Are we nuts? Transgender sports and mass formation psychosis

Ten years from now, will biological men still participate in women's sports? I don't think so. 

In fact, the people who are advocating now for allowing transgender women to compete against real women in varsity sports will be embarrassed by their stance and will try to scrub this bizarre episode in our national psyche from social media archives. 

Kinda like Senator Elizabeth Warren downplaying references to her Cherokee heritage. Or President Nixon's henchmen who had "no present recollection" of Watergate.

Are we nuts? Isn't anyone embarrassed by the sight of a transgender shot putter competing against school girls at a middle-school athletic event? 

How do we explain the nation's descent into monumental foolishness? Robert Malone, a medical doctor, posited the term "mass formation psychosis" for outbreaks of national craziness. This is how he defined the phenomenon:

When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.

Malone's theory has not been accepted in medical literature, and the term "mass formation psychosis" is not a recognized psychiatric diagnosis. Nevertheless, his hypothesis makes a great deal of sense.

Otherwise, how can you explain federal bureaucrats' position that Title IX legislation,  adopted by Congress to stop discrimination against women and girls at schools and colleges,  gives biological males the right to compete against real women in varsity athletic contests?

I think today's transgender madness will one day be looked upon as some sort of societal disorder, much like the Ku Klux Klan era when otherwise sensible businessmen thought it made sense to dress up in hoods and white robes and bully Blacks and Catholics. Even Hugo Black, who later became a Supreme Court justice, bought into that nonsense.

Here's my advice to school superintendents, college presidents, and varsity coaches. Don't put yourselves on the public record as a supporter of the nation's transgender mania because someday you will have to apologize to your granddaughters.

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out." Reflections on Martin Niemöller, who stood up against the Nazis

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller

 (1892-1984)

Like most Americans, I am familiar with Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous quote, but I knew almost nothing about him until recently. I knew he was a Protestant pastor who opposed Adolph Hitler during the 1930s, but I did not realize that Niemöller spent seven years in a Nazi concentration camp.

As William Shirer noted in his memoirs, Niemöller would seem to be an unlikely person to stand up to the Nazis. Niemöller had been a decorated U-boat commander during the First World War. He was a fervent nationalist during the post-war years, and he welcomed the day when Hitler became the chancellor of the Reich in 1933.

But Niemöller slowly became disillusioned with Hitler, and he spoke out publicly against Nazism from his pulpit. At some point, Niemoller realized that Hitler meant to wipe out Christianity in Germany and replace it with the National Reich Church.

Indeed, Hitler's national church publicly repudiated the "strange and foreign" Christian religion. The Reich church openly acknowledged that it intended to place Mein Kampe on church altars instead of the Bible.

With great courage, Niemöllerdefended his Christian faith against Hitler's paganism. In 1937, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau.

Shirer, reflecting on the struggle between Hitler and German Christians during the 1930s, admitted that he had perhaps paid too much attention to it. After all, most Germans were not alarmed by what the Nazis were doing. "I should have realized," Shirer wrote, "that a people who had so lightly given up their political, cultural and economic freedom were not . . . going to die or even risk imprisonment to preserve freedom of worship."

Today, the United States is swirling in a witch's brew of cancel culture, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and "wokedom." Elected politicians publicly denounce the police, and demonstrators feel free to throw bricks and bottles at police officers. Day after day, vandals posing as protesters destroy statues and monuments that memorialize America's heritage. Churches and businesses are being set afire, and almost no one is prosecuted.

If the United States had a free press and healthy universities, all this destructive rhetoric and criminal behavior would be thunderously denounced in the media, much as some newspapers denounced the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

But America no longer has a free press. Instead, as Bari Weiss wrote this week in a letter to the New York Times," a new consensus has emerged in the press . . . that truth isn't a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else."

If our nation's universities were truly a marketplace of ideas, as the Supreme Court once described them, our intellectuals would speak up when a professor is bullied and even fired for failing to acquiesce to the destructive agenda of the cancel culture. But they are not speaking up.

For the most part, Americans are indifferent to the mass assault on traditional American values and our nation's democratic traditions. Our media and our universities are hell-bent on destroying American society, and few people dare to stand up to them.

We are like the Germans of the 1930s who stayed on the sidelines instead of opposing Hitler's thuggery. And like the Germans, we will eventually regret our cowardice.

Pastor Martin Niemöller spent seven years in a Nazi concentration camp.