Heavy pressure is brought to bear on schoolchildren to “change” their “gender”. It is a new and terrible fad on the political left. The authorities of whole school districts have policies to persuade children to “transgender” – by which they mean undergo drastic hormone treatment and physical mutilation – and to keep parents ignorant of the atrocity their children are subjected to.

In an article at Front Page, Danusha Goska gives examples of the appalling suffering of the victims of this cult of human vivisection.

Colleen [in adolescence] … paid a surgeon to snip off her nipples, resize them, and sew them back on.

After which they were insensate.

The surgeon was himself a man who identifies as a woman and a “trans activist” and had had body-altering surgery himself years before. … 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. … 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 …

Later, one gathers (it is not explicitly stated) she underwent more surgery.

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. … [Some] 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.” …

There are many testimonies on the web that are not as religiously ecstatic as Colleen’s. …  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 uses the word “butcher” for what doctors did to her young body. … She 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. …

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. …

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.

Ritchie Herron’s surgeries [at an age not given] 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, …

Most suitably named is this Dr. Metzger!  “Metzger” is the German word for butcher.

… 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. …

In reality, no one ever “transgenders”. No one ever can. There are two only two sexes (“gender” is a grammatical term) and everyone remains the sex they were born no matter what is done to their bodies. A baby’s sex is not “assigned” to it, as the “transgender” fanatics claim; he or she is born male or female.

Though all the medical associations of the Western world are insistently for subjecting children to the torture of “transgendering”, there are doctors who are firmly against it

“We are dealing with what may be the biggest medical and ethical scandal of modern times,” Dr. William Malone, a board-certified endocrinologist, said. “Transgender medicine is big business, and youth who are transitioning today will be medical patients for life, for the next 60-plus years.”

“Transgendering” is enormously lucrative for doctors, particularly for surgeons. (Phalloplasty “can go as high as $150,000.00”)

And “transgendering” is a now a doctrine of Leftist ideology:

On Transgender Day of Visibility (sic!), Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) endorsed sex change procedures for children.

And the Judiciary supports the doctrine:

Judges Across The Country Have Denied Custody To Parents Who Refuse To Give Children “Transgender” Medical Treatments

What about religious leaders? Surely they are against this horror?

No:

Hundreds of religious leaders say they stand with transgender siblings who are being targeted by legislators around the country.

But those “legislators around the country” – they are trying to put a stop to the feverish campaign of cruelty, aren’t they? Surely the states won’t allow it?

Wrong. Many will.

Nineteen states are so much for it, they are  proposing to make laws to prevent anyone from trying to stop it. This how the enthusiasts for the practice word their virtuous support of it:

LGBTQ LAWMAKERS IN 19 STATES HAVE OR WILL INTRODUCE LAWS TO PROTECT TRANS KIDS FROM CIVIL AND CRIMINAL PENALTIES WHEN SEEKING GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE

How many more states will follow that lead?

Florida, under the governorship of Ron DeSantis, is against it.

The media report that story as a vicious wrong. They call the appalling procedure “gender-affirming care”:

The Florida Board of Medicine approved a rule Friday that bans minors from obtaining gender-affirming care—though it will still face additional steps before being adopted—overruling guidance from leading medical groups and making Florida the latest state to target healthcare for transgender residents.

So there are other states  “targeting” the atrocious practice.

What does the American public think about the issue?

One poll finds that –

The majority of Americans say transgender surgeries for minors should be illegal, newly released polling data shows, backing up a movement to ban the practice in states around the country.

And the report lists more states in which Republican legislators plan to “ban the practice”: Utah, Oklahoma, Michigan, Tennessee, Texas.

And, “Arkansas, Alabama, and Arizona have outlawed medical and surgical transitions in youth, with more such laws likely on the way.”

But Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin are all for the maiming of children and the ruin of their lives: Tax dollars from citizens of Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin are funneling into state university health programs that openly provide unproven hormonal injections shown to be exceptionally risky—including possible side effects of infertility, cancer, and death.

Indiana University’s Student Health Center, the University Health Services for University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Illinois’ McKinley Center all provide hormonal injections for students and other services they claim are “gender-affirming care” without parental notification and often with great medical risk.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s “Informed Consent” form for receiving “feminizing hormones” contains several contradictions.

In the introduction, the form describes hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, as an “important component of transition” that “can greatly improve quality of life, psychological well-being, and affirm identity.” The form goes on to describe increased chances for migraines, decreased bone density, diabetes, infertility, cancer, and death. … The transgender health association suggests, in documents linked by Indiana University, that children as young as 2 years old begin showing gender dysphoria, and claims that children as young as 9 should be considered for hormone injections.

Any day now, the “Democratic” junta that governs the federation will surely unveil a statue of the Nazi doctor known as “the Angel of Death”.

He conducted medical experiments on thousands of pairs of twins, most of them children, at Auschwitz.

He placed victims in pressure chambers, injected them with drugs and lethal bacteria, castrated them, froze them to death, performed surgery on them without anesthesia, gave them sex changes, and amputated their limbs. And the majority of his victims were children.

His name was Dr. Josef Mengele.

In an article at American Greatness titled Wall Street Will Die, Theodore R. Malloch and Nicholas Capaldi write:

Something was radically different about the stock market in 2022, and it was not simply that it was a massively down year. A more profound change has occurred. …

The entire economic system is focused on growth, and therefore is designed to bring together creative people who lack resources with people who have resources. This is the genius of the U.S. market economy.

Here is how the stock market used to work. It goes up and down but over time it always has gone up—it must go up, long term, or the whole system collapses. The way to prosperity is to buy and hold a diverse portfolio of value stocks. Trying to “read” the market short term is a risky business. … Buying and holding in a patient fashion over the long term has always been the way to prosperity.

As Friedrich Hayek explained long ago, the market economy is not a mechanical system that can be predicted. But you can bet that over time the market will go up because the entire economy is geared for growth. This means some general strategies will work well in the long term.

Most investors rely on wealth professionals and financial advisors. The professionals do not and cannot know which individual stocks will succeed. What they do know is how to read the tea leaves—charts, graphs, comparisons to earlier analogous situations, interviews with CEOs, studies of foreign governments and exchange rates, company ratings and valuations. This is old-fashioned inductive reasoning. Mostly they play follow-the-leader or follow-the-rising-star. Remember the number of salespeople on Wall Street far outnumbers the number of researchers. Following the stock market publications, like nearly all forms of journalism, has become a form of entertainment. Just think of Mad Jim Cramer. As long as we believe that the market, in general, will go up, the fun will last.

A second way of earning money is to sell short (culturally sometimes considered anti-American). Selling short still requires that somebody has to buy—somebody who still believes that the market is eventually going to go up. In bad times, hedge funds could manipulate the market by driving it up one day (we have been conditioned for optimism) and then selling it the next. This works as long as the public in general believes that the market will go up over time. No matter how bad things get, some hedge funds will thrive, will be in the news, and therefore contribute to the myth that there are experts who really know how to win and play the volatility.

When Republicans control the government, certain industries are favored because those industries support Republican candidates and policies. Favoring certain industries is compatible with and generally requires a healthy economy—otherwise the favored industries cannot sell their products or services.

When traditional Democrats controlled the government, a different set of industries was favored for the same kinds of reasons and with the same assumptions—namely, a robust economy helps favored economic interests, including labor. The political parties before now did not do much damage—what they did was skim the cream for their more influential constituents. There have been many years when having a Democrat in the White House was better for the stock market or for certain stocks.

In both cases, members of the government have inside information about how government regulation will create winners and losers. From time to time, parties will make mistakes (remember, nobody can really predict) and be voted out of office. Not to worry. The other party will eventually be in the same position, and each party gets another bite of the apple ad infinitum.

However, 2022 was a real disaster for the stock market. U.S. stocks had their worst year since 2008 (the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency).

The Dow Jones Industrial Average started at 36,585 and ended at 33,147. The S&P 500 started at 4,797 and ended at 3,840. The NASDAQ started at 15,832 and ended at 10,466.

The declines were 8.6 percent, 19 percent, and 33 percent respectively. There was no point in trying to buy on the dip because the dip had no clear bottom.

You see the overall context. What is different now? Well, the present Democratic Party is not interested primarily in skimming the cream. They want to kill and eat the cow, redistributing the scraps.

What market predictors sometimes forget is that the economic realm and the social realm are interconnected. They influence each other. In Joseph Schumpeter’s famous words, economic growth is a form of “creative destruction.” Economic growth or progress is accompanied not only by changes in economic institutions but by social change as well. Some of the latter are easily perceived as causes of social dislocation.

Republicans have been focused primarily on growth (liberty); Democrats, meanwhile, have focused on the (mal)distribution of wealth. There has always been a conflict between rival elites for the leadership of America: entrepreneurs (business leaders) versus professional politicians and bureaucrats and their academic allies who favor the therapeutic state.

What has changed is that Democrats are now prepared to sacrifice growth in favor of distribution (or what they call equality).

Actually, they prefer to use the term “equity”, by which they mean “equality of outcome”, ie. everyone being as poor as everyone else. Except themselves. They seem to believe that their own wealth will be unaffected, undiminished.

What the Democrats needed to be able to demand fundamental redistribution was the perception of a social problem so grave that it demanded total and permanent political control. COVID was the warm-up, and here we saw blue states sacrifice economic growth for the (mis)perception that mandatory masks and vaccines could overcome all viruses.

The present alleged permanent and overriding crisis is the environment (global warming, climate change, or whatever expression is popular this week). Survival of the human race does not depend upon or require infinite long-term growth according to this view. More to the point, survival may be incompatible with growth.

[Read or] reread The Limits to Growth, published in 1971 by the Club of Rome and based on a faulty MIT model, to review the argument. Many have been personally reassured by the current Jesuit Pope, as well as the autistic Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, that it is not possible for the whole world to enjoy the lifestyle of the American middle class and that this standard must end.

The trick for the Democrats was to manufacture a crisis that requires or dictates permanent government intervention in the economy. Democrats have figured out how to win elections through mail-in ballots by registering, harvesting, and assisting hordes of people who never used to vote. The current base of the party consists of people who are the least likely to be invested in the stock market (African Americans, Hispanics, young people, single moms, and the poor). The worse the economy becomes, the more we seem to require a quick fix from government intervention (additional indexed benefits). Lack of growth will drive more people into the lower classes, and they, in turn, will vote routinely for Democrats.

Immigration is the icing on the cake. We can redefine “growth” so that there is always some form of (Orwellian) “growth.” Why not—we do this with everything else. Remember, Franklin Roosevelt was elected three times over 12 years without getting us out of the Great Depression before World War II saved his administration and reputation.

In an emergency, there is always the possibility of raising the national debt (the invisible form of taxation). We can always raise the national debt; Congress does it regularly. It stands at $31.4 trillion and is growing each year. We can always count on other countries to play follow the leader. We do not have to worry too much about the debt going up in the long term because the politicians of both parties who favored and voted for it will, by that time, be dead, even if the interest on the debt is itself a killer. Having a credit card without repayment is a convenient government course of action.

Welcome to the new normal.

Mind you, this is not just a temporary limit on economic growth. It is the end of the dream—and, as a consequence, the end of the stock market itself. Why invest if there is no chance to profit and see your investment grow? Wall Street does not want to admit it, but in a thoroughly socialist economy, there is no need or reason for stocks. Over time companies will cease to exist, the market will be dictated, and the state, through its regulatory bureaucracies, will control everything.

But why are the Lords of Commerce and Industry allowing this to happen? And not just allowing it, but promoting it with passionate enthusiasm?

Is it because they expect to be the government?

If not that, then what? How do they explain it to themselves?

Victor Davis Hanson asks vital questions that desperately need answers – but will get none.

He writes at Townhall:

Did someone or something seize control of the United States?

What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?

Since when did money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?

When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent to dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal?

Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas—furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their d—s”?

Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?

How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?

When did we assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked? Was it legal suddenly for one presidential candidate to hire a foreign ex-spy to subvert the campaign of her rival?

Was some state or federal law passed that allowed biological males to compete in female sports? Did Congress enact such a law? Did the Supreme Court guarantee that biological male students could shower in gym locker rooms with biological women? Were women ever asked to redefine the very sports they had championed?

When did the government pass a law depriving Americans of their freedom during a pandemic? In America can health officials simply cancel rental contracts or declare loan payments in suspension? How could it become illegal for mom-and-pop stores to sell flowers or shoes during a quarantine but not so for Walmart or Target?

Since when did the people decide that 70 percent of voters would not cast their ballots on Election Day? Was this revolutionary change the subject of a national debate, a heated congressional session, or the votes of dozens of state legislatures?

What happened to Election Night returns? Did the fact that Americans created more electronic ballots and computerized tallies make it take so much longer to tabulate the votes?

When did the nation abruptly decide that theft is not a crime, assault not a felony? How can thieves walk out with bags of stolen goods, without the wrath of angry shoppers, much less fear of the law?

Was there ever a national debate about the terrified flight from Afghanistan?  Who planned it and why?

What happened to the once trusted FBI? Why almost overnight did its directors decide to mislead Congress, to deceive judges with concocted tales from fake dossiers and with doctored writs? Did Congress pass a law that our federal leaders in the FBI or CIA could lie with impunity under oath?

Who redefined our military and with whose consent? Who proclaimed that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could call his Chinese Communist counterpart to warn him that America’s president was supposedly unstable? Was it always true that retired generals routinely libeled their commander-in-chief as a near Nazi, a Mussolini, an adherent of the tools of Auschwitz?

Were Americans ever asked whether their universities could discriminate against their sons and daughters based on their race? How did it become physically dangerous to speak the truth on a campus? Whose idea was it to reboot racial segregation and bias as “theme houses,” “safe spaces,” and “diversity”? How did that happen in America?

How did a virus cancel the Constitution? Did the lockdowns rob of us of our sanity? Or was it the woke hysteria that ignited our collective madness?

We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare to a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup we never knew.

Perhaps there are answers to these questions of ours – or at least conjectures about probabilities:

Are “we”, as Hanson says, beginning to wake up?

Are there signs that the nightmare is over? If so, what are they?

They are hard to discern. The economy is worsening, sources of ample cheap energy are being abandoned, squadrons of new viruses are pouring out of China, the populations of the West are dying out and our countries are under increasing occupation by barbarians.

The United States is still governed by crooks, idiots, and freaks.

Is there any reason to expect change for the better?