main target is the all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the linchpin of our universal politics of “reproductive futurism.” Edelman argues that the child, understood as innocence in need of protection, represents the possibility of the future against which the queer is positioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony, jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself.
Are you understanding this? Edelman is openly saying that queers should become child-hating nihilists. From what I’ve been able to discern, this position is controversial among queer theorists, but Michael Cobb thinks this is all great fun:
And although he might be overstating the case about the Child’s essentially forward-timing qualities, and although he might upset people with his most irreverent assertions (“Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis”), he does some very important work pointing out that our political names carry a destructive logic that need not only bind us inexorably to the worst kind of political brat—the future. Instead, we might “bring out what’s ‘impossible, inhuman’” embedded within future’s captivity: “a haunting, destructive excess bound up with pious sentimentality, an overdetermination that betrays the place of the kernel of irony that futurism tries to allegorize as narrative, as history.”13 We might bring out the ghosts, then, the impossible beings, in order to break open the seams of the overarching political narrative. We would not then get history (that otherwise irons over the irony of the queer), but something more excessive, something that need not be figured well in advance. Attacking the Child somehow sparks such creative possibilities.
“Attacking the Child somehow sparks such creative possibilities,” said every child abuser, ever. Here, by the way, is the fuller quote from Edelman, cursing the enemies of queerness:
Fuck the social order and the figural children paraded before us as its terroristic emblem; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Miz; fuck the poor innocent kid on the ‘Net; fuck Laws both with capital ‘l’s and with small; fuck the whole network of symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.
Cobb considers the work of Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, described by, whaddaya know, publisher Duke University Press in this way:
Children are thoroughly, shockingly queer, as Kathryn Bond Stockton explains in The Queer Child, where she examines children’s strangeness, even some children’s subliminal “gayness,” in the twentieth century. Estranging, broadening, darkening forms of children emerge as this book illuminates the child queered by innocence, the child queered by color, the child queered by Freud, the child queered by money, and the grown homosexual metaphorically seen as a child (or as an animal), alongside the gay child. What might the notion of a “gay” child do to conceptions of the child? How might it outline the pain, closets, emotional labors, sexual motives, and sideways movements that attend all children, however we deny it?
Engaging and challenging the work of sociologists, legal theorists, and historians, Stockton coins the term “growing sideways” to describe ways of growing that defy the usual sense of growing “up” in a linear trajectory toward full stature, marriage, reproduction, and the relinquishing of childish ways. Growing sideways is a mode of irregular growth involving odd lingerings, wayward paths, and fertile delays. Contending that children’s queerness is rendered and explored best in fictional forms, including literature, film, and television, Stockton offers dazzling readings of works ranging from novels by Henry James, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Vladimir Nabokov to the movies Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Hanging Garden, Heavenly Creatures, Hoop Dreams, and the 2005 remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The result is a fascinating look at children’s masochism, their interactions with pedophiles and animals, their unfathomable, hazy motives (leading them at times into sex, seduction, delinquency, and murder), their interracial appetites, and their love of consumption and destruction through the alluring economy of candy.
Yeah, I guess we all want to know what queer theorists think about children’s masochism and interactions with pedophiles, right? Here’s what Cobb says, in appreciation of Stockton. Again, emphases mine:
Such an unorthodox form of theorizing exemplifies what many of the thinkers I’ve been discussing are doing, although Stockton does it in a more hyperbolic way: seeking to get beyond the prohibition and scandal of queer children, and to allow for the importance of the child to be turned into anything other than something thought to be natural and sacred and not open to queer play. That is, they are working out difficult histories and rhetorical tropes of the child, which have long been guarded by the more conservative, traditional family-loving members of North America. They accomplish as much through rhetorical leaps, metaphorical inventions, and analytical games. They do what children are thought to do in their most romantic, if not cheesy, idealizations: they are playful, they are imaginative, and they are suggestive.
Surely we must open children to “queer play” — that’s what Drag Queen Story Hour, and child drag shows, are doing — or the Christianists will win!
Here’s how Cobb’s essay ends. Once more, emphases are mine:
Nowhere, or no future, or not where we’re supposed to traditionally go, or grow. But the figurative dissolutions Stockton and the numerous, queer others writing about queer children produce help tear apart the world in order to offer some playful other things: as Edelman similarly suggests, in his discussion of birds, “[r]ather than expanding the reach of the human . . . we might . . insist on enlarging the inhuman instead—or enlarging what, in its excess, in its unintelligibility, exposes the human itself as always misrecognized catachresis [a misapplication of a phrase — RD], a positing blind to the willful violence that marks its imposition.” Somehow the queer child has given us not only queer children and the scandals they occasion, but also the ability to be radically speculative, suggestive, and intelligent. Queers become children and, then, animals. Very naughty indeed.
He’s praising Edelman for saying that queerness ought to cause us to throw off the human. That queerness means the death of Man. (Maybe the “trans wolf” Matt Walsh interviewed is an Edelman reader.) More from Edelman’s book:
Truth, like queerness, irreducibly linked to the “aberrant or atypical,” to what chafes against “normalization,” finds its value not in a good susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn particularity that voids every notion of a general good. The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself.
In other words, total nihilism. Happy Pride, y’all!
I don’t believe that nihilist filth represents all gay people. The nice lesbian couple down the block probably doesn’t even know that it exists, or barely understands it. They aren’t responsible for it. But when the backlash comes, it is not going to discriminate.
I think Matt Walsh’s film, “What Is A Woman?”, is massively important, and I can’t urge you strongly enough to watch it. Kale Zelden and I will be interviewing him later today for our podcast. One striking thing about it is why it took so long for somebody to make this movie. Matt Walsh is just a conservative Catholic layman asking plain, sensible questions, and making pro-trans experts (e.g., a gender theorist, doctors) look like dissembling fools. Let me clarify: Walsh’s questions are not designed to make these people look bad; they are just straightforward, but it would seem that no journalist has ever asked these people these kinds of things before. Radical questions like, “What is a woman?” Walsh just lets these people talk. The results? Well, look — this could not be better:
One of the questions I’m going to ask Walsh today is why activists like him and Chris Rufo get so much further in challenging this garbage than the massively funded Conservatism, Inc., infrastructure, Congressional Republicans, and the churches? Ask your pastor to screen this movie for middle schoolers and older at your church — and if he refuses, screen it for them off-campus. It’s important, and I know for a fact that so many religious leaders just don’t want to deal with this stuff. Walsh is not only talking about maleness and femaleness, but the concept of truth itself.
And yet, I think this guy is right (and his comment applies to me too, I concede):
He’s wrong to fault Walsh for asking the questions — the fact that Walsh’s movie is so controversial shows you that it’s really timely — but he’s right that these questions require action. What, then? What can we really do to stop this stuff? I’m not asking rhetorically. Tell me, lawyers, what can be done?
In 2017, the late political philosopher Angelo Codevilla said that Americans already live in a state of “cold civil war.” The only way to prevent it from going hot, he said, is to return to a robust federalism. Excerpt:
America is in the throes of revolution. The 2016 election and its aftermath reflect the distinction, difference, even enmity that has grown exponentially over the past quarter century between America’s ruling class and the rest of the country. During the Civil War, President Lincoln observed that all sides “pray[ed] to the same God.” They revered, though in clashing ways, the same founders and principles. None doubted that those on the other side were responsible human beings. Today, none of that holds. Our ruling class and their clients broadly view Biblical religion as the foundation of all that is wrong with the world. According to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy, or any form of intolerance.”
The government apparatus identifies with the ruling class’s interests, proclivities, and tastes, and almost unanimously with the Democratic Party. As it uses government power to press those interests, proclivities, and tastes upon the ruled, it acts as a partisan state. This party state’s political objective is to delegitimize not so much the politicians who champion the ruled from time to time, but the ruled themselves. Ever since Woodrow Wilson nearly a century and a half ago at Princeton, colleges have taught that ordinary Americans are rightly ruled by experts because they are incapable of governing themselves. Millions of graduates have identified themselves as the personifiers of expertise and believe themselves entitled to rule. Their practical definition of discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, etc., is neither more nor less than anyone’s reluctance to bow to them. It’s personal.
On the other side, some two thirds of regular Americans chafe at insults from on high and believe that “the system” is rigged against them and, hence, illegitimate—that elected and appointed officials, plus the courts, business leaders, and educators are leading the country in the wrong direction. The non-elites blame the elites for corruptly ruling us against our will, for impoverishing us, for getting us into wars and losing them. Many demand payback—with interest.
So many on all sides have withdrawn consent from one another, as well as from republicanism as defined by the Constitution and as it was practiced until the mid-20th century, that it is difficult to imagine how the trust and sympathy necessary for good government might ever return. Instead, we have a cold civil war. Statesmanship’s first task is to prevent it from turning hot. In today’s circumstances, fostering mutual forbearance may require loosening the Union in unfamiliar and unwelcome ways to accommodate differences that may otherwise become far worse.
The day may well be coming when enough men and women get sick of the bacha-bazi’ing of children by a degenerate culture endorsed by elites that they start to take matters into their own hands. We should hope and pray to forestall that day by voting for political leaders who are willing and able to stop these predators. A society that sexualizes its children is not a society that deserves to exist. Want to know where all this is headed? Watch the experts interviewed by Matt Walsh in “What Is A Woman?” Read the queer theorists. Read Live Not By Lies, especially this passage:
“[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”
This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.” [Emphasis mine — RD]
Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.”
This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose. For them, the ideology of social justice—as defined not by church teaching but by critical theorists in the academy—functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.
They’ve got Big Business, academia, the media, Hollywood, publishing, the music industry, law, medicine, the military — what’s left? The only institution capable of resisting the woke totalitarianism of these institutions is the US Government, two branches of which are now in the hands of the Democratic Party. We had better elect some intelligent and convicted politicians of the Right in these next two cycles — men and women who are sick of this garbage, and are unafraid to use the power of the state to defend normal people and normal families, and our freedoms, from the predators in these corrupted mediating institutions. It’s turning traditional totalitarian theory on its head — whoever imagined that the mediating institutions would be the corrupt oppressors, not the defenders of people from a corrupt and oppressive state? — but that’s where we are.
People like Peter Sagal don’t understand this, and might be capable of understanding it. What’s your excuse? If we fail to do our utmost to protect our kids, if we defenders of normalcy sit there passively while these creeps run over us and conquer the minds and bodies of our children, then we will have delivered our country to captivity — and ensured either civil war, or the solidification of totalitarianism via a social credit system administered by elites. The withdrawal of confidence in the US military by the classes that produce its next generation is a canary in the coal mine of civic and cultural collapse. These men didn’t fight the culture of bacha bazi only to come home to the Shire and find it corrupted by an American version of the same — and to find commanding officers and civilian military leadership who celebrate this kind of “diversity”.
At some point, many of you are going to have to realize that what “alarmists” like me are saying is actually true, and important. Here is how the process works; Scott Wiener is a California state legislator:
UPDATE: This is deeply true. It gives me no pleasure at all to recognize that is hard to imagine sharing a country under these conditions. This is quickly moving far beyond “tolerance”. The scariest thing in Matt Walsh’s documentary is not so much the male-female confusion, but the inability of these people to recognize truth as knowable and sharable:
UPDATE.2: OK, bam, right here is a sign of how deep and how high the insanity goes. Here is a story a reader sent from the US Air Force Sustainment Center. This is an official USAF publication. It is about how Airman Bryan Tisdale became Airman Anahlisa Tisdale. Excerpts, with boldface emphasis mine:
Nearly a decade later, the DOD Transgender Policy came to fruition, opening a door for Tisdale and those alike within the military. By this time Tisdale was married with a child on the way. Despite being married to a woman, Tisdale was conflicted about how she would live her life going forward. While her wife knew about her true identity, she knew that a transition to truly become Anahlisa would affect their marriage.
More:
While the decision to come out caused a rift in her marriage, Tisdale says she finally feels free being able to present her true self.
And:
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Tisdale largely credits her liberation to the “amazing” leadership at Tinker AFB who have supported and backed her up through the entire process.
“I think she’s an inspirational Airmen,” said 72nd Air Base Wing Commander Col. Hall Sebren, “She is staying true to herself, which can be difficult for anyone to do under ordinary circumstances. By telling her story she allows others to be open and honest about who they are. … .”
It’s just like the deeper subtext of Matt Walsh’s film: gender ideology depends on a negation of the concept of Truth. This is why its advocates, including the US Armed Forces, fall back on an Orwellian distortion of language to advance ideological goals.
This is the US military today.
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