Everyone Has Gone Nuts

Everyone Has Gone Nuts

Peter Stockland is a former editor-in-chief of the Montreal Gazette and co-founder of Convivium magazine under the auspices of the think tank Cardus. He is also head of strategic communications for Ottawa’s Acacia Law Group. He writes: “In a pre-publication interview for her novel, American author and journalist Lionel Shriver said it’s easy to diagnose what’s wrong with today’s world.

Her novel is titled Mania because, Ms. Shriver explained, we are in the grip of the manifold social manias that periodically sweep through humanity. The evidence, she insists, is clear.

“All that’s required is to take a step back and recognize everyone has gone nuts,” Ms. Shriver told Laura Dodsworth of The Free Mind website.

As if to verify the claim, the National Post coincidentally reported on a legal dispute in which a self-identified nonbinary Ontarian has gone to court to have the public purse pay for surgery that will leave the individual with both a vagina and a penis. Nuts R Us.

Not, however, the special kind of dark and twisted social nuttiness that has led to an otherwise healthy 27-year-old Alberta woman’s being given legal blessing to have state-authorized medical agents kill her. Why? Because she simply doesn’t want to live anymore. Why else?

The judge who issued the nonculpable homicidal benediction, which has since been appealed by the woman’s father, said he didn’t have the authority to interfere with a “medical act” approved by two doctors.

Intriguingly, in the Ontario case of Mixed Genitalia v. Beaten Down Taxpayers, the Post notes that the “2SLGBTQI” rights lobby group EGALE is arguing the opposite. Ontario’s health insurance system, OHIP, has no standing to make assumptions about what care may be medically necessary and therefore qualify for public payment, the group contends.

“Ultimately OHIP’s interpretation (of a vaginoplasty) is exclusionary and discriminates against nonbinary people on the basis of their gender identity,” EGALE argues, according to the National Post.

So the courts are unable to stop the delivery of gratuitous medical death. But the courts can—and should—order the public health system to have the cosmetically conjoined happily ever after at taxpayers’ expense? And we think fruitcake is only a Christmas affliction.

Fittingly, Ms. Shriver said in her interview that the seeds for Mania were planted about a dozen years ago, when the “rage for transgenderism” jumped the garden wall and made itself seen on the streets of every city, town, and village in the Western world.

“I wanted to ... fashion my own mania,” she said of the novel’s plot. “The mania I invented most resembles our sudden obsession with pretending to change sex. Virtually overnight it becomes holy writ (in ‘Mania’) that you mustn’t ever impugn anyone else’s intelligence, much as virtually overnight transgenderism also became ‘the last great civil rights fight.’ To emit a single discouraging word about ‘trans’ would be guaranteed to destroy your career and reputation.”

Ms. Shriver, a long-married she/she who changed her name legally to Lionel from Margaret Ann when

she was a rebellious 15-year-old, makes abundantly clear she doesn’t single out only gender identity in “Mania.” Neither the novel nor the supporting interview is a “transphobic” tract.

As in her other work, the real target is rigid intellectual conformity. It’s the unthink adoption of the latest fashionable brain burp-cum-slogan, which rapidly metastasizes into a social, political, and legal imperative. You can almost hear her sardonic laughter coming off the page of the interview when she describes “South Koreans marching down their streets chanting ‘Black Lives Matter!’ when the country basically doesn’t have any Black people.”

The impulse to enforce conformity has been part of humanity since the first cave artist was de-platformed for painting insufficiently diverse woolly mammoths on the walls at Lascaux. We always and everywhere think of ourselves as reasonable and au courant, ergo we accept phrenology or bloodletting or Stalin as “progress” until the latest fit of ideological fashion passes and we see each one as a succession of sheer lunacy.

“What’s changed,” Ms. Shriver said, “is the rapidity with which people suddenly embrace one prescribed view, and also the ease with which these mind viruses now spread internationally.”

COVID-19, she argues, was the viral proof. “[It] was itself a mania—the infection fatality rate of the disease especially for anyone but the very old did not merit our draconian response—that gave birth to sub-manias: the love of lockdowns, the cult of the vaccine, the hysterical faith in masks,” she said.

Almost overnight, “the land of the Magna Carta” became a country of citizens willing to give up birthright freedoms of speech, assembly, the press, mobility, and “even the right to leave your own home,” she pointed out.

“Obviously, people will believe anything, and for something like National Socialism to triumph in the UK, it would take Adolf Hitler at the most about three weeks,” she said. Call me a maniacal optimist but that’s where I part company with Ms. Shriver’s thesis, though certainly not with her as a singularly courageous and free-minded artist. There remains a cohort of questioners who insist on asking, across same-think lines, “Is that true?” “Are you sure?” “Why do you think that?” “How does that make sense if...?”

Socrates never rode a bandwagon. Now, neither does Ms. Shriver. Given that this is her 18^th novel, there must also be a sizeable audience eager to say “nuts” to toeing any ideological line.”

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The Elites Have Engineered a Second Guilded Age: That’s Not a Good Thing

Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages. He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. One of the most widely read American novelists of the early years of the 20th century was the incredible Edith Wharton, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature. Like other great novelists, her books all have similar themes that trace to her own biography. She was highborn, well-educated, extensively traveled, and lived through a time of tremendous upheaval. She was a keen observer of her time and had a passion to defend the rights of individuals in all times.

The subject she covers is society and the navigation of its cultural hierarchies and the rewards and cruelties associated with it. Wharton’s background is steeped in old money but, more importantly, deep learning and careful cultivation. She made America her home and was witness to the rise of a monied class of social elites who had none of her background and rarified taste.

What was called Society—back when the United States had something that could be legitimately called the Upper Class—in those days we know as the thin layer of elites who ruled the day by virtue of their influence over just about everything, from media to finance to universities to government. Their homes were in New York and Boston, but the real action took place seasonally in places such as Newport, Rhode Island; Nantucket, Massachusetts; and other luxurious outposts.

Here is where the mating rituals took place. As with other literature of the time, she focuses often on the concerns of rich men looking for suitable wives with good reputations in society so they could move up the hierarchy. There are also daughters of rich families in society seeking eligible males who would ensure their daughter’s continued status within society.

Regardless of the particulars of the circumstances, the game always involved maintaining one’s membership in the exclusive club. The worst possible nightmare was falling out, being cut off from one’s family inheritance, landing among the professional or working class, and then finally confronting the worst possible fate, which is dire poverty. All anxiety concerned that possible fate, which is worse than death, and everyone in their private darkest moments knew this was possible.

To Wharton, this system deployed unrelenting but subtle forms of cruelty that warred against the basic exercise of human volition and freedom. So in America, she noted a deep irony at that time. The country was all about freedom, which is precisely what gave rise to the astonishing wealth of the period. But this very freedom was denied to the highest levels of society, where conformism, compliance, obedience, and fear ruled the day.

Her most popular book before “The Age of Innocence” was “The House of Mirth,” which tells the deeply tragic story of a beautiful young woman who dared to attempt a break from the stolid and staid

expectations of her benefactor aunt. She kept delaying marriage while falling in love with the wrong men from the wrong class, not working class but professional class. She had a respectable income from her aunt but had a habit of misspending it, particularly on gambling. She was not wild or dangerous but merely sneaky and curious, with a penchant for giving in to small temptations.

At some point, an on-the-make money man offers to handle her finances, and she agrees, only to hear reports of having made sudden fortunes in the stock markets. Confident of her newfound wealth, she gambles away her gains only to discover that they were nothing like what she hoped and then faced a grim debt, which amounts to about $300,000 in today’s dollars.

She pleads with her aunt for a bailout and is refused on the grounds that she needs to learn a lesson. The third party who approached her offers to pay off her debt in exchange for sexual favors but she refuses on principle. The money-bags investor offers her marriage provided she undertakes a blackmail operation to get back in the good graces of society. She refuses that too.

In short, despite her one small mistake with a big price tag, she is a woman of solid principle and moral courage and refuses to give that up merely to retain her social standing. She would not play the game. She is mostly disinherited upon her aunt’s death, and her aunt’s niece refuses to countenance any favors. She goes to work as a private secretary within society until her bad reputation catches up to her and she is terminated.

Poor and deeply in debt, she sets out to find a job with some wages to pay her nominal rent and finds a position in a hatmaker’s shop. But there is one problem: She doesn’t really know how to sew or do much of anything. She is then dismissed from that position too and faces the worst possible fate. When a check finally arrives from her aunt’s estate, a small payout compared to the whole, she signs it over to her creditor and takes a potion to end her life.

Society, despite its appearance as civilized and genteel, chewed her up, spat her out, and finally killed her. That’s the book, and that’s what Edith Wharton decried: the displacement of moral courage for money-grubbing and social climbing, with the result that those who make it relinquish all volition and vision. It sickened her.

She also despised the privilege of birth that comes with not knowing anything or being capable of doing anything, which she found particularly dangerous for women because it doomed them always into a position of dependency.

There is this moment when the lead character in “The House of Mirth,” having been fired by the milliner’s shop, says with defeat: “I’m completely useless.” That is precisely what Wharton opposed, people who had no real occupation, skills, purpose, or drive and were forever fated to curry favor with the system that created and protects them.

The days of Wharton are long gone, including the visibly rigid social hierarchies of the time. Class mobility grew over time so people could take more risks up and down the social ladder, sometimes poor and sometimes rich, and let the next generation take matters into their own hands in a spirit of freedom and tolerance.

Or so they say. Perhaps that ideal world emerged following World War II and lasted for some decades.

These days, however, there is every indication that extreme stratification of the 1890s and 1910s has

come roaring back. In 2020, governments around the country divided the workforce between essential and nonessential. The former category was a strange one: it included high-end professionals and those who serve them. The latter category was essentially everyone else, the people who are considered dispensable.

Think of the milliners. They were the dispensable ones in 1906. Today, they are nail salon employees, pastors, hair cutters, small business employees, bowling alley attendants, restaurant servers, and so on, people who actually do stuff for the middle layer of society that we used to call the bourgeoisie. To our masters and commanders, the new Upper Class, all these people are on hold, keepable or not depending on circumstances of time and place.

The great fear in 1906 among the upper classes was that some rumor would start to circulate that would kick them out of the top tier, some indication that a person was out of compliance, not fully on board with the group, slightly deviating from expectations. It was the fear of the consequences that kept people in line.

And today, class mobility has become boggy again, if not frozen. You either go to the right schools or you do not. You are from the right neighborhoods or you are not. You have the credentials or you do not. Once you cross that invisible line into class and income security, one holds on to it for dear life, fearing the consequences of falling out. As in “The House of Mirth,” the fall could be dramatic and unending all the way to the bottom.

The social safety net, by which I mean not the welfare state but free enterprise and economic opportunity, has become so tattered and insecure. One does really wonder if there is any hope post- cancellation, post-termination, or post-disgrace, even if based on complete fabrications, as it so often is. This is terrifying for vast numbers of people in the professional world today and precisely why so many people in the upper strata of society are so easily controlled.

This insight—drawn from a book written 120 years ago—explains so much about the past four years and so much about the politics of our time. For example, how does it come to be that large swaths of a demographic that would be most harmed by the loss of freedom are nonetheless rallying in favor of that very thing?

The answer comes down to psychological crowd control. No one really wants to be the “odd man out” simply because there seems to be no future after that. This financial insecurity and fear of the bottom reinforces compliance. The less social mobility, the more class-based group-think and despair.

It’s a human tendency to choose security and material comfort over principle in all ages, but it seems especially obvious in our own times. Let it not be so. Let’s revisit the outrage of Wharton and learn the lessons she tried so desperately to teach.

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What Have The Elites Wrought?

Jim Fanell is a retired U.S. Navy captain, currently a government fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy in Switzerland, and a former director of intelligence and information operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet. He also is the creator and manager of the Indo-Pacific Security forum Red Star Rising/Risen. Bradley A. Thayer is a founding member of the Committee on Present Danger China and the coauthor James Fanell of Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure.

 They write: “From the war in Ukraine to the horrific terror attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and subsequent conflict in the Middle East to the roiling waters of the South China Sea, the world today is in crisis. The causes are not found in Moscow or Tehran alone, but primarily in Washington and Beijing.

They are the consequence of two fundamental and interrelated grand strategic mistakes made by the United States. First, the failure to understand the threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Second, the failure to balance against it.

As a result, the United States is at risk of losing its dominant position to an emboldened PRC working in cooperation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the mullahs in Iran. Surveying the global unrest, Americans must comprehend three reasons why they face this dire strategic landscape.

First, U.S. elites did not perceive the threat because of the triumphalism of the “End of History”—the false assertion that modernizing nations such as China were on the path to democratization and free market economics. Great power conflict was seen as an artifact of the past. This hubris contributed to what we term “threat deflation,” whereby year after year, U.S. decision-makers consistently dismissed or underestimated the threat from the PRC.

Second, U.S. business interests and financiers indefatigably sought economic gain from cooperation with Beijing. This facilitated China’s rise as it entered the West’s economic ecosystem, as did its admission to the World Trade Organization.

Their influence on the major U.S. political parties and at the highest levels of U.S. politics hindered the U.S. response and promoted the conceit of globalization. Thus emerged an “engagement school,” which asserted that by engaging the PRC, it would become wealthy, a “responsible stakeholder” in the international order, and even democratic. In essence, the United States willingly and enthusiastically taught, trained, and even equipped, its mortal enemy. Business interests and financiers funded our national security think tanks, which contributed to a bias toward the engagement school, and thus to the threat deflation of the PRC.

Third, Deng Xiaoping, arguably one of the most influential strategists of the 20th century, advanced a brilliant political warfare strategy to promote threat deflation. Deng’s strategy focused on U.S. and other Western elites, enriching them and shaping their perception of the PRC and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while using the enticement of a growing market to influence their behavior. For a generation, Chinese leaders masked their intentions and framed their expansion as economic, for the good of all, rather than strategic and for the benefit of the CCP.

Consequently, the PRC has risen and now employs its power to the detriment of U.S. national security through its worldwide actions, especially in the East and South China Seas and Taiwan, as well as through its proxies in Iran and Russia.

To meet this threat, Washington first needs to see communist China for what it is: an aggressive great power that seeks the overthrow of the United States.

Second, the United States must support the education of strategists so younger generations may understand how to defeat the PRC. Education in the principles of power politics and the CCP’s ideology are essential to achieve victory.

Third, there must be sustained presidential leadership to define the enemy, educate the American people, and generate the necessary whole-of-government response.

Fourth, the failure of the intelligence community to identify China as an existential threat greatly weakened the ability of U.S. national security decision-makers to identify and act against the threat. The fundamental assumptions regarding China’s behavior were informed by the engagement school of thought. Ultimately, and perversely, the intelligence community was aiding threat deflation for a generation. This must be reversed.

Fifth, U.S. military leadership did not recognize and prepare for China’s emergence as a formidable military power. It must also be held accountable for the current state of unpreparedness. Specifically, the failure of the U.S. Navy’s leadership to recognize the centrality of the maritime domain to the PRC’s grand strategy and its naval modernization efforts stands in stark contrast to the pro-active performance of prior generations of admirals from World War II through the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Leadership needs to prioritize rebuilding the U.S. Navy to meet the PRC threat.

The United States aided the rise of its enemy. Now, the Kremlin and Iran are operating in the strategic space that the PRC provides them. That space and Beijing’s aggression will only increase if the United States does not act to end its threat deflation, break the chokehold of the engagement school on the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and defeat the CCP by evicting it from power.”

Unfortunately, Ms. Shriver’s “cohort of questioners” doesn’t extend to America’s federal government, where what might be called insanity has more sinister characteristics.

Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital, primarily covering immigration and border security. He writes: “Department of Homeland Security (DHS) [Whack-a-Mole immigration policy] data is revealing the more than 45 cities in the U.S. that hundreds of thousands of migrants have flown into via a controversial parole program for four nationalities — with the vast majority entering the U.S. via airports in Florida.

During an eight-month period from January through August 2023, roughly 200,000 migrants flew into the U.S. via the program. Of those, 80% of them, (161,562) arrived in the state of Florida in four cities: Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando and Tampa Bay, according to DHS data obtained via a subpoena by the House Homeland Security Committee and provided to Fox News.

[Florida, it must be noted, is one of the “Reddest” States in the Union, so 80% of these illegals arriving in the State of Florida is a curious coincidence during the “Blue Biden” administration, no?]

The policy was first announced for Venezuelans in October 2022, which allowed a limited number to fly or travel directly into the U.S. as long as they had not entered illegally, had a sponsor in the U.S. already, and passed certain biometric and biographical vetting. The program does not itself facilitate flights, and migrants are responsible for their own travel.

In January 2023, the administration announced that the program was expanding to include Haitians, Nicaraguans and Cubans and that the program would allow up to 30,000 people per month into the U.S. It allows for migrants to receive work permits and a two-year authorization to live in the U.S. and was announced alongside an expansion of Title 42 expulsions to include those nationalities. By the end of February 2024, more than 400,000 nationals have arrived under the parole program, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said at the time that the program is a "safe and orderly way to reach the United States" and has "led to a reduction in numbers of those nationalities." "It is a key element of our efforts to address the unprecedented level of migration throughout our hemisphere, and other countries around the world see it as a model to tackle the challenge of increased irregular migration that they too are experiencing," Mayorkas said.

DHS also revealed in the subpoena response that as of October 2023, there were about 1.6 million applicants waiting for DHS approval to fly to the U.S. via the parole program. "All individuals paroled into the United States are, by definition, inadmissible, including those paroled under the CHNV processes."

Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green, argues that the program exceeds parole powers put in

place by Congress. The authority is to be used on a "case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit."

"These documents expose the egregious lengths Secretary Mayorkas will go to ensure inadmissible aliens reach every corner of the country, from Orlando and Atlanta to Las Vegas and San Francisco," he said in a statement.

"Secretary Mayorkas’ CHNV parole program is an unlawful sleight of hand used to hide the worsening border crisis from the American people. Implementing a program that allows otherwise inadmissible aliens to fly directly into the U.S. — not for significant public benefit or urgent humanitarian reasons as the Immigration and Nationality Act mandates — has been proven an impeachable offense." 

"Following our subpoena and the House’s impeachment vote — especially in light of the Senate's complete failure to fulfill its duty to hold a trial — the Committee will not rest until this administration is finally held accountable for its open-borders agenda and its devastating impact on our homeland security," he said.

Green's arguments against the program have been echoed in a lawsuit by multiple states, who have sued to block the program. The 20 states argued that it "amounts to the creation of a new visa program that allows hundreds of thousands of aliens to enter the United States who otherwise have no basis for doing so." The lawsuit was struck down by a district judge, but states have appealed.

 Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration has repeatedly said it is confident the lawsuit will ultimately be successful. "Biden's parole program is unlawful, and constitutes an abuse of constitutional authority. Florida is currently suing Biden to shut it down, and we believe that we will prevail," press secretary Jeremy Redfern told Fox News. 

DHS has said that those who enter the U.S. under the program undergo and clear a "robust security vetting" as well as other eligibility criteria. [This, of course, is a complete fabrication because the information comes from the countries trying to get rid of these people, and is unverifiable.]

"These processes are publicly available online, and DHS has been providing regular updates on their use to the public. These processes are part of the administration’s strategy to combine expanded lawful pathways with stronger consequences to reduce irregular migration, and have kept hundreds of thousands of people from migrating irregularly," a spokesperson told Fox News Digital this month.”

NGOs: The Plague of the Post Cold War World