I often relive, in my mind, a conversation I had maybe fifteen years ago. I remember how afraid I felt. No matter what I said, my words would be twisted to paint me as the member of an enemy tribe. I remember feeling as if a tide I hadn’t even been aware of was approaching my toes, and suddenly realizing that this tide would soon engulf all America, sucking under valuables, sweeping in dismembered body parts of a formerly coherent culture broken to bits in a powerful storm. I berate myself for not having words at the ready that could rewrite the history that this conversation ushered in. And I feel rage. Why did they do this to me?
For you to understand the weight of this conversation, to understand how vulnerable I was, and how much I risked losing, you need the backstory.
Miriam and I had met at work, many years before. We were both the kind of women who read literary classics and the daily paper, who discuss current events and the latest movie. Women like that find each other, and we value each other. We were healthy and young and headed in different directions: Miriam into business, me into academia. We were confident we were destined for success.
I went away to grad school, thinking I’d be gone for a couple of years, come back home and get a tenure-track professorship. My first semester at Indiana University I was harassed by a professor for taking off four workdays to attend my father’s funeral. Deans on campus begged me to testify against that professor. I was told that the professor was a menace, but because she was black and a woman no one would speak up. I testified for months, while taking a full load of graduate courses. My inner ear burst, which meant six years of uncontrollable vomiting, nystagmus, and paralyzing vertigo. I lost my life savings, and plunged into rock bottom poverty. A pro bono surgery at Riley Hospital relieved most of my vestibular symptoms, but left me deaf in one ear.
I returned to my home state with a PhD. The night I moved into my apartment, I sat on the floor and ate dinner off the lid of one of the pots I had brought with me. A street lamp outside illuminated my meal. I had no chair and no lamp.
You can live without a chair or a lamp but you can’t live without friends. I sought Miriam out. She was the same. Smart, funny, caring, beautiful, creative, brave, unconventional, a delight. Her warmth and generosity were a lifeline. Miriam became possibly the most important female friend I’ve ever had. Miriam was now married. Friendship was a package deal.
Sol was an outgoing social impresario with dozens of friends. Sol, like Miriam, was warm and generous. I owe Miriam and Sol a great deal. I love them, both. I see them, in my mind, sitting in sunlight and flowers.
Sol pegged me as a “conservative.” I was astounded. Violent crime harms people – thinking that makes me a conservative? Employees hired on merit rather than identity perform better; people are responsible for their actions – are these conservative ideas? Simply to exist, countries require borders – that’s common sense, not a left-wing nor right-wing point of view. Questions of left vs. right begin when you debate whether border guards should use rubber bullets or live rounds. Abortion, Christianity, atheism: Sol insisted on debating each. I just wanted to hang out with Miriam. But friendship had become a package deal.
I could have mentioned that Sol’s talking points were abstractions, unrelated to contact with real people, whereas my views were rooted in my real life. I could have mentioned that I never saw Sol, an economically comfortable white man, in the same room with a black person. Sol lived in one of America’s wealthiest counties, a county with a black population of three percent; the statewide percentage is thirteen. I lived in a poor, majority minority city, but Sol was the unquestioned authority on matters of race and class; I was the dismissible “conservative.” I could have mentioned that Sol announced himself as representative of a larger value system, the political left, whose signature was compassion. I could have mentioned that Sol never extended compassion to me over what was done to me at Indiana University; for his worldview to make sense, whites are never victims and blacks are never perpetrators. Any bad thing any black person did was always ultimately caused by white racism. Any pain that any white person felt was just punishment for white guilt. I had just watched a university’s entire administration kneel and tremble in fear before a serial abuser lest she cry, “Racism! Sexism!” Yet Sol insisted that white supremacy was all powerful.
Then came THE conversation. We were in Sol and Miriam’s sprawling home. Two panels of windows to our left and right looked out on gardens, foxes, and deer. Above us rose a cathedral ceiling. Across from me, at the same heavy wooden table, sat Sol. The man who never stopped smiling suddenly had the facial expression of Inspector Javert closing in on Jean Valjean. This new scowl frightened me.
“We have some news to share with you,” Sol said.
Was someone dying? I wondered.
“Colleen is becoming a boy. From now on, we are to refer to Charles using the pronouns ‘he, him, his.'”
Colleen? Why was Sol ordering me to care about Colleen? I’d only ever met Colleen a couple of times, and I’d never given her much thought. What I write here are fleeting impressions resurrected from encounters that, had THE conversation never taken place, I would have just forgotten.
Colleen first appears in my memory at a picnic. Every other person there was at least forty years older than Colleen. Colleen displayed herself in her bikini but she also erected a wall, not making eye contact, not responding to greetings. I was troubled by Colleen’s combination of “Look at me; I know you think I am gorgeous” with “You are beneath my notice.” Frankly, I idly wondered what her mental health diagnosis might be. And yet Colleen also seemed especially vulnerable to me, and I somehow wanted to protect that vulnerability. I couldn’t of course. Colleen was not my kid nor my friend.
Then one day circumstances conspired accidentally to put Colleen and me together for a one-on-one. I loved the girl in that encounter. I understood her remoteness as not so much arrogance, although maybe it partially was. Rather, she seemed most at home far from humanity, in the wild. Her walls dropped and what emerged was an almost otherworldly forest sprite. When interacting with animals, Colleen flowed with warmth, so different from her velvet-rope stance at the picnic. She issued forth sweetness, innocence, enthusiasm, and fragility.
You know you are old and have left youth behind when you encounter a young person and want badly to protect her from dangers you see clearly, but that are invisible to her, and you suddenly fall, face-first, onto your own impotence. The dangers you see in her path are not just the lions and tigers of bears of predatory men and life’s inevitable disappointments, in other words, not just the bad stuff outside of oneself, but also the pitfalls and palisades inside of oneself: our own pride, our own tunnel vision focused on our own worst choices.
I wanted to say to her, “Colleen, be patient. Whatever you are feeing right now will change. Yes, I’ve been a teenage girl, and yes, I can guarantee that today’s monumental emotions will later be laughable or embarrassing. Be charitable. People may say or do things that you find objectionable, but they may be operating from benign impulses. Please don’t make any life-altering decisions until you’ve moved out of your mother’s house and have been economically independent for at least a couple of years.”
What else did I know about Colleen? Her father abandoned her. Her life was the side effect of uncommitted sex. In contrast to her diffident daughter Colleen, mother Becky liked to entertain the crowd at parties. She made comments about her own sex life. Women who talk about their sex lives publicly always have a certain number of fans. Like Sol, indeed like all of their mutual friends, Becky was a party-line leftist. Christianity is corrupt. Republicans are stock villains. The political left, if only it got enough power, could save the world. Becky sent me a Facebook friend request. I accepted. I posted something that could be interpreted as “conservative.” Becky immediately “unfriended” me, though she’d sent me the friend request just hours before. If you scratched beneath the surface of Becky’s politics, you didn’t encounter deep reading or personal struggle. Nothing alienates tribe members like a woman who voices original thoughts. In any case, Becky and Colleen gave every sign of having a happy, loving relationship. Yes, they seemed to be more “best friends” than mother and daughter, but, hey, none of my business.
Though Colleen was, again, someone I barely knew, I knew many other details about her life. I didn’t want to know these details. Colleen announced these details publicly. One such detail: she paid a surgeon to snip off her nipples, resize them, and sew them back on. The surgeon was himself a man who identifies as a woman and a “trans activist” and had had body-altering surgery himself years before.
And if you are wondering, yes, in addition to their obvious function in breast feeding new life, nipples are also part of an erogenous organ. And, yes, snipping them off and sewing them back on destroys their sexual, as well as their nutritive function. A man pretending to be a woman did that to a confused young girl. And we are told that if we use the word “mutilation” we are committing a hate crime. Why did shy, young Colleen announce such personal details about her own body so that any stranger could learn them? Because Colleen had had a conversion experience.
Colleen had been seeing a psychiatrist from age six. Here, again, vocabulary becomes a litmus test. In the world I grew up in, if a child was diagnosed with “depression,” that was a sign that something in that kid’s life needed to change. More love, more work, more outdoors play, more wholesome food, and less junk, more structure and guardrails. Religion: “Where did I come from; why am I here; where am I going; what do I do to get there?” These are religious questions and the answers can contribute to or alleviate depression. “God loves you” was one of the key anti-depressants in my childhood, as was the physical exhaustion from playing or working all day. My thoughts about depression were condemned as “conservative.” The “liberal” approach, popular in wealthy white suburbs, was that a young child’s depression was a chemical accident that bore no relation to behaviors, parenting, or values, and medicalization and certainly more chemicals, in the form of prescription drugs, were the “solution.”
Though depressed, Colleen had previously enjoyed being a girl. She looked forward to having breasts, and once they grew in, she was aware that older men paid her a lot of attention. Then puberty started to feel uncomfortable. In her self-revelation, Colleen never mentioned that other girls might also find puberty uncomfortable.
Colleen’s tunnel-vision focus on her own discomfort, as if no one had ever felt uncomfortable with puberty before her, is not a minor point. When we focus only on ourselves, and only on right now, our perception becomes skewed. We are just one member of the larger human race. Our fleeting perceptions are changing, changeable, and something we can overcome if need be. My fellow students at St. Francis School might faint if they heard me say this, but Catholicism and nuns trained us in endurance. Wool uniforms in summer. Playing in full sun on asphalt with just one water fountain dispensing lukewarm liquid as refreshment. Fasting before communion. We learned to say, “This hurts; the pain won’t last forever.” It didn’t. We moved on. G. K. Chesterton said that “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” In lieu of the dead, we had housewives sitting around drinking coffee. “I hate wearing a bra! I want to cut off my boobs!” I liked to say when I was Colleen’s age. Women in housedresses laughed. They talked about how much they hated wearing bras. And then they slurped, and life moved on. I still have my boobs. I still wear bras. I know this won’t last forever, alas.
Colleen’s turning point came when she met an older girl who introduced her to trans pornography. Colleen was transfixed. She plunged into social media through the internet. She encountered hundreds of other lonely white girls convinced that they were trans.
Colleen found identity, community, and purpose. “Identity, community, and purpose”: what young people seek, according to former Neo-Nazi Christian Picciolini. Identity, community, purpose: mocked and denigrated by the modern left. Being American, being white, even just having descended from Christians, all marks of shame.
With new found identity, community, and purpose, formerly shy Colleen began a campaign of public disclosures. Graphic sharing of her surgeries and sex life was a crusade to make the world a kinder, more loving place. The crusade featured leftwing economics. It is the fault of the unrighteous US government that girls have to pay out of pocket to have their nipples excised, resized, and sewn back on. In a new Utopia, such procedures would be “free,” that is, the taxpayer would foot the bill.
Colleen was a testifying evangelist; she was going door to door distributing a tract. The contents of her pamphlet were her nipples, her mastectomies, her vagina, her hair, her vanity. Previously, Colleen had been a child so confused and depressed that she reached out to internet porn for salvation. Suddenly, Colleen had been elevated to the status of Bodhisattva enlightening the masses. The listeners’ correct reaction was to accept salvation.
Colleen talked about chopping off her breasts and tossing them away, even while going out of her way to mention that she knew that women envied her breasts and men desired them. This reminded me of her stance that day at the picnic, a young girl in a bikini surrounded by older people’s sagging flesh and lost youths. There’s a scene in It’s a Wonderful Life. Starlet Gloria Graham is bouncing down the sidewalk in a tight, short dress. She greets a taxi driver, a cop, and George Bailey, from the local savings and loan. They compliment her dress. “This old thing? I only wear it when I don’t care how I look,” she replies, tossing her curls. Colleen displayed the same flirty dismissal of her own charms, even as she chose to reduce them to medical waste.
Colleen reported pain. Depression, confusion, unwanted changes to her body that she had been warned about but that she had refused, in her girl’s immature mind, to believe would actually happen to her after surgery and hormones. Colleen’s testimony worked to transubstantiate her pain into the blood of the martyrs that feeds the church. “Yes, this surgery, these drugs, these regrets, this confusion, these second thoughts, all hurt, physically and emotionally, but this pain is good because it is the pain the caterpillar feels when it transforms into a butterfly. As I report this pain to you, you are becoming more open to the trans future!” That sort of desperate spin. In addition to identity, community, and purpose, young people want to suffer for a cause. Colleen’s literal blood, photographed post-op, was talismanic evidence of her salvific suffering for a worthy cause. Colleen’s audience seemed always to be her mother’s friends. Much older people, gray beards and solicitous old ladies struggling to be hip in a showy way, applauded a girl’s self-mutilation. “She’s teaching us.”
But, again, Colleen was none of my business. Until I was asked to sign an oath of allegiance.
Sol stared at me with his frightening new expression.
“We support Charles. We need all of our friends to support Charles.”
And there it was.
“I have had virtually no contact with Colleen … or Charles.” I said.
“We must never use the name Colleen again,” Sol directed. Miriam stood behind him, watching.
“She’s your friend, not mine. This doesn’t involve me,” I said.
“Do you know that there is an epidemic of trans people being murdered?”
“I’m not killing anyone, Sol.”
“Speech is violence. Do you agree to using he, him, his pronouns for Charles?”
“I have never spoken about this person, so I’ve never had to use any pronouns in reference to this person. But I’m not going to lie to make you happy,” I said.
Miriam turned away.
“Sol,” I began. I knew I had already lost; I still wanted to hear myself say this. “I grew up with most of my relatives behind the Iron Curtain. I visited there. Nazism, communism, facts of life for my loved ones. Totalitarians manipulate language. ‘Aktion’ – meaning mass murder. ‘Fraternal Protection’ – meaning subjugation. ‘Reeducation’ – meaning prison.
“Tadeusz Rozewicz was a poet. He wrote that during the Nazi occupation of Poland, all these words meant the same thing: ‘Man and animal / Love and hate / Enemy and friend / Darkness and light / Virtue and vice / Truth and lies / Beauty and ugliness / Bravery and cowardice.’ After liberation, what did he crave? ‘Let me call things by their true names again.’ Instead he got the communist takeover, where language was also prostituted. I never thought we’d get to the point in America where you’d be non-personed for referring to a girl as ‘she,’ but if that’s where we are, so be it.”
Miriam came to the table. “I think of you as a kind person. Why are you not being kind?”
And that’s where my mind just grinds its gears. All I want to do at this point is grab Miriam and beg her to continue liking me. Her friendship was my lifeline. I miss her every day.
For all I know, Colleen’s decision to mutilate her body and display that mutilation publicly was the very best decision for her. Honestly? I don’t care, and it’s none of my business.
It is my business that friends pressured me to violate my own conscience. It is my business that teachers like Peter Vlaming, John Kluge, Tanner Cross, and Nicholas Meriwether have been harassed or fired for refusing to call students by incorrect pronouns. It is my business when my country turns down the same route of mandated language manipulation that totalitarian regimes have taken in the past. It is my business when the word “woman” is redefined into non-existence, and when men invade women’s spaces.
Miriam spoke of kindness. What is kindness?
I think life-altering surgeries and drugs administered for cosmetic reasons should be for adults only. I hope that lawsuits like Keira Bell’s and Chloe Cole’s will cause doctors to think twice about drugging and mutilating children. Trans activists forbid use of the word “mutilate.” Chloe Cole uses the word “butcher” for what doctors did to her young body.
I think citizens have a duty to address hidden and taboo aspects of overwhelming social panics. There are many testimonies on the web that are not as religiously ecstatic as Colleen’s. Here’s one such video. A girl who identifies as a boy chooses a double mastectomy, which she dismissively labels “top surgery.” She says she woke up with clothes and sheets covered with blood; she passed blood clots the size of a golf ball; her chest “collapsed into a black, hollow cavity; there was discolored tissue spilling out of it.” A second surgery removed “a half a foot of dead, rotten tissue.” “They gave me an extra large drain and I had to have it in for over three weeks.” Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, this girl’s surgeon, pushes her transgender mastectomies for children via aggressive TikTok videos.
Chloe Cole talks about not only losing her breasts to trans surgery at age 15, but also losing sensation in her entire chest. Cole says she almost immediately began to regret this loss. “I was so ashamed of myself. It was a hard thing to admit.” Through school, “I learned that breast feeding is one of the main ways that you bond with your kid. I never really thought about this before. I never really thought about being a parent, even. I was a kid when I consented to all this and I wasn’t really focused on things like that. Deep down I have a maternal instinct that wasn’t fostered because I was being socialized as a boy. I started to realize what was taken from me. I had no friends in real life by this time. My only friends were online. I said online that I regret my transition and I was met with a lot of hatred from transgender individuals.” Cole felt pressured to silence herself.
A reddit post from summer, 2022, went viral. “I just miss my breasts so much. I got top surgery when I was 18, I’m 27 now … I want mine back. Not only were they mine, but they were great looking … I never ever thought that this would happen to me, I was always 10000000% sure I made the right decision … I look at girls nowadays, any girl at all and I’m completely jealous. At least they still have their natural body.”
In addition to regretting what they lost, many regret what they got. A man who identified as a woman and now identifies as a man calls himself “Shape Shifter.” He received a surgically constructed, so-called “neo vagina” that makes sex impossible for him. Shape Shifter spoke for over an hour about his regrets. His interview is an open fire hydrant of medical crises, psychiatric complaints, and suicidal despair.
Scott Newgent, a woman who identified as a man, received phalloplasty, that is a surgically constructed artificial penis built out of the skin in her arm. She “suffered” “seven surgeries, a pulmonary embolism, an induced stress heart attack, sepsis, a 17-month recurring infection, 16 rounds of antibiotics, three weeks of daily IV antibiotics, arm reconstructive surgery, lung, heart and bladder damage … $1 million in medical expenses … I spent many nights in the bathroom in too much pain to even make it to the toilet, forced to urinate on the floor, screaming as what felt like razor blades left my body. Rest came only in 45-minute increments that I induced with four shots of vodka, six Benadryl pills and a handful of melatonin.”
Newgent explained that she cannot sue her surgeon because “there is no structured, tested or widely accepted baseline for transgender health care.” This reason for Newgent’s inability to sue gives the lie to Biden’s assistant secretary for health, Admiral Rachel Levine, MD, himself a man who identifies as a woman, who insists that there are such standards. “There is an evidence-based standard of care for the evaluation and treatment of trans individuals,” Levine insists.
“I’ve had bladder problems. I’m almost completely numb in my chest area. I wish I could feel my chest,” says Sinead Watson, who began undergoing trans medical procedures when she was 24 years old. In the early stages after her surgeries, Sinead initially believed that “transition saved my life.” In fact she was still struggling with self-hatred. “Cutting your breasts off doesn’t remove that. I didn’t need hormones or surgery. I needed therapy.”
Ritchie Herron’s surgeries were paid for by Britain’s National Health Service. He says he was brainwashed by health care providers. He now has to spend a great deal of time attempting to go to the bathroom, and doing so causes great pain. He is incontinent and his entire groin is numb. “I am never going to be the same ever again. There is no reversal to this. Do not let anyone tell you that this can be reversed. It is criminal what they are doing to people.”
In October, 2022, Project Veritas released video from a WPATHGEI online conference. WPATHGEI is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Global Education Institute. The video’s star is Dr. Daniel Metzger, who participates in the medical transing of children. The name of this Canadian doctor’s program is Trans Youth CAN! The exclamation point is part of the program’s name. Dr. Metzger acknowledges that it’s virtually impossible to have a serious conversation with a fourteen year old about post-surgical regret. “Most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really talk about it in a serious way. I know I’m talking to a blank wall.” But, he says, “We want the kids to be happy. Happier in the moment, right?” Metzger acknowledges that he has been approached by former patients in their twenties who suddenly realize, and regret, that they cannot have children. “I don’t know what to do,” he says. He doesn’t know what to do. He has participated in making children sterile, to make them happy in the moment, and he doesn’t know what to do about that.
Is any of this “kind”? No.
Colleen wasn’t the only one who found identity, community, and purpose while watching trans porn online. Sol, Miriam, Becky, and all the others found a narrative. In this narrative, these folks, already primed to view monolithic conservatives as villains, attributed new and more horrible features to conservatives. Conservatives with even longer fangs and bloodier claws. Conservatives were not just racist, sexist, and chauvinist. They were also a new thing, “transphobic.” If anyone voiced any reservations about such a young girl undergoing surgical mutilation, that person was a transphobe, responsible for a murder epidemic, and needed to be beaten back with pitchforks and torches. Propping up this villain eliminated the need to devote any serious thought to the potential downsides of the trans narrative, downsides that now flood the internet in testimonies like those above.
Upon reflection, I can’t help but think that THE conversation happened for the above reason. Sol and Miriam knew I barely knew Colleen, and never used any pronouns to talk about her, because I never talked about her. It wasn’t necessary to inform me of her “transition,” that I otherwise never would have known about, because she and I never crossed paths again. Rather than pronouns, I think the entire point of THE conversation was to recruit me to the self-congratulatory crew of older folks unquestioningly cheering this young girl on, or, if I failed to join the parade, to demonize me as a handy villain.
Is there an epidemic of killing in this country? Statistics suggest that in one age bracket, young black men are twenty-two times more likely to be shot to death than young white men. Who is shooting these young black men? Other young black men. There’s your murder epidemic. Addressing that epidemic would be denounced as “conservative.” Addressing black-on-black crime is “racist.”
The Human Rights Campaign published a PDF purporting to prove a trans murder epidemic. The PDF is a thirty-page pamphlet. It lists the names and photos of twenty-two dead people, some of whom may not be murder victims. There are surprisingly few details. I googled a few of the names. Some were streetwalkers. Prostitution is a dangerous job. In other cases, a boyfriend committed the murder. In some of the cases, law enforcement specified that the killing was not a hate crime. At least one HRC-identified martyr was killed in a non-ideological mass shooting committed by the victim’s mentally ill sibling. One was killed by another trans person. None of this information is available in the HRC PDF that lists alleged victims of transphobic hate crimes.
Andy Ngo questioned the validity of the trans murder epidemic and was suspended from Twitter for doing so. In fact, though, researchers have run the numbers and the transgender murder rate appears to be lower than that for members of many other groups see here. “Homicide Rates of Transgender Individuals in the United States: 2010-2014” published in The American Journal of Public Health reports that, “The overall homicide rate of transgender individuals was likely to be less than that of cisgender individuals.”
The insistence, in spite of objective facts, that there is an epidemic of trans murders lives on, and it fuels one of the purest expressions of leftist thought out there: the movement to pay black men who identify as women. This movement is named “Pay Black Trans Women.” The movement does not argue that one hire black trans persons; expecting them to do work would be “conservative.” No, just give black men who identify as women your money. Start today; there are persons waiting now for your payment. Donate here. San Francisco offers GIFT: Guaranteed Income for Transgender People.
Trans extremism will eventually die down. Such trends always do. Eventually enough people say out loud that the emperor has no clothes. That won’t be the end, though. There will be another litmus test to separate the cool from the uncool. When I was in kindergarten, I was uncool. I was a poor kid, from a big family, with a mother working two jobs. My clothes were not new, I was unkempt, and the youngest sister of four brothers, I played like a boy. In the intervening years I have learned to live with being uncool. I still miss those I have lost along the way.
PS: In writing this, with each word I typed, I thought, if Colleen / Charles reads this, will my words cause pain? Because, Charles, I wish you every good thing in life: love, employment satisfaction, health, and home. You are a beautiful person, inside and out. I don’t know, and I don’t care, if your choices were right for you. They were never any of my business, and they shouldn’t have been made my business. I will never refer to you as “he,” and if you want to know why … it’s all in this essay.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
Mark Dunn says
This article moved me to sorrow and pity, sorrow for one who lost a friend, pity for a generation caught up in a Satanic delusion.
Sandra Larson Gonzales says
Agreed, the World is insane and upside down
Will it right itself, I m really
Not that optimistic
Mark Dunn says
Normal isn’t coming back but Jesus is.
THX 1138 says
Yes, unreason is making its way back to dominate over reason and return reason once more to being the mere handmaiden of faith.
Christianity prepared the ground for the unreason of Marxism. And Marxism is preparing the ground for a return to religion. What Marx essentially did was to secularize Christianity and dress it up in pseudo-scientific gibberish. Marxism is a religious fish out of water and must re-immerse itself back in religion to survive. That’s why you see such a profound affinity between Marxism and Pope Francis, between Marxism and Islam, the Red-Green Axis.
“I can only say that the communists have stolen our flag. The flag of the poor is Christian. Poverty is at the center of the Gospel,” he said, citing Biblical passages about the need to help the poor, the sick and the needy.
“Communists say that all this is communism. Sure, twenty centuries later. So when they speak, one can say to them: ‘but then you are Christian’,” he said, laughing.”
THX 1138 says
“I believe that the medievals understood much better than the moderns on what basis to build a totalitarian society that would last and not collapse in less than a century. They did it. The people in the rising religious movement today, know that full-well…. Socialism is really helping religion. The bigger the statism, the more people are accustomed to government rule over everything, the more people are ready… for religionists to take over the lead away from the more secular side…. The socialists are building the basis for totalitarianism but only the religionists are going to cash in on it and take over.” – Leonard Peikoff
“Is religion more dangerous in America than socialism or collectivism?” https://peikoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/2009-07-20.071_B.L.mp3
THX 1138 says
The quote above about the fundamental affinity between Christianity and Communism is from Pope Francis.
“The roots of America’s welfare state lie in the Populist-Progressive Era of the late 19th century and early 20th century, especially with the Protestant social gospel movement, which held that Christian ethics and “social justice” should drive public policy, including wealth redistribution, trust-busting, graduated tax rates to punish the rich, cradle-to-grave handouts, and missionary-style imperialistic ventures abroad to spread the faith and make the world “safe for democracy.” The concept of social justice, which jettisoned the idea that we actually earn and deserve what we get in life, was first adopted by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in the 1840s, as drawn from the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.” – Richard M. Salsman
“Holy Scripture and the Welfare State” – Richard M. Salsman
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardsalsman/2011/04/28/holy-scripture-and-the-welfare-state/?sh=62cb3cac24f2
BJB AZ says
The Good Shepherd can restore the souls of even the mutilated and butchered, deceived by satan.
The Gospel must be preached and then shall the end come.
We must prepare to meet our Maker.
Steven Brizel says
If you have not seen it yet go and watch “What is a Woman?” It is a must see for anyone concerned about this issue
Francis W. Porretto says
This poignant article is an important data point in the ongoing struggle for the facts. Note that your friends Sol and Miriam were determined to deny observable facts. They had to do so in service to their ideology. Ideologies, especially the sort coupled to mass movements, are like that. Eric Hoffer pointed out in “The True Believer” that they must protect their adherents with a “fact-proof screen.” For mass movements seek the submergence of the individual in the movement. He must subordinate his identity and his personal interests to the agenda of the movement…and the only way to get a rational individual to do that is to deny, obscure, or conceal the facts.
sue says
Yes, didn’t George Orwell define it for us as Doublethink and Doublespeak? And didn’t he also provide the world Thoughtcrime, which works handily alongside these two Doubles?
As the Poet might have said: “Orwell, thou shoulds’t be living at this hour” (if only to say “I told you so”)
Thanks to Dr. Goska and to Frontpage for letting us know what has been going on in the world. And also for reminding me of how much we need the loving, perfect, impartial and truthful Kingdom of God ruling over us – the heavenly government for whose coming Jesus taught us to pray.
Virginia says
I guess one advantage of having lived awhile is how to react to all the trans stuf, to wit:
.
1. Are you people nuts ?
You might also search for the deeper agenda for all this drag queen/trans/LGBTQ stuff being foisted onto the U.S. tearing down society is fundamental to the success of the so called Cultural component of Marxism.
True friends don’t require any particular parameters or “stands” to friendship.
Terence Gallagher says
An excellent and perceptive article about a horrifying situation. One final irony I can’t help mentioning, the name “Colleen” literally means “Girl” in the Irish language.
Dr. Armando Simon says
Fascinating. Illustrative. And enlightening.
THX 1138 says
Ms. Goska, the antidote for one form of unreason is not another form of unreason. Transgenderism is a rebellion against reason and reality; the biological, physical, reality of the human body. It is a rebellion against common sense but so, in one way or another, is Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. In one way or another every supernatural, mystical, religion is a rebellion against reality, reason, and common sense.
The antidote for transgenderism is not Christianity or any religion; the antidote is accepting and embracing reality and reason.
Christianity also has its rebellion against the body and against sex. The devout, serious, Christian is not the typical modern and predominantly secular and rational Christian. The truly devout and serious Christian is a sexual ascetic like Mother Teresa or a Saint Antony the Great. These were devout Christians devoutly practicing an ascetic rejection of sex, the pleasures of the body, the pleasures of this earth, and a rejection of the reality of this one and only world for an imaginary, supernatural, Christian utopia in the after-life.
THX 1138 says
“As to the realm of physical nature, the medievals characteristically regarded it as a semi-real haze, a transitory stage in the divine plan, and a troublesome one at that, a delusion and a snare — a delusion because men mistake it for reality, a snare because they are tempted by its lures to jeopardize their immortal souls. What tempts them is the prospect of earthly pleasure.
What kind of life, then, does the immortal soul require on earth? Self-denial, asceticism, the resolute shunning of this temptation. But isn’t it unfair to ask men to throw away their whole enjoyment of life? Augustine’s answer is: what else befits creatures befouled by Original Sin, creatures who are, as he put it, “crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous”?…
THX 1138 says
What were the practical results of the medieval approach? The Dark Ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular philosophy, science, art; he regarded all of it as an abomination to be swept aside; he cursed science in particular as “the lust of the eyes.” Unlike many Americans today, who drive to church in their Cadillac or tape their favorite reverend on the VCR so as not to interrupt their tennis practice, the medievals took religion seriously. They proceeded to create a society that was anti-materialistic and anti-intellectual. I do not have to remind you of the lives of the saints, who were the heroes of the period, including the men who ate only sheep’s gall and ashes, quenched their thirst with laundry water, and slept with a rock for their pillow. These were men resolutely defying nature, the body, sex, pleasure, all the snares of this life — and they were canonized for it, as, by the essence of religion, they should have been.” – Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America”
“Religion versus America”
BJB AZ says
Jesus Christ/Yeshua and His Word constitute the standard for Christianity.
We are pilgrims passing through.
You have little to say about
your life or its extent except to seek the Truth.
Seek God and you will find him.
There is a far greater intelligence running the universe than you can ever hope to understand.
THX 1138 says
“Reason is man’s tool of knowledge, the faculty that enables him to perceive the facts of reality….
Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—and of self-protection. Reason is the most SELFISH human faculty: it has to be used in and by a man’s own mind, and its product—truth—makes him inflexible, intransigent, impervious to the power of any pack or any ruler. Deprived of the ability to reason, man becomes a docile, pliant, impotent chunk of clay, to be shaped into any subhuman form and used for any purpose by anyone who wants to bother….
There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or “limited”) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority. Philosophically, most men do not understand the issue to this day; but psycho-epistemologically, they have sensed it since prehistoric times. Observe the nature of mankind’s earliest legends—such as the fall of Lucifer, “the light-bearer,” for the sin of defying authority; or the story of Prometheus, who taught men the practical arts of survival. Power-seekers have always known that if men are to be made submissive, the obstacle is not their feelings, their wishes or their “instincts,” but their minds; if men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason.” – Ayn Rand
Deacon Jim Stagg says
Ephesians 4:29-32
Never let evil talk pass your lips; say only the good things men need to hear, things that will really help them. Do nothing that will sadden the Holy Spirit with whom you were sealed against the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, all passion and anger, harsh words, slander, and malice of every kind. In place of these, be kind to one another, compassionate, and mutually forgiving, just as God has forgiven you in Christ.
THX 1138 says
Reality can be a harsh mistress. Men can forgive one another, men can help and love one another to the extent that reality allows us, but the facts of reality do not forgive, they bend for no one. If we want to live and love one another on earth, successfully, we must follow and obey reality. Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed. Tough love is sometimes necessary.
“The Cold Equations” – Tom Godwin
BJB AZ says
You have never read the Bible nor the teachings of Mother Teresa.
God made sex, dear. But not for selfish indulgence. Like food or wine, there are parameters for full enjoyment. Mother Teresa chose to dedicate herself to service to the poor.
Who are you to say she had no right to choose?
You people who throw live human infants into medical waste bins can only kill and destroy.
You couldn’t create a blade of grass to grow, much less have you studied the miracle of life
and the incredible complexities of the cell.
You are a victim of your own ignorance and pride. Pride goes before a fall.
Mo de Profit says
Silence was the stern reply.
THX 1138 says
I did not say an ascetic does not have the right to choose to be an ascetic. What I do say is that asceticism is wrong, immoral, nihilistic, and anti-life. It is a philosophical, emotional, or psychological anti-life position to take.
Sexual asceticism is as perverse and anti-life as anorexia nervosa. Why would anyone reject healthy nutrition, delicious healthy food, but for an emotional, psychological, aberration which ultimately boils down to a rejection of life, an alienation from life and the body? The same is true of the person who chooses life-long, voluntary, celibacy for religious, philosophical, or emotional reasons.
Sex is good and food is good, personal happiness is good, healthy loving sex and healthy, delicious, food are precious values of life that make life possible and make life worth living.
THX 1138 says
I’ve never thrown a live, human infant, in a trash bin, to do so is an evil act of murder. But if you’re referring to the right of abortion — abortion is a right. The crucial issue is the first trimester, an embryo in the first trimester is by no objective, scientific, definition an infant. And even in the second and third trimester the state can have no right to interfere with a woman’s ownership of her body, her body is her private property. Once the infant is born, he has his own, independently, existing body and acquires his individual and private property rights over his body and life, not before.
Independent does not mean self-supporting, independent refers to the independently existing body. If another baby, Baby Paul, needed a kidney from Baby Peter to live, the state could have no right to tell Baby Peter, “Baby Paul needs your kidney to live, he has a right to life, therefore we will steal part of your body to grant Baby Paul his right to life”. Baby Peter’s body belongs to Baby Peter and not to Baby Paul.
Robert O'Donnell says
Your ‘offerings’ here are some of the most illogical rants I have ever had the displeasure of reading. Each one displays an ignorance so skewed and deep that to unravel one sentence might take a doctoral thesis. Example: “Once the infant is born, he has his own, independently, existing body and acquires his individual and private property rights over his body and life, not before.”
1. Who has granted you the authority to determine that birth completes the definition of personhood?
2. Who has given you the authority to proclaim that after birth the child now ‘owns’ himself, is independent, and has ‘acquired’ “individual property rights?”
3. What authority grants him property rights over his body and life, which he had not prior to exiting the womb?
4. What is a right? And to whom are we to be thankful or ingracious? Is a right material or immaterial?
5. Since you don’t believe in the spirit realm, you obviously believe that rights can be measured. How are they measured?
I could go on for pages just on that one sentence alone! But I’ll leave you with Proverbs 26:4-5. Which one applies to you verse 4 or verse 5?
THX 1138 says
“1. Who has granted you the authority to determine that birth completes the definition of personhood?”
Objectivity, the Rights of Man, and science are not determined by a “who” but by the facts of reality. Reality is the ultimate arbiter of what is real and not real, and of what is true and not true. Reason and logic are the means to discover the facts of reality.
Without property rights there is no way to implement individual rights. Man is not a disembodied, eternal spirit, temporarily housed in a physical body. Man is an indivisible integration of consciousness and body. Property rights begin with the right of ownership over one’s independently existing body and one’s mind, without that line of demarcation there is no way to implement the right to life.
THX 1138 says
4. What is a right? And to whom are we to be thankful or ingracious? Is a right material or immaterial?
“A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)…
The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.” – Ayn Rand
“Individual Rights” – The Ayn Rand Lexicon
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/individual_rights.html
THX 1138 says
5. Since you don’t believe in the spirit realm, you obviously believe that rights can be measured. How are they measured?
How are rights measured? It’s quite simple, your rights end where my rights begin. And my rights end where your rights begin.
THX 1138 says
“Proverbs 26:4-5 4 Do not answer a fool according to his folly,
or you yourself will be just like him. 5 Answer a fool according to his folly,
or he will be wise in his own eyes.”
Is that all you have for me? Personal insults? Personal insults mean nothing to me unless their grounded in rational facts about me.
Interesting that a person who believes in Adam and Eve and a Talking Snake, the Parting of the Red Sea, Noah’s Ark, and many, many, other irrational, illogical, claims of mythological, magical thinking, calls me a fool.
Intrepid says
Abortion is most definitely not a right because it has never been codified into law. Along with your “Christianity prepared the ground for Marxism” vile lie, your other vile lie is your belief that abortion is a right.
THX 1138 says
A Natural Right does not have to be codified into law to be a Natural Right. Rights are not permissions created by and granted by government. They are UNALIENABLE social conditions that are necessary for men to flourish by the IMMUTABLE nature of man.
What is tyranny and dictatorship but the denial and destruction of the Natural Rights of Man? You can legally deny rights but not by right. Just as a criminal can murder another man but not by right.
THX 1138 says
Ms. Goska, you write so beautifully and so honestly and it is such a pleasure to read your essays that I feel guilty that I’m not paying you a hefty sum for the pleasure. Your essays are the most absorbing here at FPM.
Intrepid says
I have a feeling Ms. Goska wants nothing to do with you. You tried the suck up approach last year. Didn’t work then. Won’t work now.
Are you looking for a job yet?
THX 1138 says
It was the philosopher Immanuel Kant who ushered in our Age of Unreason, the Age of the Counter Renaissance, the Age of the Counter Enlightenment, when in 1781 he began to publish his attack on reason, “The Critique Of Pure Reason”.
“I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.” – Immanuel Kant
“The man who . . . closed the door of philosophy to reason, was Immanuel Kant. . . .
Kant’s expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice [and self-mutilation]. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base—and what it had to be saved from was REASON….
No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely did as thorough a job of undercutting as anyone could ever do.
If you trace the roots of all our current philosophies—such as pragmatism, logical positivism, [transgenderism], and all the rest of the neo-mystics who announce happily that you cannot prove that you exist—you will find that they all grew out of Kant.” – Ayn Rand
“Kant, Immanuel” – The Ayn Rand Lexicon
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/kant,_immanuel.html
THX 1138 says
“Progressively abandoning their Aristotelian heritage, the philosophers of the Enlightenment had reached a state of formal bankruptcy in the skepticism of David Hume. Hume claimed that neither the senses nor reason can yield reliable knowledge. He concluded that man is a helpless creature caught in an unintelligible universe. Meanwhile a variety of lesser figures (such as Rousseau, the admirer of the “noble savage”) were foreshadowing the era to come. They were suggesting that reason had had its chance but had failed, and that something else, something opposite, holds the key to reality and the future.
The two figures who created the new era and made this viewpoint the norm in the West — the two who welded the mystic stirrings of the late eighteenth century into a powerful, self-conscious, intellectually respectable voice, and who placed that voice at the base of all later philosophy — were Kant and Hegel. Kant is the father of the romanticist movement. It is he who claimed to have proved for the first time that existence is in principle unknowable to man’s mind. Thereafter, Hegel, Kant’s chief heir, most powerfully articulated the new movement’s central ideas, in every branch of philosophy….
THX 1138 says
But neither Kant nor Hegel is a full romanticist. Kant opened the door to the movement, but hesitated to walk firmly through. Hegel did walk through, but paid vigorous lip service to reason all the way. There were many, however, who did not hesitate and who did little to mask their views. In Germany the most influential of these men were J.G. Herder (another hero of the Nazis), Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, Schleimacher, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The product of this main romanticist line was an army of lesser intellectuals and fellow travelers (generally cruder and more open than their mentors), who helped to spread the new approach to every corner of Germany.
The romanticists held (following Kant) that reason is a faculty restricted to a surface world of appearances and incapable of penetrating true reality. Man’s true source of knowledge, they declared (drawing explicitly the conclusion Kant had implied), is feeling — or passion, or intuition, or faith, etc. Man in this view is not a rational being: he is in essence an emotional being, and he must seek the truth and live his life accordingly….
THX 1138 says
Although most of the romanticists advocated some form of religion, religion is not an essential component of this philosophy. On the whole, the romanticists were more modern than that. They offered a somewhat secularized version of the earlier religious approach, stressing instinct more than revelation, the voice of the subconscious more than of the supernatural. But they never forgot their philosophic ancestors and brothers-in-spirit. While condemning the civilization of the Enlightenment, they passionately admired two cultures: the medieval and the Oriental.” – Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff, from his book “The Ominous Parallels: The End Of Freedom In America”
Intrepid says
You really released the note card Krakken today. And all of it has not a thing to do with the article, except in your won mind.
JPFH says
Please remember that atheism is a belief system. It believes there is no Creator and that the universe is essentially an accident without any higher purpose. In your own thoughts (Randian) it simply exists. You cannot prove there is no God and you ignore, though barrow from, the divine order that exists in nature. Your then make up your own moral system to justify your own behavior. At least that is what Rand did.
What is so amazing is that the typical atheist uses has God given reasoning abilities to argue that there is no Intelligence behind the existence of the universe and man’s place in the greater scheme of things. The atheist never faces the implications of his own system as at bottom it is not a rational system. To argue there is no design and Designer transcendent to the universe is to argue there is no rational understandable design and purpose for the universe or man. Reason has no place in an unreasonable universe.
Intrepid says
When are you going to outgrow Rand?
Sapwolf says
This country is done. We need to talk publicly about a divorce. Let’s go for a peaceful divorce, as a violent one will be brutal like the blues can’t imagine. Let’s get the talk going before it’s too late.
It’s time.
Nancy C. Roberts says
I can’t tally up the number of people – on both sides – who have suggested “divorce” as the only solution at this point. I hate to agree, but sometimes things have gone to far to hope for reconciliation. I can live with differing opinions, but I can’t be told what I have to SAY or THINK or DO (as opposed to not do, like speed, or steal).
Kynarion Hellenis says
How unreasonable you must be! You will not submit to your betters? You actually want to be free to live and think and speak as you wish?
Seekers says
That so many grown adults so blithely and effortlessly embrace “transgendering,” and demand that others embrace it as well, is nothing short of astounding. Even 10 or 15 years ago this flight from reality on a mass scale was unthinkable. What we are seeing is the unraveling of Western civilization.
Deacon Jim Stagg says
Thank you, Danusha Goska for a marvelous article, which strikes deep into the heart.
Dr.Ernesto says
It’s not a “phobia”. It’s just regular old pity.
hrwolfe says
The problem is every time we rebound, we rebound less. Education’s done it’s work..
THX 1138 says
Yes, I’m glad you see that too. The light of reason is slowly going out in the West and therefore the world. The best analogy I can think of is the progression of HIV and AIDS or cancer. You have outbursts of the full-blown disease, followed by remissions, and then another outburst. But each new outburst weakens the immune system more until there is no more immune system and the disease kills you.
The West has been infected with the philosophical equivalent of HIV. The philosophical virus of Platonic-Kantian-Hegelian unreason and this unreason is slowly killing Aristotelian reason. But the death of reason doesn’t happen over night, it can take centuries. Just as the Renaissance (the rebirth of Aristotelian reason) and the slow and tortuous growth of reason took 500 years to reach the Age of Enlightenment (the light of reason) and produce the generation of the Founding Fathers and America, the death of reason can take centuries.
If no philosophical antidote defending reason and discrediting Plato, Kant, and Hegel is discovered and applied, Kantian unreason will kill Aristotelian reason. The antidote defending reason and discrediting Plato, Kant, and Hegel is Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.
Intrepid says
Wow that’s just what I want to do. Go to a meeting where folks debate Plato, Kant, and Hegel vs. Aristotelian reason and the Age of Enlightenment, followed by a big dollop of Rand and her religion.
The way you describe it almost sounds like……………………………………………. religion.
THX 1138 says
Religion is an early form of philosophy. You have no choice but to have some form of philosophy, philosophy is as necessary to a conceptual being like Man is as water, air, or food.
“But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy….
THX 1138 says
As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown….
The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power.
The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them—from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default.’ – Ayn Rand
Intrepid says
Abortion is most definitely not a right because it has never been codified into law. Along with your “Christianity prepared the ground for Marxism” vile lie, your other vile lie is your belief that abortion is a right.
Felinity says
Our regime, I mean administration -– in concert with the WEF and Fauci & Co. — want We The People killed/ maimed by COVID and its vaxxes/boosts; isolated; deprived; starved; devoid of light and hope; genderless; and desperate. A dark, collective cynicism has infected the entire world. Oscar Wilde — an avid homosexual, BTW — said it well: “A cynic is is one who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”
P.S. And here’s the WEF’s banner child: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-13-at-3.24.39-PM.png
THX 1138 says
“There is nothing so naive as cynicism. A cynic is one who believes that men are innately depraved, that irrationality and cowardice are their basic characteristics, that fear is the most potent of human incentives—and, therefore, that the most practical method of dealing with men is to count on their stupidity, appeal to their knavery, and keep them in constant terror.
In private life, this belief creates a criminal; in politics, it creates a statist. But, contrary to the cynic’s belief, crime and statism do not pay.
A criminal might thrive on human vices, but is reduced to impotence when he comes up against the fact that “you can’t cheat an honest man.” A statist might ride to power by dispensing promises, threats and handouts to the seekers of the unearned—but he finds himself impotent in a national emergency, because the language, methods and policies which were successful with parasites, do not work when the country needs producers.” – Ayn Rand
Kynarion Hellenis says
” ‘But I’m not going to lie to make you happy,’ I said.
Miriam turned away.”
If you had lied, you would have proved your lack of love.
You still miss Miriam because you love her. She knows that and the story is not over. Love is very powerful.
What was being done to you at the table was a setup. You had to be removed from their world because your life, your logic, your faith, your rationality was an affront to the comfortable lies necessary to live in their disordered world.
I notice that you used the name “Charles” when reaching out to Colleen, but would not use masculine pronouns for her. Terrence Gallagher points out that “Colleen” means “girl.” “Charles” means “free man.” Isn’t that ironic? She will never be a free man. Hopefully, she may one day recover her true identity both physically and spiritually. And I pray, Ms. Goska, that you will have that jewel in your crown.
Peter J. Long, Jr says
Wow! What a hard hitting but yet, gentle, reply. Beautifully said. Thank you.
Spurwing Plover says
When some University administrators gives students list of words they are not allowed to speak because some little snowflake might get their little feelings hurt then its time to tell them Freedom of Seech trumps their little feelings and maybe its time for little snowflakes to know what the U.S. Constitution really means
Hanna says
As usual-Brilliant, yet harrowing insights by Dr. Goska.
CHARLES R DISQUE says
Recently a friend told me of attending a family gathering over the holidays. There he was informed that his grand-nephew Marvin, age 13, was now Marvella and has had ‘bottom’ surgery. Marvin/Marvella attends a parochial school in my city. What a tragedy for the boy who has taken a step that is irreversible and that he will most likely one day regret. And what a tragedy for the family, friends and teachers, when they face whether to lie by pronouns.
Thank you, Professor Goska, for standing for truth, and so eloquently. Thank you for showing what courage and sacrifice look like, and so lighting the path for others.
I also thank David Horowitz or whoever at Front Page Magazine discovered you and gave you a platform on which to speak.
* * * * *
As for the gentleman who so relentlessly uses his comments to promote Objectivism, I commend to his attention Whittaker Chambers’ review essay re “Atlas Shrugged,” the novel authored by that philosophy’s prime prophet in 1957. The review, titled “Big Sister Is Watching You,” appeared in the December 28, 1957, issue of “National Review.”
Danusha V Goska says
13 years old.
OMG
THX 1138 says
I’ve read the DISHONEST Whittaker Chambers’ review several times. It is THOROUGHLY dishonest. I recommend to you that you read “Atlas Shrugged” and compare it to the abject dishonesty of Chambers’ review. But, like William F. Buckley, you probably will never do that.
“Whitaker Chambers’s review began the now famous vendetta against Ayn Rand and “Atlas Shrugged” by “National Review” — most particularly on the grounds of her opposition to religious faith — that has lasted to this day. In the pages of his magazine, William Buckley has attacked the “desiccated philosophy” of “Atlas Shrugged” and has written, “All that needed to be said about it had already been said in the Sermon on the Mount.” He attacked again in both of the two newspaper columns he wrote about Ayn and her ideas immediately following her death, denouncing “the essential aridity of Miss Rand’s philosophy” and quoting Chambers’s references to Atlas Shrugged’s “tone of over-riding arrogance … its shrillness… its dogmatism.”…
THX 1138 says
Many years after Whitaker Chambers review appeared, William Buckley was asked why he chose Chambers to review “Atlas” for “National Review”. “He volunteered,” Buckley insisted. “He had read the first one hundred pages and said that it was off to a wonderful narrative start, and he exclaimed over how thoroughly she knew her material… I was in Europe when the review came out, so I didn’t see it before it was published.”
Asked if the review was representative of his own opinion, Buckley said, *”I never read the book* [italics mine]. When I read the review of it and saw the length of the book, I never picked it up. I THINK I read all her other novels. I didn’t read her philosophy books… One of these days I’ll probably get around to reading “Atlas Shrugged” – Barbara Branden, from her book “The Passion of Ayn Rand”
CHARLES R DISQUE says
I’d simply recommend everyone to read the Chambers review and then decide whether to read the 1088 pages of “Atlas Shrugged,” which I did 50+ years ago.
A better use of one’s time would be to read Chambers’ classic memoir, “Witness.”
THX 1138 says
Are you saying you read “Atlas Shrugged” 50 years ago or you read Whittaker Chambers’ dishonest smear review of “Atlas Shrugged” 50 years ago?
If you have actually read “Atlas Shrugged” then please offer your own reasons why you are convinced Rand is wrong. What is she wrong about and why?
THX 1138 says
Fighting for one’s rational values is NOT a sacrifice. Sacrifice is an evil word, it means the betrayal of one’s rational values.
“Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less “selfish,” than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one…
“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. “Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. “Sacrifice” is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t….
If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who’s willing. If a man refuses to sell his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he is the sort of man who has no convictions.” – Ayn Rand
Len says
Each person who reads this should make a solemn vow to oppose this “transgenocide” as well as the author. has. What a superb piece of writing!!!!!!
Sammy Adams says
Isn’t it interesting that the left (Sol & Miriam) wanted her to conform to their way of thinking and criticized her and alienated her if she didn’t agree with them, but they were not willing to afford her the same?