Elon Musk talks a lot about the “woke mind virus” that ate away the sanity of his estranged son, Xavier — who currently calls himself Vivian Jenna Wilson. The word “himself” is used deliberately, but not maliciously. The distinction is important. Vivian is no more a “she” than a Tesla is a Pinto.
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NYT’s Bestselling author John Leake’s new book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions explains why and how.
To begin with, it is malicious to deliberately deny objective reality — and to demand others deny it, too — such as the biological fact that there are two sexes, male and female. “Gender” is a grammatical construct used to construct a false reality about biological fungibility; i.e., the claim that an individual can fluidly shift from male to female (or female to male) and also be plural at the same time. If this is true, then a white person could just as logically “transition” into being a black person and claim all the historic grievances leftists say black people are entitled to, including reparations. Of course, leftists would never stand for that — because leftism is not about truth but ideology, a distinction that is existentially important.
Leake explains why that is.
In Chapter 21, he gets into the specific maliciousness directed at children. This, he argues, is deliberately malicious because children’s sense of themselves isn’t yet gelled and thus is inherently malleable. Also, the defining characteristic of childhood is that a child has not yet attained what the ancients called the “age of reason.” Kids — little kids — fantasize about being dinosaurs and have pretend friends. Malicious people use this state of credulity and vulnerability to confuse children about their biological identity.
“Until recently, it was universally understood that eccentric fantasies are one thing, the unavoidable facts of life another. One of the hard facts of life is that the divide between male and female is as impassable as the divide between the living and the dead,” he writes.
This is as objectively true as granite being hard — like it or not.
This was more than 100 years ago.
So it’s nothing new that latter-day Dr. Frankensteins are creating monsters — in many cases, out of children (and sometimes without their parents’ consent). This is also a profitable business, now that the government — as in California — is using tax dollars to fund such “transitions.”
“The mercenary motive for treating so-called ‘gender dysphoria’ was candidly revealed by a leaked video recording of a staff meeting of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, founded in 2018 by Dr. Shayne Taylor. In the recording, Dr. Taylor proclaims that female-to-male bottom surgeries are ‘huge money makers,’ elaborating that a single phalloplasty could bring in up to $100,000, and that even routine hormone treatments generate steady revenue for the hospital.”
Dr. Josef Mengele – the notorious Nazi “Angel of Death” at the Auschwitz concentration camp — can at least be credited for performing his experiments for other than grubby financial reasons.
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Leake writes that
“Transsexualism was initially thought to be an adult phenomenon, and transsexual procedures were only offered to adults. For several years after the field was established, providers of transsexual procedures continued to regard childhood and adolescence as periods of rapid change and unstable identity, marked by awkward and confusing phases between the ages of twelve and eighteen, and then stabilizing between the ages of eighteen and thirty. The idea of deeply intervening in this complex developmental process with a potent medical procedure was therefore not countenanced by doctors or parents.”
(Italics added.)
Kids used to be off limits. Now they are fair game.
Why? Because there are only so many adults disturbed enough to willingly have themselves surgically mutilated and chemically altered. Children are easier prey. That is why, as Leake explains, the mind virus of “gender dysphoria” got pushed as hard as masks during the COVID hysteria (which he gets into in another chapter). It is why — out of the blue — a “condition” that was almost unheard of in children suddenly became a kind of epidemic.
“With increasing insurance coverage after the Affordable Healthcare Act went into effect in 2014, the number of transsexual procedures performed on minors exploded. By 2015, clinics were reporting fourfold and fivefold increases of trans-identifying kids seeking their services, including thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls clamoring to get double mastectomies.”
He goes on to explain that “Between 2013 and 2020, the University of California San Francisco medical center reported thirteen-fold increase of mastectomies performed on adolescent girls (fourteen to seventeen years old).” This horror goes beyond the mutilation of people. It is the mutilation of reality — caused by metastatic mind viruses.
Leake also mentions the seemingly out-of-nowhere increase in mass shootings by “trans” people that began just a few years ago. There is nothing “seemingly” about it. A society addled by mind viruses will inevitably go insane.
A society grounded in reality — with an intact sense of morality — recoils from insanity and the first and most necessary step to recovering sanity is forthrightly and unashamedly call out insanity. That requires being willing to do it — even if it hurts the feelings of people in the grip of mind viruses.
Leake’s book does just that — and that’s why it’s worth your time to read it.
A.J. Rice is the host of the Dangerous Laughter podcast, serves as president & CEO of Publius PR, editor-in-chief of The Publius National Post, and author of The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity.
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